Friday, June 21, 2024
1788, the US Constitution came into effect when New Hampshire was the 9th ratified it.
1879, Frank Woolworth opened his 1st successful "Woolworth's Great Five Cent Store."
1945, the US defeated Japanese forces on Okinawa.
1963, Cardinal Montini elected Pope Paul VI, succeeding John XXIII.
. . . . . .
At 10:30 this morning, after I had written almost all of the following in today's journal, I had a voicemail from Mary Fran Schröder, Ed Felsenthat's eldest daughter. She asked me to call her, which I knew signified bad news. Ed is dying from pancreatic cancer which has spread to his liver. He has refused all treatment and is resigned to dying. The news brought tears to my eyes. I'll write more about this probably tomorrow. Now I need to stop writing and grieve.
. . . . .
In bed at 10 and up at 3:05 with nasty pain in my mid-back, thankful to have the walker to help me from the bedroom to the TV room and the power recliner. I let Lilly out at 4:30 into the cool morning air (63°) and listened to the competition between the robins and the cardinals, thinking I could also identify the call of a Carolina wren.
Prednisone, day 40, 15 mg., day 4. I am struggling with what to eat for breakfast. The glucose spike I experienced the other day from Raisin Nut Bran and berries persuades me I have to give up that morning treat, but I had quite a rise also from oatmeal and berries. I can't believe it's a good idea to have CBH and eggs every morning. I'll try McCann's steel-cut oatmeal and berries again this morning with some Icelandic thick yogurt and see how it goes. I took my 15 mg. at 5:13 and ate the oatmeal at 5:30 but with Activia Vanilla which has 9 grams of carbs including 5 grams of sugars, 'none added' whatever that means. At 5:50, the reading is 135^. At 7:010, 223->. I took my BP 1 hour after medications and it's high, 159/84 with a half-tab of HCT.
Dystopia: I-43 shooting. The lead story on the 5 o'clock news was an exchange of gunfire on I-43 and Keefe Avenue that led to a crash, with one person dead, and another wounded. There was little information available at that time, but by the 10 p.m. news, it was reported that an 18-year-old pregnant woman was shot by the police during a chase and her unborn child was killed in the incident. Additionally, a 17-year-old man was wounded. The chase started after an armed downtown carjacking at Jefferson and Clybourn Streets. Six Black teenagers, 15 to 18 years old, were involved in the carjacking and all were arrested. I looked for the news report in this morning's JSOnline and found none, only a video of the crash scene with no audio or print report. What does this say about Milwaukee? Was Trump right in calling Milwaukee a "horrible city," regardless of whether he was talking about the city generally or just its crime situation? I drive through I-43 and Keefe every time I go to the VA and every time I go downtown for any reason, e.g., to drop off clothing at Repairers of the Breach. Thousands of other drivers pass that site every day. The freeway was shut down for 6 hours during the police investigation and many drivers were trapped on the freeway for two hours before they could get off it. Yet the crime, the police shooting, and the death of the in vitro baby merited no story in the next morning's newspaper?!?! I found the information only by going to the recorded 10 o'clock news on YouTubeIV. I guess by 4 o'clock this morning it was considered "old news," not worth reporting.
Anniversaries. First, on June 2, 1963, I raised my right hand and said "I, Charles Clausen, "I, having been appointed an officer in the United States Marine Corps in the grade of Second Lieutenant, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter; So help me God." I gave no particular thought to that oath or what it meant to 'support and defend' the Constitution. I wonder about it now because I have come to know much more about the Constitution and its origins and the financial, social, and political interests of those who drafted it back in 1787. I have come to see it not as a governing document promoting democracy and majority rule, but rather as the opposite, a bulwark against democracy and majority rule. I have come to see it as the protector of minority interests, rural over urban and suburban, Republican over Democratic, radical rightwingers over democratic believers in "the common good." The U.S. Senate, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court are all anti-democratic and perhaps never more brazenly than in recent years. There have been 5 U.S. presidents who have lost the popular vote: John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George W. Bush in 2000, and Donald J. Trump in 2016. Overall, Al Gore received about half a million more votes than "W" but the Supreme Court and the Electoral College gave us Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Iraq, and Afghanistan, renditions, "enhanced interrogations," and Abu Ghraib. Hillary Clinton received 2.8 million more votes than Trump, but Trump won the Electoral College 304 to 227 so we got Trump, Pence, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, "the Wall," immigrant family separations, the pandemic response imbroglio, intense polarization, and January 6th. And we oughtn't to forget that Hayes was elected by the House of Representatives in 1876 despite losing both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote, due to a dirty deal in which the Republicans agreed to pull federal troops out of the defeated Confederate States and to end Reconstruction, opening the door to Jim Crow America. In any event, the reverence we show the Constitution is unearned. It has lasted as long as it has in large measure only because it favors entrenched political, social, and economic interests and because it is practically impossible to amend in any way that disfavors those interests.
Second, why do I note Frank Woolworth's with what became the 'five and dime store'? Because it reminds me of the criminal period of my childhood. There was a time when I was a shoplifter at our local dime store. I'm embarrassed admitting it and I can't explain it except to say that I think it coincided with a traumatic time in my life and that of my family when my father and mother were both suffering from PTSD, he from the horrors of Iwo Jima in 1945, she from the horrors of sexual assault in 1947. In any case, developed a case of 'sticky fingers' which I still remember. I remember the shame and guilt I felt while doing it but my doing it despite the shame and guilt. Worse yet, I once took a $20 bill from my mother's purse. I wrote of this theft in my memoir:
When I was still quite young, maybe 6 or 7, sometime after the Hartmann crime, I took a $20 bill from my mother’s purse. That amount of money was huge in our circumstances; it may well have been all we had to live on till the next uncertain payday. I went to a couple of neighborhood stores and bought items that were attractive to a kid of 6 or 7 – candy? a small toy? I actually still remember, though vaguely, this guilty shopping expedition. I knew that what I had done was wrong and I don’t know why I did it. I suspect – and probably hope - that it was somehow related to the Hartmann trauma and the infectious misery in our home, but I did it in full knowledge that it was wrong. I couldn’t have spent much of the $20 and as I think back on it, I’m surprised that a store owner in those days wouldn’t have questioned a kid with a $20 bill buying junk. In any event, my mother of course soon knew that her $20 bill was missing and asked me if I had seen it. My face must have radiated what criminal lawyers call “guilty knowledge” and I cried. I felt awful and I remember the feeling to this day. This is my third discrete and conscious memory from my early childhood, after the VJ Day parade and my Dad’s return: the theft, the consciousness of wrongdoing, and my mother’s reaction. I remember lying in bed in the bedroom, crying, guilty, indeed morose, and my mother comforting me: not excusing the wrongness of taking the money, but loving me despite it. I have to pause, quite a long time actually, as I recall this and try to write about it, because it was such a significant event in my life. If she had not been the kind of person she was, God rest her soul, I surely would not have been the kind of person I am, or Kitty the kind of person she is, or my Dad finally the kind of person he became. In my own case, I did not become sinless, but Deo gratias I continue to be burdened and blessed by consciousness of wrongdoing – shame and guilt and contrition – and I have never forgotten the lesson of love and forgiveness my mother gave me. Tears come to my eyes as I write this.
Before I 'straightened up and flew right," I engaged in other wrongdoing in my childhood when I hung out with older guys at the PineCrest dry cleaners on 73rd Street. Tom 'Pete' Peterson, Gordon Zarenheusen, 'Butch' Mannix, 'Skipper' and 'Pudgy' Adamson, and Johnny Nelson, who ended up being arrested and sent to JDH, the Juvenile Detention Home. What strikes me now is my consciousness of guilt, of wrongdoing, whenever I did something I shouldn't have done. Why did I nonetheless do it? Was I just "acting out" because of the deep sadness and loneliness at home" I don't know and suppose I never will but I think of another epitaph from the Spoon River graveyard:
Aner Clute
OVER and over they used to ask me,
While buying the wine or the beer,
In Peoria first, and later in Chicago,
Denver, Frisco, New York, wherever I lived,
How I happened to lead the life,
And what was the start of it.
Well, I told them a silk dress,
And a promise of marriage from a rich man—
(It was Lucius Atherton).
But that was not really it at all.
Suppose a boy steals an apple
From the tray at the grocery store,
And they all begin to call him a thief,
The editor, minister, judge, and all the people—
“A thief,” “a thief,” “a thief,” wherever he goes.
And he can’t get work, and he can’t get bread
Without stealing it, why the boy will steal.
It’s the way the people regard the theft of the apple
That makes the boy what he is.
Third, blood-soaked Okinawa, where I would live as an American occupier two decades later. I devoted a chapter in my memoir to that experience.
And finally, Pope Paul VI succeeded Pope John XXIII, my favorite pope, the one who convened Vatican II 'to open the windows of the Church and let in some fresh air.' Paul VI's contribution to life in the Church was almost entirely negative, as I described in my memoir:
The Catholic Church also revealed its feet of clay during 1968. Cardinal Spellman was spouting his murderous nonsense about ‘a war for civilization’ without restraint by the Vatican and Catholics were generally as resistant as any other group to much of the civil rights demands. The big difference maker in terms of Church authority however had nothing to do with war and peace or civil rights, but with sex, Paul VI’s encyclical banning contraception, including birth control pills. In 1963, John XXIII had established a commission to study population and birth control issues. Paul VI appointed 15 cardinals and bishops and 64 lay experts to the commission. The commission provided a report in 1966 saying contraception was not intrinsically evil. The vote among the clergy was 9 to 6; the lay commission vote was 60 to 4. One of the dissenters was Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, later John Paul II. The dissenters feared that a change in the Church’s position would call into question the pope’s teaching authority. The report was leaked to the press in 1967 and there was a very favorable reaction among modern Catholics, who expected the pope to adopt the commission’s recommendation. Instead, on July 25, 1968, Paul VI rejected the commission’s recommendation and adopted the dissenting position, undoubtedly fearing that any change in the Church’s position would weaken the claim to papal authority.
The opening lines of Humanae Vitae were priceless, words that could have been written only by a celibate and childless male who had spent his entire adult life in a misogynistic power structure, i.e., the self-proclaimed Holy Apostolic and Roman Catholic Church:
To His Venerable Brothers the Patriarchs, Archbishops, Bishops, and other Local Ordinaries in Peace and Communion with the Apostolic See, to the Clergy and Faithful of the Whole Catholic World, and to All Men of Good Will
Venerable Brothers and Beloved Sons [quaere: how about the sisters? daughters? mothers?] The most serious duty of transmitting human life [humanae vitae], for which married persons are the free and responsible collaborators of God the Creator, has always been a source of great joys to them, even if sometimes accompanied by not a few difficulties and by distress.
The words of the encyclical as well as its substance were patronizing and arrogant and essentially untrue. What happened, of course, was precisely what Paul and the Vatican conservatives (like the future John Paul II) wanted to avoid: widespread rejection of the Church’s teaching authority, especially by American and Western European Catholics. The pope and his conservative curial apparatchiks were seen as, at best, mired in medievalism, and, at worst, more concerned about the power of the shepherds than in the welfare of the flock.
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