2/29/24

 Thursday, February 29, 2029

In bed at 9:10, awake with some bladder and shoulder pain at 2:30, unable to sleep, up at 2:40, Let Lilly out.  17°, clear through the morning with wind 10 mph, 9-19, 32, wind chill is 5°, high of 39°.  Sunrise at 6:28, sunset at 5:40, 11+11.    

Treadmill; pain.  I was disappointed to feel some pain in my left shoulder while lying in bed, even a bit in my right wrist,  Neither pain was nearly as bad as before the cortisone injection, duller and less intense.  

I'm grateful that the sun is shining this morning and yesterday's wind has abated.   I'm also grateful for my weekly mindfulness/meditation session.  Today's group [ was Lou, Mike, Rose, Amanda, and me. 

The State of the Union.  I'm trying to remember a time when America was more riven by factionalism, Left v. Right, Democrat v. Republican, Red State v. Blue State, neighbor v. neighbor, family member v. family member. Evangelicals v. seculars, etc.  The only times that come close to our current era were the late 40s and 50s with the big Communist Scare (McCarthyism, John Birch Society, HUAC, black lists, bomb shelters and air raid drills in schools) and the mid and late 60s and early 70s with the Vietnam invasion, and the draft, civil rights demonstrations, the pill and the Sexual Revolution, and Watergate.  These were the times of Barry Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), ghost-written by L. Brent Bozell, William F. Buckley's brother-in-law, and None Dare Call It Treason (1964), written by the evangelical minister John A. Stormer.  Those were the days of my adolescence and young adulthood.  I feel shame in admitting that for a while I fell for all the right-wing propaganda that was all about.  I voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964. It was the era of the Warren Court from 1953 to 1969 including revolutionary cases like Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and Miranda v. Arizona in 1966.  It was the era of the Catholic Church's Second Vatican Council, from 1962 to 1965 with its seemingly revolutionary changes in liturgy, doctrines and practices, ecumenism and relations with Jews, and religious freedom.  They were heady times to be a working-class young guy born during FDR's New Deal and raised 'in the bosom of' the Church' during the turbulent, triumphalist days between the end of World War II and the debacle of Vietnam.  I went from naïvely voting for Goldwater in 1964 to returning from Vietnam less than 2 years later in a state of culture shock, feeling morally depressed, isolated, disillusioned, and at best skeptical or cynical about most political, social, and religious "isms."

Are the days we are living in worse than the 50s, 60s, and early 70s?  I think so.  I would be the last guy to refer to those earlier days as "the good old days."  They weren't good.  Americans were deeply polarized then over civil rights, racism, military adventurism, sexual mores, religion, and certainly politics.  But I never felt the country was "coming apart at the seams" as I do now.  I never felt that Richard Nixon Gerry Ford, Ronald Reagan, or either of the Bushes was a fascist, intent on fundamentally changing the nature or structure of the American government toward one-party rule or dictatorship.  I never thought that my conservative Republican colleagues on the law faculty at Marquette were fascists.  Even during the days of the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Sterling Hall Math Center bombing in Madison, I never felt we were on the verge of widespread violent attacks on agents, organs, and instrumentalities of democratic government.  I never thought that the leaders of the Republican Party, or their supporters, were mentally deranged and evil.  Although I thought that the values and policies of the Republicans were mistaken, selfish, or even dangerous, I didn't think that Republicans were actually delusional, unable to distinguish reality from imaginings, and unable to surrender false beliefs despite overwhelming evidence disproving those beliefs.  Donald Trump is deranged, mentally unbalanced and unhinged.  There is every reason to believe he is a sociopath with a narcissistic personality disorder.  He is a bad man, wicked, amoral and immoral, depraved and contemptible.  His millions of followers are delusional, insisting that Trump was cheated out of winning the 2020 election despite all the evidence to the contrary.  Many of his followers are disposed to believe whacko conspiracy theories spread by QAnon and others.  And they are well-armed, some of them organized into quasi-military militias.  They believe the apocalyptic rhetoric spouted by Trump and others about Americans being at risk of 'losing your country' to "the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country."  With the country awash in lethal weapons, including assault weapons, most of them probably owned by 2nd Amendment gun nuts, we are all in trouble worse than we ever were during the turbulent days of the 50s, 60s, and early 70s.  Or am I the delusional one, the paranoid one?

I confess these thoughts were triggered by the decision of the Supreme Court to review the decision of the D.C. Circuit Court rejecting Trump's claim of immunity.  As a practical matter, the Court's action almost certainly means Trump's trial in Judge Tanya Chutkan's court for the attempted coup will not occur before the November presidential election.  The public will not learn of all the evidence the Special Counsel has amassed.  Was that the Republican Court's purpose in taking the case and in delaying the argument until sometime in the week of April 22?  Can there be any doubt?  In law, In tort an individual is considered to intend the consequences of an act—whether or not she or he actually intends those consequences—if the individual is substantially certain that those consequences will result.

Errands:  Best Buy for ink cartridges, Sentry for food, Shell for gas, and veterinarian's office for Lilly's medicines.