Thursday, June 15, 2023
In bed around 9:30 after sleeping on the recliner, and up at 6:03. 60℉, high of 65℉, cloudy morning, wind SW at 3 mph, 2 to 15 mph during the day, gusts up to 23 mph. No rain in the last 24 hours and none is expected until 6/24. The sun rose at 5:11 and will set at 8:33. 15+22.
Animal cruelty? Yesterday I moved the long niger seed feeder from the sunflower seed & suet shepherd's crooks to the nesting material crook so Chip 'n Dale couldn't engage in their acrobatic leaps to access the bird food. The chippies were not only frustrated, but they also seemed to be beside themselves, even attempting suicide leaps from the shaft of the crooks to the upper side of the baffle. More guilt feelings though I suspect there is plenty enough food on the ground under the feeders to keep their food larder under our front stoop well supplied.
Yesterday's wasted day. Geri spent much of the day yesterday in bed. She was experiencing a lot of dizziness. I bought her some Claritin in the late afternoon and she said that seemed to help. I don't know at what time she got to bed last night as I fell asleep in my chair watching some British cop show (Murder in the Suburbs w/ Caroline Catz of Doc Martin fame) and then again during Lawrence O'Donnell's show after dozing off a few times during the day and feeling half-alive. Whasupwidat?😲😳😴😵
Today's Pearls Before Swine.
Goat to Pig: What are you doing, Pig?
Pig to Goat: Filling out this personality questionnaire. It's asking what kind of things make me happy.
Goat to Pig: Well, nothing 'makes' us happy. Things happen as they will and we choose how to react. Because while events are not in our control, how we react to them is.
Pig quietly thinks and then: I'll just say chocolate.
Fox News chyron labels Biden a "Wannabe Dictator"; calls Trump "the president of the United States." On Tuesday night, after Trump's indictment and leading into his fund-raising speech at his Bedminster golf club, Fox News broadcast a split screen showing Joe Biden delivering a Juneteenth Day speech at the White House on the left side and Trump's speech setting on the right side with a chyron reading "Wannabe dictator delivers speech at the White House after having his political rival arrested." Brian Kilmeade led into Trump's speech saying "This is the President of the United States" about to speak to his supporters. The chyron was promptly replaced but Fox has offered no explanation or defense of its appearance. Fox carried Trump's speech live including statements like this: “This day will go down in infamy, and Joe Biden will forever be remembered as not only the most corrupt president in the history of our country but perhaps even more importantly, the president who together with a band of his closest thugs, misfits and Marxists tried to destroy American democracy. But they will fail, and we will win bigger and better.” Neither MSNBC nor CNN carried the speech, with Jake Tapper and Rachel Maddow explaining the decision not to carry it by referring to Trump's mendacity and the dangers posed by his inflammatory lies. This is what we can look forward to for the foreseeable future. I keep thinking back to my daily early-morning conversations with Kitty about what is happening to the country and the grim times ahead. Speaking of which . . .
Trump promised to use his reelection to prosecute Biden: “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” Mr. Trump said at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., on Tuesday night after his arraignment earlier that day in Miami. “I will totally obliterate the Deep State.”
Stand back and stand by.
The summer of 1967. There is an excellent essay in this morning's JSOnline by Jill J. Morin entitled "Sidney, Monroe, and Jerry: Conversations I Wish I Had With My Dad About His Pale Perspective." She starts the piece by referring to attending a drive-in movie showing of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" in 1967. I tried unsuccessfully to submit this comment to the piece:
This is a lovely essay by Ms. Morin. I well remember the summer of 1967 in Milwaukee. I had just returned to the city after being discharged from the U. S. Marine Corps and after having served in Vietnam in 1965-1966. Racial tension was high all over the country and certainly in Milwaukee with Father Groppi and the NAACP Commandos marching over the 16th Street viaduct into the lily-white South Side. It was the summer of the so-called 'riot' on 3rd Street, Mayor Maier and Police Chief Harold Breier shutting down the city, of the frightenied John Oraa Tucker shooting MPD officers from his home and killing officer Bryan Moschea. While I was in Vietnam fighting for "freedom" and "democracy" in Asia, I was well aware of the 2 separate Americas that existed in our own country, very separate and very unequal. I am now in my 80s, living with the memories of those days, those years of apartheid America. Some real progress has been made in dismantling de facto apartheid in our country, but to see how much of it remains, all one needs to do drive through Milwaukee (or Chicago or Detroit or Birmingham or . . ) or read the statistics on racial disparities in income, wealth, education, incarceration, etc. In 1968, the Kerner Commission issued its report and concluded that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal" and that unless conditons changed we were heading toward a system of apartheid in our major cities. Of course, we already had a system of de facto apartheid and the question is to what degree are we still in that system.
Moral Life in America's capitalist health care system. From this morning's NYT: The Moral Crisis of America’s Doctors: The corporatization of health care has changed the practice of medicine, causing many physicians to feel alienated from their work.
"In July 2018, Dean published an essay with Simon G. Talbot, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon, that argued that many physicians were suffering from a condition known as moral injury. Military psychiatrists use the term to describe an emotional wound sustained when, in the course of fulfilling their duties, soldiers witnessed or committed acts — raiding a home, killing a noncombatant — that transgressed their core values. Doctors on the front lines of America’s profit-driven health care system were also susceptible to such wounds, Dean and Talbot submitted, as the demands of administrators, hospital executives and insurers forced them to stray from the ethical principles that were supposed to govern their profession. The pull of these forces left many doctors anguished and distraught, caught between the Hippocratic oath and “the realities of making a profit from people at their sickest and most vulnerable.”
The article was published on Stat, a medical-news website with a modest readership. To Dean’s surprise, it quickly went viral. Doctors and nurses started reaching out to Dean to tell her how much the article spoke to them. “It went everywhere,” Dean told me when I visited her last March in Carlisle, Pa., where she now lives. By the time we met, the distress among medical professionals had reached alarming levels: One survey found that nearly one in five health care workers had quit their job since the start of the pandemic and that an additional 31 percent had considered leaving. Professional organizations like National Nurses United, the largest group of registered nurses in the country, had begun referring to “moral injury” and “moral distress” in pamphlets and news releases. Mona Masood, a psychiatrist who established a support line for doctors shortly after the pandemic began, recalls being struck by how clinicians reacted when she mentioned the term. “I remember all these physicians were like, Wow, that is what I was looking for,” she says. “This is it.”
. . . . . “It’s all about the almighty dollar and all about productivity,” [an E.R. doctor] said, “which is obviously not why most of us sign up to do the job.” That’s not always clear to patients, many of whom naturally assume that their doctors are the ones who decide how much time to spend with them and what to charge them for care. “Doctors are increasingly the scapegoats of systemic problems within the health care system,” Masood says, “because the patient is not seeing the insurance company that denied them the procedure, they’re not seeing the electronic medical records that are taking up all of our time. They’re just seeing the doctor who can only spend 10 minutes with them in the room, or the doctor who says, ‘I can’t get you this medication, because it costs $500 a month.’ And what ends up happening is we internalize that feeling.”
I'm interested in this idea of "moral injury" which comports with the sense of complicity which I so often feel in connection with my participation in the bombing and spraying of North and South Vietnam and Laos, with the whole Vietnam War, with the whole of America's economic imperialism. Military actions (or as Vladimir Putin would put it "special military operations") engaged in to permit and provide economic exploitation of raw materials and corporate markets. We call it 'protecting our freedoms' or the freedoms, e.g., of the Vietnamese peasants we shot, bombed, burned, and left with lands and bodies poisoned with carcinogenic and teratogenic chemicals to protect them, regardless of their wishes, from a form of government and economy that would after awhile become one of the larger trading partners of America's corporate economy always needing cheaper labor costs. It reminds me of George III's song in Hamilton, "You'll Be Back."
. . . when push comes to shove,
I'll send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love.
. . .
You'll be back like before,
I will fight the fight and win the war
For your love, for your praise,
And I'll love you till my dying days.
When you're gone, I'll go mad
So don't throw away this thing we had
'Cause when push comes to shove
I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love.
VA Eye Clinic visit. Pressure readings are good, no glaucoma, and no retinal bleeding. Pretty young ophthalmology resident offered to have me schedule a laser cleansing of some sort of the film that has formed behind the new lens inserted after the removal of the cataract in my left eye by Tom Alprin. I declined. The idea of shooting a laser beam into my eye is not appealing to me.
Female vocalist playlist. I listened to some old, old favorites on my way to Zablocki, including the tremendous (word used advisedly) Nina Simone (Be My Husband, Strange Fruit, Nobody Knows You, Mood Indigo) and the extraordinary Sinead O'Connor before her terrible troubles (Feel So Different, I Am Stretched on Your Grave, Black Boys on Mopeds, The Emperor's New Clothes, Nothing Compares 2 U, Jerusalem). I'm always moved by them, never tire of them.
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