1016

 Sunday, October 16, 2022

In bed at 9:30, long, slow awakening at 5:25, out of bed at 5;30, 5 pss, no vino, waking up realizing it is Sunday, thinking of church for some reason and De Hoang's reverence for the Catholic Church, his long speech in Vietnamese's at Anh & Andy's wedding about faithfulness to the Church, his goodness.

Happy, happy, happy

I turned on the TV  around 6 to see if there would be anyone I cared to listen to on any of the Sunday morning talk shows.  Good Morning America came on and I saw again, as I always do, that the principal requirement to be a regular on any of these television morning shows is the ability to be invincibly happy, cheerful, laughing at the drop of a hat.  National shows, local shows, all of them: happy, happy, happy.  Just like American television commercials, consuming Americans not only always smiling and happy, happy, happy with their purchased products and services, but so deliriously happy they break into spontaneous dancing once they have purchased the hawked product.  The producers of these shows and commercials and designers of political ads tell us much about what the "influencers," the professional propagandists, the hidden persuaders know about us, know about the American public.  They know how to pull our chains, and push our buttons and what they reveal about us is ugly.  Can it be any wonder that so many hate our culture, including millions who live in it?  Can it be any wonder that our polity is so exploitable, so manipulable by the likes of Putin and Trump?

Sunday morning activities

Load of laundry, fill two weeks medicine boxes, CBH & basted eggs, check & eschew Sunday morning talk shows. let Lilly out, let Lilly in, let Lilly out, let Lilly in, let . . . .

I Can't Breathe

A Small Needful Fact

by Ross Gay

Is that Eric Garner worked for some time for the Parks and Rec. Horticultural Department, which means, perhaps, that with his very large hands, perhaps, in all likelihood, he put gently into the earth some plants which, most likely, some of them, in all likelihood, continue to grow, continue to do what such plants do, like house and feed small and necessary creatures, like being pleasant to touch and smell, like converting sunlight into food, like making it easier for us to breathe.

Of the countless brutal unnecessary unjustified killings of unarmed, unthreatening Black men by heavily-armed White law enforcement officers, the one that tears the hardest into my heart is the chokehold strangulation of Eric Garner, arrested on Staten Island by NYC police for selling 'loosies', individual cigarettes to the many potential buyers unable to afford the price of a pack of cigarettes in NYC.  Husband, father of six, family man, trying to earn a living as a streetcorner entrepreneur, a capitalist, serving a market created by high sales taxes imposed by the NYC government.  Dying words: "I can't breathe."  The killing police officer of course not charged with any crime by the investigating prosecutors and grand jury.

Donald Trump, January 6th, and the Elusive Search for Accountability

Susan Glasser, the Atlantic, October 13, 2022

"So did any of the committee’s work matter? When the January 6th hearings began, on June 9th, Trump’s average approval rating in the polls was 41.9 percent, and his average disapproval rating was 53.5 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight. As the hearings ended, Trump’s average approval rating stood at 40.4 percent. All that damning evidence and the polls were basically unchanged. The straight line in the former President’s approval rating is the literal representation of the crisis in American democracy. There is an essentially immovable forty percent of the country whose loyalty to Donald Trump cannot be shaken by anything."

Probably enough to carry the day, carry the elections, carry the country into its dark night, year, decade, more?

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,

The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,

The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,

The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,

Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,

Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,

And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha

And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,

And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.

And we all go with them, into the silent funeral

from T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets,  East Coker,  III

Dinner at Culver's, good cod sandwich for me, not good Reuben for Geri.