9/12/23

 September 12, 2023

In bed at 9:40, up at 6:28 after many pss, one brr.  54°, high of 67°, sunny day ahead with beach hazard warning, high waves & dangerous currents. AQI=23, wind NNW at 12, 5-12/19.  0.3" of rain in the last 24 hours.  Sunrise at 6:28, sunset at 7:07, 12+39.

LTMW at a male house finch on the short feeder who confirms my hunch that the safflower seeds are more popular than the black-oil sunflower seeds, at least with him.  The chickadees get the 'early bird' award this morning, appearing in numbers mostly on the long niger tube.  So elegant, so hyper.  One chipmunk scrounging around under the short tube.  Goldfinches, a cardinal, and a nuthatch show up later, increasing my guilt at letting the sunflower/safflower tube get so short of feed, but I'm mostly impressed with the number of chickadees congregating at our feeders this morning.  Wow.  At 8:30, a young mother with her baby in a stroller passes by on Wakefield, heading up to Mequon.  Later she returns followed by another young mother pushing a double stroller with 2 youngsters, accompanied by their pet dog.  I think of them, and all the other parents and children, as I write the next entry.

Reign of Terror.  While reading an article (The 9/11 Speech That Was Never Delivered) by Jeff Nussbaum in The Atlantic online, about a speech prepared for but never delivered by Condoleezza Rice when she was National Security Advisor to GWB, I was struck by these lines: "Conventional wisdom holds that the threat of massive retaliation is the only thing stopping a nuclear attack on America. This is the doctrine of mutual assured destruction, or MAD."  How long have we all lived under the cloud of MAD, since the 1950s?  Since the Soviets perfected their atom bombs or hydrogen bombs and their missile technology?  I still have a vestigial memory of air raid drills at St. Leo Grammar School, everyone gathering in the big hallway on the first floor of the building, rehearsing what we would do if the Russians sent an atom bomb our way.  We kids in our Catholic school uniforms (tan shirts, blue ties for the boys), kneeling pitched forward with our hands naively protecting our heads, didn't know it, but the grownups knew that Chicago would be a prime target with all its manufacturing, finance, communication, and transportation assets.  Those were the days of designated Air Raid Shelters and of Civil Defense Preparedness, rich people with personal bomb shelters at their residences, and of people storing supplies of food and water in their basements, of Catholic people praying their rosaries for the conversion of the atheistic communists.  At some point, those fears of Russian attacks on America (we didn't call it 'the homeland' then) subsided and we all went on with our lives ignoring, if not oblivious to, the fact that the Russians had hundreds and then thousands of nuclear weapons targeted at us just as we had ours targeted at them.  The weapons have never gone away; they have rather grown more powerful and more sophisticated with better delivery systems as time has moved on.  Not only have the weapons gotten bigger, they have also gotten smaller, "suitcase bombs," which could be used by terrorists, and tactical nuclear weapons, which can be deployed and detonated on battlefields, like Ukraine.  And we have many powerful men who threaten to use these weapons, though none has been used since Hiroshima & Nagasaki in 1945.  There were Americans - in government and out -  who wanted to use them against North Vietnam just as there are Russians who want to use them in Ukraine.  "Why have them if we're not going to use them?", right?  We have been living under the threat of nuclear warfare and of nuclear annihilation, Mutually Assured Destruction, most of my long life. We act as if it weren't so simply because we must.  Otherwise we would go nuts, knowing there are other human beings who could and would blow us away if they could get away with it without consequences.  But now instead of bomb drills in our schools, a la 1950s, we have 'active shooter' drills.  Instead of building bomb shelters, we work to "harden" our school buildings against child killers as we have hardened our hearts to accept the daily slaughter from gun violence that we are no more capable of addressing than we are capable of disarming or befriending Russia, or China, or North Korea.

  I have of late, (but wherefore I know not) lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition; that this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither; though by your smiling you seem to say so.  Hamlet, Act II, scene 2.

 

 Democracy, Seelf-government, and Judicial Overisght in Israel and the U.S.  The Israeli supreme court has begun hearing the appeal of the right-wing government's law limiting the jurisdiction of the court by removing, as a basis for the court's decisions, the ground of "unreasonableness."  The case raises all kinds of questions about democratic/representive/republican government and who gets the last word on the enforceability, scope, and meanng of legislation.  In the U.S., we have lived with the theory (looking for the right word) of judicial supremacy since Marbury v. Madison in 1803 which held that the Constitution is a law itself, indeed the supreme law, and that all legislation must be consistent with it, or at least, not inconsistent with it.  In Israel, however, as in the UK, there is no written constitution against which to measure legislation.  By what authority then does the Israeli supreme court get to declare any legislation invalid?  Presumably, and hopefully, we will get the anwer when the court decides the case currently being considered.  But the real answer will come when we find out whether the government will abide by the decision of the court if the court finds the legislation invalid.  A number of government ministers have already declared that they will not abide by a negative decision from the court.  Then what?  A true constitutional crisis and probable violence in the streets and the big issue becoming how the military reacts.  Could such a crisis occur in the U.S., even with our written Constitution?  Why not?  What's to stop our Supreme Court from overruling Marbury v. Madison, just as it did Plessy v. Furguson (arguably in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and/or in Bob Jones University v. United States (1983), or as it did Roe v. Wade (1973) in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022)?   Or what is to prevent a future administration from refusing to abide by or obey a court order and to back up its resistance with armed force?  Let's remember January 6, 2021 and what the polls tell us about the very real possibility of Trump's being returned to office in 2025.  There is nothing ineluctably necessary about Marbury's result.  Could not we have a system in which the legislature itself decides on the legitimacy of its enactments, with a presumed constituional legitimacy from the mere fact of enactment, and perhaps a legislative review of constitutionality triggered by some prescribed appeal process in the Congress itself?  Why not?  We know now that a very large percentage of the American electorate does not belive in democracy or maximum suffrage within the population.  Wisconsin provides a great demonstation of the reality that legislative districting and gerrymandering can guarantee minority rule in any American jurisdiction.  Indeed the Constitution itself pretty much guarantees minority rule by virtue of the prescribed composition of the Senate and the Electoral College.  The composition of the current Supreme Court completes the triad of minority rule.  In large measure, our country is now divided old against young and rural against urban with the game rigged against the young and the urban.  Why do we fool ourselves that ours is a functioning democacy and that our Constitution and the Supreme Court are deserving of our respect, much less our veneration?

My latest Camille Claudel.  I wonder whether I'm neurotic painting different iterations from my one reference portrait of Camille but I am enjoying it, noticing how each one is different from the preceding ones, each has its own distinctive errors but the errors also sort of defining each painting and giving it some character.  Since my standards are necessarily low to begin with (or else I would have to give up painting altogether because of my ineptitude), I get some enjoyment from the variations from the  one reference piece.  This one I painted on a larger canvas I had on hand.  I sketched the outline freehand with a piece of colored chalk, using only 2 gridlines to locate the middle of the canvas.  Her mouth is a bit larger than I had intended, as are her eyes which are also non-identical, one larger than the other.  The red/blue/purple background reminds me a bit of Munck's skies in his "Scream" paintings and sort of suggests the mental consternations she must have suffered during her 30 years of confinement in an asylum.  Today I added some shading to her face and neck.

The Increasing Meaninglessness of Impeachment.  Today Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy announced that the House Oversight Committee and House Judiciary Committee under Neanderthal chairmen James Comer and Jim Jordan will begin an 'impeachment inquiry', whatever that means in the absence of a full house vote authorizing it, against President Biden.

On an unrelated related note, an original action has been filed in the Wisconsin supreme court seeking to block Republican efforts in the state legislature to impeach Justice Janet Protasiewicz to keep her from ruling on an upcoming redistricting case (and abortion and other cases as well.)  The rawest power politics are at work at all levels of government, no pretense of norms, guardrails, good government.

We live in the world of Kellyanne Conway's "alternate facts," the world of 'my truth' and 'your truth,' and no truth.  USA, USA, USA!!!

Whazupwidat???

Hemorrhage in my left hand for the last 4 days, from nowhere.