6/12/24

 Wednesday, June 12, 2024

1942,  Anne Frank gets her diary as a birthday present in Amsterdam

2014, Israel blames Hamas after 3 Israeli teenagers are kidnapped in the West Bank

In bed at 10, pss at 12, 1, and 2:35, up at 2:47, let Lilly out and turned slow cooker oatmeal down to "warm."  My lower back is very sore.

Predisone, day 31, day 9 at 30 mg. I ate my oatmeal and took my pill at 4 a.m., dropping and losing one 10 mg. pill in the process.  These tiny pills are a challenge for me, the 5 mg. pills (which haven't arrived a week after being ordered by Dr. Ryzka) will be even harder to handle with my clumsy fingers. (I found the pill with my flashlight.)  I'm hoping the warm oatmeal will help me nod off later, which it did until Lilly woke me up again to go out.  I dozed off again at some point after she returned until the lawn crew showed up around 7 a.m. to deal with two weeks of grass growth. . . . For the second time in the last week, I forgot to remove the Lidocaine patch from my lower back, leaving it on for almost 24 hours instead of the 12-hour maximum instructed so no patch today.

I'm grateful to be alive and functioning, though I grieve Kitty and so many younger friends and colleagues who predeceased me.  It was only weeks ago I was wishing I could die.

The Most American City: Searching for the Nation's Future in Phoenix, Arizona is a very long article in The Atlantic by George Packer.  I finished reading it yesterday.  The spoken version of the article is 2 hours and 33 minutes long.  He paints what seems to be a pretty thorough picture of Phoenix, Maricopa County, and Arizona plus some outlying areas like Mesa, Buckeye, and even my old home,  Yuma, and neighboring San Luis, Mexico.  He breaks his study into 11 sections, focussing on:

1. The Conscience of Rusty Bowers (2020 election and the Big Lie)

2. The Heat Zone (reliance on air conditioning; homelessness)

3. Democracy and Water (groundwater, subsidence, water fights)

4. Sunshine Patriots (right-wingers, Charlie Kirk, QAnon Shaman)

5. The Asperationalist (ASU president Michael Crow, growth)

6. The Things They Carried (border-crossing migrants, Yuma)  

7. American Dreams (racism, classism, segregation, Maryvale)

8. Campaigners (political candidates of all stripes)

9. The Good Trump Voter (what drive voters to Trump)

10. Dry Wells (MAGA politics and disappearing water)

11. Epilogue

I don't know quite what to think of the article but I have the sense that Packer may have bitten off more than he could chew.  There is a lot of information in the article but most of it is anecdotal, about Rusty Bowers, or the Cortez family near Maryvale, or various politicians and office-seekers.  But the basic facts stand out: about 5 million people are living in a desert valley that is too hot to sustain life in the summer without massive amounts of energy and with not enough water.  Nonetheless, the population continues to grow, developers continue to build, and industries (especially high-tech) continue to locate there.

The last time I went to Phoenix was on August 25, 2021, to visit Kitty when she was in home hospice care and seriously depressed.  Thankfully my visit perked her up considerably and she held on to life until March 3rd.  I remember flying into Sky Harbor Airport over I10, looking down at the endless traffic on the interstate, knowing it was the same on all the major arterials in the Valley, and thinking what a terrible place Phoenix is.  I remembered the last time I drove out to Phoenix and approached through the Apache Reservation to the east,  When I got to Globe I could look down on the Valley with its huge cloud of smog hanging over it.  It's not visible from the Valley floor but unmissable from Globe.  My nephew Michael picked me up and soon we were one of the hundreds of thousands of cars on the I10, heading west and then north out to Surprise where Kitty had bought a new house with 2 living quarters to provide for Jim and Chrissy after Kitty was gone.  I stayed with Kitty Chrissie and Jim until September 8th, leaving with Barb Tunney to fly back to O'Hare.  I don't think I set foot out of Kitty's house once during the two weeks I was there.  The trip out there and back were awful for me, especially the trip back, and I knew I wouldn't be able to return when Kitty got worse, something about which I still go into and out of guilt trips.  As Barb and I drove to the airport we passed a lot of new construction, residential and commercial, and (where we couldn't see it) industrial.  I thought to myself what insane places Phoenix and Maricopa County are.  George Packer's article confirms my belief.

You know you have a serious problem when depleting groundwater is causing the earth beneath your feet to sink and cracks to appear on the surface.  Road signs:  "Caution - Earth Fissures Possible".  Phoenix is the 5th largest city in the U.S. and the 10th largest metropolitan area, a huge urban, suburban, and exurban sprawl.  It has lots of wealth, lots of poverty, lots of homelessness, lots of crime, lots of swimming pools, lots of cacti, and not enough water or trees.  I can't help thinking of it as some sort of environmental abomination.  It makes me realize how beautiful Milwaukee is in comparison.

For the part of Packer's article dealing with immigration, migrants, and asylum seekers, he left Maricopa County for my old digs in Yuma, almost 200 miles away.  When I lived there in 1964-65, the city had about 30,000 people, the county 60,000.  Now the city population has passed 100,000 and the county 213,000.  15 miles southwest of the city is San Luis, Mexico, a semi-charming little border town we would occasionally visit.  Now the Yuma sector of the border is a major pathway for immigrants and a border wall is present where there used to be the open desert.  The Marine Corps Air Station where I worked used to be miles out of town; now it is cheek-by-jowl and surrounded by sandbags and protective equipment.  I was struck by this photograph outside San Luis in Packer's article.  How the world has changed since my days in Yuma.

. . . .

Another part of the article that interested me was Packer's attempt to understand Trump voters, the people in approximately one-half of the electorate who are prepared to pay the price that a second term in office would exact.  His interview of Jacob Chansley, the Shaman of QAnon was interesting, but the guy is clearly a whacko, representative only of paranoid conspiracy theorists but there appear to be hundreds of thousands of them.  I found more interesting Bernadette Greene Placentia, the long haul trucker, an old-fashioned, New Deal Democrat who wanted to run for Congress but failed to get on the ballot.  Her explanation for Trump's rise: “The Democratic Party purports to be the party of the working class. Bullshit. . . . As rich as that fucker is, he stood up there and said, ‘You know what? It’s not your fault; it’s their fault. They don’t care about you—I care about you. I will fight for you. They’re busy fighting to get guys in dresses.’ Crude, but that’s what he said. And when your life has fallen apart, when you’re not making shit, and somebody stands there and says, ‘I will help you. I believe in you,’ you’re gonna go there. We gotta belong to a pack. If that pack isn’t paying attention to us, you’re gonna go to another pack. . . .  When you’re falling and the party that built its back on you isn’t there, and you look over and they’re busy with everybody else and the environment and all this shit, and your life is falling apart, and all you see is them rising, it breeds resentment.”  Especially since the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary, the Democratic Party has focussed on identity politics, specifically on minority identities: Blacks, Hispanics, women, LGBTQ+, handicapped, et al.  The identification is strongest with Blacks, not only with the Clintons, and with Obama of course, but also with Biden who gained the presidency through Jim Clyburn, the South Carolina primary, and its Black vote.  It's not so, but it seemed like one never saw Hillary Clinton when she wasn't partially surrounded by Black supporters.  Look at the so-called Democratic political analysts on MSNBC and notice how many are urban Blacks.  It doesn't take long to see why so many working-class Whites see the Democrats as the party for everybody but them, indeed the party that rigs the system for everybody but them.  Affirmative action is seen as discriminating against them, make-up programs for Black farmers long discriminated against by DoA programs as discriminating against White farmers, etc.  There are so many times when I wonder how so many people are for Trump and the Republicans, but I should be wondering how so many people not see the Democrats as panderers to the elites and to minorities, always trying to increase burdensome regulations and taxes to benefit the interests of elites and minorities.  I'm persuaded that (excluding some extrinsic factor) Trump and the Republicans will win the elections come November, that America and much of the world will suffer for decades from it, and that a large measure of the blame will lie with Biden and the Democrats themselves.  Mene mene tekel upharsin. 

I'm grateful to be painting again, though I'm not enthusiastic about my current project.  I couldn't get the drawing right and then I screwed up what were supposed to be subtly rosy cheeks that I had to glaze over with a few flesh-tone glazes to tone down.  For the drawing, I drew two parabolas, one for her body and robe, and the other for her head.   It didn't work out very well but it got me off the dime and at least I'm mixing paints and putting brushes to canvas again.  It was intended as a workup for a very large painting of a Klimt knockoff.  The next challenge is to assemble the canvas frame and stretch the canvas.  I was hoping Peter would be able to help me with that but it never worked out.

Today's projects:  (1) Wash sheets and pillowcases; change bedding.  (2) Work on the eyes, lips, and cheeks of the parabola lady.

Sumer is icumen in, lhude sing cuccu.   It hit 81° today and we have an Air Quality Advisory for ozone.