Yesterday, the brilliant writer and reporter Christopher Dickey died in Paris. It put my memory in a pleasant place despite the world losing an intrepid reporter and eloquent writer who mentored younger journalists.

The loss of good people always hurts, and since the coronavirus hit the United States, we’ve lost too many people, and we’re going to lose a lot more. I don’t want to come across as insensitive to this. I find more heartbreak in this period of history than in any other I’ve lived through. It is far more heartbreaking than my childhood. More painful but, I guess, in a different way. I’m aware that this world isn’t centered on me; that I am not going to be remembered when I’m gone, and nobody will likely even know that I’m gone. But the people who have suffered and died during Donald Trump’s presidency, they are missed. As Mary L. Trump said in her interview with Rachel Maddow, one of the most horrifying things that the president has done, putting children in cages and kidnapping and allowing them to be tortured, motivated her to write her book, “Too Much, Not Enough”.

COVID-19 is killing people in absolutely sickening numbers, and Trump may deny responsibility, but it’s all on him. Mary L. Trump is a hero. I hope people will read her book and sober up. She gives us a portrait of a disgusting man who is both dangerous and who should never be underestimated.

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Death may not be the true end for people of certain cultures and religions, but that has never made the surviving families and friends feel any less broken of heart. Not if the dead were truly loved.

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When Christopher Dickey died, he didn’t leave behind a father. He left behind a wife, two siblings, a son and grandchildren. Working for Daily Beast , he was active up to his final minutes.

He worked for the Washington Post, then Newsweek until it merged with Daily Beast. He was 68 when he died, having lived a productive and memorable life.

But it doesn’t seem that he liked his father that much. Author James Dickey of Deliverance fame — he wrote the novel and appeared as the sheriff in the hit movie — was a notable poet. But he had a dark side, as all of us do, and he acted on that dark side often. He seems to have been dysfunctional as a father and husband, he kept a mistress, and he drank. He was evidently pretty hard on Chris. And Chris blamed his father for the death of his mother; she was neglected and began to drink.

Christopher did seek a reconciliation as his father was near death. He wrote a book called “Summer of Deliverance” in which he recalled spending time with his father on the film locations.

That is also on my reading list along with Mary L. Trump’s book and John Bolton’s book.

My only experience with James Dickey was pleasant. After watching Deliverance in 1984, I was talking about the film with a colleague. We couldn’t agree on one thing that the film deliberately confused the audience with. After the rape scene, Burt Reynolds as Lewis shoots the first mountain man with an arrow. The second mountain man, listed by IMDb as “toothless man” flees, with Drew (Ronny Cox) chasing him for a few yards.

After arguing about whether to report the incident, a consensus is reached to bury the “cracker” (another name for a mountain man). This is sound, they think, because the river they are canoeing on will be flooded by a dam. Any ground on the banks will be covered by a deep lake and the body will never be found. But afterward, back in the canoes, the four of them encounter Rapids leading into a gorge. Drew is told by Ed (Jon Voight) to put his lifejacket on, but Drew doesn’t, and pitches forward out of the front of his canoe. Both canoes collide and all four are swept into the rapids. A deep pool sits under sheer rock face, and there Ed discovers that Lewis has been seriously injured. He and Bobby (Ned Beatty) drag him to a rock shelf and recover the aluminum canoe; the other one broke up. Despite his pain, Lewis tells Ed that Drew was shot. Armed with bow and arrows, Ed climbs the rock face after dark. He knows the second mountain man is up there, waiting for them to move out from the rocks into the river.

In the morning, Ed shoots the second mountain man and is scared to find that this guy isn’t missing his two top front teeth. On closer inspection, he finds that the teeth are a partial, and when he gets the body down to the others, asks Bobby to identify the guy. But Bobby isn’t sure. He’s traumatized by being raped by the cracker that Lewis shot.

At no time is it ever said for certain whether Ed shoots the right guy or not. My colleague debated. It turned into an argument: did Ed shoot the right guy? Probably so, because he’s up top with a rifle, looking down at the river when Ed catches up to him. I wondered how I could find out. I decided to get a library card and read the book.

The book was excellent. The film is listed under the “Horror” genre, and since I’ve been through the Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia and Florida, I was able to picture in my mind things that weren’t exactly in the film. I find the southern east coast to be thoroughly chilling, haunted, dangerous even on the interstate (don’t run out of gas), and despite natural beauty, fodder for nightmares. God willing, I’ll never have to go back.

The book was no help, however, in solving the mystery of the man on the rocky top of the gorge. I told my colleague about it. We argued the same thing over again. Finally I looked at the jacket, saw where James Dickey lived, called information for his number, and got it.

I dialed him up and his second wife answered. “Are you a reporter?” she asked.

“No ma’am just a fan with a question, ” I said. James Dickey answered the phone. I told him about our argument and he explained that whether Ed killed the right man or not didn’t matter; that part of the story was about survival. “They did what they had to do to survive”, he said simply. And added, to my everlasting frustration, that he himself didn’t know the answer, had never even considered it. He said he had a new book coming soon, asked if I would read it, I promised I would, and we said goodbye. I found his willingness to chat with me, his southern accent and his eagerness to discuss the subject very endearing. I’ll never forget it.

That was when I knew very little about him. That he was an alcoholic and at least verbally abusive makes me very sad. Our short phone conversation was in the summer of 1984. Dickey passed away in 1998. Now, father and son are together again. I hope they know peace and happiness in God’s care.

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Sadly, some fathers create monsters. Donald Trump’s father, according to Mary L. Trump, was a real shitball and so hard on his kids that one son went on to drink himself to death. Donald learned how to be vicious, vindictive and a liar, along with a racist and a cheater who could never excel at anything. If he didn’t steal it, he could not posses it. If he didn’t pay contractors, he at least gave them insults concerning their work. He cheated his own siblings out of their share of their father’s estate, and he cut funding for the medical bills for an autistic boy, a nephew, I believe. That’s your president. That’s the man who got evil people to put children in cages, deny them bathroom facilities and hygiene essentials, put them through tortures in the heat in tents, being bitten by insects and made sick by the heat. I never bought the stories that attempted to debunk the claims of torture like sleep deprivation and sexual abuse, starvation and lack of basic healthcare. We heard the story of a child who was left with a fever who later died. We wondered, if there was any humanity in us, how many more died in the ICE concentration camps.

We should have been outraged. Should have been. There were protests. At first. Before he died, Elijah Cummings was outraged and questioned some meatball about stories coming out that the mylar blankets the kids were given were covered in solid waste. I don’t remember any follow-up to that inquiry. A month ago the kids were ordered released because of COVID-19. But their parents are South of the border. Where will you release these kids? Across the border, where they’ll be trafficked by cartels? The land of justice…the land of the free and the home of the brave, the country that used to hate it when human rights abuses happened in other countries, has become a land of vermin and a cesspool of the worst humanity has to offer.

Mary L. Trump gives insight, as a clinical psychologist, into the lack of character, morals, ethics and decency her uncle is made up of. When he came forth from the womb, his fate was sealed already. He was a slime even as a child, bullying schoolmates. He hated people of color; refused to rent shitty apartments to them, even faced a court proceeding for it. That only made him more hateful.

I won’t say much more about Trump. Weve looked at two dysfunctional fathers and seen one son whom we now mourn, whose truthful reporting and intrepidity will be missed.

The other son went on to dismantle a government and kill so many people that his soul will surely be reunited with his father in a dark and tortuous place.