0827

August 27, 2022

 In bed around 10, up around 4:45, 3 pss, 2 glasses of red, day 7? of waking up with a backache, inevitably wondering about lung cancer or some other dread malady.  Life at 81😱  What do I need to be doing now to be 'getting my affairs in order' for Geri?  VA social worker?  Schmidt & Bartelt?  Forest Home?  Get on the ball, buddy.   Thinking about how dependent I am on her, how lost, adrift, alone, forlorn I would be without her anchoring my life.

    All the news sources remain heavily focused on the release of the redacted 37-page affidavit in support of the search warrant on Mar-a-Lago.  Among the most significant unredacted statements: "The FBI has not yet identified all potential criminal confederates."  The situation is what used to be callously called 'a fight in the leper colony' in my old law firm, people affected/infected by a common threat fighting one another to save themselves and throw others under the bus, to mix metaphors.  Who among those around True do we suppose NOT to be lawyered up?  Who can he trust?  Who can trust him?  I wonder about Ivanka and Jerrod, Stephen Miller, servants.  Such a powerful term "criminal confederates."

    Another piece in this morning's WaPo is about the likelihood of another Oklahoma City bombing, the hardening of the violent far right.    January 6th, the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, GOP political ads featuring candidates brandishing guns and hunting or targeting enemies.  Brings to mind all my direful predictions to Kitty over the last few years about a fascist takeover, me hoping I was wrong, her dreading that I might be right.  Not the 1860 War Between the States, but Northern Ireland 'Troubles' civil war.  Bombings, assassinations, sabotage.

    More in the intro to Moral Man & Immoral Society:

        "As Niebuhr once remarked, it was only an unusual individual who could feel his own power or his wisdom to be such that they could claim to be the center of the world.  As a consequence, most of us make this claim together,  through the community of which we are a part: a tribe, family, religion, nation, race, gender, profession, or church.  Serious sins are mostly communal sins. . . . We make the interests of our relevant group central to our thought and action, and so we give ourselves with all our loyalty and power to our group, to its security and success, and to its conquest and domination of competing groups.  Thus results the social group sins of historical life: sins of class, race, religion, nation, and gender.  These communities support, defend, and secure the individuals within them   - as the social power of men over women aids each man in his domination of women....  "

    Niebuhr wrote MM&IS in 1932, before WWII and Hiroshima, Dresden, Tokyo, and Nagasaki.  It was reissued in 1960, and in a preface to the 1960 publication, he reaffirmed his belief in the main points of the work.  He was a member of the faculty of Union Theological Seminary throughout most of his career.  I find myself wondering about what his thoughts about "God" were in 1932 and in 1960, what would they be today.

    Jimmy was here for dinner and a visit, linguini con vongole.  In a week, Steve will be here to take him away from us.