Gently in Manner Strongly in Deed

<p class=ql-align-center>Author's Notes on Second Edition:</p><p><br></p><p>Before going to West Point Dwight D. Eisenhower </p><p>took a job at a local creamery. This was also where his father </p><p>worked as a refrigeration engineer. A portion of his pay went </p><p>to funding his brother's college education and Ike himself </p><p>was without concrete plans for his future. One day on the job </p><p>Eisenhower accidentally fell into a large cooling tank filled with </p><p>cold salt water. After his coworkers pulled him out he looked at </p><p>his saviors and said You should have pushed me under.</p><p>It's hard to imagine this man years later pacing the </p><p>grounds of Greenham Common Airfield as the D-Day invasion </p><p>was in full swing. Before he became himself he was a Kansan </p><p>who drove a battery-operated car designed for women and barely </p><p>managed entry into West Point on football scholarship. He spent </p><p>his time in training dreaming of moving to South America and </p><p>becoming a Cowboy (a fate that almost came to fruition). His </p><p>wife and her father refused to let him become a pilot so he </p><p>settled for work that propelled him to victory of fascism the </p><p>presidency and world wide admiration.</p><p>Somewhere in there he managed to prop up some pet </p><p>dictators in Latin America and seal us into a very long and cold </p><p>ideological war. He was a Republican who created federal jobs </p><p>favored a 90 percent corporate tax rate and expanded social </p><p>security. He was a unionist and a man of business. He was a </p><p>soldier who ended his presidency with a chilling speech that </p><p>accurately predicted our future reliance on the military industrial </p><p>complex and shunned war outright as impractical and outright evil. </p><p>Hypocrisy and complexity are two sides of something </p><p>I'm sure. To be honest I don't know where to draw the line nor </p><p>can I guarantee that if one were to venture into the space between </p><p>that there would be anything worth a second glance. However I </p><p>am moved by the stories within and have done my best to stay </p><p>true to my instinctual though fickle inclinations.</p><p>This edition is not much different than the first. It </p><p>features far less commentary and a little more poetry. A few of </p><p>the poems have been edited. The original edition was the raw </p><p>unvetted text of a Master's thesis. This is something else; this is </p><p>at the very least something new. </p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p>Timothy Tarkelly</p><p>March 2 2023</p>