The Northcountry Chronicle

Why I Don’t Watch Political Speeches

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by W. D. Ehrhart I stopped watching major political speeches fifty-two years ago in the wake of Richard Nixon’s televised announcement in the spring of 1972 that he was mining Hai Phong harbor in North Vietnam. It made me so angry that I pulled off my boot and threw it at the president. This was back when televisions were boxlike things with all sorts of vacuum tubes and stuff like that inside. The television exploded. Glass all over my college dorm room, and the television’s insides popping and sparking. I’m lucky I didn’t start a fire. And the television wasn’t even mine. I’d borrowed it …

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Hail to the Chief

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by W.D. Ehrhart During a recent campaign event in New Jersey, Donald Trump proclaimed that the Presidential Medal of Freedom is the “equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor but civilian version. It’s actually much better because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor. They’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead. [Miriam Adelson, a major Republican donor to whom Trump gave the Medal of Freedom in 2018] gets it, and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman. They’re rated equal, but she got the Presidential Medal of Freedom and she got it through committees …

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Uncle Sam Wants You!

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by W.D. Ehrhart In a recent essay in the Lynchburg News & Advance, my friend, former enlisted Marine and now-retired Major, Ed Palm pointed out that in spite of minimum starting salaries twenty (20) times higher than my $88 a month back in 1966, “signing bonuses” as high as $40,000, and generous educational benefits, the U.S. military has been unable to meet its enlistment needs in the era of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF). The AVF was supposed to ensure that the U.S. would never again suffer another humiliating defeat like the American Fiasco in Vietnam when reluctant and unwilling soldiers ultimately engaged in open revolt …

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Once More Unto the Breach

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by W.D. Ehrhart I have just returned from the most relaxing, refreshing, rejuvenating, restorative, happy, stress-free four days I’ve experienced in many years. Decades even. Maybe in my entire life. There are not enough superlatives to describe it. My wife and I had driven up to the Adirondacks to visit old college friends of mine. They live on top of a hill in the midst of 134 acres of forested land surrounded by mountains. You can’t see it from their porch, but there’s a beaver pond down below them in the valley. You can see the hummingbirds that come to their feeders. And the blue …

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There Really Is Still Time

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by W.D. Ehrhart Over the course of the previous two weeks, I have been working on an essay I had titled “There Is Still Time—But Not Much,” in which I argued that President Joe Biden should step aside and withdraw from this November’s election if the Democrats want even the slightest chance of defeating former President Donald Trump. Given that Biden officially withdrew his candidacy this past Sunday, and has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the top spot on the ticket, there seems little point in reiterating my arguments in any detail. Suffice it to say that Biden is a decent enough person with …

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A Personal Farewell to an American Hero

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by W.D. Ehrhart Only recently did I learn that H. Bruce Franklin, the prolific scholar, cultural historian, and passionate teacher, had died back in mid-May. Aside from a June 7th obituary in the New York Times, and brief mentions on a couple of left-progressive websites, Franklin’s death went almost unnoticed by both mainstream and progressive media. The whole world paid homage when Daniel Ellsberg died eleven months earlier because Ellsberg—by stealing and revealing the infamous Pentagon Papers—had become famous: front-page top-of-the-fold headline news for months and even years. But in his own way, Bruce Franklin was equally committed to truth-telling and exposing the lies and …

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