Thursday, November 16, 2023
In bed at 10:45, up at 6:34, let Lilly out, 46°, high of 60°, mostly cloudy, AQI=95 (PN2.5), wind SSW at 11 mph, 2-19/35, windy afternoon expected. Sunrise at 6:45 at 115°SE, sunset at 4:27 at 245°SW, 9+41 . Solar noon at 11:36 a.m., alt. at 28°
Journaling and my 'asshole epiphany. It's odd the things we remember from long ago, and perhaps odder the things we partially remember. Many years ago when I was a young professor at the law school, I drove to work one day along Lake Drive and Lincoln Memorial Drive on the lakefront. There was to be a faculty meeting that day and I was thinking about my position on some matter that would be coming up. I knew that my position would not find favor with my older, much more conservative colleagues, and I recall thinking to myself, "If I say such and such, they'll think I'm an asshole." That thought was immediately followed by "Maybe I am an asshole on this issue, so what." The words aren't exact but I recall pretty vividly the epiphanous insight that on some issues I might be an asshole, out of sync with most others, and even maybe wrong but also perhaps right and the others wrong and that I could live with that, being outé was OK. The thought sequence occurred as I was turning from Lake Drive onto Lincoln Memorial Drive at Lake Park. What I don't recall is what the issue was on which I would be the outlier, the asshole. There were many issues over many years on which I differed from my older, Republican, traditional Catholic colleagues. I'm thinking back on that experience now in connection with the practice of journaling, attempting to put in writing my thoughts on any number of matters on which my thoughts may be incoherent, unclear, perhaps contradictory, uninformed or misinformed, perhaps "tattooed in my cradle" with tribal falsities, biases, and prejudices, etc., or simply wrong. I'm also thinking of my many thoughts of my complicities, my weaknesses, guilt, all that Yeatsian 'responsibility so weighs me down' and 'my conscience or my vanity appalled' stuff. I realize that this paragraph itself is incoherent, without a clear sequitur between its beginning and this ending, but so be it I guess, maybe I am an asshole.
Meditation and Mindfulness Awareness. This morning for the first time, I dialed in to join this group, moderated out of Green Bay. There were perhaps 8 veterans in the group [ plus Lou, a peer counselor out of Green Bay, and Mary, a Whole Health health coach out of GB. It was interesting and I will probably stick with it. I'm about to leave to go to the North Shore and WFB libraries to check out some Mindfulness materials. . . I picked up 2 DVDs on mindfulness practice and one book "Beginning Mindfulness: Learning the Way of Awareness."
Fintan O'Toole: Biden's Selective Outrage in the November 14 issue of NYRB O'Toole is one of my favorite, perhaps my favorite, essayist. He writes great stuff for NYRB and The Irish Times. He's a 'youngster', only 65 years old, born in Dublin to working-class parents, educated (like me) by the Irish Christian Brothers (a/k/a ICBs or International Child Beaters), and at University College-Dublin, not Trinity or Oxford or Cambridge. Also, like me, he is not a big fan of Joseph Robinette Biden. He's not utterly condemnatory, like MAGA morons, but he isn't taken in by Biden's schtick. His most recent offering in NYRB about Biden's selective outrage is subtitled "The rhetorical choice to pair Israel and Ukraine has not created a common moral cause. It has exposed a double standard." He writes:
The pairing of Israel and Ukraine has not created a single moral cause. It has exposed a double standard. From the early days of Putin’s war on Ukraine, as evidence began to emerge of the extensive war crimes committed by his forces, it was clear that there was a weak spot in America’s accusations of Russian depravity. The US has a history of deep ambivalence toward war crimes—evident in, for example, its refusal to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Its inconsistency on this score has long threatened to undermine the belief, so important to the struggle being waged by the people of Ukraine, that Putin is violating not just territorial borders but moral boundaries. For Putin it is good news indeed that the US, so fierce in its denunciation of his attacks on civilians, has been so forbearing in its attitude to similar assaults on Gaza. His cynical belief that ethical standards are just weapons in the propaganda war is being vindicated. . . .
There has been nothing secret about Israel’s intent to punish the whole population of Gaza by depriving them of electricity and water. On October 9 the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, announced a “complete siege” of the Strip. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel.” The following day the Israeli Army’s coordinator of government activities in the territories, Major General Ghassan Alian, addressed the population of Gaza in Arabic: “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water. There will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”
We do not have to guess how the Biden administration would have responded to such statements had they come from Moscow rather than Tel Aviv. In November 2022 Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the United Nations, spoke to the security council about Russia’s destruction of civilian infrastructure in Ukrainian cities, which had left millions of people without power or clean water: . . .
ILater that month the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, used even stronger language to condemn Russian attacks on vital infrastructure: “Heat, water, electricity—for children, for the elderly, for the sick—these are President Putin’s new targets. He’s hitting them hard. This brutalization of Ukraine’s people is barbaric.” . . . .
In July, when the US began to share evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine with the ICC, The New York Times reported that “American intelligence agencies are said to have gathered information including details about decisions by Russian officials to deliberately strike civilian infrastructure in Ukraine.” Assuming such reports are accurate, this means that the Biden administration has been actively helping the ICC prepare a possible indictment of Putin for deliberately depriving civilians of electricity and clean water.
Each recorded fatal Israeli airstrike on Gaza since October 7 has reportedly caused an average of ten civilian deaths. The Biden administration has acknowledged that killing innocent people at this rate is unacceptable. As Blinken put it on a visit to India, “Far too many Palestinians have been killed; far too many have suffered these past weeks.” By the logic it applied to Iran, the US has to take responsibility for its indirect part in those deaths. Yet there is no evidence that it is willing to hold itself to the moral standards it insists on for others—and very little evidence either that the influence it seeks to wield behind the scenes in its dealings with Netanyahu has had much effect on the ground in Gaza. The administration’s tacit moral case—that its backing for Israel’s war allows it to save Palestinian lives by restraining what Biden, on his visit to Tel Aviv, called “an all-consuming rage”—seems more and more like wishful thinking.
O'Toole wrote another piece in NYRB two weeks ago: "No Endgame in Gaza: After weeks of bombardment and thousands of deaths, what are Netanyahu’s political and ethical limits?" There he wrote:As the conflict in Ukraine looks increasingly attritional and settles into a bloody stalemate with no obvious endpoint, it has become harder for democracies to sustain the idea that this is not a proxy war between power blocs but a genuine struggle for decent values and an international order based on universal laws. What will those Western governments say this winter when Putin again tries to destroy Ukraine’s power grids? Can they say, as they have before, that these attacks are horrific and barbaric? Or must they now preserve an awkward silence because such language has lost the power to express a shared sense of revulsion at all inhumane acts, whoever perpetrates them?
Peacemaking is a political process. Wars may shape the circumstances in which it is done, but they do not make it happen. Rabin, one of Israel’s most accomplished warriors, understood that truth. With his assassination and Netanyahu’s rise, it was deliberately unlearned. Politics—the negotiation of a just settlement with the Palestinians—was abandoned and replaced by the illusion that security could indeed be created and maintained by planes, tanks, fortifications, and surveillance technology. That illusion has died a terrible death, but it retains a zombie existence. It persists because the first condition of a return to politics would be the admission that Netanyahu’s whole approach has been a disaster, not just for the Palestinians, but for Israel. . . .
The idea of controlled carnage ended in the unrestrained slaughter of October 7. Netanyahu was forced to abandon overnight the scheme that had been the touchstone of his whole approach to the Palestinian question: keeping Hamas strong enough to deny authority to the Palestinian Authority, but weak enough to pose no more than a sporadic and limited threat to Israeli citizens. . . .
Netanyahu is Trump in a kippah, but much smarter, more politically astute, and never buffoonish. He has led his country to disaster and chaos, just as Trump will lead the U.S. to disaster and chaos if he is returned to the White House, which now is looking more like a probability than a mere possibility. Joe Biden provided an escape from Trump's treacheries in 2020 but he may lead the U.S. and the world to a more disastrous Trump return in 2024.The failure of Israel’s Plan A was acknowledged with its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. The even more catastrophic collapse of Plan B has been conceded, as it had to be, after Hamas’s attacks destroyed the illusion of literal and political containment. But the only response of which Netanyahu seems capable is a completely incoherent mix of Plan A and Plan B. There will be, for an unknown period, a military occupation. But it will end in some kind of reversion to the situation that followed the 2005 withdrawal: power without responsibility. Israel will exert complete power over Gaza. But it will take no responsibility for Gaza. This is not a plan. It is a fusion of two failures.
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