8/9/2026

 Sunday, August 9, 2026

1253 Clare of Assisi's rules confirmed by Pope Innocent IV for Clare's Order of Poor Ladies

1854 American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau published "Walden."

1945 Nagasaki

This is a photo I took of myself and a mural I painted on the wall of the bedroom I used as a studio when we lived on Newton Avenue in Shorewood.  I took the photo after we put the house up for sale when Geri took a position in Seattle, and I moved into our condo in the Knickerbocker Hotel.  I copied it from the cover of a Time or Newsweek or U S News magazine during the Balkan wars.  I was struck by the power of the image, which depicted an American airman who was shot down and captured during the war.  I also had an urge to paint something big, on a big surface.  To sell the house, I had to paint over the image, though, if I could have, I would have had the plaster wall removed and saved, and a new wall installed.  Alas, not to be.  I was about 57 years old when I took the photo.

In bed at 9, up at 5:30; 0545 201.0  117/75/63 109;  62/79/61, cloudy/partly cloudy morning, thunderstorms expected this afternoon.

Morning meds at 7:45 a.m.  Eliquis at 6:20 a.m. and p.m. Weight loss suggests dehydration as the urology nurse told me on Friday.  I finally measured the weight of water in my water bottle at 22 ozs., so drinking 2 full bottles and a little more would get me to the recommended minimum of 48 ozs.

More thoughts while working my way through East of Eden. (1). I started the morning reading chapter 39, which cuts too close to the bone for my comfort.  Steinbeck deals with how fathers may know little of their sons, and vice versa.  He also deals with the consequences of the sins of the fathers being visited on their sons.  It brings to mind of course the main theme of Elizabeth Strout's novel, how little we know of one another, even in our intimate relationships.  Both authors tackle the truth famously recognized by Alexandr Solszenitzen in The Gulag Archipelago: 

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained” 

It reminds me too of something Tracy Letts, author of August, Osage County, said in an interview and which I made a note of:

"I think there comes a point in your life where you own your damage.  You don't necessarily get over it, you don't necessarily have it all figured out, you just say this is mine, these are the things I have to be aware of, take care of, work around."  Tracy Letts, NY Times Magazine, 3/23/2014  

(2) Cathy/Kate Ames is incredibly, almost literally, evil as this story moves along.   She's a murderer and a thief and filled with hate, but I don't have a sense of why or how she got to be this way.  She was a bad actor even as a child and I'm wondering whether Steinbeck has created her as an exception to his personal philosophy that there are no all-good or all-bad human beings.  Cathy/Kate is the big mystery in the novel, at last so far, 80% through the plot.

 Test to SCC:

Hi, Sweetie.  I just read in the Times that Europe is expecting its 5th heat wave since May, but when I checked the weather report for Geretsried, it appears that you are already in it.  I hope you and the rest of the family are holding up in it.  It’s been pretty pleasant here, though we are expecting thunderstorms this afternoon, with the possibility of a train of storms, one following another.  It was a year ago this weekend that we had the 1,000 rain that flooded our basement, causing a lot of stress and expense.  We got 11 inches of rain here over two days.  That event, plus all the news of droughts and wildfires around the world have made me too aware of the dangers from climate change, and the fact that none of us is protected from it. . . . My old pal Larry Anderson and his wife will be visiting us on Tuesday.  I’ve become quite a FB friend with Jan, who regularly posts nastygrams about Trump.  Currently, they are traveling with their dog in their RV, staying last week outside of Penisula State Park in Door County.  Larry is retired as a bird colonel from the Marine Corps reserve and both he and Jan are former career assistant US attorneys, disgusted with what Trump (and now Blanche) has done to the Department of Justice.  Larry is 80 years old and during their stay in Door County, drove his classic Triumph motorcycle 150 miles to a lake outside Waupaca to attend a reunion of AUSAs from the Milwaukee office.  The ride persuaded him that his days of long distance travel by motorcycle are now over. . . .  I’ve been reading and mostly enjoying “East of Eden” by John Steinbeck, which I hadn’t read before, nor seen the movie in which James Dean made such a splash.  It’s over 800 pages long and I’m only through 75% of it, but I’m looking forward to the last couple of hundred pages.  It’s quite dramatic, sometimes melodramatic, but an interesting study of human nature, especially father-son relationships.  Some of it is painful or troubling for me to read, triggering memories.  I’ve seen nothing of Andy or his family all summer except for giving Lizzie a ride to work one afternoon.  I hope he’s weathering  his job change OK. . .  Stay safe, stay cool.  Love you forever.❤️

Charles Clausen:

Hi, Sweetie.  I just read in the Times that Europe is expecting its 5th heat wave since May, but when I checked the weather report for Geretsried, it appears that you are already in it.  I hope you and the rest of the family are holding up in it.  It’s been pretty pleasant here, though we are expecting thunderstorms this afternoon, with the possibility of a train of storms, one following another.  It was a year ago this weekend that we had the 1,000 rain that flooded our basement, causing a lot of stress and expense.  We got 11 inches of rain here over two days.  That event, plus all the news of droughts and wildfires around the world have made me too aware of the dangers from climate change, and the fact that none of us is protected from it. . . . My old pal Larry Anderson and his wife will be visiting us on Tuesday.  I’ve become quite a FB friend with Jan, who regularly posts nastygrams about Trump.  Currently, they are traveling with their dog in their RV, staying last week outside of Penisula State Park in Door County.  Larry is retired as a bird colonel from the Marine Corps reserve and both he and Jan are former career assistant US attorneys, disgusted with what Trump (and now Blanche) has done to the Department of Justice.  Larry is 80 years old and during their stay in Door County, drove his classic Triumph motorcycle 150 miles to a lake outside Waupaca to attend a reunion of AUSAs from the Milwaukee office.  The ride persuaded him that his days of long distance travel by motorcycle are now over. . . .  I’ve been reading and mostly enjoying “East of Eden” by John Steinbeck, which I hadn’t read before, nor seen the movie in which James Dean made such a splash.  It’s over 800 pages long and I’m only through 75% of it, but I’m looking forward to the last couple of hundred pages.  It’s quite dramatic, sometimes melodramatic, but an interesting study of human nature, especially father-son relationships.  Some of it is painful or troubling for me to read, triggering memories.  I’ve seen nothing of Andy or his family all summer except for giving Lizzie a ride to work one afternoon.  I hope he’s weathering  his job change OK. . .  Stay safe, stay cool.  Love you forever.❤️

Hi Dad! It’s warm here, but not bad for August. I have always felt somewhat bad for the Bavarian kids who get summer vacation so late (August until mid September) and how the ‘nice’ summer weather typically peters out into rain for their time off. It is very dry here though, and lawns are brown and crunchy for the most part. I’m slowly working through a book on the establishment of the American Museum of Natural History by Douglas Preston. It’s quiet this time of year because so many folks are out on holidays, but we’re at work until our cruise in November. Give Geri my best and greetings to Larry. I can vaguely remember my first motorcycle ride with him many years ago. Love to you always - ❤️ 

 A fuzzy photo taken through the window and screen, wet from a heavy rain, of a flock of wild turkeys, 3 hens and about 15 youngsters, cleaning up every seed in the grass under our bird feeders.  The chicks are growing pretty fast.  They are trailed by a posse of 4 big tom turkeys, presumably up to no good. 

8/8/2026

 Saturday, August 8, 2026

1973 Vice President Spiro Agnew said reports he took kickbacks from government contracts in Maryland are "damned lies" and vowed not to resign.

1974 Richard Nixon announced that he was resigning the presidency the next day.

2022 FBI conducted a search of Donald Trump's Florida home over his handling of classified government documents

2025 Germany announced it will halt weapon shipments to Israel that could be used in Gaza "until further notice" in light of Israel's plan to fully militarily occupy Gaza.   The Israel Defense Forces began massing troops and tanks on the border with Gaza ahead of an expected major ground offensive.

In bed at 9:15, up at 5:45; 0555 202.2 118/69/62 123; 66/79/66, sunny

Morning meds at 7:30 a.m.  Eliquis at 6:30 a.m. and p.m.

Comment on JJA's elegant Facebook commentary on Door County:

I truly enjoy your writing, certainly your political commentary, but especially your travelogues, and most especially your writings about the Upper Midwest, including my adopted home state of Wisconsin. Ezra Klein interviewed the journalist Jasmine Sun,f or his column in the New York Times a few days ago. She has been investigating local opposition to new data centers being constructed, including the huge one outside Port Washington, Wisconsin. She started his comments with this: "I think one of the most important things about rural Wisconsin and rural Michigan is how beautiful it is. I felt like I was in Eden. I felt like I was in Paradise. It's incredibly lush and incredibly green." Yesterday, I took one of my regular drives through northern Ozaukee County, near the Sheboygan County line, just to look, to see, to take in and feel how beautiful it is - the farms, the woods, the fields of corn, and beans, and alfalfa, and the softly rolling hills. I had the same feeling that Jasmine Sun described, like being in Eden, in Paradise, literally awesome. I hope you keep visiting and keep writing and posting your beautiful photos.

Todd Blanche was confirmed as Attonrey General.  A national disgrace.  Blanche, a disgrace to the legal profession.  

Trump, Musk, DOGE, the VA and veterans.  Our current, and hopefully temporary, Commander-in-Chief proclaims his profound love for the nation's military men and women and its veterans, even though he made sure to see to it, through a certification of a physician who was a tenant of his father, that he had bone spurs on his feet, that he wouldn't wear a uniform and serve in his nation's controversial war in Vietnam.  Thus he is not a veteran himself, nor one enrolled in the VA's Health program for veterans.  Nonetheless, as Commander-in-Chief, he is entitled to a government-provided, government-paid personal physician, indeed a team of them.  And he receives services and treatments at the government-owned and operated Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. 

 Nonetheless, one of the C-in-C's first actions in his second term was to appoint the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, as head of a pulled-out-of-his-ass organization dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency, whose purpose was to slash government employment, including at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).  His handpicked Secretary of Veterans Affairs is Doug Collins, a former George congressman famous for his right-wing politics while in Congress.  From ChatGPT:

The VA lost more than 40,000 employees in FY2025, its first annual net workforce loss in its history. About 88% of those departures were in the Veterans Health Administration. The losses included approximately:

1,000 physicians

3,000 registered nurses

1,500 schedulers

hundreds of mental-health professionals

thousands of other clinical and support personnel.

Importantly, this wasn't simply DOGE firing 40,000 people. The reduction came through a mixture of hiring restrictions, deferred resignations, retirements, attrition, dismissals, and decisions not to refill vacant positions. That distinction matters.

The VA itself initially argued that it could reduce its workforce by roughly 30,000 without impairing care because many of the positions were administrative or non-mission-critical. It also said that more than 350,000 positions were exempt from the hiring freeze.

But what happened subsequently is more troubling.

The problem became vacancies, not just layoffs

One of the most consequential developments has been the VA's decision to eliminate large numbers of unfilled medical positions rather than recruit replacements.

An analysis of VA internal records found that the VA eliminated roughly 14,400 vacant medical positions, including more than 1,500 physician positions and 4,900 nursing positions. That's roughly 5% of the VA's medical staffing capacity.

That is potentially more consequential than the original headline number of employees dismissed. A vacant position doesn't immediately deprive a patient of a doctor—but eliminating the position means the VA has decided that it won't necessarily replace that doctor when one leaves.

And there are measurable consequences

The most disturbing evidence concerns mental health care.

By January 2026, the national average wait for a new individual mental-health appointment was reported at more than 35 days, compared with the 20-day threshold at which a veteran becomes eligible for community care. Some states were reporting waits of 40–60 days. One California VA clinic reportedly had a 134-day wait after seven of its twelve mental-health providers departed.

ProPublica has also documented veterans losing established therapists and, in some cases, waiting as long as six months for therapy.

There are reports of similar problems in other specialties. In Wisconsin, for example, the VA secretary recently acknowledged that some medical centers had become understaffed after the workforce reductions and said they would be allowed to hire where necessary.

But there is another side to the story

I wouldn't conclude that "DOGE wrecked the VA." That's too simple.

The administration argues that the VA had accumulated excessive bureaucracy and that reducing administrative positions and consolidating operations can actually put more resources into direct patient care. It points to improvements in disability-claim processing and says that mission-critical positions were protected.

And there is at least one striking piece of evidence supporting the administration's contention that the VA hasn't simply collapsed: VA reports that 82% of veterans who used VA services in the first quarter of FY2026 said they trusted the VA to fulfill its commitment to them—a record high.

So the picture isn't uniformly negative.

My assessment

I'd characterize the evidence this way:

The cuts have produced genuine staffing shortages in portions of the VA, particularly in health care, and those shortages have produced longer waits and reduced continuity of care in some places. The evidence is particularly strong for mental-health services.

But the evidence does not support saying that VA health care as a whole has been destroyed or that every veteran is experiencing worse care. Some administrative reductions may indeed have eliminated unnecessary bureaucracy, and some VA performance measures have improved.

The bigger concern, in my view, is the loss of institutional capacity. A VA hospital can continue operating reasonably well for a while after losing personnel. But if it loses experienced physicians, nurses, schedulers and therapists and then eliminates the vacant positions, it becomes progressively harder to recover.

And that is especially consequential for the VA because the VA's principal advantage is that it provides an integrated health-care system. Losing a patient's established physician or therapist isn't quite equivalent to losing an employee somewhere else in government. It can disrupt an ongoing relationship and require the veteran to start over.

I thought about these issues yesterday as I waited - and waited -  for an operator to answer the phone at the Zablocki VA Medical Center so I could ask to be switched to the Urology Clinic to schedule an appointment.  Before Trump II, DOGE, and Collins, when I called the medical center switchboard, the call was answered promptly.  Now there is inevitably a long wait for an operator to pick up the phone.  When I finally got through and was switched to Urology, I connected with a recorded message, and my call was returned about 5 hours later.  I was able to schedule an appointment with a urologist, but I was advised to 'reach out' to my primary care provider to alert her to my situation.  My primary care provider for about 8 years pre-Trump was a physician; now she is a nurse practitioner.  My advisor in the Congestive Heart Failure Clinic is another nurse practitioner.  She tells me that, pre-Trump, she was able to concentrate on heart failure patients; now she is spread out over other departments within the Cardiology Clinic.  I admire nurse practitioners, and trust them, but they are not physicians, and replacing doctors with NPs is a marked step downward at the VA.  We had a nursing clinic at the House of Peace when I was executive director for about 2 and 1/2 years.  It was staffed by nurses from the UWM School of Nursing and headed by a very capable nurse practitioner.  That clinic, along with other services we offereed, was a very valued resource in Milwaukee's inner city.  Maintaining it wouldn't have been feasible if we had needed an M.D. at its helm.

I'm reminded too of when I was hospitalized for 5 days in March of this year for bradycardia, or very low blood pressure and slow heart rate or pulse.  I was wheeled into the Emergency Department in the morning by the Infectious Disease doctor I had come to see on a follow-up appointment after my cellulitis hospitalization in September/October 20025.  I wasn't able to be admitted into the hospital as an inpatient until 11 o'clock that night because 'the house was full,' i.e., there were no beds available.   This has become too common a problem at Zablocki because of the substantial increase in demand for VA services with the aging veteran population, plus the impact of the PACT Act, passed in 2022, and staffing shortages.

I, and literally hundreds of thousands of other vets, am fortunate in that Zablocki has weathered better than most VA facilities the storm created by the simultaneous increase in demand for services and decrease in staffing, but I don't fool myself by thinking that Donald J. Trump, draft dodger, is a friend either to current service members or to veterans.   

Yesterday's ride to Hilltop Road in the Town of Fredonia; another exchange with JJA:

Janice Jenkins Anderson. I stopped on the side of the road to snap this in Bailey’s Harbor - it just felt like a scene in an impressionist painting to me.

Charles D. Clausen. You have an artist's eye.

Janice Jenkins Anderson  I joke that I see the world through a view finder in my mind’s eye and often make Larry pull over so I can stand in a road and snap a pho

Charles D. Clausen. On my drive along Hilltop Rd in the Town of Fredonia yesterday, I pulled off the road to get a photo of 3 elegant cranes in a field of soybeans. I've tried to get a good photo of the rolling hills one sees from that vantage, but the photos never capture how breathtakingly beautiful the sight is to the eye.. I have a hunch that you are probably the only person I know who would say "Sure!" when I'd suggest a ride in the country. Most look at me with a look that suggests I must be nuts.😄

Janice Jenkins Anderson.  Wonderful!

 ·

 

8/7/2026

 Friday, August 7, 2026

1957 Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

1964 US Congress approved the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.

2025  Attorney General Pam Bondi announced a $50 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, saying his capture and extradition to the United States was vital for national security.

In bed at 9:15, up at 5:15; 0530 202.2 115/72/63 123; 66/83/66 sunny.  

Morning meds at 7:30 a.m.  Eliquis at 6 a.m. and 6:20 p.m.;  Trulicity injection at 11 a.m.

Some thoughts while reading East of Eden.  (1).  I was struck by this passage in chapter 9:

Every once in a while a story would start about how young girls were stolen and enslaved by the controllers of the [whorehouse] industry, and perhaps many of the stories were true.  But the great majority of whores drifted into their profession through laziness and stupidity.  In the houses they had no responsibility.  They were fed and clothed and taken care of until they were too old, and then they were kicked out.

That's a mighty simplistic and negative view of women in the sex trade.  Is it true that the great majority of them are lazy and stupid?  That they are in the business of prostitution only because it's an easy way of avoiding personal responsibility?  I very much doubt that.  It ignores factors like poverty and lack of economic opportunity, childhood abuse, neglect, or trafficking, addiction, coercion by partners or organized crime, and limited education or employment options.  The novel was published in 1952.  I suspect, and hope, that the statement did not reflect Steinbeck's personal view but rather that of the story's narrator.

(2)  There are quite a few interesting characters in the novel, but the one I'm most fascinated with right now, i.e., less than 1/3rd of the way through the novel, is Cathy Ames Trask.  I described her in an earlier comment as 'a psychopath,' and perhaps she was, but I now suspect that description was too dismissive of her.  In any event, I'm struck by Steinbeck's not very flattering portrayal of women, at least in the first half of the book, where the women (except for Cathy) are all secondary characters and none is particularly heroic, unless it's the narrator's mother, Olive Hamilton, or his grandmother Liza Hamilton.  Again, other than Cathy, it's a book about men among men: the weak Adam and Charles Trask and the heroic Samuel Hamilton, the narrator's maternal grandfather.

(3) The story of East of Eden is built upon and around the enigmatic story of Cain and Abel in the book of Genesis:

Adam made love to his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain.  She said, “With the help of the Lord I have brought forth a man.” 2 Later she gave birth to his brother Abel.

Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil.  In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the Lord.  And Abel also brought an offering—fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The Lord looked with favor on Abel and his offering,  but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast.

Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? 7 If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.”

Now Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.” While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.

Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

The Lord said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.  Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.  When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.”

Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is more than I can bear.  Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”

But the Lord said to him, “Not so; anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over.” Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him. So Cain went out from the Lord’s presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

What a curious story!  What does it suggest about God?  About human nature?  About life outside of the Garden of Eden/Heaven?  Why did God favor Abel's offering and ignore Cain's?  Does God play favorites?  Wasn't God responsible, at least in part, for provoking Cain? He knew Cain was vulnerable: "sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it."  Is enmity and violence built into human relationships? Why does God protect Cain with 'the mark'?  What was 'the mark'?  Does it tell us anything about justice in our East of Eden world?  About capital punishment?  Is this tale, following the tale of the Fall and the expulsion from the Garden, the origin of our idea of "free will" - 'sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it'?  What was meant by "Cain went out from the Lord's presence"?  Subsequent passages tell us that Cain built cities after his move east of Eden.  Is this a suggestion that great achievements are accomplished by sinners and criminals, not by pious shepherds like Abel?

In the Catholic tradition, Abel is treated as a precursory figure of Jesus Christ (innocent, offering a sacrifice acceptable to God) and Cain as Everyman, prone to sin but, with Grace, able to resist it, i.e., having free will.  Pope John Paul II gave the Cain story renewed prominence in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae ("The Gospel of Life").  He saw Cain's question—"Am I my brother's keeper?" —as echoing throughout modern society whenever people deny responsibility for the vulnerable, the poor, the unborn, the elderly, or victims of violence.  For John Paul II, God's implicit answer is: Yes. Every person is his brother's keeper.  Jesus taught the same in his parable of the Good Samaritan.

Steinbeck addresses the questions raised by the Cain and Abel fable in chapter 22 of East of Eden, but of course his characters can't answer or resolve them any better than we can.

Worthy of note in this morning's Wall Street Journal:

(1) Putin’s War and Kirill’s Blasphemy: The head of Russia’s Orthodox Church betrays his faith to support the state. By George Weigel

As Russian missiles and drones continue their assault on Ukrainian civilians, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, has just published “War: Beyond the Visible Causes and Consequences,” doubling down on his campaign to justify in religious terms Russia’s war of extermination against Ukraine.

Issued by the official publishing house of the Moscow patriarchate, the book casts Vladimir Putin’s war as a salvific action: a duty to God and a Russian service to a corrupt world. Patriarch Kirill lurched into heresy when he promised Russian soldiers immediate entrance into heaven, their sins forgiven, if they die in Mr. Putin’s “holy war.” Now Patriarch Kirill asserts the “great responsibility” of the Russian people is to win the war because “our earthly vocation is to be warriors of the Lord, to resist evil.” God has determined the war’s outcome, he writes, “and victory belongs to those who stand on the side of the light.”

In the first decades of Soviet communism, Russian Orthodoxy gave a great witness of martyrdom, even as its exiled thinkers enriched Christian theology and fostered ecumenical dialogue. But since 1943—when Stalin, trying to strengthen patriotic resistance to the Nazi war machine, relegitimized the Orthodox Church—the church’s leadership has been under the Kremlin’s thumb. Its leaders, including the current patriarch, have had strong connections to Moscow’s security services. Perhaps as a result, all of them have had a special loathing for Ukrainian national consciousness. The Moscow patriarchate worked hand in glove with Soviet spymasters to orchestrate a spurious Ukrainian church council in 1946, which legally abolished the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, a custodian of Ukrainian culture and identity. 

Cardinal Spellman, archbishop of the Military Vicarate during the Vietnam War, said very similar things to us American troops during that war.   

(2) Socialism Is Here—and It’s Serious: As religion recedes, politics takes its place. As confidence fades, political movements grow radical.  By Peggy Noonan

Socialism is not a passing thing but an arriving thing. It must be taken seriously as a factor in our politics and the Democratic Party. A CNN/SSRS poll issued this week reported 34% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults identify as “democratic socialists.” That number won’t be depressed by the success of Abdul El-Sayed, who won the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in Michigan on Tuesday by racking up huge margins in progressive enclaves and university towns.

Socialism’s opponents imagine there is safety in its poor track record, which is obvious to everyone. No it isn’t. Many of its proponents wouldn’t know the history and many wouldn’t care: Our version will be better.

Here is some of what that version involves, from an interview two weeks ago by Shannon Bream of “Fox News Sunday” with Megan Romer, national co-chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America. Normally socialists are evasive or euphemistic regarding their policy goals. Ms. Romer wasn’t.

Bream: “Just give me sort of a true or false on these. Abolish the Senate?”

Romer: “True.”

Bream: “Replace the presidency and Supreme Court as we now know them?”

Romer: “Yep.”

Bream: “Abolish ICE?”

Romer: “Absolutely.”

Bream: “Abolish borders and give amnesty to anyone currently in the United States illegally?”

Romer: “As a long-term plan, yep.”

Bream: “Defund the Pentagon?”

Romer: “Absolutely.”

Bream: “Abolish prisons, at least in large part?”

Romer: “Yeah—again as part of a long-term program, yeah.”

Bream: “Government or public ownership of most large corporations?”

Romer: “Yeah, absolutely.”

I joined the DSA years ago because it supported single-payer medicine, i.e., its opposition to our health system run, in large measure, by private insurance companies.   It's inconceivable to me how some form of government-paid health care can succeed throughout the industrialized, advanced world everywhere but in the United States.  None of the systems is perfect of course, but I fully suspect that every one of them, for all its flaws, is better than the system we have in our own country.  My daughter has lived with, and used, the German system for the last 15 years, and wouldn't dream of trading it for what we live with in this country.  That said, I dropped my DSA membership some years ago when the group got really radical and grossly unrealistic, as it is now.  Our problem is that Republicans and right-wingers conflate any government-sponsored, government-financed, or government-managed social program with Socialism and Socialism = Communism.  They have long targeted the Veterans Administration Health Care System since it is government-sponsored, -financed, and -managed.  It surely has problems, but the vast majority of us veterans are happy with it and grateful for it, to the endless consternation of its right-wing critics.

A more mundane mystery than the story of Cain and Abel.  I walked into the kitchen at about 6 o'clock this morning and saw the loaf of sourdough bread that Geri bought yesterday on the floor next to the refrigerator.  I left it there for Geri to see when she got up later and asked her if she had put it there, knowing of course that she wouldn't do that.  She said she put it in our breadbox last night and it must have fallen out somehow.  But it's not below the breadbox.  How did it get to where it was?  In the photo, the breadbox is on the third shelf, above the microwave oven.   Did that loaf of bread walk from under the breadbox to next to the refrigerator?  Did this soft loaf of bread bounce over there?  Roll over there?   Is it really likely Geri would have placed the loaf in the breadbox in so haphazard a way that it could fall out????

 We voted today.  We dropped off our absentee ballets at the Village Hall this morning.  I voted for Milwaukee's County Executive Crowley and Geri voted for some other candidate (but not DSA member Franscesca Hong), neither of us thinking the Dems have a chance at holding the governor's office  in November.  

 

8/6/2026

 Thursday, August 6, 2026

1945 HIROSHIMA

1965 LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act.

2018 Chicago police appealed for help after 66 people were shot in the city in one weekend

2025 Donald Trump issued an executive order raising the total tariff on Indian imports to the United States to 50%, with an additional 25% that would take effect 21 days after August 7 due to its purchases of Russian oil.

In bed at 9:20, up at 5:50 with bladder pain; 0610 202.2 112/71/65 109; 65/76/65, cloudy, rainy around noon.

Morning meds at 10:30 a.m.  Eliquis at 6:45 a.m. and  p.m.  

An archival photo of a mother and baby in Nagasaki after its atomic bombing, the baby too weak to draw milk from the mother’s breast.  The baby was reported to have died three days after the photo was taken. The mother, Tananka, lived to 91, and died in Nagasaki in 2006. 

Hiroshima.  There are a few days each year when I pretty much devote the pages of my journal to an anniversary that is, for some reason, significant.  They include August 6th, the anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima.  It surely is at least partly and probably mostly because  I visited Hiroshima in 1965 while I was waiting for space-available transportation to Vietnam.   I remember the short commuter train ride from Iwakuni to Hiroshima with my Marine buddy Ron Kendall and the woman who owned the  "officers' bar" frequented by young Marine officers in my unit before almost all of them were deployed to Vietnam.  The owner of the bar, whose name I can't recall, served as our guide in Hiroshima.  She would have been a child when the bomb destroyed the city only 20 miles from Iwakuni. I'm embarrassed and a bit ashamed that I don't recall asking her whether she lived in Iwakuni on August 6th and remembered the explosion only 20 miles north.   From my memoir:

One day, the woman who owned or at least managed the bar we frequented took us on a commuter train to Hiroshima to see the Peace Memorial Museum at the original Ground Zero.  The twentieth anniversary of the bombing of the city was only several weeks away.  I was – stupidly – struck by how new and modern the city was as I emerged from the train station.  Walking to and through the Peace Memorial Museum was a searing experience.  The “Atomic Bomb Dome” building was still standing.  The bomb had detonated almost directly above that building and a few others that were still standing.  The force of the blast was downward, blowing away roofs and floors and everything in between but leaving the steel-reinforced exterior walls standing.

I was solemn the whole time I was in Hiroshima, but the atmosphere in the city’s downtown area and even around the Peace Memorial was busy, bustling, like New York or Chicago.  There were a great many people, including families with children, at the Peace Memorial and their demeanors seemed not all that different from people going into the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago or the Metropolitan Museum in New York, kind of semi-festive.  The Japanese adults ignored Ron and me but little children stared at us.  For many of them, I suspect we were the first Americans or Europeans that they had seen in person and up close, or perhaps they stared because of the Marine Corps ‘whitewall’ haircuts that we had.  I was a freak in the eyes of the children.

It was hard not to feel some responsibility, even guilt.  I was (forgive the expression) blown away by the photographs and artifacts and the realization of where I was.  I was a couple weeks shy of my 4th birthday when the bomb was dropped, but I am connected with Hiroshima by the fact that I am American.  By the fact that my father shared a killing field with Japanese soldiers.  By the fact that the justification for dropping the bomb was to obviate the necessity of invading the home islands, an invasion my father had been in line for.  By the fact that I was a Marine on my way to another Asian killing field.  By shared humanity.   The Japanese government would have resisted invasion to the bitter end, as the Germans had, and the cost in lives would have been appalling.  There doesn’t seem to be much doubt about that.  Indeed, the battles on Iwo Jima and Okinawa had been ‘designed’ to make it clear to the Americans how high the cost of invasion of the home islands would be.  But was it necessary to bomb the city?  Two cities?  Could the power of the Bomb have been shown by dropping it atop Mount Fuji or in Tokyo Bay or on the big naval base at Yokosuka?  The U. S. had inflicted perhaps hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties by the fire bombing of Tokyo, Yokohama, Kawasaki, Kobe, Nagoya, and Osaka starting in March of 1945 while the battle was raging on Iwo Jima, and then on Okinawa.  The destruction already inflicted on the home islands narrowed the choice of ‘suitable’ targets for the A-bombs but I believe it is naïve to think that Truman and the generals and the American public did not wish to inflict maximum civilian casualties.  The firebombing raids proved otherwise.  The feeling had to have been widespread that, as the song said, ‘we’re going to have to slap the dirty little Jap, and Uncle Sam’s the guy who can do it.” 

I couldn’t know it at the time, of course, but visiting the Peace Memorial and seeing evidence of the devastation wrought by American bombing was a fitting introduction to my impending work in Vietnam.  The Japanese suffered hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties from American strategic bombing, mostly from B-29 missions from late 1944 through the August, 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The human toll in Vietnam was to be worse.

I take special note this morning of my paragraph that started " It was hard not to feel some responsibility, even guilt."  Last year at this time I wrote a long reflection on identifying the people of a state with the actions of the state's government.  It was triggered by thinking of Israel's apparent identification of all Gazans with Hamas, and Hamas' apparent identification of all Jews with the actions of the State of Israel. In the October 20, 2020, issue of Prospect, Samuel Moyn wrote an essay titled "You have misunderstood the relevance of Hannah Arendt."  In it, he discussed Arendt's ideas on 'universal responsibility' which she spelled out in a 1945 essay entitled “Organised Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” where she warned that it would not be easy to tell the good from the bad German after the war ended.

Those who were not in Germany but condemned it from the outside were going to be tempted to punish the bad Germans. But the truth is that their crimes (while they of course deserved prosecution) spread complicity far and wide. Until such evils were preventable, even those with no relation to them should admit that they earned not pride but shame. The religion of the Jews, Arendt suggested, taught humanity not comfortable moralising but “universal responsibility.” Even in the face of Nazism, Arendt insisted that responsibility allowed no one to say “I am not like that.” Compared to those with vengeful zeal for the punishment of Nazi perpetrators (which she supported), Arendt praised those “who are filled with a genuine fear of the inescapable guilt of the human race.” 

Her thinking seems to be in line with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's famous lines from The Gulag Archipelago:

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained”

He didn't need to add the clear corollary that even within hearts filled with goodness, at least one small bridgehead of evil exists.

Samuel Moyn ended his short essay on Arendt with this:

In her 1945 essay, Arendt wrote that when she met people who told her they were ashamed of being German, she was always tempted to reply: “I am ashamed of being human.” In America, there is going to be an immense pressure to exact apologies, if not from Trump (who is incapable of them), then from those who enabled him. Not generalising responsibility, as Arendt demanded, but othering and scapegoating is how the mainstream will proceed, in an attempt to bracket the Trump era as if it never was, for the sake of a new zero hour. Her former aficionados will stop citing Arendt precisely when she is relevant. Not only will they skirt embarrassment at being human; few will even say that they are ashamed of being American.

I added this footnote to my discussion of Hiroshima and guilt in my memoir:

The best book I have read about modern war is Chris Hedges’ War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,  including this passage:

There is among many who fight in war a sense of shame, one that is made worse by the patriotic drivel used to justify the act of killing in war.  Those who seek meaning in patriotism do not want to hear the truth of war, wary of bursting the bubble.  The tensions between those who were there and those who were not, those who refuse to let go of the myth and those that know it to be a lie, feed into the dislocation and malaise after war.  In the end, neither side dares to speak to the other.  The shame and alienation of combat soldiers, coupled with the indifference to the truth of war by those who were not there, reduces many societies to silence.  It seems better to forget.

“I, too, belong to this species,” J. Glenn Gray wrote [in The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle].  “I am ashamed not only of my own deeds, not only of my nation’s deeds, but of human deeds as well.  I am ashamed to be a man.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

A drawing I fashioned from the photo of the mother and baby, to which I added what seemed like some apt quotes.  
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

8/5/2026

 Wednesday, August 5, 2026

1964 US began bombing North Vietnam in response to the attacks in the Gulf of Tonkin

1966 Protesters threw rocks and bottles at Martin Luther King Jr. during a fair housing protest march at Marquette Park in Chicago 

1966 The Beatles released the single "Eleanor Rigby

2025 My meatotomy, cystoscopy, and bladder fulguration, 6.5 hours in the VA hospital

In bed at 9:20, up at 5:35; 0550 202.8 108/108/65/68 121;68/73/66, cloudy, rainy.

Morning meds at 9 a.m.  Eliquis at 6:20 a.m. and 5:30 p.m.

Last year's schwantz and bladder surgery.  For some reason, it is surprising to me that it's only been a year since the surgery on my penis and bladder.  Perhaps it's because I've believed for some time now that I need the surgery again, both the meatotomy and the fulguration.   This anniversary reminds me that I should call the urology department today to set up another visit with whoever my new urologist will be.  My former doc has moved on.  I'm at the point of wondering whether the bladder discomfort I regularly experience before pit stops is early pain from another (or recurring) lesion/ulcer on my bladder lining.  I may need my 6th fulguration.  Also, the stenosis of the opening of my schwantz seemed inadequate to the doc who doc who did the meatotomy and was disappointed with the result.  I can't say I'm looking forward to another procedure, but so it goes.  In the last 15 months, I've had 3 outpatient surgeries at the VA (penis & bladder, cataract, heart ablation) plus 10 days of inpatient care for cellulitis in my leg and bradycardia.  I'm grateful and not complaining, but sheesh . . . Old age.  I need to remember what Kate Bowler, who thought she was dying of stage 4 cancer in her mid-30s, said to her friends who were complaining about the indignities of old age: "Old age is a fucking privilege!" Agreed (but, sheesh . . .)

Ezra Klein's AI interviewee confirms what I've thought for years:  He interviewed Jasmine Sun, who has been conducting research on popular opposition to data centers.  She had just returned from a reporting journey to Wisconsin and Michigan and said:

I think one of the most important things about rural Wisconsin and rural Michigan is how beautiful it is.  I felt like I was in Eden.  I felt like I was in Paradise.  It's incredibly lush and incrdibly green.

She went on to describe what one sees as you approach and arrive at a data center, not only all the power lines, but what appears as a huge windowless industrial park, huge warehouses.  "Data centers are very ugly."  I've only seen one, the one northwest of Port Washington off I-43, but I agree with her: it's ugly, huge, somehow intimidating and somehow a bit fearsome, if not terrifying. 

East of Eden.  I've started John Steinbeck's favorite novel, about 150 pages into it.  It's interesting - the story of the Hamilton and Trask families.  I'm especially enjoying the story of the Trask brothers, Adam and Charles, based on the Cain and Abel characters in Genesis.  Neither one of these guys seems particularly admirable to me, but they're sure not dull.  Ditto the psychopath Cathy Ames, a real piece of work. It's a long book, over 800 pages, so this is going to keep me occupied and 'off the streets' for quite a few days.

Anniversary thoughts:   (1) The Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Less than a year later, I was landing in Chu Lai en route to Danang.

(2)  MLK's open housing march in the Marquette Park neighborhood that my parents and Kitty lived in after they fled the blockbusting, overnight racial changes in their Englewood and Auburn-Gresham neighborhoods on the South Side.  None of them would have participated in the hostilities toward Dr. King and his fellow demonstrators, but I'm sure they weren't surprised by the violence.  I was in Vietnam at the time, as part of the phony effort to "win the hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese peasants with high explosive bombs, napalm and white phosphorus, bullets and artillery rounds, strategic hamlets and free fire zones.  What a sick joke it all was.

(3) What are the saddest songs I know?  Elvis's Old Shep?  Duke Ellington's Sophisticated Lady?  The Beatles' Eleanor Rigby?  What else?

Ah, look at all the lonely people / Ah, look at all the lonely people

Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been / Lives in a dream

Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door / Who is it for?

All the lonely people Where do they all come from?

All the lonely people / Where do they all belong?

Father McKenzie writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear / No one comes near.

Look at him working, darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there / What does he care?

All the lonely people / Where do they all come from?

All the lonely people /. Where do they all belong?

Ah, look at all the lonely people / Ah, look at all the lonely people

Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name / Nobody came.

Father McKenzie wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave / No one was saved.

All the lonely people / (Ah, look at all the lonely people) / Where do they all come from?

All the lonely people / (Ah, look at all the lonely people) / Where do they all belong?

My journal entry 4 years ago today:

Friday, August 5, 2022

Russian invasions and American invasions

 I suspect there may be some American veterans experiencing disquieting thoughts from Russia's invasion and massive bombing of a smaller, weaker nation whose political/economic system is displeasing to the more powerful Russian government.  Some will recall that we dropped more than twice the tonnage of bombs on Vietnam than we did in both the European and Asian theaters of operation in World War II.  Some will remember our "Shock and Awe" boasting that preceded our invasion of Iraq to destroy non-existent "weapons of mass destruction."  I find myself remembering that on the very day I left the US to participate in our lethal intervention in Vietnam's civil war, President Lyndon B. Johnson spoke to our Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and said:   “. . . it’s going to be difficult for us to prosecute effectively a war that far away from home with the [political] divisions we have here and particularly the potential divisions.  And it’s really had me concerned for a month and I’m very depressed about it because I see no program from either Defense or State that gives me much hope of doing anything except just praying and grasping to hold on during [the] monsoon [season] and hope they’ll quit.  And I don’t believe they’re ever goin’ to quit.  And I don’t see that we have any plan for victory militarily or diplomatically.”  That was on June 21, 1965, ajust days after I had received my PCS orders oversease, and of course Johnson was correct: they were never going to quit, but that didn't keep Johnson and the next American president from continuing the carnage of Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, and American lives for years until Marine helicopters were called in to pluck desperate people off the roof of our embassy 10 years later.  What the Russians are doing is hideous, evil, and criminal, but it also ought to prompt a national examination of conscience here.  As Donald Trump infamously told Bill O'Reilly when Reilly 

 out that Vladimir Putin "is a killer":  “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”

8/4/2026

 Tuesday, August 4, 2026

1919 Rodin Museum opened in Paris 

1925 US Marines left Nicaragua after a 13-year occupation

2016 Sarah Catherine Clausen married Christian Kovacs in Geretsried, Germany

2025 At least 74 Palestinians were killed by Israeli gunfire and airstrikes, including ten seeking aid, and another five Palestinians died of starvation. (Reuters)

In bed at 9:30,up at 5:10; 0525 202.8 120/73/67 122; 68/83/64, sunny

Morning meds at a.m., Eliquis at 6:20 a.m. and 1:15 p.m.

I started Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee yesterday after finishing Everything Happens For A Reason.  The book consists of story after story about White men screwing Indians, something I had some knowledge of from general reading over a lifetime.  I had hoped the book would have more of a narrative sweep to it, but it appears to be chapter after chapter of variations on the same theme, i.e., how, driven by greed for land or gold or power, Americans from European backgrounds stole land and all its resources from, as it is put in the Declaration of Independence, "merciless Indian savages."  It is hard reading, not because of difficulties with the author's style, diction, or syntax, but of the repeated wrongdoings it (probably) pretty accurately portrays.  I suspect most of us today have some sensitivity to the idea of White Privilege in America and White Racism, so reading about how it was exercised by our predecessors and our government to destroy or at least dominate racial minorities, especially the red men and Blacks who got in the way of White mastery, is painful.  I stopped reading   A few years ago, I stopped reading Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson because it has the same challenge as Bury My Heart, story after story of racial injustice perpetrated by Whites in the pursuit of wealth and social and political and economic dominance.  Both books are valuable compendiums of evidence of America's racial sins and crimes, valuable as research resources, and well worth reading, but in bits and snatches rather than cover to cover, which is just emotionally exhausting. They remind us always of why Adolph Hitler looked principally to American history for inspiration on how to build a society dominated by a Master Race.  The early chapters of Bury My Heart, addressing the rounding up and incarcerating the Navahos at Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico and the war of Chief Little Crow in Minnesota,  remind me of  Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.  A settler class (White Americans) wants the land on which another people (Native Americans or Indians) have lived for generations, forces them onto other lands, and the other people fight back, resist dispossession, and fight back against occupation.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Hitler had America as a model for dealing with Untermenschen, so did the early Zionists and later settlers in territories occupied in 1967, but it all goes back to Thucydides's wisdom as he wrote about the Peloponnesian Wars: The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must.  And homo hominis lupus.

After writing the above, I decided to move on, temporarily, from Bury My Heart to John Steinbeck's East of Eden, which I have never read.  There, in the introductory pages, I found this:

The history [of the Salinas Valley] was like that of the rest of the state..  First there were Indians, an inferior breed without energy, inventiveness, or culture, a people that lived on grubs and grasshoppers and shellfish, too lazy to hunt or fish.  They ate what they could pick up and planted nothing.  They pounded bitter acorns for flour.  Even their warfare was a weary pantomime.

and

When people first came to the West, particularly from the owned  and fought-over farmlets of Europe, and saw so much land to  be had for the signing of a paper and the building of a founda- tion, an itching land-greed seemed to come over them. They wanted more and more land — good land if-possible but land anyway.  Perhaps they had filaments of memory of feudal Europwhere great families became and remamed great because they, owned things. The early settlers took up land they didn’t need and couldn’t use; they took up worthless land just to own it.   And all proportions changed. A man who might have been well-to-do on ten acres in Europe was rat-poor on two thousand in California. , . 

Illuminating lines. 

There's an article in the current edition of the online Atlantic Magazine titled "The Catholic Church's New Schism," by Paul Parales.  It's about the recent excommunication of all members of the Society of Saint Pius X, a//k/a SSPX.  SSPX is a group of Catholics who broadly reject the teachings of the ecumenical church council that met between 1962 and 1965 and is generally known as "Vatican II."  These dissidents are mostly known for their rejection of the new Mass liturgy, especially the use of vernacular language rather than the traditional Latin,  the priest facing the congregation rather than the altar, and the call-and-response interaction between the priest and the congregation.  Their disagreements with much broader and deeper, however, including the Council's teaching that salvation is possible outside the Church 😱, and the promotion of religious freedom, and interfaith dialogue and collaboration.  The SSPXers believe extra ecclesiam nulla salus, no salvation outside the Church, and that all other religions are false religions and the creation of the Devil.  These guys take me back to my childhood and youth in Chicago's Irish Catholic Church in the 1940s and 1950, though really they would like to go all the way back to the world in the days before the Protestant Revolution, to the days of the Papal States.  From my memoir, the chapter titled "Raised in the Bosom of the Church":

As volatile as things could be at home, there was no visible volatility in the Holy, Roman, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, especially the Irish American version that ruled in Chicago and in St. Leo Parish.  The Church taught us that it was infallible, immutable, incorruptible and, in its view, specially commissioned by God Himself to lead us little children to Jesus.

In English feudalism after the Norman Conquest, all land was considered ultimately owned by the King.  The king distributed the land to vassals who promised always to render him loyalty, often to pay him money and other things of value, and usually to provide troops to him for his wars.  The top vassals, barons and earls, subdivided their tenures to subvassals who made similar promises of loyalty, rents, military service, or other ‘incidents of tenure’ in return for protection of their tenures by their immediate overlord.  From the king to the barons though layers of ‘subinfeudation’ down to the lowest freeholder there existed a system of reciprocal rights and duties between lords and vassals.

This kind of system is still in play in the Catholic Church.  The Pope has the role of King or more aptly Emperor, the ultimate owner of the Church’s dominions and principalities (in trust for God, of course.)  He has his imperial court or curia.  He divides the imperium into geographical and jurisdictional dioceses (much as the Late Roman Empire was divided into dioceses) in which the usual vassal is the local ‘ordinary’ or bishop, who owes fealty, obedience and a share of his revenues from the diocesan holdings to the Pope in return for the Pope’s loyalty and protection (witness the Pope’s cushy treatment of Bernard Cardinal Law after his resignation in disgrace from the Boston archdiocese.)  The diocese in turn is subdivided geographically and jurisdictionally into parishes controlled by pastors who owe fealty, obedience and a share of the revenues from their parochial holding to the bishop in return for the bishop’s loyalty and protection (witness, as but one example, the bishops’ disgraceful protection of criminal priests in America, Ireland, Austria, and elsewhere.)  It is all very feudal, based on personal power and loyalty relationships between lords and vassals.  It is not mere tradition that causes the bishops to kneel before the Pope and kiss his ring or that calls for new priests and deacons to lie prostrate before their bishop during the Litany of Saints in the ordination liturgy in which they vow obedience to him, or that has the Pope addressed as “Your Holiness.” cardinals as “Your Eminence,” archbishops as “Your Grace,” and bishops as “My Lord.”  These practices and many more have their roots in the imperial courts of the Roman Empire and in European feudalism.  The Church’s feudal power structure was very much in force in the Chicago in which the Clausen children grew up.  Our parish priests were accountable to our pastor, our pastor was accountable only to the archbishop who was accountable only to the Vatican.

How the Church operated internally, e.g., how it handled its finances and its personnel, was kept secret from the “laity,” a term whose only meaning is negative: those who are not priests.  How much money did the parishes provide to the archdiocese?  How much did the archdiocese provide to Rome?  How were bishops selected?  How were pastors and curates selected?  How were priests with alcohol or worse problems handled?  These were not matters for the ‘laity,’ but rather for ‘the Church,’ i.e., the priestly caste.  The Church was the clergy; the role of the laity was to pray, pay and obey.  As Pope Pius X wrote in his 1906 encyclical  Vehementer Nos: 

It follows that the church is by essence an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful.  So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end  of the society and directing all its members toward that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the pastors.

I mentioned earlier that the Church was the greatest influence on Kitty and me other than our family.  It would be hard to overstate the centrality of the Church in our lives in the post-war, pre-Vatican II era.   Mondays through Fridays we were in the care of the Sisters of Providence, with prayers and religion classes every day of the school week. Every piece of school paper we turned in had “JMJ” (Jesus, Mary and Joseph) and a “+” on the top of the page.  Friday afternoons during Lent and Advent were for Stations of the Cross and Benediction. Saturday was Confession day.  Sunday of course was Mass.  Baptisms, First Holy Communions, Confirmations, marriages and funerals were all occasions for churchgoing and family gatherings.  There were four ‘daily masses’ Monday through Saturday mornings, 6:30, 7:15, 8:00, and 8:45, and those of us of the male persuasion (girls weren’t allowed and still aren’t in many parish venues) who were able to learn the Latin (Ad Deum mumble mumble . . .) served as altar boys at these masses for three years, 6th, 7th and 8th grades.  On weeknights there were various “Devotions” during the year: benedictions, novenas, 40 hours adoration, stations of the cross and so on.  There were weekend retreats for men and separate ones for women.  Women who had given birth were “churched” after weekday morning masses.  Marian devotions were huge: devotions to Our Lady of Fatima and to Our Lady of Lourdes and to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, devotions relating to the Miraculous Medal, the May Crowning of the main statue of Our Lady, and of course rosary beads were prayed by everyone.  During Lent and Advent we fasted and abstained as directed by the Church.  Throughout the year, we abstained from meat on Fridays, forming fish fry and macaroni and cheese habits that for many of my generation have lasted a lifetime.  On top of all the liturgies and devotions, there were also many social groups organized around the parish: the Holy Name Society for men only, Altar and Rosary Society for women only, the Happy Death Society, the Men’s Sodality, the Women’s Sodality, St. Vincent de Paul Society and so on.  Finally, there were parish bowling leagues, basketball and softball leagues, the Catholic Youth Organization boxing and other sports tournaments and weekly bingo games. 

Dayenu.  As if the liturgies and devotionals and social organizations were not enough to set us apart and to ensure the centrality of the Church in our lives, there was also the shunning of people and things beyond the control of the Church.  Going to a wedding or a funeral in a non-Catholic church or synagogue was forbidden.  (Attending a regular worship service of course was unthinkable, tantamount to apostasy.)    Attending public schools rather than Catholic schools was forbidden if there was a Catholic school available and in Chicago there was always a Catholic school available (if you weren’t African-American.)  Socializing with non-Catholics was discouraged.  Marrying ‘outside the Faith’ was strongly discouraged, with both the Catholic and the non-Catholic who failed to convert made to jump through hoops to ensure that any children would be baptized and raised Catholic.  Dating non-Catholics?  An occasion of sin.  There were plenty of good Catholic girls at Mercy High School and Mother MacCauley taught by the Sisters of Mercy, at Visitation taught by the Sinsinawa Dominicans, and at the many other Catholic girls’ schools.  We met the Catholic girls through common Catholic friends, or because we went to Catholic elementary school together, or at Catholic socials, like the weekly chaperoned ‘sock hops’ at St. Sabina parish just west of St. Leo parish.  When we met another Catholic, we identified ourselves by parish, not by neighborhood.  It was no accident that my first three girlfriends, Shirley Jankowski, Maureen Boyle, and Charlene Wegge (rhymes with “Peggy,”) were all Catholic.  We shared a common culture: Chicago Catholic.

With almost a million and a half Catholics living in Chicago, organized into largely self-contained parishes under the control of the Cardinal Archbishop, it was pretty easy for Catholic children to grow up in a very Catholic environment, not quite sociologically and psychologically ghettoized, but approaching it.  I didn’t have a good friend who was not Catholic until I was 16 or 17 years old when I became friends with Dave Sinclair, a Protestant who lived down the block from us.   We both worked as stockboys at a food and liquor store on the corner of 74th and Halsted owned by Wally Halperin, the first Jew I ever met.  The store was kitty-corner from ‘the Greeks,’ where my mother started her waitressing career.  Dave Sinclair was an altogether good guy who attended our neighborhood public high school, Calumet. I saw no reason why he shouldn’t be eligible for Heaven notwithstanding his non-membership in the One True Religion and Church.  Wally, on the other hand, though very good to Dave and to me, clearly wasn’t saved because he stashed ‘girlie magazines’ in the stockroom at the back of the store, which of course Dave and I peeked at.  More mortal sins for me, but no effect for Dave since he wasn’t Heaven-bound to begin with.

Until my exposure to Wally and Dave at the liquor store, my world was thoroughly Catholic: Catholic church, Catholic elementary school, Catholic high school, Catholic friends, Catholic (in a manner of speaking) family members.  The ‘best’ hospitals were the Catholic hospitals, like Little Company of Mary.  The ‘best’ old age homes were the Catholic old age homes, like the Little Sisters of the Poor.  The only movies we could attend were those that passed muster with the Catholic Legion of Decency, whose movie ratings were published every week in the archdiocese’s Catholic newspaper, The New World.  When television arrived on the scene, the programs, unlike post-war movies, were family-oriented and non-threatening (Kukla, Fran and Ollie, Howdie Doodie, I Remember Mama, etc.), but on Tuesday nights we all watched Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s network program Life is Worth Living, even though it ran opposite The Milton Berle Show.  Sheen was an auxiliary bishop in the archdiocese of New York, under the powerful Cardinal Spellman.  It speaks to the size and influence of the American Church in the 1950’s that the first national televangelist was a foppish  Catholic hierarch and not a Jimmy Swaggert or Pat Robertson or even Billy Graham.

I have scratched the surface of some of the besetting sins of the Church I knew as a child and a youth: clericalism, legalism, authoritarianism, sexism coupled with a morbid sexual obsessiveness,  racism,  secrecy and superstition.  It was an institution marked by pride and arrogance and an addiction to power and control.  St. Paul admonished the Colossian Christian community “as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.”  These virtues were for the sheep, Pius X’s ‘docile flock,’ not for the shepherds.  The besetting sins of the Church existed long before the mid-20th century and well beyond the archdiocese of Chicago.  Some of them pre-dated but became fixed by the first Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325 and they were still around at and after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.  

And so it was.