4/8/23

 Saturday, April 8, 2023

Holy Saturday

In bed at 10:30, up at 6:30 from unsettling dreams of bad days at old law firm, plus of the 1st 5 names on the letterhead, 3 are dead.  37℉, mostly cloudy, high of 52℉, wind 3 to 10 mph, with gusts up to 14 mph.  Sun rose at 6:20, sunset at 7:26, 13+4.

Easter Weekend.  Warm temperatures, sunny skies.  Spring is sprung/the grass is ris/I wonder where the birdies is.

Snowdrops, a few weeks later than ordinary

My Detachment.  "Before [some colonel] dismissed me, he talked about facial hair.  The Army high command had recently authorized mustaches, of precise measurements, not much wider than Hitler's.  But in the colonel's estimation, this was a mistake.  "Mustaches are dirt catchers.  They are disease spreaders.  I expect that officers in my command will not grow mustaches."  My memory from Vietnam about the disapproval of mustaches was the wonderment 'why anyone would cultivate around his mouth what grows wild around his asshole.'  Nonetheless, many of us grew mustaches in 1965 and early 1966, often the first mustaches in our lives, and often of the handlebar, longhorn cattle variety.  Then the Marine Corps issued an order similar to the one Tracy Kidder described above.

Homogeneity and the Welfare State.   "Anti-immigrant voices sold the idea that Denmark’s success was a result of its homogeneity — that protecting the welfare state required protecting “Danishness.”"  This is from an article in this morning's WaPo:  How progressive Denmark became the face of the anti-migration left: Danish authorities are threatening settled refugees with deportation and pushing for overseas processing centers. It may be a sign of what's to come in Europe.  The Danes (and other nations) are dealing with the "otherness" problem that has beset America since the end of the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments - the resistance to providing social/governmental benefits to members of group that are identifiably different from the dominant group.  It's the theory I've held for years, i.e., that the major underlying dynamic of America's stinginess when it comes to social welfare benefits is White resistance to providing help to "undeserving" Blacks (and other 'others'.)  Wealth redistribution = taking from Whites and giving to Blacks and Browns=Socialism.  All an extension of family before clan, clan before tribe, tribe before non-tribe.  If America were a lot Whiter, a lot less Black and Brown, America might be a lot more like Europe and the rest of the developed world.  But we're not.  The celebration of diversity has many costs.

I listened to the New Yorker podcast Israel on the Brink: Understanding the Judicial Overhaul, and the Protests Against It with David Remnick interviewing Ruth and Avishai Margalit.  Israel may have a much worse problem of tribalism than the U.S. has.  For more than 75 years the Jews and the Palestinians have been at each other's throats and increasingly Israeli's are more deeply divided among themselves than ever.  The ultraorthodox used to be non-Zionists, against the establishment of the Jewish state.  Increasingly they have become nationalists and ultranationalists, joining forces with the settler component of Israeli society.  The more secular Israelis, the 'Tel Aviv Jews' as opposed to the 'Jerusalem Jews' are a strong but not dominant force in Israeli politics and they are being outproduced by ultras, i.e., the Haredi and the settlers are having many more children than the secular Jews.  It's hard for me to see this inherently conflictual situation in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza ever getting resolved, much less resolved without huge amounts of bloodshed.  It leads to the question whether dividing the British protectorate into a Jewish state and an Arab one was a bad idea from the beginning but, even if it was, was it an inevitable decision after the Holocaust.