9/28/23

 Thursday, September 28, 2023

In bed before 10, awake at 3:40 and up at 3:58, unable to sleep.  60°, mostly cloudy day ahead, high of 65°.  AQI=19, wind ENE at 8 mph, 5-9/14, 0.35" of rain in last 24 hours.  Sunrise at 6:45, sunset at 6:38, 11+53.

Woke with back pains as usual.  The pains have moved from my right side below the kidney area to the left side, lower and mid back, occasionallly sharp, stabbing, shooting pains starting yesterday in the car driving away from Meijer's in Grafton.  I don't recall having a pain problem in the store while shopping and wasn't aware of having strained anything while loading the stuff into the back of the car (2 gallons of distilled water, 2 fairly heavy bags of groceries) but the stabbing pain started before I was out of the parking lot.  Geri applied a 5% lidocaine patch at about 5 because I was having some bad pains again.

This Is Us; Jack, Vietnam.  We watched episode 3, series 3 last night, focused on Jack's time in Vietnam in 1970 and his relationship with his mother and father.  I skipped most of the 'in country' scenes, keeping busy in the kitchen.  I've been largely turned off by the hokey unreality of the story's dialogues for some time, especially Jack's perfection in his role as loving husband and loving, nurturing father.  Ditto Randall's  perfections, and even Toby's.  I'm thinking the story may have 'jumped the shark' generally. But this episode's treatment of the Draft Lottery, of men moving to Canada to avoid being sent to Vietnam (like Mike McC.'s brother), of the certainty by 1970 that "we" weren't going to "win" the war, the horrifying futility of the war and the randomness of the dying.  Random in the sense of the lottery based on birthdays, not so random in term of class & caste-based deferrals, including as we now know Donald J. Trump's "bone spurs" and Dick Cheney's multiple  deferrals.  It was a terrible, and for many, a terrifying time the land of the free and the home of the brave.  The time of Dick Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Henry Kissinger, and "Peace with Honor."  Of  the invasion of Cambodia, Kent State, Jackson State, the bombing of Sterling Hall in Madison, the SDS and the Weathermen.  Of My Lai.  It was the year I graduated from law school shortly after the dean of the law school asked me and two former Milwaukee police officers, Freddie St. Clair and Leroy Jones,  to stand 'sentry duty' at the school all night because of threats of bombing because of the Cambodia invasion.  I was remined of that time as I watched Jack's 'little brother' Nicky's birthday come up as #4 in lottery.  There was also a scene in the episode in which Jack & Nicky's faather threatened violence against their mother and Nicky had the courage to tell him to stop, which reminded of a similar terrible incident in my life when we lived at 7307 S. Emerald which I still remember pretty vividly.  The depiction of Jack's father throughout the series reminded of my father though my father was not as wantonly cruel as Jack's father was; he had other problems that impacted my sister and me for the rest of our lives.

Irish peasant lineage.  I am of Irish peasant stock.  My roots are working class, blue collar, proletariat, commoner, plebian. hoi polloi, the great unwashed. When my grandfather Dennis Healy came over from Kilgarvan, County Kerry, Ireland in 1904, his passage had been paid for by an unnamed brother, he had $6 in his pocket and a ticket to Chicago where he had a sister Mary living in a room in the Lakota Hotel at 30th Street and Michigan Boulevard.  The immigration records make it clear that the emigrating Healys were almost certainly poor, landless and with no prospect of acquiring land.  Their ‘occupation or calling’ is always listed as ‘laborer’ or ‘servant.’  According to some anecdotal evidence I found on the internet, most of the Healys in Kilgarvin were not native Kerrymen but had migrated to Kilgarvin after evictions by the Earl of Donoughmore during the “Penal Times.”  The barony of Donoughmore lay about 25 miles northwest of Cork City, about 40 miles east of Kilgarvin.    Kilgarvan is now a town of about 550 people in a mountainous area with scant possibilities for eking out a living.  I suspect it had a considerably larger population in 1904 but even fewer opportunities to scratch out a living.    There was a workhouse in Kenmare, down the road from Kilgarvan, and chances are the only options Dennis and his siblings saw were the Kenmare workhouse or emigration.  My mother grew up during the Great Depression and attended but did not graduate from St. Martin High School, which prepared Catholic girls for office work.   During much of her life, she worked as a waitress and then as a factory worker in a plant that made Kool-Aid and other products.  My father worked at a great many jobs none of which lasted very long because of his war-related PTSD until he settled into a maintenance job at a Continental Can factory.

    I think almost reflexively of my Irish commoner roots whenever I see or read news coverage of the British royal family.  I recall what I have learned of the treatment accorded to the Irish people through the centuries by their English conquerors usually under the banner of the British royalty (or of parliamentary authority under the cruel savagery of Oliver Cromwell.)  Thus I am inclined to puke when I see the attention lavished on the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II and the coronation of King Charles III.  And thus I was delighted to see in this morning's WaPo the story of the British royal families direct involment in and profiting from the trans-Atlantic slave trade: "A Crown Branded onto Bodies Links British Monarchy to Slave Trade."

The broad outlines of that history were already known: For 270 years, British kings and queens, as heads of state, oversaw a commercial enterprise that denied people their basic humanity and condemned them into bondage, sending them across an ocean to be exploited for their labor — though thousands died as a result of the brutal conditions of the passage.

But new investigations, based on records scattered in libraries and archives on multiple continents, are revealing that successive British monarchs played a more intimate role than previously recognized, reaping profits that continue to benefit British royals today. . .

Edmond Smith, a historian at the University of Manchester, said that the discovery of the brand in the South Sea Company records — like other kinds of physical evidence, including iron rods or shackles — helps to highlight the “horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and really bring it to life. … We can talk about the transatlantic slave trade in terms of millions of people, but that can somehow bizarrely diminish the emotional impact.”

Newman, the Virginia-based historian, said the brand was emblematic of royal involvement.  “It’s not just even that they invested in these companies and made dividends off of or got customs revenue,” she said. “It’s that they were willing to have their brand literally branded into the flesh of people. This was because, at the time, the slave trade was seen as the way to build an empire and the way to make money to funnel money back into the royal pocketbook.” 

Lest we forget, the heritage of the British royals is barbarism.  The title of the song that the Brits so love to sing "Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves! / Britons never, never, never will be slaves" should be changed to Cruel Britannia.