Today is, as you’re surely aware, the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that sparked America’s involvement in World War II.

I’m not sure what to say. I’m tempted to write something nostalgic about the kind of America (I grew up in its backwash, and so remember it a little) that could unify in the face of aggression and dig in for the long haul, making sacrifices for the sake of victory—and justice. Errors were made of course. No one is proud of the internment of the American Japanese. And yet even that demonstrates the differences between that America and ours. Instead of assuming the mantle of victimhood, the Nisei grimly set about proving their loyalty beyond all doubt—a profoundly American response that secured for them an honored place in our society forever.

In contrast, I find on Robert J. Avrech’s Seraphic Secret blog a report that shocks and shames me. It’s not an apples to apples thing—he’s talking about Norway, not the United States. But Norway is my second favorite country, and one of the countries our political leadership looks to today as a model. Norway, like the U.S., is no longer the country it was when it was attacked in the 1940s. Continue reading Pearl Harbor before swine →

I had a little adventure on Saturday. A relation of mine from Norway, a young man, is spending a year studying at a college in South Dakota. He contacted me a while back, saying a bus tour was being arranged to the Mall of America here in Minneapolis, and would I show him around town if he came? I agreed of course, and so he ditched the tour and I took him around the Cities. He’d asked to see some of the sites related to Norwegians.

The first place I took him, after lunch, was an obscure one. I told him he’d probably wonder why I bothered with it, but it’s one most tour guides don’t know about (I think). I only know it because I read David Michaelis’s book, Schulz and Peanuts.

I took him to the corner of Snelling and Syndicate in St. Paul,and we walked to a cafe next to O’Gara’s Bar. The cafe has large front windows. I explained that this (I was pretty sure) was the place where the father of the creator of the Peanuts comic strip, Charles M. Schulz, had had his barber shop.

“They lived in several places,” I told my cousin, “but the last place they lived as a family was an upstairs apartment just around the corner, where the bar’s parking lot is now. It was there that Schulz’ mother died of cancer, about the same time he was preparing to go off to war.

“Are you familiar with the Norwegian nickname, ‘Snupi?’” I asked.

“Oh yes,” he said. (Snupi is a term of endearment, something a mother might call her child).

“Well, it was right there that Schulz’s mother, who was Norwegian by ancestry, said to him, ‘If we ever have another dog, I think we should name him Snupi.’” It was one of the last things she ever said to him.

Years later, when Schulz was making a deal to syndicate the Peanuts strip, somebody found out that the name he’d chosen for his cartoon dog, “Sniffy,” had already been taken by another cartoonist. So Schulz whited out the name “Sniffy” from all the panels, and inked in “Snoopy,” the name his mother had liked—the spelling altered so Americans could pronounce it.

Some people think there’s a Da Vinci painting on the other side of a fresco-laden wall in Florence. They want to drill through the fresco to get to it. Others want to preserve the fresco. “Vasari [who painted The Battle of Marciano in Val di Chiana in 1563] knew how to remove works by other people [meaning Da Vinci’s abandoned work on the same wall] while keeping them intact. What sense would there have been sealing up the Da Vinci, unless you get into childish Dan Brown logic?”

Ah, Mr. Brown. You have sealed your name in history, haven’t you?