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One A Monday, December 12, 2020

In bed @ 9:30. up at 5, ? pss, no toddy.  32 cloudy degrees, high of 37.

The Reinvention of the Catholic Church is my morning read (or one of them) in The Atlantic online.  Written by Paul Elie, who wrote a collection of biographies of Catholic writers that I read some years ago and enjoyed.  He reviews a new book written by John T. McGreevy Catholicism: A Global History From the French Revolution to Pope Francis.  I was struck by the similarity in the driving forces behind the Church and the U.S. government and Capitalism: fear of and opposition to Democracy and to socialism and communism.  Fascism is OK as long as it doesn't threaten traditional power structures like the Church and Capitalism. Hence the Church's official neutrality during WW II, its support of fascist Franco in the Spanish Civil War and thereafter and his support of the Church, the cozy modus vivendi with Central American authoritarian government against socialist/communist insurgents, its concordats with Mussolini and with Hitler.  Elie points out that it's always clear what the Church is against, but not so clear what the Church is for (other than I suppose the cliche: pray, pay, and obey.)  He also focuses on the Church's historic opposition to "modernism" without mentioning Pious IX's (he of Immaculate Conception fame) Syllabus of Errors.

Nursing Home 'Care' and The Ballad of Narayama  This morning's JSOnline carries a USA Today story entitled "Many nursing homes are poorly staffed. How do they get away with it?"  It focuses on the staffing needs of nursing homes, but what I thought of as I read it was what it reveals about the lives of the patients, their inability to care for themselves, bathe, get to a toilet, etc.  Hard to avoid thinking of these places as anything other than warehouses for the old and incapables.  And state and federal enforcement of staffing and other standards is virtually non-existent, a cruel joke.  Nightmare living conditions, degradation, diapers, pain, discomfort, fear, helplessness.  Some patients in them simply 'recovering from a fall.'  Should I buy a pistol to avoid such an ending?  What if I have a stroke and lose the ability to end it all?  Euthanasia illegal.  Assisted suicide illegal.  Suicide illegal.  Marijuana, cocaine, heroin, psychedelics illegal.  The only legal and I think constitutionally-protected way out is VSED, voluntarily stopping eating and drinking, but the choice may not be available when needed. Land of the free and home of the brave.

"Financial filings required of REITs offered insight into how corporate chains and REITs can make money off Medicare and Medicaid, the federal health insurance programs for seniors and people with disabilities.  The nursing home industry’s corporate layers can result in individual facilities posting losses while investors profit off their parent companies, according to attorney Ernie Tosh, who maintains a national database of nursing home financial information used by other lawyers filing lawsuits for families and prosecutors fighting fraud.“That is why people die,” Tosh said. “The facilities would rather take that profit than staff correctly.”"

American Capitalism.

Kitty has been gone longer than 9 months now.  In coming out of the library this afternoon, I randomly opened a book on aging that I had just picked up.  The page I opened to had Elizabeth Bishop's fine poem One Art on it.  It made me think of Kitty and had me wondering 'am I now at a point of not thinking of her every day?'  and, if so, is this a good thing or bad?

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day.  Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

. . . . .

I lost my mother's watch.  And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones.  And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it isn't a disaster.

Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident

The art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster. 

Long ago my saintly, heroic mother, then my late-engaged father, and now Kitty, with who I shared so much of our mother and father, the only person in the world who knew what we knew of life in the basement, life on Emerald Avenue, life in St. Leo parish.  Such a hole in my life that she alone used to fill.