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?