Monday, July 3, 2023
In bed at 10:30, awake at 4:50, and up at 5:05. Let Lilly in. 60℉, high of 78℉, clear skies all day, AQI=49 "Good". Wind NW at 6 mph, 3 to 8 mph today with gusts up to 13 mph. No rain. Sunrise at 5:17, sunset at 8:34, 15+18.
Steve and Nikki arrived home safely after a very enjoyable, as usual, visit of 4 hours or so. Steve is still my doppelgänger and an amazing 'eclectician.' Nikki's just coming out of a very rough period with staffing woes at her firm. A great couple; all our children are in great partnerships.
Patio time this morning, half an hour or more, sitting, looking, hearing. There was a very gentle breeze, hardly enough to stir the leaves on the pear tree, not enough to sound the wind chimes, but enough to slowly spin the metal sculpture in the marginal garden and sway the tall ferns. On this Monday of the 4-day holiday weekend the white noise from the freeway was more muted than usual. I watched a male cardinal feeding at the platform feeder and 3 goldfinches fly into and out of the pear tree. I sat wondering why I have seen no chipmunks lately when a young one, small, scurried out from near the bottle-brush tree, climbed onto a tall planter and then onto the patio table to explore the empty squirrel-proof tube feeder, climbed back down, and came over and stopped an inch from my Haflinger slipper. I wondered whether he would climb on top of it and up my leg but I must have moved slightly for s/he scurried away quickly back to the bottle-brush area. I could hear a very loud chipmunk chunking in the marginal garden or on the slope down to the neighbor's driveway. Also heard a cardinal, house wren, house finch, cowbird, blue jay, chickadee, and robin. I spotted a casualty on a paving stone and wondered what did her in.
How to Stave Off Constitutional Extinction, an op-ed over the weekend by Jill Lepore in the NYT: "The consequences of a constitution frozen in time in the age of Evel Knievel, “Shaft” and the Pentagon Papers are dire. Consider, for instance, climate change. Members of Congress first began proposing environmental rights amendments in 1970. They got nowhere. Today, according to one researcher, 148 of the world’s 196 national constitutions include environmental protection provisions. But not ours. Or take democratic legitimacy. Over the last decades, and beginning even earlier, as the political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky point out in a forthcoming book, “The Tyranny of the Minority,” nearly every other established democracy has eliminated the type of antiquated, antidemocratic provisions that still hobble the United States: the Electoral College, malapportionment in the Senate and lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices. None of these problems can be fixed except by amending the Constitution, which, seemingly, can’t be done. . . . . While it’s true that Americans can no longer, for all practical purposes, revise the Constitution, they can still change it, as long as they can convince five Supreme Court justices to read it differently. But how well has that worked out? . . . No one has ever taken stock of this history of failed amendments, an America that never was but was wanted by some, and sometimes by very many, or even most. Americans won’t be able to agree anytime soon on how to amend the U.S. Constitution and will instead face the ongoing risk of “commotions, mobs, bloodshed, and Civil War.” Amending is what makes the Constitution everyone’s. But until the Constitution can once again be amended, only the court can change it. And if that bench insists, perversely, illogically and in defiance of the very idea of constitutionalism that all change must be rooted in the past, its justices have got a whole lot of reading to do, into a richer, wider, better history."
Lepore's essay reminds me of my conversation with Steve yesterday and of our shared deep pessimism over the future of the country, the world that today's children, and our grandchildren, will grow into. I remarked to Steve that many of them will surely blame our generations for 'letting this happen,' but really what could we have done to prevent the rightward drift into authoritarianism and fascism? To my everlasting shame and embarrassment, I voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and I think I may have voted once for Tommy Thompson, but other than those sins, I have always voted for and occasionally donated to any candidate who wasn't a Republican. They have all gone downhill since Nixon and Ford, starting with Reagan.
Burgeoning Fascism. Some of today's headlines: (1) In North Carolina, Republicans have gone on the offense, leading to clashes over voting access and control over elections. (2) Cracking Down on Dissent, Russia Seeds a Surveillance Supply Chain (3) At the University of Chicago, a Debate Over Free Speech and Cyber Bullying: A student objected to a class and tweeted the lecturer’s photo and email address. Hate mail poured in. What should the school do? (4) With Ron DeSantis on the Stump, Disney Sees a Long Campaign Ahead: The company, long allergic to controversy, is likely to be the subject of very public and partisan criticism throughout the Republican primary. (5) Authors and Students Sue Over Florida Law Driving Book Bans: The authors of a picture book about a penguin family with two fathers sued the state and a school district that removed the book from libraries. (6) A Witch Hunt for the Vulnerable in Tennessee, Margaret Renkl
My tinnitus has gotten worse over the last year. It's now 'two-tune', i.e., the normal high-pitched ring or whistle that I have heard for decades plus a new tune, more complex and on top of the old tune. I wake up with it every morning and go to bed with it every night. It's been a lifetime since I enjoyed the sound of silence, reminding me of course of Paul Simon's poetry in The Sound of Silence
Hello darkness, my old friend / I've come to talk with you again Because a vision softly creeping / Left its seeds while I was sleeping And the vision that was planted in my brain / Still remains Within the sound of silence In restless dreams I walked alone / Narrow streets of cobblestone 'Neath the halo of a street lamp / I turned my collar to the cold and damp When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light / That split the night And touched the sound of silence And in the naked light I saw / Ten thousand people, maybe more People talking without speaking / People hearing without listening People writing songs that voices never share / No one dared Disturb the sound of silence
. . . .
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets / Are written on the subway walls And tenement halls" And whispered in the sounds of silence.This reminds me to get Simon's latest album, Seven Psalms
Anniversary of the End of the Draft. Last Friday I underwent a perfunctory examination of my blood pressure by a private nurse practitioner in connection with my VA disability rating. It was also the 50th anniversary of the ending of the military draft, the conscription system I grew up with after the Second World War and Korea and that influenced my entire life by conditioning my decision to apply for a Navy ROTC scholarship to college. The scholarship required a minimum of 4 years of active duty service as a commissioned officer, but I knew I was facing probably 2 years of service as an enlisted soldier in any event so the trade-off seemed a very reasonable one. That conscription-influenced decision brought me a college education away from home and eventually a legal education with the help of the GI Bill benefits. On June 30, 1973, a man named Dwight Elliot Stone was the last of more than 17,000,000 men drafted into the U. S. military. I well remember being opposed to Nixon's ending of the draft and reliance on an all-volunteer Army. America's involvement in Vietnam's civil war had ended - ignominiously - and the U.S. was at the tail-end of years of civil protests against the war, civil rights violations, etc. I feared that making the entire Army like the Marine Corps when I was commissioned - i.e., all volunteers - would decrease internal resistance to aggressive, indefensible wars. My fears were justified, witness the U.S.'s disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003 about which George W. Bush is said to have remarked to a group of Oval Office visitors in 2006: "If I had to do this with a draft army, I would have been impeached by now." Every now and then I hear someone or another raise the idea of reviving the draft or, more ludicrously, of instituting some required 'national service program' for young Americans. Imagine the reaction of young Americans (and of old Americans for that matter) to forced service under the Donald Trump administration or the Joe Biden (or Obama) administration. The days of required national service of any kind are far behind us. Increasingly I am afraid that Americans are much more likely to volunteer for combat against their fellow citizens with whom they disagree politically, more than a little bit as in the 1850s.
First Sighting
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