September 11, 2023
In bed at 9:40, up from brr at 4:45. 62°, drizzle, high of 65°, rainy day ahead, AQI=37, wind NNE at 7 mph, 5-12/18, 0.6" total rainfall expected. Sunrise at 6:26, sunset at 7:09, 12+42.
NFL Football and Shameless Virtue Signaling. There is a piece in yesterday's The Atlantic titled "The Joy and Shame of Loving Football" in which Mark Leibovich writes: "The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: I’m writing this on the first weekend of the NFL season. There’s a reason most of the top-rated television shows every single year are NFL games. America’s most successful sports league is such a juggernaut, and I’m definitely part of the problem. Why problem? Because, among other things, football is morally precarious, causes incalculable damage to its players’ bodies and brains, and is run and owned by some of the worst people in the world, nearly all of them billionaires." For precisely the reasons Leibovich lists, I quit following NFL football about 6 years ago (5? 7? Could it be 8?) For me, Leibovich's 3 reasons all coalesced and despite my sometimes-scrupulous, sometimes-complacent conscience, I finally decided I just didn't want to support those billionaire bastards who increase their billions by paying athletes to do oft-times permanent damage to their bodies and brains to provide Sunday afternoon/Monday night/Thursday night entertainment to me and millions of other Americans wearied by our world. I know my defection from the ranks hasn't made a bit of difference to the owners or to the players, but at least I carved out a thin slice from my recurring sense of personal complicity in our culture's corruption. I wondered what I would do with all those hours I had been devoting to watching, reading, and talking about the Green Bay Packers and their football foes but, despite persistent but diminishing urges to fall off the wagon, it soon became clear to me that everything I did do during the hours I would otherwise have devoted to NFL football - reading, shopping, painting, napping, nothing - was preferable to feeding my addiction to football. (And, to be fair, I should thank Aaron Rodgers for easing my withdrawal pains. And Roger Goodell.)
Binging Unforgotten. We have been binging on this old series starring Nicola Walker (as Cassie Stuart) and Sanjeev Bhaskar (as Sunny Khan). Both lead actors seem perfect for their roles. We first watched Season 4 at the end of which Cassie is fatally injured in a car crash. Her acting throughout the series is simply superb, on a level with that of Sarah Lancashire in Happy Valley, another truly moving cop drama with three-dimensional, well-developed characters. Sanjeev Bhaskar and Siobhan Finneran were also superb in their principal supporting roles. We had seen Season 4 of Unforgotten before but neither of us could remember how the very complicated plot worked out and was resolved so we didn't mind watching the whole series again - in fact, just the opposite. We earlier had watched Season 2, another very complicated plot and great acting. I will suggest to Geri that we try Season 3 again in which Cassie suffers a nervous breakdown because of the stress of her work, leading to her unsuccessful effort at the beginning of Season 4 to retire. We're big fans of Nicola Walker, having enjoyed her roles in another police procedural River with Stellan Skarsgārd, and in Last Tango in Halifax, opposite the great Sarah Lancashire.
Today also is the 50th anniversary of the Nixon-Kissinger coup that overthrew the freely-elected government of Marxist Salvador Allende and installed the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, resulting in the deaths or 'disappearances' of about 3,000 Chileans and the imprisonment and torture of another 38,000 who meant us no harm. The reason: to stop the spread of socialism in South and Central America, regardless of what the citizens wanted for their own countries.
I could rant all day about these two interventions by the United States government in the internal affairs of other countries, imposing America's (capitalist, corporate) will on those countries regardless of their own citizens' wishes, but I'm pooped from a shopping trip to Walmart and Costco and a stop to inflate my tires on the way home, so I'll save it for later.
I am reminded of Barack Obama's former pastor on the South Side of Chicago, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the controversy he stirred up with his prophetic sermons calling out America's sins, much as Jeremiah and Ezekiel called out Israel's sins:
An ABC News review of dozens of Rev. Wright's sermons, offered for sale by the church, found repeated denunciations of the U.S. based on what he described as his reading of the Gospels and the treatment of black Americans.
"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," he said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."
And he didn't even mention Vietnam, Chili, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and all the banana republics, Indonesia, kidnapping and 'renditions', black prisons, waterboarding, and on and on. King Herod slaughtered the innocents because he feared a threat to his hegemony. Mt. 2:13-23. Catholics celebrate the Feast of the Holy Innocents on December 28th each year. How many innocents has the United States killed to protect its corporate, capitalist hegemony?
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