10/6/23

 Friday, October 6, 2023

In bed before 10:30, up at 5:25.  Let Lilly out.  51°chilly, high of 56°, cloudy, windy, maybe drizzly day ahead.  AQI=27, wind W at 11 mph, 9-17/29,  Sunrise at 6:54, sunset at 6:24, 11+29.   

Dropped Andy off at CSMO at 7:20 a.m. for a screening procedure which I am no longer privileged or burdened to undergo, then picked up Lizzie and Drew for dropoff at the Middle School.  Lizzie's broken ankle may turn out to be a sprain, rather than a fracture.  In either case, she wants to get back to gymnastics.  Braver than me. . . .  Picked Andy up at the GILab at 10 a.m., bought him a PubBurger and cheese curds at Culver's, and dropped him off at home where he was eager to wolf down the burger and curds and to take a nap.

David Brooks op-ed this morning puts me in terrorem.  He writes about the electoral weakness of the Democratic Party, not just Joe Biden.  The party that used to be associated with the working and middle classes is now identified with college-educated managers and professionals and, though he didn't say, with minorities, mainly Black since Hispanics are increasingly voting Republican.  If Trump wins in 2024, we can't blame it all on Joe Biden, despite his weaknesses.

Blood libel.  Donald Trump  interviewed by Raheem Kassam for the neo-fascist The National Pulse on September 27, 2023:

KASSAM: You've been giving some huge speeches to some huge crowds, but I noticed specifically the focus on immigration. And I wonder if... it brought to my mind the thing from your inauguration speech where you talked about "American carnage," right?

TRUMP: Right, yes.

TRUMP: No, nobody has ever seen anything like this. And I think we could say worldwide. I think you could go to the... you could go to a banana republic and pick the worst one, and you're not going to see what we're witnessing now. No control whatsoever. Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions [and] insane asylums. We know they're terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like what we're witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It's poisoning the blood of our country. It's so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have. . . 

From Mein Kampf, chapter two:

"Unfortunately the German national being is not based on a uniform racial type. The process of welding the original elements together has not gone so far as to warrant us in saying that a new race has emerged. On the contrary, the poison which has invaded the national body, especially since the Thirty Years' War, has destroyed the uniform constitution not only of our blood but also of our national soul. The open frontiers of our native country, the association with non-German foreign elements in the territories that lie all along those frontiers, and especially the strong influx of foreign blood into the interior of the Reich itself, has prevented any complete assimilation of those various elements, because the influx has continued steadily."

NAZI slogans:

Blut und Boden - Blood and Soil

Blut und Ehre - Blood and Honor

Blood, blood, blood.

Gathering of Friends.  Caren and Dan Goldberg and David and Pip Lowe came over for a gathering before the Lowes depart next Tuesday for their new home outside Tucson.  I was reminded again of how friendship is a privileging conferred by friends.  No one has a right to a friend, except I suppose under the Good Samaritan ethic.  We might think we have earned someone's friendship and that the other's withholding of it is wrong, but we could never make a claim to the other's friendship as a matter of right; it would be preposterous.    If we have a friend, we have been privileged by that friend, voluntarily benefited by his or her benevolent caring about us, his or her willingness and desire to share time, thoughts, activities and experiences with us.  Real friendship isn't transactional, a quid pro quo relationship; it is a voluntary blessing or grace voluntarily and mutually conferred by two people.  The ultimate human friendship is or ought to be marriage, a partnering of two persons in all of life's happenings, a commitment to love and to cherish' for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.'  A mutually shared benevolence like that is a covenant because of its comprehensiveness and commitment to duration.  Non-marital friendships are less covenantal, but equally voluntary, unbargained-for, reciprocal but not transactional, essentially generous.  We and the Goldbergs and Lowes have been making it a point to gather every 3 months to share time and dinner.  We can't remember when we started but I'm told it was when we lived in the Knickerbocker, so between 20 and 25 years ago.  I am the alte kaker with Geri trailing me, the Lowes 10 or more years behind and the Goldbergs more than 15 years.  Caren and David and I worked together at the old F&F law firm, which each of us left at different times and for different reasons.  David had been one of my students at MULS and co-authored a law review article on the state's new (i.e., federal) rules of civil procedure in the mid-1970s.  Our friendship is approaching 50 years duration.  He clerked at the firm before clerking for Judge Myron Gordon and then joined the firm as an attorney.  Caren joined the firm after graduating from UWLS in 1984 and clerking at the Wisconsin court of appeals.  She is the "youngster" of our group.  When I first met her, she was childless; now she is the mother of a doctor, a nurse, and a computer engineer.  After she left the law firm, she and I regularly got together for lunch every month or two to schmooze.  Perhaps those regular lunches formed the basis of our subsequent family dinners together with the Lowes.   In any event, our gatherings go back many years and there is some sadness associated with today's gathering, with the Lowes moving far away. 

Ellis overnight with Nona tonight.