6/18/24

 Tuesday, June 19, 2024

1983, The first American woman to fly into outer space, Sally Ride, was launched with four other astronauts aboard the space shuttle Challenger.

2006, Katharine Jefferts Schori was elected presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the U. S., becoming the first woman chosen as a churchwide leader in the 400-year history of the Anglican Communion.

2019, US President Donald Trump announces his campaign for re-election

In bed at 9, and up at 3:20.

Prednisone, day 37, 15 mg., day 1.  At 4:40 as I prepare breakfast, my glucose reading is 113.  I let Lilly out into the 71° morning air with the Cardinals and the Robins competing for dominance of the airwaves and a Carolina wren chirping in.  I spilled several 5 mg. pills onto my hand with a 10 mg. pill, creating confusion.  I selected what I thought was 10 10 mg. pill along with a 5 and poured the remaining pills back into the 5 mg. container, maybe compounding the problem.  I hope I picked up the right pills for a 15 mg. dosage.  Rats!  Live and learn.  Breakfast of CBH & eggs at 5:15 - 5:30.  At 6:15, the reading is 105->.  At 7:15, 163->.  At 8:18, 186->.

More thoughts on Out of Africa.  The most challenging aspect of the film, for me, director Sydney Pollack, and protagonist Meryl Streep, was Karen Blixen's characteristics as a wealthy, aristocratic, White, plantation-owning settler in Black Africa.  The character is admirable in her independence and courage in dealing with the challenges of beginning and running a big business with what was for her an almost entirely 'foreign', though Indigenous, workforce in the early 20th century, long before women's liberation.  On the other hand, she is an imperialist, a settler colonist, and an exploiting, racist, White supremacist who treats her Black workers imperiously.  Both her husband and her lover were aristocratic big game hunters, and her lover was an ivory hunter, a killer of African elephants, whose activities contributed to the devastation of the African elephant population from 26 million in 1900 to about a million today.  The movie depicts her as greatly concerned with the welfare and cultural advancement (reading lessons in school) of her Kikuyu, Masai, and Somali servants and field workers and perhaps she was, but she was a plantation owner, not a farmer.  The scenes of Black workers harvesting and then processing coffee beans are reminiscent of African slaves harvesting cotton in the U.S.  Her attitude seemed to be at best paternalistic while imperious.  Pollack and Streep did a good job of portraying her complexity in relation to the Blacks she employed while perhaps 'jumping the shark' with her on her knees begging the British colonial governor as she was leaving Kenya to preserve for her workers the land they lived on when she employed them.  I wonder whether that scene represented an event she wrote about in Out of Africa or elsewhere, or if screenwriter Kurt Luedtke made it up to make the heroine's character more benevolent, gracious, and noble.

The movie is a love story, a romance. intended in large part to reflect Karen Blixen's/Isak Dinesen's admirable qualities and those of Denys Finch Hatton.  The characters are beautiful (Streep), handsome (Redford), likable, and admirable.  But we oughtn't to ignore the society, culture, and economic/political world of which they were a part, the world of European empires and of settler colonies intended to benefit the White settlers and to subordinate, exploit, or replace the indigenous people and to exploit the land where they lived.  I can't help but think about these matters and life in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.

Anniversaries.  The coinciding anniversaries of the achievements of Sally Ride and Katharine Jefferts are interesting, illustrating how much sooner women were able to advance in secular professions than they were in religious leadership, where the Catholic Church still and possibly forever refuses to admit them to the priesthood.  In 1994, Pope John Paul II issued an "apostolic letter" (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis) declaring  "So that all doubt [...] may be removed, I declare by virtue of my office [...] that the Church has no authority whatsoever to ordain women to the priesthood and that all the faithful of the Church must definitively abide by this decision."  His intent was forever to put an end to discussions within the Church about the ordination of women as priests.  It was claimed that, as a matter of the Church's magisterium, or teaching authority, the statement was "infallible," so as to prevent any future pope or council from changing it.  That was the purpose of the carefully chosen language in the letter: "all doubt . .  removed," "by virtue of my office," "no authority whatsoever," and "all the faithful . . . must abide by this decision."  JPII's authoritarian desire to end all talk of women as priests within the Church hasn't worked as he intended.  There is much dissent on the issue, especially in Europe and the U.S.  Moreover, the letter never stopped discussions about women as deacons, the lowest level of ordination (deacon, priest, bishop).  In 2023, the World Synod convened by Pope Francis discussed the topic.

I am reminded of two things.  First, in my law school entering class in 1967, there were 114 men and 5 women.  Admissions to Marquette's law school were handled by the school's chaplain, a Jesuit priest whose name I omit because of de mortuis nil nisi bonum.  I wonder how much of that gender disparity may have been caused by the Jesuit's selection criteria rather than by gender differences in application volumes.  Second, who was a friend of mine and who baptized Sarah, in a conversation with me, once referred to Black basketball players as "jigaboos," showing that ordination to the priesthood doesn't preclude all sorts of bigotry.  Secondly, I recall the terrific homily on the Transfiguration delivered by a female Episcopal priest at the National Cathedral at a mass that Geri and I attended in 1994 or 1995 when we were in Washington for me to testify before a Senate subcommittee.  On leaving the Cathedral after mass, I remarked that the reason the Catholic Church didn't ordain women was that the male priests couldn't stand the competition.

Regarding Trump's 2019 announcement for reelection, little did we realize how fateful that bid would become. However, the writing was on the wall with Trump's many pre-election references to "voter fraud" and his refusal to commit to honoring the results of the election setting up his "heads I win, tails you lose" election strategy.  Ultimately we got a massive conspiracy to steal the election, the January 6th insurrection, all the legal actions that are currently pending, and abysmal political polarization throughout the country.

Today's project was a shopping outing to Costco (gas, etc.), Wild Birds Unlimited (suet), and Sendik's (fruit, oatmeal, herring, yogurt, cheese, etc.)  My lower back was challenging me the whole time, making the mission difficult.