7/4/23

 Tuesday, July 4, 2023

In bed at 10:30, 6(?) pss, and up at 6:00 with tinnitus really roaring, a million birds tweeting and cheeping and singing ensemble in my head.  68℉ already, on the way to a high of 83℉, mostly sunny, DP 59-66, AQI of 65, 'Moderate' but an Air Quality Alert for ozone will be in effect from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. - 'Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups.' Wind WSW at 7 mph, 4 to 10 today, gusts to 17.  The sun rose at 5:17 and will set at 8:34, 15+17.

Curmudgeon.  I confess: I'm not a fan of the 4th of July. For one thing, in my teaching days, I used to consider it the end of summer and the beginning of serious preparation for the upcoming school year.  Also, I haven't really given much thought to the idea, but if I did, I suspect I would conclude that we would all be better off if our early oligarchs hadn't declared independence from Great Britain because it was precisely the bloody revolution that started in 1776 that gave rise in 1887-89 to our terribly flawed Constitution, the crowning achievement of the Flounder Fathers, dominated by the group of oligarchs whose wealth depended on the forced labor of kidnapped enslaved Africans and their descendants.  It's that very Constitution under which we suffer today and will suffer long after I am dead.  As Lord Acton reminded a correspondent in 1887, "Great men are almost always bad men."  So it was with the likes of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and most of the nation's early presidents and legislatures.  Slavery was intrinsically evil and enslavers were evil men. In 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered a 4th of July speech entitled "What to a Slave is the 4th of July?"  In it, he said: "Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them.  At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! Had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake."  Of course, that's just what the nation got.

 But this isn't why I started writing this entry; rather, it was

FIREWORKS!!!.  I don't like them.  Actually, I dislike them a lot, the "rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air" and all that.  More importantly, our dear dog Lilly doesn't like them.  They frighten and upset her.  They keep her from going outside, enjoying the night air, and relieving herself at will.  I at least understand what's going on with all the sis-boom-bah; she doesn't.  Fireworks remind me of two military experiences in my life.  The first was "Hell Night" at the Marine Corps Basic School.   That was a demonstration of the firepower loosed along a Main Line of Resistance when defending against an assault.  It was held at night out in the 'boonies', the second lieutenants were required to attend and wives were invited.  It was a pretty terrifying display of firepower: artillery, recoilless rifles, mortars, tanks, machine guns, etc., a vivid reminder the war is hell.  The second was nightly rounds of "H&I fire" down the road from my tent at the airbase in Danang.  Every night at random hours the heavy artillery battery down the road from our tents fired off into VC-held areas or 'free fire zones' ''harassing and interdicting" rounds.  It was supposed to disrupt the VC; it certainly disrupted the sleep of all of us trying to sleep in those tents.  I've had enough fireworks.  I don't find simulated death-dealing explosions entertaining.  Bah, humbug1

Somebody Somewhere.  We watched all 14 half-hour episodes of this dramedy over the last few days.  I loved it although at my age and with my 1950s Irish Catholic Puritan background I still find it hard to digest the earthy humor which abounds in this series.  There are lots of "c ___s" and "p___y" and "t__s" thrown about.  The star is Bridget Everett and the series is set in her hometown of Manhattan, KS.  She plays Sam Miller, a buxom single woman in a mid-life crisis who grew up on a farm outside Manhattan with her alcoholic mother, her father, and 2 sisters, Tricia who runs a gift boutique in town, and Holly, who recently died of cancer.  Jeff Hiller plays Joel, Sam's good, gay, and very likable buddy.  Murray Hill plays Fred Rococo, another good, gay/trans, and very likable friend, also a professor of some sort at the agricultural school at Kansas State University located in Manhattan.  The series has recently been renewed for a 3rd season in which we are told Sampire will become a nudist.  I can't say I'm looking forward to that.

Life in Dystopia.  5 killed, 2 children wounded in Black-on-Black shooting in a Black neighborhood in SW Philadelphia.  This follows yesterday's Black-on-Black shooting in Baltimore where 30 people were shot, and 2 killed.  At least 10 mass shootings occurred across the country between Friday and Sunday night, making this the third consecutive weekend in which U.S. law enforcement officers have responded to multiple incidents, each involving four or more victims shot.    Shootings this weekend have left at least 10 people dead and 42 injured in 10 cities, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a site that tracks shootings across the country. At least 346 mass shootings so far this year.  In Indianapolis, a teenage girl was killed and 3 others wounded.  In Forth Worth TX, 3 people were killed and 8 others wounded in the same place where a shooting occurred exactly one year ago.

Other July 4ths.  1845.  Henry David Thoreau begins his 26-month stay at Walden Pond.  'I went to the woods because I wish to . . . see if I could not learn what [life] had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."  Like John Prine's Angel From Montgomery  "just give me one thing that I can hold on to, to believe in this living is just a hard way to go."  Or Robert Frost in The Death of the Hired Man: "Poor Silar, so concerned with other folks, and nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope, so now and never any different."

1855. Walt Whitman at age 36 published at his own expense Leaves of Grass, revolutionary, wonderful, gay, proud., exuberant, emotional.

1950.  Israel's Knesset unanimously passed The Law of Return granting all Jews the right to come to Israel and be entitled to immediate citizenship, giving rise to the controversial question of who is a Jew.  Palestinian Arabs who fled Palestine during the Nakba are not permitted to return to their homes or villages or Israel, a wound that festers to this day with endless killings on both sides.