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 Friday, November 4, 2022

In bed at 10:10, up at 1:10, unable to sleep.  Went into the tv room to use the computer, Lilly was awake, lying on the rug in front of my recliner and moved to her living room mattress.  Thinking about the wireless printer problem and inability to connect with WiFi LAN.  Hoping to be back in bed in the not-too-distant future. . . .  Approaching 4 a.m., still awake, having read MSOnline and WaPo, holding off on NYT, Atlantic, and New Yorker.  Went downstairs to see if pushing the 'reset' button on the new router might magically connect our printer: but no such luck.  Started browsing Donald Hall's Essays After Eighty, starting with -

Donald Hall, Out the Window

"Today it is January mid-month, midday android-New Hampshire.  I sit in my blue armchair looking out the winder.  I teeter when I walk, I no longer drive, I look out the window.  Snow started before I woke . . . .I watch birds come to my feeder, hanging from a clapboard in my line of sight.  All winter, juncos and chickadees take nourishment here. When snow is as thick as today, the feeder bends under the weight of a dozen birds at once.  They swerve from their tree perches, peck, and fly back to bare branches.  Prettily they light, snap beaks into seed, and burst away: nuthatches, evening grosbeaks, American goldfinches, sparrows. . . . After a life of loving the old, by natural law I turned old myself. . . . then came my cancers, Jane's death, and over the years I traveled to another universe.  However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy.  It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life.  They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennas.  They can be pleasant, they can be annoying - in the supermarket, these old ladies won't get out of my way - but most important they are permanently other.  When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial.  If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances."

. . . .

Reading printed pages is a challenge for me at any time because of the nasty combination of presbyopia and dry eyes, but I learn that reading between 4 a.m. and 4:15 a.m., on 3 hours of sleep, is not in the cards.  Typing these jottings is easy enough because of my fingers' muscle memory of where each key on the keyboard is AND my laptop's ability to increase font size AND its ability to increase and decrease screen brightness.  But the printed page, no such luck.  It's 4:30 and I'm thinking the morning talking head shows will come on at 5, "Morning Joe" with the incredibly rude know-it-all Joe Scarborough and wife, the tsk-tsking Mika Brzezinski, and the CNN show with the new line-up of Don Lemon, Poppy Harlow, and Kaitlan Collins replacing John German and my long favorite Brianna Keiller, who I now see on Jake Tapper's afternoon show, permanent partner or temporary fill-in, who knows.  In any event, I don't want to turn on the television because . .  well, because.  I still hope to nod off into LaLa Land. . .  . Back to bed at 6 a.m. and slept until 8:30 when I was awakened by my phone with a fundraising appeal supposedly from the campaign of Republican Joe O'Dea running for the Senate in Colorado against Michael Bennett.   Gonna be a long day.

Barbara Chase-Riboud

Yesterday driving about on my errands, I listened to more of I Always Knew.  It is still almost hard to believe that she led the life that she did as a young American Black woman, some of its wonderfulness attributable to her already high status as a sculptor, perhaps more attributable to her marriage to Marc Riboud, his high status as a photojournalist and artist, and his membership in the tres haute bourgeois Riboud family.  His most famous photo is probably the young woman with a flower in her hand facing a line of rifle-bearing soldiers at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration at the Pentagon in 1967.  

 The letters I listened to yesterday were written from France during the year I spent outside Philadelphia, Barbara's hometown where her family still lived.  It was my first year back from Vietnam and the Far East, the year of my every-six-day dread and anxiety as a CACO.  It was the year the U. S. Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia, declaring unconstitutional laws forbidding interracial marriage (miscegenation to some, mongrelization to others) such as Barbara Chase's marriage to Marc Riboud.  Virginia and 15 other states had such laws on the books in 1967.  On April 15, 1967, huge demonstrations in New York and San Francisco and elsewhere drew hundreds of thousands of protestors demonstrating against the Vietnam War, including Martin Luther King,  It was a turbulent time to be an American, probably more turbulent for me because I was still a Marine, raised Catholic and compliant, called upon occasionally to give luncheon addresses about the war to local Rotary and other clubs, all the time believing, as I did in Vietnam, 'this is not going to end well.'  After I was discharged, there were 'race riots' in Milwaukee, in Newark with 27 dead, and in Detroit with 46 killed.  With my personal situation during those years, late 66 and early 67, so different from Barbara's in Paris, it is hard to relate to her ebullience in the letters to her mother.  But I appreciate that she was young, life was good for her, and she was an almost incredibly gifted, accomplished, and celebrated artist.  She wrote 6 novels, 6 books of poetry, and created many, many sculptures and drawings.  A truly extraordinary, accomplished human being.

Denny the Downer

    For years I burdened my dear sister with predictions that America is turning hard right.  I still feel that way though I recognize that as much as anything my fears are rooted in a deep-seated pessimism in me.  I'll see how rational a prognosticator I am next week.

Wisconsin: Barnes loses, Evers loses

Pennsylvania: Fetterman loses to Charlatan, Mastriano loses

Arizona: Keri Lake beats Hobbs, Mark Kelly loses to Blake Nimrod

Georgia: Stacey Abrams loses to Kemp, ?? Herschel Walker, Warnock

Florida: Val Demings loses to Rubio, DeSantis beats Crist

Texas: Greg Abbott wins over Beto O'Rourke

Ohio: J. D. Vance wins over Tim Ryan

New Hampshire: Hassan over Bolduc

North Carolina: Budd over Beasley

Nevada: Laxalt beats Cortez Masto

NBC News is reporting that Trump intends to announce his candidacy for a second term soon after the midterm next week, hoping to follow in the footsteps of his corrupt right-wing buddy, Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel is always facing the issue of National Identity, whether it can exist as a Jewish state and a democracy with its demographics. We have been going through an Identify Crisis since at least the political campaigns leading up to the 2016 selection of Trump's the Republican standard bearer and the defeat of Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote.  Ditto the 2020 campaign when compromise candidate and perennial Joe Biden was selected and won both the popular vote and the Electoral College, but occasioned a widespread rejection of election votes by Republicans.   Joe Biden gave a big speech the other night warning that 'democracy is on the ballot' next Tuesday, seemingly thinking that everyone considers 'democracy' and specifically American-style 'democracy' is a universal value.  Niebuhr asserts, correctly I think, that no one wants democracy for its own sake, but rather one accepts democracy as a compromise out of the realization that we can't always get our way.  If we could count on always getting our way, we would scrap democracy in favor of Power.  

Niebuhr: " . . . . when collective power, whether in the form of imperialism or class domination, exploits weakness, it can never be dislodged unless power is raised against it. . . . Conflict is inevitable and in this conflict power must be met with power. . . . Contending factions in a social struggle require morale that is created by the right dogmas, symbols, and emotionally potent oversimplification. . . . The world of history, particularly in man's collective behavior, will never be conquered by reason, unless reason uses tools, and is itself driven by forces that are not rational.

Reminded of Oriana Fallaci: "No matter what system you live under, there is no escaping the law that it is always the strongest, the cruelest, the least generous who win."

It's similar to the situation with the touted "Rule of Law."  No one really believes that Law is always a Good to be valued.  Sometimes Law is good, often it is not.  Law in one way or another reflects the will of the Powerful, not the will of the Good.  Witness the American tax code.  Witness our 'sacred' Constitution and its minoritarian bias.  Republicans today simply act out their self-interest. If Democracy disfavors their interests, the hell with Democracy.  Limit the franchise by restrictive laws and gerrymanders and acquire control of the apparatus of vote-counting.  Truth be told, Democrats would operate the same way if they could.  The Republicans are just much much better at instrumental politics than the Democrats are: stronger, most cruel, least generous.  Look at Mitch McConnell's handling of the nominations of  Merrick Garland and Amy Coney Barrett.