Tuesday, October 10 2023
In bed at 9, up at 2:45 from brr to let Lilly out. 45°, high of 55°, cloudy day ahead, AQI=28, wind W at 10 mph, 5-12/21. Sunrise at 6:50, sunset at 6:17, 11+18.
Weltschmerz und Zeitgeist. I am profoundly grateful for my liberal arts education at Leo High School and Marquette University. It has provided comfort to me in my senectitude (fancy word for old age from the Latin senex, old/aged, and defined by Merriam-Webster, rather gloomily, as "the final stage of a normal life.") I have one minor regret: I wish I had studied German rather than French. My roommate Joe Daley took German in our freshman year and hated it. I preferred the mellifluousness of French. (I have a hilarious memory of one of my fine English professors, Dr. John Pick, illustrating the different sounds of the two languages in one of my English classes, C'est bon compared to Das ist gut.) Now my daughter is a long-term resident in Germany with a German husband and mischpuche, but that's not the only reason I wish I had some little ability with the language. The other reason is that I have come to like German nouns, especially those cobbled-together maxi words like Fahrradscheinwerfer, bicycle + shine + thrower = bicycle light, or even the tongue-twister Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung, motor vehicle liability insurance. I realized not so long ago that I write a lot of hyphenated expressions in this journal, expressions that wouldn't be hyphenated according to Standard English Usage. I also notice that I occasionally like to capitalize a noun in the middle of a sentence, perhaps imitating the Germans who capitalize Nouns. Mostly, though, I like those shorter German words that seem so right, words like schadenfreude, weltschmerz, weltanschauung kulturkampf, and zeitgeist.
The older I get, the more aware I become of my own Weltschmerz. I think it started when I was starting each day with often-long daily text conversations with Kitty early each morning, beginning I think in 2015, when Trump announced his run for the presidency. We would grouse with each other about him and became dejected (niedergeschlagen!) of course when he was elected, especially while losing the popular vote. I had then and have now a very pessimistic view of the direction the U.S. and the world were headed. We would often confess to "throwing pity parties" for ourselves. Despite Trump's loss to Biden in 2020, my pessimism has only gotten worse, especially with the events leading up, including, and following January 6th, 2021. My spirits bottomed out when Russia invaded Ukraine. That invasion, and the atrocities that followed it, reminded me of our actions in Vietnam. I know there are differences, of course, but bottom line, our corporate-controlled, capitalist government did not like the kind of government the Vietnamese people as a whole preferred, i.e., one run by their George Washington, Ho Chi Minh, so we sent in our military to force upon them to a government and form of economy that we preferred, and millions of innocents were killed or injured, maimed, burned, poisoned, forced from their homes, or otherwise haunted by loss. They include not only the killed and wounded but also my mother crying next to her mailbox while reading my letter informing her that I was on my way to Vietnam and then anxious about me until I left the country months later. And millions of other mothers, fathers, wives, sons, and daughters. And now I can't forget or excuse my naive complicity in all that.
I have also wondered more than once what I would call our era's Zeitgeist. Is my near-despondency if not unique at least not widely shared or is it common? Is our Zeitgeist a sense of despair, of powerlessness, or loss of agency, disinformation, manipulation, what else? Niedergeschlagenheit?
Israel's Siege of Gaza. The CIA estimates that 40% of the population of Gaza consists of children 15 years of age and younger, 50% 18 and under. Israel has cut off access to food, water, and electricity.
In the unlikely event that anyone would read my comments about Israel and Gaza, he would think me incredibly insensitive to the suffering of innocent Israelis, or engaged in indefensible false moral equivalency, 'whataboutism,' or God forbid antisemitic, to speak ill of Israel's historic treatment of Palestinians. Or perhaps morally oblivious to the depravities of Hamas. I make no excuse for the depraved acts of any Palestinians, whether Hamas, PLO, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, ISIS, or any other group or individual. I do not excuse them or claim that their acts are justified by misdeeds by Israelis or their government. Nonetheless, it is a mistake to think these depravities have occurred in a vacuum, to ignore the sufferings imposed on Palestinians by some Israelis or their government since the founding of the Jewish state. Even today there are reports of widespread acts of violence being visited upon Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli settlers. My heart aches for all the victims of injustice within Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and greater Jerusalem. My heart aches for all the victims of warfare in Ukraine, both Ukrainian and Russian. What I try to avoid is simplistic, binary thinking that, looking at the history of Israeli-Palestinian relations, paints the Israelis alabaster white and the Palestinians jet black. As Auden wrote in September 1, 1939:
“I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”
It's the human condition that so weighs me down, the dominance of greed, cruelty, hatred, and the will to power in our species. It's the pernicious role that religion so often plays in the oppression of people, including the religious claim to the West Bank, and the crazy idea that "this land is mine, God gave this land to me," Those are the opening lyrics of the Theme from Exodus song that ends "If I must fight, I'll fight to make this land our own. Until I die, this land is mine." Counter this with the footage of so many terrorists in the process of mass murder shouting "Allahu Akbar," God is great! And consider the role of Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church in supporting Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
Treadmill: 20:44; 0.50
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