10/2/2026

 Friday, October 2, 2026

1904 German General Lothar von Trotha issued an order to exterminate the native Herero and Namaqua peoples of German South West Africa (present-day Namibia); the 1st genocide of the 20th Century, killed 65,000 Herero and 10,000 of the Namaqua tribe

1919 US President Woodrow Wilson had a stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed

1928 "Prelature of the Holy Cross and the Work of God", known as Opus Dei, was founded by the Catholic priest Josemaría Escrivá in Madrid, Spain

2020 President Donald Trump announced via Twitter that he and First Lady Melania Trump had tested positive for COVID-19; Trump was hospitalized later that day

2025 Two people were killed and 4 others injured in a vehicle-ramming and mass stabbing attack at a synagogue in Manchester, England. The perpetrator and a victim were shot dead by police

In bed at 9:30, awake at 3:30, up at 4; 0410 202.2 112/66/67. 124; 52/45/62/49, mostly sunny day ahead.

Morning meds at 5:45 a.m.  Entresto at 5 a.m. and p.m.  Trulicity injection at 12 p.m.

Text exchange with Andy last night:

Hi, Son.  I received a polo shirt and jacket from the Honor Flight folks in today’s mail and I’m wondering if you’ve heard from them.  I can hardly believe it’s only about a week away.  I’m still a little anxious about it, wondering if I made a mistake accepting the invitation.

Yes, we had guardian training last week to go over what to expect and get our own polis and jackets so we are easily identifiable. I’ll be taking a backpack with us to carry things and I’ll also bring a pad for your wheelchair, unless you have one you want to bring and I’ll carry that when n 

I hadn’t thought about a pad, but now that you mention it, it’s great.  I’ve had to use a wheelchair a few times at the VA and they are hard on the butt.  I’m afraid I will be spending quite a bit of time on a chair in D.C. so a pad may be a real butt-saver. I do have a couple of pads that are pretty good, but we’d have to check this weekend or next week to see if they would fit in your backpack,.  BTW, Sarah is here this weekend, in from Austin.  I found out today also that we’ll be with the 6 a.m.group rather than the 5 a.m. group.  Hallelujah!

Yes, so I’ll plan on picking you up around 5:30 AM. I can drop you off at the departure area and a volunteer there will take you up to the upper level where I can meet you after parking.

Great.❤️

Early morning blues.  Another insufficient night's sleep.  It took me extra long to get to sleep after I hit the sack at (:30. I ended up turning on the Torch Songs playlist on my iPhone, on law volume, and eventually fell asleep at some unknown time, but woke up with a head full of unwanted throughts sometime after 3 and got out of bed before 4.  I got to wondering whether a mild tranquilizer might help, though I am loathe to take any prescription-strength psychotropic drug.  I've taken NyQuilPM twice and had decent night's sleep afterward, but I know that can become habit-forming and ineffective after some time.  The Honor Flight a week from tomorrow has me a bit worked up, indeed too worked up.  As I sat in Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix in 2022 waiting to return to O'Hare and then  and it wasMilwaukee, I told myself that would be my last airliner travel and it was, until this Honor Flight thing came up.  I probably should have just declined the invitation, but it's too late now.  I'd have a hard time living with the guilt of having deprived some other old vet of the opportunity by backing out late.

More on Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism.  There is a long review in the current New York Review of Books titled Where Hatred Lies by Omer Bartov, a "nuanced new history by Mark Mazower [that] reminds us that antisemitism, an age-old threat to Jewish life, can be warped into a political tool—as we see today, when any criticism of Israel can be deemed antisemitic."  Mazower's book is titled On Antisemitism, A Word in History.  In Bartov's review, he reminds us that until the 1970s and 1980s, antisemitism was largely a phenomenon associated with right-wing politics.

At that time [the inter-world-wars period]no one would have disputed that antisemitism was a specifically right-wing and fascist hatred, intent on reversing Jewish emancipation and all that it stood for as a symbol of humanism, enlightenment, and the equality of all members of humankind.

None of this would need stating if, several decades after the end of World War II, the meaning of antisemitism in the West had not undergone an odd transformation. In the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in the US and Western Europe, ever more commentators and intellectuals started maintaining that, in Mazower’s words, “antisemitism was the same as opposition to Israel, and that it was therefore chiefly a problem of the Left rather than the Right.” To many in the American Jewish establishment, “a new form of antisemitism” seemed to have arrived on the scene, constituting, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would later put it, “vicious efforts to demonize the Jewish state and deny the Jewish people the right to self-determination.” 

Since Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, and the genocidal Israeli assault on Gaza that followed, the association between criticism of Israel and antisemitism has become ubiquitous. A growing range of scholars and other observers seem to agree with Mazower that even if “some anti-Zionism masks anti-Jewish sentiments, much of it does not.” But most major American Jewish organizations have stayed attached to the assumption that the main source of antisemitism in the world today is the anti-Israel left. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) contends that “anti-Zionism is antisemitic, in intent or effect.” The American Jewish Committee (AJC) defines anti-Zionism as “inherently bigoted” and claims that, because its “end goal…is to undermine and eliminate Jewish rights,” the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement is driven by “antisemitic motivations.”

Various factions of the political right, meanwhile, have been quick to turn these assumptions to their advantage. Some have used allegations of antisemitism as a cudgel against the left in order to, in Mazower’s words, “police the universities, end long-standing anti-discrimination and diversity initiatives, reassert ‘Western values,’ and reaffirm the role of religion in American life.” Others have conscripted anti-Zionist, pro-Palestine rhetoric into the service of a notion of “Western values” rooted explicitly in Christian nationalism, expressing suspicion and hostility toward American Jews rather than opportunistically claiming to protect them.

There can be no doubt that, as Mazower puts it, “Jews continue to be among those groups who are targeted these days for who they are.” [Many exammples are cited, including the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh in 2018.]

Precisely because it remains “an ongoing problem,” Mazower writes, “anyone who takes antisemitism seriously” ought to be “dismayed by the confusion that exists around the term, not to mention the overuse that threatens to strip it of meaning.” How did it “come to seem unassailable common sense to a lot of people” today that a prejudice once central to the ideology of far-right anticommunism now resides primarily on the left? And if that common sense is wrongheaded, how might we better understand the workings of this all-too-present bigotry?  (My emphasis added.]

Is that "common sense wrongheaded"?  Is anti-Zionism antisemitism?  I can't accept that without damning myself, but what does Zionism mean today, and what does anti-Zionism mean today?

 Israel has been in existence as an independent state for 78 years.  It is recognized by all the other countries of the world, with the exception of the 15 Arab League countries, 11 other Muslim-majority countries, and North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela.  It has been a member of the UN since a year after its declaration of independent statehood. It is home to millions of people.  Out of more than 7.5 million Jews in Israel, more than 3/4 were born there. Of the more than 2 million Arabs in Israel, virtually all were born there.  Israel is not just the dream of Theodor Herzl and the early Zionists; it is a long-existing de facto and de jure nation.   Zionism today means, therefore at least that the country has the right to exist in its historic form as a Jewish-majority, Jewish-dominated, and governed state.  Anti-Zionism means a belief that Israel does not have a right to exist as is.  What it means beyond that is not easy to ascertain, and I'm reasonably confident that I'm not up to defining it.  

Anti-Zionism cannot mean the expulsion of Jews "from the river to the sea," any more than the notion of the expulsion of Arabs "from the river to the sea" can be justified.  No "ethnic cleansing."  It can only mean, I suspect, some form of a "one-state solution" to the seemingly intractable "Palestine Problem."  One state with equal rights for all inhabitants, where full citizenship is not based on ethnicity or religion. Jews and Palestinian Arabs would constitute two populations of approximately equal size within a single country of about 15–16 million people. Neither would have a decisive demographic majority.  Looking at how such a state would be constituted politically, however, leads one into seemingly an endless morass.

 

 

10/1

October 1, 2026

1867 Karl Marx published "Das Kapital" in Berlin, a description of the capitalist system, its instability, and its tendency toward self-destruction

1918 World War I: Combined Arab and British forces under T. E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia, captured Damascus from the Turks

1932 Oswald Mosley formed the British Union of Fascists

1946 12 Nazi war criminals were sentenced to death in Nuremberg

1949 People's Republic of China was proclaimed by Mao Zedong and the Republic of China (Taiwan) formed on the island of Formosa

1955 Jackie Gleason's sitcom "The Honeymooners" debuted on CBS, replacing his variety series

2019 Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was taken to a hospital after suffering a heart attack

2021 US COVID-19 death toll passed 700,000, with daily deaths averaging 1,900 a day

In bed at 9:30, up at 4; 0425 202.8 116/67/66; 65/67/58, rain all day.

Morning meds at 9 a.m.   Entresto at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m.

I'm feeling a bit wiped out today.      I haven't slept very well the last 3 nights, and I'm feeling it.😴😪 

Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History by Benjamin Moser.  I'm making slow progress with this book, but not because it isn't interesting and informative, just because I don't even have the energy to read the last couple of days.  I'm almost a third of the way through it, having finished the most interesting chapter so far, which deals with the history behind the (in)famous Balfour Declaration.  Most interesting to me has been the degree to which Herzl's Zionism was much more supported by anti-semitic Christians than it was by largely assimilated European Jews.  

Arthur James Balfour, the British foreign secretary who issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, had a documented record of expressing anti-Jewish prejudice and supporting restrictions on Jewish immigration.  In 1905, when Balfour was prime minister, his government enacted the Aliens Act, Britain's first modern immigration restriction. Although the legislation was not explicitly directed at Jews, its principal targets included impoverished Eastern European Jews fleeing persecution, particularly in the Russian Empire. In parliamentary debate, Balfour argued that even industrious, patriotic Jewish immigrants might remain a distinct community that would be difficult to assimilate into British society. The legislation and his remarks have been cited by historians as evidence of the anti-Jewish assumptions underlying his immigration policy.

The idea that Jews constituted a distinct people, rather than simply British, French or German citizens who practiced Judaism, was shared by many Zionists. But it also reinforced the prejudices of people who regarded Jews as perpetual foreigners.

Several considerations shaped British support for Zionism, including wartime diplomacy, Britain's strategic interests in the Middle East and sympathy for Jewish national aspirations. Historians differ over the relative importance of these motives and the extent to which Balfour's personal attitudes toward Jews influenced his position, but it seems clear that it wasn't based on any love by the British elites for Jews.  Indeed,  a prominent Jewish member of Balfour's own government accused it of antisemitism. 

Edwin Montagu was Secretary of State for India and one of the few Jewish members of the British Cabinet.  In August 1917, during the deliberations preceding the Balfour Declaration, he circulated a memorandum titled The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government.  Montagu feared that declaring Palestine the national home of the Jewish people would undermine the position of Jews who regarded Britain as their homeland. Other countries might use the declaration as justification for treating their Jewish citizens as foreigners.  He insisted that British Jews were entitled to be regarded as Britons, not as members of a foreign nationality residing in Britain.

The fight over whether Jews constitute a separate nation, a separate "people", or even a separate "race," seems to be an eternal one.  Many right-wing anti-Semites in America include Jews among those they smear as not "real Americans," that mystical group that Sarah Palin could identify as distinct from the rest of us.  We may be forgiven for wondering whether J. D. Vance includes Jews in New York or Los Angeles among those he seems to see as more American than the rest of us.  The more basic question of Jewish identity - who is a "real Jew"? - still divides people.  Yeshayahu Leibowitz devoted some very serious writing to it.  Leibowitz was himself a Zionist.  He supported Jewish political independence as a means of freeing Jews from foreign rule.  What he rejected was the assertion that modern Jewish nationhood necessarily continued the religious identity that had historically constituted the Jewish people.   He therefore distinguished between two understandings of collective Jewish identity.: historical Jewish peoplehood based on observance of Jewish Law (halakah) and modern secular Jewish nationalism.  For Leibowitz, the existence of the second did not make it identical to the first. Nor did Jewish sovereignty endow the state with religious sanctity.  This raises a particularly interesting implication of his thought: if Jews no longer share religious observance, language, territory, or a common political allegiance, on what basis do they continue to constitute one people?  He regarded that as a genuine problem of modern Jewish identity, rather than a question conclusively settled by invoking either common ancestry or the State of Israel.   Leibowitz was concerned not only with the state's authority to define an individual Jew, but with the much more fundamental question of what, following the separation of Jewishness from Judaism, continues to bind Jews together as a people.  For me, it raises the question of by what "right" do Jews from Russia, Singapore, New York, Liverpool, Buenos Aires, or East Chibichiland, any of whom may be Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, atheist, or agnostic, have a right to their own sovereign state in the land in which their very remote ancestors resided millennia ago, and to exclude from it people who lived on the land as recently as 1948?  I cannot come up with any satisfactory answer to that root question.

In any event, I wonder whether it isn't Zionism and the actions of the State of Israel, at least as much as any other factor, that contribute to modern anti-Semitism, at least since the occupation of the conquered territories after 1967 and the near-total dominance of right-wing political parties, and Benjamin Netanyahu, since the assassination of Rabin in 1995.  For most people worldwide, Netanyahu has become the face of Israel.  He never misses a chance to suggest that he is the spokesman for all Jews in the world, and to conflate anti-Zionism or opposition to his government's racist and oppressive policies with anti-Semitism.  

 

9/30/2026

 Wednesday, September 30, 2026

1938 Treaty of Munich forced Czechoslovakia to give territory to Germany. Chamberlain infamously declared "Peace for our time" upon his return to London.

1946 Twenty-two Nazi leaders, including Hermann Goering, were found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to death or prison at the Nuremberg war trials

2022 In defiance of international law, Vladimir Putin announced Russia's annexation of  four Ukrainian provinces: Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia

2023 Bipartisan deal to avoid US government shutdown is signed just hours before the midnight deadline and provides funding for 45 days 

In bed at 9:20, awake at 3, up at 3:20; 0335 203.4.  119/72/67; 62/69/61; rain expected most of the day.

Morning meds at 6:30 a.m.  Entresto at 5:30 a.m. and p.m.

Some additional thoughts on Anti-Zionism-A Jewish History, Rabbi Aaron Tamares, and Yeshayahu Leibowitz.  Yesterday I mentioned what Rabbi Tamares said about Jewish statehood and its effect on Jewish people, and what Leibowitz said about the effect the occupation of Palestinian land would have on the Jewish people and on the State of Israel.  Both men could hardly have been more authentically, proudly, and lovingly Jewish.  Neither can rationally be considered a "self-hating Jew."  Leibowitz was a Zionist Jew, and Tamares an anti-Zionist Jew.  Both reject the proposition that Jewish nationhood itself is redemptive or holy.  Both, however, are deeply suspicious of turning political power into a religious absolute.  In that sense, Tamares and Leibowitz belong to the same broad Jewish critique of nationalist idolatry, even though Leibowitz accepts the political state and Tamares is much closer to principled anti-nationalism.  Benjamin Moser’s framing of Tamares fits that distinction: Moser presents Jewish anti-Zionists as arguing that Judaism is “older and larger than any single political project,” and Tamares is one of the clearest early examples of that ethical-spiritual critique of nationalism.  The shortest way to put it is: Leibowitz says, “Have a Jewish state, but do not worship it.” Tamares says, “The very drive to become a state-centered nation may itself deform Judaism."

I do not believe in Judaism any more than I believe in the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised, or in the Protestant religions that consider Catholicism an Anti-Christ and 'the Whore of Babylon."  I do believe, however, that all the major religions have some real value, call it what we may: spiritual, emotional, psychological, salvific, or redemptive.  That certainly includes the profoundly rich depths of Judaism every bit as much as it includes Christianity, Islam, and even Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, Baháʼí. and probably other "offshoots" of the majors.  I certainly include Buddhism also, though it's not at all clear that Buddhism is a religion.  

Have Judaism and the Israeli Jews been corrupted by the creation of the State of Israel, as Rabbi Tamares predicted, or by the occupation of the Palestinian territories, as Yeshayahu Leibowitz predicted?  People will have very differing views on those questions, largely depending on where they stand, sit, or live, but I do note that the Jews in Palestine/Israel have been living with strife, warfare, and existential precarity for more than 100 years now, since the Jerusalem riots of 1920, the Jaffa riots of 1921, and the much more lethal riots across Palestine in 1929.  I note too that it was precisely the arrival of the European Jews that precipitated the deadly strife.  The long-established Jews in Palestine, mostly religious, had lived in peace with the Arabs pre-Balfour, as had the Arab Christians.  

Israel has become, to a great many throughout the world, a pariah state, an apartheid state, an aggressive and oppressive state, and a chronic abuser of human rights.  Its people have never truly lived in peace and safety.  Every militant move intended to increase the security of its people has resulted in more strife, jeopardy, and precarity down the road.

This morning's NYTimes reports that all the Democrats in the U.S. Senate, save one, voted to force Trump to deliver a Human Rights assessment of Israel's behavior on the West Bank.  All the Republicans, save one, voted against it.  There is an ever-growing movement within the American population, especially among the young, to sever America's intimate relationship with Israel, to cut off military and economic assistance, and to punish its human rights abuses against Palestinians.  If American allegiance ends, who will be in Israel's corner?

I know I am a pessimist (Being Irish . . ., etc.), but I long ago lost hope for Israel, at least since 1995, when Yigal Amir,  the religious nationalist supporter of the settlement movement and opponent of Palestinian statehood, assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, and the people elected Benjamin Netanyahu to become leader.  He has served as leader of Israel for 19 of the last 30 years, Israel's longest-serving prime minister.  With the death of Rabin, and effectively, of the leftist Labor Party in Israel, all hope for any kind of statehood for the Palestinians ended.  Excluding East Jerusalem, the Israeli settler population in the West Bank was about 138,600 at the end of 1995. By the end of 2024, Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics data show about 511,100 settlers. That is an increase of roughly 372,500 people, or about 269%. Put another way, the settler population is now about 3.7 times what it was when Rabin was assassinated.

The growth has continued since then. A 2026 report based on settler-group data says the West Bank settler population grew another 2.2% during 2025, again excluding East Jerusalem.

If we include East Jerusalem, the numbers are larger still. Peace Now estimated about 230,000 Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem by 2023, compared with about 140,000 in 1993. So by the mid-2020s, the combined settler population of the West Bank and East Jerusalem was on the order of three-quarters of a million people, depending on the exact year and counting method.

The West Bank has been carved up like a turkey.  How do you realistically form a state out of what Israel has left of it? (I say nothing of Gaza, and what Israel has left of it.)

I write all these thoughts in the hours before daybreak, hoping for some coherence, but in any event trying to understand my ultimate thought that Zionism has been a bad idea, an unjustifiable goal from the beginning.  I've read only the Introduction and first chapter of Benjamin Moser's book, but my thought on this matter preceded my purchase of the book.  I expect my thoughts on this matter will become only more embedded as I read on.   (I haven't addressed the question of whether being an anti-Zionist makes me an anti-semite, which is what Benjamin Netanyahu would charge, as he always does.  But that's another subject.)

Quo tandem, Catalina?  From this morning's NYTimes:

After Two Decades, U.S. Forces Leave Iraq to an Uncertain Future

U.S. forces formally withdrew from Iraq on Wednesday, ending a two-decade military presence that stoked years of devastating bloodshed, and leaves behind a battered nation struggling to unshackle itself from its two most powerful, and now warring, allies.

After toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003, the brutal dictator who ruled Iraq for nearly 24 years, American forces are making their second withdrawal from the country.

The U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation, which ended in 2011, left a country reeling from sectarian bloodletting and militant insurgencies that cost nearly 4,500 U.S. lives and killed more than 115,000 Iraqis, according to the most modest counts.

American forces ultimately returned three years later — this time to lead the international coalition fighting the Islamic State, the jihadist force that once seized swaths of Iraq and Syria and became notorious for its slaughter of Shiite Muslim Iraqis, public killings of hostages, and torture and enslavement of women from Iraq’s Yazidi minority. 

Why am I reminded of King George's song from Hamilton? 

You'll be back like before

I will fight the fight and win the war

For your love, for your praise

And I'll love you 'til my dying days

When you're gone, I'll go mad

So don't throw away this thing we had

'Cause when push comes to shove

I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love.

 Tom Friedman reminds me of why I live with doom and gloom.  From his latest column:

President Trump is such an awful human being that just writing about him feels degrading. . . . 

Alas, though, when someone as morally warped as Trump — whose first secretary of state called him a “moron” — assumes this much unchecked power at the dawn of the Age of Artificial Intelligence, he can’t be ignored. Because right now Trump is leaving America exposed to dangerous viruses: digital, biological and diplomatic. Something bad is going to happen to us as a result. We and our children are going to pay for this, and not only at the gas pump.

He goes on to show how we are suffering and will continue to suffer under the incompetent, malign, delusional, and misanthropic leader we have placed in the White House, but I don't have the strength to carry on.

Still more on why I live with doom and gloom.  I asked an AI chatbox this morning a series of question composed to determine to what extent, if any, I was correct in thinking that we may have already "passed the tipping point' in terms of losing practical human control over AI models:  Here is a pared-down, but verbatim, record of the exchange, with my questions in italics and the responses in roman type:

Are AI "models" separate entities? How is one differentiated from another?  A model is not normally a single physical machine sitting in one data center. Copies of the same model can run on many servers at once.

Could there be an almost infinite number of individual "models" of AI extant?  Yes—at least in principle, the number of distinct AI models that could exist is astronomically large.

Once a model is created, can it be killed or destroyed?  Yes . . . But “destroyed” is trickier than it sounds. Once a model has been copied, backed up, downloaded, replicated across servers, or distributed to other organizations or individuals, eliminating every copy may be very difficult or impossible. Deleting one deployed copy does not destroy the model if another copy of the same weights still exists somewhere else.

Could models be created that are indestructible? Could models, once created, create other different models?  Yes to the second question; only approximately to the first. . . . But a model could be made extremely hard to eliminate by replicating itself widely across many independent servers, jurisdictions, devices, and storage systems. . . And yes. a model can be used to help create other models.  That is already happening in several forms.

Would the increase in the number of data centers around the world increase the practical possibility of the creation on practically indestructible models? Not in absolute or mathematical terms, but as a practical matter, a matter of likelihood?   Yes. As a practical matter, more data centers increase the possibility that a model could become extremely difficult to eliminate, though the increase is indirect rather than automatic. . .  ,A model that exists only on one company’s servers can be shut down relatively easily. A model whose weights have been copied to hundreds or thousands of independently controlled systems in different countries is a very different problem. . .  . For software, copying is much easier than biological reproduction, so distribution can happen extremely rapidly.

Is it thus possible even now that an ill-aligned model already exists, is very difficult to identify, and iwould be very difficult to erase, destroy, or control?  Yes. It is possible now that a poorly aligned or deliberately modified model exists somewhere outside public view and would be difficult to identify or eliminate. . . . So a model could already exist that has been deliberately stripped of its safety training, fine-tuned for harmful purposes, and stored on private servers. . . . There is also now evidence that advanced models can behave in unexpectedly agentic ways under certain conditions. . .   The unsettling feature of digital systems is that detection and destruction are asymmetric. Creating one copy is easy; proving that all copies have been found is extremely difficult.  In that limited sense, your intuition is correct: we may already have crossed the point at which humanity can guarantee that every unwanted AI model could be found and erased.  (The bolding emphasis added by me.)

 And even "in that limited sense", I find that exchange "unsettling" indeed.

9/29/2026

 Tuesday, September 29, 2026

1567 War of Religion breaks out in France as Huguenots try to kidnap King Charles IX

1835 The Treaty of New Echota was signed between the US government and representatives of a minority Cherokee political faction to cede all lands of the Cherokee east of the Mississippi River to the United States

1890 US 7th Cavalry massacred 200+ captive Sioux at Wounded Knee, South Dakota

1908 A patent was granted for a 4-wheel automobile brake, Clintonville, Wisconsin

1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act was signed by President Richard M. Nixon

2020 First debate between US Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Joe Biden was held, widely criticized as chaotic and ill-tempered

2023 More than 50 people were killed in two suicide attacks in Pakistan, during celebrations for the birth of the Prophet Muhammad

2025 German airline Lufthansa announced they would cut 4,000 administrative positions by 2030 and replace them with artificial intelligence and digitization processes. 

In bed at 9:20, up at 4; 0410 204.2 119/67/68 111; 52/70/51, cloudy

Morning meds at 8 a.m.  Entresto at 5:15 a.m. and 5:30 p.m.

The handsome fellow in the photo is a Cooper's Hawk, of which we have many in our neck of the woods.  One of them landed on the ground under our bird feeders yesterday, and I suspect that he has been hanging around the neighborhood lately.  I neglected to fill the bird feeders last night and filled them this morning.  Normally, some of our neighboring birds show up not long after I fill the feeders, but not this morning.  A beautiful little chipmunk is in the grass under the feeders, stuffing his cheek pouches with some of the safflower and/or sunflower seeds I spread on the ground whenever I fill the tube and tray feeders.   He competes with the mourning doves, which also like to ground-feed, when they aren't 'setting up shop' on or near the tray feeder above.  I've read that chipmunk cheeks can grow to 3 times the size of their heads when filled with food,  This explains, in large measure, why I don't have to worry about a large accumulation of seeds under our feeders; they are either eaten quickly by the birds or hauled away by the chipmunks.  Yesterday I watched what appeared to be a fight between two chipmunks competing for pride of place in the feeding ground.  The aggressor appeared to jump on the other before they got involved in the more normal chasing activity.  Although Cooper's hawks feed normally on smaller birds, I suspect a chipmunk would be a welcome snack for one, so the little guy I'm watching is running a risk by filling up.  . . . The birds stayed away all day.

Anti-Ziomism: A Jewish History by Benjamin Moser.  I was struck by this passage in Chapter 1, titled The Sensitive Rabbi - Aaron Samuel Tamares, Poland:

For Aaron Samuel Tamares, the rabbi of the tiny shtetl of Milejczyce, the controversy would define his life and his ministry. Located on the edge of the ancient forest of Białowieża, on what is today the Polish side of the border of Belarus and Poland, even tiny Milejczyce, for Tamares, was sometimes too big. Nearly every day, weather permitting, he would head into the forest, where he composed most of his works. These were not, at first, intended to be read. “Whenever he became upset by an impure event that took place in society,” he wrote in a third-person memoir toward the end of his life, “he fled to the forest and poured his heart out before the innocent trees—and, with their help, put pen to paper.” When he began to publish, he adopted a pseudonym, “One of the Sensitive Rabbis.” It was under that name that he became known throughout the Jewish world. (p. 36).

 Rabbi Tamares reminds me of myself, at least early on in his writing endeavors: sitting alone and writing, "whenever he became upset by an impure event that took place in society.  He fled to the forest; I sit in my Lazy Boy recliner with my laptop.  Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, writers gotta write.

It is an interesting experience to be reading this book about anti-Zionism and its distinction from and relation to anti-semitism at this time in history, with the State of Israel now held in such low regard throughout the world, and with the Guardian film, NAZA, about Israel's behavior in its war on Gaza attracting so much attention in Israel and the U.S.  I thought of the writing of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, urging Israel's leaders not to occupy the conquered territories after the Six Day War in 1967, when I read this in Moser's book:

Where other nationalist movements sought to overthrow imperialist powers, Zionism always sought to join them. From the beginning, when Herzl sought a sponsor, the movement had known that it would succeed only if it could find an imperial backer. The movement’s champion would arrive in 1917, when Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, a promise to establish a “national home” for the Jewish people in Palestine. This was both undignified and irreligious, Tamares insisted: Judaism was “independent of land, kings, and lords.” He had no doubts where this embrace of statism, militarism, and nationalism would lead: “It is completely incongruous and misleading to use the slogan ‘nationalism,’ inasmuch as it is the complete opposite of ‘The Bible.’ ” The Jews were enjoined to resist the same nationalism that was threatening to swallow up the world: “Even if the ideas of ‘nationalism’ and ‘terror’ had already conquered the hearts of all the nations, even so it would be incumbent upon ‘the people of the book, a nation driven and plucked,’ that nation most expert in matters of justice and compassion, to withhold its assent.” What was at stake was nothing less than the entire moral and spiritual legacy of the Jews. “Perhaps there was one people on earth, the Jewish people, which truly cherished the vision of Isaiah: ‘Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,’ ” he would write, looking back, a year before he died. “But those Jews who would suddenly delight in the beauty of the ‘loin of the warrior,’ girded with sword, must go forth with high hand to revile the prophet Isaiah!”  (pp. 43-44). Kindle Edition. 

In 1968, Leibowitz wrote an essay titled "The Territories" in which he warned what occupation of the conquered lands would mean for the Jewish people in Israel:

“Rule over the occupied territories would have social repercussions. After a few years there would be no Jewish workers or Jewish farmers. The Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police—mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech, and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the state of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people's army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations.  Out of concern for the Jewish people and its state we have no choice but to withdraw from the territories and their population of one and a half million Arabs.”

We know today what the fruits of Zionism have been, not only for the Palestinians Arabs and the rest of the world, but for the Jews, both in Israel and outside of Israel.

Doom and Gloom.  Yesterday I wrote of the book The Nerd Reich: "It was the scariest book I think I have ever read, about the takeover of government by wealthy tech elites.  That sounds preposterous, but we are partway there already with the election of Donald Trump . . ."  Today I watched and read the interview of Bill Gates by Ezra Klein in this morning's NYTimes.  It was the scariest interview I have ever seen.  Gates said that AI is “by far” the most dangerous technology ever created and that the transition into the AI era could be one of the most turbulent periods in human history. That view is consistent with comments he has made in the past few days in other forums.

What seems to worry him most is not primarily a science-fiction scenario in which AI spontaneously becomes evil. His emphasis is more immediate and concrete: AI can greatly amplify the capabilities of malicious human beings. He pointed to risks such as catastrophic cyberattacks, bioterrorism, attacks on critical infrastructure, and potentially mass casualties on a scale that previously would have required the resources of a nation-state. Recent reporting on his remarks says he has warned that misuse could conceivably lead to a billion casualties or more.  Others speak of a real risk of annihilation of the human species.

Gates also believes the danger is compounded by the fact that AI can increasingly replace or exceed human cognition in important tasks, while advancing faster than governments and institutions are adapting. In his own recent writing, Gates says that AI is the first technology capable of replacing and surpassing human cognitive abilities in this way, and that even under favorable circumstances the transition will be exceptionally turbulent.

He was emphatic about governance. He rejected the idea that the AI industry can safely police itself; the episode description characterizes him as calling self-regulation “insane.” He wants government, law enforcement, academia, and international institutions involved in monitoring dangerous uses and setting enforceable safeguards.

I had Gates' comments in mind as I watched the CNN coverage of Donald Trump's meeting with an abundance of AI and Big Tech executives this afternoon.  (In his role of Lord of Language and Names, Trump has changed the term for Artificial Intelligence to Super Intelligence.)  Trump continues to assert that no government oversight of AI development is necessary or desirable.  He believes in self-regulation, which means no regulation.  He turns for support to the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, who, to me, appears to be in a distinct minority among tech leaders in minimizing the risks of AI.  Elon Musk was in the back row of the big gaggle of Trump and the execs outside the White House while Trump was questioned by the feckless White House press corps.  Geri and I both noted his disbelieving facial expressions as Trump announced his rosy assessment about the non-risks of AI.  Regarding all the people at this meeting and those at the state dinner for Xi Jinping, I'm reminded of George Carlin's stand-up routine: "They own us" and of Thucydides: The powerful do what they will; the powerless suffer what they must. 

I still wonder whether we have already passed the tipping point on AI.  As Donald Rumsfeld ominously reminded us, “There are known knowns, things we know that we know; and there are known unknowns, things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns, things we do not know we don't know.”  Even the AI developers, the experts, don't know what they don't know about what's going on, or has gone on, inside their creations.

We are in deep shit.  Our children and grandchildren, the world's children and grandchildren, are in deeper shit.

An anniversary note.  I note that today is the first anniversary of the day the German airline Lufthansa announced it would cut 4,000 administrative positions by 2030 and replace them with artificial intelligence and digitization processes.  

A final note before putting today's journal to bed.  I referred earlier to the highly controversial film NAZA, a neologism referring to collateral damage, or the amount of innocent life sacrificed in the achievement of military objectives.  I look forward to seeing it when it becomes available to me in part for what it will reveal about Israeli war policies respecting Palestinians, but equally for what it will reveal about the use of AI in war targeting.  It won't be pretty.

 
    

9/28/2026

 Monday, September 28, 2026

1878 Pope Leo XIII published the encyclical Quod apostolici muneris (socialism)

1981 1st American test-tube baby, Elizabeth Jordan Carr, was born in Norfolk, Virginia

2015 Japan and South Korea reached an agreement over WWII "comfort women"; Japan apologized and paid 1bn yen compensation

In bed at 9, up at 6:45; 0700 203.4  117/74/69  122; 52/69/50, suuny

Morning meds at 8:30 a.m.  Entresto at 7:25 a.m. and p.m.

I finished The Nerd Reich by Gil Durán yesterday afternoon.  It was the scariest book I think I have ever read, about the takeover of government by wealthy tech elites.  That sounds preposterous, but we are partway there already with the election of Donald Trump to his second term.  It was no accident that the tech elites had the seats of honor at his second inauguration, in front of even his Cabinet members; that Christian Nationalist Russell Vought is his Director of the Office of Management and Budget; that Elon Musk and his crew of young technocrats were given extraordinary power to slash federal employees and programs like USAID, etc.; that the president and his family have become active in and enriched by entry into the Cryptocurrency market; or that David Sacks was appointed Trump's Artificial Intelligence and Crypto czar, and co-chairs the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology; that the president has deployed troops to American cities and has created his own "brownshirts" to hunt down non-citizen immigrants; that the president and his minions have flouted the rule of law; and more.  The movement's chief villain is Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance's mentor.  Their intellectual guru is Curtis Yarvin, a brilliant but whacko software program designer/coder and right-wing dabbler and fantasist in political theory.   Their common target is liberal democracy; the goal is a technocratic autocracy, monarchy, or dictatorship.  

The book was slow-going for me at first, and I recommended to Geri that, if she reads it, she start with the last chapter, The Future, then move to the penultimate chapter, The Antichrist, about Peter Thiel's whacko theories, and to the last half or so of the preceding chapter, Apokálypsis, about the purpose of the cryptocurrency movement.  The chapter before that is titled The Unicorn and is about J.D. Vance’s rise from author and venture-capital figure to U.S. senator and then vice president, with particular emphasis on the role of Peter Thiel and the Silicon Valley political network in that ascent. The chapter’s subtitle is “JD Vance and the Road to the White House.”  The author uses “unicorn” in the venture-capital sense: a rare investment that produces an outsized return. His argument is that Vance became, politically, the equivalent of a venture-capital unicorn—someone whose career was helped by money, jobs, introductions, and ideological support from Thiel and allied tech figures, and who eventually reached national executive power.  Chapter 3, “Exit: Balaji Srinivasan and the Network State,” is where the author most directly develops the role of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as political technology, not merely as speculative finance. He argues that crypto fits the broader “exit” project: creating ways for wealthy technologists and their communities to route around governments, national currencies, regulation, taxation, and eventually territorial states themselves. 

I'm glad that I read the book.  It is well-researched and supported.  It is alarming, but not alarmist, and warns of catastrophe without catastrophizing.  On the other hand, it has led me to lead off today's journal entry with this sort of "doom and gloom" entry.

I want to return to my campaign against doom and gloom, to considering some of my favorite things, including poems, like Walt Whitman's Come Up from the Fields, Father.

Come up from the fields, Father, here’s a letter from our Pete,

And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.

Lo, ’tis autumn,

Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,

Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind,

Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines,   

(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?

Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)

Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent after the rain, and with wondrous clouds,   

Below too, all calm, all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers well.

Down in the fields all prospers well,

But now from the fields come father, come at the daughter’s call,

And come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away.

Fast as she can she hurries, something ominous, her steps trembling,

She does not tarry to smooth her hair nor adjust her cap.

Open the envelope quickly,   

O this is not our son’s writing, yet his name is sign’d,

O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother’s soul!

All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main words only,

Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,

At present low, but will soon be better.

Ah now the single figure to me,

Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio with all its cities and farms,

Sickly white in the face and dull in the head, very faint,

By the jamb of a door leans.

Grieve not so, dear mother, (the just-grown daughter speaks through her sobs,

The little sisters huddle around speechless and dismay’d,)

See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be better.

Alas poor boy, he will never be better, (nor may-be needs to be better, that brave and simple soul,)

While they stand at home at the door he is dead already,

The only son is dead.

But the mother needs to be better,

She with thin form presently drest in black,

By day her meals untouch’d, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,

In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,   

O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,

To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.

But . . . is this even gloomier than The Nerd Reich?  For me, this poem, as much or more than any of Whitman's many others, illustrates his genius, his insight into life's realities, including the centrality of love, his wisdom and compassion.  It touches me deeply, reminds me of my own experience with Vietnam, of my mother crying in the vestibule of their 3-flat as she read my letter telling the family that I was headed there, and of my days as a Marine CACO for North Philadelphia and the northern suburbs.  It gives me heartache, a good heartache, every time I read it.  O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,  / To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.

An eerie coincidence and similarity.  Today I started to read Benjamin Moser's historical and personal book, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History.  The opening chapter focuses much of its attention on Theodor Herzl, the modern founder of Zionism.  What strikes me as a bit eerie is the similarity between the kind of ideal state envisioned by Herzl in Der Judenstaat and the kind of state envisioned by Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, and other techfascists:  From Moser's book:

Herzl’s mind was bursting with novelistic excesses. As he was composing Der Judenstaat, he confided his fantasies to his diary. A sympathetic biographer, Derek Penslar, recalls them: Herzl imagined himself as a great statesman, dictating terms to Hirsch and other wealthy Jews whom he had always envied and despised. He wrote that he would be an all-powerful leader and command unquestioning obedience in the future Jewish state. Bankers’ daughters would be given in marriage to “vigorous young men” for the good of the state and the “self-fertilization of the nation.” A “well-run secret police” would ensure Herzl’s security. The Jewish state would be run by a Herzlian dynasty; his father Jakob would be the first senator of the Jewish state, and his son Hans would be its doge. Herzl envisioned a coronation ceremony with cuirassiers, artillery, and infantry, “marching in gold-studded gala uniforms.” “The doge himself will wear the garb of shame of a medieval ghetto Jew: the pointed hat, the yellow badge…Only inside the temple we wrap a princely cloak about his shoulders and place the crown on his head.” Herzl wept at the grandeur of his own vision and the prospect of crowning his own son as doge. “Love and kisses to my Father-King,” Herzl wrote in a telegram to his son on the little boy’s fourth birthday. Moser, Benjamin. Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History (p. 11). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Herzl, like Yarvin and Thiel, is a fantasist.  They all dream(ed) of make-believe worlds where like-minded people live in harmony under a benevolent monarch or dictator, where all needs are satisfied.   What's so scary is that Herzl's dream came true in 1948, and the people living in his Beatific Vision have been at war ever since.  Yarvin's and Thiel's dream came closer to realization in 2024, when 77,302,580 American adults voted Donald Trump back into power, but instead of a benign dictator, we got a malign dictator.

Reading these fantasists' hypothesizing about Brave New Worlds ruled over by the likes of themselves made me think of a reference I noted about the political scientist Robert O. Hirschman writing about the writings of another political scientist, Adam Przeworski.   In the latter's Democracy and the Limits of Self-Government (2010),  Przeworski writes that politics begins from the fact that interests and values conflict. If they did not—if everyone wanted the same thing—then “anyone could be a benevolent dictator,” but literal self-government—each person living only under laws he personally chooses—is impossible once people disagree. Democracy is therefore a second-best arrangement: collective decisions reflect individual preferences imperfectly, and everyone must sometimes live under laws they dislike.  Hirschman wrote that Przeworski had emphasized a defining feature of democracy: uncertainty. In a democracy, no faction can be sure its preferred policies will prevail; parties and citizens must accept that they may lose today and have another chance later. Hirschman summarized the democratic virtue as valuing the democratic process more highly than getting one’s preferred program enacted every time.  Yarvin, Thiel, and the other techfascists don't value the democratic process at all.  Unlike technology, democracy is messy, sloppy, wasteful, and inefficient.  Thus, they fantasize about their technological Valhallas.  At heart, though, their methods, values, and goals are essentially fascist, and we see this in the real world that they have succeeded in creating by empowering Donald Trump's MAGA movement and government.  [It appears I can't stay away from the doom and gloom.]

                                                     

9/27/2026

 Sunday, September 27, 2026

70 The walls of the upper city of Jerusalem were battered down by the Roman army

1066 William the Conqueror's troops set sail from Normandy to conquer England

1590 Pope Urban VII died 13 days after being chosen as Pope, making his reign the shortest papacy in history

2020 Details of President Donald Trump's tax returns were released by the NY Times, showing he paid $750 in income tax (2016 & 2017), revealing "chronic losses and years of tax avoidance"

2025 Donald Trump ordered the deployment of troops to Portland, Oregon, saying he has directed defense secretary Pete Hegseth to secure the "war-ravaged" city.

In bed at 8:35, up at 5:35; 118/72/66 107 204.4; 48/67/48, Dense Fog, dissipating by 10 a.m., partly cloudy day ahead. 

Morning meds at 7 a.m.  Entresto at 6:30 a.m. and p.m.  I missed yesterday's evening dose.

One year ago today, Geri took me to the ER at the VA hospital with a very swollen, bright red left lower leg, infected with cellulitis.  The ER docs had me admitted to the hospital as an in-patient, the fear being that the cellulitis might develop into sepsis or turn out to be MRSA.  Neither of those life-threatening conditions happened, thank God.  That was my first in-patient admission to the hospital, to be followed by another this March, 5 days each.  

Yesterday was another beautiful autumn day.  I took a ride up to Harrington Beach State Park in north-east Ozaukee County. It's the side of an old limestone quarry which is now a lake and a mile of Lake Michigan lakefront.  I didn't go into the park itself, but skirted it's boundary on County D, which leads to another stretch of lakefront.  As I crested a hill on County D, I had a wide view of Lake Michigan and thought how true it is to call it an "inland sea."  I have lived near it my entire life, except for my years as a Marine.  On the way back to Milwaukee County, I drove along Ozaukee County LL, which overlooks to new data center rising north-west of Port Washington.  It seems even more immense (and monstrous?) from LL than it does from I-43.  It sits on 642 acres of land and is expected to by used by Oracle and OpenAI.  Oracle is providing the cloud/AI infrastructure, while the computing capacity is intended substantially for OpenAI workloads.  OpenAI (Sam Altman) owns ChatGPT, of which I have been become a regular user, regarding which I note the following, from the closing thoughts in The Nerd Reich:

We must also hold ourselves accountable for the degree to which we have ceded our freedom and lost our way in exchange for technologies that mask danger as convenience. . . So, we each have responsibility to radically reevaluate our own complicity in their power. Why do we spend our lives staring at our tiny screens? . . . The truth is, the tech fascists are right again: Most of us have already become transhuman, mind-melded with our machines in an endless cycle of poisonous dependency. . . We must rethink our relationship with technology, which means rethinking what it means to be human.  Durán, Gil. The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy (p. 262). Kindle Edition. 

I've started thinking about this already, but need to do a lot more.  To what extent am I making myself dependent on ChatGPT?

My campaign against doom and gloom.   I received a handwritten note from a good friend, who was also aformer student of mine at the law school, and later a colleague at our law firm.  I don't mention his name because I haven't asked his permission to copy his note in this journal and, although I don't think this is the case,, he might not want his name associated with the note in cyberspace.  I keep the note on a table next to my bedroom recliner, in a copy of the written project he and I worked on together half a century ago.  It warms my heart each time I see it,, or even think of it.  I include it here to remind myself of what I have to be thankful for, despite all the bad news that besets us:

Churck,

It is hard to believe that nearly 50 years have elapsed since we worked on this project.

I will forever be grateful for the opportunity to learn from you and then gain your lifelong friendship.  No one had a greater influence on my career that you, and in many ways my personal life as well.

While geography will separate us soon, I know that we will want and need to stay in touch regularly.

With fond regards,   /s/ 

Another favorite poem, by Emily Dickinson:

In this short Life that only lasts an hour

How much - how little - is within our power 

A portrrait I did of James Joyce from a famous photo portrait by Berenice Abbot

 

9/262026

 Saturday, September 26, 2026

1983 Soviet military officer Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov averted a worldwide nuclear war by judging a supposed missile attack from the US to be an error

1984 President Reagan vetoed sanctions against South Africa

2019 US income inequality was the widest it has been in over 50 years, with the worst levels in California, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana, and New York, according to new census figures

2020  Donald Trump nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the US Supreme Court to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg

2023 Donald Trump was found guilty of fraud for inflating his assets in a civil case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James

2025. Médecins Sans Frontières suspended its activities in Gaza City citing security concerns due to the Israeli offensive

2025  A fire at a South Korean government data center in Daejeon disrupted more than 600 e-government systems after an explosion in a lithium-ion battery triggered the blaze.

2025  Slovakia passed a constitutional amendment stating there are only two genders. Only married couples have the right to adopt, which prevented same-sex couples from adopting, while also banning surrogacy.

2025. Vietnamese activist Trịnh Bá Phương, already serving a 10-year sentence for anti-state propaganda, is sentenced to an additional 11 years after being convicted of writing statements against the Communist Party while in prison.

2025 Former FBI director James Comey was indicted by a federal grand jury on two charges in a prosecution led by Lindsey Halligan, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

In bed at 9, up at 6:40; 0700 203.4  124/74/64 117; 54/64/52; sunny morning, mostly cloudy afternoon.

Morning meds at 8:40 a.m.  Entresto at 7:20 a.m. and p.m.

There is plenty of bad news today, and there was plenty of bad news a year ago today (see anniversaries), but I withhold ranting, wailing, gnashing of teeth, and renting of garments as part of my campaign against doom and gloom.

The sky is blue today.  It is often, and perhaps usually, thought that this is a good thing, and indeed it is, but it means the sky is without clouds.  Is that a good thing or a deprivation?    I have become a keen appreciator of clouds ever since my old friend Janine Geske began posting photos of the sunrises she sees each morning from her home on Lake Michigan in Door County.  The sunrises are wondrous on clear mornings, and often more wondrous on cloudy mornings.  It's all good.

Favorite poems.  Two days ago I wrote about some favorite movies, part of my effort to avoid focusing on doom and gloom.  Continuing the campaign, today I'll mention some favorite poems.  I'll start with a poem that is a favorite only inasmuch as it is one that I have re-read so many times.  It's T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.  Unlike so much of modern poetry, it's easy to read.  Eliot uses ordinary language and doesn't try to conceal his points.  

Prufrock is a very unhappy guy who worries about growing old, and dying, and about his own meaninglessness and the emptiness of all the people who surround him.  He is intensely self-conscious of himself as a misfit, of not belonging anywhere or to anyone.  He sees social interaction as Kabuki, everyone wearing masks.  "There will be time, there will be time, / To prepare a face to meet the faces you will meet."  Everyone a persona, no one a person.  Prufrock lives in a lonely, unknowable world.  He reminds me of some characters in Elizabeth Strout's novels, unable to fully know, understand, or communicate with others, nor to be known or understood.

It's a tale of indecision or indecisiveness.  [There will be time left] 'for a hundred indecisions, / And for a hundred visions and revisions, / Before the taking of a toast or tea."  And of fear of what others will say about or think of him:

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —

(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —

(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

 Why do I enjoy this dolorous poem so much?  I suppose that, in part at least, I sort of identify with poor J. Alfred.  I have considered myself a misfit in many of my life's settings.  I never quite fit in as a typical Marine, nor as an academic on the law school faculty, nor as a lawyer in a private practice boutique litigation firm, nor as one of the faithful filling the pews on Sundays and holydays.  And, like many or most (?) people, I've been concerned about what others think of me.  I'm reminded of one day decades ago when I was teaching at the law school; as I drove to work one day I experienced what I came to call my 'asshole epiphany.'  I would be at a faculty meeting later, and I intended to make a motion that I knew would not be well received by my very conservative elders.   I thought to myself: (1) "They're going to think I'm an asshole," (2) "Maybe I am an asshole on this point," and (3) "So what? So I'm an asshole, so what?"  It was a liberating insight, simply accepting the fact that there are or may be areas in which I am just an asshole, and so what?  But another reason that I enjoy reading the poems is just enjoying Eliot's great mastery of the diction of the poem, the rhythm and meter of the lines. 

I grow old ... I grow old ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

and

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table; 

You can easily recite these words singsongy, but if you avoid the affectation, the words flow beautifully.

It's a sad poem, a dejected one.  Eliot wrote it when he was 22 years old, in 1911 and 1912, before the beginning of the Great War.  (I grow old . . . I grow old???) Yet it speaks of isolation, alienation, social fraudulence, and meaninglessness as if it were written after the Great War or after WWII by a Beatnik or Existentialist, by a Ginsberg or a Camus.  In any case, I like reading it and probably have read and re-read it more than any other poem.

More happy photos

Nona and Elllis

The Goldberg, the Lowes, and the Clausens

My mother at Kitty's wedding in October, 1967

Andy, Anh, Peter, Lizzie, and Drew

Sarah at Glacier National Park on our second camping trip to national parks