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September 8, 2022 

Stayed up late, reading, watching, and thinking.  By the time I went to bed, had finished a bottle of red and what was left in a bag of spice drops.  Trop!  Listening to Lawrence O'Donnell and Laurence Tribe and others discussing DOJ's options regarding Judge Cannon's decision in the Trump case reminded me of what I have thought for some time now: that we have passed the tipping point on the road to fascism in this nation.  This Cannon decision illustrates it.  Cannon a Trump appointee.  The 11th Circuit has 11 judges with 6 appointed by Trump.  And the Supreme Court is now thought of not as the Roberts Court, but as the Clarence Thomas Court.  Thanks to George H. W. Bush,  George W, Bush,  Donald J. Trump, Mitch McConnell, and others, even Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

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   I did some more work on the Calder geometric piece this afternoon.

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    I read an op-ed piece in the NYTimes this morning: "Your Childhood Home Is In Front of You.  Do You Go In?"  My childhood home was a 3-room flat in the basement of a 3-story, 12-unit apartment building at 7303 South Emerald Avenue in the now-notorious Englewood district of Chicago.  It was where my mother lived after my father was drafted into the Marines in WWII, fearing and fighting the cockroaches (benignly renamed 'water bugs) that shared the basement space.  It was where we all lived (in a manner of speaking) after my father returned at the end of 1945, war-wrecked, haunted by sights and sounds that never left him, brought back from Iwo Jima.  It was where, on September 30, 1947, my mother was slashed and raped by a knife-wielding neighbor boy who threatened to kill my 3-year-old sister and me unless my mother satisfied his demands.  He had killed another woman with his knife only days before in a parking lot of Englewood's big shopping district at 63rd and Halstead Street.  To answer the question posed in the op-ed: I can't go into that childhood home.  The building is gone, with only a vacant lot remaining.  Can't say the same of the memories from my time there.

Some of the Chicago newspaper coverage: [Wouldn't print]

Speed Stabbing, Sex Attack Trials

_________

(Picture on page 5)

Prosecution officials yesterday planned a speedy trial for James Hartmann, 15, of 710 W. 76th Street, for the murder of Mrs. Gracelyn Bush, 32, and for a sex crime against Mrs. Mary Clausen, 25.. . . Hartmann will be charged with robbery and a crime against nature for his offense against Mrs. Clausen, 7303 Emerald Avenue, whom he pulled out of bed and mistreated in her home Tuesday night.  He robbed her before fleeing.. . .

Remorseless and alert, Jimmy Hartmann scrawled his signature to two confessions in which he told in detail of the knife murder of Mrs. Gracelyn Bush, 35, on September 24 and the sex torture and robbery of Mrs. Mary Clausen, 25, last Tuesday night.”

. . .

After reading the two confessions, [State’s Attorney] Touhy released to newspapers the youth’s story of the Bush murder but withheld the statement on the Clausen case.

2nd Statement Shocking

It was one of the most shocking I have ever read,” the prosecutor said.  “It is too appalling, too atrocious to be read by the public.  Considerations of Mrs. Clausen would also require that it be withheld.. . . . . . . . 

I was 6 years old when James Hartmann stole into our basement apartment, put a knife to my throat and raped my mother.  She and my 3-year-old sister and I were all sleeping in the same bed at the time.  I have no conscious memory of the assaults and learned the specifics from my mother only when I was 22 years old and in the Marines.  I do remember the police being there after the crime, my father being home for his 2nd shift job, and waiting in my coat to be taken somewhere (aunt? uncle? grandparents?)  For years after the crime, however, I was bothered by nightmares of someone being present in the room where I was sleeping, someone dangerous, who I tried to scare away with loud moaning.  After September 30, 1947, each member of our family, except perhaps my younger sister, lived with some form of PTSD.

Sweeny Agonistes, T. S. Eliot

When you’re alone in the middle of the night and

you wake in a sweat and a hell of a fright 

When you’re alone in the middle of the bed and

you wake like someone hit you in the head

You’ve had a cream of a nightmare dream and

you’ve got the hoo-ha’s coming to you.

Hoo hoo hoo

You dreamt you waked up at seven o'clock and it's foggy

    and its damp and it's dawn and it's dark

And you wait for a knock and the turning of a lock for

   you know the hangman's waiting for you.

And perhaps you're alive

And perhaps you're dead

HOO HA HA

HOO HA HA 

HOO

HOO

HOO

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

KNOCK

KNOCK 

KNOCK

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