3/20/2026

 Friday, March 20, 2026

1854 Anti-slavery activists within the Whig party opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act formed a new Republican Party; notable politicians who switched allegiance include Abraham Lincoln, Rutherford B. Hayes, Chester A. Arthur, and Benjamin Harrison

2003 A US-led coalition launched a ground invasion of Iraq after an ultimatum for Saddam Hussein and his sons to leave Iraq expired

2018 Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman met with US President Donald Trump at the White House

2025   Donald Trump signed an executive order that ordered Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to start dismantling the U.S. Department of Education, which ihas beenresponsible for allocating federal funds to schools and disbursing financial aid.

In bed all day, evening, and night yesterday at the VA ER.

Text message to Sarah and Andy this morning:

Good Morning (Afternoon).  This is to let you know I’m back in the VA hospital again.  I came in yesterday morning for a follow up visit with the infectious disease doc who treated me for the cellulitis in my leg that had me hospitalized last Fall but ended up in the ER all day and evening.  My blood pressure and heart rate were very low and I was woozy so she put me in a wheelchair and wheeled me down to the ER where I stayed till I could be admitted to the inpatient hospitt

+49 176 20023048:

How are you feeling now?

Charles Clausen:

I hit the ‘send’ button by mistake.  I’m feeling OK and had a pretty good night’s sleep after going through all the rigamarole connected with being admitted as an inpatient (100 questions, physical inspections all over for open sores, etc.) and I’m hoping I’ll be discharged today, but that may be optimistic.  My old body’s natural tendency to take a header is being exacerbated by a lot of dizziness, lightheadedness, and extreme fatigue from the heart failure, some anemia, and ‘bradycardia’ or slow heart rate and low diastolic BP.  It sounds like some of it may be attributable to the new cardiac meds I’ve been taking but I should know more today after I talk to the docs.  I’m hooked up to a Holter monitor telemetry gizmo here.  Geri brought me my laptop yesterday and scolded me for not informing you guys about what was going on but I have a hard time typing messages on the dinky keyboard on my phone and couldn’t use the laptop till this morning.  In any event, if and when I learned anything more definitive, I’ll let you know.  For now, as usual, they are treating me very well here at the VA and I’m very thankful for them, and for you.❤️❤️

+49 176 20023048:

❤️❤️❤️

Andy Clausen:

So they’re just observing you at the moment?

Charles Clausen:

Hi, Son.  I just saw your message.  I’m not sure how to describe what they are doing other than a lot of testing, blood tests, cardiac behaviors, etc., and a meeting with the inpatient PT folks at some point.  I spoke with a few docs yesterday in the ER, but none so far in the hospital.  I think the goal is to make some changes to the fistful of meds I take each morning, especially the cardiac new ones.  I’m in a great room with a great view of the Old Soldiers Home and the food is great, but I still hope to be discharged this afternoon, but I’m not betting on it. 

+49 176 20023048:

        Gerhard and Olga send their greetings and hope you feel better. 

 Charles Clausen:

I send warm greetings to them and a warm Danke for the kind wishes.

Andy Clausen:

I hope you can get outside today or tomorrow, at least. It’s warm* out there.

*for March

Charles Clausen:

I just saw the doc.  She says I'll be here for the weekend and it's because of the very slow heart rate and low BP creating a big risk of falling down, bone breaks, brain bleeds, etc.  She attributes it to the "beta blocker" new med that the cardiologist put me on.  I just took a nice walk down a long corridor with a CNA and I'm sitting on a recliner instead of lying on the bed, which feels great.  I've got my new laptop, my trusty iPhone, and a TV with CNN and the broadcast networks for my eye on the world, so I'm in great shape, feeling good and counting my many blessings.❤️❤️

Texts to Geri:

 I just saw the doc.  She says I'll be here for the weekend and it's because of the very slow heart rate and low BP creating a big risk of falling down, bone breaks, brain bleeds, etc.  She attributes it to the "beta blocker" new med that the cardiologist put me on.  I just took a nice walk down a long corridor with a CNA and I'm sitting on a recliner instead of lying on the bed, which feels great.  I've got my new laptop, my trusty iPhone, and a TV with CNN and the broadcast networks for my eye on the world, so I'm in great shape, feeling good and counting my many blessings.❤️❤️

Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I'm free at last.  After a long chat with the young physical therapist, Gabe Sereaphin, who came to evaluate me in terms of risks and needs re my eventual discharge, and after repeating the long walk from my corner room down and around the long 7th floor corridor without incident of lightheadedness or exhaustion, he advised my nurse amna that my "bed alarm" and "chair alarm" could be removed or turned off, so I wouldn't have to call for help from the CNA or nurse every time I wanted to make a pit stop, get out of bed, or up from the chair in my room.  Thank you, Lord!  Those alarms made me feel like a prisoner of the bed or chair, or like a toddler needing help going potty.  I admitted to Gabe that I was lobbying him for release from those alarms and thankfully, it worked..  Except for the more than 12 hours spent on the bed in the ER yesterday working on some bed sores, this hospital stay has been easier on me that my 7 day visit in late September/early October last year.  The wonderful view from my expansive windows is a big help.  Ditto my new computer.

My view from the Presidential Suite😇

Here's a thought that I probably ought to record.  I'm a bit surprised at myself for thinking that a case can be made to going to war with Iran, not in the way Trump has done it, but if done properly.  My basic disposition is to oppose offensive wars, especially wars like Vietnam, Iraq,  and Afghanistan.  I'm not generally disposed to excuse wars intended to change governning regimes or structures, especially when out real main purpose is to protect international business interests, like Standard Oil, United Fruit Company, or Chase Manhattan Bank.  I believe it was wrong for the U.S., through the CIA and others, to depose Mossadegh in Iran and Allende in Chile.  I think it was wrong for the U.S. to step into France's boots in Vietnam to install and maintain a government in the South more to our liking than Ho Chi Minh's and Le Duan's.  I rarely believe any government's expressed reasons for engaging in warfare against foes (defense of freedom, defense of democracy, etc.) and with Trump's "excursion" against Iran, it is especially impossible to assess his primary motivation(s) because he's offered so many: regime change, support of Iranian people, destruction of the already supposedly demolished nuclear capability, destruction of its missile stockpiles and/or missile manufacturing capacity, seizure of the almost-1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium, etc.  But the fact remains that Iran's government and religious and military estaablishements are the most dangerous, criminal, and destructive forces throughout the Middle East.  The list of its crimes against other nation's is long.  It is not entirely strethching the truth to characterize Trump's 'excursion" as a defensive rather than aggressive exercise.  At least, I think a case can be made for so justifying it, and should have been made in the halls of Congress, and on the public airways to the American people, and in the Security Council of the UN and to our allies.  It shouldn't have been a private deal between Netanyahu and Trump, between Mossad and the IDF and Hegseth.  I'm not sure I'm thinking very clearly on this issue, but I've never been able to reconcile war and most of Life with a rudimentary Christianity, * but it's where I am now, wondering what I really believe, and why.

* Niebuhr's An Interpretration of Christian Ethics, the chapter on "The Relevance of an Impossible Christian Ethic," and his Moral Man and Immoral Society.

Good night, and good luck.  Edward R. Murrow.

From today's Wall Street Journal, "CBS News to End Storied Radio Broadcast, Lay Off 6% of Staff," by Isabella Simonetti and Joe Flint

CBS News is ending its radio service as part of broader layoffs while Editor in Chief Bari Weiss looks to reshape the storied network. 

All positions on the CBS News Radio team are being eliminated and the service will end on May 22, according to an email that Weiss and CBS News President Tom Cibrowski sent to staff on Friday and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

“A shift in radio station programming strategies, coupled with challenging economic realities, has made it impossible to continue the service,” the email said. “We are sharing this announcement now to fulfill our commitments to our radio partners and affiliates, which require advance notice of the service’s conclusion.”

CBS Radio rose to prominence in the early days of World War II when legendary newscaster Edward R. Murrow provided live coverage from London rooftops during Germany’s bombing raids. Many of CBS’s most well-known newscasters, including Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid, who reported on the fall of Paris in 1940 live to Americans, started on radio. Sevareid was the last American journalist in Paris before it fell to the Nazis.

Although CBS had sold its radio stations in 2017, the CBS Radio News unit still produced and syndicated content for seven hundred stations around the country. The “World News Roundup” from CBS Radio is the longest-running newscast in the country. 

 

3/19/2026

 Thursday, March 19, 2026

1987 Televangelist Jim Bakker resigned after rape accusation by his secretary

1999 David Branch died

2003 Airstrikes by an American and British-led coalition signaled the beginning of the Invasion of Iraq, without United Nations support and in defiance of world opinion

In bed at 9:30, awake around 3:15 w/ flank pain and onto LZB, up at 4:20 after weigh-in.  32/44/32. 122/68/58 101 207.2

Morning meds at. a.m.  

David Stillman Branch, 1945-1999

Today is the 78th day of 2026.  So far I have had 16 trips to the VA, or an average of almost 1 every 5 days.  I never checked my stats for 2025, but in 2024, I averaged 1 trip to the VA for medical appointments every 10 days, and that's not counting telephone and video consults with my clinical pharmacist, a triage nurse, etc.  I'm hoping this isn't a sign of things to come the rest of the year.  This morning it's a follow-up appointment with the Infectious Disease doc for last Fall's cellulitis, next week a CT scan for the recurrent pain in my back/flank. 

******************

Spent the day and evening in the ER at VA Zablocki.  Hospitalized as inpatient at 9:05 p.m.

3/18/2026

 Wednesday, March 18, 2026 

My final PMR injection!👏

1940 Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler met at the Brenner Pass, where the Italian dictator agrees to join Germany's impending war effort in the west

1942 US President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9102, creating the War Relocation Authority, which was charged with overseeing the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II

2005 Terri Schiavo's feeding tube was removed at the request of her husband

2014 Russia formally annexed Crimea, previously part of Ukraine

2018 First fatal accident involving an Uber self-driving car hitting a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona

2025   Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin agreed to an immediate energy infrastructure ceasefire in Ukraine during a phone call, with additional negotiations to begin immediately on a permanent settlement of the conflict. Putin stated that the end of all foreign military and intelligence support to Ukraine would be one condition of such a settlement.

In bed at 9:30, up at 4:55.  17/9/23/10  128/58/32 -- 207.4   

Morning meds at 9:30 a.m.  Last Kevzara injection at 10 a.m. after more than a year on this steroidal "biologic."  Fingers crossed that the polymyalgia  rheumatica never returns.

B'rer Chuck says he thinks Iran is Donald Trump's tar baby.  He's B'rer Rabbit and Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are B'rer Fox, laughing their asses off, while B'rer Donald is frantically looking for a briar patch.

My challenging visit to the VA today.   I had a 1:30 appointment with Dr. Cheng, my Physical Medicine and Rehab doc.  I got there only a few minutes before the appointed time because of traffic tie-ups on Milwaukee city streets, specifically at the intersection of 35th & National Avenue.  I need to take the city streets now because of the construction work going on on I-94 West near the Brewers' stadium and the VA.  The condition will continue most of the year; what a mess.  When I walked from the VA parking garage to the medical center, I experienced significant exhaustion, and lightheadedness again, needing to stop and rest 3 times on my way to the reception area, where the greeter asked me - twice - whether I needed a wheelchair and escort.  I declined and made it to the 4th floor PM&R clinic to check in.  However, just walking with the nurse from the waiting room to Dr. Cheng's office, I got lightheaded again and the nurse insisted on getting me a wheelchair.  Most of my time with Dr. Cheng was spent discussing my recent problems with lightheadedness, wooziness, balance, etc.  An escort was called to take me from PM&R to Radiology to check on the status of a CT scan Kali Kisro has ordered, and then to the doorway, whence I made it back to my car without much difficulty.  No answer to what the cause of this problem is (low blood pressure, dehydration, etc.), but Dr. Cheng thought it might be related to the beta blocker recently prescribed for me by the cardiologist Dr. Singh.  The CT scan on my kidneys, etc., is scheduled for next Thursday.  That's for my recurrent back pain, not the 'woozes.'  

I wrote the following 3 years ago this date.  I was duly concerned then and am even more concerned three years later, with 3 more years of decrepitude.  Shudder.

A painting I did back in 1989 from a news photo of a mother and son outside the House of Peace, with all their worldly possessions in a shopping cart on which they were resting.  When I painted it, I never thought that a dozen years later I would become executive director of the House of Peace and would manage the place for the better part of three years, the best job I ever had.  I call the canvas a "painting," but it's actually a pentimento or underpainting.  I did it with oil paints rather than acrylics and was unhappy with the result, so I wiped all the paint off the canvas with a turpentine-soaked rag, intending to use the canvas for another stab at something worth saving.  Strangely, I liked the pigment-stained canvas without the paint better than I liked it with the paint, so I've saved it for the last 37 years.  Go figure.    

Dementia, Feebeleness, Long-term Care and the Ballad of Narayama.  This morning's WaPo features an article with the title "Senior Care is Brutally Expensive.  Boomers aren't ready."  It reveals that assisted-living facilities "start at $60,000 a year on average, according to the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care (NIC) — and costs go up as residents age and need more care. Locked units for dementia patients, which increasingly are being established within assisted-living facilities or as stand-alone facilities, run more than $80,000 a year on average." Additionally,  home-care aides are in very short supply, and nursing home care for the most disabled, costs about $120,000 a year unless you qualify for Medicaid which requires impoverishment.  Home-care aides for 40 hours a week cost about $56,000 a year if you can find one.

Another article in the same issue is "Americans are Knee-Deep in Medical Debt.  Most owe hospitals."  A third article warns "Financial Risks Grow in Shadowy Corner of Markets, Worrying Washington."  And yet another article asks "Why are so many Americans poor? Because we allow it, two books argue.  Sociologists Mark Robert Rank and Matthew Desmond examine the attitudes and policies that keep poverty entrenched.  All these stories reflect the real costs of our national commitment to winner-take-all Capitalism and our aversion to anything that 'reeks' of Socialism, i.e., anything that creates or increases governmental oversight, monitoring, regulation, or taxation of economic activity, or that in any manner redistributes wealth or income from the better-off to the less-well-off.  I have long believed that this American phenomenon is based in very large measure on Racism, specifically on anti-Black racism.  It has its roots in race-based slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and White Supremacy.  Race-based slavery is our Original Sin and our Persistent Sin.  To continue the religious metaphor, like certain sacraments, it has left "an indelible mark on the soul" of the nation.  We tend to blame the poor for being poor, blame the marginalized for living on the margins, and blame the disabled for being disabled.  We even seem subconsciously to blame Blacks for being Black and Browns for being Brown, other than White and privileged by not being Black or Brown.

What most caught my attention about the articles in this morning's papers was the article on care for the elderly, i.e., people like me and Geri.  We have lived comfortably in retirement for many years now but we know that we skate on thin ice and that with each passing day, each passing month and year, the ice gets thinner.  The statistics on the age-relatedness of Alzheimer's and other dementias are daunting.  Physical feebleness increases with age and with it the risk of falling, broken bones, concussions,, strokes, and the need for hospitalization or institutional care.  Is old age a blessing or a curse?  I always think of The Ballad of Narayama, the story of a poor mountain village with chronic food shortages that it addresses by an enforced custom of villagers who reach the age of 70 leaving the village to go up Mount Narayama to die of exposure and starvation so the younger, productive villagers will have enough food to survive.  In Peter Freuchen's book Eskimo, the author describes a custom of Eskimo families who must migrate with their food sources in the harsh climate.  When an elder becomes to sick or weak to keep up with the need of the other family members to follow their food sources, an igloo is built around the elder who is left to die in it so the rest of the family can survive.  What is the right 'disposition' of us old folks in America?  What should be done to protect them?  To protect their families, their caregivers?  What is clear is that our current policies, or lack of policies, can have devastating effects both on the old and on their families.  With the baby boomers moving into old age, the crisis is mounting, but we've known of it for years and done little, near nothing.  Same with the increasing crisis of health care for rural communities.  How can we be so callous about these dire needs staring us right in the face?  To my Republican neighbors of course, the answer is obvious: if they haven't accrued and saved enough money to buy needed care in their old age, it's their own fault.  If their families can't take care or provide care to their elders, it's their own fault.  Letting the government 'bail out' these old folks just creates 'moral hazard,' i.e., that selfish, lazy people will intentionally not work hard and save enough to provide old age care, relying on the government to provide what they should provide on their own.  God and the Government help those who help themselves.  

 

3/17/2026

Tuesday, March 17, 2026

St. Patrick's Day

1932 German police raided Adolf Hitler's Nazi headquarters

1945 Marine Charles E. Clausen departed Iwo Jima after 27 days

1966 US submarine located a missing hydrogen bomb on the Mediterranean sea floor

In bed at  9:30, awake and on to the LZBB at 2:15.  Rested till 3:30 till weigh-in and out to TV room at 3:45.  10/-7/21/7  120/69/61 111 207.2 

Morning meds at  a.m.       

Congestive heart failure.  This cardiac condition seems to be becoming more of a problem, not in terms of fluid retention (as manifested in unexpected weight gain), but in terms of 'the woozes," all four types of which I have been experiencing the last several days, mainly the sensation of being about to fall down.  I write these words at 4:15 a.m.; let's see how I do today.  I usually experience the sensation when I am on my feet, walking or doing some kitchen or other chore.

Recent pithy comments that say so much:  (1) This is not our war.  Words spoken by the German Defense Minister in rejecting Donald Trump's pathetic call for assistance from other nations in forcing open the Strait of Hormuz.  (2) I think I can do whatever I want with it, referring to the sovereign nation of Cuba, about which Donald Trump said yesterday,  I do believe I will be having the honor of taking Cuba.  Taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it.   I think I can do whatever I want with it.  For the past three months, the United States has choked off Cuba’s access to foreign oil, blocking shipments from Venezuela and elsewhere. Frequent blackouts have followed — including the broad power outage on Monday — and hospitals have had to postpone some procedures, deepening a humanitarian crisis that has also involved food shortages and has led to rare protests on the island.

Thoughts from my journal on this date in 2023:

Science, religion, poetry, and mystery.  I have long thought that religion, theology, God, and scripture can only be apprehended, if at all, in the same way we apprehend poetry, with a sense of Mystery underlying all of it, not Fantasy, but Mystery.  I am reminded of this thought in reading Marilynne Robinson's essay in the 12/22/22 issue of NYRB "A Theology of the Present Moment."  She addresses the ultimate question - why is there something rather than nothing.  And she acknowledges "Space, time, light, gravity—all of these elude understanding, radically and profoundly."  I joked about the Mystery of 'creation ex nihilo' when I created this Slogthrop Imponderables and Incommensurables blog 15 years ago as a repository of the then-many comments I posted to WaPo news stories during the George W. Bush administration using the pseudonym P. Bosley Slogthrop: 

"Boz has been a permanent resident of Bosky Dells Home for Broken-Down Old Lawyers since he became deranged pondering what he calls the “Slogthopian Conundrum,” i.e., that nothing must be something. Boz began losing sleep after hearing Billy Preston sing “Nuthin’ from nuthin’ leaves nuthin’ . . . You gotta have somethin’ to be with me . . .” He started perseverating ‘nuthin’ from nuthin, nuthin’ from nuthin’’. His fevered brain reasoned “You can’t take away nothing, for there would be nothing to take away! Ergo, nothing must really be SOMETHING! But if nothing = something, must it not follow that SOMETHING = NOTHING???” Night after night, day after day, for weeks on end, old Boz pondered the paradox – nothing is something, something is nothing – until at last he was led bleary-eyed and blathering from his local Taco Bell to be committed to Bosky Dells where he spends his bleary days and restless nights posting comments to stories in the Washington Post and wherever else he can squeeze a comment. The old duffer's schizophrenia is sometimes under control but rarely so when he writes." 

 Boz's name was created as a corruption of "[Tyrone] Slothrop," from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.  'Sloth' was changed to 'Slog' in reference to a controversial memo written by SecDef Donald Rumsfeld in which he wrote: 'It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.''   'P. Bosley' started out as 'Percy Bysshe' after you-know-who and I changed 'Bysshe' to 'Bosley' after Tom Bosley who played Richie's father in the Happy Days sitcom of yore, ending up with the ridiculously pompous P. Bosley Slogthrop.

But back to Marilynne Robinson's essay in which she bravely works to relate God and quantum physics.  I have struggled to do what she does, i.e., to have some minimal comprehension of God and of subatomic physics.  She undoubtedly succeeds more than I have.  I struggle with her essay ex necessitate, as when she writes: "I will mention one more thing that is known and proven, just another observable phenomenon from the point of view of younger physicists, already put to work in industry: quantum entanglement. If a photon is split in two, a change in either half will occur simultaneously in the other half at any distance—across the universe, in theory. I know that other particles can be entangled. I have no idea what this means. Basically, however, in its nonlocal expression, change can occur in physical objects, the entangled halves of a photon, unmediated by space or time—that is, as if there were no space or time. What are we to make of that? Dr. Johnson’s rationalist boot struck the irrefragable stone, which flew a distance proportionate to the angle of the blow, the weight of the stone, and the force expended. Textbook causality. It has worked so well. But it seems that reality has other options.  Space and time are now being thought about as the effects of entanglement. This is all too complex and counterintuitive for me to attempt to enlarge on, heaven knows."  She goes on, but my mind is boggled by all of this.  What exactly is a photon?  What is matter?  What is mass?  What is energy?  What is spacetime?  What is space?  What is time?  What is God?  I can only repeat what I wrote to start this piece: "I have long thought that religion, theology, God, and scripture can only be apprehended, if at all, in the same way we apprehend poetry, with a sense of Mystery underlying all of it, not Fantasy, but Mystery."

I still feel this.  How can we not be blown away, mystified, by the merest fact of anything existing? A grain of sand, a boulder, a goldfinch, the Taj Mahal, ourselves?   I've often written over the last few years, in these journal pages, that I don't believe in God, at least not the God that was fed to me with my pablum as a child, that was fed to me in my religion classes by the Sisters of Providence and the Irish Christian Brothers, and in my theology classes by the Jesuits and in my philosophy classes by the lay Thomists and Scholastics hired by the Jesuits to continue the indocrination process started centuries ago to preserve and transmit "the Deposit of Faith," entrusted to the Magisterium, or the exclusive teaching authority of the Church, i.e., the Pope and bishops.  Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so, and His eye is on the sparrow, and The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly, and ordered their estate.  But I lit a candle this morning as I sat alone in the predawn darkness, and I looked at it and thought of my sister Kitty, of my mother and my father, of Tom St. John, Ed Felsenthal, David Branch, and even of my Uncle Jim, who taught me how to play catch, to ride my first bicycle and to drive his panel truck.  Am I just remembering them, or mysteriously praying to them and for them?  What's that all about?  Whazupwidat?   It's all a Mystery, isn't it?

Fateful Anniversary.  Twenty years ago tonight, Geri and I were in Santa Rosa, California, in beautiful Sonoma County wine country.  We were there for my long interview for the position of communications director for the Diocese of Santa Rosa.  The diocese was scandal-plagued and for a number of reasons, I withdrew my application for the job.  What I am remembering today however, is not the long interviewing, but rather sitting in an eatery with Geri watching George W. Bush deliver his fateful address to the nation about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, "WMD",  and giving Saddam Hussein and his two sons 48 hours to leave Iraq.  "Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict, commenced at a time of our choosing."  We all know what followed: our hubristic "shock and awe" bombardment and invasion, discovery of no 'weapons of mass destruction,' our long and controversial occupation, and the Middle East in seemingly permanent turmoil, with Muslim refugees flooding Europe and elsewhere.  A catastrophic tragedy, brought to the world by the 3 amigos, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.  I remember listening to the speech and thinking we learned nothing in Vietnam.  Now it's 20 years later and the Middle East is still a mess, with American influence diminishing and Chinese influence growing.  The Taliban utterly defeated us in Afghanistan,   Bashar al-Assad and the Russians prevailed over our interests in Syria.  The Iranians are ever closer to developing their own 'WMD.' And even Israel is involved in an existential struggle internally with what passes for democracy on the line.  Obama was largely quiescent when Russia seized and annexed Crimea, remembering the backlash to the Iraq fiasco (which played a significant role in getting him elected) and Donald Trump has turned the Republican Party into a predominantly anti-internationalist, anti-globalist party of near-isolationists who have more affection for Vladimir Putin than for Joe Biden.  I believe that much of what has happened in the U.S. and in the world over the last 20 years was set in motion by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld policies underlying that stupid "you've got 48 hours to get out of town" speech 20 years ago tonight.  How stupid and feckless we can be.  Alas.

 Trip to the Apple Store. I finally bit the bullet and bought a new MacBook Air.  My most recent one has been booting me off our wifi network at home relentlessly, driving me nuts when I'm surfing the internet, doing research, or writing in this journal. Two previous trips to the Genius Bar didn't fix the problem.  Today I was helped by an Irish colleen named Margaret Rose, who ran a more throrough diagnostics test and learned that my battery was shot and needed to be replaced, and the screen also needed to be replaced because of the right-side 20% of it going blewie.  The cost for those two items would be more than $700 and that. along with whatever she did today, might not fix the problem of the computer disconnecting me from the wifi.  So I bought a new one with one terabyte of storage and 512 gigabytes of RAM for more than $1300.  I didn't trade in the old one for fear of losing photos, text messages with Kitty, etc.  I can bring the old one in within a few days to trade it in for a $300 credit.

 

   

 

3/16/2026

 Monday, March 16, 2026

1968 My Lai massacre occurred when American soldiers killed ~400 unarmed Vietnamese civilians in one of the most controversial incidents of the Vietnam War

1977 US President Jimmy Carter pleaded for a Palestinian homeland

1978 US Senate accepted the Panama Canal treaty

2019 A beached dead whale was found to have 88 pounds of plastic inside it, including 40 pounds of plastic bags, in Mabini, Philippines

2025  President Donald Trump signed an executive order shutting down multiple state-funded broadcasters, including Voice of America, Radio y Televisión Martí and Alhurra, and ceasing grants to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia.

In bed at 9, up and on to the LZB again at 2 with back/flank pain, no chance for sleep, out to kitchen to unload and reload the dishwasher, tidy up counters, and do a load of laundry.  BLIZZARD WARNING!  25/+1/29/13  112/70/58  112  205.8  18,000 WE Customers w/o power.  We're OK so far at 0430.  Last24 hours: 6.7 inches of snow following 0.9 inches of rain.  Next 24 hours: 2-3 inches of snow expected

Morning meds at 5:30 a.m.

Bruce and me.😊  Yesterday I wrote about the commonality shared by Bruce Springsteen and me: loving, supportive mothers and alcoholic, mentally ill, unloving and rejecting fathers.  We also shared a common gender and a Catholic school upbringing, in his case only elementary school, but in mine, elementary, high school, college, and law school (19 years, egad!)  It would be wrong to think, however, that we shared anything else.  Indeed, it's a stretch even to think of our Catholic upbringing as a shared background.  Bruce was raised in an Italian Catholic family, whereas I was raised in an Irish Catholic family, and the two cultures were not very similar.  The biggest differences between us lay in when we were born, me in August of 1941 and he in September of 1949.  That difference made me a child of the 40s and the 50s, and him a child of the 60s.  He was a baby boomer, whereas I was a member of 'the silent generation,' and in more ways than one.  I was struck by the significance of our age difference in reading the section of his autobiography in which he mentioned the impact of The Beatles on him,  It was 1964 and he was 15 years old, a high school sophomore living at home in Freehold, NJ.  I was 23 years old, a college graduate, a lieutenant in the Marine Corps, living in Yuma, AZ.  I was married and hadn't lived with my birth family for 5 years.  The following year I would be in Vietnam.   The even bigger difference between us, of course, is his immense artistic,, musical, and songwriting talent of which I share not one whit.  Another difference is that Bruce avoided military service during the Vietnam War by purposefully failing his induction physical, which he described in his autobiography.  There are a thousand other differences between Bruce and me, but in reading his bio, I am becoming one of his millions of admirers, a fan.  I checked out 4 of his albums from the Whitefish Bay Library yesterday, and will be watching YouTube videos of his concerts today.  We are both old men now, he 76 and I 84, far from our early commonalities, but better late than never.  

An entry from this journal one year ago today:

My journal entries, or daily notes, for the last 2 and ½ years in the  binders, with my holographic chronicle of "Life in the Time of Covid" about Tump and the pandemic in watercolor sketchbooks on the right

Former selves.  There is a guest essay by the novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro in today's New York Times, "I Don’t Want Anyone to Read My Diaries. Yet I Can’t Burn Them."  She relates that she kept diaries and journals for years and some time ago decided to burn all of them but discovered that she couldn't do so.   

I grabbed more pages from the 1990 box, but before I had a chance to incinerate them, a few sentences caught my attention. I was writing about what it had been like for me as a young writer in New York just starting out. . . I stopped feeding more pages into the fire after making acquaintance with the self who wrote them. It felt like killing her somehow, to destroy evidence of who she had been. Maybe she still had things to teach me. . . Joan Didion wrote “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not" 

She added: 

As the author of multiple memoirs, I was accustomed to controlling my own narrative. People would often tell me they knew everything about me. “You didn’t read my diary,” I’d joke. “If you had, I’d have to kill you.” . . . 

I had always thought of my diaries as garbage cans into which I tossed all the detritus: the obsessions, petty jealousies, fantasies, secret crushes, stinging rejections, all to clear the path to my “real” work, which is to say the attempt to make meaning and even beauty out of the chaos of being human. Memoirs are crafted, edited stories, no matter how close to the bone. The decision to include or leave out certain details or scenes or even characters are strategic literary ones. What serves the story? Whereas diaries are, at least initially, dumping grounds. And yet dumping grounds can yield the most fertile soil.

The essay made me wonder again why i bother writing words that I expect no one but myself to read.  Some day when I've got a little energy and nothing else to do (including reading and writing), I hope to browse through the 2 and ½ years of daily entries in these notes ("journals" seems too presumptious, maybe precious) to find out how often I have reflected about why I keep writing into the void, to no one.  I write and post them on the Blogspot/Blogger platform but not to attract "followers," but rather because (1) I could never manage to write as much as I do by hand, or holographically as we lawyers say, and (2) the blog format allows me to include photos which please me, as in the case of my paintings and drawings, or which have some relevance to what I write about.  In any event, the most common reasons I have come up with for composing daily notes are (1) it's a poor substitute for the text conversations I had every morning with my sister Kitty, also my dear friend, (2) it's a way to try to clarify my thoughts about whatever I am writing about, and (3) it's a way of trying to keep track of how many of my mental marbles I am losing.  Dani Shapiro and Joan Didion suggest another reason: it's a way of "staying on nodding terms with" [the guy] I used to be, whether [I] find him attractive company or not."  This is to say, it's a bit like lying on a couch in a psychiatrist's office where I am both the patient and the psychiatrist.  I suppose that was what I was doing yesterday when I reflected on whether I was "a quitter," comparing myself perhaps unjustly though not maliciously to my Dad.  It's what I was doing whenever I reflected on my troubled relationship with my Dad from my earliest memories of him after the War until we became friends, thank God, late in life, or when I reflect how I kind of deserted my birth family when I left for college at age 18, and to the Marines at age 21.  Tom St. John, Ed Felsenthal, David Branch, and Kitty are all gone now.  I don't often see friends anymore and those I do see are considerably younger than me, none with similar backgrounds, and all busy with their own lives, children, and grandchildren.  So, I pick up my laptop early each morning and start writing to myself.

3/15/2026

 Sunday, March 15,20206

The ides of March

44 B.C. Julius Caesar was stabed to death b Brutus, Cassius, and several other Roman senators on the Ides of March in Rome

1966 Riots erupted in the Watts section of Los Angeles, California

1989  Department of Veterans Affairs was officially established as a Cabinet position

2025  UNICEF reported that 1 in 3 children in North Gaza were malnourished due to the Israeli blockade stopping all humanitarian aid, describing the situation as "catastrophic."

2025   Donald Trump said Tren de Aragua is "conducting irregular warfare" against the US and ordered its members to be deported under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Following a legal challenge from the ACLU, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg temporarily blocksed this order.   The Trump administration nonetheless deported more than 200 alleged members of Tren de Aragua and MS-13 to El Salvador where they are transferred to the Terrorism Confinement Center

In bed at 9, move to LZB at 2 with right flank pain, up at 3 for weigh in, BP check, read some Springsteen bio, then out to TV room.  WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY.  35/16/41/30  121/62/6 112 206.6 Back to bed at 6 and slept till up at 9.

Morning meds at 10:40 a.m.  

From Born to Run, excerpts:

 When you walked through barroom doors in my hometown, you entered the mysterious realm of men. . .  Schlitz and Pabst Blue Ribbon ruled, with the blue ribbon stamped on the bartender's pouring spout as the golden eliir was slid expertly into tilted glasses that were then set with a hard knock on the wooden bar.  There I stood, a small spirit reminder of what a lot of these men were spending a few moments trying to forget -  work, responsibility, the family, the blessings and burdens of adult life.

. . . 

I was not my father's favorite citizen. As a boy, I figured it was just the way men were, distant, uncommunicative, busy within the currents of the grown-up world.  As a child, you don't question your parents' choices.  You accept them. They are justified by the godlike status of parenthood. If you aren't spoken to, you're not worth the time. If you're not greeted with love and affection, you haven't earned it.  If you're ignored, you don't exist.  Control over your own behavior is the one card you have to play in the hope of modifying theirs.  Maybe you have to be tougher, stronger, more athletic, smarter, in some way better . . . who knows? . . . I was a stranger, a competitor in our home and a fearful disappointment. . .

 Unfortunately, my dad's desire to engage with me almost always came after the nightly religious ritual of the "sacred six-pack."  One beer after another in the pitch dark of our kitchen.  It was always then that he wanted to see me, and it was always the same.. . . It was a shame, he loved me, but he couldn't stand me.  He felt we competed for my mother's affection.  We did. . .  [B]ack in the days when our relationship was at its most tempestuous, these things remained mysteries and created a legacy of pain and misunderstanding.

 Excerpts from my own memoir, from the section I titled "Homecoming":

        The Battle of Iwo Jima horribly wounded my father and, through my father, it injured his wife and his children.  To the extent that I developed bad coping behaviors in dealing with him and his condition after the war, it impacted me and, through me, my family.  Thus, in a very real sense, wounds from that battle 60 years ago are still felt in our family.

 . . . .

        [My father] was one of Mowat’s “most unfortunate ones,” of Remarque’s “restless, aimless, . . . essentially unhappy” men who, “though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.”  I am confident that had it not been for the support of my mother and of my grandparents and Aunt Monica, he would have been one of the army of lost souls in the “beer halls and gutters.”  He would not have survived on his own.  In the same conversation in which he told me that it took him 25 years to ‘get over’ Iwo Jima, he also told me that the Marines did not want to ‘let him out’ or discharge him after the war because of his ‘condition’ and how hard it was for my mother to live with him.  I don’t know whether he has any idea how hard those years were for Kitty and me. He has never acknowledged it to either of us.  Kitty and I rarely talk of it and never at length, but in a serious conversation about 25 years ago she remarked that we had been ‘emotionally crippled from growing up with Dad.’  She was pretty accurate 

My father had all the characteristics of the combat-induced PTSD veteran:

 isolation from family and others with a ‘leave me alone’ attitude

 inability to handle frustrations or even to identify them

 inability to express or share his feelings

 inability to handle it when things are going well, from a standpoint of not feeling worthy, survivor’s guilt

 lack of self-esteem, great insecurity, and feelings of worthlessness and helplessness

 jealousy of his wife’s relationships and activities, and, making everything worse, and, very significantly,

 abuse of alcohol, ‘self-medication.’

        The problems experienced by combat-stressed veterans’ spouses are now well known and well documented.  I’m sure my mother, only 23 years old when my father returned from the war, experienced many of those problems:

 being overwhelmed by pressures

 having to assume total responsibility, including the tremendous strain of financial insecurity because of her husband’s job instability

 feeling guilty that somehow she is responsible for my father’s rage or anger reactions.

 experiencing self-doubts generated by emotional and job instability of her husband; caught up in frequent crisis-responding, losing sight of her own needs or overall pattern.

 being afraid to say anything to him and not knowing how to respond, frustrated in her ability to help.

 being confused as to whether his problems were combat-related or not and whether there would ever by any resolution of his conflict.

 feeling responsible for ‘making it better.’ having to ‘mother’ or ‘nurture’ him and hence creating greater resentment and irresponsibility on his part.

 seeing him separated not only from her, but also from my sister and me with little sense of family and poor father-child relationships.

 feeling that support is not welcomed by him.

 experiencing emotional and verbal abuse.

 feeling dragged down by his negative attitudes.

 reduced self-esteem, anxiety, and a sense of hopelessness.

        My father was never physically abusive to me or to Kitty.  He wasn’t a physically violent man, except for one incident with my mother when I was a teenager..  Growing up with him in those close quarters was so very difficult, mostly because he was so profoundly unhappy, and it was impossible not to be infected by his unhappiness.  He was one of those whose ‘spiritual feet had been knocked out from under him. . . spiritually depleted, burned out.’  He had seen what we cannot (thank God) imagine.  What he had seen accompanied him to 73rd and Emerald after the war and stayed with him, especially in the nightmares.  His drinking made a terrible situation worse.  I’ll say more about that later.

. . . 

        As I look back on my life in the process of writing these letters, I realize what little contact I had with my father after I left home at 18.  He wrote me two letters, one during my freshman year at college and another when I wrote home after my sophomore year that I had decided to take my commission in the Marine Corps rather than the Navy.  He was taciturn at home and even more so on the telephone (“Well, let’s not run up this phone bill” marked the quick end of every long distance call.)  He fled to Florida after my mother’s death in 1972 and for a period of 13 years, from 1982 till 1995, we never spoke or wrote to each other, a long silence that wasn’t broken until my grandmother’s death, when I wrote him.  I mention all this simply as a preface to the (obvious) statement that I don’t know my father well.  Other than the years from our reconciliation in 1995 till his death in 2007, most of my memories are from the end of World War II until 1959 when I left home, a period spanning his life from age 25 to age 39.  Those were, I believe, his worst years, years that, but for the war and the Iwo Jima trauma, should have been his best years, years of establishing himself in some work, growing into maturity, enjoying his family, and building a future.  Instead, they were in large measure lost and wasted years.  The frequent bouts of anxiety and depression, the relentless terrorizing dreams and the out-of-control alcoholism drained him of vitality.  I cannot remember him having any hobbies or recreational interests.  If he had any educational or vocational interests, it didn’t show.  As far as I know, he had no enthusiasm for anything.  I have no memory of him ever building anything, or fixing anything, or caring very much for anything other than perhaps his car.  It was my Uncle Jim who took us cousins to Comiskey Park to watch the White Sox games, who took us to the Brookfield Zoo, who took us to Riverview Amusement Park, who started to teach me how to drive, who played ‘catch’ with me.  I don’t remember my father taking part in any of these activities or indeed in much of anything that could properly be characterized as an “activity.”  By the time I left home in 1959, he reminded me of the farm worker in Robert Frost’s The Death of the Hired Hand:

Poor Silas, . . .

. . .  nothing to look backward to with pride,

And nothing to look forward to with hope,

So now and never any different.

He was pretty much a lost soul, trapped with his own thoughts and memories and debilitating dreams, cut off from the rest of the world, including his children.  

I have read only the first 100 pages or so of Springsteen's bio, but I am struck by the similar experiences that he and I (and our siblings) shared with our cold, distant, rejecting, unloving fathers.  Each of us grew up to be self-sufficient, functional, thriving adult males, he an international rock star, and I a Marine officer, law professor, and lawyer.  But each of us, when it came to rendering our own life stories to our own children inevitably started our stories, and in a sense end our stories, focusing on our very loving mothers and our very unloving fathers.  It was this commonality, that I noticed in the movie Deliver Me From Nowhere, that got me interested in Springsteen's life, and in his music, to reading his Born to Run, and to writing these notes.

"My Father's House"

Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska album

Last night I dreamed that I was a child
Out where the pines grow wild and tall
I was trying to make it home through the forest
Before the darkness falls

I heard the wind rustling through the trees
And ghostly voices rose from the fields
I ran with my heart pounding down that broken path
With the devil snappin' at my heels

I broke through the trees and there in the night
My father's house stood shining hard
And bright the branches and brambles tore
My clothes and scratched my arms
But I ran 'till I fell shaking in his arms

I awoke and I imagined the hard things that pulled us apart
Will never again Sir tear us from each other's hearts
I got dressed and to that house
I did ride from out on the road I could see
Its windows shining in light

I walked up the steps and stood on the porch a woman
I didn't recognize came and spoke to me
Through a chained door
I told her my story and who I'd come for
She said "I'm sorry son but no one by that name
Lives here anymore"

 My father's house shines hard and bright

It stands like a beacon calling me in the night
Calling and calling so cold and alone
Shining 'cross this dark highway
Where our sins lie unatoned

 

3/14/2026

 Saturday, March 14, 2026

2019 US Senate passed its resolution overturning President Donald Trump's national emergency declaration

2025  Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared South African Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool persona non grata for criticizing Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign.

In bed at 10:10, up at 5:10.  26/37/26.  WINTER STORM WATCH for tomorrow.😨  131/61/30  115  205.7

Morning meds at 8:10 a.m.      

Throne room reading is Bruce Springsteen's autobiography, Born to Run, which I am thoroughly enjoying.   I was hooked on it, at least for now, by the initial chapters, titled "My Street," "My House," "The Church," and "My Mother."  It reminded me of course of my own memoir which I wrote about 10 years before Springsteen wrote his:  "Some Lineage," "My Family's First Home," "My Mother,""Raised in the Bosom of the Church," etc.  His mother was 100% Italian, a  Zirilli, as were his most important relatives and he concludes his chapter on "The Italians" with a reference to "We, the Italians," showing his intimate relationship with that side of his heritage, notwithstanding his Dutch surname derived from his paternal great grandfather.

I will write more about this book later.  I wore myself out at the MetroMarket this afternoon and my back is killing me.😱😩😪😡

k