0803

August 3, 2022

 Down at 10, up at 6, 4 pss, snifter of cognac before bed.

    Kansas voters rejected, by a 19 or so point margin a constitutional change that would have permitted its Republican legislature to ban or sharply limit abortion.  A lot of Trump-supported fascists won their primaries, and some lost.

    I fell this morning, or did I?  In moving between my chair and the ottoman in front of it, I did some awkward move toward the Venetian blinds on the window, lost my balance, and fell into my chair.  Does this count as a fall?  I think it does.  Loss of balance, and unintended movement from standing to sitting, even though it was into the comfort of my regular chair.  

    I watched a documentary the other night titled "Germans and Jews."  It focused on the relationship between Germans and Jews since the Holocaust.  At the very beginning of the film, a Jewish man says "My father told me there were only two kinds of people in the world, Jews and Nazis."  I thought at the time that the statement properly understood was correct, that the world can be divided between the exploiters/oppressors and the exploited/oppressed.  I think of it now though along with the statement by Alexandre Solzhenitzen that 'the battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.' There are times and circumstances when I fill the role of the Nazi, and times when I am the Jew.  I think about this now because I have become so conscious of my complicity in so much badness throughout my long life.  It must be why for so long I have considered as my 'favorite' (a bad choice of words) bit of poetry are Yeats' lines in "Vacillation":

Responsibility so weighs me down.

Things said or done long years ago,

Or things I did not do or say

But thought that I might say or do,

Weigh me down, and not a day

But something is recalled,

My conscience or my vanity appalled.

As I think these thoughts I am reminded of a theory I heard some years ago about the Last Judgment, i.e., that the Judgment will not consist of  God or Christ weighing our deeds and separating the sheep from the goats as in Matthew 25: 31-46, but rather simply facing a mirror which reveals each of us as we were and are, no ignoring or hiding from the truth of our sins, our faults, our failings, our cruelties, our indifference to the suffering of others, just in living a life in a Consumer Culture, an America First nation.  L'enfer, c'est les autres et l'enfer, c'est moi.  We have met the enemy and he is us.  A jumble of thoughts in an old mind.

   I filled two pages of my current Canson watercolor paper booklet Chronicle.  One is a tracing and drawing of Alfred E. Neuman, and the facing page is a list of distressing current headlines regarding 1/6 coverups, gun culture, climate change, and the pandemic.  What, me worry?

    Nancy Pelosi stopped in Taiwan today with what? to gain and potentially so much to lose.  Feet of clay.

    I watched another documentary on OVID, "Wifi Howls from Happiness," about the Iranian artist/painter/sculptor Bahman Mohasses, released in 2014.  Excerpt from his conversation/monologue with the director: "I am a human rights prisoner.  A worm has the right to crawl the earth, but I don't have that right.  So when they say, democracy or dictatorship, it's all the same to me.  Democracy is just as rotten as a dictatorship.  One loses one's faith."  Reminded me, but by way of contrast, with the op-ed in this morning's NYTimes "The Violent Fantasies of Blake Masters" by Sam Adler-Bell about Masters, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, and (unmentioned) Ayn Rand.