3/31/23

 Friday, March 31 2023

In bed at 11:30, awake at 5:50, up at 6:10 with painful toes, back, CPP, and tinnitus, let Lilly out.  42℉ drizzly weather, thunder & lightning during the night.  High today of 57℉!!!!, rainy & windy day ahead, wind now S at 11 mph, 4 to 21 mph during the day, gusts up to 38 mph.  Total rainfall today will be .85 inches.  Sunrise at 6:34, sunset at 7:16, 12+41

No one is above the law.  DJT has finally been indicted by the Manhattan grand jury led by DA  Alvin Bragg.  Rumor has it the indictment has 34 counts, most if not all related to the 'hush money' paid to Stormy Daniels by Atty. Michael Cohen, the fixer, and reimbursed by Trump personally and his company.  The on-screen personalities at MSNBC have been ecstatic, Ari Melber, Joy Reid, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O'Donnell, all spinning on their heels.  I hear talk of 'no one is above the law' and have to laugh.  The main alleged crime for which he has finally been indicted occurred in the Fall of 2016.  Michael Cohen was indicted in federal court by SDNY, pled and found guilty, and incarcerated in federal prison for a year.  His indictment noted that he acted on behalf of "Individual 1," known to be DJT.  U. S. Attorney General William Barr short-circuited any prosecution of DJT's role in the payoff.  The feds have never charged DJT with the crime that put Cohen in prison.  Alvin Bragg himself refused to pursue the case until recently when for some reason he finally changed his mind.  Now, years after DJT's orchestration of Cohen's crime became nationally notorious, and a year after lead investigators Mark Pomerantzland Carey Dunne resigned in disgust over Bragg's refusal to charge DJT  and a month after Pomerantz published his book People v. Donald Trump, Bragg finally has obtained an indictment.  No one is above the law?  Stop peeing on my shoe and telling me it's raining out.  Anyone with a billion dollars and the ability to hire a stable full of skillful lawyers who can exhaust the resources of a prosecutor's office is above the law.  So it has always been, so it is now, so it will continue to be.  How many bankers were indicted and imprisoned after the 2008 financial system catastrophe?

Lower Back pain all morning.  Out of commission.  

From Casualties of War  The chaplain to whom Erickson spoke: "“I decided I was hearing an individual who wished he could have saved that girl but hadn’t been able to,” Kirk told me. I can assure you I wasn’t being paranoid in thinking he might be shot in the back for seeing me. In war—at least, the war we were in—it was nothing unusual to hear shots that were unexplained, to find a body that might or might not have been shot in combat. Where we were, it was a time and place for thousands of men to play for keeps, and that certainly included Meserve and the others in the patrol, because if they wanted to eliminate Sven as a potential witness they had the M-16s to do it with.”  This reminds me of my friend and college roommate Tom Devitt who served as an artillery officer in Vietnam and whose first duty assignment there was replacing a battery XO who had been 'fragged' in his tent by another Marine.  Just thinking of this article/book and of the crime of kidnapping, rape, and murder of a young Vietnamese woman and the more commonplace crimes of killing Vietnamese men who may or may not have been enemy combatants makes me almost nauseous.

I finished the article/book.  It is a short but devastating read.  In the end, each of the 4 defendants had his sentence for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of 19-year-old Phan Thi Mao either reduced or dismissed.  It reminds me of course of Lt. William Calley and the slaughter at My Lai.  We forget the role that racism played in the war, how little we valued the lives of the Vietnamese, how unable to tell friend from foe among them,  how free we felt to force them to leave their homes and rice fields to move to 'strategic hamlets,' how entitled we felt to drop high explosive and incendiary bombs on them, to spray toxic defoliants over their land, to shoot artillery shells and M16/A-15 bullets into their bodies.  Part of Phan Thi Mao's skull was blown off by the M16 rounds shot into her 19-year-old body.  Her body moldered for three weeks on Hill 192 before the Army forensics team picked up the parts of her body as evidence and carried her away in a body bag.  All of this happened in 1966, the year I left Vietnam.  I remember hearing rumors of Marines throwing captured VCs out of helicopters and of other Marines collecting severed ears of Vietnamese KIAs.  How cavalier we were about what we were doing to the Vietnamese, to ourselves.  How indifferent.

A pencil drawing I did from a photograph of

a terrified young Vietnamese woman and her infant

3/30/23

 Thursday, March 30, 2023

In bed at 10:40, up at 6:20.  22℉, high of 41℉, wind SSW at 5 mph, gusts up to 25 mph today, wind chill is 15℉, ranging from 14 to 35℉. Some wintery mix is expected today.  Sunrise 6:37, sunset 7:15, 12+38.

Christian Nationalism.  The current issue of The Atlantic online contains an article by Kelefa Sanneh with the title "How Christian Is Christian Nationalism" and the subtitle "Many Americans who advocate it have little interest in religion and an aversion to American culture as it currently exists. What really defines the movement?" Most of the information in it is unsurprising since Christian Nationalism is simply a form of neo-fascism.  What mainly caught my eye was this: "But they also note that the white Christian nationalists in their survey expressed the most hostility not toward immigrants or toward Muslims but toward socialists."  By 'socialists' they mean Democrats and anyone who supports government programs that in any way redistribute wealth, i.e., me.  This poll finding is consistent with other polls I've seen that say the people in this group of Whites would rather have their child marry a Black or other minority or a believer in another religion than marry a 'socialist.'  Political identity tends to be the dominant concern in separating 'the good guys' from 'the bad guys.'  I think of this contempt for 'socialists' whenever I hear references to Donald Trump's ominous campaign promise: "I am your warrior.  I am your justice.  I am your retribution."  I suppose this rhetoric can be interpreted innocently, as something like "You can show those nasty Biden voters who claim to have won the last election  how wrong they are by re-electing me next time."  But 'retribution' suggests a lot more than demonstrating the rightness of your cause and the wrongness of your opponent's.  It means punishment and vengeance.  There should be no doubt that if he, or someone with his same fascist inclinations, like Ron DeSantis, regains governmental power, we Lefties are in deep trouble.  It will kindle thoughts of 1933 Germany.  

Another sentence in the article caught my attention: " . . . Israeli political scientist Yoram Hazony, who has suggested that American nationalists should draw inspiration from the example of Israel, which conceives of itself as “the national state of a particular people.”  The ultraorthodox and ultranationalists who control the current Israeli government under Netanyahu care more about Israel's Jewish identity than its status as a democracy, much like the American Christian Nationalists care more about America's 'Christian heritage' than they do about democracy.  Both countries are coming apart at the seams over identity.

Marine Bank Plaza/Chase Tower is undergoing renovation to attract more tenants.  One of the oldest office buildings in downtown Milwaukee, it was built in 1962, when I was a Marquette undergrad.  After I was discharged from the Marine Corps and before I started at MULS, I took a job there on the night maintenance crew.  I was 'the interior glass man,' cleaning all the accessible glass surfaces in the interior of the building.  I wanted to earn some money and thought I could work until school started around Labor Day.  I only lasted a few weeks.  My crew mates were a talkative fellow named Freddie, whose mother brought him his lunch every night, and another I think of as Lurch, from the Addams Family. who rarely said anything.  Freddie spent our breaks talking to me.  Whatever I would say, Freddie would repeat verbatim and precede it with "In other words, . . ." After a few weeks of this, he drove me a little crazy and I quit.  Four years as a Marine Corps officer had rendered me unfit for menial labor.  I was abashed that I didn't hold on to that job until the start of the school year, but not abashed enough to spend more hours with Freddie and Lurch.

Casualties of War by Daniel Lang is my Throne Room reading.  Its opening sentence: "Like their predecessors in all wars, American veterans of the Vietnam campaign who are coming home to civilian life have their heads filled with memories that may last the rest of their days, for, no matter how far from the front a man may have spent his time as a soldier, he will remember it as a special time, when, fleetingly, his daily existence appeared to approach the heroic." [ The book originally appeared as a feature article in the October 18, 1969  The New Yorker.]  I certainly agree that my time in Vietnam was "a special time" in my life and that, once returned from Vietnam, my head was filled with memories that have indeed lasted for the rest of my days, not so much memories anymore, though I have many, but impressions, senses, feelings.  I can't say that I recall ever having the sense that my 'daily existence [there] appeared to approach the heroic.' I arrived 'in country' on 9 July 1965, and left on 28 February 1966, 234 days later.  I was never a combatant; I was what came to be called a REMF, a rear echelon mother fucker.  I was part of the Wing headquarters operation in the early days of the American invasion.  The air base was shelled with rockets only once while I was there and I remember little of it.  It happened after nightfall and I had a snootful of booze from the officers club.  All I remember is putting on my helmet and my.45 Cold pistol and running in the dark from the tent I lived in to my 'battle station' at the Tactical Air Control Center, fearful that I would be shot by another Marine.  I remember that fear of a trigger-happy teenage Marine seeing a figure running in the dark and BANG!  Fortunately, no one shot me and I didn't shoot anyone else.  I believe I also had a sense of futility, especially after learning that the number of 'hostiles' around the airbase had doubled since we got there in numbers, despite all the patrols, all the 'H&I' and targeted artillery barrages, and despite all the strafing, napalm, and bombing runs.  In any event, I can't recall anything feeling 'my existence approach[ing] the heroic' during my time in Vietnam.  What I do recall is a sense of absurdity, a sense of not being welcome, of not belonging there, perhaps a sense of being there under false pretenses, i.e., of being there to help the Vietnamese and not to help ourselves.

But back to Daniel Lang's article/book.  It is a horror story.  It drives home to me every nightmare fear I've ever had about what we did in Vietnam.  It is a story of a preplanned, cold-blooded, gang-rape and murder of an innocent young Vietnamese girl by American soldiers. I do not believe that the conduct of the 4 soldiers who engaged in the conduct was typical of all the soldiers and Marines in Vietnam nor do I know that it was common.  I don't think it was.  But military training and combat turn men into killers.  It brutalizes them. And for the vast majority of Americans in Vietnam, the Vietnamese people were not our friends.  There was always the question of where their loyalty lay.  Even if the Vietnamese were nots hostile, they were the reason the Americans were there and the Americans didn't want to be there, certainly didn't want to be in danger of losing their young lives or limbs on behalf of the 'slopes', the 'gooks', the 'zipperheads.' War ruins people.

3/29/23

Wednesday, March 29, 2023

In bed at 9:30, up at 4:50, 33℉, high of 36, windy morning ahead, followed by a sunny afternoon, a current WNW wind at 11 mph, winds during the day from 4 to 17 mph, and gusts up to 28 mph, wind chill at 25℉.  Sunrise at 6:39, sunset at 7:14.   12+35.

Withdrawal from Vietnam.  50 years ago today, 'peace with honor', what a sick joke.  Nixon, Kissinger, Vietnam, Chile.  The democratically elected government of Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup on September 11, 1973, spurred on and supported by the Nixon-Kissinger CIA.  Allende literally blew his brains out with an AK-47 as the Chilean army, led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, established a neo-fascist military dictatorship that ruthlessly ruled the country until 1990.  When was it I first learned never to believe what the government tells us, always to suspect the worst in what the government doesn't tell us? 

 My office, 1965-1966

Facebook Postings

March 29, 2018:  After much urging by my college roommate and friend Ed Felsenthal, I finally enrolled with the Veterans Administration health system last year.  I had avoided the VA for years because of all the bad news coverage it received, such as serious facilities deficiencies at Walter Reed, and inadequate and worse medical care at the Tomah hospital, and waiting list scandals in Phoenix and elsewhere.  Now we have the VA Secretary Shulkin's junkets with his wife and his intended replacement by President Trump's White House doctor.

   I need to say a word (and more) in defense of the VA.  I have received services in many departments from many people at the VA's Zablocki Medical Center in Milwaukee.  I have been tremendously impressed by my experiences there.  The medical and support staff have been not only very competent and professional but also very caring.  I usually come home to tell Geri how touched I have been by the level of helpfulness I experienced at the hospital.   To say I've been "astounded" or "blown away" by these experiences would be hyperbolic, but I lack the words to describe adequately how favorably impressed, and truly touched, I've been by the health care providers and others at this VA facility.  I am confident it is not the only such facility in the system.  Hence my sadness to read more negative press coverage about troubles at the top of the system.

  A further word.  Right wing politicians despise the VA and want to privatize it.  It is, after all, a classic single-payer government-sponsored health care system., i.e., (shudder!)  a socialist program.  Mr. Trump wanted to nominate a Fox News anchor to head the system, a guy who has championed VA privatization for years.  He was thwarted in this and has turned to his personal White House physician as a second choice.  We should make no mistake however about his goal of privatizing, i.e., destroying, the VA.  All veterans organizations opposed this and I hope all my friends will join this opposition.  The VA's mission is taken from Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address - "to care for him [and her] who shall have borne the battle" is a noble one, befitting a caring if bellicose nation.  Let's hope that Trump doesn't succeed in destroying this worthy government agency.

This morning: My thoughts on the VA have not changed over the last 5 years; if anything, they have become more fixed.  Those thoughts are probably more focused today because it is the 50th anniversary of the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, 57 years since my leaving the country.  I regularly see fellow Vietnam vets, as well as Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan vets at the VA Medical Center, most in some stage of infirmity, some of it age-related, some war-related.  There is hardly a visit there without hearing the PA system activate and announce "Your attention, please.  Medical emergency,  Rapid Response Team needed at (giving a location within the hospital).  I feel a sense of kinship with all those old vets, and the young ones too.  I have the same sense while driving through Wood National Cemetery next to the VA Medical Center.  It's not a sense of specialness, rather the opposite, a sense of commonness with millions of other Americans who have served in our military, sometimes in good causes, but too often in unwise, unworthy, or  ignoble causes.  On this solemn anniversary, I think of course of the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam, but also of the 3,000,000 or so Vietnamese who died, and of the countless Americans and Vietnamese who suffered profound misfortunes other than death, continuing to this day.  I wish I could believe that at least we learned a lesson in Vietnam.  If only.

Our Town  In just this past week in Milwaukee, a 2-year-old and a 5-year-old were shot by firearms.  Today's newspaper reports that a 12-year-old has been charged as an adult with 1st-degree intentional homicide in the shooting death of 34-year-old Brandon Felton who had refused to sell guns to the 12-year-old.  Felton owned and kept at his home a handgun and an AR-15 assault rifle which the 12-year-old wanted.  Though he is charged as an adult, the Journal Sentinel is not reporting his name and he is being held in the county's juvenile detention center rather than the county jail.  The city's mayor, Cavalier Johnson, has called for residents to "help stop the violence" by "reaching out to loved ones to put down their guns."  He also told his television interviewer that we should not ignore "the great progress" that has been made in addressing violence in the city in the last year.  About 4 months ago, a 10-year-old in Milwaukee was charged with homicide for shooting and killing his mother.  This latest homicide by a juvenile comes a day after the school shooting in Nashville in which three  9-year-old were killed with an AR-15.

AR-15s  The AR-15 is the best-selling rifle in the United States, industry figures indicate. Almost every major gunmaker now produces its own version of the weapon, which dominates gun dealers’ walls and websites.  Critics claim that the military-style gun has no legitimate civilian use — yet about 1 in 20 Americans own one.  The gun industry estimates there are about 20 million AR-15s in circulation. There is no way to independently confirm that number, but polling can estimate how many Americans own them.  National surveys by Ipsos in 2022 found that 31 percent of adults own guns. The Post-Ipsos survey of AR-15 owners estimates that 20 percent of gun owners own an AR-15-style rifle. Taken together, the polls find that 6 percent of Americans own an AR-15, about 1 in 20.  The data suggests that with a U.S. population of 260.8 million adults, about 16 million Americans own an AR-15.

Reading Marilynne Robinson's Home.  I'm reading this book because I was so taken with Gilead and the intimate friendship of John Ames and Reverand Broughton.  I want to see how the author develops the character of Broughton and of his daughter Glory and also how the character of the Prodigal Son, Jack Broughton, is developed.  I'm only about 10% into the novel, the beginning of which I found slow-going.  The first pages of the book are devoted to providing background on Glory and her homecoming,   She had been an English teacher in a high school, perhaps in Des Moines, and she was a lover of good poetry, which didn't include Kipling!.  ["Why do we have to read poetry?  Why Il Penseroso?  Read it and you'll know why.  If you don't, read it again."]  Jack the ne'er-do-well, arrives, disheveled and hungover, having disappeared from the family's life for 20 years.  Reading of his return and of the distance between him and his father during those years reminds me of course of the 13 years during which my father and I never communicated with each other, of our painful estrangement in 1983, and of my letter to him in 1995 when my grandmother, his mother, died.  I had called him on Thanksgiving when Sarah and Andy were with me, and he hung up on me,  He was hurt that I had not been supportive when he underwent colon cancer surgery and treatment.  He was right about that largely because I was separating from Anne when he found out about his cancer but also because we had had not much of a relationship before all that occurred.  He was a hard guy to love for most of my life.  Though my mother more than once made a point of assuring me (and my sister Kitty) that "he loves you, he just doesn't know how to show it", each of us in childhood had wished she would leave him, take us away from him.  Shamefully, I even wondered if he really was my father.  Hard times for all of us and eventually 13 years with no ties at all.  Jack Broughton's situation was very different, with Reverand Broughton doting on him as he grew up and rescuing him from his many run-ins with neighbors or the sheriff.  So I'm hoping to learn more about Jack, his character, what John Ames called his 'meanness,' his scandal with the underage girl, his disappearance for 20 years, and so on.  In the process, I am enjoying again Marilynne Robinson's writing, her way with words, her insight into the character of her characters, and what has influenced it.

3/28/23

 Tuesday, March 28, 2023

In bed late, up at 7, 28℉, high of 42℉, wind WNW at 8 mph, gusts up to 19 mph, wind chill is 20℉.  Sunrise was at 6:39, sunset at 7:13. 12+32.

New Laptop I bit the bullet and bought a new MacBookAir with 16 gigs of memory and 1 terabyte of storage.  The old laptop goes to the basement office/studio area.

America/Moloch.  Leviticus 18:21 You shall not give any of your offspring to offer them to Molech, nor shall you profane the name of your God; I am the Lord.

Gun deaths for children and teens in 2020 = 4,357.  The U.S. is the only country among its peers in which guns are the leading cause of death among children.  Motor vehicle accidents and cancer are the two most common causes of death for this age group in all other comparable countries.  Combining all child firearm deaths in the U.S. with those in other OECD countries with above median GDP and GDP per capita, the U.S. accounts for 97% of gun-related child deaths, despite representing 46% of the total population in these similarly large and wealthy countries.  Combined, the eleven other peer countries account for only 153 of the total 4,510 firearm deaths for children ages 1-19 years in these nations in 2020, and the U.S. accounts for the remainder.  Firearms account for 20% of all child deaths in the U.S., compared to an average of less than 2% of child deaths in similarly large and wealthy nations.  On a per capita basis, the firearm death rate among children in the U.S. is about 7 times the rate of Canada, the country with the second-highest child firearm death rate among similarly large and wealthy nations.  If firearm deaths in the U.S. occurred at rates seen in Canada, approximately 26,000 fewer children’s lives in the U.S. would have been lost since 2010 (an average of about 2,300 lives per year). This would have reduced the total number of child deaths from all causes in the U.S. by 12%.

After reaching a recent low (of 3.1 firearm deaths per 100,000 children) in 2013, the U.S. saw an 81% increase (to 5.6 firearm deaths per 100,000 children) by 2020, just seven years later.  The U.S. is the only country among its peers that has seen an increase in the rate of child firearm deaths in the last two decades (42% since 2000). All comparably large and wealthy countries have seen child firearm deaths fall since 2000. These peer nations had an average child firearm death rate of 0.7 per 100,000 children in the year 2000, falling 56% to 0.3 per 100,000 children in 2019.

Not all firearm deaths are a result of violent attacks. In the U.S., in 2020, 30% of child deaths by firearm were ruled suicides, and 5% were unintentional or undetermined accidents. However, the most common type of child firearm death is due to violent assault (65% of all child firearm deaths are assault).

The spike in 2020 child firearm deaths in the U.S. was primarily driven by an increase in gun assault deaths. The child firearm assault mortality rate reached a high in 2020 with a rate of 3.6 per 100,000, a 39% increase from the year before. The firearm suicide mortality rate among children in the U.S. increased 13% from 2019 to 2020, 31% since 2000, and 89% since the recent low in 2010.

Not only does the U.S. have by far the highest overall firearm death rate among children, the U.S. also has the highest rates of each type of child firearm deaths — suicides, assaults, and accident or undetermined intent — among similarly large and wealthy countries.

The U.S. also has a higher overall suicide rate (regardless of whether a firearm is involved) among peer nations. In the U.S., the overall child suicide rate is 3.6 per 100,000 children, and 1.7 per 100,000 children died by suicide from firearms. In comparable countries, on average, the overall child suicide rate is 2.8 per 100,000 children, and 0.2 per 100,000 children died by suicide from firearms. If the U.S. child firearm suicide rate was brought down to 0.2 per 100,000 children (the same as the average in peer countries), 1,100 fewer children would have died in 2020 alone 

Psalm 106:35-38

But they mingled with the nations

And learned their practices,

And served their idols,

Which became a snare to them.

They even sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons,

read more.

And shed innocent blood,

The blood of their sons and their daughters,

Whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan;

And the land was polluted with the blood.

3/27/23

 Monday, March 27, 2023

In bed at 9, awake at 3:52, up at 4:20, with some CPP.  Lilly came out for me to let her out w/o waking Geri.  30℉, high 39℉,  wind NNE at 11 mph, gusts up to 21 mph, wind chill is 20℉, no precip today.  Sunrise at 6:42, sunset at 7:12, 12+29.

Israel.  The NY Times and WaPo lead this morning with the goings-on in Israel.  NYT: Turmoil Engulfs Israel Over Plan to Overhaul Top Court.  WaPo:  Israel faces airport closure, strikes as rage mounts over courts overhaul.

I have been thinking of Israel as 'the canary in the mineshaft,' a warning to the U.S. of what we are in for as the polarization here grows.  It struck me this morning that perhaps my pessimism about both Israel and the US is missing a hopeful point.  While right-wing forces have grown more powerful in the Western world (Hungary, Poland, Italy, Turkey), Israel appears to be the only country where tens of thousands of citizens are on the streets protesting and resisting the fascist aims of its government.  Significantly, the Israeli protesters include important components of the Israel Defense Forces, the business/corporate/technical community, and workers' unions who have called for a general strike, including shutting down the national airport to outgoing flights.  Even Israel's main physicians union has announced its members would suspend non-emergency medical services.  The Israelis who have taken to the streets in opposition to the government's plan to gain control over the judiciary deserve much paise.  They shame me for my own indolence in kvetching about the fascist forces in our country but doing nothing it.  I still fear for Israel knowing that, as of now at least, Netanyahu is still in power and under the thumb of ultraorthodox and ultranationalist/settler parties.  I still wonder whether the creation of the state of Israel was a mistake, perhaps an unavoidable mistake after the Holocaust, but the Shoah didnt justify the Nakba and the region seems doomed to perpetual enmity, oppression, hatred, and lethal conflict.  There is enough blame to spread around on both sides of conflict but for the last 75 years, Israel, propped up and backed up by the United States, has been in the catbird seat vis-ȁ-vis the Palestinians and the situation gets only worse with the passage of time.  The idea of a "two-state solution" now seems a pipe dream as more and more Israeli settlers make their homes in the West Bank, their Samaria and Judea under a claim of right ordained by God.  And the inherent contradiction of a single state that is both Jewish and democratic seems clear.  What can we hope for without being Pollyannish?

LTMW at a red-bellied woodpecker vigorously poking the suet cake until he gets the chunk of suet plus seed that he wants, then flying off with it in his long beak.  The sun is shining on the bright white snow, another morning intimating Spring.

Cancelling, unsubscribing.  Two of the most difficult, often impossible, tasks in our digital age are canceling a subscription to an online service and unsubscribing from marketing messages we receive in our increasingly useless email.  The FTC is considering a rule to make these efforts easier and more likely to succeed, but consider what this situation says about the ethics of modern internet-based businesses.  It is SO easy to sign up for a 'free trial' of some subscription service, providing the service with our credit card data, and SO hard to cancel online.  And forget about making contact with a human being to effect the cancellation.  And ditto the "click here to unsubscribe" from endless marketing emails.  It's all a form of corporate, capitalist thievery and exploitation and we can be certain that corporate America is doing all that it can to lobby against the FTC's interest in protecting consumers.

Borrowing from Peter Short Term to Lend to Paul Long Term.  Can it be any surprise that anyone would have little faith in the banking industry that is said to be the lifeblood of our capitalist economy?  Have we forgotten the astounding corruption that underlay the 2008 financial catastrophe?  today's WaPo has a feature headlined "The initial banking crisis is easing. Another may be around the corner: Commercial real estate could become a problem for midsize banks" ["heading for a crash over the next two years"]  Another headline: "Hundreds of banks would be vulnerable in SVB-style runs, researchers say" [" A study published Friday found that U.S. banks hold $2 trillion less in assets than they appear to have on paper."] And a third: "Bye, banks: Recent turmoil is spurring many to move their money:  An estimated $550 billion has moved out of smaller banks to big institutions and money market funds, JPMorgan Chase says"  15 years ago we learned that our banking system was a house of cards.  Dodd-Franks was supposed to take care of that.  Then Congress gutted Dodd-Franks in the Trump administration and eventually, SVB and Signature Bank failed sending tremors throughout the system and requiring another government bailout.  Then Credit Suisse failed.  When will the next shoe drop?  When will we learn?  When will we care?

3/26/23

 Sunday, March 26, 2023

In bed at  11, up at 8, muddy-minded, no thoughts, good sleep.  28℉, high of 38℉, wind WNW at 5 mph, low wind day, gusts up to 13 mph, a wintery mix of 1.1" expected, 2.75" in last 24 hours.  Sunrise was at 6:42, sunset at 7:11, 12+26.

Mendelssohn's Elijah.  Geri was Caela's guest last night at the performance by the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and Chorus.  I drove her down and picked her up.  Caela declined our offer to pick her up and hired a Lyft driver.  By the intermission, they had had enough of the performance, which is not exactly scintillating, and Geri texted me to pick them up, which I did.  After dropping Caela off at her home, we got on the freeway to return to Bayside.  I came very close to causing/having an accident when I had to serve to avoid an orange and white striped construction barrel rolling about in my lane of traffic.  I swerved directly in front of a car in the passing lane to my left, very narrowly avoiding a collision.  I don't like driving in the dark and I don't like driving on I-43.  I especially don't like the combination.  It seems as if there are millions of those orange and white striped construction barrels around with all the construction underway on and near I-43.  I'm a bit surprised that last night's was the first one I've seen 'unmoored' and loose in a traffic lane.  

It disappoints me that my days of attending concerts and plays are over.  With my various aches and pains, plumbing and mobility problems, I can't see myself climbing over or being climbed over by other theatergoers.  I especially miss the opportunity to attend concerts with the Milwaukee Symphony Chorus, of which Anne was a member for many years and also a volunteer administrative helper of some sort for the great Margaret Hawkins, the chorus' founder and artistic director.  I saw on the marquis last night that the next performance by the orchestra will feature the wonderful choral group from Africa Ladysmith Black Mambaso, recalling to me their great album Missa Luba.  I have 2 other albums in my music collection, Shaka Zulu and Ling Walk to Freedom which I will try to listen to today.  I'll also try to get a copy of Missa Luba.  I'm remembering that there was a time when Anne and I had season tickets, or partial season tickets, to the symphony, the repertory theater, the ballet, and Marquette basketball, and that all the outings became onerous, too much.  I recall too attending some performances of the symphony by myself, buying a cheap seat in the last row of the upper balcony with hardly any others around me, wearing blue jeans and a sweatshirt and stretching out to enjoy the live performance - so long ago.

Words of Wisdom.  “I’m old, you know, and I see things repeated, and something that is very common is the change people feel toward someone when they meet them. At one time they ridiculed and hated them, and then they confess that they now like them, because they saw them as they were. Or a friend told them how kind or funny they were, and conversions keep happening. I think we need to imagine people as loved and kind and funny, and any dislike is based on our limited knowledge and kindness. What I’m saying is that most of the time, we are the problem, and we need to constantly adjust our vision.”—Marian Seldes

Upcoming 50th Anniversary.  Wednesday will be the 50th anniversary of the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam.  The newspapers are carrying stories about authors who have written about the war and its aftermath, Carl Marlantes, Tim O'Brien, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nguyen Phan Que Mai, and others.  I don't believe I have ever read a novel based on the Vietnam War.  I did read Bernard Fall's history Hell in a Very Small Place, about the defeat of the French in Dien Bien Phu in 1954.  I avoided watching any movie about the war until 1982 or 1983 when I rented Apocalypse Now from Blockbusters Videos, about 17 years after I left the country. I watched it alone in my apartment at the Shamrock East on Bradford Avenue.  I had a bad reaction to it such that it took 3 separate viewings to get through all of it.  Sometime later, I watched The Deer Hunter and perhaps Platoon (I can't recall) and most notably Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, which struck me emotionally not only because of the battle scenes In Hue, but also the brutal scenes of Marine boot camp training.  More recently I've watched Ken Burns' and Lynn Novick's The Vietnam War, about which I've written in an earlier journal entry, especially Peter Coyote's line that the war was "started in good faith by decent men." I wonder if there was ever a time I felt good or righteous about our invasion of Vietnam.  I keep pausing as I write these lines as I think back on my time there, from arriving in Chu Lai on a C130 Hercules to leaving from DaNang 8 months later on a big military transport.   I remember the frightening nose down 'combat landing' at Chu Lai and meeting the ATC captain I had served with in Yuma and I remember the delays because of a fire warning light problem on the big transport in DaNang and me thinking what a great target it was for a mortar or rocket attack, parked there so big, bright and shiny.  I remember getting a haircut from a Vietnamese barber on the airbase and wondering whether he was a 'VC sympatiser' who could cut my throat with his razor - irrational fears.  I remember going into the exotic city on liberty when that was still permitted, of a water skiing trip at an Air Force Special Service facility at the harbor, and seeing an asian defecaing off his sampan into the water and me subsequently climbing back into the boat with some dark stuff on my body, fearing it was shit and happy to find it was an oil slick,  I remember evenings at the Officers Club and occasional visits from RVN officers whom we all disliked.  More blurred are the memories of a couple thousand hours spent on duty at the Tactical Air Control Center outside of Wing HQ, keeping track of thousands, maybe tens of thousands of aircraft takeoffs and returns from bombing missions in RVN, in the North, or in Laos.  Each of those missions by Marines piloting A4s, F4s, and F8s were intended to bring death and destruction to some Vietnamese, "our enemies." We were there to 'defend freedom' in the South, whose government we had financed and propped up since before 1954.  In fact we had financed and propped up the French in their miserable attempt to preserve their Asian empire.  In due course, we got our butt kicked by the Vietnamese and pulled out 50 years ago.  Now we gladly do business with the communist government.   In 2021, the United States was Vietnam’s second largest trading partner (after China), and Vietnam was the United States’ ninth largest trading partner.  More than 3,000,000 people died in that war including 58,000 Americans.  The number of people wounded, injured, hurt in one way or another is incalculable.  Bombs, bullets, chemical defoliants, napalm - we used whatever we had against the Vietnamese, with the exception of nuclear weapons and there were many back here who urged the use of nukes against the North.  And now Vietnam is a piece of ancient history for most Americans.  I feel sick thinking about it.

On a sandbag bunker outside the tent I lived in in 1965,

wearing the dog tags I wear today, wearing the Korea Era

'utilites' and leather combat boots we used at the start of the war, 

before camouflage 'jungle fatigues' were introduced in 1967.

3/25/23

 Saturday, March 25, 2023

In bed at s10:30, up at 6, screens covered with wet snow.  31℉ outside wth heavy snow.  Winter Storm Warning until 4 p.m.  High temperature of 37.  3.1 in. of wintery mix in last 6 hours, 9.24 inches fo snow predicted in next 24 hours. Heart attack snow.  The wind is NNE at 19 mph, gusts up to 33 mph today, wind chill now is 19℉.  Sunrise (so to speak) at 6:46, sunset at 7:09, 12+23.

WaPo story on books re: Vietnam.  I don't normally read readers' Comments to WaPo and NYT stories anymore.  I used to be a frequent contributor during the reign of George W. Bush and his band of neer-do-wells, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Alberto Gonzales.  Saving those comments was a reason I started this Slogthrop blog.  In any event, the subject of this morning's feature being Vietnam, I looked at the reader comments which were interesting and reminded me of how I have avoided reading the many highly praised books about Vietnam and what we did in it and to it and to the people who participated in the war, voluntarily or involuntarily.  I noted especially the shortest comment: "I learned a lot about my government through my forced participation in the war in Vietnam. Those are lessons not forgotten."  And let the church say Amen.  Next Wednesday, March 29, will mark the 50th anniversary of the withdrawal of American troops.  Words fail me, this morning at least.

I took this photo of 2 Vietnamese boys who lived in "Dogpatch" in

1965 or early 1966.  I have the print in a frame in my office downstairs and have

drawn a coupleof drawings of them.  It has always 'tugged at my heartstrings"

and still does, how thin they were, how close together they stood, how

they held onto the barbed wire that separated Us from Them, that separated

us Americans from the Vietnamese people so culturally and otherwise different from us.

CPP returned at 2:30 a.m. after an entire day without serious pain.  Thank you, Jenn.

“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”.  "What kind of person can charge another person, in this case a former President of the United States, who got more votes than any sitting President in history, and leading candidate (by far!) for the Republican Party nomination, with a Crime, when it is known by all that NO Crime has been committed, & also known that potential death & destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our Country? Why & who would do such a thing? Only a degenerate psychopath that truely hates the USA!"

What are we to think of the American electorate that gave this lunnatic 48% of its votes 2 years ago knowing who he is, how he is, what he is?

Winter Wonderland.  I neglected to fill the birdfeeders yesterday and now it's too late, the ground covered with several inches of wet snow.  The north sides of the tube feeders are covered with the snow, precluding access by the birds.  The suet cake is entirely covered.  I'm afraid this storm will cause even more damage to trees than the last heavy, wet snowstorm which did a lot of damage.

Finished reading Gilead: "While I am thinking about it - when you are an old man like I am, you might think of writing some sort of account of yourself, as I am doing.  In my experience of it, age has a tendency to make one's sense of oneself harder to maintain, less robust in some way."  John Ames' frequent description of himself as old and tired, the metaphor being "ember," dull and gray but with an internal heat and fire, ready to be refulgent again when the Lord breathes life on it.  I was struck by "one's sense of oneself [being] harder to maintain," how true that seems of old age, the age with little new except daily diminishment, little to look forward to but more diminishment, but filled with so many old memories, 80+ years of memories.  The good ones fade away, the regretful ones linger and haunt.  The good ones are almost all of the goodness of others - mother, sister, Uncle Jim, Aunt Monica, Brother Coogan, Wally Halperin, Johnny Flynn, Troy Major, Father Matthew, so many nurse-nuns - while the regretful ones are of my own failings, ingratitude, cowardice,  selfishness, vanity, pettiness, indifference.  It's curious that Marilynne Robinson named her fictional town "Gilead."  I suppose  she intended her novel to be healing, affirming.  "There is a balm in Gilead / To make the wounded whole / There is a balm in Gilea / .To heal the sin-sick soul. / Sometimes I feel discouraged / And deep I feel the pain / In prayers the holy spirit / Revives my soul again"  For those without the faith of a John Ames or Marilynne Robinson, hope comes harder.

3/24/23

Friday, March 24, 2023

In bed at 10, up at 5:20. 30℉, high of 39, wind NE at 6 mph, up to 14 mph today and gusts up to 24mph, wind chill is 24℉.  Sunrise at 6:48, sunset at 7:08, 12+20.

LTMW at a red-bellied woodpecker breaking off a big chunk of suet and flying away with it.  Where is it going and why?  to eat the suet and seeds or to feed it to nestlings?  Probably too early for nestlings.  One snowbird on the ground, one red-bellied nuthatch on the sunflower tube.  Now a white-bellied nuthatch.  I need to fill the sunflower tube which is half-empty.  Snow expected tomorrow, perhaps another 4 to 6 inches of heavy wet snow that did so much damage to our trees last time.  Maybe the storm track will change, but not likely.  Maybe not as much wind as the last damaging storm.🙏

Starting the day with Gilead.  [John Ames is 76 and 77 years old as he writes his letter to his 7 year old son.]  Mrs. Ames provides John with the text of a sermon on forgiveness he wrote and deliver in June, 1947.  I read his summary of it 3 times and will probably read it again.  I thought of my struggle with anger and resentment when I learned that Peter and Michael had 'betrayed me' years ago, of sitting in the lower church of Gesu conscious of the burden of my anger and of reflecting on 'forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us.'  And I thought that 1947 was the year 15 year of James Hartmann stole into our basement apartment with his knife when my father was working the 2nd shift at the Modess factory, and my mother was sleeping on the hide-away bed with Kitty and me, threatened to kill Kitty and me, ripped my mother's clothes off and sodomized her.  I was a month past my 6th birthday, Kitty had just turned 1, and my mother was 25.  I have repressed all memory of the crime itself but I still have a memory of part of the aftermath, policemen in the kitchen, me sitting on the floor in the living room leaning against the wall with my coat on, and my father angry and shouting at me for not watching Kitty.  I always pause and ponder as I remember that night and the fear I felt and, I suppose, the incomprehension.  I was in my coat (I surmise but don't remember) because Kitty and I were going to be taken to Aunt Monica's and my grandparents' house on Racine Avenue while my mother and father were taken to the Englewood police station.  That crime on that night put my mother and me in PTSD and undoubtedly deepened my father's war-related PTSD.  And here I am, sitting in the predawn darkness 75 and 1/2 years later still remembering what I remember and still repressing what I can.t remember but witnessed and was a part of.  I'm almost paralyzed with thoughts just as I am every time I think of that night, that crime, the defensive slash wounds on my mothr's arm and hand.  I think of John Ames' sermon on forgiveness and the difference between forgiveness of a wrong done to me and a wrong done to a loved one.  I've long wondered whatever became of 15 year old James Hartmann.  He had killed another woman with his knife the week before he raped my mother, Mrs. Gracelyn Bush.  She was 32 years old, the wife of a minister.  I find myself thinking of the similarity in the names of Mrs. Bush, Gracelyn, and the name of the author of Gilead, Marilynne, and of the fact that Mrs. Bush was the wife of a minister, causing me to wonder how John Ames would have written his 1947 sermon if he had experienced what Reverend Bush and my father did in 1947.   This is too heavy a way to start the day.  Ames ends this portion of his letter to his son sharing his memory of first encountering his wife, the son's mother:  " . . . this life has its own mortal loveliness.  And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either.  It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing.  A moment is such a slight thing, I mean, that it's abiding is a most gracious reprieve."  Or a most grievous burden.

More Gilead: "There have been heroes here, and saints and martyrs, too, and I want you to know that.  Because that is the truth, even if no one remembers it.  To look at the place, it's just a cluster of houses strung out along a few roads, and a little row of brick buildings with stores in them, and a grain elevator and a water tower with Gilead written on its side, and the post office and the schools and the playing fields and the old train station which has pretty much gone to weeds now.  But what must Galilee have looked like?  You can't tell much from the appearance of a place."

I hav long believed, and said, that we are surrounded by saints and heroes and miracles if only we have the eyes to see them.  The saints and heroes that I have seen up close and personal are mainly my mother, my sister, and my wife.  Their saintliness and their heroism is of the type referred to explicitly in Mt. 25: 31-46 - my mother caring for her father and her brother James, and noursihing and protecting Kitty and me, and even standing by my father in his long years of need, though both Kitty and I wished during our childhoods that she would leave him.  Kitty and Geri both for their taking in my father in his old age, and caring for him when he would otherwise be so alone and lonely.  For Geri becoming his best friend and confiante in his last years and for her loving care of her brother Jim during Nancy's long last illness and when Jim was widow, like my father alone and lonely.  And for the love she gives me and her sons and Lilly.  And her visits to Elise, suffering from advancing Parkinson's disease.  I have been so blessed by such good, loving, strong women in my life.  Domine, non sum dignus . . .  As for miracles, they are all around us, as John Ames realizes.  He focuses on light, air, even gravity but more broadly on all Nature including other humans.  I tend to focus on birds and trees, forests and farm fields, barns and farm houses, so much else.  Even in the dumps, beset with pain or general gloominess, I can't forget all the saints, heroes, and miracles throughout my life.  For some reason, I am recalling Wally Halperin who employed me as a stock boy at his food and liquor store at 74th and Halsted during my senior year in high school.  When I was award the NROTC scholarship and was accepted at Marquette, Wally moved me from part-time to full-time at the store to let me earn some cash before moving to Milwaukee.  I worked the checkout counter as well as stocking shelves and coolers and the fruit and vegetable stands.  I was 17 years old and illegally checking out customers buying alcohol.  Each week a Chicago cop would come to the store for a payoff from Wally for overlooking the underaged clerk. Wally never told me this; I learned of it from other adult employees. Wally was kind to me, solicitous, when he didn't have to be.  He was my first Jewish friend, but far from the last.

VA Pelvis Floor therapy. I spent about 45 minutes with Jennifer most of it half-naked enduring a digital exam while discussing the NCAA basketball tournnment.  There are some men who would pay money to have a beautiful young woman probe their butt ; for me it's one of the indigniteis of old age and creeping decrepitude.

3/23/23

 Thursday, March 23, 2023

In bed a little after 10, up a little before 5 with some CPP and thoughts of tomorrow's PT at VA.  35℉ and raining, high of 40℉, wind NNW at 12 mph, expected gusts up to 23 mph with light wintery mix of rain and snow, the wind chill is 26℉.  Sunrise at 6:49, sunset at 7:07, 12+17.

Rudy Giuliani.  We watched the MSNBC documentary last night, a fascinating study of an interesting, deeply flawed man, a man Jimmy Breslin once brilliantly described as "a dictator in search of a balcony."  He appears to be like his counterpart Donald Trump a psychopath,  pares cum paribus congregantur.  There were multiple references to him in the 1992 "police riot" at New York's City Hall and Giuliani's attack on David Dinkins.  References to police brutality in the Giuliani regime, especially Amadou Diallo (41 shots fired) and Abner Louima  (broomstick) cases reminded me that police brutality visited upon Black men started long before Rodney King, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and George Floyd.

Gilead. I'm starting off my day differently, continuing my reading of Gilead instead of diving into, or  wallowing in, the morning papers.  I'm 40% through my Kindle copy and reading slowly, being touched by many passages, especially those reflecting the narrator's treasuring the most common of life's treasures, water for example and trees, the smell of the air, and mostly 'ordinary' time spent with those he loves and loved.  I'm pierced by his expressions of regret and of course think of what must be my favorite poem, though I reject the whole idea of 'favorites', what C. S. Lewis referred in his biography as 'the pernicious tendency to compare and prefer.'  Yeats started with 'Responsibility so weighs me down' and then

Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.

Almost everything in the book is a reflection and the writer/narrator returns often to two particular memories, his trip to Kansas with his father to find his grandfather's grave and his father's sharing a biscuit with him, in the rain, the day the community turned out to bring down the Baptist church that had been struck by lightning and burned.

Gilead is apparently based on the town of Tabor, IA.  It's interesting how many churches there are.  The writer is a Calvinist or Congregationalist.  There are also the Presbyterians (old Broughton's church), the Methodists (who met down by the river and sang), the Baptists (whose church burned down) and the Lutherans.  No mention of a Catholic presence yet.

Halfway through the book, John Ames delivers his sermon on Abraham, Isaac, and Hagar and Ishmael, with Jack Broughton in the church sitting next to John's wife and son, smiling.  He address the apparent cruelty of God directing Abraham to send one child into the wilderness while taking the other to be bound on an altar and sacrificed to God.  He acknowledges that there are many fathers who abandon or mistreat their children and says that those children are nonetheless within God's providential care.  "And this is no less true, I said, if the angel carries her home to her faithful and loving Father than if He opens the spring or stops the knife and lets the child live out her sum of earthly years."  The significance of this to the relationship between Ames and Jack Broughton is not yet clear but it did call to my mind the eternal problem of theodicy, goodness, and cruelty, the question of why God is seen as a Loving Father rather than as a Cruel Prick, the God of the Hebrew Testament vs. Jesus of Nazareth.  And of course, I thought of my father after the war and his emotional abandonment of my mother, Kitty, and me, of all the times my mother assured Kitty and me that he loved us - "he just doesn't know how to show it."  How much was due to PTSD, how much to anger at my mother for not writing him, how much to resentment of Kitty and me - Kitty's theory?  Shortly after writing of Abraham and Isaac and of Hagar and Ishmael, Ames writes of the 5th commandment, Honor thy father and thy mother, and discusses the way parents honor their children's existence, 'down to the marrow of your bones' which of course calls to mind my father's emotional distance from us and his closeness to his birth family, his parents and his sister Monica, his closeness to her son Jimmy and distance from me.  Some deep memories are stirred up by this book.  In writing of his son's mother, Ames tells him "one thing I have learned in my life is what settled, habitual sadness looks like."  I recall discussing with Kitty the fact that we both came out of childhood with something like a 'settled, habitual sadness' such as Ames describes, reminiscent of the quote perhaps apocryphally attributed  to Yeats: "Being Irish he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy."  At Andy and Anhs wedding in 2004, Kitty and Geri were at the table where my Dad was seated and at some point he held Geri's hand.  Kitty told her (or was it me) that he had never held her hand.  Some hours are forgotten; some aren't. Many mysteries in life are never resolved. 

Monica, Dad, Kitty, and Geri

Starting on tax returns with customary anger.  The government already has in its computers all the information it needs to compute our income tax.  Every 1099 we have, the government already has.  The government could tell us each year how much it believes we owe or how much of a refund we are due, subject only to our corrections based on information not already in the government's computer.  Thus, instead of me telling the government what my tax obligation is, or my entitlement to a refund, the government could tell me, with an invitation to file a return if I disagree.  How many millions of hours are wasted each year by taxpayers gathering and providing to the government information the government already has in its computers? 

3/22/23

 Wednesday, March 22, 2023

In bed at 11:10, up at 4:40 with various unpleasant thoughts mostly of war.  37℉, high of 49℉, wind SSE at 11 mph, gusts today up to 21 mph, wind chill is at 30℉ & should reach 45℉ later. Sunrise at 6:51, sunset at 7:06, 12+14.

Octogenarian Life.  It's been almost 2 weeks since Mitch McConnell tripped and fell in a Washington restaurant, leading to a broken rib and a concussion.  He spent 5 days in a hospital and has been in an inpatient rehab facility ever since.  It appears that he was virtually incommunicado during that entire time until yesterday when he spoke on the telephone with his Senate leadership team, Thune of South Dakota, Barasso of Wyoming, and Cornyn of Texas.  He was called by President B hisiden and Majority Leader Schumer, but according to reports, he didn't take or return the calls.  No word on when he expects to be back on the job in D.C.  It seems that this "trip" has exacted quite a toll on McConnell.  Today is looking like a bad day for me, not as bad as McConnell's but nonetheless one of those days when I wonder whether I'm afraid I'm soon to die or whether I'm afraid I'm not soon to die, sentenced to live with ever-diminishing capabilities, physical and mental and with chronic pain.  I started the day in a sour mood which got worse with quite a bit of pain and leaking.  I need Kitty to tell me to SNAP OUT OF IT!

More Gilead  " . . . I have a wife too and a daughter.  It was as if the price of having them was losing them."

How interesting that this novel so focused on the relationships between fathers and sons was written by a woman.  Also, so focused on the antagonism between the abolitionist grandfather and the pacifist father with his hatred of war and violence.

VA Eye Clinic.  Appointment today at 12:45 to check to see if my retina is bleeding or otherwise distressed, how much damage diabetes is doing to my eyes.  Plus glaucoma of course, always reminding me of Kitty's trials, including giving up driving and having to rely more and more on Jim, even with his dementia and disappearing acts.  Oh the challenge of getting the truck from him and Kitty's confusion over whether to blame Michael or thank him.  Poor Michael. , ,  Glaucoma readings good 13 on the left eye, 17 on the right eye.  Visual acuity with the eyeglasses 20/20 minus 1 on the right eye, 20/20 minus 2 on the left.  No bleeding.

3/21/23

 Tuesday, March 21, 2023

In bed at 9, woke up at 4:10, and lay back down and up at 5:25, roaring tinnitus, a dull brain 'came to' around 6.  33℉ outside, high of 42, cloudy, wind NE at 8 mph, gusts up to 18 mph today, the wind chill is at 26. Sunrise at 6:53, sunset at 7:05, 12+11.

Bad start.  I mistakenly threw Geri's chicken soup into the garbage disposal this morning.  I was doing my usual early morning clean-up of the kitchen, filling the dishwasher, tidying up, handwashing wooden handled knives and pots and pans.  There was a large stock pot filled with liquid on the stovetop and I mistook it for a pot that was soaking while awaiting washing so I started emptying it into the garbage disposal.  By the time most of the broth was down the drain, I realized it the the soup Geri made yesterday.  This was a very bad way to start the day, reminding me of the time not so long ago that I emptied muchof my beef stock for my borscht through a strainer into the garbage disposal, forgetting to have a pot underneath to save the stock.  I feel terrible about this both because of the lost effort Geri put into making the soup and because of what it suggests about my head, mistakes, confusion, executive function, cognitive decline, and dementia.  Not good.

LTMW at one male goldfinch on the niger feeder, about 3/4 turned a beautiful yellow gold. his contrasting wings black with the two bright white wingbars.  

American failures in my lifetime have included Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Syria.  Should I add Saudi Arabia and Israel?  Pakistan and India?  Much writing recently about the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, notably by Tom Nichols and David Frum in The Atlantic.  They both supported the war and Frum was one of the writers of GWB's now infamous 'axis of evil' speech.  Nichols defends the decision to go to war for regime change but admits the 'good cause' was woefully executed and a failed mission.  Frum seems to reluctantly admit that the full-cale invasion of Iraq in 2003 was "not wise," but he is far from ready to call the war a complete shitshow.  It's hard not to conclude however that the widespread revulsion throughout the world and in the US over the war contriubted mightily to GWB's successor BHO's unwillingness to respond militarity to Russia and Syria crossing his "red line" with chemical weapons in Syria and to Russia's seizure and annexation of Crimea in 2014.  And now of course we have the invasion of all of Ukraine with no clear end in sight and the world on edge.  Thank you, Messrs. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al.

Reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson.  I remember reading reviews of this novel when it was published and intending to read it but I never got around to it.  I finally bought it on Kindle with the Audible feature though I've been retricting myself to the Kindle version.  The trouble with Audible is that the narration goes too fast.  I'm a slow reader and always have been.  I used to feel like some kind of failure back in the day when 'speed reading' was all the thing.  "I read 3 books every week!" as if that were a good thing without regard to comprehension, stopping to think about what you've just read, highlighting passages to come back to, etc.  A lot of what I read I read slowly, sentence by sentence, sometimes word by wond, wondering about meaning, connotation, nuance, sometimes even syntax.  No Evelyn Wood for me.  I'm only 1/8 of the way into the book so far, at a point where the narrator/protagonist says he thinks his wife was a person 'the Lord' would have liked to have spent a portion of his time in this life with.  He has the same thought of his grandfather. each having "an earned innocence."  An interesting thought, who did Jesus choose to spend time with and why?  Not much is said about his family after he began his 'public life,' the life recorded in the Gospels, other than his brother James, an apostle.  Mary Magdeline of course and Martha and Mary and their brother Lazarus of Bethany.  Who else?  He apparently had a lot of 'disciples' but how many friends?  Why was John 'the beloved' so special to Jesus?  In reading Gilead, I find myself asking the same question I ask when reading Niebuhr or Flannery O'Connor or any other theist, especially Christians: how is it that they believe in God?   What kind of understnding do they have of God?  Eternal, out of time and space?  All-Good, All-Loving, All-Powerful?  Creator of Good and Evil?  All-Benevalent or Mean Prick?Knowing what we do or mankind and our history, of the cruelty and indifference in us, we who are made 'in the image and likeness of God', what does that say of the God who made us?  Theodicy, how do they deal with it?  The Gilead narrator mentions all the soldiers at Fort Riley Kansas who died of Spanish Influenza and how did God allow all that death and suffering.  He wrote a sermon about it, about how the flu was a sign of God's displeasure, a punishment for the war and a way fo sparing the dead soldiers from killing and having to kill.  All of it of course is poppycock, made up out of whole cloth, based on nothing but the narrator's own imagination.  And faith that surpasseth all understanding.  Church people or God people do a lot of 'reading into' situations how the situation somehow reflects "God's will" or "God's plan."  We of the 'lost souls' crowd, we unbelievers or heathens,  can't buy into it.  On the other hand, I suppose i do believe that each of us has to find and give some meaning to his or her life and to the happenings in it.  In some ways, each of us spends a lifetime doing just that, attributing meaning or significance to things that have no meaning, no significance.  Am I remembering correctly that that is what Existentialism is about, at least in part, existence preceding essence and all that.  We want to be saved from The Absurd, from Angst, Dread, Chaos.  For most of us, the answer is God, the Savior, the Redeemer, the Alpha and the Omega, our Source and our Goal.  For Freud and heathens, God is a fantasy, created by us and our cultures to protect us from fearful realities.  It's no wonder that modern Existentialism flourished after the two world wars in the first half of the last century, after Dachau and Auschwitz and after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  How does one believe in an All-Good, All-Powerful, All-Loving God after all that?  Does it all depend on how we conceive of God?  I think two poems by the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, a favorite of mine since my college days.  First, God's Grandeur:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

   It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

   It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

   And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

   And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

   There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

   Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

   World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

Then, I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

What hours, O what black hours we have spent 

This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went! 

And more must, in yet longer light's delay. 

   With witness I speak this. But where I say 

Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament 

Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent 

To dearest him that lives alas! away. 

   I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree 

Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me; 

Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse. 

   Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see 

The lost are like this, and their scourge to be 

As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse. 

In the first poem, Hopkins seems like a good Catholic priest, a believer.  In the second, a good Existentialist.

Here's a lovely passage in the letter old, dying John Ames writes to his 7 year old son: "I'm writing this in part to tell you if you ever wonder what you've done in life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle.  You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been a good child to an old man in a shabby little town you will one day leave behind.  If only I had the words to tell you."  Indeed, if only we had words.

Another: "There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that.  A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't expect to find it, either."  John Ames, the Existentialist!

Another: "A man can know his father or his son, and there still might be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension."

3/20/23

 Monday, March 20, 2023

IIn bed around 10)30, awake at 4:30, up at 4;41, with thoughts of my mother, all she dealt with during and after the War, Hartman's crime, life in the basement, so much, guilt & ingratitude,  30℉ outside with a strong SW wind at 16 mph, gusts up to 22 mph today and wind chill at 19℉.  Sunrise at 6:55, sunset at 7:03, 12+8

SSpring arrives this afternoon when the sun is directly over the Equator and the Northern Hemisphere starts its annual tilting toward the sun.  Poetically and religiously, it is the season of renewal, new life, hope and resurrection, the season of Easter and Passover..  Socially and politically, it seems like Bunyan's Slough of Despond, Yeats' Rough Beast, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.  In Eurasia, Xi Jinping starts an official state visit to Moscow a year after Russia's naked aggression against Ukraine and its civilian population and only days after Putin was indicted by the International Criminal Court for some of his war crimes, i.e., kidnapping Ukrainian children and moving them into Russia.  The message to the West could hardly be clearer, calling to mind the 1936 Rome-Berlin Axis Agreement between Hitler and Mussolini.and the Anti-Comintern Pact between Hitler and Japan.

IIInternally, I can't remember in my lifetime a time when the United States was more torn apart, even in the 1960s and 70s.  "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; . . . The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. . . . What rough beast . .. slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"  I struggle with the question of whether the polarization is worse now than in the 60s but I'm persuaded that the answer is 'yes.'  There were 2 dominating issues in the 60s: Vietnam and civil rights.  Vietnam only became a deeply divisive issue after 1965 when draftees/conscripts were being sent there and coming home disillusioned, missing limbs, or dead.  The most fervid opponents of the war were college students vulnerable to the draft.  The "America, Love It or Leave It" crowd, Nixon's 'Silent Majority,' were mostly older, World War II and Korean War types, with very different mindsets from the 'baby boomers' being drafted to fight in Vietnam.  In any event, the war was time-limited.  By 1968, LBJ had been effectively driven out of the White House, a broken man.  On  January 27, 1973, the draft was ended and on March 29, 1973, the last U.S. combat troops were withdrawn ending 8 years of military combat in Vietnam and political combat in America.  The civil rights issues are still with us, not in the same form as during the Jim Crow Era before the civil rights legislation of the 60s, but in persistent vestigial forms of systemic racism, including voting suppression, police misconduct, etc.  I continue to believe that Race Writ Large is the dominant cause of the polarization within the U.S. today.  As Heather Cox Richardson argues, the South lost the Civil War but won the peace, that is to say, White Supremacy is still a dominating policy, value, or goal for many Americans.  It has come to be the never stated, but always present hallmark of the Donald Trump Republican Party.  

If If the growing sinister alliance between Russia and China and the internal fracturing of the United States weren't enough to cause a tailspin, today's WaPo reports: "The report released Monday from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that the world is likely to miss its most ambitious climate target — limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures — within a decade. Beyond that threshold, scientists have found, climate disasters will become so extreme that people will not be able to adapt. Basic components of the Earth system will be fundamentally, irrevocably altered. Heat waves, famines, and infectious diseases could claim millions of additional lives by century’s end."

Visit to the Apple Store.  I ordered a new MacBookAir with an M1 chip, 16 gigs of memory and 1 terabyte of storage.  Delivery to the store is expected by April 11, 3 weeks from now, probably will arrive sooner.

TThe Nuns Who Left Brooklyn is a feature piece in this morning's NYT.  It tells the tale of 10 Discalced Carmelite nuns who moved from the Monastery of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel & St. Joseph in Brooklyn to rural Pennsylvania outside Scranton.  Their old quarters became too noisy for the recluses who are true "nuns", i.e., those who live in a cloister.  Their daily life is as follows:  5:00 AM - Clappers are sounded to awaken the sisters for prayer / 5:30 AM - Lauds is recited in choir, followed by an hour of mental prayer / 7:00 AM - The hour of Prime is recited followed by the Holy Rosary / 7:30 AM - The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and thanksgiving / 8:15 AM - The hour of Terce is recited, followed by a light breakfast.  / 9:00 AM - Manual Labor: the sisters work in solitude in the cells or offices of the monastery / 11:15 AM - The hour of Sext is recited in the Choir, followed by an examen of conscience / 11:30 AM - Dinner in the refectory / 1:00 PM - Recreation / 2:00 PM - The hour of None is recited followed by spiritual reading in the cell / 3:00 PM - The Chaplet of Divine Mercy is recited followed by manual labor / 5:00 PM - Vespers is recited in the choir followed by an hour of mental prayer.  / 6:15 PM - Supper (or collation during the Fast from September 14 until Easter Sunday) / 7:30 PM - Recreation / 8:30 PM - Compline is recited, followed by the Litany of Loretto / 8:45 PM - Free time in the cells. The Great Silence begins after Compline.  / 9:30 PM - Matins is recited, followed by the commemorations of the Order.       The Gospel of the following day is read to prepare for the morning's meditation.  / 10:30 PM - The sisters retire to their cells, receive the night blessing, and rest in the Sacred Heart of Jesus. 

It It turns out that living a life of poverty and prayer isn't cheap.  "[T]he sisters have ambitious plans for their permanent home, which will include a Spanish-style monastery, a barn and a caretaker’s house, estimated to cost about $25 million. They should be able to move into a modular cloister of about 3,500 square feet on the [13 acres of]  donated land by year-end."  That's $2,500,000 per nun.  Let's hope their prayers are worth it.  I am reminded of James Baldwin's observation about involuntary poverty: “Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.” 

Coda

I  I am old and just about worn out, my parts mostly failing.  I have cut down on the time I spend watching the news on television because it is so - what is the word? - depressing doesn't quite cut it, desponding is closer to it, the verb form of Bunyon's Slough of Despond.  Can I cut down on reading the newspapers?  Become more of a recluse than I am now?  Do the ladies in the cloister know something that I don't?  Are they fools, or am I?  I fear for my children & grandchildren, all children, all grandchildren.  I despond.