12/22

 Thursday, December 22, 2022

In bed around 10, up at 5, one cognac, intestinal pain overnight, woke up with Out of Africa theme repeating in my head.  A dusting of snow or frost covers the ground Lilly covers, down to one last bag of Bengal Spice.  29 degrees and light snow starting, wind SW at 7, wind chill 22.  Sunrise 7:20, sunset 4:20, 9 hours of daylight.

The Atlantic online: IT’S HIGH NOON IN AMERICA "I tell you the story of David and Doris Young not because it is remarkable—maybe it used to be, in the 1980s and ’90s, but not anymore. I tell it to you because this figure, the violent outsider driven by extremist views and hate-filled philosophies, is everywhere now. Incel spree-killers and race-war propagators. Young white men radicalized and weaponized. They are the children of the Unabomber, each with his own self-aggrandizing manifesto. They live not in Albany, Pittsburgh, or Spokane, but in the closed information loop of Internet America, a mirror universe that reflects their own grievances back at them.  Their actions may seem irrational, but they are the practical application of a political philosophy. A decades-long undertaking to remake America, to reverse what most would call progress—toward equal rights, better schools, curbs on fraud and pollution, everything our society has done to create a safer and more caring nation—and return it to the way it was in the 19th century. A savage frontier where the strong survive and the weak surrender."

I.R.S. Routinely Audited Obama and Biden, Raising Questions Over Delays for Trump  Answer honestly provided by Donald J. Trump in 2016: “It’s a disgrace to our country  . . . It’s a crooked system. We’re running against a rigged system, and we’re running against a dishonest media.”

Stuart Stevens, the chief strategist on Romney’s 2012 campaign: "The whole idea of a guy who inherited a company, inherited all his wealth, and is now talking about a ‘rigged system’? He is the poster child of a rigged system living on Fifth Avenue.”

Sarah Smarsh, What Growing Up on a Farm Taught Me About Humility  "Even as a child, I understood that families like mine, poor rural farmers, were low in the pecking order. Television shows and movies portrayed us as buffoons and hicks, always the butt of the joke.   We didn’t need those cues to know that society held us in low esteem, though. All we had to do was look at our bank accounts.  We worked the land and killed animals so that others would eat, so that we would afford propane for the winter, and so that the rich, rigged industry we supplied grain to would become a little richer. . . The profound humility instilled in me by my upbringing left no room in my worldview for exceptionalism of any sort. It also left me troubled by the ways that most humans calculate the value of things — animals, plants, land, water, resources, even other people — according to hierarchies that suit their own interests.  From there, near the bottom of the proverbial social ladder — where women drove tractors and people of all races lived in single-wide trailers — I began to see through the many false narratives of supremacy that govern our society. That men are better than women. That white people are better than everyone else. That the rich are better than the poor. Even, yes, that human beings are better than animals. . . . But guilt for crimes committed against other species and against the earth is not equally shared. Wealthy corporations and the governments beholden to them, choosing profit over sustainability and moral decency, created and fortified the food systems with which the average individual has little choice but to engage."

I highly admire Sarah Smarsh who wrote Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.  I loved the book and read it near the same time I read Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover, another remarkable memoir by another remarkable young woman.  I journal portions of Smarsh's essay from this morning's NYT because (1) Smarsh wrote it, and (2) because of her references to social classifications and categorizations, and (3) her references to corporate capitalist hegemony in the food industry, and (4) her reference to the challenges of complicity in the world in which we live.  There are times I am weighed down, in rare and not particularly welcome moments of moral clarity, by thoughts of my own complicity in so much of modern life that I purport, in moments of high moral dudgeon, to hate.  When I get too uncomfortable with my own complicities and hypocrisies, I remind myself that we live in the dystopic world we live in, not in utopia.  'Two pounds of ground beef, please, and 6 links of the veal sausage.'

Storm Watch.  CNN tells me that the wind chill in Sioux City is 45 below, 39 below in Fort Dodge.  Sioux City where I litigated a case defending WEAIT for years against a local insurance broker and a "homer" local judge.  I grew fond of the city and of the local Holiday Inn with its 'stick to the ribs' menu and eventually won the lawsuit when a different judge was assigned for the trial and won the appeal to the Iowa supreme court.  Fort Dodge is meaningful to me too.  My great-grandmother, Grandma Miler, and her husband Albert lived on and worked a farm outside the city.  My great-grandfather grew up down the road in Duncombe and my father's cousins lived on farms in the surrounding Webster County.  The Duncombe graveyard has many Clausen headstones, including my great-grandfather Jacob's and great-grandmother Martha's.

Timely Deliveries!  We had two presents that we expected to arrive at Christmas.  They both arrived today, Peter's Milwaukee Bucks sweatshirt by USPS and Ellis' Barnes and Noble book by pick-up at the bookstore.  The drive from County Line Road to Bayshore was nice and easy, maybe an inch of snow on the ground, pretty windy, but traffic on I43 moved slowly and responsibly.  Took Port Road back and no  problem there either, very few cars on the roads.  Also, the bottom panel for the new oven was delivered by UPS this afternoon.  The temperature on the drive home was 3 degrees with a brisk westerly wind.  Tomorrow and Saturday are predicted to be worse than today.  Yecch.