Captain Renault: What in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?

Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.

Captain Renault: The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert.

Rick: I was misinformed.

I was thinking of this exchange from Casablanca when I wrote the passage below for the Civil War book Patriot Graves. In truth, I was thinking also of Donald John Trump.

The memories of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in 1832 South Carolina remained vivid, and John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 generated the hysteria that so characterized the election of 1860, when Lincoln was variously portrayed as an abolitionist, a miscegenationist, and a complicit slave insurrectionist. Southern politicians and propagandists were just as skilled then as similar figures are today in persuading poor and working-class white men to support a social order that in reality worked against them and for those at the apex of society.

As you must know, I am descended from and named for two Confederate officers—both died in 1862—Gen. James H. McBride and his staff officer son, Douglas.

I think that’s why the Daughters of the Confederacy were so keen on having me as a guest speaker, I had to write them back and inform that yes, indeed, according to the Ordinances of Secession, the ancestors they so admire did, in fact, fight for the preservation and extension of slavery.

But the Fire-eaters, the most rabid of antebellum Southern politicians, convinced them that Lincoln was a monster and what the North wanted more than anything was the destruction of the South’s “way of life.”

So, like Humphrey Bogart’s Rick, they were misinformed. The Daughters of the Confederacy did not care to be informed.

But what continues to pull at me is the undeniable fact Confederates, like Stonewall Jackson’s “foot cavalry,” like John Bell Hood’s Texans, like John B. Gordon’s Georgians, like Jeb Stuart’s horse soldiers, were, without the slightest doubt in my mind, the finest soldiers that the mid-Victorian world produced. They had no equals until Grant and Sherman discovered that, in fact, they did, among the northerners they commanded, in the last year of the Civil War.

Without waving a Confederate battle flag, that’s why this part of April moves me: The war was coming to its end, but the starving remnants of Lee’s army, eating the bark off trees during their march toward Appomattox, finally met their destiny on April 9, at a little hamlet, Appomattox Court House.

April 6 and 7 were decisive. April 6, at Sailor’s Creek, was uniquely tragic.

Here, on April 6, George Custer’s cavalry, including Charles Clark, fresh off his regiment’s destruction of the supply train, attacked a gap in the retreating Confederate columns led by James Longstreet. As infantry from two Union corps began to arrive, their men cheering Philip Sheridan at his appearance, the battle became general and it was fought with a ferocity, on the Confederates’ part, that had to be borne of exhaustion, hunger, frustration, and fury. They turned on their pursuers and fought them without mercy in hand-to-hand combat that included clubbed muskets and bayonets, but then the Confederates dropped even their rifles to come in close with their tormenters: they used knives, fists, bit noses and ears, wrapped their fingers around their enemies’ throats to choke them. Sailor’s Creek was savage and intimate, and, of course, once their adrenaline had been exhausted, the hungry rebels could fight no more. April 6 ended with the surrender of nearly 8,000 of Lee’s men, including six generals, including the man who, after Chancellorsville, had taken command of Stonewall Jackson’s old corps, Richard Ewell. Lee, watching the rout from a distance, for once let his emotions surface: “My God!” he cried. “Has the army been dissolved?”

It’s hard to imagine him as a seventeen-year-old cavalryman, but our Dr. Clark fought under George Custer in April 1865. He interrupted the meal on April 7 at Farmville. Lee got his men on the move, toward a hamlet, Appomattox Court House, where a trainload of food awaited.

Custer’s cavalry got there first. Charles Clark was among them.

Lee surrendered the next day.

Chevrolet doesn’t know it yet, but I’m pretty thrilled with their new ad. The singer is Brooke Lee, and she has a wonderful voice, although seeing her all precarious-like atop that mountain makes me really nervous. Really nervous. Hopefully, it’s CGI.

In the mid 1950s, “CGI” meant that you’d misspelled the abbreviation for “cigarette,” which there were plenty of. But this ad brought to mind my four-year-old crush on the original singer, Dinah Shore. (Burt Reynolds, many years later, had a crush on her, too.) She just seemed like a nice lady to me. And she was. Trivia Dept.: The day Pearl Harbor was attacked, Dinah was entertaining the troops at our county’s Camp Roberts. Here she is, lovely, during the war.

And here’s the version of the Chevy jingle that I remember, courtesy of Dinah:

She’s peppy and pretty, isn’t she? My favorite line mentions a levee, which, of course, reminds me of this classic song from many years later, in 1972. Thank you, Don McLean, for the stellar lyrics and for the infectious refrain. (The song’s about the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper.)

Anyway, the Chevy commercial reminded of songs that stick in my memory. They can’t hold a candle to “American Pie,” but there they are, more than sixty years later, still rattling around in between my ears.

I’m glad they’re still rattling around between my ears. There’s plenty of room there.

I am having brain surgery in June. Hold on. It’s minimally invasive, requiring only two basic instruments:

And it’s not an Omigod-You’re-Gonna-Die tumor. It’s a meningioma, benign tumor, in my left frontal cortex, but the little bastard’s growing. It’s had an impact on my balance but even more on my memory, my decision-making and my ability to organize and prioritize. I get pretty overwhelmed.

So I’m going up to Stanford, first for the MRI, if they can do one. (Evidently, helium is required for MRI’s, and in the wake of Trump’s Iran war, Qatar, which supplies a third of the world’s helium supply, has suspended exportation.) Then, two days later, for the surgery by Standford’s Dr. Robert Dodd.

Dr. Dodd is a Black man, uncommonly handsome, and I am named for two Confederates. I did not let on, even though, if you know me, I am a Lincoln man. I DID let drop that my father-in-law, Gail Bruce, was a 49er, and I think that earned me, in our telehealth conference, a few gold stars.

That part, the surgeon, I feel good about. In 2004, I went to Stanford for a history teachers’ seminar on America in the Depression, during the New Deal and in World War II. At the Hoover Institute, I got to hold this X-ray of Hitler’s skull, taken after the July 1944 bomb plot.

I have to admit, that was pretty cool.

So I figure Stanford knows their brains.

Today, I reserved a Redwood City hotel room for Elizabeth and me, for June. That that made the surgery business feel more real. Tomorrow, I visit my cardiologist, and he needs to send my EKG to Stanford via fax.

So there’s a lot on my mind, the part which Manny the Meningioma (I named him) isn’t bothering.

Luckily, I have a lot more to think about: Getting the house painted, a series of speaking engagements, the South County Historical Society, Walter the Basset Hound, my family.

So I will think about them. A lot more.

I don’t even know that I’ll get to “Danny Boy.” But there are two versions of “Galway Girl,” and both are happy.

This one’s in Galway:

And this one, a different version, is by Ed Sheeran, and it also features Saorise Ronan, one of my favorite actresses:

“Parting Glass,” by Hozier. From on Irish talk show: note the dreamy looks on the women’s faces:

Former U.S. Army Chief of Staff Marin E. Dempsey does the same song honor on his retirement:

“Seaweed,” by the University Scholars of Dublin. In Irish, of course.

And “My Gallant Hero,” by the same. Shivers.

“Toss the Feathers,” the Corrs:

“Dreams,” the Cranberries. Full of Irish mythology: the thorn tree, the keeners (mourners), the white horse.

Blue-eyed soul: “Treat Her Right,” about a fictional Dublin and, The Commitments, from the film of the same name:

“The Wexford Carol” retells the manger story.

“Foggy Dew,” Sinead O’Connor and the Chieftains, about the disastrous Easter Rising of 1916:

One more revolutionary song, from the Orthodox Celts, a Serbian band that loves Irish music:

And, yes, “Danny Boy.” I had so many beautiful versions to choose from. I chose this one. The silence of the audience is stunning.

The victims of the airstrike on the Iranian girls’ school, wrapped in mourning, await their burial.

This was evocative to me because it reminded me of an American tragedy that I taught every year to my AGHS students.

In 1911, the Triangle Fire in New York City claimed the lives of seventeen men and 129 women. Most of the women, garment workers, were the daughters of Jewish or Italian immigrants, and most were in their teens.

The factory fire escape doors were locked on the outside.

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Those are NYPD officers tending to the jumpers. The story my students read, a vivid piece of newspaper reportage, had a young man and a young woman jumping together, holding hands. The reporter described the sound of the bodies hitting the sidewalk, as painful in 1911 as the sound would be in the falls to the final floors of the 2001 World Trade Center.

And these are the coffins of the victims, awaiting identification.

Thirty-six engagement rings were recovered from the factory ruins.

Our much-loved niece, Emily, is a graduate of NYU. The Brown Building there was rebuilt from the Triangle Fire. Night-shift custodians hear rapid footsteps on the stairwells, They hear screams. Sometimes a lecturer will pause in mid-sentence because she, and her class, can hear, albeit faintly, the crackling of flames.

I compare the two because brutality has such a long and painful half-life. We will live with the little girls of Tehran for a long time to come. They died because of outdated intelligence.

That doesn’t really matter, does it?

The little girls of Tehran were our little girls, too.

The bitterness I’ve felt in the last 72 hours—I have no patience for stupidity when it’s coupled with brutality—grows even more painful when I listen to what Anthony Bourdain taught me.