7/25/2026

 Saturday, July 25, 2026

306 Constantine I was proclaimed Roman Emperor by his troops

1941 FDR banned selling benzine/gasoline to Japan

1968 Pope Paul VI published the encyclical "Humanae vitae (Of Human Life)" which rejected any artificial forms of birth control

2019 US Justice Department resumed the use of the death penalty, scheduling five executions

In bed at 9, up at 5:35; 0555  0555 132/74/59 XXX 204.0, 0606 115/71/60, 0616 110/70/60; 64/79/59, cloudy

Morning meds at 9 a.m.   

I finished A Confederacy of Dunces this afternoon.  Actually, I was listening to the last chapter and dozed off during a good portion of it, but didn't bother to go back and start again.  Basically, his mother finally gave up on Ignatius and was taking steps to have him involuntarily committed to a mental health facility when his former girlfriend Myrna Minkoff showed up from New York City, deus ex machina, and rescued him and his abundance of Big Chief notebooks containing the deranged fragments of his magnum opus, and spirited him away from New Orleans.  I was glad to be done with it, not because it was all terrible, but it became terrible at some indefinite point when it became boring.  There's only so much of Ignatius J. Reilly that an ordinary reader can take, and the book contains too much of his rantings, his deprecations, his unending hyperboles both in belittling others and in promoting himself.   I came to realize as I read and listened to the narrative that Ignatius reminded me of Donald Trump, his hyperbolic name-calling of his ubiquitous enemies and hyperbolic and narcissistic self-promotion.  

Geri gets home today after her 6-day visit with her dear buddy Kate Donovan.  I'll be glad to have her home, but I wish I were in better shape for her return.  I was in a bit of a funk when she left and am the same way today, disspirited, emotionally listless.  I watched Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt last night, and the sad sack that he played in that film reminded me of myself.  His character retired at age 66 after serving 40 years as an actuary for an insurance company and discovered that he was an empty shell.  He had no hobbies, no friends, no reading habits, and a distant relationship with his only child, his daughter.  He was emotionally alone and lonely, pathetic.  I'm not nearly as bad off as Schmidt is in the movie, but I can't say I'm enjoying life, either.  My birth family's all gone, as are most of my good friends, the guys I used to work with, golf with, and fish with.  I've got Geri, thank God, and Sarah and Andy, but Sarah lives in Europe and Andy's busy with three very active kids, a wife, and a new job, all making demands on him.  Thinking of him makes me think of the singer in "The Cat's in the Cradle."  I'm throwing a pity party for myself while realizing that doing so only worsens the condition. Pathetic.  . . . Geri got home around 3:30 and my spirits were lifted within minutes.  I'm so fortunate to have her in my life.  Indeed she is my life.

An anniversary note re Humanae Vitae, from my memoir:

The Catholic Church also revealed its feet of clay during 1968.  Cardinal Spellman was spouting his murderous nonsense about ‘a war for civilization’  without restraint by the Vatican and Catholics were generally as resistant as any other group to much of the civil rights demands.  The big difference maker in terms of authority however had nothing to do with war and peace or civil rights, but with sex, Paul VI’s encyclical banning contraception, including birth control pills.  In 1963, John XXIII had established a commission to study population and birth control issues.  Paul VI appointed 15 cardinals and bishops and 64 lay experts to the commission.  The commission provided a report in 1966 saying contraception was not intrinsically evil.  The vote among the clergy was 9 to 6; the lay commission vote was 60 to 4.  One of the dissenters was Karol Wojtyla, later John Paul II.  The dissenters feared that a change in the Church’s position would call into question the pope’s teaching authority.¹  The report was leaked to the press in 1967, and there was a very favorable reaction among modern Catholics, who expected the pope to adopt the commission’s recommendation.  Instead, Paul VI rejected the recommendation and adopted the dissenting position, undoubtedly fearing that any change in the Church’s position would weaken the claim to papal authority.  What happened, of course, was precisely what Paul and the Vatican conservatives wanted to avoid: widespread rejection of the Church’s teaching authority, especially by American and Western European Catholics. The pope and his conservative curial apparatchiks were seen as, at best. mired in medievalism, and, at worst, more concerned about the power of its shepherds than in the welfare of the flock.

From my point of view, the United States’ position on the war in Vietnam and the Church’s position on contraception flowed from the same source.   Johnson and his advisors and Paul VI and his advisors were more concerned with institutional credibility than with the lives of their “subjects.”  Not losing face, nationally and personally, was more important to Johnson than the lives of the Americans and Vietnamese who were suffering in the war.  Better that thousands should die or be horribly wounded than that the United States be seen for what it inevitably was in Vietnam, an arrogant and feckless loser.

¹“If it should be declared that contraception is not evil in itself, then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches in 1930 (when the encyclical Casti Connubi was promulgated) and in 1951 (Pius XII’s address delivered before the Society of Hematologists in the year the pope died). 

“It should likewise have to be admitted that for a half a century the Spirit failed to protect Pius XI, Pius XII, and a large part of the Catholic hierarchy from a very serious error. This would mean that the leaders of the Church, acting with extreme imprudence, had condemned thousands of innocent human acts, forbidding, under pain of eternal damnation, a practice which would now be sanctioned. The fact can neither be denied nor ignored that these same acts would now he declared licit on the grounds of principles cited by the Protestants, which popes and bishops have either condemned or at least not approved” [Emphasis added by me.]

Reading these words today, 20 years or so after I wrote them, puts me in mind of Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society, in which he argues, persuasively, that we are much more likely to sin, to act selfishly, as members of a group than we are as individuals.  His theory explains our tendency to "circle the wagons" whenever group integrity, identity, cohesiveness, safety, standing, or privilege is attacked.

 

7/24/2026

 Friday, July 24, 2026

1943, the RAF began bombing Hamburg, creating a firestorm and killing 42,600 people

1952 "High Noon", starring Gary Cooper and Thomas Mitchell, was released

1967 The first modern hospice was founded in London, beginning modern palliative care.

2019  Robert Mueller reported that President Trump was not exonerated of obstruction of justice and that Russia interfered in the US election to benefit Trump

2024 Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a defiant address to a joint session of US Congress re Gaza 

In bed at.9"30, up at 5:55; 0605 115/64/64 166 203.8;62/77/61, cloudy   

Morning meds at 9 a.m.  Trulicity injection at 10 a.m.

Approaching the end of A Confederacy of Dunces, and I don't know quite what I think of it.  Much of it is funny, but mostly it's the clever name-calling that Ignatius engages in in his frequent engagements with other human beings, all of whom he considers his intellectual inferiors.  He is like a combination of Don Rickles, Don Quixote, and Oliver Hardy.   The problem I'm having getting through the whole book is that there's not much of a plot, mostly just Ignatius in various settings acting ridiculously and berating those around him.  I love Laurel and Hardy movies, but not hour after hour of them.  

The more I learn of John Kennedy Toole, the clearer it becomes that Ignatius J. Reilly is based largely on him.  Each was an only child with a very pushy mother, and each was a medievalist.  Toole even struggled with his weight and with overeating.  

I found a January 5, 2021, review of the novel in The New Yorker by Tom Bissell that includes this:

I suddenly recalled why I found the novel so repellent the first time I read it. It’s not that I “don’t like” or “can’t relate” to Ignatius; no serious reader should care about such things. It’s more that, at every turn, Ignatius is exactly the character you expect him to be. Late in the novel, one character asks him, “Don’t you ever shut up?” He doesn’t. That’s the problem.

That is indeed the problem.  So much of the novel consists of the same scenes played over and over again, variations on a repeated theme.

An anniversary thought.  The Hamburg bombing and its firestorm killing thousands reminded me of a memo written by Winston Churchill on March 28, 1945, shortly before the end of the European war.  He wrote: 

"It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.  Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land.  We shall not, for instance, be able to get housing materials out of Germany for our own needs because some temporary provision would have to be made for the Germans themselves.  The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing.  The Foreign Secretary has spoken to me on this subject, and I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives, such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive."  I included a photocopy of the memo in my memoir in the chapter in which I described my visit to Hiroshima and its War Memorial.  I wrote:

I found this letter from Winston Churchill while doing some research on strategic bombing.  It is notable for its bald acknowledgment that a prime purpose of strategic bombing of cities was “increasing the terror, though under other pretexts” and for its reluctant abjuring of “mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.”  The German military, of course, were past masters of Schrecklichkeit or terrorism at least from the inception of World War I and its invasion of Belgium, the bombardment of historic Louvain and torching of its priceless university library.  However, it did not take long for the British and Americans to get into their own brand of in terrorem tactics on civilians, especially the firebombing of cities in Europe and Japan, including the precious medieval city of Dresden, which Churchill mentions as a “query against the conduct of Allied bombing.”  The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki represented the pinnacle of terror bombing.  

Have we made much moral progress since then, either as a species or as a nation?  We're more than 80 years past the firebombing of most Japanese cities, bombings for which Curtis LeMay accurately said of himself that he would be prosecuted for war crimes if the US had lost, rather than won, the war.  We see what Russia is doing in Ukraine, what Israel has been doing for decades against Palestinians, and now what Trump and his henchmen are threatening against Iran and what Iran is doing against US allies in the region, and we wonder.  "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again."  Homo hominis lupus.

7/23/2026

 Thursday, July 23, 2026

1973 Richard Nixon refused to release Watergate tapes of conversations in the White House relevant to the Watergate investigation

2020 US President Trump said he could send 75,000 federal agents to deal with violence in American cities like Portland, drawing backlash

In bed at 9:10, up at 4:25; 0440 203.2 116/71/64 109; 55/76/55, sunny morning, partly cloudy afternoon

Morning meds at 2 p.m.

A Confederacy of Dunces.  The title of the satire comes from an epigram of Jonathan Swift's: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."  Early in the narrative, Ignatius J. Reilly cites the epigram in reference to himself as the "true genius."  He considers himself as without peers, a savant having a unique and accurate take on all aspects of life and human history.  All the people intellectually and morally inferior to him, which includes everyone else in the world, comprise the confederacy of dunces.   I'm less than halfway through the book this morning, and, recognizing that I've written that I'm struggling to push through it, nonetheless find myself enjoying it more the more I get into it.  

Toole skewers intellectual pretentiousness and 'limousine liberals. He himself had a bachelor's degree from Tulane and a master's from Columbia.  He taught at three different schools, the University of Southwest Louisiana in Lafayette, Hunter College's Bronx campus, and lastly, Dominican College, a small, Catholic girls' school in New Orleans.  He was both liked and admired by his students.  He is reputed to have brought a terrific sense of humor to the classroom.  So he was personally well acquainted with academic culture, including all of its happy horseshit features.  Despite repeated efforts on his part, his novels were never published during his life and, at age 31, he committed suicide by inhaling carbon dioxide from his car's exhaust.  It's unclear to what degree his failure to get published contributed to his suicide.

One wonders to what degree Toole was satirizing himself in the character of Ignatius J. Reilly.  Like Reilly, Toole had a very close and not altogether easy relationship with his mother.  Each of them had both a bachelor's and a master's degree and was widely read in English literature.  Reilly taught for a very short time but was canned.  Toole taught for several years, but wrote no notable academic writings and declined the offer of a three-year doctoral fellowship at the University of Washington.  He apparently considered himself more an author than an academician, and his failure to get Confederacy published surely weighed on him.  On page 116 of the novel, we read this exchange between Ignatius's mother and a friend: "Ain't he thirty years old?" Mother: "My heart's broke." "Ain't he writing something?" Mother: "Some foolishness nobody never gonna feel like reading."  Was he writing about himself?

Ignatius has a near-universally grim view of modern life, especially of the world's failure to recognize what a great, profound thinker he is.  This grim outlook is reported humorously in the book, but one wonders if the humorous depictions of Ignatius's psyche really represented Tool's own mental condition that led to his suicide.

Re 'limousine liberals,' I got a big kick out of re-reading the chapter about Ignatius Reilly's rallying the African American workforce of Levy Pants to rebel against their working conditions.  His condescension and contempt for them while claiming to champion their right to a living wage and better working conditions is priceless.  Ditto his descriptions of his former college classmate and love interest, Myrna Minkoff, crusader for noble causes of all kinds, so long as they were liberal and disruptive of order.  Ignatius looks down his nose at her causes, believing as he does that the world took a wrong turn when it moved away from medievalism and into the Enlightenment.  Ignatius reminds me of a former student of mine (and old friend) Ron Hofer, who used to half-joke that the last great music was composed by Henry Purcell (1859 - 1695) and the last good book was Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).  Perhaps not surprisingly, before coming to law school, Ron had been a Ph.D. candidate in English literature at UVA.  Ignatius Reilly's preferred readings were Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy and Thomas Aquinas.

In any case, many passages in this novel make me laugh out loud.  It is often hysterically funny.

I took the Volvo in for its annual maintenance.  Not surprisingly, the cost was almost $600.  The car is 12 years old, but it runs well, and I expect it to outlive me, so I'm pretty careful about maintaining it.  I declined, however, the recommended coolant flush that would have added more than $200 to the cost and 30 to 40 minutes to the 2 hours I spent waiting for the service to be completed.  

The New Red Scare.  I still remember growing up in the late 1940s and the early and mid-1950s when first the House Un-American Activities Committee, and then Senator Joseph McCarthy, former circuit court judge in Appleton, Wisconsin, and then Robert Welch and his John Birch Society beat the bushes of American organizations and institutions to flush out communists and 'fellow travelers.'  They had Americans believing communists were hiding under every rock and behind every tree, all committed to overthrowing American democracy and subjecting all Americans to "Godless Communism."  Now Trump, desperate to avoid losing power, is raising the Red Scare again, but broadening it by accusing every member of the Democratic Socialists of America (starting with Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani) and Democrats generally of being communists.  He has congressional leadership falling in line behind him, folks like House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Republican Whip Steve Scalise, who once famously compared himself favorably to David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the KKK.   (I note that Johnson is a devout, practicing Southern Baptist and Scalise is a devout, practicing Roman Catholic.  Consider that for what it's worth.) Communism is, to the president, the single greatest threat to the safety, prosperity, and integrity of the United States.  How many of our neighbors will fall for this happy horseshit?  Lots.   

7/22/2026

 Wednesday, July 22, 2026

1946 Militant Zionist organization Irgun bombed the British headquarters for Palestine in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people and injuring 46

1991 Jeffrey Dahmer confessed to killing 17 men in 1978

2025  Trump announced a trade deal with Japan that would let Japan invest $550 billion into the United States and reduce the tariffs to 15%

2025 Trump announced a trade agreement with the Philippines that set a 19% tariff on Philippine exports to the United States, while U.S. goods entering the Philippines would be exempt from tariffs. 

In bed at 9:15, up at 6:05; 0615 203.0  122/72/61. 118. 203.0; 58/71/56, sunny morning, then partly cloudy.  

Morning meds at 8:30 a.m.    

I've come to a sad realization, an understanding that the reason I am not enjoying reading A Confederay of Dunces is that I see myself in the shlubby protaganist, Ignatius J. Reilly.  I'm quite confident that when I read it back in the 1980s,  I never identified myself with Reilly.  Now, however, I do, especially in his habit of writing down and saving his thoughts, his personal judgments, about the world, and Life, Modern Culture, and Other Human Beings.  Reilly is  a supreme marsicssist, with opinions about everything and everybody.  He is the center of his universe.  He thinks his opinions, his judgments, his analyses, are important enough to record and save.  In this regard,and othes, he is pathetic and delusional, but how am I different?  In one week, I will have completeda 4 years, almost 1500 days, of  daily journaling, but to what end?  I have often written little essays about why I engage in this effort and usually end up wondering whether it is not simply a futile effort to avoid death?  To have something of me to survive my corpse's becoming part of the composted soil in Fortest Home Cemetery's 'green burial' prairie?  This, even though I've long recognized that the few thousand pages of the journal that I've taken pains to print and save in looseleaf binders will all end up in an incinerator or landfill once I'm gone, along with my drawings and paintings, and other evidence of my existence. Vanitas, vanitatem, et omnia vanitas.  How am I different from Donald J. Trump vainly and foolishly trying to leave his imprint all over Washington, D.C., to survive his time in the White House, or Ignatius J. Reilly?

7/21/2026

 Tuesday, July 21, 2026

1925 John T. Scopes found guilty of teaching evolution in the “Scopes monkey trial”

1930 US Veterans Administration formed

1940 Soviet Union annexed Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania

1954 Geneva Accords for Indochina divided French colonial territories into the countries of North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos

2024 Joe Biden dropped out of presidential race and endorsed Kamala Harris

2025 The Venezuelan attorney general's office opened a formal investigation into Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele and his government's alleged mistreatment of Venezuelan migrants detained in the United States and sent to the CECOT megaprison, built to hold alleged gang members. 

In bed at 9:30, up at 4:05; 0420 119/67/65 117 203.6;70/80/61, mostly sunny, Beach hazards warnings - waves 4 to 9 feet, dangerous currents  

Morning meds at 9 a.m.

A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) by John Kennedy Toole.  I read this farcical novel many decades ago, shortly after it was published, or perhaps after it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981.  I enjoyed it very much on that first read, but I'm finding it a bit hard to plow through on this read.  It's a great satire of guys who spend many years in higher education, accumulate more than one degree, and are useless.  The 'hero' is Ignatius J. Reilly, a morbidly obese, flatulent, eructatious, gluttinous slug who, at age 30, lives with his mother in her home in New Orleans.  He spent 8 years at a university earning a bachelor's and a master's degree and has held a paying job for only 2 weeks.  "You could tell by the way he talked, though, that he had gone to school a long time. That was probably what was wrong with him.”  He is forced to seek work when his mother damaged a French Quarter balcony, the owner of which threatens to sue her.   Gainful employment, he laments, will interfere with his life's calling, which is writing a magnum opus criticizing all of modern life and culture, indeed criticizing every development in the world since the collapse of the medieval world.  "Employers sense in me a denial of their values...They fear me. I suspect that they can see that I am forced to function in a century which I loathe."  That's where I am so far in the novel.  Alas, I keep falling asleep while reading it..

Watering duties.  I watered the potted plants on the patio (and the hydrangeas) and the impatiens on the front stoop plus the several tufts of new grass where the two spruce trees once were.  

I spent the day feeling like crap again, half dead and approaching full.

7/20/2026

 Monday, July 20, 2026

1961 "Stop The World - I Want To Get Off" premiered

1969 Apollo 11 lunar module carrying Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin lands on the surface of the Moon.

1988 Michael Dukakis was selected as the Democratic nominee

In bed at 8:45, up at 5:55, then fell back to sleep after taking 'vitals' until 7:50; 0615 120/73/63 105 202.8; 69/85/60. cloudy,, AQI = 130 Unhealthy for sensitive groups,

Morning meds at ? a.m.    

Geri left for a week's visit in Urbana, IL, with her college buddy and near-lifelong friend, Kate Donovan.  Kate was widowed a few years ago when her husband, Mike, a physician, died.  Within the last year or so, she has had a issues with her heart, and recently had some sort of medical procedure on it (not an ablation.). With Geri gone all day, I've been pretty listless and brain-fogged, uninterested in writing anything until now, which is 8:15 p.m.  I find myself questioning again whether my journaling days are coming to an end.  I hope the answer is 'no,' because I fear that when I stop filling a part of my day with writing something, anything requiring some focussed thought, it will signal the end of any significant mental functioning and my descent into some form of senility.  I may be there already, semi-vegetating, sitting quietly, just trying to avoid pain and discomfort, not thinking of anything, nor meditating, just looking out the window at the birds and the passers-by outside.  I still check the headlines each morning in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and often the Washington Post, but I read very few of the stories under the headlines.  I avoid burdening my heart and brain with more and more news of the depredations, sins, lawlessness, and corruptions of Trump and his cabal of fellow crooks in his cabinet.  What's the point, I wonder.  I check the daily editorials and op-eds, but read only a few.  Ditto the articles in the online editions of The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Harper's.  Yesterday I gave up on reading Middlemarch, finding the 19th century literary prose of George Eliot, and the focus on the British gentry's social mores concerning "proper" and "right" marriage partners more than this second-generation descendent of Irish peasants can tolerate.  Now I'm in a quardary over what to read next, wanting to find a good story (I'm like a child: 'Tell me a story!') but thinking I'm in a bit of a rut with Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett.  I suspect that my disinterest in reading news stories may come from the same source as my lagging interest in writing in this journal, i.e. a diminishing interest in the world, in life.

7/19/2026

 Sunday, July 19, 2026

1692 5 more people were hanged for witchcraft (19 in all) in Salem, Massachusetts

1848 First US women's rights convention held in Seneca Falls, NY, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott

1984 Geraldine Ferraro became the 1st US female major-party vice-presidential nominee, officially joining Walter Mondale's Democratic Party ticket

In bed at 10, up at 5:15;  0530111/70/66 117 202.8, 0541 112/57/68;  64/77/64 mostly sunny, Beach hazards warnings, AQI =175 Unhealthy.

Morning meds at 10 a.m.  

Dinner last night with the Lowes at the Goldbergs

Life in a wildlife sanctuary.  While waiting for my coffee water to heat up, I saw out the window over our kitchen sink a passel of wild turkeys, 7 hens and 19 chicks, strutting across our side lawn, from east to west.  They reappeared later in the morning in our backyard.

Out of sorts again today.  Little thinking, no writing.  I started reading George Eliot's  Middlemarch yesterday but gave up today after 50 pages.  The Victorian writing style, the focus on 19th-century social customs among English propertied people and how it affected marriage choices by men and women - I just can't get into it.  The novel is almost 800 pages long and I don't want to force myself to read it.  I'm kicking myself for not getting a library copy of the book to check it out before wasting money on the Kindle version.  Not smart.

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