Tuesday, August 15, 2023
In bed at 11, following the 4th Trump indictment, up at 7:30, 2 snifters, 1 BRR. 62°, high of 74°, Beach Hazard warning, waves 3 to 5 ft, currents, AQi=73, Moderate, particulates. The wind is N at 14 mph, 3-15/26. Sunny day after almost 3 inches of rain yesterday.😳 The sun rose at 5:26 at 70° ENE and sets at 7:54, 13:57.
Masculinity. There is an article in this morning's WaPo about masculinity and loneliness. It rings true: (1) "It was a kind of connection that U.S. men increasingly say is missing from their lives, leaving them lonely, disconnected and, often, angry. Earlier this year, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy declared the country to be in an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” National suicide rates have risen in recent decades, and men in 2021 died by suicide at a rate nearly four times higher than women, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention." (2) American men’s isolation stems in large part from a pervasive cultural belief, experts say: that men should be self-reliant and hide their emotions, especially from other men. (3) “If a boy expresses too much emotion or too much need for connection, is too giddy, is too joyful, what we say to that boy is, ‘What are you, a sissy? What are you, a girl? What are you, gay?’” Greene said. “It’s your job to dominate those around you, or you will lose status, and that will increase the number of individuals above you who can dish out dominance to you. And what we find is that in that system, in that structure, men are constantly in competition with each other and constantly driven by this sense of anxiety.” (4) Going around the circle, they began to talk about what lurked in the basement. One had lost his sister a few months earlier. Many talked of fraught or violent relationships with their fathers — or of not having a father around."
Living with Geri has shown me how lonely I am, certainly since Kitty died. I'm not lonely with Geri, quite the opposite. She is my one friend with whom I have regular, indeed daily, contact. What I see watching her live her life is how much continuing contact she has with her other friends, many of them almost life-long friends. Her cousin Sue is a lifelong friend. Her friends Kate and Tuz have been friends for almost 60 years, and Chris for about 40 years. Our former neighbor Cheri has been a friend since we moved across the street from her. She is friends with both of her daughters-in-law and of course with her sons and her granddaughter. And who am I missing? The point is that Geri talks with these friends regularly. She calls them or they call her. Hardly a day goes by that she is not engaged in a good conversation with one or more of them, sharing thoughts, experiences, and advice. The only person with whom I had a friendship like Geri's was my sister Kitty, who has been gone a year and a half now. For the last several years of her life, we started each and every day conversing with each other by early morning text messages, usually long exchanges. We grew up together sharing life in our tiny, one-bedroom, basement apartment with our father suffering from post-war PTSD, alcoholism, depression, withdrawal, and no emotional room in his life for his children. and a loving, supportive and protective mother suffering from her own PTSD after being raped at knife-point in our apartment when I had just turned 6 and Kitty had just turned 3. Kitty and I shared just about everything, thoughts and experiences, fears and long-suppressed emotions which our conversations would occasionally revive. We knew each other well, as well as any two people can know each other; we knew each other's spouses well, and each other's children. And we loved each other deeply, probably as deeply as any two not-married people can love each other. For a short while after she became so sick with her COPD that she could no longer respond to my morning messages and even after she died, I continued to send her morning messages as if she were still receiving them. I knew she was gone of course and with her a huge part of my emotional life, but I pretended to hold on to her and to hold on to all she meant to me. But, melodramatic or not, a part of me died with her. I've been grieving the loss of her for about 2 years, pre-grieving as I knew her death was approaching, and I speak with no one about it. Maintaining this journal is a sorry outgrowth of her death, a solipsistic indulging of the need to express, to vent, the big difference being that no one reads it but me. Stiff upper lip, old man. Suck it up. Shake it out. Shape up or ship out. Man up, Marine. Get over it. Big boys don't cry, and all that. If I am to die before Geri, which is likely though never certain, she, thank God, will be supported by her wide circle of good and intimate friends, and family of course. If, God forbid, she should die before me, I will largely be alone. Andy and Anh will do their best to provide emotional support but they have three children growing into adulthood as well as their demanding jobs, and Sarah is on another continent. I think I know how the story ends.
Knowing where I am now as an old man, I have many regrets about not preserving, cultivating, and nourishing friendships, both male and female, during my life. At best I was much too casual about some; at worst, I was callous. I developed a habit of introversion early in life as a defense mechanism in living with my father and under the cloud of the terrible crime that occurred in our home and I still want to turn inward and clam up when faced with emotional or personal difficulties. It's a form of cowardice, easy enough to understand for a child dealing with an unloving, off-putting father and domestic trauma, but harder to countenance in an adult lacking the courage to deal directly with emotionally challenging situations. In any case, I am paying the price for this personality flaw in my old age. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Holy Days, politics, and mass delusion. For Roman Catholics, today is the Solemnity of the Assumption. According to the Catholic Catechism: “…The Immaculate Virgin, preserved free from all stain of original sin, when the course of her earthly life was finished, was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory, and exalted by the Lord as Queen over all things, so that she might be the more fully conformed to her Son, the Lord of lords and conqueror of sin and death. The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin is a singular participation in her Son’s Resurrection and an anticipation of the resurrection of other Christians: In giving birth you kept your virginity; in your Dormition, you did not leave the world, O Mother of God, but were joined to the source of Life. You conceived the living God and, by your prayers, will deliver our souls from death” (CCC 966).
Our friend Katie McManus on the MULS faculty told me of being at a gathering of Catholic friends when one was reminded that the day was a Holy Day of Obligation, the Feast of the Assumption, and explained it referred to the BVM being 'assumed bodily' into Heaven, plucked as it were from this orb to the Beatific Vision. The friend asked "Are we supposed to believe that?" and was told, "Yes, you have to belief it; it's a dogma." His reply was, "Well, I may have to believe it, but I don't have to think about it." I skip all the questions that the idea of 'the Assumption' gives rise to, but let's add it to the idea of the Immaculate Conception, the Virgin Birth, Transubstantiation, Jesus's Hypostatic Union (True God/True man) Papal infallibility, Indelible marks on the soul (baptism & confirmation), the 3-in-1 Holy Trinity, and so on. These are all dogmas, 'truths' which Catholics are religiously required to believe. Presumably, every devout Catholic believes all these dogmas and many more. Everybody who is not a devout Catholic thinks these people are nuts, or more nicely, deluded by their religion and self-deluded. Catholics think Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Muslims are deluded.
These are all mass delusions, irrational beliefs shared by millions of people. Religious mass delusions being so common, why is it surprising that we are experiencing political mass delusions in the era of Trump? I suppose there is at least one big difference between the two: religious mass delusions being a shared trust in various religious authorities or traditions (the Church, the Bible, the Koran, etc.) and current political mass delusions seem to be based mainly on shared distrust of political and social authorities, but I suppose that thinking is simplistic. Trust and distrust always involve their counterparts, to trust the Bible is to distrust those who deny the authority of the Bible. To distrust the FBI, the DOJ, the media, university elites, and all socialists, globalists, etc. is to trust those who share one's distrusts. And I suppose we all share various delusions with many others, e.g., the thought that we fight wars to 'defend freedom'.
In any event, I fear that mass delusions among the MAGA crowd will lead to violence between now and November 2024. If we are lucky, we will just live through what Geri accurately called the upcoming shitshow, charges and countercharges, vituperations, mutual hatreds without firebombs, explosives, bullets, and riots. Unlikely.
Vehementer Nos, Pope Pius X, February 11, 1906.
"The Church is by essence an unequal society comprising two categories of persons, the pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful. So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end of the society and directing all its members towards that end. The one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led and, like a docile flock, to follow the pastors."
Letter from Lord Acton, April 5, 1887
"If there is any presumption, it is . . . against the holder of power, increasing as its power increases . . . Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority but still more when you superadd the tendency, or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
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