1027

 Thursday, October 27, 2022

In bed after 11, up at 6:30, with various incoherent dreams, 3 glasses of red, 4 or 5 pss.  32 degrees out, a high of 53 expected and a sunny day.

Barbara Chase-Riboud; democrats in the WOW counties

During my long drive in Ozaukee and Washington counties yesterday as I listened to I Always Knew, I frequently thought 'This is almost unbelievable', a fairy tale.  Before she was 21, she was socializing with famous artists, like Menotti, architects, like Le Corbusier, and actors, like Charlton Heston from her bit part in Ben Hur.  From 1961 to 1971, she was married to renowned photojournalist Marc Riboud, from a fabulously wealthy French family.  Her sculpture was displayed at the first Spoleto international art fair when she was still a teenager.  She traveled the world, immensely privileged, an African-American female two years old than me, a contemporary.  And she was, I suppose not surprisingly or perhaps surprisingly, happy with her life and generally with Life.  This was in large measure because she lived, by choice, in Europe and not in the U.S.  I can't help but think of Privilege on my country drives outside Milwaukee, not necessarily in the sense of inherited wealth and status, but in the sense of 'living the American dream' with a house or farm in a beautiful location, 'far from the madding crowd' as Thomas Hardy put it.  Or as in Thomas Gray's  "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751):

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife

Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;

Along the cool sequester'd vale of life

They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

Boat launch at Little Cedar Lake

I know I am imagining or fantasizing when I think of the lives of the folks living in the countryside are unchallenged, untroubled, worry-free, and blissful, but I can't help comparing them to so many urban poor, especially Blacks in inner city ghettoes, men and mostly women I encountered at the House of Peace, getting free food in the Food Bank, free clothing in the Clothing Closet, free health care or consultations in our nursing clinic.  Black men in orange jumpsuits at the Milwaukee County Courthouse.  Mostly descendants of Blacks who came to Milwaukee in The Great Migration to work in the breweries, the foundries, the heavy industries of Allen-Bradley, A. O. Smith, Harnishfeger, Harley Davidson, and the great many smaller employers whose businesses supplied the big employers.  When the factory work disappeared, outsourced to Mexico, China, and Vietnam, life for the factory workers degenerated, especially for Blacks, and despite what seemed like hundreds of government programs to lift the community up, we are left with what we see now in the country's inner cities.  And all the problems compounded by White Backlash in the form of the contemporary Republican Party, Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, the social fabric of the country coming apart at the seams.  Each time I take one of my drives in the countryside, I wonder why anyone would expect people who live in the areas I drive through to vote Democratic when the Democratic Party has become so identified with racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, especially Blacks.  Lyndon Johnson was underestimating when he (apocryphally)  said, after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, that the Democrats had lost the South to the Republicans for a generation.  When Bill Clinton ("America's first Black president") signed NAFTA and Joe Biden's crime law in 1994, he made life worse for many urban Blacks.  The combination of the Democrats' identification with Blacks and other minorities and with the elites who pushed outsourcing American jobs, coupled with regulating everything from chewing gum to cow manure, the air we breathe and the water we drink, all this has led to the creation of a lot of yellow dog Republicans especially away from the cities.  There's some non-sequitur-ism in these thoughts, but they are thoughts that come to mind going for a ride in the country where yard signs for Democrats are rare as hens' teeth and Republican signs abound.  William Blake:

Every Night and every Morn,  Some to Misery are born.

Every Morn and every Night,   Some are Born to Sweet Delight.

Some are Born to Sweet Delight, Some are Born to Endless Night.

Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Poorly

My paintings, my drawings, my journaling.  If I had to do these activities well, I would not do them.  Every drawing, every painting, and every journal entry has errors, mistakes, and imperfections but if I weren't able to engage in these activities because of falling short of high standards, my life would be emptier and less worth living.  Three cheers for low standards.

Jimmy

Katherine reports that he has taken to calling her and Jordan "Geri" and "Chuck."  I miss him.

Macadamia Nuts

Learned today the hard way not to eat big fistfuls of macadamia nuts.

YouTubeTV

God bless Steve K. who called and led us through all the steps to find and select programs on YouTubeTV.

Zeke Emanuel and the Ballad of Narayama

I saw Dr.  Ezekiel Emanuel interviewed on a cable news show this morning, about the upcoming flu and covid season.  Reminded me of the article in the October 2014 Atlantic that he authored "WHY I HOPE TO DIE AT 75: An argument that Society and families—and You—will be better off if nature takes its course swiftly and promptly. " It's a longish article but this was pretty much its gist: ". . . here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, and the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic." [Of course, he was describing ME at 81 going on 90].  Emanuel was 57 when he wrote it and is 65  now.  I wonder how he will feel as he nears that 75-year mark.  The article(which I printed off and have retained since 2014) reminds me of the 1983 Japanese movie The Ballad of Narayama, a story of a hamlet in 19th century Japan with a custom that when villagers attained the age of 70, they would go or be taken up a mountain where they would be left to die of hunger and exposure, a practice known as ubasute or omasute.  The idea was that resources were so scarce for villagers that they couldn't be shared with nonproductive useless oldsters. who consumed resources but did not contribute to creating them.   Long ago, I read a book by the Dane Peter Freuchen called Eskimo in which he described a similar custom obtained among indigenous people, Eskimos or Inuits, in the Arctic who had to be mobile to follow and hunt their food.  If an elder was slowing the family down, threatening its survival, an igloo would be built for him or her, with no exit, and he or she would be left to die (but protected by the igloo from predators, at least till the thaw.)  What would the 'pro-life' people say about these rational utilitarian choices to sacrifice the few to save the many?  I wonder what Zeke Emanuel thinks of assisted suicides?