1/2/23

 Monday, January 2, 2023

In bed at 10:30, up at 4:15, small gewurtztraminer grappa toddy.  31 degrees to start a cloudy day, heading towards a high of 35.  Sunrise at 7:23, sunset at 4:28, 9 hours, 5 minutes of daytime. 

Irrational Man is a 2015 Woody Allen movie that we watched and enjoyed last night.  It's a takeoff on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, one of my favorite novels read (twice) many many years ago.  The Woody Allen Raskolnikov is a self-involved philosophy professor, Abe Lucas, played by Joachim Phoenix.  Allen turns Dostoevsky's story upside down.  Unlike Raskolnikov, Lucas is not tormented by his crime, he is revivified by it.  He doesn't confess but rather attempts to murder again, this time his student/lover Jill Pollard played by Emma Stone who is let on to Lucas' guilt by his other lover, Rita Richards played by Parker Posey.  The women in Allen's version are not victims of a cruel and unjust society, like Raskolnikov's innocent sister Dunya and the noble Christian prostitute Sonya; they are pampered denizens of a replica of upscale Brown University in upscale Providence, RI.  Instead of confessing and going off to Siberia, Abe is killed by falling down an elevator shaft, a fate he had intended for Jill but that backfired on him.  A perversion of Crime and Punishment but Allen still knows how to make entertaining movies.

Raskolnikov and Sonya in Siberia

Chronic pain continued yesterday through most of the day.  I see a urologist at the VA on Thursday following my "urgent care" visit to the Gold Clinic on 11/22.  Then the severe pain suggested IC.  More recently, I'm guessing I'd be better off seeing a gastroenterologist.  Who knows.  It's a crowded neighborhood down there.  

Our Town.  Photos in this morning's JSOnline: Pastor Raymond C. Monk prays over those that lost loved ones during the annual homicide vigil sponsored by Northcott Neighborhood House Thursday, Dec. 29, 2022, at Ephesians Missionary Baptist Church located at 2412 N. 6th St., Milwaukee. This year they celebrated the lives of more than 220 individuals.

I plead guilty.  Walt Whitman's I Sit and Look Out

I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame, / I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done, / I see in low life the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate, / I see the wife misused by her husband, I see the treacherous seducer of young women, / I mark the rankings of jealousy and unrequited love attempted to be hid, I see these sights on the earth, / I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny, I see martyrs and prisoners, / I observe a famine at sea, I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill'd to preserve the lives of the rest, / I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon Negroes, and the like; / All these - all the meanness and agony without and I sitting look out up, / See, hear, and am silent.

Speaking of which . . . In this morning's NYT, there is an oped piece by Costaca Bradatan entitled "I Know What Savage Fear Really Lies at the Heart of the American Dream." It's about fear of failure, but there were a couple lines in it that particularly caught my attention.  The first, writing of his native Romania: "You had to be either an incurable idealist or rotten to the core to believe in utopia, and idealism was never a plant to grow roots in that part of the world."  I thought to myself, that sentence should apply to all of Eastern Europe, a land seemingly never at peace with any particular configuration of national borders or satisfied with any temporary hegemon - Russia, Prussia, Austria-Hungary, Lithuania-Poland, Ottoman.  Countries with many ethnic nations within any given state, including millions of Jews distrusted both by whatever hegemony held sway at any given time and by the local ethnics unhappy to be under the thumb of the hegemony.  Ukraine and Poland are both great examples.  The second sentence that caught my attention was: "In school, many subjects were covered, but the discipline most widely taught was the art of cognitive dissonance: how to look at all of this and pretend to see none of it."  Aren't we Americans guilty of the same thing?  In our culture, we are "tattooed in the cradle" to think of the U.S. as the greatest, freest, most civilized, most educated, most religious, 'city on a hill', example to all the world of what a country should be.  "Land of the free and home of the brave and all that.  Yet we tolerate a government that is 'the best government money can buy'; we tolerate a government that is purposefully structured to facilitate minority rule, to prevent majority rule; we tolerate obscene wealth and income inequality; we tolerate tax laws and policies that are designed to maintain that inequality;  we tolerate the presence of more than 400,000,000 firearms in the country and astronomical levels of gun-related homicides (and many more non-lethal assaults) and mass murders; we tolerate a health care system driven by corporate-capitalist profiteering rather than universal public heath; we tolerate the long continuation of the vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow that are so visible in our demographic/racial statistics/data; we tolerate that about 2,000,000 Americans are incarcerated at any given time, disproportionately minorities, disproportionately Black. "Life can be bright in America / If you can fight in America / Life is all right in America / If you're a white in America" West Side Story.