Friday, December 8, 2023
In bed at 9:15, awake at 1:30 and up at 1:40, 43°, high of 52°, wind is SSW at 12 mph, 6-15/28. Sunrise at 7:10, sunset at 4:16, 9+5.
Treadmill; pain No pain until 2:30 p.m, when some spasms started. Just before that I put in time on the treadmill while watching a documentary on the life of W. B. Yeats. 30:00 & 0.60 slow walking, more interested in time in motion than distance achieved. Breakfast: oatmeal & fruit; Lunch: some honey mustard pretzels; Dinner: baked ziti, apple turnover.
Life as a luna-tic. I woke up around 1:30 and had it in my head that my Apple Watch was down to 5% battery power and wondering whether it was a good thing or a bad thing to let it get down to zero. I can't remember now at 3 a.m. as I type this the other thoughts, if any, whirled around my head but, in any event, I got up and moved to the TV room recliner, plugged in the watch, and saw it had about half a full charge.😡 I pulled my "sharf" over me and tried to fall asleep stretched out on the recliner, then tried to meditate, all unsuccessfully. Geri came out with Lilly at about 2:30. I offered to let Lilly in, but Geri declined, waited for her, and let her back it. I turned on the light and the laptop on 2:40. Lilly is now awake and drinking lots of water. She'll be asking me to let her out again soon. By 3:30, I go to make some oatmeal but got waylaid by the need to clean and tidy up the kitchen, especially by the need to clean fish (skin?) off the large baking pan on which the fish was cooked in last night. It took about half an hour with Dawn Powerwash and our ever-useful wok cleaner. Major salvage job, finished at 4:15, thinking perhaps I can fall asleep, back to TV room recliner, listened to Richard Strauss' Vier Letze Lieder, the 3rd song, Beim Schlafengehen, At Bedtime or Going to Sleep. a musical rendition of a poem by Herman Hesse:
Now that I am wearied of the day, / my ardent desire shall happily receive / the starry night / like a sleepy child.
Hands, stop all your work. / Brow, forget all your thinking. / All my senses now / yearn to sink into slumber.
And my unfettered soul / wishes to soar up freely / into night's magic sphere / to live there deeply and thousandfold.
I was moved by this song when I first heard it in the 1982 movie The Year of Living Dangerously starring Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver, and Linda Hunt. It played as Linda Hunt, playing Billy Kwan, grieved over a dead or dying child, preceding her defenestration for hanging a large sign out a window: "Sukarno, feed your people!" Incredibly beautiful music, at or near the top of my never-constant list of favorite music. Mozart, Piano Concerto #: Beethoven, Symphony #7, Fauré, Requiem, Brahms, A German Requiem, Ellington, Sophisticated Lady, Lloyd Webber, Love Changes Everything, Weill/Gershwin, My Ship Has Sails, . . . . .
I let Lilly out again at 5, or was it closer to 6? Only Venus visible in the predawn sky. Still no sleep. Maybe a big bowl of oatmeal will help. . . 8:45 I start nodding off, head back to bedroom at 9. I woke up at 11 and lay in bed till 11:45.
“This is not who we are”: The would-be guardians of America’s better angels have been scolding us with this line for years. Or maybe they mean it as an affirmation. Either way, the axiom prompts a question: Who is “we” anyway? Because it sure seems like a lot of this “we” keeps voting for Trump. Today the dictum sounds more like a liberal wish than any true assessment of our national character.
. . .
You can dismiss Trump voters all you want, but give them this: They’re every bit as American as any idealized vision of the place. If Trump wins in 2024, his detractors will have to reckon once again with the voters who got us here—to reconcile what it means to share a country with so many citizens who keep watching Trump spiral deeper into his moral void and still conclude, “Yes, that’s our guy.”
We just can't get ourselves to admit to the kind of society we are. Bullying, hypocritical, imperialist, selfish, money and comfort driven, etc. I'm recalling yet again the conversation in my law firm's lunchroom in which I suggested that the United States is the greatest danger to world peace if for no other reasons because our corporate economy has great need for both natural resources we can't produce internally and for open foreign markets for our goods and services. We have the world's largest military, our death-and-destruction force, precisely to ensure that nobody interferes with our access to those resources and markets. No other nation presents the overt threat of the use of military force to achieve its goals as we do, Uncle Sam, land of the free and home of the brave. To me, it was and is as clear as the nose on my face; to my colleagues in the lunchroom, not so. We have a huge societal establishment in place to cause us to believe from infancy on up that America is God's gift to world. As Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote “We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible." The political establishment, the educational establishment, the entertainment establishment, the news media establishment, even the religious establishment, all work together to instill and confirm the belief that we are the world's "good guys." The world knows better.
The political popularity of Donald Trump, and especially the fact that he received many more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, the political power of the new Confederacy, i.e., the hard "red" states, the gun culture, our history of White Supremacy, and so much more tell 'who we are' as a society, a culture, a polity and it's a pretty ugly picture.
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