Philip Caputo's Blog

I went to the “Hands Off” rally in Tucson today, Saturday, April 5, that was part of a nationwide protest against the Trump administration and its policies. Maybe I should have written the “Trumusk” Administration; Elon Musk appears to have as much sway as Trump himself, firing federal workers  left, right, and center, in the name of streamlining government.  One protestor’s sign struck my eye: it showed Musk (a South African by birth) delivering what appears to be a stiff-armed Nazi salute, and the message, “THERE’S ONY ONE IMMIGRANT TAKING AMERICAN JOBS AWAY.

The rally was one of hundreds across the nation, organized by Indivisible and MoveOn.org. Estimates are that this movement drew at least half a million people.

The scale of the Tucson demonstration was impressive. People were marching for blocks, on both sides of the street, in the neighborhood of Reid Park. My off-the-cuff guess is that 10,000 people showed up for the event, and they represented every age above, say, ten. I saw one man, who appeared to be in his eighties, in a wheelchair. A monitor told me that about 2,000 had signed up, as I did, but that represented only a fraction of the total. They carried signs, of course, and many of the messages were aimed at Musk. I’d say criticisms of him almost equalled those directed at his (political) boss.The same goes for the chants, of the “Hey-ho, Trump and Musk have got to go” variety. Drivers passing by on Alvernon Way and 22d Street, honked horns to express solidarity. Sometimes you had to shout to make yourself heard above the cacophony.

The atmosphere was festive rather than angry, though anger was evident in the signs and chants. I found it bracing. The Democratic Party, moderates as well progressives, has been quiescent in the wake of Trump’s victory in the 2024 race. Now, it’s waking up to the dangers he and his cronies pose to American democracy. His administration is pushing the United States ever closer to right-wing authoritarianism. A lot of the signs called for “King Donald’ to be deposed.

But…You expected a ‘but’ I’ll bet…protests and marches and rallies, no matter how large, are not going to change the course Trump & Company, are on. I’ve seen this before, going back to anti-war demonstrations in the 60s. Reversing that course is going to require legislators to rise up in the Congress, it’s going to require the election of opposition politicians to local and state as well as federal offices, and changes of heart in many of people who either sat things out in 2024, or voted for Trump, under the delusion that he is anything but a would-be autocrat, a convicted criminal, a man whose primary, indeed, his only, loyalty is to himself and a few billionaires. I’ve seen my share of turmoil in my 83 years, but I have never felt as concerned about where this great country is going as I am today

Oh, and by the way, I’m not letting the Democrats off the hook. The party’s obsession with fringe issues, as opposed to the economy and immigration (to name two), its habit of lecturing rather than persuading, share in the condition in which we now find ourselves. It’s past time, way past time, for all who love democracy to wake up and return to solving the problems that concern ordinary citizens

Text of an email sent to VP J.D. Vance.

February 28, 2025

The Honorable J.D. Vance                      

Office of the Vice President

Dear Vice President Vance:

I served in Vietnam, as you did in Iraq, with the United States Marine Corps. That is among the reasons why I am stunned by the appalling treatment you and President Trump administered to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine at the recent meeting in the White House. I wasn’t too taken aback by President Trump’s actions — like millions of Americans, I expect boorish, even idiotic behavior from him. But I expected a modicum of diplomacy and intelligence from you.

Yet you publicly castigated and humiliated Zelenksy, the first time in history that has happened in an Oval Office meeting with a head of state. Zelensky is an almost Churchillian figure who has valiantly led his nation for three bloody years against a massive Russian invasion. For you to tell him that his entrance into the Oval Office was disrespectful was disrespectful on your part. Worse, it was disgraceful. For you to attack Ukraine “forcing conscripts to the front line” displayed callousness and ignorance. We fought World War Two largely with conscripts. Moreover, what do you expect a mid-size power like Ukraine to do when invaded by a much bigger, better armed nation like Russia? Roll over and surrender?

I spent two years as a correspondent in Moscow, so I have more than a casual knowledge of Russian national aspirations. There is much more at stake in this conflict, as you should know (but probably don’t). Russia under Vladimir Putin wishes to resurrect the Soviet Empire. Reconquest of the Baltic and Balkan states are doubtless on the Kremlin’s agenda. That would follow the return of Ukraine to the Russian sphere of influence, and would more easily accomplished if it can demonstrate its might by while cowing the West to the role of spectator. How you and your boss can fail to see this reality is beyond me; it speaks of a blindness that’s willful.

I’ve read that the Kremlin is ecstatic over events in the Oval Office. Congratulations on your  role in stirring its elation. You, sir, are a disgrace to to the cause of democracy, to this country, your office, and to the uniform you once wore. 

Very Truly Yours,

Philip Caputo   

I am a lifelong Democrat. The first national election I voted in was in 1964 — LBJ vs. Barry Goldwater. You may then count me in the chorus calling for Joe Biden to quit the current race and make way for someone mentally and physically fit to lead this great nation. He proved that with last night’s disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump, who is unfit for the White House on grounds of character and moral probity. If he is, as many Democrats believe, an existential threat to democracy in the U.S., then the party must look to, and choose, a candidate with the youth, intelligence, and vigor to defeat him.

Memorial Day, 2024.

LCPL CARROLL FANKHAUSER, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 8/24/65
PFC ROBERT FERNANDEZ, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 6/20/65
CPL BRIAN GAUTHIER, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/11/65
LCPL REYNALDO GUZMAN, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines. 1/25/66
1STLT WALTER LEVY, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines. 9/18/65
PFC CURTIS LOCKHART, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/30/65
PFC PATRICK MANNING, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/30/65
LTCOL JOSEPH MUIR, 3d Battalion, 3d Marines. 9/11/65
PFC STEVEN PAGE, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines. 1/25/66
2DLT JAMES PARMALEE, 2d Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/14/65
1STLT FRANK REASONER,3d Reconnaissance Battalion. 7/12/65
LCPL KENNETH SEISSER, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/11/65
1STLT ADAM SIMPSON, 1st Battalion, 9th Marines. 10/3/65
PFC LONNIE SNOW, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/30/65
SGT HUGH SULLIVAN, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 6/5/65
1STLT BRUCE WARNER, 3d Tank Battalion. 2/3/66
SGT WILLIAM WEST, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines. 3/28/66.

Semper Fi, Brothers.

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Patagonia, Arizona — Yesterday, Tuesday March 19, was election day here for the Democratic primary. While I was walking home after voting, I couldn’t miss the handsome, inspiring flag snapping from a yard only two houses down from the polling place in the town library. I also couldn’t resist taking this photo (see below) with my iPhone. As I did, a woman of about forty flew out of the house screaming at me, “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Get out of here or I’m calling the cops!” I reminded her that I was on a public sidewalk and that neither she nor the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department could order me off of it, unless I was engaged in a felony. My comment did not sit well with her. Her voice rose to a shriek: “Get out! Get out! Why are you taking a picture of our flag? Get out!” Raising my own voice: “I took the photo because that flag is vulgar, offensive and stupid! I just voted for Biden and your flag says ‘Fuck You’ for doing just that.” She shot back that I was stupid and offensive.

Now, I should have told her that I took the picture because it was such a cool flag and I couldn’t wait to show it to my friends; but that’s the kind of thing you always think of afterward. This brief confrontation in a small town troubled — and still troubles — me because that it’s emblematic of the vulgarity and ignorance and offensiveness and viciousness that infects our political life like the Corona virus. It is part and parcel with Trump’s prediction, at a recent campaign rally, that a “bloodbath” will follow if he’s not elected for another term as President. Part and parcel with the GOP candidate in North Carolina for superintendent of state schools who in the recent past had tweeted that prominent Democrats — Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, Joe Biden, among others, should be executed by firing squad.

My back of the envelope calculations show that ninety-five percent of the vitriol and murderous rhetoric belches out of the MAGA precincts in the right wing. I am an old guy now, slightly older than Biden, and as I look back I cannot recall a time when hate and calls for violence, from ordinary citizens as well as from candidates for public office, were an almost daily occurrence. A new movie, “Civil War,” premiered this month. The title is unambiguous — it’s about Americans fighting and killing fellow countrymen in a dystopian U.S. No fantasy, it might well be a forecast. Yes, I’m old, and frankly glad I am. It’s the world my grandchildren may inherit that plagues my thoughts and nightmares.

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Over the years, I’ve made the rounds at numerous local bookstores, both as a patron and a visiting author. Browsing these stores is a pleasurable combination of treasure hunting and making personal connections with the book enthusiasts who work there. I always come away with a positive feeling, which I can’t say about making hit-and-run Amazon.com book purchases.

My most recent bookstore visits were extra-positive because I found my latest book, MEMORY AND DESIRE, on the “Book Club” shelf at Barrett Bookstore in Darien, Connecticut, and on the “New and Notable” shelf at the excellent Barnes and Noble store in Charlottesville, Virginia.

We could all use a little more positivity in our lives these days. So, as a longtime proponent of local bookstores, I’d like to urge readers of this post to make the effort to seek out those bookstores while you’re out and about. Try to connect with the people who work there and see what kind of treasures you happen upon as you wander around. And if you spot MEMORY AND DESIRE along the way, feel free to snap a photo of it and post it as a comment to this post. I’d love to see where my book is being found by my readers.

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A week ago, my editor at Arcade/Skyhorse Publishing sent me a review of Memory and Desire from Booklist, one of three or four services that offer advance reviews of soon-to-be-published books. The review was complimentary, but it got me thinking about the always fraught relationship between writers and literary critics, which has a long history.

In 1818, the influential periodical The Quarterly Review panned John Keats’s poetry as “unintelligible,” “diffuse,” “tiresome,” and “absurd.” Keats, today regarded as one of English literature’s immortals, died shortly afterward at age 26. Although tuberculosis was the cause, his contemporary, Lord Byron, blamed his death on the reviewer, one John Wilson Croker.

In 1851, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick received a few accolades but suffered far more abuse. Typical of the latter was this one from The London Athenaeum: “Our author must be henceforth numbered in the company of the incorrigibles who occasionally tantalize us with indications of genius, while they constantly summon us to endure monstrosities, carelessnesses, and other such harassing manifestations of bad taste as daring or disordered ingenuity can devise…”

Wow. That one must have hit Melville like a Mike Tyson right hand, if Melville took it to heart. The lesson here is that no writer should take censure or acclaim too seriously. Ernest Hemingway’s comment — If you believe the good things they (critics) say about you, then you’re bound to believe the bad — applies. It’s good advice if a writer wishes to maintain his or her mental equilibrium. I recall one review of my first novel, Horn of Africa, that more or less suggested that my typewriter should be confiscated, while others compared me to Conrad and Dostoevsky. Were I to have given credence to these conflicting opinions, I would have suffered severe emotional whiplash.

First-rate commercial writers are generally insulated from critical brickbats. These writers are known quantities whose fans will buy their books no matter what reviewers say or don’t say about them.

Writers considered to be “literary” don’t enjoy that sort of immunity. Though some protest that they don’t care if they become hot sellers, the harsh fact is that they will need to find day jobs if their performance in the marketplace isn’t at least respectable. Their publishers may even abandon them.

And that’s why reviews are anything but irrelevant. They have a direct bearing on a writer’s income; those who sell and buy books pay attention to these reviews. True, a rave doesn’t guarantee that a novel or story collection will fly off the shelves; nor does the opposite forecast a flop. But we’re talking percentages. High praise usually promises decent sales; nasty reviews, in all probability, predict commercial failure, though even that is preferable to the worst outcome: being ignored altogether.

Two examples: I recall Thomas McGuane telling me, a long time ago, that one of his early novels (I’ve forgotten which one) was draped in critical laurels but sold a mere 3,000 copies.

My 2005 novel, Acts of Faith, was very long (669 pages), very complex, with half a dozen major characters and a host of minor ones, and was set in East Africa and Sudan. My agent and friends were fairly sure it would be the literary equivalent of Michael Cimino’s 1980 film, Heaven’s Gate, one of the biggest box-office disasters in movie history.

Having taken considerable risks researching Acts of Faith and four years to write it, I had been giving myself frequent manicures with my teeth when I learned that the book was to be reviewed by the New York Times’s formidable Michiko Kakutani, who wasn’t known to be shy when it came to eviscerating books she didn’t like. Her 1,000-word review was printed in the Times’ daily editions of May 11, 2005. It was so full of accolades that one of my skeptical friends asked me, “Are you and she an item?” I assured him that I’d never met her, but would certainly give her a kiss if I ever did.

Acts of Faith sold 105,000 copies and is still in print.

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Why write? A question I’ve been asking myself lately. I’m 82, and can feel, almost as a physical sensation, the ebbing of my mental and creative energies. Whatever reputation I’ve established isn’t going to be enhanced by one more book; nor is the world exactly clamoring for the next Phil Caputo novel. (My last one, Hunter’s Moon, despite a front-page rave in the New York Times Book Review, applause in the Chicago Tribune, and praiseworthy blurbs from prominent writers, sold a mere 10,000 copies). Philip Roth and Alice Munro formally announced their retirements in their 80s. If people of that caliber see fit to hang up their spurs, it seems pretentious for me to go on scribbling.

This rational argument, however, loses out to my compulsion to keep scribbling. I’ve been doing it for so long—half a century—that it’s become as natural, and essential, as breathing. Plots and characters, sentences and partial sentences and whole paragraphs flit through my brain, demanding to be expressed; they drive me to my desk to scrawl them on a blank page or type them onto an empty laptop screen. I continue to believe that I still have something to say, continue to think, or hope, that at least a few people will find pleasure or truth in whatever I have to say, continue to feel that filling those blank spaces with words gives me a sense of purpose no other endeavor bestows.

And so I will be publishing my 18th book, Memory and Desire, this coming fall. And so I’ve recently completed three short stories of a new collection I hope to finish in the next year. And so ideas for two more novels tease me in my waking moments, and sometimes in my dreams. I go on scribbling and typing because it’s the only thing I’ve ever been halfway good at; because it’s what I believe I was put on earth to do.

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Memory and Desire is my 18th book, my 11th work of fiction, and something of a departure for me.

It is essentially a love story, a tale about the conflict between desire and duty, about a middle-aged man’s reunion with a son he fathered out of wedlock in his youth, and the consequences of a long-buried passion. Memory and Desire takes place in the months spanning the twilight of the last century and the dawn of the 21st, and has a domestic setting—South Florida.

By contrast, most of my previous novels, and my nonfiction too, have had foreign settings—Vietnam, Sudan, the Mideast—and have dealt with people confronting moral dilemmas in places or situations in which the guardrails to civilized behavior are not clear, or have vanished altogether. You might say I’ve been an extremophile, a biological term for organisms that thrive in extreme environments.

I had a fatal attraction to extremes, an antipathy for ordinary life, with its predictable rhythms (go to work, come home, have dinner, watch TV before bed) and quotidian concerns (pay bills, help the kids with their homework). I was a restless wanderer, a geographical as well as a sexual nomad who had fought in one distant war, covered several others as a correspondent, traveled to 58 countries on four continents, and burned through two marriages, not to mention any number of love affairs.

My literary soulmates were writers similarly afflicted: Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Graham Greene, etc. At the same time, curiously enough, I admired novelists whose imaginations and talent enabled them to weave compelling stories of great beauty from the threads of everyday experience. John Updike comes immediately to mind, so does Alice Munro, especially Munro. Their alchemy made poetry out of the prosaic.

I cannot fix the time, with any precision, when I began to reject violent events in intemperate climates—dark doings in sunny places in Greene’s phrase—as grist for my own work. My age—I will be 82 on June 10—had a lot to do with it. Anyway, the publication, in 2017, of Hunter’s Moon seems as good a turning point as any. That collection of interwoven short stories is set in a small-town Michigan, and its characters—a tavern keeper, a college professor, a B&B owner, among others—belong to a world most people would find recognizable.

Memory and Desire is a further step in that direction. I cannot say it’s the best book I’ve ever written; I can say without qualification that it is the best I was able to write at the time I wrote it.

Memory and Desire publishes in September 2023. Find out more here.

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Memorial Day, 2023.

LCPL CARROLL FANKHAUSER, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 8/24/65
PFC ROBERT FERNANDEZ, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 6/20/65
CPL BRIAN GAUTHIER, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/11/65
LCPL REYNALDO GUZMAN, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines. 1/25/66
1STLT WALTER LEVY, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines. 9/18/65
PFC CURTIS LOCKHART, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/30/65
PFC PATRICK MANNING, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/30/65
LTCOL JOSEPH MUIR, 3d Battalion, 3d Marines. 9/11/65
PFC STEVEN PAGE, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines. 1/25/66
2DLT JAMES PARMALEE, 2d Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/14/65
1STLT FRANK REASONER,3d Reconnaissance Battalion. 7/12/65
LCPL KENNETH SEISSER, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/11/65
1STLT ADAM SIMPSON, 1st Battalion, 9th Marines. 10/3/65
PFC LONNIE SNOW, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/30/65
SGT HUGH SULLIVAN, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 6/5/65
1STLT BRUCE WARNER, 3d Tank Battalion. 2/3/66
SGT WILLIAM WEST, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines. 3/28/66.

Semper Fi, Brothers.

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