Gone but not Forgotten

    One way to be remembered is to disappear without a trace. We still wonder about Jimmy Hoffa and Amelia Earhart, and a little further back, Ambrose Bierce, who took off for Mexico in 1913 to report on the Mexican Civil War. Bierce was a journalist and attached himself to Pablo Villa's army as an observer. He never made it home.

   There are rumors that he was executed by a firing squad or that he snuck back to the U.S. and committed suicide at the Grand Canyon, but it’s all speculation. He had fought as a Union soldier in the American Civil War and his record reads like a history of the western theater of the war: Shiloh (the worst), Chickamauga, Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, Kennesaw Mountain. He suffered a traumatic brain injury at Kennesaw Mountain and missed the last few months of the war.

   He stayed in the army after the war ending up in San Francisco where he settled as a journalist specializing in crime reporting. He wrote short stories about his war experiences. An Occurrence at Owl Creek is his best known story. In his journalism he exposed chicanery in high places and he was a social critic and satirist. The great curmudgeon H.L. Mencken was a fan.

   His most famous work, still widely quoted today, is The Devil's Dictionary, a collection of satirical definitions. Sweater: a garment worn by a child when it's mother is feeling chilly. Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. Selfish: Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others. Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math. Education: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.  

Happy Birthday Ambrose Bierce (1842) 

"Squibs: Murder by a million witticisms.”