4/9/24

 Tuesday, April 9, 2024

Lights out around 9:30, up with pain at 1:13.  46 /57.  Mostly sunny day ahead,  WSW at 7, 3-13/25.  6:18, 7:28, 13+9.   Lights out at 3:35, on again at 4:30.  I slept in chunks again.  Tired most of the day.

Pains, etc.  I took 1,000 mg. of Tylenol around 2 a.m.   I don't know whether it helped or not.  I never know.  Ditto the PT.

I'm grateful to the VA for providing me access to the Geriatric Clinic next week.  I received a telephone call from Ben in the pharmacy department of the Clinic going over all my many meds with me in a very thorough interview.    

Generation War.  I watched the concluding episode of this series during the very early morning.  Each of the 5 protagonists ended up either dead (Greta and Friedhelm) or morally, spiritually, and emotionally destroyed (Wilhelm, Charly, and Viktor.)  They all started out as innocents, full of optimism and patriotism and belief in the myths of German righteousness, powerfulness, and invincibility.  They remind me a bit of the protagonists in the Israeli series Srugim which I enjoyed so much, at least until I realized that they were all religious Zionists, members of the sect that create the larcenous, violent settlements in Palestinian lands.  They too were young, innocent, patriotic, and persuaded that God Himself had authorized Jews to make life miserable for Others.   The depiction of the barbarism of the war, especially in the East, was gruesome and I wondered how anyone could believe in anything other than homo hominis lupus after that war.  I think of course of my father and his condition after the war in the Pacific.  I think too of Gaza and Ukraine and of our homegrown fascists here and now and of Solzhenitsyn's line between good and evil.   I wonder how it can be doubted that the most efficiently barbaric cultures in the world are European as they lived in Europe and were transplanted colonially to the United States.  I think again of the lunchroom at FF&SJ where I shocked and offended my friends and colleagues by opining that the greatest threat to world peace and peace in the world is the United States, a fact that seems to me to be almost self-evident.  By our wholesale interference via the CIA, State Department, trade policies, sanctions, military support vel non and otherwise, we are also the most disrespectful of other nations' sovereignty and democratic choices, witness, Vietnam, Chili, et al.  Also consider Gaza in 2006 when the citizens elected Hamas rather than the US/Israel-preferred corrupt Palestinian Authority.