6/30/23

 Friday, June 30, 2023

In bed before 10 and up at 6.  65℉, high of 85℉, AQI of 154 "Unhealthy," wind W at 4 mph, 1 to 7 mph today, with gusts up to 15 mph.  Sunrise at 5:15, sunset at 8:35, 15+22.

Rita departed for Topeka this morning.  Geri drove her to Mitchell Field to catch her bus to O'Hare for her American flight to Kansas City.  

Affirmative Action in theory, in action, in life.  I haven't read the two decisions in which the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, just a couple of opinion pieces on it. a liberal bemoaning them, a conservative praising them.  At least early on, I am inclined to agree with the conservatives.  There doesn't seem to be much dispute about the fact that at least elite institutions with affirmative action programs discriminate against Asian-American applicants in favor of Black and Hispanic applicants.  I wonder too whether there may be some discrimination against Jewish applicants though I have seen no data on this.  The big problem, if it is one, is that so many Asian-American college applicants do so well in their pre-college studies and in their standardized test scores compared to non-Asian applicants that they 'gobble up' a lot more of the available seats than non-Asians relative to percentages of the overall population.  Colleges may fear being 'taken over' by Asians, just as some did in the past about being taken over by Jews.  From the point of view of Asian citizens, it's impossible to see this situation as anything other than invidious racial discrimination against them to favor members of other groups.  I don't know that I disagree though I want to do some more reading and thinking about this.  I wonder if my dear oldest grandchild Peter Charles Clausen would have a worse chance of getting into Harvard or Yale if his name were, e.g., Peter Nguyen Hoang or if his sister Lizzie would be disadvantaged gaining admission to one of 'the seven sisters' if her name were Bac Tuyet Hoang.

    The flurry over the decisions prompts me to look back on some of my personal experiences in academia, at a non-elite, Catholic, Jesuit university starting in 1959 and carrying on into 2001.

    First, in my undergraduate years at Marquette from 1959 to 1963, there were virtually no Black students other than athletes on athletic scholarships, especially basketball players.  I remember (but did not know personally) one Black young woman from the Virgin Islands, but no one other than her.  In my law student days, we had an entering class of 119 including 2 Black men, no Black women, 5 White women, and 112 White men, including me.  The two Black men became friends of mine.  One, Jim Beckett, was a former Army officer and the son of the head of City of Milwaukee Human Relations Commission (or some such body).  We both worked for Bronson LaFollette the summer after our first year of study.  The other, Ron (?), was a physical therapist at Mount Sinai Hospital.  He lived in a 2 bedroom corner unit at Juneau Village where Anne and I lived in a less-expensive unit.  Ron worked pretty much full-time during our first year and flunked out at the end of the year.  Through him and his wife, I met and became friends (of a sort) with Brad Carr, a Black aide to Mayor Henry Maier and sports announcer on WISN-TV, later a law student at Marquette, and later still, disbarred for misappropriating client funds, and other wrongs.

    Three incidents stick out in my memory from my days on the faculty.  One occurred when we had a Jewish applicant for an open faculty position.  The senior and most influential member of our faculty confided to me that we had one Jewish faculty member and didn't want to have 'too many.'  Another was an offhand conversation about Marquett'es basketball team with the Jesuit priest who handled law school admissions before the school had a director of admissions.  I recall him confiding to me that the university had to be careful about not having too many 'jigaboos'.  The third incident occurred when a Wisconsin state senator raised hell about the law school's long-term failure to enroll minority students, especially Black students, and brought pressure to bear on authorities to revoke a federal grant the law school had for a program funded by the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration headed by Jerris Leonard, a 1955 MULS graduate and appointee of Richard Nixon.  The grant was nominally administered by the associate dean of the law school and provided some income to the school and to the associate dean himself.  In order to deflect some of the heat being directed at the school and to preserve the federal grant, the administration admitted 17 Black students the following year.  Fourteen of them flunked out after the first year of study giving rise of course to even more heat about the school's shabby record when it came to minority students.  I was one of the freshman faculty members who gave failing grades to many of those Black students, who had performed abysmally on their final exams.  When we faculty members raised hell with the administration about the unreadiness, for want of a better term, of those students for legal studies, we discovered that the students had been admitted with grossly non-competitive undergraduate academic records and LSAT test scores.  That is to say, they never should have been admitted in the first place and had been admitted simply to solve, temporarily, a political and public relations problem.  I dimly recall making a prophylactic motion of some sort at the faculty meeting following the discovery of the facts leading up to the PR disaster of 14/17th of our Black students flunking out.  The motion was passed and we never experienced a repeat of that year's fiasco and the terrible disservice to those Black students who were 'improvidently admitted' and then flunked out.

    On the other hand, the school's experiences with affirmative action and minority enrollment remained at best 'bumpy.'  Legal education is a business, a very competitive business.  It is also a hierarchical industry, with the 'elites' at the top of the pyramid, the for-profits at the bottom, and most in-between.  Many, perhaps most, applicants try to get admitted to the "best" schools, the most 'elite,' the most selective.  The schools themselves compete for the applicants with the highest test scores. That was, and I suppose still is, especially true because of the outsized influence of the US News college and law school rankings.   Minority students, like non-minority students, try to get accepted at the 'best' schools, i.e., the schools whose students have the easiest path to high-paying, high-prestige jobs.  The elite schools skim off the 'best' minority applicants, i.e., those with the highest test scores, most impressive undergraduate records, etc., leaving all the non-elite schools to compete over the rest.  All the schools want some significant minority enrollment both as a matter of social justice and lest they be called racist and discriminatory.  Often the pool of minority applicants remaining after the elites have skimmed the top minority students is less competitive than the pool of White applicants, i.e., having had less effective prior educational opportunities, being first in the family to get through high school and college, etc.  A school like Marquette, a non-elite, accepted some Black students who would not have been accepted had they been White or whose entering 'credentials' were among the lowest in an entering class.  Some of those students did poorly on the law school's written essay exams and would have received failing grades had they been White.  But rather than give out those failing grades and accept the inevitable blowback, the grading practices were changed to avoid flunks.  Thus Marquette changed from a school where an attrition rate of about 10% was commonplace after the first year to a school where failure was a rarity because of the unwillingness to risk flunking minority students.  This raises the question of whether the earlier attrition rate was too harsh or the failure to flunk was too lenient, issues about which opinions differ.  The issue is especially dicey in Wisconsin where graduates of the state's 2 law schools enjoy 'the diploma privilege,' i.e., admission to the Bar without the need to pass a bar exam. 

    The point is that affirmative action can be and often is a messy business.  At MULS while I was there, it was very messy with little to be particularly proud of or happy about.  But Race in America is a very messy business and it is at its messiness at its core component, Black/White, because of our long history of racial slavery, Jim Crow laws, and de iure and de facto segregation.   White Supremacy, especially as manifested in the nation's treatment of Blacks, is our Original Sin and is still our Besetting Sin.  Every White American, except I suppose the youngest, suffers from some racism, not because they are all racists, but simply because we grew up in and live in a race-dominated society and culture, a world of White Supremacy and Black Subordination.  We have never known a world in which anything even approaching racial equality is anything more than a dream, a fantasy.  Despite advances by many Blacks over the last several decades, the wide disparities in wealth, income, education, etc. between Whites and Blacks tell us the world we live in.  That is the world that the Supreme Court's affirmative action decisions will operate in.  The question is whether it will be better or worse for those decisions.  I don't know.

6/29/23

 Thursday, June 29, 2023

In bed at 9 and up at 5.  63℉ and a high of 78℉.  We're still on the Air Quality Alert with an AQI of 180, Unhealthy.  The wind is SSE at 6 mph, 3 to 10 during the day with gusts up to 16 mph.  My weather app tells me there has been no rain in the last 24 hours but the ground is very wet as I let Lilly out.  Very little rain is expected today,  The humidity is 89% and will average 80% today with dew points from 57 to 67.  Sunrise at 5:14, sunset at 8:35. 15+21.

Yesterday's driveway news.  We need to get our culvert pipes replaced by the village before the driveway can be repaved.  Cost anywhere from $6500 to $10,000.  The joy of home ownership. Grumble, grumble.

Dinner last night with Geri and Rita.  Geri made a wonderful rolled lasagna, the best ever.  I'm thinking this morning of Yeats' The Stolen Child, of Jimmy, Eugene O'Neil, and other thoughts.  Not sure why.

It was a dark and hazy morning.  My entry for this year's Bulwer-Lytton prize for the opening sentence of the worst possible novel.  I'm looking out my window an hour and a half after sunrise and it is indeed 'a dark and hazy morning.'  There are 500 active wildfires in Canada as I write, half of them out of control.  There have been 3,000 so far this year.  31,000 square miles have burned, an area about the size of South Carolina with the smoke smothering much of the U.S. and now reaching to Europe.  Carried by the jet stream it may be on its way around the world, literally.  Climate change?

Mind-blowing news this morning of the discovery of 'gravitational wave background' or ripples in our space-time cosmic fabric.  I don't know what this means.  I don't understand most of what I read about modern astronomy and even less about subatomic science, all that 'quantum theory' and 'quantum mechanics' stuff.  Stories like this one remind me of how vastly and profoundly ignorant I am, of how incapable I am of apprehending basic science and the mathematics underlying that science.  This seems to be in large part a failure of imagination.  The news story relates that 'there are many billions of galaxies.'  I can barely conceive of our solar system, our one sun with its planets and other stuff circling around it in accordance with the law of gravity.  And we are a small part of one galaxy, our Milky Way.  And there are many billions of galaxies in the cosmos?!? Egad!  The story also differentiates between 'stellar mass black holes having masses akin to 10 or 20 or 30 suns' and 'supermassive black holes' having 'the mass equivalents of millions or even billions of suns.'  And of supermassive black hole binaries 'dancing with each other' and generating the background gravitational waves spreading through the cosmos.  The mass of millions or even billions of stars???  How to conceive of that?  And what the heck is 'mass'?  We're told that the universe is made up of mass and energy and they are interchangeable, E=mc squared.  I think of mass as 'stuff', that which we can see and feel, etc.  But in black holes, none of the 'stuff' is seeable, etc.  How does it even exist if the gravitational forces are so strong that even light energy cannot escape it?  Why am I reminded of the submersible that just imploded under the high pressure of the sea at depth?  The story speaks of "pulsars," a type of neutron star, the ultradense remnant of a dead star" that 'spin rapidly, hundreds of revolutions a second, and emits radio waves in a steady pulse.'  Whoa!  Why would a 'dead' star revolve hundreds of times a second?  Where does that energy come from if it's dead?  And why doesn't it run out of energy at some point, or does it?  And what with the steady stream of radio waves?  And, by the way, what exactly is meant a "wave"?  And what distinguishes a "background wave" from other kinds (s) of waves(s)?  Lord, have mercy on me, an ignoramus.

There is an unrelated book review in this morning's NYT: "The Philosophers Who Used Word Puzzles to Understand the World:  “A Terribly Serious Adventure,” by Nikhil Krishnan, brings to life the 20th-century Oxford thinkers whose methods of linguistic analysis were deeply influential and vigorously debated."  The book discusses 'linguistic' or 'analytic' philosophy as professed by a group of Oxford philosophers who were preoccupied with language, words and their relation to Reality and Truth.  The ever-present question was 'What exactly do you mean by . . . "  It sounds to me akin to the so-called Socratic dialogue and its former (?) use in legal education, but it reminds me of my wondering what exactly is meant by 'mass,' 'energy,' wave,' 'force,' etc.

Racism is something that is done to us.'  By happenstance, I watched Michael Steele's podcast today featuring an interview with Mary Trump.  I stayed with it because Mary T. and I live in the same silo, believing deep inside us that the basic problem in America is Race, and as Michael Steele said, it's Black and White.  It's not Asian, Hispanic, Muslim, etc.; it's Black and White.  Mary Trump caught my attention with her statement that the number of White people in this country who do not suffer from racism is vanishingly small.  Not that such people are racists, because being a racist is something one chooses.  She was speaking of the non-racist Whites who grew up in our society, our culture, our economy, our world in which racism is something that is done to us.  I've written about it as racism was in the air I breathed as a child growing up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s.  It was ubiquitous, everywhere, all around.  Mary Trump to White People: racism is something that was done to you, you're not responsible for what was done to you but what you can do is take responsibility for undoing it.  ["The Psychology of America," Michael Steele Network.]

From Notebook of a Tamed Cynic: 1918 (after a trip through the war training camps._  "What I dislike about most of the chaplains is that they assume a very officious and also a very masculine attitude.  Ministers are not used to authority and revel in it when acquired.  The rather too obvious masculinity which they try to suggest by word and action is meant to remove any possible taint which their Christian faith might be suspected to have left upon them in the minds of the he=men in the army.  H_____ is right/\.  He tells me that he wants to go into the army as a private and not as a chaplain.  He believes that the war is inevitable but he is not inclined to reconcile its necessity with the Christian ethic.  He will merely forget about this difficulty during the war.  That is much more honest than what I am doing."

This reminds me of my experience with chaplains in the Marines.  The one I remember most vividly was the Navy chaplain, a Protestant of some sort,  who served as chief chaplain for the 1st Marine Air Wing.  He was there at Wing HQ at the Danang Air Base.  I remember walking into the Officers' Mess one afternoon in December 1965 and the chaplain was decorating an artificial Christmas tree and singing loudly "Christmas is a-coming and the goose is getting fat, please to put a penny in the old man's hat.  If you haven't got a penny then a ha'penny will do.  If you haven't got a ha'penny, then God bless you."  He was the type that Niebuhr described as "too officious and too masculine."  I felt like punching him in the face.  The other chaplain at Wing HG was a little Catholic chaplain.  If he wasn't gay, I'd be surprised.  He was the opposite of the Wing chief chaplain and everybody liked him because he made a point of nabbing ice cream from mess halls and bringing it to Marines where they worked.  It must have been his way of honoring Matthew 25: 31-46 -- "I was hungry and you fed me", etc.   The third chaplain I remember was a reservist with the unit for which I was the I&I, inspector-instructor at NAS Willow Grove, PA.  What I remember about him is that he purported to be an atheist and suggested to me that most theology students didn't believe in God.  As I think about this now, I recall that going to Divinity School was one way to get a deferment from the draft, at least in 1966-67 while I was at Willow Grove.   In any event, I smile at Niebuhr's approval of his minister friend who intended to enlist as a private rather than accept a commission as a chaplain because "he is not inclined to reconcile [the war's] necessity with the Christian ethic.  He will merely forget about this difficulty during the war."  This reminds me of Katie at the law school telling me the tale of a friend of hers who struggled with the doctrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin.  When told it was a dogma and that as a Catholic he had to believe it, he said "Well, I may have to believe it but I don't have to think about it."

LTMW at Barkis and Peggotty feeding together on the same half-orange.  They seem to be quite a close couple.  A big white-bellied nuthatch is working on the sunflower tube,  also a female English sparrow.  A brilliant male goldfinch works on the niger tube.

More from Notebook of a Tamed Cynic:  1918  "I can see one element in this strange fascination of war which men have not adequately noted.  It reduces life to simple terms.  The modern man lives in such a complex world that one wonders how his sanity is maintained as well as it is.   Every moral venture, every social situation and every practical problem involves a whole series of conflicting loyalties, and a man may never be quite sure that he is right in giving himself to the one as against the other.  Shall he be just and sacrifice love?  Shall he strive to beauty and do it by gaining the social privileges which destroy his sense of fellowship with the underprivileged?   Shall he neglect his family and serve the State?  Or be patriotic to the detriment of the great family of mankind?  Shall he be diligent at the expense of his health?  Or keep healthy at the expense of the great cause in which he is interested?  Shall he be truthful and therefore cruel?  Or shall he be kind and therefore a little soft?  Shall he strive for the amenities of life and therefore make life less robust in the process?  Or shall he make courage the ultimate virtue and brush aside the virtues which a stable and therefore soft society has cultivated?   Out of this mesh of conflicting claims, interests, loyalties, ideals, values, and communities, he is rescued by the psychology of war which gives the state at least a momentary priority over all other communities and which makes courage the supreme virtue. . . . . Unfortunately, all these momentary simplifications of the complexities of life cannot be finally satisfying, because they do violence to life.

Why am I reminded of the tax collector in Luke - Lord have mercy on me, a sinner?

6/27/23

 Wednesday, June 27, 2023

In bed at 11:30, up at 6:10 from a bad dream of a disagreement of some sort with Steve.  57℉, high of 73, mostly sunny and more Air Quality Alert, index at 226, Very Unhealthy category, worse than yesterday which was very bad.   The wind is SW at 4 mph, 1 to 10 during the day, and gusts up to 17 mph.  The sun rose at 5:14 and will set at 8:35, 15+21. 

Rita's delayed arrival, Geri's attempt at pickup.  When I returned home from a trip to Sendik's to pick up some brat buns for tonight and chopped spinach for rolled lasagna tomorrow night, Geri's car was gone and I realized she must be on the way to Mitchell Field hoping to find Rita who had been incommunicado.  I was right but Geri returned home some time later and said she got a call from Rita while on the freeway saying she was still in Chicago.  We don't know the reason for the delay but will find out when she arrives later.  I thought to myself, however, what a good and faithful friend Geri is, heading out on her mission of mercy, thinking Rita had forgotten her telephone, was unable to make a connection, and driving to the airport 'just in case.'  It is no wonder Geri has so many friendships and of such long durations.

Morning Headline: Milwaukee's Air Quality is One of the Worst in the World, "Very Unhealthy."   EMS calls for respiratory distress have doubled, situation is worst for Blacks and the elderly.  Asthma, COPD, pre-existing conditions.  Ozone and particulates are both present in abundance.  Warm, dry, summery Spring + wildfire smoke from Canada+proper winds=AQI firestorm.

What then must we do? and Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.  I'm reminded of these New Testament lines by an essay I've been reading by Christopher Hitchens on the time he spent interviewing Saul Bellow in Chicago in 1983.  The essay is the concluding one in a collection of his essays titled The Moronic Inferno.  At one point during the interview, Hitchens wrote that he asked Bellow "What then must we do?" undoubtedly referring, without saying so, to either the line in Luke 3:10-14 or to Leo Tolstoy's nonfiction book of that title (or something like it, depending on the translation.)  The other line - Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner - is also from Luke, but in ch. 18:13.  The first line was uttered by people seeking baptism by John the Baptist, Jesus' first cousin (who today we would call a lunatic) as he was scaring the shit out of them about the coming doom and damnation - 'the axe lies ready at the root of the tree . . .'.  They were asking how to avoid the terror to come.  The second line was uttered by a despised tax collector on the margin of a crowd of Pharisees who were bragging about how observant/holy they were with Jesus saying saying the tax collector "went home justified, for he who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."  I think of both of these lines in connection with Reinhold Niebuhr's An Interpretation of Christian Ethics and its chapter entitled 'The Relevance of an Impossible Ethical Ideal."  In Luke 3:10-14, John answered his questioners that they should share all that they have with the poor, anticipating Jesus' teaching in Matthew 25: 31-46 and elsewhere.  Niebuhr points out that this Christian ethical ideal of subordinating one's own interest to benefit others runs counter to human nature, i.e., that it is impossible to follow. 

I think about those followers of John the Baptist asking 'what then must we do?'  These people had to be a little nuts to begin with.  Why else would they be down at the River Jordan seeking answers about the meaning of life from John in his camel hair tunic and diet of locusts and honey?  Who are their counterparts today?  I think too of that loathed tax collector, who he was, why he was so conscious of his sins, why Jesus said he was 'justified,' and who are his counterparts today.  I suspect today's Jordanaires (not the backup singers for Elvis and Patsy Cline, but John's groupies) are the whacko followers of whacko evangelical prophets of all sorts, but mostly of the fraudster/grifter sort, the likes of Jimmy Swaggert, Jerry Falwell, Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, Joel Osteen and on and on.  They believe that we are doomed, that Armageddon is on the way, and that they need salvation and that if they do what is required they will be 'saved' while those who aren't in the know and who don't do "what then must be done" are doomed to perdition.   

On the other hand, the penitent tax collector is Modern [Hu]Man and his  progeny are the many people who are troubled by their own inadequacy to live a 'clean' life in the society and culture in which they live, conscious of their own moral and ethical frailness, their own complicity in what they see as life's depravity, those who are kicked in the stomach by the lines in Yeat's Vacillation:  

"Responsibility so weighs me down.

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.

. . . . 

But for Jesus' tax collector and today's progeny, it's not just the acts and omissions 'long years ago' that beset their consciences, it's everyday wrongs, everyday compromises, all the moral and ethical problems that Niebuhr recognizes as permanently grounded in human nature.  They never feel innocent because they know they are not innocent.  They are not sure of how to assess individual guiltiness because they know they have been born to live in a guilty world, a guilty society, a guilty culture.  While they would like to feel like victims of this wicked, nasty, world, this society, this culture, they know full well that they are also sustainers of those systems, beneficiaries of them, "limousine liberals" and NIMBYs.

And speaking of Niebuhr, there is a very interesting op-ed piece in this morning's NYT by Thomas Edsall titled "This Is Why Trump Lies Like There’s No Tomorrow."  Excerpts:

-- "In 2008, Kang Lee, a developmental psychologist at the University of Toronto, published “Lying in the Name of the Collective Good” along with three colleagues:  Lying in the name of the collective good occurs commonly. Such lies are frequently told in business, politics, sports, and many other areas of human life. These lies are so common that they have acquired a specific name, the “blue lie” — purportedly originating from cases where police officers made false statements to protect the police force or to ensure the success of the government’s legal case against an accused.

-- "In a 2017, a Scientific American article building on Lee’s research, “How the Science of ‘Blue Lies’ May Explain Trump’s Support,” by Jeremy Adam Smith, argues that Lee’s work highlights a difficult truth about our species: we are intensely social creatures, but we are prone to divide ourselves into competitive groups, largely for the purpose of allocating resources. People can be prosocial — compassionate, empathetic, generous, honest — in their group and aggressively antisocial toward out-groups. When we divide people into groups, we open the door to competition, dehumanization, violence — and socially sanctioned deceit."

This 'modern, scientific' insight seems to come directly from Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society which was published in 1932.

Niebuhr and God.  I've wondered for some time about Niebuhr's faith, i.e., his belief in God.  What "God" means to him.  How he understands "God" to be.  How he feels, e.g., about Thomas Aquinas' notion of the "All"s: all-good, all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful, all-this and all-that.  While looking for something else in my LOA edition of Niebuhr's major writings, I found his "Notebook of a Tamed Cynic" and this entry from some unstated day in 1026:

"I had a letter from a young preacher today who told me how he was suffering for truth's sake.  He had merely been telling his congregation that Jesus was a great spiritual teacher, as was Confucius and Laotse, and that the Christ idea was the product of Greek legend and ancient mythology.  His good people were so ignorant, he thought, that they failed to show proper appreciation for his learning and resented his iconoclasm."

. . . . 

"It is not easy to define the God idea.  Scientifically I suppose God is "the element of spirituality which is integral to reality," but for all practical and religious purposes I find it both helpful and justified to define him by saying that "God is like Jesus."  The ultimate nature of reality cannot be grasped by science alone; poetic imagination is as necessary as scientific precision.  Some of the supposedly ignorant peasants against whom my youthful friend is drawing his heroic sword may have more truth on their side than any fresh young theologue could possibly realize."

I don't dare compare myself in any way with Reinhold Niebuhr, but I have shared at least one thought with him, i.e., the poetic imagination is necessary to even begin to address 'the God idea' just as it may be to address any significant idea of 'Reality.'  I wonder what Einstein meant by "God" when he said (supposedly) 'God doesn't play dice with the universe.'  He has written that he didn't believe in a personal God and he was almost certainly using the term (or idea of) 'God' metaphorically.  What did Niebuhr mean by "God"?  What does the term refer to?  If not the Thomistic "all-this all-that guy", what are we left with?  Was it the best he could do to "define him by saying that "God is like Jesus."?  There are times I think I could spend much of the rest of my limited days on earth exploring this question if only I had better vision, more energy, more this, and more that.  Excuses, excuses, pity parties . . .

6/27/23

 Tuesday, June 27, 2023

In bed at 10 and up at 5:50.  60℉, high of 72℉, mostly sunny.  Air quality alert; air quality index is 178, worse than yesterday, smoke from wildfires in Canada, "People with heart or lung conditions and older adults should consider avoiding all outdoor activity.  Currently UNHEALTHY,  may reach VERY UNHEALTHY or even HAZARDOUS category.  The wind is NNW at 12 mph, 2 to 13 mph today and gusts up to 25 mph.  No rain today.  Sunrise at 5:14, sunset at 8:35, 15+21.

Climate change?  How much of what we ae experiencing with our wether is attributable to climate change?  Lack of rain, increased windiness (or am I imagining this?), wildfires in Canaga blowing smoke over us. particulates, ozone?  Air quality so bad CNN featured views of Milwaukee in its coverage of Canadian wildfire effects in the United States.  

Trump's Bedminster tape.  After watching the concluding episode of Happy Valley last night, we watched Lawrence O'Donnell's show on MSNBC.  It started with Rachel Meadow and O'Donnell reveling over CNN's airing of the 2 minute audio tape of Donald Trump showing in some fashion a classified document of General Milley's contingency plan for a U.S. military attack on Iran.  The conversation was attended by much laughter by a Trump staffer and others.  And by Madow and O'Donnell.  I'm thinking Madow's and O'Donnell's mirth is uninformed about the significance of this leaked and broadcasted piece of evidence. (The NYTimes also has obtained a copy.)  I expect it to kick off a legal and political shitstorm.  Who leaked this tape and why?  How did CNN get it?   How did the NYTimes get it?  What impact will it have on potential jurors?  What does it mean in terms of Trump's right to respond to the leak in his defense and in his campaign to regain the presidency?  What will Judge Cannon have to say?  How does this leak and what may follow impact Trump's ability to get a fair trial?  What kind of investigation should be conducted into the leak and by whom?  Nothing to laugh about.

Happy Valley is over..  Alas.  Such superb acting by Sarah Lancashire, Siobhan Finneran, and James Norton.  A tour de force by creator/writer/director Sally Wainwright.  In a league with The Sopranos, The Wire, Boardwalk Empire, and few others.

Rita Burns arrives today, old Marquette pal of both Geri and me.  She was a big help to me in my Pretrial Practice class at the law school, playing the role of a client in depositions.  Fellow student of Geri in the Mediation Program in the Graduate School.

LTMW at a male goldfinch on the sunflower tube and a femal goldfinch on the niger tube. Also 2 English sparrows on the sunflower tube.  No suet is left and I'm wondering whether I should put a fresh cake out.  The suet more than anything else seems to be the reason for the swarms of English sparrows reducing the visits by other birds.

The Terror of Threes in the Heavens and on Earth: Physicists have long explored how phenomena in groups of three can sow chaos. A new three-body problem, they warn, could lead to not only global races for new armaments but also thermonuclear war.  This is a feature piece in this morning's NYT by science reporter William J. Broad, a very interesting essay.  My mother, who was not immune from some old-fashioned Irish superstition, used to tell us that "troubles come in threes." I have long kind of half-believed this, as when Tom St. John died within a year of my beloved sister's death, I wondered what the third would be.😰  The author provides an easy-to-understand example from within human families: "Notably, the jump ;in complexity] also shows up in human life as groups of three cause social complexities to soar — markedly in young families. Two siblings have one relationship. But a third child results in seven kinds of ties among the siblings — three one-on-one relationships, three one-on-two relationships and one group relationship. Parents, by definition, are outnumbered, and bedlam can ensue."  The thrust of the essay, however, is about the problems created as China becomes an atomic superpower, along with the U.S. and Russia.  Scary.  He also discussses the complexity of groups of threes in nature, the "three-body problem" in subatomic particle movements, planetary orbits, even eddys and maelstroms in fluids. tornadoes and hurricanes.  "If two of the swirling bodies get close, they move ahead in straight lines or circle each other.  “With three, things immediately get more complicated,” said Michael J. Shelley, a specialist in fluid dynamics at New York University. “They can collapse into each other. It gets very disordered and unpredictable. There’s a huge difference.”  Mom was right: troubles come in threes.

U. S. Senate, where Democracy goes to die.  For 4 months, Tommy Tuberville has blocked the promotions of 150 colonels and captains to general and admiral rank.  J. D. Vance is blocking the appointment of all Biden nominees to positions in the Justice Department.  These individual senators can do this because of the 'unanimous consent' practice in the Senate which is used for most noncontroversial business.  If one senator refuses to consent, the whole process essentially grinds to a halt, regardless of the will of the majority of senators and of the will of the majority of Americans.  One man (usually but not always a man) rule.  This practice joins with the filiburster and the 'blue slip' rules/practices in making the U. S. Senate the phenominally anti-democratic institution that it is.  

"Brian Fallon, a former aide to the majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said those kinds of privileges are artifacts of a racist past, used by white Southern senators to prevent passage of civil rights legislation or nominations that might have interfered with their way of life. But lately they are being taken to new heights by the MAGA wing of the Republican Party.  “If one senator is angling to get on Fox News, it gives them an outsized power to gum up the works,” said Mr. Fallon, now executive director of Demand Justice, which advocates the installation of progressive federal judges. “This is why the Democratic Party needs to understand that reforming the Senate is a necessary step to make democracy viable in 2023.”  Reform could be accomplished with a simple majority vote, just as the filibuster was eliminated for executive nominations. Among other methods, the Senate could change the types of vacancies that require its approval to fill, or it could put a time limit on holds. There are many ways that senators could make their chamber a more democratic institution, but first they have to want to do so. For now, they would rather look the other way as extremists turn their body’s courtesies into chains."  From The High Price of Petulance in the Senate, by David Firestone in this morning's NYT.

6/26/23

 Monday, June 26, 2023

In bed at 9 unable to stay awake, then awake at 1:30 unable to sleep, up at 2:02 to let Lilly out, zap a cup of coffee.  65℉, high of 70℉, cloudy, windy day ahead, maybe some rain, the wind is WNW at 11 mph, 8 to 16 mph during the day with gusts up to 27 mph.  Sunrise at 5:13, sunset at 8:35, 15+22.

To see or not to see.  The New Yorker online has a 6/23/23 review by Richard Brody of a 2001 film by Christopher Munch - "The Primal Power of “The Sleepy Time Gal”.  The review makes me think that watching the film would probably have the same effect on me as reading D. M. Thomas' novel "The White Hotel" had on me decades ago, feeling an impulse to jump off a bridge.  But, wait a minute, did I see this film many year ago?  It seems to me that I did but I'm not at all sure of it.  In any event, Brody's description of the narrative's focus on growing old, decaying, and dying comes too close to home for anyone in his 80s.  Excerpts:

 --"“The Sleepy Time Gal” is a harrowing, emotionally punishing, bleak, and bitter view of old age—its infirmities, its regrets, its disappointments, and, especially, its proximity to death."

-- "In “The Sleepy Time Gal,” the characters’ backstory is no mere filling-in of motives or explanation of behavior; it’s the embodiment of history in memory, the connection of personal experience to the societal laws and mores that determined its crucial decisions. The warping power of social norms is inextricably bound to the movie’s crucial, dreadful subject: death. . . [The film] no less horrifyingly depicts Frances’s decline from wary vigor to bedridden pain to final exhaustion. And it does something that those films don’t: it suffuses the end with regret and with rage, memory and imagination, weak vision and wild emotions. The movie’s pivotal dilemma involves Frances’s desire to take her own life—and shows her nearest and dearest finding good rational reasons, whether emotional or professional, for dissuading or preventing her from doing so. Locating universal tragedy in family melodrama, Munch dramatizes the horror of when “To be or not to be?” is a question that one can no longer answer for oneself. ♦

Gloomy Day.  The day has been gray, windy,Canadian-wildfire-smoky, and drizzly all day.  The weather coupled with my lack of sleep last night have made for a long, unproductive day..

Garbage Day success.  My Swedish Death Cleaning in the basement resulted in what seemed like a ton of trash in the Monday mornng trash cart, so much that I was worried it might be too heavy for the lift mechanism on the garage truck.  All went well 

6/25/23

 Sunday, June 25, 2023

In bed around 10, awake at 5:27, and up at 5:39 with back pain.  65℉, high of 77, partly/mostly cloudy day, about 1/2 inch of rain fell overnight, more expected today, wind SE at 11 mph, 3 to 15 mph during the day with gusts up to 27 mph.  The sun rose at 5:13 and will set at 8:35, 15+22.

Bad news from the patio.  Overnight we lost another major branch on the ornamental pear tree.  I sat on the patio for 5 to 10 minutes before noticing the significant upper branch on the far side of the tree was hanging down vertically.  How could I spend that much time looking at all the dead small branches and twigs that need to be pruned without seeing that major damage?  Can't see the forest for the trees?  I can't see the tree for the twigs.  Amazing,  Disappointing.  A little scary.

Aside from that bad news about the broken branch, it is a magnificent morning to be alive and hearing, feeling, and seeing.  'A poor life this if full of care . . ."  Even at 7 o'clock on a Sunday morning, there is the white noise of the freeway which is rather comforting rather than annoying.  I usually wonder where all those drivers are going, whether they will be delivering themselves or some cargo, to whom, where, and why.   There is also the random sound of a neighbor driving down County Line Road, perhaps one of our several doctor neighbors off on morning rounds with patients who are hospitalized. A loud cardinal is making a distinctive call.  A few birds fly to the platform feeder including one small dark bird I can't identify.  I see that some of the dead branches on the pear tree provide a handy perch for them in approaching and leaving the feeder.  A bright goldfinch flies into the thickets and a robin flies high into the pine trees on the McGregor lot line.  Chipmunks scurry all over the area along with an occasional gray squirrel.  I don't see any red squirrels around us, which is disappointing.  In Saukville, we had lots of reds, rarely a gray.  I'm reminded of how the little chipmunks resemble prairie dogs and meerkats when they pose upright on their haunches.  There is a gentle breeze blowing and I notice how disconnected (wrong word?) it is or should I say they are.  There isn't one area-wide breeze blowing over everything uniformly, but rather individual breezes impacting, e.g., some of the ferns but not others nearby.  How does that work?  Like feeling a breeze on my left arm and no breeze on my right arm.  What dynamics are at work with winds and breezes, other than the effects of obstacles?

Meanwhile, at the front of the house, the English sparrows continue their effort to take over our bird feeders, especially the suet.

I'm hungry.  Get outta my way!

Russia Clown Show?  Are we to believe what we are told has happened within one day in Vladimir Putin's Mother Russia?  Yevgeny Prigozhin led a private army of some 25,000 heavily-armed, battle-hardened troops from Eastern Ukraine into and through the large city and regional military headquarters of Rostov-on-Don and up the major highway from Rostov to within 120 miles of Moscow to oust Putin's Defense Minister and military Chief of Staff, and then, after talking with Putin's Belarussian puppet Alexander Lukashenko, changed his mind, ordered his troops to retreat/withdraw and to pledge allegiance to Putin's Defense Minister and Chief of Staff and further agreed to flee to Belarus under Lukashenko'sprotection, which is to say without the protection his private army would provide,  where he almost certainly would be murdered by one of Putin's henchmen.  Is this believable?  

    Why am I thinking of the famous/notorious Blackwater USA and Erik Prince,  its founder and leader former Navy Seal and brother of Trump's Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and their lucrative contracts to provide security services to the CIA and the State Department?  From Wikipedia: "In 2007, Blackwater received widespread notoriety for the Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad, when a group of its employees killed 17 Iraqi civilians and injured 20. Four employees were convicted in the United States and later controversially pardoned on December 22, 2020, by President Donald Trump."

6/24/23

 Saturday, June 24, 2023

In bed at 10:30, awake at 4:15 unable to fall back to sleep, up at 4:45, let Lilly out.  59℉, high 78℉, sunny, wind SW at 3 mph, 1 to 11 mph today, with gusts up to 17 mph, no rain but rain expected tomorrow.  Sunrise at 5:13, sunset at 8:35, 15+22.

LTMW at 6 a.m. at Sally P. watering her shrubs alongside their driveway, many chickadees visiting the niger tube and suet.  There is a high thin overcast (the term takes me back to my days as an air controller😊) which is about to burn off.

The Russian Revolution.  Not 1917, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, White Army and Red Army, but 2023, Putin and Prigozhin, evil fascist vs. evil fascist, warmonger vs. warmonger, Red Army vs. Wagner Group, bad guys vs. bad guys - again.

There's nothing funny about the dangerous explosion going on in Russia now.  One wonders whether the internal Russian scene and the world situation can only get worse since there are no 'good guys' in this fight.  But I am reminded of 2 jokes.  First, Bob Friebert's shortie about a man looking out the window as his mother-in-law is attacked by a bear.  The man doesn't know who to root for.  "Go, bear... go, mother-in-law."  Second, the funeral service of a bad guy when the preacher asks for members of the congregation to say some kind words about the deceased.  No one responds until, after haranguing by the preacher, a man stands and says "His brother was worse."

I am hoping that this open warfare within Russia will be bad for Russia and good for Ukraine but wonder whether this threat to his dictatorial rule will push Putin to use his weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological, nuclear) against Prigozhin's forces first and, having used them internally, to use them against the Ukrainians.  Would the West, i.e., the US, respond to a use of WMD by Russians against Russians?  Should the West respond?  How?

By mid-day here, Prigozhin announced that he has reversed his 'march on Moscow'?  What's next?

Thinking of the Russian war on the Ukrainian people and its effects on millions of youngsters.

Emily Dickenson, 141

Some, too fragile for winter winds
The thoughtful grave encloses
Tenderly tucking them in from frost
Before their feet are cold

Never the treasures in her nest
The cautious grave exposes
Building where schoolboy dare not look
And sportsman is not bold

This covert have all the children
Early aged, and often cold
Sparrow, unnoticed by the Father
Lambs for whom time had not a fold

I'm struck by the line "Sparrow, unnoticed by the Father" cf. His Eye is on the Sparrow  and  "Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows" (Matthew 10:29–31).

The Bear, season 2.  More fine acting (especially Jeremy Allen White),  more fine character development, more fine portrayal of the lives of those who work in food service, especially in fine, always busy restaurants.  An extremely fine portrayal of life within a family with an emotionally disturbed single parent, in this case, Donna ('DeDe') Berzatto, the alcoholic mother of Mikey, Carmie, and Natalie.  I had expected a happy ending to the 10-part series and the ending was happy for Sydney, Marcus, Tina, sister Natalie 'Sugar' (kind of) and cousin Richie (kind of), but not for t protagonist Carmie or for his mother or for his girlfriend and lover, 'Claire Bear.''  As in the end of the family Christmas dinner in episode 6 where DeDe deteriorated as dinnertime drew near, so Carmie also "lost it" on the 'soft opening' of The Bear as the stresses of the kitchen built up.   Due to his own neglect in failing to get the door handle on the walk-in refrigerator replaced, he locked himself in the cooler and was unable to participate in the evening's work serving the invited 'friends and family.'  He was harsh with Sydney before locking himself up and even harsher with cousin Richie in a through-the-door exchange, and finally, not knowing Claire was outside listening to him rant, he blamed his troubles on having a loving relationship with Claire, leading her to say "I'm sorry you feel that way" and walking away without replying to his calling "Claire . . . Claire  . . .  Claire." 

Thoughts: (1) DeDe made me think of my father during his PTSD days.  (2)  The narrative also made me think of the harm emotionally (and/or mentally) sick parents visit on their children: Mikey a suicide and Carmie an emotional cripple.  (3) I also think of all the years my mother worked as a waitress at 'the Greeks' at 74th and Halsted, Kilty's, Louis George's, and the Barn. (4) I wondered how many people use work or social advancement as a place to hide from personal stresses, failings, or emptiness.  Tolstoy's The Death of Ivn Ilyich. (5) How emotional numbing or deadening is a primitive psychological defense mechanism.

My mother in her Italian peasant uniform at Louis George Restaurant

Happy Valley, season 3.  Same initial comments as above except substitute police work for restaurant work.  Sarah Lancashire's work is nothing short of masterful, on a par with and probably exceeding that of the 'grande dames' of British theater.  Just extraordinary.  Judy Dench, Maggie Smith, Sarah Lancashire.

6/23/23

 Friday, June 23, 2023

In bed around 10, up at 6:30, and let Lilly out.  62℉, high of 77, sunny with another Air Quality Alert: Unhealthy, ozone, weather conditions again + Canadian wildfire smoke.  The wind is N at 4 mph, 2 to 7 mph during the day with gusts up to 13 mph.  No rain is expected till Sunday.  Sunrise 5:12, sunset 8:35, 15+23.

Habits, Good and Bad.  For as long as I can remember, I have started my days reading one or more newspapers, the exception being my year in the Far East, mostly Vietnam.  I normally start with the local paper(s), now only one but formerly two, and the NYTimes.  Several years ago I added the Washington Post, in part because of its news coverage but mostly for its op-ed and feature pieces.  I also subscribe to and regularly check out the Wall Street Journal for its good financial news coverage and its 'Books and Art' pieces, awful for its editorial page stuff.  And then there are The Atlantic and The New Yorker, which in addition to their monthly and weekly print editions post daily pieces online.  In the coffee room at my law firm we had these newspapers plus The Waukesha Freeman, the Cap Times and the Wisconsin State Journal, the Daily Reporter, and the Business Journal. I usually start out with the Milwaukee paper to see what depravities have occurred while I slept, then I move on to the WaPo and then the NYT, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker, checking out the WSJ irregularly.  It's not so much the news items that I am interested in though I always read at least the headlines and often the lead-ins, but more the op-ed and feature pieces.  They are a big part of the liberal silo I live in.  I have become more selective in my reading than I used to be, trying to eschew the "more of the same" predictable stuff, of which there is a lot, but nonetheless I spend a lot of time on my laptop reading, almost always enlarging the print size for my failing eyesight.  The good news is that I stay fairly well-informed of what's going on in the world, or at least within my silo.  Or is that bad news, considering all the wretched nastiness afoot on our planet?  The (other) bad news is that I spend a lot of time sitting on my recliner with my laptop on my lap desk.  I am the soul of sedentariness.  My Apple Watch jiggles every now and then to tell me to get off my butt and stand up.  I didn't ask for this feature but I appreciate it and usually do as my watch commands me.  It also reminds me to breathe, a part of its 'mindfulness' feature.  I also usually obey this command since deep breathing is the most significant part of the pelvic floor muscle therapy I received at the VA.  This morning I decided to be daring by reversing my order of reading and starting out with the NYT!!!  Ah, the courage of 'an aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick.'😄  I wonder whether to feel good or not-so-good that there are so many op-ed pieces I want to read?  Jamelle Bouie  (a favorite) on Trump.  Linda Greenhouse (a favorite) on Dobbs.  Jesse Wegman on Alito.  Wajahat Ali (a new favorite, a leftie Muslim) on our culture wars.  Ezra Klein (a favorite) on addressing wealth inequality.  And I haven't opened the WaPo, The Atlantic, or The New Yorker yet.  Will the morning be half-over before I finish reading the papers (and magazines)?  Am I in for hours of being reminded by my watch to STAND and BREATHE?😲Maybe I need to head to the patio to be with the birds, squirrels, chipmunks, and if I'm lucky, a white-tail.

Patio time, 9 to 9:30, 4 hours post-dawn, watching the leaves on the ornamental pear tree waft in the very gentle breeze, ditto the ferns.  listening to the birds, mainly a cardinal, blue jay, and robin, but also the loud drum of a red-bellied woodpecker (?), wondering whether the chipmunks that scurry within inches of me in my chair will climb on my Haflinger slipper to inspect it, hearing the dull sounds of the heavy construction equipment down the road working on the County Line bridge and close-by projects, a blue jay flies into and then out of the pear tree, a male cardinal lands on the nearly empty platform feeder and I resolve to fill it this morning.  Two smallish squirrels scurry across the yard in tandem, with me wondering whether it's a male chasing a female or perhaps two sibling young ones.  How beautiful the annuals Geri planted and potted on the little table next to my favorite chair.

Playing God: The Unholy Trinity.  I have read the chapter on Clarence and Ginni Thomas and Leonard Leo. long-time leader of the Federalist Society.  I need to give it some thought.  My thoughts about left-wing vs. right-wing are too muddled.  Ditto my thoughts about "socialism" vs. "fascism."  I wish I were smarter than I am.  And younger.  And healthier.   And wiser.  And stronger.  And a better human being.   And  . . .    But "I yam what I yam and tha's all what I yam," said Popeye the Sailor Man.  Toot toot!😐

......

On a related but different matter, Ross Douthat has an op-ed in today's NYT entitled "Why I Am Not A Liberal Catholic."  It's very long and undoubtedly well thought out because that's the kind of writer and thinker he is, though I usually disagree with his conservative views.  I haven't tried to digest it because it would require a lot of energy that I don't want to devote to it.  (It's hard enough to try to digest the ICWA case which I'm still working on.)  In reading the preface to Playing God, on the other hand, I was reminded of Why I Am Not A Conservative Catholic.  Author McConahay writes:

Members of the [US Conference of Catholic Bishops] already control a significant part of the U.S. health system, with one in six hospitals nationwide (and 40% of hospitals in some states) run by Catholics and subject to directives codified by the bishops: no to contraception, to abortion (to a point that may put the health of miscarrying mothers at risk), to voluntary sterilization, certain hysterectomies and end of life directives, euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, and gender-affirming care (for transgender people),  The bishops' views align with those of the six members of the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court.

 Given their way, the bishops and right-wing Catholics in power positions would impose their values and their wishes on the entire society; the U.S. would become a Christian nation regardless of the values and wishes of the majority of its citizens.  In other words, as has always been the case, and certainly since the French Revolution, the Church is authoritarian, autocratic, and anti-democratic.  To what degree this desired form of White Christian Nationalism amounts to a form of fascism one can debate (especially since it's not an easy task to define what fascism is), but there should be no doubt that it is yet another form of Minority Rule, which is what we are already living with under the anti-democratic Constitution the Founding Fathers bequeathed to the rest of us.  In this connection, I especially noted this comment in the "Unholy Trinity" chapter:   "In [Leonard] Leo's view, however, public opinion is immaterial to determining what is lawful. . . . 'He figured out twenty years ago that conservatives had lost the culture war.  Abortion, gay rights, contraception -- conservatives didn't have a chance if public opinion prevailed.  So they needed to stack the courts.'   And he could have added: 'And to rig elections and suppress votes.'

 

6/22/23

 Thursday, June 22, 2023

In bed around 10:10, up at 5:40.  60℉, sunny, high of 78, air quality alert due to Canadian wildfires, the wind is NNE at 3 mph, 2 to 8 during the day, gusts up to 14, no rain👺 The sun rose at 5:12 and will set at 8:35, 15+23.

On the patio.  I started the day sitting on the patio with my cup of yesterday's coffee zapped in the microwave.  It was about 7 o'clock when I went out and there wasn't as much bird calling as there is earlier in the morning, but along with Merlin I listened to our regular neighbors - sparrows, finches, robins, chickadees, cardinals, and blue jays.  I watched a chickadee dart down from the plum tree onto the backyard platform feeder which I later discovered was almost empty of seeds.  I noticed the very gentle breeze, first noticeable in the higher branches of neighboring trees, then at ground level.  The sky this morning is a pretty cerulean blue with scattered white powder puff clouds slowly floating west while catching the morning sun from the east.  A squirrel bounces from Geri's marginal garden over to the cedar tree on the south lot line.  A chipmunk bounces from the sunroom garden to the plants surrounding the foot of the plum tree.  At one point I clearly see the distinctive blue back and wing feathers of a bird flying from over the sunroom into the thicket behind the marginal garden.  A bluebird?  It seemed too small to be a bluejay, too light to be an indigo bunting.  I noticed all the dead twigs and small branches on the patio pear tree and thought of options for pruning it.  Andy, David, Peter, and Rustin, buy a long-handled pruner?

Meanwhile in front English sparrows have just about taken over the suet cake feeder.  I'm not pleased.

The U.S. and the Holocaust.  We watched the concluding episode 3 last night.  The documentary highlights some heroes in the U.S. government but precious few.  The heroic Eleanor Roosevelt was certainly one; what a mensch.  What is most evident is the long-standing,, deep-seated antipathy toward immigrants starting at least in the 1920 with the Immigration Act of 1924.  The Wikipedia entry is blunt: "The Immigration Act of 1924, or Johnson–Reed Act, including the Asian Exclusion Act and National Origins Act . . .  was a federal law designed to uphold white supremacy and the dominance of white Protestantism in the United States.   It prevented immigration from Asia and set quotas on the number of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe."  Episode 3 focuses on the end of WWII in Europe, the liberation of the concentration camps, and the plights of European Jews after the war. with 'nowhere they could live and nowhere they could go.  Their wealth had been stolen by the Nazis and/or by their former neighbors.  They weren't welcome in their former places of residence and they weren't welcome as refugees in other nations, like America.  In Europe they were kept in Displaced Persons Camps, reminding many of German concentration camps and they were known throughout the world as "DPs," displaced persons.  

I well remember talk of DPs in Chicago after the war and the talk I remember was not welcoming or sympathetic.  Various neighborhoods around Chicago became home turf for Eastern European immigrants, Poles, Lithuanians, et al.  Lithuanians were called "Lugans," Poles were "Polocks" or even "DPs" for 'dumb Polocks."  The terms "Bohunk" and "Hunkie" could refer to Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, or Ukrainians in part because of Eastern Europe's fluid national boundaries.  Of course, there was always an assortment of racial slurs available to refer to Jews who had been the target of Christian antipathy for centuries, long before the Nazis came to power in German.  "His blood be on us and on our children" Mt. 27: 24-25, the Gospel of John and "the Jews,"  and the prayer in the Good Friday Mass "Let us pray also for the perfidious (faithless) Jews, that God may remove the veil from their hearts. . .   '  As I watched the Burns-Novick-Botstein documentary, I noted that the producers & writers avoided the religious basis for the widespread anti-semitism in Europe and America, i.e., in "Christendom", thoroughly explored in Jame Carroll's Constantine's Sword, which I read years ago and gave away (alas!) to the Saukville library.

More Swedish Death Cleaning.  I opened my old camera bag to see if my old Nikon N60 had corroded batteries in it and was that it did not.  I think back on the years I was an amateur photographer starting with my Uncle Bud's German Agfa 35mm camera which I believed he brought back from Europe at the end of WW II.  That was the camera I used when I was a member of the Leo High School camera club, led by Brother Stoehr, in 1955-56.  I eventually moved on to Nikon SLRs and Panasonic Lumix cameras, all great products, all now put aside in favor of the iPhone's incredibly handy and incredibly capable digital camera.  The Nikon N60 is a film camera, an antique - what to do with it? Trash?  I also found a box of laser printer/copier transparency film and discovered sheets of classroom materials on discovery and discovery abuse when I was teaching Civil Procedure or more probably Pretrial Practice.  Another box held more materials from my classroom days teaching discovery practice, discovery abuse, and even my testimony on April 20, 1994, in support of Senator Herb Kohl's "Sunshine in Litigation" bill then pending in the Senate Judiciary Committee.  These things are all reflective of significant times in my life; they stir up a lot of memories.  What to do with them?  Trash?  They are significant only to me.  They remind  me of Ecclesiastes:

Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, and all is vanity. 

What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun?

A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.

The sun rises, and the sun goes down and hurries to the place where it rises. 

The wind blows to the south  and goes around to the north;

round and round goes the wind and on its circuits the wind returns.

. . . . .

 For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven: 

a time to be born and a time to die;

a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted;

a time to kill and a time to heal;

a time to break down and a time to build up;

a time to weep and a time to laugh;

a time to mourn and a time to dance;

a time to throw away stones and a time to gather stones together;

a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing;

a time to seek and a time to lose;

a time to keep and a time to throw away;

a time to tear and a time to sew;

a time to keep silent and a time to speak;

a time to love and a time to hate;

a time for war and a time for peace. 

 

It's so much easy now to keep than it is to throw away, at least if you live in a mansion, as I have seemed to for most of the last 50 years.   "A time to throw away stones and a time to gather stones together."  I seem to be simply rearranging and moving my stones from one spot to another.

PLAYING GOD: American Catholic Bishops and the Far Right by Mary Jo McConahay (1923).  I used to be Catholic, and not just Catholic but Irish Catholic.  I have deep roots in Catholicism,  My mother was Irish Catholic.  My father was a Catholic.  My beloved sister was a practicing Catholic for almost all of her life.  My grandparents were too (sort of) as were my aunts and uncles and cousins.  I attended 8 years of Catholic elementary school, 4 years of Catholic high school, 4 years at a Jesuit university, and another 3 years at that university's Catholic law school staffed overwhelmingly with Catholic professors.  I was a member of that same faculty for more than 20 years after which I worked as the executive director of a Franciscan social service ministry.  The official-issue USMC dog tags that I wore in Vietnam and have worn for the last 20 years of so identify me as "CATH."  As I say, I used to be Catholic. 

I don't know when I stopped being a Catholic.  Perhaps it was when I was 11 years old and in 6th grade at St. Leo's Grammar School and wondered and worried about whether I needed to go to confession on a Saturday and confess my guilt of Doubt.  I don't think I ever got over that persistent besetting problem of Doubt, of finding it hard and probably impossible to believe all the 'happy horseshit' as we used to call it in Vietnam, that was fed to us by the priest and nuns and brothers, especially the "mysteries."  Transubstantiation, the Trinity, the Ascension and the Assumption, and on and on.  That nasty Doubt never left me after 6th grade but despite it, I briefly considered joining the Irish Christian Brothers after high school, as my good Irish Catholic friend Johnny Flynn did, and my other good Irish Catholic friend Jack O'Keefe did.  But I liked girls too much and in my senior year, I was head over heels in love with my Catholic girlfriend Charlene Wegge.  She dumped me after my freshman year at college which might have led me to reconsider the ICBs (nicknamed not so affectionately as the International Child Beaters) except that in college I was introduced to Sex which made the ICBs out of the question.  Anne and I had our children baptized though neither of us, sporadic Mass attenders, was much of a believer.  Eventually, life led me through divorce and remarriage, a sinful condition according to Holy Mother Church disqualifying me from receiving Communion, in which I didn't believe in the Real Presence (another mystery) but, notwithstanding my Doubt or Absence of Faith, I joined an inner-city parish during my prolonged midlife crisis and was an active parishioner, indeed a leader, for 6 or 7 years.  

What finally drove me away from Holy Mother Church was the child sex scandals and the widespread disclosure of the deep culpability and hypocrisy of Holy Mother's leadership, i.e., the bishops, cardinals, and popes.  I got to the point where I was distrustful of anyone wearing a Roman collar, and especially skeptical of anyone in the hierarchy.  Eventually, I came to grips with the fact that I just don't grasp the whole idea of "God."  To use a cliche I very much dislike, I just can't 'wrap my head around' the concept of God, especially the description of God inculcated in me by my parish priests, the Sisters of Providence, the Irish Christian Brothers, and the Jesuits.

In recent years I have had another big reason for being a member of the second-largest religious group in America, i.e., former Catholics, and that is Politics, the hierarchy's persistent tendency to embrace authoritarianism, which is to say fascistic leaders and governments and to oppose Liberalism.  So the other day when I heard an interview on NPR with Mary Jo McConahay about her recently published study PLAYING GOD, dealing with America's Catholic bishops' relationship with America's Far Right, I went home and ordered the book which I am just beginning to read.  When I read the Table of Contents, I couldn't resist starting at Chapter 3, Unholy Trinity, dealing with Clarence Thomas, Leonard Leo, and Ginni Thomas.  More to follow.

6/21/23

 Wednesday, June 21, 2023

Solstice

In bed at 9:30, up at 5:20.  60℉, high of 77℉, sunny all day, no rain😦, wind ENE at 4 mph, 2 to 9 mph during the day, gusts up to 15 mph.  Sunrise at 5:11, solstice at 9:58 CDT, sunset at 8:35, 15+23, the longest day and shortest night.

Race-based governmental decision-making, affirmative action, and the Indian Child Welfare Act.  In today's The Atlantic online there is a piece by Leah Myers titled "BLOOD-QUANTUM LAWS ARE SPLINTERING MY TRIBE: The rules were supposed to preserve my community. Instead, they are slowly cutting people out of it."  Excerpts:

Even though I am a citizen of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, because of my blood I may also be the last tribal member in my family line.  My tribe requires that members be at least one-eighth Jamestown S'Klallam by blood. Because I am exactly one-eighth, unless I have kids with another citizen, my kids will be ineligible to join. Regulations like this, known as blood-quantum laws, are used by many tribal nations to determine citizenship. They do this in the name of preservation, fearing that diluting the bloodline could mean diluting the culture. However, by enforcing these laws, tribal governments not only exclude some active members of their communities, but also may be creating a future in which fewer and fewer people will be eligible for citizenship. Watching enrollment in my tribe dwindle, I’ve started to wonder: What if there were another way to think about the preservation of a community?  (Underscoring added by me.)

Blood-quantum laws were originally created by white settlers in the 18th century. They were used to prohibit interracial marriages, and to keep people deemed Native American out of public offices or on reservations—essentially to determine who would (and wouldn’t) benefit from the privileges of whiteness. By the time of the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934, tribal governments had begun implementing these laws themselves. In theory, the act was designed to preserve Native American identity. In addition to restoring Indigenous people’s fishing and hunting rights, it also offered funds and land to people who volunteered to move to reservations. This system cemented the importance of blood-quantum laws because many tribes that had previously relied on kinship and relationships to determine citizenship now used blood to determine who was allowed to settle on reservations. 

.

The act also split my own tribe, the S’Klallam, into three. The federal government paid tribal members to move to two new parcels of land in Washington State and start new tribes; they became the Port Gamble S’Klallam and Lower Elwha. Those who stayed in place on the Strait de Juan de Fuca, on the northern coast of the state, had to pool their money together to buy our ancestral land even though they lived on it already; they became the Jamestown S’Klallam. Now, because of the federal government’s requirements when it offered the land, legally we are separate tribes, even though we all share the same ancestors. Someone can be enrolled in only one of the three. Cousins of mine who have a grandfather in one tribe and a grandmother in another must choose to commit to only half of their family tree and leave behind part of their heritage. Even though they are one-quarter S’Klallam, they are only one-eighth Jamestown S’Klallam—and, unless they have children with another tribal citizen, their kids will be ineligible for citizenship, just like mine could be.

The author points out that the splintering effect of the tribal laws and the federal law is effectively dooming her tribe to extinction.

I think about the plight of the Jamestown K'Llallam Native Americans as I continue to think about the  USSC decision on the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act, and especially about Clarence Thomas' dissent and Brett Kavanaugh's concurring opinion.

From Kavanaugh's concurrence:  "In my view, the equal protection issue is serious. Under the Act, a child in foster care or adoption proceedings may in some cases be denied a particular placement because of the child’s race—even if the placement is otherwise determined to be in the child’s best interests. And a prospective foster or adoptive parent may in some cases be denied the opportunity to foster or adopt a child because of the prospective parent’s race. Those scenarios raise significant questions under bedrock equal protection principles and this Court’s precedents. 

From Thomas' dissent:  "But ICWA displaces the normal state laws governing child custody when it comes to only one group of citizens: Indian children. ICWA defines “Indian child” capaciously: It includes not only children who are members of an Indian tribe but also those children who are merely eligible for membership in a tribe and are the biological child of a tribal member. See 25 U. S. C. §1903(4). If the child resides on Indian tribal lands, then the Indian tribal court has jurisdiction. §1911(a). But, if the child resides within a State, ICWA requires state courts to transfer any proceedings to a tribal court, absent “good cause to the contrary,” upon petition by the child’s parent, custodian, or tribe. §1911(b).

[Thus, Leah Myers' children, being only 1/16th K'Lallam 'by blood', would not be an "Indian child" under the ICWA.]

Further from Thomas' dissent: "ICWA dictates the preferences a court must adhere to when deciding where to place the child. In the typical case, the primary consideration would be the best interests of that child. (Citations omitted)  That makes sense; as the majority notes, these children are some of the most vulnerable among us, and their interests should be a court’s primary concern.  But ICWA displaces that standard with its own hierarchy of preferences, requiring a court to prefer any placements with (1) a member of the child’s extended family; (2) other members of the child’s tribe; and (3) other Indian families of any tribe, anywhere in the country. §1915(a). Similar rules govern foster-care placements. §1915(b). As the majority notes, these preferences collectively ensure that any Indian from any tribe in the country outranks all non-Indians for adopting and fostering those whom ICWA deems to be Indian children.

[Thus, if Leah Myers did have a child who under a hypothetical tribal law was eligible for tribal membership based on 1/16th 'tribal blood,' that child could, in appropriate circumstances, be placed with wholly-unrelated  Indian adoptive or foster parents in Wisconsin or Florida or Maine far from the Jamestown K'Lallam native lands along the coast of the Juan de Fuca Straits in Washington State in preference to a non-Indian family living across the street from the K'Lallam reservation, and this would be so even if Leah Myers and her child wanted the child to stay with the non-Indian adoptive or foster parents and even though a Washington state court found that staying with the non-Indian adoptive or foster parents was in the best interests of the  child.]

Some thoughts: (1) Are "blood" and "race" the same or different?  How are they the same and/or how different? Didn't the Nazis treat the two concepts as equal, as in Blut und Boden, blood and land referring to the Aryan 'race'? (2) Isn't the ICWA precisely race-based discrimination mandated by Congress? (3) How is it that Indian tribes, i.e., identified only by "blood" or "race" are granted rights superior to those of (a) the child, (b) the child's biological parents and 'blood' relatives, and (c) every state's otherwise sovereign right to implement its policies respecting each individual child's welfare in adoption and custody cases, but only if the child in question is an "Indian child" as defined by ICWA and some tribe's political decision about which children are entitled to tribal membership 'by blood'?  I have not yet digested either Amy Conan Barrett's majority opinion or Neil Gorsuch's lengthy concurrence.  Alito's dissent is 11 printed pages long.  Thomas' dissent is 40 pages long.  Kavanaugh's concurrence is mercifully only 2 pages, but Gorsuch's concurrence is 38 pages long and the majority opinion is 34 pages long.  I think that's 125 pages of history and legal argument, or some would say historical and legal casuistry or sophistry.  

I'm also thinking about how the overt race-based governmental decision making the the ICWA case will be compared with race-based governmental and non-governmental decison making in the affirmative action cases which are expected to be handed down any minute.