5/11/23

 Thursday, May 11, 2023

In bed at 11:10 after watching Trump town hall on CNN, awake @ 5:40, up at 6:10, perseverating on Jane Olivor's lyric 'like a merchant in a market of thieves I came displaying my wares to you,' but from what song?  48℉, sunny, high of 66℉, clouds this afternoon and evening, wind SSE at 3 mph,  1 to 9 mph today, gusts up to 15 mph, sunrose at 5:32, sunset at 8:04, 13+31.

LTMW at a male rose-breasted grosbeak gorging on the suet cake, male goldfinches breaking their fast on some sunflower seeds, white-crowned sparrows pecking away on the ground, a brilliant red male cardinal on the ground passing a seed to his female partner,  good neighbor John McGregor out for his morning exercise, so disciplined.  The grosbeaks are becoming regular visitors.  Also, I mounted two orange halves on the shepherd's crooks and, huzzah, a beautiful male Baltimore oriole has been showing up and chowing down.  Also, the Eastern bluebird is back, attracted by the suet cake.

CNN Trump Town Hall in New Hampshire.  When I was 16, or more likely 17, I fell in love with my First True Love, Charlene Wegge.  She lived across the street from my former next-door neighbor Cathy Semrau, daughter of Carl and Ann Semrau who enabled our move from the basement of 7303 S. Emerald Avenue to their 2nd-floor flat at 7307 S. Emerald ("well, we're movin' on up, to the east side, to a deluxe apartment in the sky . . .")  Charlene was a year behind me in school, she at the Catholic chic Longwood Academy in Beverly Hills, me at everyman's Leo High School on the edge of Englewood. Charlene was The Love Of My Life and stayed that way throughout my senior year at Leo and freshman year at Marquette, after which she dumped me and broke my heart. 😰😭😩 Why think back on those salad days after watching Donald Trump's CNN town hall last night?  Because Charlene and I had a pipe dream of marrying when we finished our schooling and moving to our dream town of Berlin, New Hampshire.  We decided on Berlin while browsing an atlas and deciding that it looked ideal, situated between the White Mountains of N.H. and the Green Mountains of Vermont in scenic New England, not far from the French Canadian border.  The summer after Charlene broke my heart, my roommate Ed Felsenthal and I made a point of driving through Berlin, New Hampshire on our way back to Milwaukee after our summer active duty service in the Navy in Norfolk, VA.  My heart was still aching from losing the Love Of My Life and my condition wasn't helped by discovering that Berlin was pretty much a dump, an old paper mill town that had produced a lot of toilet paper and had fallen on very hard times.  Now its economy is largely based on incarceration, with two prisons located there, one state and one federal.  Another dream shattered.😨😩😥

During last night's town hall, I was more distressed by the New Hampshire voters comprising the audience than I was by Trump himself.  They were all New Hampshire Republican primary election voters.  Each of the audience members who asked a question on camera had voted for Trump in 2020 and intended to vote in the next Republican primary.  As Trump mouthed one outrageous lie after another the camera showed various audience members vigorously applauding and smiling broadly.  Give it to'em, Donald!  With an all-Republican audience, the event was more like a Trump campaign rally than an open town hall gathering.  Watching those people reminded me, as if I needed any reminding, that in 2016 Trump defeated Hillary Clinton with about 46% of the popular vote, just under 63 million votes, and that in 2020, he lost to Joe Biden but increased his vote count to almost 47% with more than 74 million people voting for him after watching him perform for 4 years as president.  I was looking at a sample of the Republican electorate in 2023 and near despair.  How can people support the ogre on that stage, even as he urges the government to default on the national debt?  Even as he promises to pardon many of the January 6th insurrectionists?  Even as he calls insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt a hero and the policeman who shot her a thug?  E. Jean Carroll  "a whackjob"?  Even as he says he will end the Russia-Ukraine War in 24 hours?  Gene Wilder to Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles: "You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons."  If only they were merely morons . . .

Random thoughts:  (1)  Trump's entry onto the stage at St. Anselm reminded me a 'And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?  He looked like an obese, nasty, schlub.  (2)  Kaitlan Collins did a very creditable job trying to fact-check Trump.  My nose gets out of joint listening to commentators blasting her for not taking on each of his hundreds of lies.  Give her a break; it was a town hall, not an exclusive interview.  (3)  Boo to CNN for staging this atrocity.  The network is turning right under Chris Licht and following Fox's lead in chasing ratings with its viewership declining after canning Chris Cuomo, and Don Lemon, and manically reshuffling its reporters and anchors and scheduling. It undoubtedly had high viewer ratings for the Trump program and the program is the main topic on all the MSNBC shows today.  There's money to be made putting Trump on the air, as Joe Scarborough and Fox & Friends know.  Expect CNN to continue.  Under our capitalist legal system, CNN corporate management's main duty is to maximize shareholder value and Trump helps them to do that. (4)  I've long been impressed with the intelligence, mental sharpness, and knowledge of network reporters and anchors. (5)  Trump said he would end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours.  Probably by cutting off all American military and economic aid and handing the country over to Vladimir Putin and, in the process, destroying NATO.  (6) His endorsement of letting the government default on the nation's debts makes it more likely that it will happen.  Is there any safe place to put our retirement savings other than in FDIC-insured bank accounts?

Our Old Lady.  We drove to Orvis at Bayshore and picked up a dog sling for Lilly this morning.  We can't count on her being able to jump into the back of Geri's Honda anymore.  The sling should let us pick her up and lift her into the car, but we haven't tried it yet.  Keeping our fingers crossed.

Spectrum Internet/WiFi disappeared this afternoon, out of nowhere.  I tried rebooting; Spectrum customer service sent a reboot and then another reboot.  Nothing is working.  Rep scheduled to be here tomorrow after 3 p.m.  Grrr!