8/7/2026

 Friday, August 7, 2026

1957 Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

1964 US Congress approved the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Romer: “True.”

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

Romer: “Yep.”

Bream: “Abolish ICE?”

Romer: “Absolutely.”

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

Romer: “As a long-term plan, yep.”

Bream: “Defund the Pentagon?”

Romer: “Absolutely.”

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

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

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

Romer: “Yeah, absolutely.”

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

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

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

 

8/6/2026

 Thursday, August 6, 2026

1945 HIROSHIMA

1965 LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Samuel Moyn ended his short essay on Arendt with this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

8/5/2026

 Wednesday, August 5, 2026

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

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

1966 The Beatles released the single "Eleanor Rigby

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All the lonely people Where do they all come from?

All the lonely people / Where do they all belong?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My journal entry 4 years ago today:

Friday, August 5, 2022

Russian invasions and American invasions

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

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

8/4/2026

 Tuesday, August 4, 2026

1919 Rodin Museum opened in Paris 

1925 US Marines left Nicaragua after a 13-year occupation

2016 Sarah Catherine Clausen married Christian Kovacs in Geretsried, Germany

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

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

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

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

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

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

and

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

Illuminating lines. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so it was. 

 

 

8/3/2026

 Monday, August 3, 2026

1492 Christopher Columbus set sail on his first voyage with three ships: Santa María, Pinta, and Niña from Palos de la Frontera, Spain, for the "Indies"

1882 Congress passed the first law restricting immigration

1934 Adolf Hitler merged the offices of German Chancellor and President, declaring himself "Führer" (leader)

1940 My mother and father married at St. Bernard's church in Englewood on the south side of Chicago

1943 General George S. Patton slapped a US GI in a hospital, accusing him of cowardice

1967 45,000 more US soldiers were ordered to Vietnam

1981 13,000 air traffic controllers (PATCO) began their strike; US President Ronald Reagan stated during a press conference, "If they do not report for work within 48 hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated."

1940 My mother and father wed at St. Bernard's Church at 66th and Stewart in Englewood.

2023 Trump pleaded not guilty to subverting the 2020 election

2025 Israeli forces kill at least 33 Palestinians seeking food and six other Palestinians die of hunger. (AP) (Reuters)

In bed at 9(?), up at 5:55; 0610 202.0  127/78/63 114; 61/77/60, sunny.    

Morning meds at 8 a.m.  Eliquis at 6:30 a.m. and p.m.

Everything Happens For A Reason.  One of Bowler's major themes in her memoir is the unfairness of life and how difficult that is to square with the belief in a Loving, Just, and Benevolent God.  In her case, she rued the unfairness of her stage 4 cancer in her mid-30s, with a toddler son, and still beginning her career at Duke's Divinity School.  In my case, it's the opposite: wondering why my Dad and I have lived into our mid-80s when my saintly mother died at 51, and my saintly sister died at 77.  Why did David Branch die at 53?  The list, of course, is endless, not for me especially, but for the whole world.  During a press conference in 1962, John F. Kennedy famously said: "There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war, and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country. It's very hard in military or in personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair."  Why were Reneé Good and Alex Pretti shot to death by ICE agents this year in Minneapolis?  

 Here is a favorite passage in the memoir:

Most everyone I meet is dying to make me certain.  They want me to know, without a doubt, that there is a hidden logic to this seeming chaos.  Even when I was still in the hospital, a neighbor came to the door and told my husband that everything happens for a reason.

"I'd love to hear it," he replied.

"Pardon?" she said, startled.

"The reason my wife is dying," he said . . . effectievly ending the conversation as the neighbor stammered something and handed him a casserole.

. . . 

What if everything is random?  A woman who has left the faith for science writes: "I find it comforting to believe the universe is random, because then the God I believe in is no longer cruel." 

This reminded me of course of a kitchen table conversation among Geri, her cousin Sue Clark and husband Tom, and me in thier home in Arlington Heights, IL, many hears ago in which I argued, like the woman referred to immediately above but more surrilously, that it's much easier to think of god as "a mean prick" than as a loving, all powerful Father and that was how I moved towards atheism, i.e., to take God off the hook for creating a "vale of tears."  There was nothing clever or intellectual in my thinking, just one old soul struggling with the contradictions within so much religious thought in which God plays a role like that of King George III in Hamilton, who sang:

 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

Da-da-da, dat-da, dat, da-da-da, da-ya-da

Da-da, dat, dat, da-ya-da

Da-da-da, dat-da, dat, da-da-da, da-ya-da

Da-da dat, da-ya-da

When push comes to shove, I'll send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love... I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love.  It's like George Orwell's "Doublethink" in 1984, in which the three Party slogans are War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.  The Party's purpose is to get the ruled, the governed, the enslaved, to simultaneously hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time, considering both as True.  Aren't the priests and theologians doing this kind of thing with their attempts to not hold God responsible for the mess He created?  We owe him eternal gratitude for all the Good Stuff, but He's not responsible for any of the Bad Shit.  I think back to the last lunch I had with my long-lost friend Vicki Conte when she wisely told me, "It's a heart thing, Chuck, not a head thing."  I knew then and know now there was a lot of wisdom packed into that short sentence, but I have a devilish time getting past the "head thing."

Email exchange with LOA

On Sunday, August 2, 2026 at 08:06:14 PM CDT, Lawrence Anderson wrote:

    Spent the weekend (Fri-Sun) with my buds from the USA’s office in Milwaukee. Jeff Hirschberg, Tom Brown, etc. They told me to say hello to you when I see you. Hirschberg is still full of himself and lives in DC. Joe Stadtmueller, Charlie Clevert, Steve Kravit, Bill Callahan, and John Nelson were there. Leah Lampone and Jim Fergal couldn’t make it. We were all Bill Mulligan hires. All were young with new wives/families and starting our careers in the best job we would ever have. The stories just kept coming. We all met at Brown’s gorgeous home on a lake near Waupaca.

    We last did this about 2 years ago at Tom’s place, and the death of Dave Bukey this year prompted Tom to host another one. A magical weekend. Rode the 2000 Triumph Legend TT from Fish Creek to the gathering, about 150 miles. Didn’t want to leave Jan w/o the rental car for 3 Days. The ride went ok but emphasized that my days of riding that far are coming to an end.  See ya next week.    s/

Charles Clausen.  Mon, Aug 3 at 8:03 AM

What a great weekend!  What a great group! Bill Mulligan and I were on the faculty together at MULS, but we were both like fish outta water.  Same with Tom Cannon.  I remember Joe from when he was in private practice with another guy who graduated a year ahead of us at MULS and whose name I can't pull up right now (a recurring event). Bill Callahan and Leah were students of mine way back when.  D. Jeffrey was our classmate, right?  And I practiced with him at Friebert & Finerty for a while. He was full of himself back then too.  Not what you'd call a legal scholar but good with juries.  A great bullshitter.  Good for Tom Brown that he has a great place on a lake; he deserves it.  A great guy.  You stir mixed feelings with your statement about riding the Triumph.  Driving my old Volvo isn't nearly as exciting as you riding your bikes, but taking long rides in beautiful Wisconsin countryside north of Milwaukee is one of my few remaining thrills.  I used to do it with my Dad when he was living with us, but now no one's interested in joining me on these drives that give me so much pleasure, so I go alone, always missing my Dad's company.  We're looking forward to seeing you and Jan. Stay safe and healthy. s/f

My FB post today:

It was 85 years ago that my mother and father wed.  She was 18; he was still 19, each of them still a virgin.  They were in love, full of hormones, and wanting to live and sleep together, and, as practicing Catholics, they had to be married to do that.  I was born one year and three weeks later.  What was to become the Second World War was already raging in Europe and Asia, but America wouldn't become a combatant participant until 4 months later, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the U.S. declared war on Japan, and Hitler declared war on the U.S.  My Dad was drafted into the Marines in February 1944, when I was 2 and 1/2 and my Mom was 3 months pregnant with my sister Kitty.  The government released him in November 1945, wrecked by the war.  My Mom, my sister, and I lived with the effects of the war on him and the effects of him on us for the rest of our lives.   I think of the four of us now, and of the few years we all lived together, with love and sadness, and with some sense of reverence.  I am the sole survivor, left with memories, photos, thoughts and emotions, and not a few regrets, some of which haunt me.  Mostly today I am grateful, especially to and for my mother and sister for all the love they gave me throughout their lives, but also to and for my Dad, who struggled to love even himself, probably especially himself, after his 27 days on Iwo Jima in 1945.

The priest who officiated their wedding was Father William Cousins, later to become Archbishop of Milwaukee from 1958 to 1977.  Throughout his life, he was admired and loved.  Milwaukee's diocesan center was named after him.  After his retirement, it became known that, while archbishop, he had participated in the cover-up of some clerical sex abuse cases.  In 2019, Milwaukee's Archbishop Listecki had Cousins' name removed from all Milwaukee buildings and institutions.  I think of my Mom and Dad and then-Father Cousins on August 3, 1940, what the world looked like to them then, and what lay in store for them.  There is a point to be made about that now, but I'm not sure what it is.

Another favorite passage in Kate Bowler's Everything Happens For A Reason . . .:

. . . I have always loudly proclaimed that Catholics, of all God's children, are wonderful at being sad.  I have seen the mourning of Lent a million times, from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday: The sad kiss of an overturned cross at the fronnt of a chapel, scraping their knees on the floor as they ignore the stares of strangers and friends.  The shuffle past the inscriptions around the church marking the Stations of the Cross.  When the priest dips his thumb in the black ash of burnt palm leaves, marking foreheads with the sign of the cross, he whispers the last part of Genesis 3:19: Pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.  From dust you came, and to dust you will return.  It is so grim. There is no denying our finitude.  It is plain and hard and true.

This reminds me of the long Easter weekend in 1998 I spent alone in Paris, moving from one ancient church to another, from one service to another, among thousands of Parisians and others, from Holy Thursday to Easter Monday.  The cathedral of Notre Dame (before the fire), St. Germain des Pres in the 6th Arondissement, St. Germain l'Auxerrois behind the Louvre,, St. Sulpice near the Luxembourg Gardens, St. Roch, St. Thomas d'Aquin, St. Eustache, near Les Halles,  the Chapel of the Miraculous Medal where the BVM is said to have appeared to Sr. Anne Labouré whose preserved body is on display at a side altar, St. Gervais-St. Potais, St. Severin in the Latin Quarter near the University of Paris, La Madeleine, where Gabriel Fauré had been music director and where his magnificent Requiem in D premiered in 1888, and (hard to believe!) others.  I filled 88 pages of notes in a pocket notebook on this trip, where I saw so many memorable sites and sights.  I'm thankful that I've been a scribbler of notes, even back then, preserving memories that would otherwise be lost forever.  This journal is a continuation of my compulsive scribbling.

Back to Everything Happens: I certainly believe Kate Bowler's judgment that Catholics are wonderful at being sad.  At least, it certainly was true in my fetchin' up, during which I recall at times being reduced to actual tears by religious thoughts of God's, Jesus's, and the Blessed Mother's goodness and my own unworthiness.  The brilliant imagery of Jesus's passion and death evokes sadness, as do the so-called Triduum rituals of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. The rituals I participated in in Paris were particularly evocative, especially the Easter Vigil at the Cathedral, presided over by Cardinal Lustiger, Paris's Jewish archbishop.  I wonder if anyone "makes" the Stations of the Cross anymore.   Is the reality of Roman crucifixion too real for us?   Is the unreality of the Resurrection too unreal?

 

8/2/2026

 Sunday, August 2, 2026

1790 1st US census conducted; population is 3,929,214, including 697,624 slaves

1865 Lewis Carroll published "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland."

1939 Albert Einstein wrote to US President FDR informing him of recent research on fission chain reactions, making possible the construction of "extremely powerful bombs."

1964 North Vietnam fired at the destroyer USS Maddox in what became known as the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

1990 Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait,  George H. W. Bush ordered troops to Saudi Arabia

2018 Pope Francis declared the death penalty unacceptable in all cases, reversing church teachings.

2025 Seven people have died from malnutrition in the past 24 hours due to the Israeli blockade, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

In bed at 9:45, up at 5:40; 0555. 203.8  120/71/59 101; 66/61/74/65; Beach hazards, waves 4 to 8 ft., dangerous currents, cloudy morning, sunny afternoon.

Morning meds at 8 a.m., Eliquis at 6:20 a.m. and 7:20 p.m.

Watashi-wa and constant companion, Blanche, engaging in our favorite activity

The first movement I see through my window this morning, other than the birders at the feeders, is my neighbor Lebanese American Ghasson walking his bull mastiff, Athena, at 6:30.  Athena is in the habit of stopping and looking around whenever they round the corner from Wakefield Court onto County Line Road.  What strikes me is not Athena's habit, but Ghasson's response.  He always waits patiently for her to satisfy herself with whatever she's looking at or looking for, and then they move on up County Line Road.  He doesn't tug the leash attached to her collar, or worse, pull her forcefuly until she starts walking again.  Sometimes I have seen Athena sit down on the street, and just rest and stare.  She reminds of a favorite little poem called "Leisure" by W. H. Davies, whose closing couplet has stayed with me for years: "A poor life this, if full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare."  What also strikes me is that Ghasson has owned a succession of bull mastiffs, even though they have a life expectancy of only 7 to 9 years.  I think of the great loss we felt when we lost our mixed-breed Siamese cat, Blanche, after 17 years, and when we lost our Labradoodle, Lilly, after 15.  If Geri were willing, I'd get another cat, probably a Siamese, but Geri, perhaps because she so lovingly nursed Blanche through her final days, including giving her daily IV hydrations, is not interested.  Nor have we considered replacing Lilly with another dog.  Living with her in her final days was not only emotionally hard, it was also physically overtaxing - lifting her into the car for trips to the vet.  Ghasson is younger than we are, and I suppose that accounts for a lot of his willingness to keep replacing his short-lived bull mastiffs.  More power to him.

Lilly, at her post, carefully keeping track of Geri and her walking partners Shirley and Barbara, the three barely visible figures on the road in the distance

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare?

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows:

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:

No time to see, in broad daylight,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night:

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance:

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare. 

 

I'm halfway through Kate Bowler's memoir, Everything Happens for a Reason, and other lies I've loved.  I discovered her only yesterday when, by chance, I stumbled upon a YouTube video of her interviewing Ann Patchett.  I learned that she (Kate) had written about her life with Stage 4 cancer in her mid-30s.  She's a Canadian (Manitoba) and was raised in a Mennonite community and is a professor at Duke U. Divinity School.  I liked what I saw of her in the interview and picked up a Kindle copy of her memoir.  The book is, in large measure, about how she came to reject "the Prosperity Gospel," about which she wrote a comprehensive history, and the notion that God rewards those who act in accordance with His desires, and punishes or at least withholds rewards from those who don't.   Some quotes:

"I too was taught that you had to have just a little faith to be healed, command money to come down from heaven in order to receive a blessing. That the reason why you were not healed is because you lacked faith. Either that or you need to tithe your money in order to receive a breakthrough from God..WHAT?? Now that I think about it, that is a load of Bullshi....SHUT YOUR MOUTH!"

"When someone is drowning, the only thing worse than failing to throw them a life preserver is handing them a reason."

"I wanted to make God to make me good and make me faithful,with just a few shining accolades along the way. Anything would do do if hardship were only detours on my long way life's journey. I believed God would make a way. I don't believe that anymore."

“A lot of Christians like to remind me that heaven is my true home, which makes me want to ask them if they would like to go home first.” 

“I used to think that grief was about looking backward, old men saddled with regrets or young ones pondering should‑haves. I see now that it is about eyes squinting through tears into an unbearable future. The world cannot be remade by the sheer force of love. A brutal world demands capitulation to what seems impossible—separation. Brokeness. An end without an ending.” 

“Life is a series of losses," says my father-in-law one afternoon...."What Dad?"..."oh, I was just thinking about how, with age, it is one loss after another, " he replies. "Huh." He is right. With age we slowly lose our senses and even our pleasures, our parents and then our friends, preparing us for our own absence. An interesting thought.” 

"I think the same thoughts again and again. Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.”

What I'm wondering about Kate Bowler is what I've wondered for years about Reinhold Niebuhr, the popes, clergy generally, my mother and sister: how is it that they believe in God at all, at least  the God who is All Love that we all taught to love and adore?  This book is another theodicy, an attempt to deal with the question of why an all-loving and all powerful God would create a world with so much pain, suffering, unfairness, wickedness and evil.  I've struggled with this most of my life, including the many years I was a churchgoing Catholic.  I'm not sure whether I've won the struggle or lost it.

Some anniversary thoughts: (1)  Isn't it rather astounding that, even in our nation's first census in 1790, almost one out of every five of those counted were enslaved?    This was 14 years after the most powerful men in the nation declared to the world that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of happiness.”  Think of the astounding hypocrisy of our primary founding document and of its draftsman, T. Jefferson.

(2) Two of my favorite books: Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

(3) The Gulf of Tonkin incident led to the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on August 10th, and the game was on.  Eleven months later, I was landing on the SATS strip at Chu Lai on my way to Danang.  58,000 dead Americans and millions of dead Vietnamese later,  our ass was grass and Ho Chi Minh was the lawnmower.

(4)  After driving the Iraqis out of Kuwait, George H. W. Bush famously boasted, “It’s a proud day for America. And, by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all."  What a fool.  Some time later, I painted a painting of him and Margaret Thatcher (who claimed to have given him a spine transplant), with him exulting and the ghosts of dead victims of the war in the background.