4/30/2026

 Thursday, April 30, 2026

1975 Saigon fell & became Ho Chi Minh City

1977 Human rights group Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo began protesting at the forced disappearances of thousands, under the Argentine dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla

2015 Bernie Sanders announced he would seek the Democratic nomination for President

2021 45 were killed and 150 injured in a crush of people at the Israeli Lag B'Omer festival at Mount Meron

2025 The United States and Ukraine signed the Ukraine–United States Mineral Resources Agreement to share profits from the future sales of Ukraine's mineral and energy reserves

In bed by 10, up at 6:15; 0625 138/73/47 110 205.4; 38/45/35, sunny

Morning meds at 9 a.m.; Bisoprolol half-dose at 7 a.m.

Apocalypse Now Redux.  There are many times when I wish I were smarter, more on the ball, less obtuse, a person with greater insight and understanding of what's going on.  Those times include when I don't get jokes on SNL, or on late night monologues, or when I read a poem that is comepletely indecipherable to me, or see a movie that I don't understand.  I sort of have that feeling about Apocalypse Now.  I think I get the big picture, i.e., that it's an indictment of American popular culture, and of our national hubris about our role in the world and what great things can be wrought with our immense military and economic weight.  It's no secret of course that the movie is a clever adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the jungles of the then-Belgian Congo to the jungles of Indochina, and from European economic exploitation to American military exploitation, from the hypocrisy of Western European civilization to the hypocrisy of American 'exceptionalism,' etc.  I especially enjoyed Col. Kurtz pointing out the hypocrisy of our military and poltitical leaders forbidding our airmen from writing "Fuck" on the fuselage of our aircreaft that drop napalm and white phosphorous bombs on human beings: "We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!"  When I was in Vietnam, seven days a week for 33 weeks or so, I and my team kept track of thousands, I suppose tens of thousands, of our aircraft leaving and (mostly) returning from missions during which  they dropped fire, and high explosives, and poisons on tens of thousands of human beings,  human beings we were taught in our churches and many schools were "children of God," and "our brothers and sisters," and "our fellow men," and we did it with as much emotion and moral compunction or qualm as if we were keeping track of a factory's inventory of nuts, bolts, or sheet metal.  We flew into Vietnam with our rifles, heavy artillery, bullets, bombs, and herbicides and as if we had a perfect right to do so.  In the 'land of the free and home of the brave,' our government plucked young men off our streets, out of their workplaces, and out of their schools to train them to become killers of strange men and women and children thousands of miles away, men who posed a threat to our young men only because our government put them 'in harm's way.'  Anyone who knows me at all knows how I feel about our government and what it did in and to Vietnam, what it did to the young men it sent to Vietnam, and to their families.  Thus, it's obvious that in the main I am glad that John Milius wrote Apocalypse Now and that Francis Coppola turned it into the movie that showed at least some of what the war was like.  That said, however, I wonder whether they went overboard in their depiction.  I write 'I wonder' because I don't have a strong judgment about it.  To be sure, they depicted a hell on earth, and for those victimized by it, war can surely be a hell on earth.  And the most vivid image of Hell is fire, but the semi-ubiquity of fire in the movie seemed really gratuitious.  And what are we to make of the ritual slaughter of Col. Kurtz, much like the simultaneous ritual slaughter of a water buffalo by the montangards?  And what of the idea that the government has professional assassins in the special services?  Capt. Willard already had six assassinations notched on his .45 when he received the mission to assassinate Col. Kurtz.  And what of the assignmen to one man, armed only with a .45 pistol, to travel into Cambodia to kill Kurtz, who was surrounded by an army of loyal montangards?  I know these comments are incoherent, that they don't make much sense, and one doesn't follow from another, but it seemed to me on second viewing that the film doesn't quite hang together, that it sort of falls apart once Willard arrives at Kurtz's camp. It's probably me being not smart enough or educated enough to get it as a work of genius, but I don't understand the title, Apocalypse Now.  Wikipedia says "apocalypse" has come to mean a catastrophe "but the Greek word apokálypsis, from which it is derived, means a revelation."  I don't get what, in the plot of the movie, was the catastrophe, or what was the revelation.  Was it Kurtz's insight about the wisdom of the NVA/VC fores who chopped off the arms of the children who had been vaccinated against polio by his American special forces?    That 'wisdom' seems to be that moral restraint is a liability in war, that the end justifies the means, and that in order to win, one must embrace or at least accept horror as a means and to use it without hesitation.  Is this the point of the movie?  Or is it a rejection of that?  How about the means the Americans used?  Assassination.  Ritual slaughter.  How about Willard's murdering the girl with the puppy in the sampan?

This was an act of murder by the hero of this film, as was his butchering by machete of Colonel Kurtz.  What are we to think of these acts?  What are we to think of the other 6 assassinatins that Captain Willard commtted before Kurtz?  What are we to think of the general, the colonel, and the CIA agent who ordered it?  Who were the heroes in this film?  Were there any?  Maybe "Chief"?  

 

4/29/2026

 Wednesday, April 29, 2026

1970 US and South Vietnamese forces launched an incursion into Cambodia

1975 US began to evacuate its citizens from Saigon in Operation Frequent Wind in response to advancing North Vietnamese forces, bringing an end to the Vietnam War

1992 Jury acquitted Los Angeles Police Department officers on charges of excessive force in the beating of Rodney King; the decision sparked massive riots in the city

2022 World's longest glass-bottomed bridge, the Bach Long (White Dragon), 632m long, opened in Moc Chau Island mountain park and resort, Vietnam

In bed at7, not due to sleepiness, but attempting to lessen the right-side back pain that had plagued me all day, got up at 6 a.m.  0610 132/74/54 120 207.2; 62/53/62/49/

Morning meds at 11 a.m., half-dose of Bisoprolol at a6:40 .m.   

Heart of Darkness.  I've read Parts I and II of the novel, and started the concluding Part III, about to meet Mr. Kurtz. . .  

I finished the book mid-afternoon.  I think it's a novelistic expression of 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”

Marlowe, the narrator, is the hero/protagonist of the novel, but the central character is the enigmatic Kurtz, who appears in only a relatively few pages of the entire book.  Kurtz is the mystery man.  He is described as brilliant, poetic, good-natured, and altogether admirable early in the tale, but turns out to be a greedy, self-centered despot by the end of the book, the character who looks back on his life, shortly before his death, and utters the famous words: "The horror.  The horror."  Actually, it appears that he is not only reflecting on his own life, with its cataclysmic fall from grace, but also on European colonialism, and exploitation, of the rest of the world, using the Belgian Congo as an exemplar.  Marlowe is a bit harder to characterize.  He is nowhere near the tyrannical murderer that Kurtz became from his unconstrained life in the jungle, but it's clear he recognizes the Solzhenitsyn duality in himself and presumably all human beings.  He feels a strange loyalty to Kurtz I suppose only because he recognizes his duality, the On the Waterfront Terry Malloy quality: “You don’t understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender, I could’ve been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.”  Of courser, Kurtz wasn't 'a bum,' but rather a king, a ruler of the middle of the jungle where he lived.  The plot of the novel ends with Marlowe returning to the London, "a river-bound imperial city", a dark place on a dark river, which pretends to be civilized but whose inhabitants, at least the powerful among them, are no more civilized than the "savages" exploited by Kurtz.  He returns some letter that Kurtz had entrusted to him before he died to Kurtz's fiancée, and lies to her.  He tells her that Kurtz's last words were not "The horror.  The horror", but rather the fiancée's name.  It's an enigmatic ending to an enigmatic story.  

Among the things I enjoyed about the novel(la), in addition to Joseph Conrad's clear writing style, was it's clear relevance to the morality of imperialism, consumerism, and capitalism.  The Congo was a private property of King Leopold of Belgium from 1885 to 1908.

 In September 1908, Belgium formally annexed the Congo Free State (CFS) from King Leopold II, transitioning it into the Belgian Congo. This significant political shift occurred after years of international and domestic pressure due to widespread reports of atrocities committed under Leopold's rule, which had resulted in the deaths of an estimated ten million Congolese. Initially established as a personal fiefdom by Leopold, the CFS had been characterized by brutal exploitation and forced labor, particularly in the collection of rubber and ivory. However, following the annexation, there was a noted decrease in the most severe abuses, although colonial rule continued to exert political and economic control over the Congolese people.

Reading the novel prompted me to go to the North Shore Library and to pick up a copy of the DVD of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.  It was the first Vietnam War movie I ever watched, back in 1983, 17 years after I departed that beautiful but accursed county.  I got the 'redux' version of the film which is even longer than the 3 hour originally-released version.  Will I have the emotional stamina to watch all of it?  We'll see.

I note that today is the anniversary of our invasion of Cambodia in 1970, which I still remember, especially the reactions in the U.S. and on college campuses.  From the chapter in my memoir, 1958 - 1970:

I have mentioned that the Marquette campus was quiescent in terms of the [Vietnam] war.  There were intermittent calls for the ouster of the ROTC units and occasional antiwar letters to the editor in the Marquette Tribune, but visiting the Marquette campus in the late 1960s and the Madison campus was like being in two different countries, only one of which was involved in an unpopular war.  The only ripple on the otherwise calm sea of oblivion that was the Marquette campus came after the May 4, 1970 gunning down of four Kent State students during a campus demonstration against the American invasion of Cambodia.  

                  

More than 400 college campuses across the country were roiled by Nixon’s Cambodia incursion and the killing of the Kent State students.  At Marquette there were anonymous bomb threats that almost certainly had more to do with disrupting final examinations than with any moral or political outrage over Cambodia or Kent State.  Dean Boden asked me, a couple of other men with military backgrounds, and two former Milwaukee cops to stay at the law school from closing time on the night of the threatened bombing until 8 the following morning.  We agreed of course and of course there was no bombing.  (I still wonder what it was he thought we could do if there was a bomber afoot intent on blowing up the law school.)  

It is a curious thing to compare the radicalism and highly activist opposition to the war at Madison and the lack of it at Marquette.  The longer the war continued, the more apparent it became to most people that there was no longer any justification – if there ever had been – for the suffering resulting from the continued American intervention.  People were being killed and horribly injured by the tens of thousands.  The land was salted with unexploded bombs and other ordnance and with thousands of anti-personnel land mines.  The soil and water and people were being poisoned daily by the dioxin and other chemical defoliants sprayed by American C130s and other aircraft.  The war was a continuing atrocity carried on by the American government in the name of the American people, carried on by an overwhelmingly “Christian” people against mostly Buddhist and animist people.  Students on “secular” campuses could see the immorality of the war,  why not Catholic students?  Why did Catholic students sit on their hands while so many Protestants and Jews and ‘non-believers’ were raising clenched fists against the government?

The answer, I think, lay in the Catholic school system and the authoritarian structure of the Church, i.e., American (which was to say, Irish-) Catholic culture.  Most of the students at Marquette and Holy Cross and Notre Dame and so on came from Catholic high schools and Catholic elementary schools.  They were raised on a philosophy of “do what the good sisters tell you,” “do what the good fathers tell you,” “do what the bishops and cardinals and popes tell you.”  Whether directly or indirectly they had been schooled on the poppycock from chapter 13 of Paul’s epistle to the Romans:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.  Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.  For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad.  Do you wish to have no fear of the authority?  Then do what is good.  But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain!  It is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer.  Therefore one must be subject, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience.  For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, busy with this very thing. 

How could the Roman authorities – and imperial warmongers of whatever era - not love this guy?   Once the Church got into bed with the emperors after the conversion of Constantine, this passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans really came into its own in terms of keeping Christians in line: obey the Roman authorities and obey your bishops and you’ll stay out of trouble and go to Heaven.  From Paul through Constantine through the Catholic grade schools and high schools to the Catholic campuses during the Vietnam War: pray, pay, and obey.  The most active war and draft resisters at Madison were not Catholic or even Christian students from Wisconsin’s cities and villages and farms.  They were Jews from the East Coast, post-Holocaust Jews who, no surprise, hardly accepted the notion that “those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.”  Neither did I, but the Catholic culture ingrained in me by the parish priests, the Sisters of Providence, the Irish Christian Brothers and the Jesuits, the culture that prepared me for Marine Corps enculturation, ensured that I would not be one to march against the war.  Alas.

 Today is also the anniversary of the beginning of the evacuation from Saigon in 1975, Saigon that was soon to become Ho Chi Minh City.  I'll never forget that day either, not only the evacuation of our embassy personnel and thousands of Vietnamese afraid for their lives as the NVA/VC army enteree the city, but the profound national shame and embarassment over the war we had foolishly begun 10 years before, only to lose so ignominiously.

The Vietnam War was the nation's longest and costliest conflict of the Cold War. Over 8.7 million Americans served in the Armed Forces during the Vietnam era from 1964 to 197.   More than 3.4 million were deployed to Southeast Asia, and approximately 2.7 million of those served in the Republic of Vietnam.  More than 58,000 of them were killed.  More than 300,000 were wounded.  Even more were injured in ways that didn't rate a Purple Heart.  Most of us left Vietnam without visible wounds, but Vietnam never left us.

4/28/2026

 Tuesday, April 28, 2026

1887 One of my maternal grandfather Dennis Healy's birthdays

1956 The last French troops left Vietnam

1965 US Marines invaded the Dominican Republic,and stayed until October 1966

1967 Muhammad Ali refused induction into the army & was  stripped of his boxing title

1996 In Australia's worst massacre in modern history, Martin Bryant shot and killed 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania, leading to a compulsory gun buyback program and major changes to gun control laws.

2025 A sailor is injured when an F/A-18E fighter jet falls off the deck of the USS Harry Truman and sinks while the aircraft carrier engaged in evasive maneuvers to avoid a Houthi attack.

In bed at 9:15, awake & onto LZB at 2:20, up at 4:30.  0453 135/76/50 129 206.6; 50/41/60/48.  

Morning meds at 8 a.m., with half dose of Bisoprolol at 5:45 a.m.  My bladder's really been bothering me lately.  I need another appointment with Urology for another look inside.

I've felt crappy all day, mainly with low and mid back pain.  I woke up with it around 2 this morning when I moved to the LZB.  I applied a 5% Lidocaine patch which has helped, but I've spent way too much time today sleeping.  When not sleeping, I'm reading (and enjoying) Heart of Darkness.

James Comey has been indicted again, proving that Todd Blanche, acting Attorney General, (1) has no pride, (2) has no shame, and (3) will do anything to please Trump and hold on to the job of AG.

I'd rather read than write today, so I'll copy and paste what I've written before about my maternal grandfather, since today may or may not be his 139th birthday.

"Boppa" Denny was my maternal grandfather, Dennis M. Healy.  He died when I was 11, my first experience with death.  We don't know how old he was when he died.  He was born in the Townland of Slaheny, Village of Kilgarvan, in County Kerry, Ireland.  There were 14 houses in Slaheny: 4 occupied by Healys, 4 by Sullivans, 3 by Peahens, and 1 by Finnegans.  House #5 was a 2-room thatched roof cottage with 2 windows.  The head of household was listed in the census as Dennis' brother Daniel, age 30, who lived with his wife Mary, also 30, their daughter Mary, 4, and their 3 sons John, 1, Timothy, 3, and Jeremiah, 5.  The pater families was Daniel, age 75, and the mother, Margaret, age 55, who also lived in that same cottage.  Dennis gave his age as 24 when he arrived in 1904 at Ellis Island from County Kerry via Cobh on the steamship Oceanic.  Years later when he applied for citizenship he gave his year of birth as 1883 which would have made him 21 at Ellis Island.  The 'holy card' from his wake and funeral gave his DOB as April 28, 1887, which would make him barely 17 at Ellis Island.  The birth registry for my mother lists his year of birth as 1886.  Perhaps he was 72 when he died, perhaps 65, perhaps something in between.  I think of him today because I've been continuing to read in small bits Sean O'Faolain's Bird Alone.  I'm at the part where the protagonist Corny is in London at the Irish pub behind which his Uncle Mel lives.  The group in the barroom sings The Ould Ivied Ruin, referring to abandoned homesteads in Ireland and mournful yearning to return.  "There were cries from time to time . .  or a silence for several verses when the pathos of the thing moved them too much, or thoughts of 'the ould land' they might never see again . . "  My grandfather carried a piece of "the ould sod", a chunk of dirt from Ireland, wrapped in a Kleenex in his pocket.  I wonder what became of it when he died.  I remember looking at it once, unwrapping the frayed Kleenex around it.  When Boppa Denny would come to visit us in our basement digs after he had had too much to drink, he would get filled with emotion and curse the English, especially the "Black and Tans" who savaged the Irish during their War of Independence, long after Dennis was already in the U.S.   I vaguely remember him once trying to dance an Irish jig in our little living room, losing his balance and falling into a chair.  He was a sad man, alcoholic in his old age and probably before, widowed early, left with 3 sons, a daughter, and dim but fervent memories of Ireland.

From my memoir:

My mother’s father was Dennis M. Healy  who was from Kilgarvan, County Kerry, Ireland, 6 miles upstream from Kenmare where the Kenmare River empties into the Atlantic.  He grew up in the era of Fenianism, Michael Davitt, the Land League, and the long battle between constitutionalists seeking Home Rule and the more radical separatists seeking complete independence from Great Britain, with Charles Stuart Parnell straddling the divide.  The country had been hit by agricultural depression starting in 1879 and “outrages” (murders of landlords and agents, maiming of cattle, etc.) in the West where the Healy clan lived rose to three times the ‘normal’ incidence in 1880-82.  The struggles with Britain and the Ascendency for land reform, the end of landlordism, and Home Rule and the struggle for complete independence continued well past his emigration to the U. S. and continued through the Easter Rising, the war against Britain and the Black and Tans, the establishment of the Free State and the civil war.  It must have seemed a good time to leave Ireland in search of greener pastures.  He left in 1904, the year the Abbey Theater was founded and Joyce started writing Dubliners (and had his first outing with Nora Barnacle on June 16th, Bloomsday.)  “On the other side,” it was the year Teddy Roosevelt became president.

The immigration records make it clear that the emigrating Healys were almost certainly poor, landless and with no prospect of acquiring land.  Their ‘occupation or calling’ is always listed as ‘laborer’ or ‘servant.’  According to some anecdotal evidence I found on the internet, most of the Healys in Kilgarvin were not native Kerrymen but had migrated to Kilgarvin after evictions by the Earl of Donoughmore during the “Penal Times.”  The barony of Donoughmore lay about 25 miles northwest of Cork City, about 40 miles east of Kilgarvin.    Kilgarvan is now a town of about 550 people in a mountainous area with scant possibilities for eking out a living.  I suspect it had a considerably larger population in 1904 but even fewer opportunities to scratch out a living.    There was a workhouse in Kenmare, down the road from Kilgarvan, and chances are the only options Dennis and his siblings saw were the Kenmare workhouse or emigration.

Dennis sailed to New York on the White Lines steamship Oceanic, departing Queenstown (now Cobh), County Cork, May 19, 1904 and arriving May 26th..  On arrival, he gave his age as 24 as that is the age listed on the “List or Manifest of Alien Passengers” in the Ellis Island records. That would have made 1880 the year of his birth.  Years later, however, when he executed a Declaration of Intention to become a citizen, he gave his birth date as May 5, 1883, which would have made him barely 21 when he arrived.  Adding further confusion to the issue, the ‘holy card’ from his wake and funeral gives his birth date as April 28, 1887, which would have made him barely 17 when he arrived in New York.  It may be that April 28th was his date of birth, and May 5th the date of baptism.  To complete the confusion, the Itasca County birth register entry evidencing my mother’s birth on April 15, 1922, gives her father’s age as 36, which suggests that he was born in 1886, making him barely 18 when he arrived in the United States.  Whether he was born in 1880, as the immigration record declares, or 1883, as the naturalization record declares, or 1886, as my mother’s birth registry declares, or 1887, as the death record states, is anyone’s guess.

At Ellis Island, he stated that his passage to America had been paid by his brother (no name given) and that he was on his way to meet his sister, Mary Healy, who lived in the Lakota Hotel in Chicago.  He had a railroad ticket to Chicago and $6 in his pocket. He stated he had never been an inmate of a prison, an almshouse, or of an institution for the insane, nor had he been a ward of charity, an anarchist or a polygamist. According to the manifest, he was able to read and write.  I never knew of any siblings of my grandfather, but the Ellis Island records suggest that the Healy clan of Kilgarvan was not small.  There were six or seven “Mary Healy”s from Kilgarvan who passed through Ellis Island between 1898 and 1910, all in their teens or early 20s, including one who arrived only two months before my grandfather, in March 1904.  Which was the sister in the hotel in Chicago?  Who was the brother was paid the passage?  I don’t know.  (My Aunt Monica told me that her mother told her that my mother lived with “her aunts” for some period before she married my father.  My father, on the other hand, said my mother lived with her father and brothers, not with any aunts.  Such are the limitations of having to rely on oral histories.) 

The Oceanic was only 5 years old in 1904, built in Belfast in 1899 by the shipyard that was later to build the Titanic, the Harland & Wolff shipyard (of Leon Uris’ Trinity fame).  When launched, she was the largest ship in the world and was still the longest ship at 705 feet when Dennis boarded her for America.   He was a steerage passenger.  There was a lively competition among steamship lines for steerage passengers and, in 1904, the steerage fare (on some ships at least) was only 2 ₤ or about $10.    Dennis was one of almost 60,000 Irish emigrants that year who departed Ireland for destinations outside of Europe and the Mediterranean, generally the U. S., Canada, Australia or New Zealand. 

How did it happen that he ‘left hearth and home’ for a country far away?    Did he go alone?  Did he walk across the mountains of south Kerry and west Cork to Cobh?  Even today there is only one rail line in County Kerry from Tralee to Farranfore to Killarney to Rathmore and points east, all towns considerably north of Kilgarvan.   Cobh is only about 70 miles east southeast of Kilgarvin, now only an hour and a half drive along N22, the Killarney-Macroom-Cork highway, but in 1904, traveling that distance over the challenging terrain of counties Kerry and Cork on foot must have been taxing, even for a young man.

In any event, I know nothing of Dennis’ early life other than he was married to Catherine (or Katherine) O’Shea, also an Irish immigrant, sometime before October 2, 1918 when, as a resident of Taconite in Itasca County, Minnesota, he executed a Declaration of Intention ‘to renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince . . . particularly George V, King of Great Britain and Ireland, of whom I am now a subject . . . [and] to become a citizen of the United States of America and to reside permanently therein.”  He gave his occupation as ‘pipefitter’, which would indicate welding skills, and 3½ years later, his occupation was listed as “plumber” on the Itasca County birth registry for my mother, but as far as I knew as I was growing up, he was a common laborer, not a skilled tradesman.  Prior to 1922, wives did not execute separate Declarations of Intention; thus, I have no clue about Catherine’s place of birth, other than “Ireland.’  I seem to have a vestigial memory, however, that her roots were in County Cork.  As to her age, my Aunt Monica informs me that, according to Dennis, Catherine was considerably younger than he was, a typical Irish marriage, but the birth registry for my mother gives her age as 35 when my mother was born, only a year or so younger than Dennis.  The anecdotal evidence from my aunt, however, supports the statement on the Oceanic’s Manifest of Alien Passengers that Dennis was born in 1880, which would have made him 42 when my mother was born.

Dennis and Catherine had five children: Cornelius James (called ‘Jim’), born in Chicago on January 25, 1918 (according to his Navy discharge papers); Donald (called ‘Bud’), place and date of birth unknown, but probably Grand Rapids, Minnesota: Mary Norma my mother, born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota on April 15, 1922; and Dennis Brendan (called ‘Bim’) born in Chicago on November 22, 1923 (according to his Certificate of Baptism executed in 1931.   The fifth child must have died at birth or in infancy before the births of my mother and my Uncle Bim, for the birth registry states that my mother was Catherine’s fourth child.   In 1927 or 1928, when my mother was 5 years old, her mother died of pernicious anemia, an autoimmune deficiency (perhaps hereditary) causing non-absorption of vitamin B-12 needed for red blood cell production.   The timing of her death was particularly tragic, for in 1926 scientists had discovered that regular feeding of liver was effective in treating pernicious anemia and in 1928, a chemist at Harvard succeeded in producing a liver extract that was 50 to 100 times more potent than simply eating liver.  Pernicious anemia ceased to be a fatal disease just as my mother’s mother was dying from it.  Dennis never remarried.

Catherine O'Shea Healy

4/27/2026

 Monday, April 27, 2026

1877 Rutherford B. Hayes removed Federal troops from Louisiana, Reconstruction ends

1940 Himmler ordered the establishment of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp

1962 The US performed an atmospheric nuclear test at Christmas Island

2025 orth Korea confirmed the deployment of its soldiers to Russia a day after Russia confirmed the presence of North Korean soldiers fighting alongside them.

In bed at 8:50, up at 5:45; 6 a.m., 144/74/50 118 205.8; 46/36/59/42, cloudy morning and rainy afternoon and evening.  This April has been Milwaukee's rainiest on record, more than 9 inches, with more coming today and Wednesday.  😰

Morning meds at 9 a.m.  Bisoprolol at 7 a.m.

Notes from Underground.  I finished it this morning, wondering whether it was the strangest novel I had ever read, and thinking, 'yes.'  From this one work, I see more clearer how Dostoevski is seen as the literary father of Joyce's stream-of-consciousness, Freud's psychoanalysis, existentialism, the Beat Movement, Nietzsche, Kafka, and how many and how much else?  That said, this novella was no fun to read.  Indeed, until the final pages dealing with his realtionship with the prostitute Liza, it was a struggle to stay with it.  It was in the final passages dealing with Liza that Dostoevski developed (not the right word) his main philosophical and religious idea of the redeeming, saving power of Love and Compassion, and only Love and Compassion.  Of course, being Dostoevski, he doesn't provide his reader with a happy ending, one where Underground Man and Liza realize that their present and future happiness depends on their acceptance of their mutual Love and Compassion, marry, and live happily ever after.  Noooo, when Underground Man recognizes that downtrodden, exploited Liza offers him Love and Compassion springing from the Love and Compassion he showed to her, he treats her like shit, unspeakably bad, and drives her away, never to be found.  It is thus that he ends up the guy he describes in the opening lines of the story:  "I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased."  

My next reading challenge is Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.  I've never read it.  The closest I have gotten is watching Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now almost forty-five years ago, in 1982 or 83.  It was the first Vietnam movie I could get myself to watch since I left RVN in 1966.  It's strongly based of course on Heart of Darkness, Marlon Brando in the role of Kurtz and Capt. Willard, the Marlowe character.  My feelings were still raw about the whole Vietnam lethal fiasco when I watched it, and, though I wtched it on videotape all alone, I remember not being able to watch it all the way through.  I saw it in three sittings.  From the little I know of Heart of Darkness, reading it will also be a rough experience.  I'm reminded of the madness and horror in the mind of Dostoevski's Underground Man and think I'll find it replicated, in spades and in numbers, in Heart of Darkness.

Catheter Ablation.  I called Dr. Singh's nurse this afternoon to let her and him know that I've decided to go along with the recommended surgery.  I visited with Dr. Ryzka of the Rheumatology Clinic this morning as a follow-up to my poymyalgia rheumatica illiness.  In the course of our discussion of my recent hospitalization, he informed me that he has worked closely with Dr. Singh and commented that Singh is phenomonally knowledgeable and skilled at dealing with arrythmia cardiac problems, and the two of Ruzka's uncle only recently underwent catherter ablations in Poland, and that they felt better afterwards.  I suppose it was in some measure based on Dr. Ryzka's comments that the called Singh's nurse today.  I suppose I am always free to withdraw my consent to the surgery right up to the time I'm in the operating room but I'm unlikely to do so.  I admit nonetheless that I feel some real anxiety about the idea of someone threading a catheter up from my thigh through my torso into my heart, the lower chamber at that, zapping some portion of the inside of my heart, and then pulling the catheter back out through my groin.  I shudder thinking about it.  (I know: Don't think about it. Count your blessings.  A typical catheter ablation in Milwaukee costs about $30,000-$35,000.  I'll not pay anything, because of the VA.)

Last year I wrote, after a reflection on the old scuffed-up shoes in which Pope Francis was buried:

As I read these words, I thought of my mother.  She died 52 years ago, at age 51.  She has been dead now longer than she lived.  After she died, I went into her bedroom for some reason I can no longer remember,  but I remember seeing her work shoes on the floor.  White, clean, but 'broken-in' and well-worn.  I remember seeing them as somehow sacred or perhaps venerable, relics. I was deeply moved just looking at her shoes.  Once she was gone, things that were her's took on a significance they had not had while she was still with us.  Her time was up, shockingly, unbelievably, unimaginably, and so was our time with her. Her shoes, her work uniforms, her clothing, her rosary and prayer book, things that had been so ordinary and unnoteworthy, became imbued with significance and precious.  I think of Emily in Our Town, brought back from the dead, seeing her mother in her kitchen before in earlier times:

Oh, Mama, look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I'm dead. You're a grandmother, Mama! Wally's dead, too. His appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it - don't you remember? But, just for a moment now we're all together. Mama, just for a moment we're happy. Let's really look at one another!... I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another.  I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed.  Take me back -- up the hill -- to my grave. . . Oh, earth,you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?

Now that I'm old and living each day in the death zone (the age when no one will say "Oh, he died so young, before his time" but rather "Well, he had a good life"),  I try always to remember and to live Emily's late-found wisdom. Oh, Mama, look at me . . ."  And to remember my Mom's work shoes.  When I see my beloved wife's gardening shoes collected in the garage, or her shoes on the drying pad by the front door, or her shoes in the TV room, way back in my mind, I remember my mother's venerable work shoes and I count my blessings.  When she occasionally says she can't find her shoes, I smile and count my blessings.  When she speaks to me and shares her thoughts about anything, I count my blessings.  Not always, because I am weak, unwise, and inconstant, but usually.  

The "Emily experience" I described has stayed with me this year, and perhaps increased.  Am I being foolish, or chickenhearted, or dramatizing or catastrophizing, thinking that I am getting closer to Death's Door?  Perhaps, but I don't think so.  I was awake and out of bed again last night, sitting on the bedroom recliner, and experiencing rapid heartbeats again, wondering about them, fibrillation? or imagination?  I mentioned to Geri yesterday that the one thing I never really considered to be risk for me was heart disease since, to my knowledge at least, there was no history of it in my family.  Yet here I am still debating whether to undergo the catheter ablation recommended by Dr. Singh.  Here I am wondering whether, if I consent to the surgery, am I trying artificially to prolong my already diminished life, or am I just trying to avoid the pain and discomfort of degenerating heart failure, being bedridden, hooked up to oxygen, a 'basket case'?

4/26

 Sunday, April 26, 2026

1954 Mass trials of Jonas Salk's anti-polio vaccine began

2019 "No religion" topped a survey of American religious identity for the first time at 23.1%, edging out Catholics 23.0% and evangelicals 22.5%, in the General Social Survey

2023 Joe Biden announced his bid for a second term, saying he has a “job to finish” 

2023 E. Jean Carroll testified in a NY court that Donald Trump raped her

In bed at 9:05, awake at 4:30, up at 4:45; 0500 125/56/30 127 207.2; 41/54/41. cloudy all day

Morning meds at 8:30 a.m., half dose of Bisoprolol at 5:35 a.m.

White House Correspondents Dinner.  This morning, we are waiting for more information about the man arrested just past the perimeter of last night's dinner.  We know his name, Cole Tomas Allen, supposedly a game developer and teacher of some sort, from Torrence, California a suburb of Los Angeles.  I went to bed last night at 9 without waiting for Trump's presser.

JJA's FB post re the Whitney Plantation and my note:

Jan's comment:

On my day to choose an excursion (Larry chose the previous day’s visit to Chalmette Battlefield), we spent an afternoon touring the Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana. It is owned and operated by the Whitney Institute, a nonprofit organization, whose mission is the to educate the public about the history and enduring legacies of slavery in the United States.

I’ve always avoided plantation tours. I never wanted to contribute—even indirectly—to the romanticizing of a way of life built on the evil and brutality of slavery. But visiting Whitney Plantation was something entirely different. The Whitney Plantation is a 200 acre former sugar plantation turned historic site dedicated to telling the history of slavery in the United States from the perspective of the enslaved people who built America’s wealth.

Originally established in 1752 by Ambroise Heidel as a small indigo plantation, it relied from the beginning on the forced labor and expertise of enslaved Africans—many taken from regions in West Africa where rice and indigo cultivation were already deeply understood. As the Heidel family became the Haydels and the plantation transitioned to sugar production around 1800, the scale—and cruelty—intensified. Sugar was a notoriously brutal crop; it demanded longer hours, harsher conditions, and a rapidly expanding enslaved population. Families were torn apart. For many, being sold south to Louisiana was considered a death sentence.

By the mid-19th century, under Azelie Haydel, the plantation was at its most profitable—over 100 enslaved people producing hundreds of thousands of pounds of sugar each year. That wealth came at an unimaginable human cost. Enslaved men, women, and children labored in the fields, in the sugar mill, with livestock, and inside the home. They were skilled workers, parents, and individuals with lives and identities far beyond the roles forced upon them.

One story that stays with me is Anna’s. Enslaved and working in the main house, she was sexually assaulted by a member of the Haydel family and gave birth to a son, Victor—who was both enslaved and biologically related to his enslavers. Victor lived most of his life on that plantation. His descendants include civil rights leaders like Sybil Haydel Morial and Marc Morial (current president of the National Urban League and former mayor of New Orleans) - a  powerful reminder that this history is not distant but rather it is living, present, and deeply connected to our world today.

After the Civil War, the plantation was renamed Whitney, and it continued operating well into the 20th century. Whitney doesn’t gloss over any of this. It doesn’t sanitize or soften the truth. It centers the lives, labor, and suffering of the enslaved people who made everything else possible. It tells the story that so many other places have historically chosen not to.

I’m still wary of how history can be presented in these spaces—but this felt like something else entirely: not a celebration, but a reckoning.

And that matters.

 Charles D. Clausen

Thank you so much for posting your reflections and these photos. I had read some years ago of this famous and infamous slave labor camp, for such all so-called "plantations" were, and I wished I could visit it, to see what you and Larry saw and read what you read. I knew from what I had read that sugar was even harder for slaves to toil with than cotton in the Deep South and tobacco elsewhere. You have a much keener understanding and appreciation than most of us of the real horrors that the institution of slavery visited upon its victims. I think that most of us were fooled by the "Gone With the Wind" depiction of it, with Hattie McDaniel as Mammy and Butterfly McQueen as Prissy. Slavery played an essential role in the development of American capitalism and our finance industry, the enslaved serving as the enslavers' capital and collateral supporting the evil institution's financing and expansion. We're still suffering from its effects. Thanks again.

The leader of the free world 

Notes from Underground.  I'm halfway through this novella and wondering why I'm reading it.  For no reason other than its renowned author, I'm feeling a bit compelled to finish it, but I suspect I will regret it.  I'm not enjoying it.  So far, I'm getting nothing out of the reading, or rather the listening, since I'm listening to more of it than I've read so far.  The "hero" is an anti-hero, a pathetic, self-loathing and other-loathing 40 year old with the darkest outlook on the world on himself and on others.  He reminds me of a story I read once many years ago in a book by Anthony DeMello.  A man is walking along a road looking for a place to settle down.  At a fork in the road, he comes upon an old wise man whom he asks, 'What are the people like in the town where this road to the right leads?'  The wise man asks, 'What were the people like in the town where you used to live?'  The man answers, "Oh, there were a terrible lot.  Nasty, selfish, gossipy, deceitful, just awful.'  The wise man said, 'The people in the town to the right are just the same.  A second man comes along later and asks the same question, which the wise follows with his same question.  This man answers, 'They were lovely people, kind, thoughtful, generous, good neigbors,'  and the wise man said, 'The people in the town to the right are just the same.'  In other words, attitude is everything, or, at least, how we view people and the world depends in great measure on how we look upon the world, with what kind of predisposition, through what kind of lens we view the world.  Dostoevski wrote Notes in 1864.  He wrote The Idiot later.  In the former, the nameless Underground Man sees the world through a very dark lens.  In the latter, Prince Myshkin looked through rose-colored glasses.  It's been many years now, but it seems to me that I enjoyed both Crimes and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov as I was reading them.  Not so much with The Idiot, and not at all (so far at least) with Notes from Underground.😕

In the current The Atlantic on-line:

How Netanyahu Hurt America’s Jews

The Israeli prime minister’s focus is, as always, on himself and his near-term political needs. The plight of American Jews is simply not his concern. By Michael A. Cohen

The relationship between the United States and Israel is in crisis. Six in 10 Americans have a negative view of Israel, and a majority of those under 50 in both major parties view Israel as well as its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, negatively. After the brutal Gaza war, a large percentage of liberal-leaning Generation Z considers Israel a pariah state. Democratic candidates are scrambling to distance themselves from Israel and its controversial leader; earlier this month, 40 of the 47 Democratic senators voted against a military aid package for the country. And hostility toward Israel is spilling over into hostility toward Jews. Liberal influencers, activists, podcasters, and even politicians are invoking age-old anti-Semitic tropes with frightening regularity.

Yet what is for American Jews the worst of times is, from Netanyahu’s perspective, the best of times. His more than a decade of meddling in American politics on behalf of Republican candidates and key GOP constituencies has, over the past few weeks, paid remarkable dividends. In the skies over Iran, Israeli and American pilots flew side by side. For a prime minister who has long viewed Iran as an existential threat, this was a historic achievement.

In putting all his chips on President Trump, though, Netanyahu has exacerbated the deep and growing divide between Israel and the Democratic Party.

This growing distance could create a problem for Israel if a Democrat wins the White House in 2028, but it creates a far more immediate problem for American Jews. 

Diaspora Jews have, for much of the past century, found a home within both the Democratic Party and also progressive social, cultural, and institutional spaces. But since October 7, 2023, that sense of belonging has been shattered. American Jews are under attack from liberal and progressive activists who are stridently anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, and in some cases anti-Semitic.

In pursuing Israel’s interests at the expense of American Jews, Netanyahu has put the world’s largest community of diaspora Jews in a terrible bind, caught between support for Israel and its liberal allies. 

And, it seems, he couldn’t care less.

. . . 

For much of Israel’s early history, American Jewish leaders were more involved in supporting Israel or weighing in on questions related to Jewish identity than they were in security-related issues. That changed most dramatically in the 1990s with the signing of the Oslo Accords, in 1993. Hawkish American Jews opposed the deal and lobbied Congress to place conditions on aid to the newly created Palestinian Authority. Their efforts were supported by Netanyahu, in what was at the time an unprecedented effort to politicize the American Jewish community.

For me, Israel's best hope for the future died when Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, a supporter of settlers and settlement, in 1995.

A prime minister who saw American Jews as more than an instrument for furthering Israel’s security but as “partners in building the Jewish future,” as he told American Jews more than a decade ago, would take his responsibilities to the American Jewish community more seriously. He would take into account how Israel’s actions boomerang against diaspora Jews and empower anti-Semites. He would seek to depoliticize the U.S.-Israel relationship and ensure that American Jews are not forced to choose between their Jewish identity and the progressive and political spaces they’ve long called home.

But Netanyahu hasn’t—and he won’t. Bibi’s focus is, as always, on himself and his near-term political needs. The plight of American Jews is simply not his concern. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4/25/2026

 Saturday, April 26, 2026

1953 Francis Crick and James Watson's discovery of the double helix structure of DNA was published in "Nature" magazine

1971 About 200,000 anti-Vietnam War protesters marched on Washington, D.C.

2022 Twitter announced a deal to sell itself to Elon Musk for $44 billion

2025 The German government cut its economic growth forecast to zero, with the Deutsche Bundesbank estimating a future recession. Minister of Economic Affairs Robert Habeck accused  Donald Trump's tariffs of being the primary reason for Germany's continued economic crisis. 

2025 Hannah Dugan was arrested by United States on obstruction charges after allegedly helping an undocumented immigrant evade arrest. 

In bed at 9:05, awake at 3:35 for a pit stop, thinking of the catheter ablation, up at 4:35, thinking I was awake all that time but probably not.  0450 140/77/55, 0500 128/76/54. 205.8; 43/38/54/42, cloudy morning, sunny afternoon.

Morning meds at 7 a.m., including the half-dose of Bisoprolol.  I noticed very little lightheadedness yesterday.  Fingers crossed.

I feel a bit sheepish admitting it, but I miss the Morning Joe program on weekend mornings.  I don't particularly like Joe Scarborough or Mika Brzezinski, each of whom seems like a SNL characature to me, but I enjoy learning from most of their guests: David Ignatius, David Rohde, Richard Haas, Jim VandeHei, Katty Kay, Steve Rattner, and even John Heileman.  I don't particularly enjoy Willy Geis, or Mike Baranacle, and confess to a longtime grudge against Al Sharpton for his behavior in the infamous Tawana Brawley case.  Joe Scarborough himself is probably the rudest man on national television,  succeeding  Chris Matthews.  Each of them is notorious for interrupting other speakers, not letting them finish whatever comments they are making, yet insisting, when they are interrupted, "Let me finish."  Nonetheless, I count on checking in with Morning Joe after I awake and finish my morning protocols to help organize my scattershot thinking about what is going on in the world, or at least in the American part of the world with its tentacles reaching wherever they wish in the rest of the world.

I'm a glutton for punishment.  I seem to be driven by some devilish inner force.  All of which is to say that I am reading more Dostoevski, to wit, Notes from Underground, or as Nobokov translates the title, Memoirs from a Mousehole.  In self-defense, I plead that it is a novella, not one of his magna opera, but it is nonetheless depressing which I should have guessed from the opening lines of Part One: "I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased."  Things can only go up from there, right? Wrong!  The book is about the human mind, consciousnees and its substrata, science and suffering, humman perversity or moral obligquity, as Dostoevski calls it.  The closing lines of Part One are:

 Consciousness is infinitely superior to twice two makes four.  Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing left to do or understand.  There will be nothing left but to bottle up your five senses and plunge into contemplation.  While if you stick to conscousness, even the same result is attained, you can at least flog yourself at tiesm and that will, at any rate, liven you up.  Reactionary as it is, corporal punishment is better than nothing.

With those opening and closing lines from Part One, why would anyone other than a glutton for punishment plow ahead into Part Two? Yet I forge on. 

4/24/2026

 Friday, April 24, 2026

1916 The Easter Rising against British occupation began in Dublin

1961 JFK accepted "sole responsibility" following the Bay of Pigs

1967  General Westmoreland said that the enemy has "gained support in the US that gives him hope that he can win politically that which he cannot win militarily."

1980 US military operation to rescue 52 hostages in Iran failed, and 8 died

2025 Israeli settlers in the West Bank shoot 5 Palestinians and set fire to homes and farmland

In bed at 9:15, awake at 4:15 with low glucose alarm, up at 4:30; 0450, 124/72/57 132. 207.4;  63/69/44, partly cloudy.

Morning meds at 9a.m, with half-dose of Bisoproplol.  

Scattered thoughts this morning:  (1) Yesterday I thought I should go ahead with the catheter ablation of my heart, that I should just rely on this Dr. Singh, who is highly experienced, board certified, and on the staff at both Zablocki and Froederdt and on the faculty of the Medical College of Wisconsin.  Today, I'm wondering again, largely about undergoing such a procedure at my age and in my condition.  It bothers me that Singh didn't mention any of the risks of the surgery, but rather just gave me a brochure that included them among about pieces of information about the procedure.  I'm aware of the unavoidable conflict of interest with fee-for-service professionals, i.e., that with the greater number the services they recommend, the greater their income.  In my teaching days, I used to explain it to students with the adage about leaving no stone unturned, when you bill by the stone.  The conflict certainly doesn't disqualify the professional from giving the advice, and doesn't mean the advice should be ignored, but it's a factor in deciding whether to follow it.  I'm pretty sure it's accurate to say that Dr. Singh makes most of his lucrative income in operating rooms in hospitals, not in examination rooms in medical offices.

(2) The Idiot, The Grand Inquisitor, The crucifixion, nihilism, existentialism, the paths of glory lead but to the grave, Jesus Christ, and Reinhold Niebuhr.  Now that I've finished The Idiot, I'm wondering what it was about.  What was Dostoevski's point in writing it?  It's a tragedy.  Prince Myshkin, the hero, ends up back in a sanitarium in Switzerland, where he had been when the story began, but he's in much worse shape, arguably better off dead.  Natasia Phillipovna, the other main character (though she appears only relatively rarely in the narrative), ends up dead, murdered by her (would-be?) lover, Rogozhin, who ends up in prison in Siberia.  Aglaya Ivanovna, Myshkin's other lover interest, ends up married to a cad and converts to Roman Catholicism, which. according to Myshkin, is worse than atheism and nihilism.  Ippolyte, the nihilist doomed to die at age 18 of tuberculosis, is dead.  What is the point of the whole story?  Crucially, who is 'the idiot'?  Is it just Prince Myshkin, the 'hero', or is it Jesus of Nazareth, on whose teachings his life is lived? Or is it all the other characters, especially those who profess to be Christians but don't live as Jesus urged?  Or Ippolyte, the nihilist who believed that life is utterly meaningless, a character who could have been created by Camus or Sartre, who reminds us of Sisyphus or Meursault, or is the Meursault character Rogozhin, who commits the senseless murder of Natasia?  Was the murder senseless or was he 'putting her out of her misery?'  Was she an idiot for refusing to marry Myshkin, who loved her more than anyone else in the world did, and infinitely more than she loved herself?  Or was Dostoevski the idiot, writing about himself, he who actually believed in Jesus's teaching despite it's inconsistency with human nature, our 'fallen' human nature?  I don't think these are just academic questions, but rather spring inevitably from the novel itself, especially read with some knowledge of Dostoevski's life.  I'm wondering whether Reinhold Niebuhr wrote about Doestoevski, or thought about him, when he wrote his long, dense An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, which I read so many years ago.  I have misplaced my marked-up, highlighted, old paperback copy of the work, but there is a full-text version on-line.  It includes a chapter entitled "The Relevance of an Impossible Christian Ethic."  Niebuhr makes the point that we human beings are, by nature, i.e., as his God created us, incapable of acting wholly in accordance with Jesus's instructions, of loving our neighbors as ourselves, of loving our enemies, of turning the other cheek when struck, of forgiving 'seven times seventy' when wronged, etc.  He wrote: "Jesus thus made demands upon the human spirit which no finite man can fulfil, , ," It is this fact that makes M."yshkin such an unbelievable character.  Niebuhr also wrote: "The real crux of the issue between essential Christianity and modern culture lies at this point.  The conflict is between those who have a confidence in human virtue which haman nautre cannot support and those who have looked too deeply into life and their own owuls to place their trust in so broken a reed."  A reader wonders whether Dostoevski intended his readers to accept Myshkin as a possible, flesh-and-blood human character, when no one has ever met another person so selfless.  If he didn't so intend him, what did he intend.  Again, what was Dostoevski's point with this story?

(Myshkin kind of reminds me of a precursor of today's Ted Lasso, though I haven't watched enough of the Lasso series to make such a comparison.)

The Idiot was published in 1869 and The Brother Karamozov in 1880.  One wonders whether the former was the basis for the chapter in the latter, "The Grand Inquisitor," in which Christ returns to earth and is forced first to be burned at the stake by the Church, and then simply to go back where he came from, to leave humankind and their religions alone.  There are major non-congruities, of course, but I think of the closing of "The Grand Inquisitor" where Jesus kisses the Inquisitor, and the penultimate chapter of The Idiot, where Myshkin caresses and kisses Rogozhin who has killed Natasia whom Myshkin had intended to marry.

I'm wondering what The Idiot would look like if written from the point of view of Natasia Phillipovna.  She was the victim of childhood sexual abuse by her guardian, Totsky.  She seemed to hate herself as a result, although she had an immense quantum of pride (though of a self-destructive kind.)  She considered herself dirtied and unworthy of marriage to a good man, perhaps even of social relations with 'polite society,' a devalued woman.  She was kind of 'knocked off her rocker' by the sexual abuse and Myshkin realized that and was described as "pitying her" although that seems like the wrong term, "having deep compassion for her" being better.  To know all is to understand all.  Perhaps her sense of bitterness was also because she perceived the unfairness of her parents dying early and her being delivered to the pervert Totski that unbalanced her, much like Ippolyte saw the unfairness in his death sentence from TB as a teenager while most others were spared.  (Why me, Lord? and all that.)  To me, Natasia and Ippolyte were characters that deserved better development in the novel, more than, say, the flippant, selfish Aglaya Ivanovna.  

I'm glad that I read the novel though I don't know that I would recommend it many people.  I've read Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment (more than once) and The Brothers Karmazov, and may read one of them again, or perhaps Notes From the Underground, or perhaps one or more of his short stories.  Or not.  I enjoyed both Crime and Karamzov a lot more than I enjoyed The Idiot.  In fact, "enjoy" is not the right word to describe this reading experience.  I read it on Kindle with audio and it took many hours.  The Penquin edition of the book is 784 pages and I've read that some editions are over 1,000 pages.  'nuf said.

(3) Doppelganger nations.  I have long thought and written in this journal over the last almost 4 years that the United States and Israel are doppelgangers, twins, images of each other.  Both think they are "exceptional", i.e., ot subject to the same rules as other, lesser sovereignties.  Each has long been victim to outsized influence from religious leaders, always from the right, rarely from the left.  Each has long had outsized military forces and military budgets.  Each has suffered from some form of racism throughout its history.  Each started as a settler-colonial enterprise with a need to subdue, subordinate, and ultimately expel indigenous people in the interest of nationhood/statehood and national security.  Each has a long history of expansionism.  Each has long thought they God is on their side, that their existence and welfare is an expression of God's will and of God operating in the world throughout history.  Each is a nation of immigrants.  Each is dominated by conservative institutions and forces, with moderates and liberals now feeling feeling as if they are passengers on ships of states captained by fools, mad men, or totally self-interested, wicked men.

Soul brothers