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 Wednesday, December 21, 2022

Winter Solstice

In bed around 10:15, up at 4:30, one cognac.  The solstice brings the coldest day of the year so far, 4 below zero, wind out of the NW at 8 mph,  wind chill 9 below, expected high in the 20s.  Sunrise at 7:20, sunset at 4:19, 8 hours, 59 minutes of sunlight.  Longer than yesterday?  Let Lilly out at 4:30. She was out 5 minutes or more, hot-footed back to bed once in.

Morning TV coverage of Trump's Taxes.  I watched Fox & Friends for its first 1/2 hour on-air: zero mention of Trump's tax returns.  CNN Morning program went 16 minutes before any mention then a @ 2 minute report by reporter Lauren Fox, no comments by anchors.  On Morning Joe, 15 minutes into the show, Mika Brzinski went off on the story, with graphics, after leading off with Zelenski's visit to the White House and Congress.  Discussion with Charlie Savage, NYT, Mike Barnacle, Mika, and David Ignatius.

Blizzard Watch has me worried about another power outage.  Last one lasted 26 or 27 hours.  Have to go out and stock up on AA batteries, have portable radios and candles handy in the house. . . . Went out to pick up some wine at TotalWine, AA batteries and a battery powered lantern at Ace Hardware.  . . Surprise, the new Port Road bridge is half-open, one way southbound.  Snow forecasts for our area down to 3 to 5 inches, keeping fingers crossed.  Biggest expected problem not the snow on Thursday, but rather the wind (and cold) on Friday.

The White Lotus on HBO Max is not very interesting to me.  Seems very contemporary, lots of focus on sex, sexuality,  use of the f-word by teenagers in front of parents, women's lib, neo-colonialism.  Not my kind of story.

January 6 Report not to be released until tomorrow, not a big surprise.

Zelenskyy visit is getting most of the attention on the news channels. Gen. Barry McCaffrey on Deadline White House reminds us that Russia under Putin has turned into an aggressor pariah nation: Syria, Chechnya, Georgia, seizure of Crimea, Ukrainian Donbas, invasion of Ukraine.  Julia Ioffe also on, reminding us that Ukraine has a long, long history of persecution of Jews and how remarkable it is that Zelenskyy, a Jew, has so unified the nation against Russian imperial adventurism.  Most of us think of Ukrainian anti-semitism in terms of Babi Yar, the ravine in Kyiv where, on 29-30 September, 1941, 33,771 Jews were murdered by SS troops with some help from Ukrainians.  My latest book from the library however, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The pogroms of 1918-1921 and the onset of the Holocaust by Jeffrey Veidlinger, amply desribes the long history of pogroms in what is now Ukraine, focusing especially the the pogroms between the 2 world wars.  McCaffrey and Ioffe are two of my favorite commentators.  And, btw, I've come to think of all Eastern Europe the way I think of the American South: morally benighted spheres.  The American South lived for almost 250 years with race-based slavery and the society, economy, and culture grounded on that slavery.     The slave-based society, economy, and culture were replaced for most of a century with the Jim Crow society, economy, and culture. To this day, the centuries of race-based slavery and Jim Crow haunt the South.  It's in the air they breath and the water they drink.  The sinful racism it infects in Americans isn't restricted to the South of course; it thrived in St. Leo the Great parish in Englewood on the South Side of Chicago where I grew up and it infected all of us one way or another, including most certainly me.  Eastern Europe has a not-dissimilar history with Ashkenazi Jews, so many of whom lived in that territory with always shifting national borders and hegemonic wars between competing empires, especially Russian, Prussian, Austrian, Ukrainian, even Lithuanian-Polish.  The Jews in their shtetls were in the middle, different, distinctive, non-assimilative.  When the Russians fought with the Poles, the Jews were neither Russian nor Polish, their loyalty always therefore suspect on both sides.  When members of a traditional, distinctive minority with its own history, its own stories, its own language, style of dress, and above all religion, steadfastly refuses to assimilate into a majority culture, some measure of distrust, suspicion, and offense-taking occurs rather naturally.  And given a 'perfect storm' set of circumstances, distrust, suspicion, and offense-taking easily turns into animosity, hatred, oppression, and persecution.  The history of Eastern Europe is a history of unstable power relations, competing tribal, ethnic and national power groups with ever shifting borders and the Jews always "in the middle."  And of course throughout all of the history the CHURCH had its pernicious influence based in large measure on the Passion in the Gospel of John and "Let his blood be on us and on our children." Matthew 25:27.  I donated my copy of James Carroll's wonderful history of the Catholic Church's pernicious anti-semitism Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews.  A treasure, I should have held onto it.  The American South persecuted Blacks (though certainly not exclusively); Eastern Europe persecuted Jews (though certainly not exclusively.)  Both territories seem to me to be haunted by their histories of persecution and cruelty and oppression.