7/24/23

 Monday, July 24, 2023

In bed around 9:14, u at 6:10. Let Lilly out.  65℉, high 84, AWI=83, Moderate, Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups, Canadian Smoke.,  The wind is WNW at 5, 3-7/13, dew point 59-63,  Sunrose at 5:34, sets at 8:22, 14+48

Poland, A Green Land.  I finished the novel today.  The protagonist is Yaakov Fein, a middle-aged owner of a women's dress shop in Tel Aviv, a former Israeli Army officer, a secular Jew.  His parents, Holocaust survivors from Szydoche, Poland, are both dead.  He had a distant relationship with them and with religious Judaism, even resisting being bar mitzvahed.  His relationships with his wife and 2 daughters is cold and distant.  He seems estranged generally for life, having positive feelings mostly about his military life.  In his mid-life crisis he decided to go to the small Polish village of his parents and ancesters. for reasons that aren't all that clear either to him or to readers.  He falls in love with the Polish shiksa, a farmer, with whom he boards for a few weeks.  The plot and a good deal of the dialogue seemed forced to me by the author does catalogue pretty well the most common anti-Semetic projudices which are shared by all the Poles in Szydoche except his landlady/lover and an old woman in town who knew his grandparents and even his highly respected grandfather, Itche Meir.  One theme of the novel seems to be that, in terms of fear and envy and hatred of Jews, nothing has changed among the Poles from the Holocaust and pre-Holocaust days and today.  I can't say I enjoyed the novel very much though I am thinking of the description of Yaakov's estrangement , his loneliness, his mid-life crisis, and his regret, remorse really, about ignoring his parents before they died and even when they died.  He sold their home as soon as he could and gave all of its contents to a charity, including items that most people would hold onto.  "Take everything", he told the movers.  I'm thinking too of his too-late learning about his parents' lives, and his grandparents' through his lover Magda and through Wanda, the wise old lady of the village, and a little bit throught Nikolai, the Polish farmer who hid his parents from the Nazis, for a time and for a price.  I am reminded of the great effort I devoted to learning some of my parents' history while writing the memoir, reminded of driving up to Grand Rapids and Taconite , Minnesota, to see where my grandparents lived when my mother was born.  I'm thinking too of the regret I'm feeling this week about not being able to find the documents from Los Alamos that my Aunt Mary kept for decades after she and Uncle Bud lived there when he worked on the Manhattan Project.  So many mysteries about grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles.  How many questions I wish I had asked when they were all alive.  Old man regrets.

Random bait bucket thoughts about Israel and the U.S.  They are so similar in such significant ways.  Each is aptly described as a political project and a political experiment.   Can the U.S. succeed as a roughly democratic republic?  ("A republic, if you can keep it" and all that)  Can Israel be both a Jewish state and a democracy?  Each is divided down the middle and appears to be coming apart at the seams.  Left vs. Right.  Religious vs. Secular.  Fascist vs. anti-Fascist.  In America, urban vs. rural.  A part of Israel's problem is that it doesn't have a constitution, and has been kept from the worst extremism by its supreme court's power to invalidate laws as "unreasonable."  A part of America's problem is that it does have a constitution, but one written by anti-democratic oligarchs and plutocrats more than 230 years ago for a pre-industrial economy and society.  Israel is only 75 years old, governed in its formative years by secular, socialist, Ashkenazi, Holocaust-haunted Jews.  Now it is governed by ultra-religious, ultra-nationalist groups whose racist policies regarding Arabs/Palestinians have erstwhile supporters of Israel wondering whether the Israel project and experiment has failed and whether Israel itself has become a racist and fascist state after 56 years of military occupation and aggressive settlement of formerly Palestinian lands.  

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The Knesset passed the first and vital part of the judicial 'reform' bill today, limiting the supreme court's ability to nullify laws based on 'unreasonableness.'  The opposition staged a walkout so the bill passed unanimously with votes from Nehanyahu's coalition.  The controversy should make us wonder about what is the real basis for judicial review and invalidation of legislation.  Conservatives raise the issue when a court of last resort invalidates a law or practice that conservatives favor; Progressives raise the same issue when a law or practice that they favor is struck down.  I think any fair analysis of the issue will lead to the conclusion that judicial review is all based on politics, power politics.  Any interpretative result that is desired can always be justified by some rubric, some rule of interpretation.  It is a myth that judges of a court of last resort don't make the law, they only interpret the law, that the meaning of the law and the meanings of the cases and constitutional language relied on to sustain or nullify any law are inherent in the language of the statutes and cases; the meaning simply has to be 'discovered,' or 'discerned.'  All the judges know that the law is what the judges say it is.  For any desired result, AI could compose a rational rationale.  Perhaps most distressing is the spurious use of history to compel results, whee the judges become historians rather and lawyers and jurists.  Gorsuch, Thomas, and Alito have all induldged in this in the Indian Child Welfare Act case, and the dobbs case.  "History" is like 'rule of statutory construction' - ripe for cherry picking to support any desired results.   All the nonsense we read about 'originalism' and 'the Framers' intent' is baloney, a gloss of lipstick on the pig of power politics.

CNN chryon re; mass shootings tells us that mass shooting in America are far outpacing former years, averaging 2 every day.

Another semi-crappy day.  Not fit company for man nor beast.  Not fit company for myself.  Vanitas, vanitas et omnia vanitas.  I need a cave to retire to.  Shame on me.