12/29/23

 Friday, December 29, 2023

In bed at 10, up R 6.  Let Lilly out. 36°, cloudy, high of 39°,  Wind N at 14 mph, 7-15/24.  0.25" inches of rain in the last 24 hours.  Sunrise at 7:23, sunset at 4:24, 9+1.     

Treadmill; pain.   There's tightness in the PFM this morning, but no spasms as of 10:30.  30:31 & 0.60 while watching James Carville on YouTube announcing his annual Starr-Hastert PAHA, or Perverts and Hypocrites Awards.  The big prize is a toss-up between the Sarasota Florida Republican leaders famous for their threesomes and Jerry Falwell, Jr. and his wife and their relationship with a pool boy at the Fontainbleu Hotel.

I'm grateful for good neighbors and for having had many in my life.  In my childhood, we had Carl and Ann Semrau, our next-door neighbors who let us move out of the basement at 7303 S. Emerald Avenue and up to their spacious 2nd-floor flat at 7307 S. Emerald.  'Movin' on up' like the Jeffersons, and what a life-altering change, made possible I'm sure only by their friendship.  It's hard for me to believe that my parents would have passed a 1950s version of a landlord's credit check with my father's PTSD, alcohol abuse, and employment history and our finances so dependent on my mother's income as a waitress, but Carl and Ann were our friends during those terrible days and the notorious rape of my mother in 1947.  I remember both of them being kind to us and their daughters, Cathy and Rosemary, being good friends of Kitty and me.  They moved away from the neighborhood, as we did, later in the 1950s, participants in the Great White Flight during the blockbusting era of whole Chicago neighborhoods changing, seemingly overnight, from all-White to all-Black.  The Semraus' new neighbors at 80th and Campbell included my First True Love, mentioned below in the note about Nikki Haley, introduced to me by Cathy Semrau.  (The faded photo above is from my memoir.)  We've had many good neighbors since the Semraus, including Lance and Marianne Herrick on Newberry Boulevard, and Don Jones, my landlord and downstairs neighbor on Murray Street in Shorewood, and Paula Simon and Howard Schoenfeld on Newton Avenue, our neighbors in Saukville whose names, alas, I cannot remember, and the McGregors, Cheri Bubrick, and Reuben and Patti Peterson in Bayside.   Life with a nasty neighbor can be a nightmare; life with good neighbors is a great blessing, for which I am most grateful.

    As I write this I am mindful of my experience at the Sports Clips barbershop a couple of hours ago.  I was experiencing some mobility issues that made it awkward to get out of the barber's chair and I had some difficulty getting my fleece vest on as I was leaving.  As I turned around from the cashier's counter to the door, I saw that the next customer, a middle-aged man whom I had never seen before,  was standing at the door waiting to open the door for me.  I was touched by his kindness, his thoughtfulness.  I said 'Thank you, sir' and he replied 'You're welcome, and Happy New Year.'  He was a momentary good neighbor and I was once again blessed - and grateful.

UW-Lacrosse chancellor, porn shows & free 'speech',   Joe Gow. 63, and his wife Carmen Wilson, 56. like to f--- & s--- while being filmed.  They also like to have the films shown on porn sites under the search term "Happy Sexy Couple."  For 17 years, Joe Gow was the chancellor of UW-LaCrosse.   He is also a tenured professor in the school's  Communications Department.  Carmen Wilson has a Ph.D. from Iowa State University in Counseling Psychology.  In 2006, she chaired the search committee that recommended Gow for the chancellorship at LaCrosse and served as his chief of staff from 2008 until 2011 when she was appointed to head UW-Rock County where she served until 2016.  She and Gow married in 2014.  She was Provost and VP for Academic Affairs at Dickinson State in North Dakota from 2016 to 2019 and was a finalist for the presidency of Southwest Minnesota State in 2019.  She served as an unpaid "Associate to the Chancellor" at Uw-W-LaCrosse.  In 2018, she and Gow published a book, available on Amazon, entitled "Married With Benefits; Our Real Life Adult Industry Adventures," in which they described their experiences in the porn industry, including making films with other porn actors.

On being fired, Gow told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: "I am perfectly fine if the regents want to criticize what we've done but to say that I'm going to lose my position, that is a clear violation of First Amendment,  It is a clear violation of the regents' commitment to academic freedom. ... It's a clear violation of Wisconsin's constitution and statutes."  Are f-----g and s-----g on porn sites "speech" within the meaning of the First Amendment?  Is it an exercise of "academic freedom"  when it is done pseudonymously and is apparently unrelated to any teaching or research activities?  Does the Wisconsin constitution cover this kind of activity?  Has anybody ever read the Wisconsin constitution?  We'll find out if and when Joe and Carmen go to court unless there is some kind of settlement that quiets the scandal around their activities and the academic honors that have attended their careers.  With my undergraduate major in Psychology, my one course in Abnormal Psychology, and no professional experience in the field, it seems to me that Joe and Carmen are afflicted with a bad case of the mental disorder called exhibitionism so I am wondering whether Joe's next move will be to claim a defense under the Americans With Disabilities Act.  And their rock duo act styled "The FurLows" perhaps should adopt the name of an earlier group - The Kinks.

Nikki Haley is smoother, and more attractive, but just another Trumpie.  Q & A at a campaign stop in Berlin, N.H. on December 27:

Q: What was the cause of the United States Civil War?

A: Well, don’t come with an easy question or any — I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run. The freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do. What do you think the cause of the Civil War was?  . . . .  I mean, I think it always comes down to the role of government, and what the rights of the people are. And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people. Government doesn’t have to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life. They need to make sure that you have freedom. We need to have capitalism. We need to have economic freedom. We need to make sure that we do all things so that individuals have the liberties — so that they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way.

Q:  Thank you. And in the year 2023, it is astonishing to me that you answered that question without mentioning the word “slavery.”

A:  What do you want me to say about slavery?

Q:  No, um, you’ve answered my question. Thank you.

A:  Next question.

Some thoughts come to mind: (1) We should never forget in our post-Reagan, post-Bush(es), post-Trump era that all politicians who choose to embrace the Republican label are Republicans through and through, which is to say, not to be trusted.  (2)  Berlin, New Hampshire, where Haley gave her ham-handed answer to the simple question was a dream town for me and my First True Love, Charlene Wegge, pictured above. While browsing an atlas one night, we decided we wanted to live in Berlin, between the White Mountains and the Green Mountains.  After she dumped me in 1960, Ed Felsenthal and I drove through Berlin in 1961 on our way home from a summer of active duty in the Navy.  I discovered that Berlin was an old, beat-up pulp and paper mill town and decidedly not an idyllic destination for young lovers.  I suspect it's in better shape now than it was 62 years ago.

What Netanyahu and his ilk ignore and I and many Israelis and other Jews cannot.  In the December 21 issue of the New York Review of Books, there is an essay titled "A Bitter Season in the West Bank' by David Shulman, Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  Excerpts:

As war rages in Gaza and the Middle East as a whole is skittering on the brink of a wider conflagration, the fate of thousands of Palestinian shepherds and farmers on the West Bank looks grim. Neither the government nor the army has done anything to stop rampaging Israeli settlers who are hell-bent on driving these people—some of whom are my friends—off their lands. By now the situation has been reported widely in at least some of the Israeli media as well as in the international press. President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have both warned that this settler violence has to be curbed. On November 8 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made an empty public gesture: “There is a tiny handful of people,” he said, “who take the law into their own hands…. We are not prepared to tolerate this.” So far he seems able to tolerate it quite easily. The same day he reassured his supporters, including the hundreds of thousands of settlers in the territories: “I told President Biden that the accusations against the settlement movement are baseless.”

If you happen to be a Palestinian shepherd in the South Hebron Hills or the Jordan Valley, that “tiny handful” are terrifying thugs who can invade villages and hamlets at any moment (with a certain preference for late at night). They are heavily armed with M16 rifles, pistols, butcher knives, and often all three, and they take obvious pleasure in causing pain: beating people; breaking anything breakable; stealing; torching cars and homes; destroying food, water tanks, and solar panels; and shooting in the air—and sometimes not in the air. They have a standard formula that has been repeated in village after village: “You have twenty-four hours to leave. If you don’t, we’ll be back to kill all of you.”

Who are these violent settlers? Many of them are young men, even adolescents, who shouldn’t be carrying guns in the first place; they have had no military training, though they often wear uniforms. They have been armed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, Netanyahu’s shameless minister of national security, a follower of the racist Meir Kahane and a pyromaniac who loves nothing more than fomenting havoc in mixed Jewish-Arab cities such as Lod, Ramleh, Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem. Ben-Gvir has been handing out rifles—some eight thousand in the last few weeks—to whoever wants one (provided the recipient is Jewish, of course). They may come in handy in the civil war that Ben-Gvir is conniving to bring about. Some of these settlers are now organized in paramilitary units supposedly under the aegis of the Israeli army. In reality there is no longer any clear distinction between the settler militias and the army units, mostly manned by settlers from the area, that are stationed in South Hebron and only too eager to join the hunt.  . . . . . 

Who are these violent settlers? Many of them are young men, even adolescents, who shouldn’t be carrying guns in the first place; they have had no military training, though they often wear uniforms. They have been armed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, Netanyahu’s shameless minister of national security, a follower of the racist Meir Kahane and a pyromaniac who loves nothing more than fomenting havoc in mixed Jewish-Arab cities such as Lod, Ramleh, Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem. Ben-Gvir has been handing out rifles—some eight thousand in the last few weeks—to whoever wants one (provided the recipient is Jewish, of course). They may come in handy in the civil war that Ben-Gvir is conniving to bring about. Some of these settlers are now organized in paramilitary units supposedly under the aegis of the Israeli army. In reality there is no longer any clear distinction between the settler militias and the army units, mostly manned by settlers from the area, that are stationed in South Hebron and only too eager to join the hunt.

For years the settlers in the illegal outposts now littering all of Area C in the West Bank (the 62 percent under full Israeli control) have been terrorizing their Palestinian neighbors. I’ve met not a few—actually too many—of them. They often seem to be troubled, confused, even lost, though they have found refuge in the outposts and undergone an ideological brainwashing by the older settlers. By now the average age of the marauding settlers has gone up; adolescents have turned into adults in their twenties or thirties. Their guiding idea is that the Land of Israel belongs uniquely to the Jews; all others have to be expelled or worse. If that plan materializes, the Messiah will come—possibly, or even preferably, in the aftermath of an apocalyptic war—and install a theocratic state in place of the present corrupt and dangerously democratic one. These settlers are now in a state of messianic ecstasy, with the Gaza war providing them the opportunity they have long been preparing for. They are stealing with impunity more and more Palestinian land while perpetrating ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, with considerable success. We are seeing the beginning of a second Nakba, accelerating day by day.

It is not only what is happening in Gaza that horrifies much of the world (and yes, of course, what happened on October 7th), but also what is happening and has happened for decades in the West Bank.

We took Lilly to the vet for her shots and a check-up.  Everything looked AOK, waiting for the blood test results on Tuedsay.