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 Tuesday, October 11, 2022

In bed by 9:30, up at 6:30, 4/5 pss, no vino.  After wondering if I have some family insomnia yesterday, I was in bed for 9 hours last night.  Go figure.

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We watched "Fences" last night, with powerful acting by Denzel Washington (who also directed) and Viola Davis.  It reminded me of  "Death of a Salesman" with Troy Maxson a Black Willie Loman.  Playwright August Wilson must have been very familiar with and influenced somewhat by Arthur Miller's drama.  It also reminded me painfully of my relationship with my own father.  I was also struck by how true it was to 'modern' Black history insofar as 3 of the 4 male characters were criminals, Troy for a robbery-related murder, Bono for I cant remember what, and older son Lyons for forgery.  Son Cory escapes a life marred by crime and incarceration only by joining the Marines.  Viola Davis as wife/mother Rose Lee Maxson struggles to hold the family together, to get Cory into college, and to raise Raynell, the child Troy had with another woman, Alberta who died in childbirth.  A lot of reality is reflected in the work, including the fact that none of the men with criminal convictions in his past is defined by the criminal conduct and incarceration.  Each has strengths and talent; each is 'more than his worst' conduct and history, reminding me of past visits to the maximum security prrison outside of Green Bay and restorative justice gatherings there.

    The hero/antihero Troy is 53 years old during the principal part of the play which is set in Pittsburgh in the 1950s so he was born probably in the 19oughts and lived with Jim Crow throughout his life.  This was before Brown v. Board of Education and before the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s.  A very talented baseball player, he played only in the Negro League with the likes of Satchel Paige and Jackie Robinson, until he broke the color barrier in 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers.  Robinson was 28 years old when he joined the Dodgers and by that time, Troy Maxson would have been about 40 or older, over the hill.  Nonetheless, Troy believed he didn't make the big leagues only because of his race and of course, in a sense, he may have been right despite the timing issue.

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This morning's NYT has a guest essay by clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster: "What Teenagers' Mental Health Can Tell Us About America."   "We seem to have forgotten that adolescents are lightning rods for the zeitgeist. They live at the fault lines of culture, exposing our weak spots and showing the available array of solutions and insolubilities. They are holding up a mirror for us to see ourselves more clearly." "B. also spoke to the contradictions of her parents, who seemed unhappy in their work, in their role as parents, in the privileges accorded to them, along with those denied to them, and were enraged by the political environment on all sides. Yet, she proclaimed, they were pushing their daughters toward the same kinds of achievements and the same lifestyle, and any sign of negative emotion from their children was seen as an attack, as if they were pointing out that the life they were given wasn’t any good when the reality of everything these parents said pointed to the fact that, well, life wasn’t so good. Why, she proclaimed, would she want any of this, and why do they want her to pretend as if she wants it? “They don’t even pretend they want it, really!” she exclaimed."

[Curiously, the following rather deprecatory essay in the op-eds is "Why Do People Think Going to Therapy Makes You a Good Person?"]

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Mah Nishtanah

GENEVA — Russia appears to have deliberately targeted civilians and critical infrastructure in its bombardment of Ukraine on Monday, which constitutes a war crime, the United Nations human rights office said on Tuesday.

 “I want to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction … and when the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, to protect Russia and our people, we will certainly use all means at our disposal,” Putin said on Sept. 21. “This is not a bluff.”

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Our Town

Milwaukee police say a 12-year-old girl was shot and killed on the north side Monday night. A 46-year-old woman was also struck and she is expected to survive.  The double shooting occurred in the 5300 block of North 38th Street around 6 p.m.  The girl was transported to a hospital, where she later died.  Police do not have anyone in custody. Anyone with any information is asked to contact Milwaukee Police at (414) 935-7360 or to remain anonymous, contact Crime Stoppers at (414) 224-Tips or P3 Tips.  Last week, a 12-year-old boy was shot in the Lincoln Creek neighborhood on Thursday and a 2-year-old boy, and two others, were shot while at the 21st & Keefe Park on Tuesday.

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Facebook Posting; Brainwashing

October 11, 2021, reposted today.

I listened this morning to an hour-long discussion of Facebook on NPR’s “One A.” I also listened to much of the recent congressional testimony of Facebook ‘whistleblower’ Frances Haugen.  A  good part of the finger-pointing at  Facebook and its now infamous algorithms focuses on the fact that users tend to stay on Facebook longer and to interact more frequently (or “engage”) with postings, and thus to increase Facebook's profits, when what they see and read on Facebook  makes them discontented, or frustrated, or angry, ‘riled up.’   Online disinformation, about covid, or vaccination or facemasks on the one hand, or about political adversaries on the other, is often designed precisely to stir up these feelings of discontent, frustration, anger or resentment.  Thus, disinformation, specifically of a  type to get people feeling bad, tends to increase Facebook’s profit by increasing user “engagement.”  None of this is surprising but it does call to mind the notion that we live in an age and in a culture where the manipulation of information of one sort or another is all around us all the time.  Public relations and advertising firms specialize in it.  Half-truths, and too often lies, are the coin of the realm for politicians and 'spin doctors.'.  We see it most recently in the ubiquity among Republicans of “The Big Lie” about the 2020 election, but we know that Democratic politicians are hardly innocent when it comes to half-truths and lies.  We have long known that the government itself is chronically guilty of misrepresentation and concealment of truth.  Look at Vietnam, Afghanistan, “weapons of mass destruction,” “enhanced interrogation,” and on and on.  In my own profession, lawyering, attorneys are forbidden by their code of ethics from deceit and misrepresentation (no laughter, please), but does it surprise anyone that concealment of truth and creating false impressions may be considered not only permissible for lawyers but a matter of duty?  But perhaps the sector of our economy and corporatist and consumerist culture that is most designed to stir up personal discontent and frustration is media advertising, especially television advertising.  Most commercials effectively say “If you buy my product or service, you will be happier than you are now without it.  If you don’t eat my cereal, ingest my medication, or drive my car, you will be less happy than those who do.  Buy, spend, acquire, improve your lot like all these inanely smiling consumers or hucksters (Joe Namath for Medicare Advantage programs???) we have hired to influence your thoughts, emotions, and spending choices.”  So it can come as little surprise that Mark Zuckerberg and his acolytes follow the lead of our political and business leaders in taking advantage of the gullibility and the emotional and intellectual malleability of his fellow citizens to serve his own purposes.  And it comes as even less of a surprise that Congress has been so reluctant to try to regulate the manipulation of “truth” and “facts” and “disinformation” when such manipulation is part of the lifeblood of our political and economic culture.

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Vatican II

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the opening of Vatican II.

Cataract

Geri's off for the ultrasound needed for her surgery.

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Borscht

My problematic sweet-sour borscht thawed over the last 3 days in the refrigerator.  Had a big bowl for lunch today, very edible but the cabbage lost its al dente crispness from having been frozen.  Three more containers are in the refrigerator.

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Not resting, doing laundry

Washed my bedding this afternoon while Geri was getting the ultrasound.  While the laundry was washing and drying, I watched Francois Truffaut's 1980 The Last Metro on Criterion.    An early dialogue caught my attention when actor Gerard Depardieu asked a stagehand at the theatre during the German Occupation in 1942 about the escape of the theater's director, Lucas Steiner, a Jew, the stagehand said 'they' came looking for him.  Depardieu asks "The Germans?" and the stagehand replies "No, the French." Steiner's wife, Catherine Deneuve, refuses to hire Jews and Depardieu must sign a certificate asserting that neither of his parents or any of his grandparents are/were Jews.  The setting of the movie is the Occupation and the Holocaust in France and overall it seems too dismissive of the War, the Occupation, and the Holocaust but it sure points a finger at French collaboration and complicity in Nazi brutality towards Jews, especially in the form of a theater critic. Daxiat.   The movie introduced me to a Nazi crime I hadn't been familiar with false Aryanization, a Jew signing over property to a gentile to avoid confiscation by the authorities.  Nonetheless, unlike the other New Wave movies I've watched, this one has some entertainment value and shows people as 3 dimensional and Life as not entirely nihilistic, bleak, Hobbesian, etc. And notably, there is a storyline that is linear and coherent and can be followed by an unsophisticate like me.  Corny, hokie ending, and very un-NewWavish. A decent way to spend time while the sheets and pillowcases are drying.

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Around 2:30, a cold front is moving in, the wind has picked up, and leaves are falling from the ash trees like snow.

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Illegal Abortion, Dobbs realized

Finished listening to Annie Ernaux's Happening on Audible.  Want to listen to the whole book again, or preferably to read it in print, but 7 holds on first return at the library, 47 holds on The Years,  27 holds on Do What They Say or Else.  Powerful memoir, a powerful critique of men and classism in 1960s France when abortions were illegal and probably now.  “Girls like me were a waste of time for doctors. With no money and no connections— otherwise we wouldn’t accidentally end up on their doorstep—we were a constant reminder of the law that could send them to jail and close down their practice for good. They would never tell us the truth, that they weren’t prepared to sacrifice their career for some sweet chick foolish enough to get knocked up”. . . . . . “As was often the case, you couldn’t tell whether abortion was banned because it was wrong or wrong because it was banned. People judged according to the law, they didn’t judge the law”. 

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Picked up Peter and Drew at Nicolet at 6:30.