Pride and Pepto-Bismol

Santa Claus was a little over-generous this year, was my waning flu was topped off with a Christmas Night onset of acid reflux, in St. Nick-sized portions. Being almost 40 lbs. overweight, feeling the tightness in my chest, and with the untimely deaths of Jeff Simpson and Sarah Ralston fresh in mind … well, let’s say I feel lucky I’m typing this from my home office (with the faithful J’Adoube close at hand) and not from a hospital bed. Also, continuing to eat dishes like the one pictured above is probably another way to plant myself in an early grave, especially since I lost my gallbladder early in my Las Vegas Business Press tenure, on Thanksgiving weekend, 2005. However, if Las Vegas Strip restaurants continue to shovel large portions of such things into the stomachs of the douchebagerie, perhaps we will be rid of those unsightly, TAG-sprayed, tattoo-covered boors sooner than we ever dared hope.

Enforced convalescence had the spiritually salubrious effect of enabling me read Craig L. Symonds‘ The Battle of Midway cover-to-cover in less than six days’ time. Given the hysteria-prone tenor of contemporary world affairs, it’s salutary to step back to 1942, a time when world freedom hung in a very precarious balance — a tide turned by shared purpose and sacrifice on the home front. Not only did American victory at Midway blunt the advance of Japanese colonialism, it was the first step toward the “Co-Prosperity Sphere” Japan promised to its Pacific Rim conquests but which postwar U.S. magnanimity made possible … leading very circuitously toward the overthrow of Las Vegas by Macao and Singapore, if you care to make that argument. From Admiral Chester Nimitz through heroic Aviaition Machinist’s Mate First Class Bruno P. Gaido (captured and murdered by the Japanese off Midway), down to the nameless heroes of the “black gang” in the boiler rooms who kept our ships sailing, the men of the U.S. Navy did their duty nearly to a man and we owe them a debt that can never be repaid. (If you read Symonds’ book, you’ll also find out how Chicago‘s airports got their names.) It’s a volume that makes you proud to be an American and not in some jingoistic, self-aggrandizing Lee Greenwood sort of way but rather in one that makes you appreciate our forefathers — and the “Greatest Generation” in particular — with even deeper esteem. Thank you, Craig Symonds.