I'm fighting for blueberry pie!

I remembered when I was just a kid in grade school and we (Paul, Frankie and Me) were asking one another which was your favorite pie...and without hesitation Frankie answered on my behalf, "Yours is blueberry!" Well, if you really want to know that was an easy guess because when you're brought up in an orphanage, we all know each other's habits. We all sleep in the same dorms, go to the same in-house chapel, play in the same school yard, and eat in the same refectory. These were the post WWII years, and they were some of the happiest years of my life... no worries, no worries, no worries.
Today I'm worried. I'm worried about my country. The corruption, the unfounded attacks on Donald Trump, the over-looked anti-Americanism of the Obamas, Clintons, Bidens, the mainstream media, Hollywood (it's already looking like Sodom and Gomorrah), and all the leaders of the so-called deep state; George Soros, Klaus Schwab, the Pfizer Corporation, et.al. And perhaps the biggest worry, China! ...and you can throw in Russia, Iran, and anti-American Muslims who have infiltrated our political process; not assimilated, yes, infiltrated.
So, whenever these worries get under my skin, I seek relief in reading...even if it means reading something I've already read. Such is the case below.
I read Alistair Cooke's book, 'The American Homefront' the year it was published and believe it to be the best account of the goings on in America during WWII. We were united! How I wish we were today, only without the war. Pages 305 through 310 has a section titled Envoi; I had to look that up when I first read it, but now you don't have to, it's all here. With that said let me end this intro with a quote from Alistar Cooke just to remind China where we stand today...

"They have nine million men tanned, and tough and confident, ready to bounce into action against the anxious armies of the Axis. They are doing this because they cherish fiercely the things that their nation stood for when it was created a hundred and sixty-seven years ago, and that it stands for now. The boys in the Pacific, one of them said, are fighting for blueberry pie. That's a little thing they don't intend to lose."

I'm fighting for blueberry pie! ~ N.E. Hooben

...and I don't intend to lose.

Envoi *

During the 1940s Alistair Cooke became a regular contributor to the established BBC radio programme American Commentary. His contributions intensified as events unfolded once the United States entered the war. Such was the success of these broadcasts that the BBC commissioned Cooke's own weekly talks as American Letter, which in 1950 became the legendary Letter from America. In his broadcasts Cooke would occasionally refer back to the key experiences during his journey across America. Reprinted here is his broadcast for American Commentary on July 2, 1943 - an eve of Independence Day letter that powerfully conveyed what the Americans were doing for the war.

American Commentary:                                                       On Circuit

Alistair Cooke For Home and Empire Services                 July 2nd, 1943

 

A couple of weeks ago I stepped off a train in New York. I had gone 'round and across the American continent, and I was back where I started. If you had met me then, and said to me, “It must have been exciting, what was it like?” - well, I will try in a few minutes to tell you some of the things it was like. You have heard a lot about America in the past three years, and perhaps rather too much of Washington and New York.  Since 1939 it has been hard, and at times embarrassing, to say what America was doing for the war. To you, who had lost your homes and the people you loved, it was hard to talk of American sacrifice. It must have seemed as if we were asking you to take out your handkerchief and weep for a very rich man who had mislaid a favorite diamond ring. Even very early last year, it was the same America, the same landscape; the automobile highways were getting emptier every day; the boy next door went into the army; you heard about small farming towns here and there turning into smokeless powder factories. But last year, however much people felt about the war, or didn't, there was one big and obvious fact. Industry and agriculture were committed to the war and all their brains and investment were going into it. This was something the civilian didn't quite see, until suddenly this year the war took him by the scruff of the neck and moved him across this continent wherever the Army, or war industry or farming needed him. Now this year you can talk about American sacrifice and really mean all sorts of strange and inspiring things that have a special American twist, that are different from the sacrifices of countries which have, for instance, only one climate. For example, you have known for a long time the minor hardships of traveling by train in wartime. But at least you have the consolation that not too many railway journeys in England take two or three or four days, or even an overnight trip. f would pack my bags to leave Tucson, Arizona and get to the station at midnight - the train was meant to leave at eleven o'clock.  At one-thirty the great monster came roaring into the station. There were hundreds of people on the platform, sailors, wives and soldiers, a few Mexicans, a Chinese or two, long-legged Western girls dressed in gay colors, shuffling negro porters, government service men. They all surged forward to board the train. Then a voice booms out - 'Attention. Train No. 5, the Thunderbolt now arriving on track two for Phoenix, Yuma, Los Angeles and points west.  All civilian accommodation cancelled on this train. Will the two hundred Selective Service men line up opposite the subway enclosure. The Californian will arrive in one hour.' The Thunderbolt shot into the west. So we waited for another hour, then sat up all night, then waited until all the soldiers were fed before we could eat. It's good to treat civilians like that. In America it's new, and very cheering. Then you have heard that Americans haven't got the petrol they used to have, and maybe you think this means that the poor things will have to do without a picnic. But consider that everywhere west of the Mississippi, cities were built on the assumption that the only way a human moved was by motor car. A rancher in West Texas said he was going to have to work on horseback, for the first time in fifteen years. Then out on the Great Plains I stood with a sheep rancher in Wyoming, and he looked over his workshop - it was all the sweeping, rolling short, grassed earth between him and the horizon. He had a rationing form from Washington in his hand. He looked at it forlornly. He said, 'It says here, to share your car with your neighbor. My neighbor lives 97 miles away'. You may have heard too that the workers in shipyards and aircraft factories are producing thousands of torpedo boats and Liberty ships and four-motored bombers.  And so, they are. You may also have heard that they're all living the life of Ri1ey. Well, a month ago I spoke with a family, one of hundreds of families living and working on the damp, hot Gulf Coast of Mississippi. This family of four was making over forty pounds a week. But they are in a town that simply can't house ten times its normal population. So, what does this family's money buy for it? Well, it buys them a tent with a dirt floor and no lighting and no heat. If they'd gone back home, to Dallas, Texas, they would have earned a fifth of what they earn now. But they'd have had comforts they'll never know till the war is over. Well, they aren't going home. They'll stick it out and bring up their children in a tent or trailer. That, too, is sacrifice. Or let your mind fly four thousand miles north and west to the beautiful Cascade and Bitterroot mountains, and all the drenching green valleys of Oregon and Washington, where noble Douglas firs stand across the tops of mountains almost like avenues of cathedrals. Here is the greatest congregation of trees in the Western hemisphere. You'd think that one thing these people wouldn’t lack is wood. You can't buy a stick of wood to make a toy for your child. When I was there, the Navy had just gratefully received eleven million tons of lumber. In the golden Sacramento Valley, in California, last year, I saw vast fields flooded and rice being sown - by airplane - pretty tricky work. You have to skim parallel to the land not much more than a few yards above it. They used to lose good flyers. This year I went back the man I knew who sowed rice there, and who had never been outside California, this year used the same low-flying technique to fly wounded over the barren hills of North Africa there is today no part of America where you can expect the landscape to look the way it looked last year. I drove last year through an orchard in Georgia - a pecan nut orchard, five miles long. Today, the earth has been ravished by tractors and bulldozers, and planes sit out there in the sun, wings touching, like battalions of bluebottles. Maybe you have heard some of these things. But too often the news that's cabled across the ocean is the people's outcry against a new regulation from Washington. This is because Americans temperamentally don't like much government, they think of it as a healthy man thinks of a surgeon's knife. And when somebody tries to ration their life, their liberty, and their pursuit of happiness, they feel that they're being forcibly plumped on an operating table. You in Britain have the fine habit of grumbling. Americans howl. They are as convinced as you are that the operation is essential to their future health. But they howl for the record.  Unfortunately, a howl travels across the Atlantic louder and clearer than a deep conviction of a hundred and thirty million people. Dr. Goebbels says Americans are mad at the war.  Dr. Goebbels is right. But he left out an essential word. Americans are fighting mad. They transform a farm the size of Surrey into a tank training ground. They tear up the sagebrush from a desert the size of Yorkshire to make an air base. And if you ask them how many planes will fly out of here, the number is enough to make you fall in a dead faint; enough to make Hitler speed up his plans to abdicate. And when you ask why they need yet another airfield in a region of the country that breeds airplanes like flies, they say - 'This is one of the air bases we'll use in 1945 or 6.' They have changed the look of their vast and beautiful landscape; they have set in motion a migration of working populations unequalled since the pioneers walked across the West. They have nine million men tanned, and tough and confident, ready to bounce into action against the anxious armies of the Axis. They are doing this because they cherish fiercely the things that their nation stood for when it was created a hundred and sixty-seven years ago, and that it stands for now. The boys in the Pacific, one of them said, are fighting for blueberry pie. That's a little thing they don't intend to lose. There are some big things, the right to vote into power any man or government they want. The right to live in their own house and bring their children up as they please, and go fishing on Sunday, and pitch horseshoes, and say what's on their mind whether Washington agrees or not. And on the eve of Independence Day, this is what the New World, with its blood, its humor, and its roaring energy is fighting for.

*En·voi   /ˈenˌvoi/
noun
1.a short stanza concluding a ballade.
2.an author's concluding words.