Monday, March 13, 2023
In bed at 11 (DST, Grrr...) and up at 5:45, from muddled dreams featuring my sister on crutches, me with my cane, my cousin Jim driving a bunch of us to Glendale, AZ maybe for the Super Bowl, eating at a restaurant with a steep staircase, styrofoam 'doggie bags' making descending the stairs hazardous. Pit stop in the middle of the night, and woke up very sweaty. 34℉, steady blowing snow, snow plows out, high today is only 29℉, the wind is WNW at 8, ranging from 6 to 22 mph today with gusts up to 33 mph producing a current wind chill of 15 and wind chills of 9 to 21℉ during the day. There has been 1.75" of wintery mix in the last 24 hours, and today's wintery mix will be just under an inch. Sunrise at 7:07, sunset at 6:55, 11+47.
Facebook Immortality. I opened FB this morning to find that its algorithms had a "friend suggestion" for me: Jim Tunney who died in 2017 and with whom I have two mutual friends, including my sister Kitty who died a year ago, and my nephew Michael. The Tunneys were at Kitty's house in Glendale in February 2007, when my Dad died and Andy and Anh flew out to be with us. Anh was 6 months pregnant with Peter who would be born on May 3 of that year and in a discussion of potential names for him, Tunney suggested "Little Jimmy," which is a bit of humor that lives on Andy, Anh, and us. Jim died after very protracted final illnesses such that his death was thought a blessing. It was Tunney's wife Barb who drove me to Sky Harbor Airport at the end of my last visit to Kitty on September 8, 2021, and it was Barb who called me on March 3 last year to tell me Kitty had died. We met Kitty and Jim Reck for a visit at their motel near Palos Park, IL because Kitty begged off coming up to Wisconsin to visit us after the funeral. Jim Reck had gotten hopelessly confused and lost on their drive from AZ to IL and insisted on driving the wrong direction for a couple hundred miles, leaving poor Kitty frazzled and frustrated, unwilling to have him drive to WI, and eager to get home.
10th Anniversary of Pope Francis' Papacy. He has been a breath of fresh air after Benedict XVI and JP II each of whom contributed to large effluxes of liberal Catholics from the Church. The only great pope in my lifetime was John XXIII, who convened the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965 to 'open the windows of the Church to let in some fresh air.' I grew up with the stern, dour face of Pius XII staring out from classroom, rectory, and convent walls all over the world. Paul VI brought some humanity to his papacy but on the most important issue facing him, the morality of artificial birth control and 'the Pill,' he rejected the findings and recommendations of the Church's own fact-finding and advisory commission and bowed to the threats of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla who would become JP II and held to the doctrine that the only moral method of birth control was abstinence and the 'rhythm method.' He taught that the use of birth control pills was sinful and with that fateful choice, he destroyed what Woytyla tried to preserve, the magisterium or teaching authority of the Church. JP I I can't even remember, holding the job only 33 days before he kicked the bucket, raising anew doubts about the degree, if any, to which his election was guided by "the Holy Ghost" working His will in the Sistine Chapel. JP II was a hero for secular political reasons; his leadership in Poland and Rome contributed significantly to the breakup of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe and eventually of the breakup of the Soviet Union. In terms of theology and ecclesiology, however, he was a troglodyte, as was his successor Benedict XVI. Both were authoritarians, dogmatists, 'company men.' Women can't be priests because the apostles were all men. Were they? JP II issued a papal letter worthy of a Stalin or Mussolini that warned that the issue could not even be discussed. All the teachings on 'pelvic issues' were sacrosanct: masturbation, homosexuality, premarital sex, divorce, all sinful, all against God's will, all leading to firey punishment in Purgatory or Hell. With that kind of history behind him, Francis seemed a Godsend and he has been at least in terms of his humanity, humility, and openness when it comes to moral judgments about human behaviors. When asked about homosexuality shortly after his election, he famously (or infamously said, depending on your POV): "If someone is gay and is searching for the Lord and has a good will, then who am I to judge him?” It calls to mind Matthew 7:1-3: "Judge not, that ye not be judged, for with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto ye. And why do ye behold the mote in your brother's eye but consider not the beam in your own eye?" On the other hand, he hasn't delivered much in terms of real changes within the Church's embrace of dogmatism, feudal governance structures, or theology. He is 86 years old now and worn down if not worn out. It's an open question whether he will step down voluntarily as Benedict did but whether he does or not, it seems a safe bet that with the College of Cardinals constituted as it is with appointees of JP II and Benedict XVI, the next pope will be a traditionalist in their mode. Francis will come to be seen as a blip, a pause on the Church hierarchy's rightward rush. The Church will become more and more like American Evangelicals and less and less like Jesus of Nazareth.
Complicit Every now and then I am struck by my own complicity in life's woes, especially political, social, and economic woes. I'm very good at liberal virtue-signaling, complaining about all the injustices in American society, moaning about our racist, exploitative history of White Supremacy, our callousness and indifference to the needs, the sufferings of others. I live in a wonderful old house in an 'upscale' almost all White neighborhood where my neighbors are doctors and lawyers and business owners and executives, where the house to the west of us recently sold for more than $1M and the house across the street sold for about $750,000. We are not in a literally gated community but we might as well be in one. It's clear that the poor are not entitled to live near us, no sign on our borders bid “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Just the opposite. We, and our 'limousine liberal' friends chose to live in upper middle class segregation.
The March 20, 2023 edition of The New Yorker includes a long book review by Margaret Talbot of sociologist Matthew Desmond's recent work POVERTY: BY AMERICA. "“Poverty, by America,” he explains, is a book about how and why the rest of us abide poverty and are complicit in it. Why do many of us seem to accept that the problem is one of scarcity—that there is simply not enough to go around in our very rich country? Where there is exploitation, there are exploiters, and this time Desmond sees many more of them, including most of his prospective readers. Corporations batten on low-wage labor, but so do consumers, who have come to expect the cheap goods and services—the illusorily frictionless food deliveries, the Amazon orders that arrive like conjuring tricks the afternoon you place them—that poorly paid, nonunionized, often temporary workers provide. . . . How is it that the United States, a country with a gross domestic product “larger than the combined economies of Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, France, and Italy,” has a higher relative poverty rate than those other advanced democracies? Why do one in eight Americans, and one in six children, live in poverty—a rate about the same as it was in 1970? Why do we put up with it? The short answer, Desmond argues, is that as a society we have made a priority of other things: maximal wealth accumulation for the few and cheap stuff for the many. At the same time, we’ve either ignored or enabled the gouging of the poor—by big banks that charge them stiff overdraft fees, by predatory payday lenders and check-cashing outlets of what Desmond calls the “fringe banking industry,” by landlords who squeeze their tenants because the side hustle of rent collecting has turned into their main hustle, by companies that underpay their workers or deny them benefits by confining them to gig status or that keep them perpetually off balance with “just-in-time scheduling” of shifts. To the extent that middle- and upper-class people unthinkingly buy products from such companies and invest in their stock, or park their money in those banks, or oppose public housing in their neighborhoods despite a professed commitment to it, or bid up the prices of fixer-uppers in Austin or San Francisco or Washington, D.C., they, too, are helping to buttress the system."
How do you plead, virtue-signaler? Guilty as charged.
EO I started to watch this Polish film by Jerzy Skolimovski on Criterion Channel, got a half hour tnto but decided I didn't have the heart to watch the balance of it in which the star Sardinian donkey, Eo, is mistreated and eventually sent to the slaughterhouse. It's a fresh take on Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar which I watched a few years ago during a Bresson binge. It's not an enjoyable film by any means depicting as it does cruelty and indifference to suffering. It's clearly not intended to be "enjoyable' or "entertaining." Nor is EO. Perhaps I'll screw up my courage and go back to the film.
I returned to the film and saw it to the finish which was EO following the flow of cattle into an abattoir. The film paints a grim picture of humankind, especially the male component of the species. It also paints a grim picture of modern industrial society and culture. It is easy to love the docile donkeys who were used to play the role of EO. Just as easy to feel disgust at the humans among whom he lived.
The Banking Game. I have thought since 2008 that the banking business is a house of cards, a con game, a racket. I still think so. I don't trust banks or bankers. Everything about them has 'an aura of reek,' even the language used to describe banking. Savings and checking customers are said to "deposit" their money, kind of the way a hen deposits an egg into a nest, suggesting that the money is in a deposit, but it isn't. Customers don't 'deposit' money "in" banks; they lend the money to the bank and the banks are free to gamble with that money in any attempt to generate enough winnings to return (1) the amount lent by the customer plus (2) some interest to be paid to customers with interest-generating accounts, and (2) a profit for the bank and the bankers. Customer 'deposits' are not called "assets" of the bank; they are "liabilities" because the bank is liable to repay the money to their lenders, I.e., their 'depositors.' 'Assets" of the bank consist not only of money and other things of value they possess but of money they have lent out to other customers, e.g., mortgage borrowers, or otherwise 'invested', i.e., gambled with. Capitalism = Banking. Banking = Capitalism. Corrupt economic financial institutions. Our capitalist government told us the problems that brought our financial system to its knees were solved by the Dodd-Frank legislation. Wrong. Plus, much of Dodd-Frank was repealed during the Trump Administration, with some help from Democratic legislators. We are so corrupt.
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