8/8/23

 Tuesday, August 8, 2023

In bed at 10, up at 5:30.  Let Lilly out. 64℉, high of 82℉, mostly sunny morning, mostly cloudy afternoon40,40, AQI=40, wind WNW at 8 mph, 3-8/16.  Sunrise at 5:50, sunset at 8:04,  14+15.

Bad back.  Again.

News Blues.  I tell myself that I am cutting down on news consumption, especially TV/cable news, and I suppose I am, at least compared to the time Trump was in office.  But I've been a news junkie most of my adult life and old habits die hard.  I still check out the local (dying) newspaper, the NYT, the WaPo, the Atlantic and New Yorker online every morning, and occasionally the WSJ and the Guardian.  I haven't watched the Today show, or any of its broadcast competitors for years, for some of the same reasons I hate watching local TV news, all those relentlessly happy people, laughing and pretending to really like one another so much as they report one item of awful news after another.  "Milwaukee has broken its record on children killed by guns but some good news for Packers fans and Barbie broke box office records for its opening weekend. . ."  Please, pass me the basin.  I usually watch at least one daytime news program on CNN and/or MSNBC, plus Lawrence O'Donnell at 9 o'clock at night.  I feel a little shame in admitting that this represents a decrease from my former news junkie life during the Trump administration.

The Oxford-based  Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.reports that  the proportion of people who are “extremely” or “very interested” in the news continued to sink. In the United States, this group was in the minority (49 percent) for the first time in the survey’s short history, down from 67 percent in 2015. The institute’s data also suggest a sharper percentage-point drop abroad (including 27 points in the United Kingdom).  Many reasons are suggested including the unavoidable ubiquity of news, but also the fact that much of it, respondents say, drives feelings of depression, anger, anxiety or helplessness.  Count me in!  I'm wondering if those feelings are worse because I'm old or not so bad because I'm old.  Both the present dystopic conditions in the U.S. and the future look so bleak it is easy to slip into the selfish 'thank God I'm not going to be around much longer', selfish thinking that Jimmy Aquavia and I used to smugly share.  But to think that way or speak that way is to ignore the threats that face our children and grandchildren and all the children and grandchildren in the world.  I think of Bertolt Brecht's To Those Born Later:   "Truly, I live in dark times! / The guileless word is folly. A smooth forehead / Suggests insensitivity. The man who laughs / Has simply not yet heard / The terrible news. / What kind of times are they, when / A conversation about trees is almost a crime / Because it implies silence about so many horrors..."   Brecht grew up at the end of Kaiser Wilhelm's reign, saw WW I and the Weimar Republic, and left his native German for Scandanavia when the Nazis took over the government.  He spent the WW II years in the U.S., where he was surveilled by the FBI because he was a communist and was hauled in from of the House Unamerican Activities Committee, Joe McCarthy's predecessor persector of leftwingers.  Are our times so very differnet from the 1920s and 30s that Brecht viewed so pessimistically?  Have we really progressed so much socially and politically?  Ethically and morally?  I don't think so, actually quite the opposite.  Call me pisher.

Only in America.  Rachel Maddow opened her program last night with a long discourse on a company that is marketing child-size assault rifles, real rifles that fire real bullets from a weapon small enough to be used by small children.  "Leftie" state legislatures (CA, IL) are trying to pass legislation banning advertising of these weapons but not the sale of them.

News from the madness in Ukraine calls to mind James Boswell's Esssay on War. including:

"Were there any good produced by war which could in any degree compensate its direful effects; were better men to spring up from the ruins of those who fall in battle, as more beautiful material forms sometimes arise from the ashes of others; or were those who escape from its destruction to have an increase of happiness; in short, were there any great beneficial effect to follow it, the notion of its irrationality would be only the notion of narrow comprehension. But we find that war is followed by no general good whatever. The power, the glory, or the wealth of a very few may be enlarged. But the people in general, upon both sides, after all the sufferings are passed, pursue their ordinary occupations, with no difference from their former state. The evils therefore of war, upon a general view of humanity are as the French say, à pure perte, a mere loss without any advantage, unless indeed furnishing subjects for history, poetry, and painting. And although it should be allowed that mankind have gained enjoyment in these respects, I suppose it will not be seriously said, that the misery is overbalanced. At any rate, there is already such a store of subjects, that an addition to them would be dearly purchased by more wars."

and

" That amiable religion which 'proclaims peace on earth,' hath not as yet made war to cease. The furious passions of men, modified as they are by moral instruction, still operate with much force; and by a perpetual fallacy, even the conscientious in each contending nation think they may join in war, because they each believe they are repelling an aggressor. Were the mild and humane doctrine of those Christians, who are called Quakers, which Mr Jenyns has lately embellished with his elegant pen, to prevail, human felicity would gain more than we can well conceive. But perhaps it is necessary that mankind in this state of existence, the purpose of which is so mysterious, should ever suffer the woes of war."