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.