DiaBLOGue

Where Everyone Builds Bombs

Of course, when anyone asks me what my husband does for a living, I never say, “He builds nuclear weapons.” No one in Richland builds bombs. People here only teach school, fight fires, design containment…

The High Price of Poetry

Adolph Hitler was barely one month old when my father, Walter ‘Edward Clark, now still living, was born on 31 May 1889. When he was fifteen, in 1904, Father started to farm on his own in Idaho. Hitler was then a choirboy in Austria, avidly aspiring to become a priest. Only six years earlier, the United States had been engaged in a “splendid little war” on the largest Carribean island — at the enthusiastic urging of William Randolph Hearst and Teddy Roosevelt.

Making Sense of the Senseless: An Irish Education

NOVEMBER 1982:  I’m out of breath. This past month I’ve passed both my written and oral exams and presented my prospectus. Now nothing stands in the way of my trip to Ireland except earning the…

Thoughts of a Mormon Centurion

I was born and raised in Bremen, a city in northwest Germany, in a I middle-class family. At age fifteen, I became interested in politics, joined a neo-orthodox communistic “cell group” at high school, and…