2/2/23

 Thursday, February 2, 2023

In bed before 10, up at 4:51, waking from an incoherent dream involving Traverse City, needing a room for a breakfast meeting of 16 people. 19 degrees out, clear skies, wind SSW at 14, a windy day ahead with winds 11 to 18 mph and gusts up to 30 mph, wind chills currently is 6 degrees, & will range between 18 below zero to 12 above. Geri let Lilly out at 5:25, and shuddered "Cooolld out there."  Sunrise at 7:06, sunset at 5:05, 9+58.

Genius.  I watched the second half of this movie about the relationship between Thomas Wolfe and his editor, Maxwell Perkins while Geri was out at a medical appointment and a trip to Costco.  We watched the first half of the film yesterday.  Jude Law played Wolfe, Colin Firth played Perkins, and Nicole Kidman played Aline Bernstein, Wolfe's lover and financial supporter.  Neither of us enjoyed the film very much.  Colin Firth's acting was so deadpan as to almost seem comatose or at least lethargic, maybe phlegmatic.  (And why did he wear a fedora all the time, even at the dinner table?)  Jude Law's depiction of Wolfe, on the other hand, was almost manic.  Considering the length of his novels, maybe he was manic.  I believe I read Look Homeward, Angel many decades ago but when I looked up the plot in Wikipedia, I recognized none of it, perhaps because of the passage of more than half a century. All I remember of the novel is Wolfe's beautiful, lyrical, poetic writing, his power of elegant expression.  I owned a copy of the novel for many years and must have given it away, perhaps to a library, at some point.  Reminds me of another favorite of mine from many years ago, USA, John Dos Passos's wonderful trilogy about the IWW (the 'Wobblies') and much more.  That volume also disappeared from my bookshelves somewhere along the line.

Ukraine and Musee des Beaux Arts. I think of Auden's poem when I read news reports of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.  In Volgograd, the renamed Stalingrad, Putin gave a propaganda speech about the righteousness of Russia's aggression against the Ukrainians and the "aggression of the collective West" against Russia, expressing shock that Russia is again facing assault by German tanks, comparing Ukraine's self-defense with the Nazi aggressions of the last century.  The following news stories describe Russian casualties of about 100,000 men and Ukrainian casualties approaching that number.  Another story describes the Russians attacking Kramatorsk: "Reports of Russian artillery barrages in eastern Ukraine had risen from an average of about 60 per day four weeks ago to more than 90 per day last week, with 111 Ukrainian locations targeted on one day alone, Konrad Muzyka, a military analyst for Rochan Consulting, which tracks Russian deployments, said this week.  On Wednesday night, at least three people were killed and more than a dozen others were wounded when a rocket slammed into a four-story apartment complex in Kramatorsk, turning much of the building into a smoking ruin.  As rescuers were digging furiously through the rubble on Thursday, trying to find an entry into a basement where residents may have been hiding, there was a flash and two more missiles hit nearby, sending firefighters running in all directions.  One missile struck a courtyard, mangling several vehicles and a row of garages, and another stuck in the middle of the road. Residents fled to basements as the police warned that additional missiles were coming."  These sentences describe horrors, yet I read them sitting in my recliner, warm, comfortable, safe, having just enjoyed a cup of coffee and and a few powdered mini-doughnuts. Another story relates that the Russian commanders are throwing masses of poorly-trained recruits against experienced, motivated, well-fortified, dug-in Ukrainian troops.  Day after day soldiers and civilians are being slaughtere in this war while to most of us outside the combat zones, it's just news reports, received with sometimes less emotional involvement than the local weather and sports reports.  We are the passengers on "the expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky / [but] Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."

In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.  From reading The 1919 Project online in the NYT.  "This is a capitalist society. It’s a fatalistic mantra that seems to get repeated to anyone who questions why America can’t be more fair or equal. But around the world, there are many types of capitalist societies, ranging from liberating to exploitative, protective to abusive, democratic to unregulated. When Americans declare that “we live in a capitalist society” — as a real estate mogul told The Miami Herald last year when explaining his feelings about small-business owners being evicted from their Little Haiti storefronts — what they’re often defending is our nation’s peculiarly brutal economy. “Low-road capitalism,” the University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Joel Rogers has called it. In a capitalist society that goes low, wages are depressed as businesses compete over the price, not the quality, of goods; so-called unskilled workers are typically incentivized through punishments, not promotions; inequality reigns and poverty spreads. In the United States, the richest 1 percent of Americans own 40 percent of the country’s wealth, while a larger share of working-age people (18-65) live in poverty than in any other nation belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.).

Or consider worker rights in different capitalist nations. In Iceland, 90 percent of wage and salaried workers belong to trade unions authorized to fight for living wages and fair working conditions. Thirty-four percent of Italian workers are unionized, as are 26 percent of Canadian workers. Only 10 percent of American wage and salaried workers carry union cards. The O.E.C.D. scores nations along a number of indicators, such as how countries regulate temporary work arrangements. Scores run from 5 (“very strict”) to 1 (“very loose”). Brazil scores 4.1 and Thailand, 3.7, signaling toothy regulations on temp work. Further down the list are Norway (3.4), India (2.5) and Japan (1.3). The United States scored 0.3, tied for second to last place with Malaysia. How easy is it to fire workers? Countries like Indonesia (4.1) and Portugal (3) have strong rules about severance pay and reasons for dismissal. Those rules relax somewhat in places like Denmark (2.1) and Mexico (1.9). They virtually disappear in the United States, ranked dead last out of 71 nations with a score of 0.5."....."Labor power had little chance when the bosses could choose between buying people, renting them, contracting indentured servants, taking on apprentices or hiring children and prisoners."