Tuesday, November 8, 2022
Election Day
In bed, exhausted, at 9, up at 5, unk. pss, no vino. Katherine's 53rd birthday. 44 degrees outside, a high of 51i is expected. Sunrise at 6:35 in clear skies expected to turn cloudy later, how appropriate on this day.
Dies Irae
Denny the Downer expects a bad day today, enough Republican victories to gain control of both the House and the Senate, to return Ron Johnson to the Senate for another 6 years and to put Tim Michels in the governor's mansion in Madison. If my fears turn out, the country will have made a hard right turn towards fascism heading into the 2024 presidential election and another Republican victory. By that time, I may well be dead already, but Geri, our children and grandchildren, and millions of others will live under (an appropriate preposition) that government. Trumpist Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, the White House, and a solid majority of state governments. With that kind of control, they will structure the apparatus of government so as to make regaining control via the election process by small 'd' democrats too difficult to accomplish. The process will be aided throughout by the anti-democratic Constitution the revered Founding Fathers left us, as interpreted by the likes of Thomas, Alito, Coney Barrett, Gorsuch, Roberts, and Kavanaugh. I know it's a dystopian and extreme vision and that such visions are usually way overblown, grossly distorted, and wrong, but 'timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes.'
Norah O'Donnell too?
This morning's WaPo: ‘Democracy is at stake’: TV news braces for election night chaos. Ballot-box confrontations. Legal challenges. And what if a candidate claims premature victory? ‘Democracy is at stake,’ says one anchor.
"Viewers tuning in to live coverage of the midterm elections Tuesday night will probably find the usual busy graphics of updating vote tallies, the celebratory scenes from far-flung hotel ballrooms and the familiar studio panels of pundits holding forth on what it all means. But for the first national election night since the cycle that culminated in an attack on the U.S. Capitol, broadcast networks will have to look far beyond the vote tallies. There could be live reports on confrontations at local ballot boxes. Deep analysis of down-ballot races that never previously made the grade for the national news.And if a candidate in a close race takes the podium to declare victory? Don’t expect the cameras to turn that way in a hurry. “I feel an incredible responsibility to get it right,” said CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell, who has been covering elections since 1996. “I think democracy is at stake.”
A shopping trip with Barbara Chase-Riboud
I drove up to Saukville/Port Washington this morning to get some 'necessaries' at Walmart: CBH, Lilly's toppings, and birdseed. I stayed on county roads and off the freeway to lengthen the drive as I continued listening to I Always Knew. I had been wondering when her narrative and letters would get to the dissolution of her marriage which I sensed was coming just from the extraordinary amount of time they spent 'doing their own thing(s)'. He was literally all over the world with his camera covering wars and other current events and she was pursuing her own interests with her sculpting and then her poetry and eventually her novels and her friendship/editing relationship with Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis and the writing & publication of Sally Hemings. They spent relatively little time with each other as a married couple, which, depending on many circumstances, can be a bad thing or a good thing. In their case, it eventually led to the end of the marriage. Even before the divorce, it seemed like they also spent a lot of time away from their two sons, who were off skiing in the Alps or enjoying themselves with cousins on the Riviera. In any event, she spends precious little time discussing the late stage of their marriage either in the narrative portion of the book nor in her letters to her mother. She also says precious little about writing poetry and getting it published. She does discuss a bit the impetus to writing about Sally Hemings, but mostly in terms of the role of Jackie O as a friend and editor at Viking Press. Disappointing. I've now spent more than 18 hours with the readings with another 5 remaining to the end. I suppose I will see (or hear) it through to the end now that I'm this far into it, especially since I listen to it only while doing something else, driving or cleaning up the kitchen. Today's drive provided the opportunity for a "binge listen" and also an opportunity to drive by a favorite site, the elk farm in Grafton, reminding me of driving there with my Dad and with Jimmy.
Notes from the French documentary Far From Vietnam (1967)
US v. Vietnam Biggest industrial and military power of all time v. Vietnam, (mid-60s populations) 200,000,000 v. 17,000,000 "It is in Vietnam that the main question of our times arises: the right of the poor to establish societies based on something other than the interests of the rich."
[Alain Resnais, William Klein, Joris Ivens, Claude Lelouch, Jean-Luc Godard,] Les guaves, cluster bombs, "mother bomb" sends out 300 smaller bombs in a radius of one kilometer. Each one releases 600 bomblets at the human level which have almost no effect on metal or concrete. Their logical target is human flesh. A4s, F4s, A10s, F8s [American bombardment of N. Vietnam reminds me of the Russian bombardment of Ukraine, Vietnamese found ways to defend, protect, resist, and endure, simple round concrete bomb shelters with concrete lids designed to hold 1 or 2 people, buried along streets in Hanoi] Films of women, children, elderly, dead, wounded. weeping April 1967, Humphrey visits Europe, and hundreds of demonstrators protest. NYC April 29, 1967, War Veterans Day pro-war better dead than red Wall Street, May 1, 1967, Anti-War demonstration capitalist 'suits' jeering the protestors, shouting 'Bomb Hanoi, bomb Hanoi'
"It''s the first war that everybody can see at the same time. Nobody has seen a war that close- while it is actually happening. Nobody can say: "If I'd known . . ." Now they know, they see it. This war is filthy. Not only the pope says it. Also others. . . They see it. The bombs really kill, the bullets really make holes. Poor little orphans, lost in a world they don't understand. And what? Pity, fear, ... all happening in a piece of furniture. Not in Vietnam, heads, streets, but in a piece of furniture. Furniture isn't scary. We have the Vietnam War in our living room. On the news. . . . . . . The Americans are the Vietnamese Germans. . . . Everybody's for Vietnam, it gives every a good conscience. It's joy, rights, and freedom, because Vietnam is a victim of America, and Americans are horrible, different, ignorant, tyrants, and colonialists. There are 40 million anti-colonialists in France. It went unnoticed during the war in Algeria. . . . The Americans in Vietnam. They send out the negroes and the farmers. So the students have the luxury of protesting. And society has the luxury of having students who protest. . . . . . The Germans being Fascists was expected. Almost because they were German. But the Americans! Proper people, democratic. All the workers have cars. And pacifists. Violence is for the others, war is for the others. They had to go to war to help the others. But now it's over.
On July 20, 1954, a French general and a Viet Minh official signed the Geneva Agreements. The French war in Indochina is over. The Vietnam War, the American war has already started. From the end of 1949, to include France in the Atlantic Alliance, Washington helps France to maintain itself in Indochina. In 1951, 3 years before Geneva, Ho Chi Minh designates the Americans as the revolution's opponents. It is true that the war is now financed by Washington. April 1954, Dien Bien Phu capitulates. . . elections, reunion within 2 years. Washington won't agree, and only says they will not break the agreements by force. At the end of July 1954, the Americans, without fighting or making promises, managed to get the victors at Dien Bien Phu to give up 1/3 of the territory that Giap had won by force. By ignoring the Geneva Agreements, the negotiation becomes a fool's deal. The Vietnamese will remember that in the future when negotiations are suggested to them. The Viet Minh has signed agreements with the French, but the Americans recognize none of them. Second American operation: the settling of the regime of the Catholic Mandarin. The elections that were agreed to be held in 1956 are canceled. Eisenhower writes in his memoirs that an election in wartime would have given 80% of the votes to the communists. . . . In February 1962, Washington announces the creation of an American command in Vietnam, thus making its military intervention in the civil war public. . . . The Americans throw off their masks on February 8, 1965. Incapable of winning the war on the ground, in the jungles and rice fields of South Vietnam, they move it over to the North, normalizing the bombings.
LYNDON JOHNSON TOLD THE NATION, Tom Paxton
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