0921

September 21, 2022

 In bed before 10, awake at 3:40, out of bed before 4, und. pss, one cognac.

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8:40 tonight marks the arrival of the autumnal equinox.  Andy told me yesterday that folklore has it that one can balance an egg upright on this night due to the earth's magnetic field and axis tilt.  In any case, as the rising sun moves steadily south over Lake Michigan, the sunlight streaming through the window in our east-facing family room moves steadily north, moving from Jimmy's glider chair across the long expanse of the sofa, ending on the face of the fireplace. "As sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our life.' 

     One benefit of all the car frustrations we've been enduring recently is that I've had a lot of great conversations with Andy about his family, Life, work, legal education, and the state of the world.  His views are always interesting to me and have been since he was a tyke.  Last night he was coaching Drew's flag-football team since the originally-designated coach somehow took a powder.  Today he leaves work early to be home when the dishwasher installation guy gets there.  After that, we're hoping that the Lexus is repaired and that Andy can pick it up and drive it safely.  I'm a bit fearful that the mechanic's substitute customized solution won't work.  Maybe I'm just down on auto repair operators right now, no surprise. . . . . Andy called @ 11:45, Lexus ready.  Picked me up to drop him off at Andrew Toyota.  Hallelujah.

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The morning news is distressing: Putin has mobilized the reserves.  It calls to mind my experience after I resigned my regular commission in the Marines and was on 'standby reserve' (or whatever it was called) for 2 years, i.e., fresh from active service, ready to slide right into active duty, and subject to recall at any time.  Those 2 years coincided with my 1st and 2nd year of law school, and a very few of my classmates thought it was humorous to misinform me, as President Johnson kept increasing the number of troops in Vietnam, that he had 'called up the reserves.'  To me, of course, it was as funny as a broken crutch or a heart attack.  Neither Johnson nor Nixon ever did activate the reserves for service in Vietnam, probably out of fear that there would be rioting in the streets and massive opposition, especially after 1968.  One wonders how what Putin is calling a 'partial mobilization' will be received by the Russian populace.

    The mobilization news also increases concern that Putin and his plodding military will resort to the use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical or other unconventional weapons, or some combination thereof.  [“To those who allow themselves such statements about Russia, I want to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction, and some components are more modern than those of the NATO countries,” Putin said.]  The thought of Putin and his military being backed into a corner is troubling, to say the least.  In his speech announcing the call-up of 300,000 reserve troops, he also again uttered a nor-so-veiled threat of using nuclear weapons.  His almost mystical belief in Mother Russia, the Russian Empire, Russkiy Mir, egged on by Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church, makes the Ukraine 'special military operation' almost a holy war, a crusade, in the mind of hyper-nationalist Putin.  If possible, holy wars are even more ruthless, less inhibited than 'ordinary wars'.  All's fair, sanctioned, and even demanded by God.

    By happenstance, I was listening to Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony, the Pathetique, in my AirPods as I read the news out of Russia.  Seemed appropriate, especially the 4th movement, the adagio lamentoso.  My very first classical record purchase as a teenager was Tchaikovsky's 6th, a cheapie at our local National Foodstore.

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    Robin Givhan is my favorite writer at the WaPo.  Her piece this morning is on King Charles III, including this: "The new king is the embodiment of so many traditions and injustices that Western culture is struggling to come to terms with — stolen land, stolen wealth, stolen labor, stolen hope — and among them is the notion of inevitability." Anyone with more than a smidgen of knowledge of British history should be their tendency to gag a little at all the pomp and circumstance surrounding his mother's funeral. 

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    Watched Godard's second feature film, Le Petit Soldat, set mostly in Geneva during the French Algerian War.  Brutal scenes of torture (burning flesh, near drowning, water-boarding, electric shock) by French intelligence agents on the protagonist, Bruno Forestier, an amoral French citizen believed to have desired information about Algerian agents.  Interesting colloquy between the protagonist and Algerian agent girlfriend:  Bruno: It's funny how everybody hates the French today.  I'm very proud to be French.  But I'm also against nationalism.  One defends ideas, not territories.  I love France because I love Joachim du Bellay and Louis Aragon.  I love Germany because I love Beethoven.  I don't love Barcelona because of Spain.  I love Spain because a city like Barcelona exists and America because I love American cars."   The French operatives end up torturing and killing Bruno's girlfriend, who was an aide of some sort for the Algerians whom she supported simply because 'they have an ideal, the French have no ideal.'  All of the characters in this film seemed like moral and emotional zombies to me, the living dead.  Watching this film and Breathless together lead me to wonder what Godard's moral and emotional state was when he made them.  I keep in mind that France was very much in the post-WWII recovery period in 1969, recovering from German occupation, living with those who collaborated with the Germans during the occupation, defeat by the colonized Vietnamese at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, reliant on the U.S. for financial and other support, and fighting a vicious was in Algeria.  The era of Camus and L'Etranger, Sartre and Huis Clos [L'enfer, c'est les autres.]  A profoundly depressing movie.  In any case, none of the characters in this film seems much alive, morally or emotionally.  So, so far, I'm not a big Godard fan though I'll try to watch some of his other films.

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Old friend Janine Geske, MULS class of 1975, posted a VERY complimentary essay she wrote about me in 2008 for the MULS Faculty Blog, with an official faculty photo of me in my 'salad days'.  I couldn't recognize the person she wrote about.  Reminded me of the classic old Lone Ranger show: 'Who WAS that masked man?'