Wednesday, January 31, 2024
In bed at 9:30, awake at 4:40 and up at 4:57. Let Lilly out. 31°, high of 42°, sunny day ahead, wind W at 7 mph, 4-15/28. Sunrise at 7:08, sunset at 5:02, 9+53/
Treadmill; pain. Back, left shoulder, right wrist. I see the doc at PM&R this afternoon. Advice, relief??? 8 p.m., 30:10 & 0.70, watching Irish Dail motion to join S. Africa in ICJ case re Gaza.
I'm grateful that I am able to walk. I visited the VA again today and saw so many old vets in wheelchairs, as I always do. My gait is unsteady, my balance is poor, and I often rely on one of my trusty canes for stability, but at least I am on my feet and for this I am grateful. The photo is of a collection of wheelchairs outside the VA Medical Center, available for veterans who pull into the valet parking area at the entrance to the hospital.
VA PM&R Clinic. I saw young Dr. Cheng again and, as was true the last time, my symptoms (sore shoulder and right wrist) were almost completely absent today. Remarkable. He refers me to Physical Therapy for the shoulder, prescribes an analgesic topical med for the shoulder and wrist, and put in an order for x-rays of both the wrist and shoulder.
The Ruined House by Ruby Namdar is a novel I have started to read. I am only on page 35 of this 500 page book but I have to close it because of my inability to focus on the printed words for anything othr than a short time. Is this a dry eyes condition or presbyopia? I need to start using the microwavable eye mask I bought at Amazon. So far aat least, I am enjoying the novel.
Rules for the Ruling Class is a long essay in the January 29 print edition of The New Yorker by staff writer Even Osnos. He discusses social class in America, elitism, status, and wealth inequality. It reminds me of so many things, but primarily the lottery of birth and my favorite little poem of William Blake: ' Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night.' The essay begins and ends by looking at Tucker Carlson, his rise and fall. Carlson's stepmother was an heir of the Swanson frozen food fortune. His father, Dick, "was a California TV anchor who became a Washington fixture after a stint in the Reagan Administration."
As a teen-ager, Carlson attended St. George’s School, beside the ocean in Rhode Island, one of sixteen American prep schools that the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell described as “differentiating the upper classes from the rest of the population.” Carlson dated (and later married) the headmaster’s daughter. His college applications were rejected, but the headmaster exerted influence at his own alma mater, Trinity College, and Carlson was admitted. He did not excel there; he went on to earn what he described as a “string of Ds.” After college, he applied to the C.I.A., and when he was rejected there, too, his father offered some rueful advice: “You should consider journalism. They’ll take anybody.” Soon, Carlson was writing for the Policy Review, a periodical published by the Heritage Foundation, followed by The Weekly Standard, Esquire, and New York, while also becoming the youngest anchor on CNN.
I think of Carlson's background and compare it with that of, for example, Donald J. Trump and Jared Kushner on the one hand and with the backgrounds of billions of other human beings on the planet not blessed with multi-millionaire parents and trust funds. I think of the enslaver Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence, and the fable of "all men are created equal."
Excerpts from the essay:
The class divide was widening once more, and the greatest gap was the one separating Americans who could protect themselves with money from those who could not. Fussell quoted the working-class father of a man killed in Vietnam: “You bet your goddam dollar I’m bitter. It’s people like us who give up our sons for the country."
The crux of [Peter Turchin's] findings: a nation that funnels too much money and opportunity upward gets so top-heavy that it can tip over. In the dispassionate tone of a scientist assessing an ant colony, Turchin writes, “In one-sixth of the cases, elite groups were targeted for extermination. The probability of ruler assassination was 40 percent.”
Under Franklin D. Roosevelt (Groton, Harvard), the U.S. raised taxes, took steps to protect unions, and established a minimum wage. The costs, Turchin writes, “were borne by the American ruling class.” Between 1925 and 1950, the number of American millionaires fell—from sixteen hundred to fewer than nine hundred. Between the nineteen-thirties and the nineteen-seventies, a period that scholars call the Great Compression, economic inequality narrowed, except among Black Americans, who were largely excluded from those gains.
But by the nineteen-eighties the Great Compression was over. As the rich grew richer than ever, they sought to turn their money into political power; spending on politics soared. The 2016 Republican Presidential primary involved seventeen contestants, the largest field in modern history.
Turchin ends his book [“End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration.”] with a sobering vision. Using data to model scenarios for the future, he concludes, “At some point during the 2020s, the model predicts, instability becomes so high that it starts cutting down the elite numbers.” He likens the present time to the run-up to the Civil War. America could still relearn the lessons of the Great Compression—“one of the exceptional, hopeful cases”—and act to prevent a top-heavy society from toppling. When that has happened in history, “elites eventually became alarmed by incessant violence and disorder,” he writes. “And we are not there—yet.”
Left undisturbed, the most powerful among us will take steps to stay in place, a pattern that sociologists call the “iron law of oligarchy.” . . . Democracy is meant to insure that the élite continue to circulate. But no democracy can function well if people are unwilling to lose power—if a generation of leaders, on both the right and the left, becomes so entrenched that it ages into gerontocracy; if one of two major parties denies the arithmetic of elections; if a cohort of the ruling class loses status that it once enjoyed and sets out to salvage it.
The Concussion Files is a long investigative report in this morning's WaPo about the settlement between the NFL and former NFL players growing out of the realization that playing football and incurring repeated blows to the head can cause chronic traumatic encephalopaty - brain damage. The story makes me glad that I swore off watching football on television years ago, not wanting my viewership to contribute in even a minute way to the enormous profits realized by NFL owners based on what they know is permanent brain injuries suffered by their employees, the players.
