Wednesday, July 31, 2024

1917 World War I: The Battle of Passchendaele (Third Battle of Ypres) began and caused approximately 500,000 casualties.

1961 Israel welcomed its one millionth immigrant.

1972 Senator Thomas Eagleton withdrew as Democratic vice presidential candidate at George McGovern's request after news Eagleton had sought treatment for depression.

In bed at 8:30 p.m., awake at 2:45 a.m., up and out to the BL by 3:00 with pain in the lower right back, right hip, thigh, and knee.  I let Lilly out around 4.  I'm a bit discombobulated this morning, unable to focus my thoughts on Paul Elie's article on J. D. Vance's religion, bouncing from pillar to post mentally, distracted by nasty pain from my hip through the thigh to the knee.  I'm getting a bit "mental" over it.  The pain and inability to stand for more than a couple of minutes without it has persisted since July 12, 3 weeks as of tomorrow, with almost another week before I see Dr. England and receive, or not, a steroid injection which may provide relief, or not.  

Prednisone, day 80, 15 mn., day 2 of 14.  I took my 15 mg. at 5 a.m. with cottage cheese, blueberries, and blackberries.  I took 1300 mg. of Tylenol later in the morning.

J. D. Vance, cafeteria Catholicism, cafeteriaprinciples.  Does J. D. Vance believe in anything other than the advancement of J. D. Vance?  I'm reading Paul Elie's essay in the July 24th The New Yorker "J. D. Vance’s Radical Religion: How might the Republican V.P. nominee’s conversion to conservative Catholicism influence his political worldview:"  Elie is a Catholic writer and the author of a book I read and enjoyed sevral years ago, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, a group biography of 4 American Catholic authors: Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day.   He is an intelligent, thoughtful writer, and when I come across an essay by him, I usually read it. 

First, an aside rfrom Elie's article elated to a point I made in an earlier journal entry, about all the right-wing Catholics who supported Trump in his first administration:

After President Ronald Reagan took office, in 1981, he stocked his Administration with conservative Catholics steeped in the Church’s history of fervid anti-Communism—the Secretary of State, General Alexander Haig; the C.I.A. director, William J. Casey; and the national-security adviser, William P. Clark—who then helped shape policies backing Church-allied oligarchies in El Salvador and Nicaragua as necessary for the Cold War “containment” of Communism.

Increasingly, traditional, authoritarisan, top-down, anti-democratic, hierarchical Catholicism is the religion of choice for right-wing Republicans. 

Now about Vance.  First, he has moved from a fervent never-Trumper ("an American Hitler") to an acolyte, a disciple, and a true believer.  "“President Trump’s vision is clear and powerful—we’re putting America first, not catering to Wall Street or globalist interests,” Vance said in his acceptance speech at the RNC in Milwaukee.  That's quite a swing.

Second, Vance purports to be a spokesman for blue-collar America, like factory workers in Middletown, OH and miners in Jackson, KY, but he has spent most of his life getting far away from those places and their people.  First, he completed high school and enlisted in the Marine Corps,  then went to college, and then to arguably the most elite law school in the U.S., Yale. alma mater of the Clintons and almost countless senators, ambassadors, cabinet members, and luminaries of all sorts.  Then he clerked for a federal judge, a gateway job leading to employment by silk-stocking law firms, like Sidley Austin, where Vance took a job working for the monied interests of the world rather than, for example, the interests of factory workers or miners.  Then he lived in San Francisco while serving for a time in a Silicon Valley venture capital firm led by billionaire Peter Thiel before moving back to Ohio, starting a 501(c)4 advocacy nonprofit, as well as investment firms, Revolution LLC and Narya Capital.  Eventually of course, with $15 million backing from Petr Thiel, he ran for and won a seat in the U.S. Senate, a rarified venue far from Midddletown OH and Jackson KY.

Vance is famous, or more accurately notorious, for boosting stay-at-home moms raising their children, but he married Usha Chilukuri, a fellow Yale Law graduate who clerked for then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts and worked for a white-shoe law firm in San Francisco.  She resigned from the law firm only this month, i.e., when J.D. was selected as Trump's vice president running mate.  What Vance preaches for others he and his wife don't practice at home.  Moreover, though he rails against the "elites," he has made himself one of them and he married another.  Usha's family is Brahmin caste Hindu.  Her father is a mechanical engineer and a lecturer at San Diego State University and her mother is a molecular biologist and provost at the University of California, San Diego.  

How does his conversion to Catholicism affect Vance?  Is it sincere or opportunistic?  In a 2020 article in The Lamp, a Catholic journal, he claimed to be influenced by the teachings of the polymath René Girard, another convert to Catholicism.

One of his most influential ideas is that society is enslaved to a process of “mimetic desire” whereby people learn to want the things that others have, strive to have them for themselves, and then regard themselves as rivals when in fact they’re just imitating one another. Vance looked into Girard’s work, and over time, he writes in The Lamp, he came to see “mimetic rivalry” as an apt description for what goes on not only in places like Yale Law but in the meritocracy generally. The thrust of the essay is that becoming a Catholic was a means of defying the patterns of imitation fostered by the “meritocratic master class”—and, not coincidentally, what he saw as its way of inducing its members to believe that “Christians are rubes.”

Yet it could be said that in the years after law school Vance simply moved out of one élite and into another—and that he has thrived through mimetic rivalry. In Silicon Valley, he worked for Mithril, a venture-capital firm co-founded by Thiel. He wrote “Hillbilly Elegy,” appeared as a contributor on CNN, and wrote opinion pieces for the Times and The Atlantic. He ran for the U.S. Senate and won, bolstered by fifteen million dollars from Thiel. As a senator, he pivoted from harsh criticism of Trump to positions so closely akin to the former President’s that Steve Bannon suggested to Politico’s Ian Ward that Vance could be, as Ward put it, “St. Paul to Trump’s Jesus—the zealous convert who spreads the gospel of Trumpism further than Trump himself ever could.”

 So who is this guy?  Champion of the downtrodden, the forgotten, the ignored factory worker and miner, Joe Lunchbucket and Betty Babushka, or just a different and more intellectually gifted version of the narcissistic, self-serving Donald Trump?  How does his purported Catholicism comport with his support of Trump's political positions like mass deportations, leaving abortion regulation to the states, capital punishment, "retribution," personal disparagement of adversaries, etc.?  Finally, what are we to make of his demonizing childless women and marriages and fetishizing families with children?

“There are just these basic cadences of life that I think are really powerful and really valuable when you have kids in your life,” Vance said on the Chris Buskirk podcast. “And the fact that so many people, especially in America’s leadership class, just don’t have that in their lives.  You know, I worry that it makes people more sociopathic and ultimately our whole country a little bit less, less mentally stable. And of course, you talk about going on Twitter—final point I’ll make is you go on Twitter and almost always the people who are most deranged and most psychotic are people who don’t have kids at home,” 

Sociopathic, mentally unstable, deranged, psychotic?  My daughter and her husband?  Our daughter-in-law and son? My Aunt Mary and Uncle Bud?    Friends?  Neighbors?  Infertile couples?  Those who rationally choose not to bring children into this 'vale of tears'?  If I were capable of bringing a child into this world today, it's inconceivable to me that I would.  I think of the Salve Regina from my youth: "Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears."  How bizarre that we were required to mouth these words of woe as children!

Escalating escalation.  Some Iranian-backed force killed many children on the soccer field in the Golan Heights on Saturday, July 27.  Yesterday, Israel killed Hamas's political leader Ismail Haniyeh in his residence in Teheran.  The day before it killed Hamas's military commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut, Lebanon.  Two lethal strikes within two national capitals.  Will Iran repeat the barrage of rocket, cruise and ballistic missile, and drone attacks on Israel?  Will Hezbollah open a northern front and stretch the IDF's already overstretched resources?  Will there be an attempt at another intifada in Israel and the West Bank?  What does it all mean for America and how will the Biden administration react now that Biden himself is the lamest of lame ducks, with Kamala Harris carrying the torch?  Which country is most powerful in the drama, which is the dog and which is the tail?  The U.S. is clearly powerless to stop this conflict.  Will Russia or more likely China step into the breach and work toward some solution, showing America's fecklessness in the process?

Most notable about the killing of Hamas's political leader in Teheran by Israel is that Israel has killed the ceasefire negotiations that were occurring.  This comports with Netanyahu's and his most extreme cabinet members' (Ben Gvir and Smotrich) wish for the war to go on in Gaza.  So much for Joe Biden's ceasefire initiative.  Another international embarrassment.

Anniversaries thoughts.  Passchendaele.  In his Memoirs of 1938, Lloyd George wrote, "Passchendaele was indeed one of the greatest disasters of the war ... No soldier of any intelligence now defends this senseless campaign ...".  Meatgrinder, slaughterhouse, but aren't all battles in all wars variations on the Passchendaele theme?  What leads men to fight in them as soldiers?  Shouldn't we all be deserters, draft dodgers? 

Dulce et Decorum Est 

BY WILFRED OWEN

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Second, and Israel's leaders assured that  one millionths immigrant that Israel is not a settler colony.

Third, McGovern claimed to be behind Eagleton "1,000%" before dumping him.  So it goes.

7/30/24

 Tuesday, July 30, 2024

1945 After delivering the atomic bomb across the Pacific, the USS Indianapolis was sunk by the Japanese submarine I-58. 880 of the crew die, many after being attacked by sharks.

1965 US President Lyndon Johnson signed the Medicare bill. 

1967 'Race riot' in Milwaukee (4 killed)

1988 Jordanian King Hussein renounced sovereignty over the West Bank to the PLO, hours after dissolving Jordan's House of Representatives.

In bed at 9 p.m. awake at 12:03 a.m. and up at 12:35, unable to sleep with pain in my right hip, thigh, and knee.  I read the papers and wrote in the journal till 4 when I let Lilly out, awake for 4 hours and operating on 3 hours sleep, pain in knee and hip.  I nodded off for about half and hour between 6:30 and 7 a.m.

Prednisone, day 79, 15 mg., day 1.  The first day the dosage was reduced back to 15 mg. in the morning, and none in the evening.   I took my 15 mg. at 5:15 a.m.   Breakfast was 2 pieces of buttered high-fiber toast.  I took 1300 mg. Tylenol Extended Release at 7 a.m. and another 1300 at 3 p.m.

William Calley.  News has surfaced that Wiliam Calley, the officer in charge of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam on March 16, 1968, died in a hospice in Florida on April 28th of this year.  From the WaPo story:

On the morning of March 16, 1968, the unit was airlifted by helicopter to Son My, a patchwork village of rice paddies, irrigation ditches and small settlements, including a hamlet known to U.S. soldiers as My Lai 4. Over the next few hours, Mr. Calley and other soldiers in Charlie Company shot and bayoneted women, children and elderly men, destroying the village while searching for Viet Cong guerrillas and sympathizers who were said to have been hiding in the area. Homes were burned, and some women and girls were gang-raped before being killed.

An Army investigation later concluded that 347 men, women and children had been killed, including victims of another American unit, Bravo Company. A Vietnamese estimate placed the death toll at 504.

For more than a year and a half, the details of the atrocity were hidden and covered up from the public. A report to headquarters initially characterized the attack as a significant victory, claiming that 128 “enemy” fighters had been killed. Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the top commander in Vietnam, praised American forces at My Lai for dealing a “heavy blow” to the Viet Cong.

What struck me in reading the story was the similarity between My Lai and Hamas's actions in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. but also what has been happening for the 9 months thereafter in Gaza, i.e.,, the killing of women, children, and elderly noncombatants, although on an industrial scale in Gaza.  I was also struck by how, by the beginning of 1968, less than 3 years after the 3rd Marine Division landed in Vietnam, the military was so hard up for leadership.  Calley was about 5' 3" tall and 130 pounds, child size.  He had to repeat 7th grade.  He graduated in the bottom quarter of his high school class.  He flunked out of Palm Beach Junior College after which he worked as a hotel bellhop and a restaurant dishwasher.  With that background, he was selected for Officer Candidate School where he graduated 120th in his class of 156.  What is most striking about Calley and his men and the My Lai massacre is that these American soldiers were ordered to kill hundreds of Asian civilians - women, children, and old men - and they did it.  They did it, much like the Hamas "terrorists" did it on October 7th, just like the Russian soldiers did in Bucha, north of Kyiv, in 2022, much like the Marines who killed 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq, did it in 2005 - men, women, elderly people and children as young as 1-year-old.  Many thoughts are darting around my brain as I reflect on the military and war and what they do to people but I'm too tired and in too much distracting pain at 6 o'clock this morning as I write to say much about it except for one thought: I wonder how many civilians of all ages were killed or wounded, incinerated or poisoned, by the thousands of air missions we kept track of in the TACC during my time there.  How much did we think of them?  What did we think of them?  How connected to them, spiritually, and emotionally, as nominal Christians, Jews, and people of the Book, were we as we lived behind our barbed wire fencing?  think the honest answer is "Not at all."  What does that say about us?  About me?  And finally, what are we to think of our government's, i.e., Joe Biden's, providing 14,000 2,000-pound bombs to Israel since Hamas's October massacre, knowing their immense destructive power and knowing that they would be used against Palestinian civilians in one of the world's most densely populated areas?

Anniversaries thoughts: First, The Indianapolis.  I have taken to taking note of certain anniversaries in this journal and ignoring most.  The reason is that I feel some connection, historically or emotionally or otherwise, to some though not to most.  My connection to the Indy is through Iwo Jima where she was one of the many ships providing naval gunfire in support of the Marines onshore, including my father, and through Hiroshima, where I visited in 1965 before deploying to Vietnam.  The Indy was the ship that transported the uranium and some other vital parts to Tinian Island in July 1945 to be incorporated into the atom bomb that leveled Hiroshima on August 6th.  For reasons that are not at all clear to me, there seems to be some cosmic significance to the fact that, after delivering the deadly uranium to Tinian, the Indy was torpedoed on July 30 by a Japanese submarine and sank in 12 minutes in the Philippine Sea.  Of 1,195 crewmen aboard, approximately 300 went down with the ship. The remaining 890 faced exposure, dehydration, saltwater poisoning, and shark attacks while stranded in the open ocean with few lifeboats and almost no food or water.  Only 316 survived.  The sinking of the Indianapolis was the greatest loss of life from a single ship lost at sea in the history of the U.S. Navy.  On August 15, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's unconditional surrender.

The ship's history in the Pacific Theater of WW II is extensive and the story of the hundreds of sailors cast adrift after the ship sank is dramatic.  Indeed, it is mentioned in the movie Jaws and is the subject of two documentary films.  The experience of those sailors and naval officers reminds me, though I need no reminding, that it isn't just soldiers and Marines who endure tremendous hardship and risk injury and death in war, but also sailors and air crews.  And of course, as I remember from my days as a CACO in Philadelphia, there are those loved ones  back home who each day dread the knock on the door.

Second, Medicare was created 59 years ago today and whether and now it may continue is still uncertain  today.  The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 is widely, and accurately believed, to be a blueprint of actions to be taken if and when Donald Trump becomes president again next year. “In essence, our deficit problem is a Medicare and Medicaid problem,” the Project 2025 proposal states.  Project 2025 proposes making Medicare Advantage, the bundled alternative to Original Medicare, the default enrollment plan for Medicare beneficiaries. Medicare Advantage is offered by private insurers with federal government contracts to individuals who qualify for Medicare. It functions similarly to health insurance plans offered by private employers, in which policyholders have a set network of providers they can visit. About half of Medicare recipients are currently enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans.  Medicare Advantage is basically an HMO plan, i.,e. it largely privatizes Medicare by relying on private insurance companies to provide care.  Although Trump himself has taken a 'hands-off' position on changes to Social Security and Medicare, and Project 2025 does not propose abolishing either, Republicans have always been on the warpath against these 'socialist' programs (like the VA's health care program) and if Trumpsters take over the government, watch out.  They are 'standing back and standing by.'

 Third, Milwaukee's 'race riot' in 1967 stirs memories.  From my memoir:

On Monday morning, July 31st, your mother and I were sleeping in the bedroom of our new home, a fifth floor apartment in the northernmost Juneau Village building at 1129 N. Jackson Street.  The phone rang between 5 and 5:30.  Half-asleep, I dragged myself out of bed to get to the kitchen and answer it.  It was my father who responded to my croaky “Hello?” with a worried “Are you alright?”  I said “We’re fine.  What’s wrong?”  (My Dad is an early riser, but he was not in the habit of calling at daybreak simply to inquire about our general well-being.)  “There’s a riot up there and they’ve closed off the city.”  That was how I learned that Milwaukee had joined the list of the other cities in having what was called either a “civil disturbance” or a “race riot,” depending on one’s purpose, one’s level of excitability and one’s tendency to look at the world through race-tinted lenses.  I woke up your mother and turned on the Channel 6 news which confirmed my father’s report.  

It took some imagination to characterize the trouble in Milwaukee as a “riot.”  The disturbance was pretty much restricted to a 5 hour period on the night of July 30-31.  Starting at about 9:45 p.m. on Sunday, the 30th, a group of young blacks went on a vandalism rampage on North 3rd Street, starting north of State Street and proceeding up to the Center Street, Burleigh Avenue area, breaking windows and raising hell, but without gunfire or arson or significant looting.  As the vandalism on Third Street raged, Father Matthew left the St. Francis rectory at 4th and Brown and tried to calm down the vandals.  He came close to getting beaten by one of the participants, but others protected Matthew, whose peacemaking efforts proved inadequate to the challenge of what was occurring.  A few blocks north, on Center Street, a white yahoo drove up and down the street, calling the on-looking residents “niggers” and, according to some witnesses, shooting a weapon out the car window.   One of the residents, a 55 year old man of limited mental capacity named John Oraa Tucker, a janitor at Shorewood High School, went into his house at 134 West Center Street, grabbed his shotgun, came back outside and shot at the white provocateur, who drove away.  A short time later, however, another car with 4 white men pulled up and, when the riders started to get out of the car, Tucker believed them to be threatening troublemakers.  He discharged his shotgun at them.  As it turned out, those men were plainclothes police officers.  In what quickly became a shootout between Tucker and responding police officers, one officer was killed by a shotgun blast, 6 others were wounded, and a bystander was killed by a police bullet.  Two of the injured officers were to become my law students later: John Carter, who was blinded, and LeRoy Jones, whose torso was peppered with birdshot.  Mayor Maier got governor Warren Knowles (of Dick Cheney internship fame) to call out the Wisconsin National Guard, who set up their headquarters at Garfield Avenue School. Chief Brier established his tactical headquarters in the Gimbel’s-Shusters building across from the school.  Maier declared a state of emergency and put the entire city under curfew.  None of us was permitted to leave his or her home on either Monday the 31st or Tuesday, August 1st.   On August 2nd, the curfew was eased to 7 p.m. to 5:30 a.m.  It stayed in place through August 8th.  In the days immediately after the disturbance, Maier also quarantined the city, permitting no one in or out.  (This was to keep out those ubiquitous fomenters of urban uprisings, “outside agitators,” i.e., Chicago blacks.)  

The Aftermath

Milwaukee has yet to recover from that one night of vandalism and violence four decades ago.  The black uprising was followed by open housing marches led by the increasingly-in-your-face Father Jim (I’m No Martin Luther King) Groppi and his NAACP Youth Council “Commandos.” I haven’t checked the census data, but I suspect that white flight increased after the uprising, and spiked after the school desegregation decree in 1976.  The 3rd Street shopping area, the North Side equivalent of the once-thriving Mitchell Street area on the South Side, has never regained the vitality it had before the uprising.

The uprising, the state of emergency, the curfew, the National Guard troops patrolling the city, the quarantine or blockade: such was our welcome back to Milwaukee.  It would be too much to compare it to life on the airbase in Danang, of course, but there we were, confined to close quarters at night for fear of encountering hostile forces, with the area occupied by armed troops (the equivalent of about 2 ½ Marine infantry battalions), access controlled at check points, and a sense of fear and anger and resentment and distrust and suspicion afoot throughout the city.  It wasn’t all that different from Vietnam.  So much for gemeutlichkeit.

Fourth, Jordan ceded sovereignty over the West Bank to the PLO in 1988.   It was never clear that Jordan had legal sovereignty over the West Bank after Israel's War of Independence.  That Jordan occupied and controlled the West Bank was clear enough, but most of the world's nation-states did not recognize its claim to legitimacy and sovereignty.  Everything was complicated by the long history of Ottoman rule, WW II, the British Mandate, and the creation of the State of Israel. From Wikipedia:

 "In 1974, the Arab League decided to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. The decision forced King Hussein to relinquish his claim to speak for the Palestinian people during peace negotiations and to recognize an independent Palestinian state that is independent of Jordan.

On 28 July 1988, King Hussein announced the cessation of a $1.3 billion development program for the West Bank. He explained that the aim of this move was to allow the PLO to take more responsibility for these territories.  Two days later the king dissolved Jordan's lower house of parliament, half of whose members represented constituencies in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

For the last 57 years, Israel has occupied the West Bank, reminding me of Br'er Fox's tar baby. 

7/29/24

 Monday, July 29, 2024

In bed at 9 p.m., awake around 4 a.m., and up at 4:30.  I let Lilly out at 6.   

Prednisone, day 78, 15+5, day 14 (and last).   While lying in bed, I noticed that the pain in my hip was considerably worse when I lay on my left side than it was lying directly on my hip on my right side.  I don't know whether this might have been a one-time occurrence or is typical. . . I took my 15 mg. at 5 a.m. and a 650 mg. Tylenol at 5:30 and another at 12:30.. Breakfast was a bowl of cherries around 6 a.m. (The cherries have caused a terrific spike in my blood glucose; lesson learned.)

Feeding the hungry.  "There are so many people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread." — Mahatma Gandhi.    Yesterday was the tenth Sunday after Pentecost and the gospel reading was the tale of the feeding of the five thousand.  Jesus was said to have fed 5,000 of his followers with 5 loaves of barley bread and two fishes.  Indeed, the few loaves and fishes he distributed produced 12 baskets of leftovers!  Brother Booker Ashe, the founder of and my predecessor managing the House of Peace had a theory about this gospel story.  He said that what really happened was that the people in Jesus' audience saw him giving away the little available food, they took out and shared the food they had squirreled away in their clothing and bags so that everybody got something to eat with much left over.  His theory was that seeing Jesus' generosity led the followers to stop being selfish and to become sharers.  I am thinking of this gospel story and of Booker's reading of it as I think of what has been happening in Gaza for the last 9 months, i.e., Israel using starvation of Palestinian civilians as an instrument of war.  Of all the genocide and war crime charges against the State of Israel, the one that is most damning is that of depriving the civilian population of food and clean water, producing famine or near-famine conditions.  Yoav Gallant, the Defense Minister, announced shortly after October 7th, "I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly" and so it has been.  In his recent speech to Congress, Benjamin Netanyahu lied in saying

The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has shamefully accused Israel of deliberately starving the people of Gaza. This is utter complete nonsense. It’s a complete fabrication. Israel has enabled more than 40,000 aid trucks to enter Gaza. That’s half a million tons of food, and that’s more than 3,000 calories for every man, woman and child in Gaza. If there are Palestinians in Gaza who aren’t getting enough food, it’s not because Israel is blocking it, it’s because Hamas steals it.

It's the old story: Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?  Dp we believe the countless news photos and videos showing desperately hungry Palestinians chasing food trucks or holding plates of some sort toward servers at food distribution sites, the World Health Organization, Doctors Without Borders in Gaza, and all the humanitarian organizations striving to provide some relief to the civilian population in Gaza, and countless reporters  or do we believe Benjamin Netanyahu who also said

The ICC prosecutor accuses Israel of deliberately targeting civilians. What in God’s green earth is he talking about? The IDF has dropped millions of flyers, sent millions of text messages, made hundreds of thousands of phone calls to get Palestinian civilians out of harm’s way.

Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?  Yet so many American legislators in the room stood and applauded his lies.  What does this say about "who we are"?

Perhaps the lie that most offended me was Netanyahu's attempt to identify the State of Israel and its fascist current government with the Jewish people, to equate opposition to Israeli political and military policies and practices with antisemitism.

Antisemitism is the world’s oldest hatred. For centuries, the massacre of Jews was always preceded by wild accusations. We were accused of everything from poisoning wells to spreading plagues to using the blood of slaughtered children to bake Passover matzos. These preposterous antisemitic lies led to persecution, mass murder and ultimately to history’s worst genocide, the Holocaust.

 Now, just as malicious lies were levelled for centuries at the Jewish people, malicious lies are now being levelled at the Jewish state. No, no. Don’t applaud. Listen. The outrageous slanders that paint Israel as racist and genocidal are meant to delegitimize Israel, to demonize the Jewish State and to demonize Jews everywhere. And no wonder, no wonder we’ve witnessed an appalling rise of antisemitism in America and around the world.  My friends,

Whenever and wherever we see the scourge of antisemitism, we must unequivocally condemn it and resolutely fight it, without exception.

 The greatest cause of antisemitism in the world, especially for diaspora Jews, has become the State of Israel and its fascist, criminal government led by Benjamin Netanyahu.

I started out with Gandhi and Jesus and ended up with Netanyahu.  Not a good sign.

Transience.  I watched a video of Joni Mitchell singing Both Sides Now when she was young and in her prime and thought we are all fireflies, daylilies.

World's second-largest religion?  Christians remain the world's largest religion at 31% of the world's population, with Muslims coming in second at 24% and Hindus at 15%.  Within Christianity, Catholics claim pride of place with about 1.28 million followers, followed by Protestantism with 920,000 unless you count the Anglicans/Episcopalians, in which case they are the largest with about 1.5 million believers.  In any case, I used to hear it said that the Catholics were the largest and that the second largest were the ex-Catholics, or 'fallen away Catholics, i.e., people like me.  Why are there so many ex-Catholics?  Why are there so many ex-Catholics with hostile feelings about their former religion?  Some thoughts:

1. I think of Sinead O'Connor and her experiences, indeed all of Ireland's experience, with the Irish Catholic Church.

2. I think of the popes and cardinals and bishops and their sorry history.

3. I think of Humanae vitae and A Syllabus of Errors and Vehementer Nos: 

It follows that the church is by essence an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful.  So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end  of the society and directing all its members toward that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the pastors.

4.  I think of thousands of pedophiliac priests all over the world harming mostly boys but also girls, many for life.  How long has this been going on?  How long has it been tolerated and hidden by the Church?  How many victims have there been?  We will never know.

5. But I also think of our Supreme Court with 5 and perhaps 6 of the radically right-wing justices being Catholic.  I think of Donald Trump's Catholic aides and enablers like Rudy Giuliani, Bill Barr, Pat Cippolone, Dan Scavino,  Steve Bannon, Newt Gingrich, Elise Stafanik, Leonard Leo, Kellyanne Conway, Kevin Roberts (Heritage Foundations/Project 2025), Fox's Laura Ingraham, Matt and Mercedes Scjlapp (CPAC), and now J. D. Vance who converted in 2019.  Trump is surrounded by right-wing Catholics and Evangelical Protestants so one wonders what is the difference between the two groups.  All are, like the Church itself, conservative, reactionary, and anti-democratic.  One wonders why Vance decided to become a Catholic in 2019, the 3rd year of the Trump presidency.    Was he socially embarrassed by his prior affiliation with Pentecostalism or politically embarrassed by his prior claims of atheism?  In. Right-wing America, Catholic is cool.

6.  On the other hand, there is "cafeteria Catholicism" everywhere, condemned when practiced by liberal Catholics (an oxymoron?).  Vance supports the death penalty in some cases, wants to boost fossil fuels, wants to deport millions of migrants, and has voted against many government programs aimed at aiding the poor. All of those positions are in opposition to his church.  Also, data on the number of conversions is spotty. Polling organizations including Pew Research have long shown that many more people are leaving the Catholic faith than joining it — by more than 6 to 1.

Joe Biden, a day late and a dollar short, again.  He is calling for an 18-year term limit and an enforceable code of ethics for the justices as well as a constitutional amendment banning a general criminal immunity for presidential crimes.  Biden has long resisted efforts to impose reforms on the Supreme Court.  Now that he is a lame duck and now that it makes no difference what he proposes and now that reform of the radical right Republican Court is politically impossible, Joe gets on board the reform movement.  Thanks, Joe.  You promote court reform like you arm the Ukrainians, not like you arm the Israelis. 

Blogging/journalling.  It was two years ago tomorrow that I opened my Blogger app and typed in "Am I here?", wondering whether the site was still active and useable to record a journal.  It was and as of today I haved posted 728 entries.  Almost all are daily journal postings but a few are ad hoc others, like the suffered-over eulogy for Tom St. John.  I started posting on blogger back in December of 2007, when "W" was still president, after his catastrophic 'shock and awe' invasion of Iraq and before the catastrophic collapse of the financial and housing markets in 2008.  Mostly I posted comments I had written to articles in the Washington Posst and wanted to save for one reason or another.  It's depressing to look back at most of them.  

For example, just last April 26th, David Ignatius published a column titled "Is the sun slowly setting on U.S. power? That depends on us."  He wrote:

The United States might be stumbling toward a decline from which few great powers have ever recovered. It has many of the tools of national recovery but doesn’t yet have a shared recognition of the problem and how to fix it.  That’s not a quote from a MAGA or progressive leaflet. It’s a summary of a startling new study by Rand that was commissioned by the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. It should serve as a loud wake-up call for America in this crucial election year.

The Rand study, which has the anodyne title “The Sources of Renewed National Dynamism,” will be published Tuesday. . . Unless Americans can unite to identify and fix these problems, we risk falling into a downward spiral. “Recovery from significant long-term national decline is rare and difficult to detect in the historical record,” the authors note. Think of Rome, or Habsburg Spain, or the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, or the Soviet Union. “When great powers have slid from a position of preeminence or leadership because of domestic factors, they seldom reversed this trend.”

 He wrote that column this year, onlly 3 months ago.  On June 7, 2007, more than 17 years ago, he published a column titled "Stovepipe America" in which he wrote:

America's politicians behave like a college faculty, constantly warring over petty differences and relentlessly putting self-interest ahead of that of the community as a whole. Our great federal agencies are risk-averse and slow-moving behemoths -- better at following rules than at innovating and solving problems. We are "stovepipe America" -- with each segment of society caught in its own narrow channel while the country's big problems go unsolved. , , , We are a country that is not solving its problems -- that cannot summon the will to break down the obstacles to fixing what is wrong. This has to change, or America will enter a period of cyclical decline. 

I wrote a comment then, as follows:

". . . or America will enter a period of cyclical decline"? Or? As an American who was born on the eve of the country's entry into the Second World War, it's pretty hard not to accept the fact that we are in the cyclical decline right now and still on the downslope. For the last half of the last century, this country was universally considered "the leader of the free world." To the extent that that is still true, it is only by dint of the overwhelming destructive power of our military establishment. Whatever moral leadership we retained at the end of the century, Messrs. Bush and Cheney squandered in Iraq. Maybe the next president will regain some of that moral leadership, but one would have to be quite an optimist to believe that the damage done by the current regime will be undone by the next regime. As Mark Anthony said of Caesar, "The evil men do lives after them." We'll be paying for our recklessness in Iraq, in more ways than one, long after I've departed this life. Domestically, our manufacturing strength has been decimated by globalization. In my city, the loss of manufacturing jobs to Mexico, China and elsewhere has had a devastating effect, especially in minority communities. The crime rates in certain neighborhoods reminds one of Baghdad or Beirut during the civil war. The loss of well-paying factory work has led to a sense of hopelessness that is manifested in all kinds of ways, all bad. We have moved from being the world's No. 1 creditor nation to being the world's No. 1 debtor nation. Our dependency on other nations for everything from manufactured goods to debt financing has put us in such a vulnerable position that we must maintain a military budget as large as the rest of the world's military budgets combined, or very nearly as large. Is it any wonder that so much of the world considers America the greatest threat to world peace? No, the news isn't all bad; there is still much to be grateful for about living in America but one would have to be wilfully blind not to recognize that the country is in a period of decline and vulnerability. Turning that situation around will require great leadership and willing followership. ASU President Crow is clearly correct about the seriousness of the problem of "stovepipe" thinking and institutional organization, but how likely is it that real change will occur in large private institutions. Look at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler and the health care sector of the economy. As for the federal government, don't Katrina and Iraq say it all?

Was I wrong? 

 

7/28/24

 Sunday, July 28, 2024

1915 Woodrow Wilson sent US Marines ashore in Haiti leading to occupation until 1934

1965 LBJ sends 50,000 more soldiers to Vietnam (total of 125,000)

In bed at 9, awake around 4, and up at 4:15 with a badly aching right knee, worse than my right hip.  Lilly showed up at 5 to be let out. 

Prednisone, day 77, 15+5, day 13.   I took 15 mg. at 5 a.m.  I applied 2 5% Lidocaine patches to my right thigh and another to my right hip area at 8:30 a.m.  I took 1,000 mg. of Tylenol at 9 a.m.  I have a lot of pain in that hip-to-knee expanse this morning. . . Took my 5 mg. pill at 5 p.m.

Moloch.   Hezbollah or some other militia in Lebanon has fired rockets into a soccer field in the Golan Heights killing 12 Israelis, mostly children and teens, and injuring many more.  The attack followed an Israeli attack on a school compound sheltering displaced Palestinians in central Gaza.  That attack killed at least 36 Palestinians, including 16 children.  The IDF said the compound was a Hamas command and control center.  From the WaPo:

At least 39,258 people have been killed and 90,589 injured in Gaza since the war began, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children. Israel estimates that about 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, including more than 300 soldiers, and says 329 soldiers have been killed since the launch of its military operation in Gaza.

Psalm 137:

O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.   Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones. 

Alan Ginsberg's Howl:

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Jeremiah 32:35:

They built high places for Baal in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to sacrifice their sons and daughters to Molek, though I never commanded—nor did it enter my mind—that they should do such a detestable thing and so make Judah sin.

Herodotus, Book I, ch. 87:

 In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.

Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut:

“It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?”

“I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.” 

America's news media.  I turned on the television this morning to catch any news about what is happening in Israel, Lebanon, Golan, and Gaza.  Will Israel invade Lebanon - again?  Can Israel wage a two-front or three-front war?  What does this situation mean for the U.S.?   What does the Biden administration have to say about all this?  Are Biden and Harris on the same page?  What was available was coverage of the Olympics in Paris and coverage of the presidential race in the U.S., not meaningful discussion of any substantive issues, but the polls, the horse race, who is leading and who is behind in what demographics, how effective are the negative ads, how are the candidates portrayed as "radical" and "controversial," J. D. Vance's misogyny, Kamala Harris, "a low IQ individual," flunked her first try at the California bar exam, etc.  I need always to remember that the news media is part of corporate, capitalist America in the business not of selling commercials to me, but of selling me as an audience, a consciousness to be influenced, to merchants of goods and services.  First, build up the audience numbers with entertainment (Olympics, 'news', sitcoms, sex), then sell the audience to other sellers.  We are all being pushed and pulled, manipulated and influenced.  Think this way, feel this way,fear these people, buy this product, use this service, vote this way, call your congressman, . . .

Shack Dye

Edgar Lee Masters

         The white men played all sorts of jokes on me.

        They took big fish off my hook

        And put little ones on, while I was away

        Getting a stringer, and made me believe

        I hadn't seen aright the fish I had caught.

        When Burr Robbins, circus came to town

        They got the ring master to let a tame leopard

        Into the ring, and made me believe

        I was whipping a wild beast like Samson

        When I, for an offer of fifty dollars,

        Dragged him out to his cage.

        One time I entered my blacksmith shop

        And shook as I saw some horse-shoes crawling

        Across the floor, as if alive -

        Walter Simmons had put a magnet

        Under the barrel of water.

        Yet everyone of you, you white men,

        Was fooled about fish and about leopards too,

        And you didn't know any more than the horse-shoes did

        What moved you about Spoon River.

Sentenced to Life

Clive James

Sentenced to life, I sleep face-up as though

Ice-bound, lest I should cough the night away,

And when I walk the mile to town, I show

The right technique for wading through deep clay.

A sad man, sorrier than he can say.

But surely not so guilty he should die

Each day from knowing that his race is run:

My sin was to be faithless. I would lie

As if I could be true to everyone

At once, and all the damage that was done

Was in the name of love, or so I thought.

I might have met my death believing this,

But no, there was a lesson to be taught.

Now, not just old, but ill, with much amiss,

I see things with a whole new emphasis.

My daughter’s garden has a goldfish pool

With six fish, each a little finger long.

I stand and watch them following their rule

Of never touching, never going wrong:

Trajectories as perfect as plain song.

Once, I would not have noticed; nor have known

The name for Japanese anemones,

So pale, so frail. But now I catch the tone

Of leaves. No birds can touch down in the trees

Without my seeing them. I count the bees.

Even my memories are clearly seen:

Whence comes the answer if I’m told I must

Be aching for my homeland. Had I been

Dulled in the brain to match my lungs of dust

There’d be no recollection I could trust.

Yet I, despite my guilt, despite my grief,

Watch the Pacific sunset, heaven sent,

In glowing colours and in sharp relief,

Painting the white clouds when the day is spent,

As if it were my will and testament –

As if my first impressions were my last,

And time had only made them more defined,

Now I am weak. The sky is overcast

Here in the English autumn, but my mind

Basks in the light I never left behind.

--TLS, May 2, 2014

The Comfort of Strangers.  While Geri was out on household errands at Target and ordering replacement eyeglasses for me at Costco, I watched this first of a collection of Paul Schrader films in the Criterion Collection.  I don't recall when I became interested in his work, perhaps when I watched First Reformed or even the later Master Gardener, but he wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver which was released in 1976, so perhaps it was back then.  Not likely, though.  He was born in Grand Rapids, MI, into a strict Dutch Reformed Calvinist family, attended a Calvinist Reformed Christian Church, and attended and graduated from Calvin College before studying film at UCLA.  Knowing his religious background helps to understand, in part at least, his films, which are really into sex and sin, but it also make it difficult. I'm thinking of Marylynne Robinson and her uplifting version of Calvinism revealed in her Gilead novels.  It's hard to imagine two artist sharing such similar religious grounding manifested in such different ways in their work.

In any event, I don't know what to say about The Comfort of Strangers other than I didn't get it.  "My father was a very big man. And he wore a black mustache. When he grew older and it grew gray, he colored it with a pencil. The kind women use. Mascara."  These were the words Christopher Walken's weird character spoke thrice in the movie, apparently suggesting something important but what it was was beyond me.  There is a fair amount of sex and nudity in the movie between Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson, and suggestions of it between Walken and his wife played by Helen Mirren, sadism and masochism in the case of the latter two, and an ending life a snuff movie.  But what was the point of it all?  Beyond me.  The screenplay was written by dramatist Harold Pinter which maybe explains something.  He is described in Wikipedia as " pugnacious, enigmatic, taciturn, terse, prickly, explosive and forbidding" further: "The historian Geoffrey Alderman . . .  expressed his own "Jewish View" of Harold Pinter: "Whatever his merit as a writer, actor and director, on an ethical plane Harold Pinter seems to me to have been intensely flawed, and his moral compass deeply fractured."

That said, I watched Schrader's second film Hardcore with George C. Scott, which starts out with a household scene, a family argument around a dining room table about unpardonable sins and the Pelagian heresy followed by a scene of children leaving from a Dutch Reformed Calvinist Church in Grand Rapids, MI to a Calvinist Youth Convention in California.  Nothing subtle about Schrader's Calvinist roots in this movie.  Later in the film, he explains the Calvinist belief in TULIP. T= TOTAL DEPRAVITY.  U= UNCONDITIONAL ELECTION, L= LIMITED ATONEMENT, I=IRRESISTIBLE GRACE, and P=PERSEVERANCE OF THE SAINTS.  Predestination comes from Omniscience.  There is a lot of religion in it but I don't know what Schrader's point was in making the film.  Roger Ebert accurately pointed out that the end of the story is a real mess.  I need to think about it, read some reviews perhaps.  Movies like this, and The Comfort of Strangers, remind me of how dull-witted I am about so many things.

Anniversaries thoughts.  The Marine's invasion, occupation, and military control of Haiti was done entirely on behalf of American corporate financial and business interests, primarily Nationall City Bank of New York.  The use of the Marines to protect financial interests was pointed out most forcibly in General Smedley Butler's War is a Racket.

I had barely arrived in Vietnam before LBJ, Robert McNamara, and the Pentagon announced that another increment of 50,000 troops would soon join us.  9,087,000 military personnel served on active duty during the official Vietnam era from August 5, 1964 to May 7, 1975.  2,709,918 Americans served in uniform in Vietnam.  58,148 were killed in Vietnam, 75,000 severely disabled, 23,214 were 100% disabled, 5,283 lost limbs and 1,081 sustained multiple amputations.  Of those killed, 61% were younger than 21 years old.  11,465 of those killed were younger than 20 years old.  Of those killed, 17,539 were married.  The average age of the men killed: 23.1 years.  As in Haiti from 1915 to 1934, our presence in Vietnam was an invasion and occupation.  If it wasn't directly done to protect financial interests, it was ultimately done to protect capitalists from socialism and communism, to protect American business's access to raw material and to markets for our goods and services.  Money, money, money.

7/27/24

 Saturday, July 27, 2024

I inadvertently deleted much that I had written in today's journal.

1944 Thomas William St. John was born

In bed at 9, awake at 1:37, with/ pain in my hip and knee, and up at 2:00 when I moved to the TV room & took one 500 mg. Tylenol.  I took another at 9 a.m.   

Prednisone, day 76, 15+5. day 12.  I changed sensors on my Libre3 yesterday afternoon and had unusual fluctuations for the rest of the day and night, even triggering a low glucose alarm at 69 mg./dL at about 8 p.m., for which I ate an apple and immediately bounced up to a reading of 140 ^. . . . I took my 15 mg. at 4:50 a.m.  I need to count the remaining pills to see how many days I have left and to notify Dr. Ryzka about refilling the prescription.  Cold cauliflower pizza for breakfast.    

Thanatopsis.  I'm burning a Yahrtzeit candle today in honor of TSJ's  80th birthday.  Also remembering David Branch, Bob Friebert, Bill Guis, Bill Roush, Ed Felsenthal, and my former student Bill Wiseman, whose funeral is today, and his grieving wife Chris Giaimo Wiseman, my first research assistant at the law school, and their 3 children.  My parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, and most of all my dear sister.  And I'm thinking of Lilly and watching her body fail for her, the collapsing hind legs, her heart and lungs working hard to breathe, subtle signs of confusion.  And I'm thinking of the terrifying 3 articles on assisted-living facilities in Wisconsin in this morning's JSOnline.  I sent the main article to Geri with a note that we should discuss "options" but I know there is only one.

I texted Micaela: "I'm thinking of you today and of Tom, of course, wishing I could wish him a happy birthday.  I've been awake since the middle of the night and lit a Yahrtzeit candle for his birthday.  I hope you are as well as you can be.♥️"  She replied: "You are so a good friend. We are having dinner together this week at my house on Thursday?  I replied: "Geri intends to tell you that I am out of commission with immobilizing hip and knee pain.  I can't stand on my feet for more than a minute or two without needing to sit down to relieve the pain.  I've been like this since July 12th and am scheduled to get a cortisone injection on 8/6 at the VA.  I'm hoping that will help."

Old and exhausted.  I pushed Judy out to the sunroom intending to sit on the patio, listen to the birds, and watch the chipmunks and squirrels dart about.  When I reached the sunroom I changed my mind because of my aching hip and knee and the fear that I might not be able to mount the single step up from the patio deck to the sunroom floor.  Pathetic.  And then there is the world we have been living in for the last 8 years or more.  From Lydia Polgreen's op-ed in the NYTimes this morning:

Americans have been through a lot since early 2020 — a pandemic, Jan. 6, a turbulent economy and high inflation, the invasion of Ukraine, the slaughter in Israel and Gaza and the never-ending 2024 presidential race. I also wondered if the Trump-Biden era changed what we want from a president. We are a frustrated, exhausted and divided nation. Most Americans believe we are on the wrong track, and we spent the past 20 months staring at a grim choice between Biden and Trump, the two men whose presidencies sent us down that track.

And for the 4 years before that, Trump, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Sean Spicer, Kelly Ann Conway ("alternative facts"), Bill Barr, Robert Mueller, 2 impeachments, the "perfect phone calls," and on and on ad infinitum et ad infernum.  Where is Walden?  And how could I live there if I can't count on being able to mount a single step up from the patio deck to the sunroom floor, from the front sidewalk to the stoop?  

The Great Santini.  I watched the movie yesterday afternoon between showering and mounting my replacement continuous glucose monitoring sensor.  It's not an easy story for me to follow because (1) it's a great depiction of toxic masculinity; (2) it uses the Marine Corps to illustrate it and the shoe fits; and, (3) it depicts a love/hate relationship between a father and a son, a situation too close to home for me.  Here is a segment from Pat Conroy's novel, on which the movie is based, that I reprinted in my memoir:

The Great Santini

Pat Conroy

“Athletics is a strange world.  You climb to your peak, but often that is not very impressive unless there are very small peaks around you.”

“Then why play sports at all?”

“It’s very important, Ben.  Sports show you your limits.  Sports teach humility.  Sooner or later the athlete becomes humble no matter how good he is.  But he plays until he has reached as high as he can.”

“I play basketball because I have to win a scholarship,” Ben announced.

“No, that’s not true,” Mr. Dacus disagreed, turning down River Street and walking down the sidewalk beneath the massive wind-sculpted water oaks that paralleled the river.  “That’s not even close to the truth.  You play basketball because you love your father.”

“I hate my father,” Ben said darkly.

“No, you love him and he loves you.  I’ve seen a lot of Marine fathers since I’ve been at the high school, Ben.  Hundreds upon hundreds of them, year after year.  They’re a tight-assed lot and your father is as tight-assed as any of them.  They love their families with their hearts and souls, and they wage war against them to prove it.  All your dad is doing is loving you by trying to live his life over again through you.  He makes bad mistakes, but he makes them because he is part of an organization that does not tolerate substandard performance.  He just sometimes forgets there’s a difference between a Marine and a son.  Did he give you that shiner?”

“Yes, sir.  Palmer called him down to the jail and told him I resisted an arrest for drunk driving.  He hit me when I came up to the bars to talk to him.”

“Your father is the dream of a high school principal or a deputy sheriff.  He believes in the institution over the individual even when the individual is his own child.  That’s why he’s such a good Marine.”

“And such a lousy father.”

“You’ll come to understand him better when you grow up.”

“I’ll never love him, though.”

“Sure you will.  I told you that you love him right now and I meant it.  There’s something profound about boys and their fathers.  There’s bad blood, it seems, almost always, and yet there’s this inevitable tenderness that neither of them recognizes when it’s present.  But over a lifetime it’s hard to hate the seed that fathered you.”

The story is based on the real relationship between Pat Conroy and his father, a Marine fighter pilot in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam.  The story is set in Beaufort, South Carolina, home of Parris Island and the Marine Corps Air Station where "Bull" Meechum was stationed and where he and his family lived.  Bull called himself "the great Santini," and fostered a myth about himself being the greatest F-8 Crusader pilot in the world, the toughest Marine, the best at everything.  He adopted the macho Marine style as his way of living.  He went overboard on almost everything except showing warmth, love, and affection to his children, especially to his eldest son Ben.  He brought boot camp discipline to his home and family life, calling himself the family's commander-in-chief and his children "hogs."  He was hypercompetitive and tried to instill that competitiveness in his children, especially Ben.  In other words, he was a real asshole.  Pat Conroy has frequently said that his real father was a lot worse than Bull Meecham, intimidating and physically abusive both to his wife and to his children.  At the premiere of the Santini film, one of his brothers leaned over to him and said "Bambi", suggesting that the Robert Duvall character was Bambi compared to their actual father.

He was also very unlike my father, almost the opposite.  My father was not competitive, not combative, withdrawn, and not very engaged in life at all.  I've attributed this to his PTSD after Iwo Jima, but I'm speculating.  He quit high school before graduating, he quit the CCC during the depression, he quit a lot of jobs, and he quit on his marriage and fatherhood after the war.  In my memoir, I described him like Silas in Robert Frost's poem, The Death of the Hired Man;

Poor Silas, so concerned for other folk,

And nothing to look backward to with pride,

And nothing to look forward to with hope,

So now and never any different.”

In any case, both Bull Meecham and my father created real love/hate relationships with their sons, by being distant, cold, demanding (in very different ways), and unloving.  I used to wonder if perhaps he wasn't really my father and both my sister and I wished my mother would leave him and take us away from him.  So watching a movie like this stirs lots of memories.  Most of all, it makes me miss my sister, with whom I was so close the last many years of her life, starting every day in communication with her.

I wish I could say there are no Marines as awful as Bull Meecham but I'm sure there are some, guys who are gung-ho in the extreme.  One of my fellow second lieutenants at my first permanent duty station (an oxymoron) at MCAS Yuma, AZ, was Bill Space, from Wilkes Barre, PA.  He and his wife Bonnie had a baby whom Bill called "Turd," thinking it was funny.  But 99% of the men I served with were good guys, normal, well-adjusted guys who for various reasons chose to join the Marines.  On the other hand, for outrageous behavior by Naval and Marine aviators, I think back to the Tailhook scandal, the subject of a long historical account on Wikipedia, including:

The Tailhook scandal was a military scandal in which United States (U.S.) Navy and U.S. Marine Corps aviation officers were alleged to have sexually assaulted up to 83 women and seven men, or otherwise engaged in "improper and indecent" conduct at the Las Vegas Hilton in Las Vegas, Nevada. The events took place at the 35th Annual Tailhook Association Symposium from September 5 to 8, 1991. The event was subsequently abbreviated as "Tailhook '91" in media accounts.

Two American Families.  I watched the concluding episode of this long term documentary by Bill Moyers of two families in Milwaukee, one Black, one White, affected by the layoffs of their principal wage-earners when the owners of the factories at which they had high-paying jobs outsourced their work to overseas companies.  Borh families never recovered from the loss of income from the manufacutring jobs that had enabled them to purchase their own homes and start a family.  Their history extends over 30+ years.  The White family, the Neumanns, suffered a divorced and ultimately the loss of their home because of the stresses of trying to survive on significantly reduced income from non-union jobs, many of which paid minimum wage or not much more.  Their children also struggled to make a living on their high school or less education.   The Black family, the Stanleys survived intact  and managed to hold on to their home in the Sherman Park neigborhood but they tried unsuccessfully to sell it and move away because of all the violent crime in the area.

I could not watch the documentary without anger about the 40,000 jobs that Milwaukee lost during the Great Outsoucing of American manufacturing to China, Mexico, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and elsewhere where labor is cheap, protection of workers is niggardly, and environmental and other safeguards are minimal compared to America.  Capitalism is what caused these families to suffer.  American capitalist corporate law is what caused these families to suffer.  NAFTA,, free trade, and globalism caused these families to suffer.  Bill Clinton and his New Democrats are responsibly.  Republicans are responsible.

By the concluding interviews and film segments of the show, violent crime had increased dramatically in Milwuakee, turning the city into the dystopia that it has become, an inner city that is an armed camp, children regularly shot and often killed by gun violence on the streets.  For this too we should plame corporate America, the capitalists who control our government and our country,  When family-supporting work disappears, social cohesion disappears, families fall apart from economic stress and all the related stresses the economic stress causes.  And in our crazy Second Amerdment Clockwork Orange Westworld, handjuns prolifierate.  The Stanley family spent $2800 on putting cast iron protection on thier windows and doors in Sherman Park and couldn't find a buyer for their house when they wanted to move.  Whose fault is this, the labor unions at Briggs & Stratton, A. O. Smith, Allen Bradley, or the corporate managers and consultants, who decided to transfer the jobs to  non-union states in the former confederacy, or to Communist China or Communist Vietnam, or India, or Bangladesh?  Who has brought all this suffering on America's blue collar workforce if not the people and groups joined at the hip to the Republican Party?  How curious it is that now J.D. Vance and his cronies are part of what is called the New Republicans, purporting to be interested in protecting American workers and encouraging labor unions, and using high tariffs to encourage manufacturing in the U.S.  I'll belive it when I see it.  

Further your affiant ranteth not.

 

7/26/24

Friday, July 26, 2024

1948  Truman issues Executive Order No. 9981 to desegregate the US armed forces

2023 Sinead O'Connor 12/8/55 - 7/27/23   

In bed at 9, awake and in hip, leg, and knee pain at 3:20, and up at 3:50 wishing I had a battery-powered wheelchair to move me to the TV room but I walked.  Intestinal problems last evening and night.  What did I eat or drink that brought this on? . . . Lilly emerged from Geri's room at 5:40 to be let out.  Geri raised the looming question yesterday, considering her failing back legs, whether it is time "to have her 'put down'".  I dread it as does Geri.   I think of Elvis and "Old Shep": 'I just couldn't do it. I wanted to run.  I wished they could shoot me instead."  One of the saddest songs I know.

Prednisone, day 75, 15+5, day 11.  I took my 15 mg. of prednisone at 5 a.m.  I will take the additional 5 mg. at 5 p.m. I keep my iPhone alarm set for that time to remind myself since I so easily forget the evening dose. I took 1,000 mg. of Tylenol at 4:30 a.m.  I'm down to my last 3 500 mg. tablets and have to ask Geri to resupply me today after her visit with Dr. Balachandran.    

Anniversaries thoughts.  First,  Sinead O'Connor was also a hero of mine, like Frank Petersen whom I recall below.   She was an extraordinary, powerful singer, of course.  I still enjoy listening to her first two albums, The Lion and the Cobra and I Do Not Want What I Do Not Have. She was also a rebel.  From Wikipedia: 

O'Connor drew attention to issues such as child abuse, human rights, racism, and women's rights. During a Saturday Night Live performance in 1992, she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II to protest against abuse in the Catholic Church, sparking controversy. Throughout her musical career, she openly discussed her spiritual journey, activism, socio-political viewpoints, and her experiences with trauma and struggles with mental health. After converting to Islam in 2018, she adopted the name Shuhada' Sadaqat while continuing to perform and record under her birth name.

 On October 3, 1992, Sinead appeared on Saturday Night Live, sang a version of Bob Marley's War, and tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II, saying "Fight the real enemy."  It was only 9 years later that JPII admitted the problem of child abuse within the Catholic Church.  Meanwhile, Sinead suffered abundant abuse from those offended by her protest.  She died of unspecified natural causes at age 56.  During the last decades of her life, she was a mess: psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually.  She endured much suffering in her life and it showed in her erratic and confused behavior, but she has long occupied a warm place in my heart and I will make a point of listening to and enjoying her albums again today.

The painting I attached is one I did a great many years ago, on canvasboard, freehand.  Sinead was the subject and obviously, I did a very poor job of rendering her extraordinary facial beauty.  Nonetheless, I kept it because it turned out interesting though not as intended.  The photo below shows the exquisite face that I badly failed to capture in the painting above.

 Second, about segregation in the military: I was almost 7 years old when Truman desegregated the Armed Forces, the Armed Forces that another Democratic president,  Woodrow Wilson, had made it a point to keep segregated.  "During Wilson’s presidency, he allowed his cabinet to segregate the Treasury, the Post Office, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the Navy, the Interior, the Marine Hospital, the War Department, and the Government Printing Office. This meant creating separate offices, lunchrooms, bathrooms, and other facilities for white and Black workers. It also meant dismissing Black supervisors, cutting off Black employees’ access to promotions and better-paying jobs and reserving those jobs for white people."  The Navy and the Marines were the slowest of the service branches to integrate.  The Navy actually used Philapino and Black sailors as servants, or "stewards" as they were called, waiting on Navy officers in their wardrooms.  I recall no Black midshipmen or officer candidates in my T&T Regiment at Quantico in 1962 nor at the Basic School in 1963.  The only Black Marine officer I encountered in the Marine Corps between 1963 and 1967 when I was discharged became of friend of mine, then Major and later General Frank Peterson,  We served together at the Marine Corps Reserve Detachment, NAS, Willow Grove, Pennsylvania.  He was a fighter pilot.  We drove together to Cherry Hill, New Jersey, to enjoy a performance by the great Nancy Wilson.  Frank was a remarkable man, a remarkable aviator, a remarkable leader,  and a remarkable Marine,  He was the first Black Marine aviator and the first Black Marine general.  He retired as a 3-star Lieutenant General.  And he was the only Black felllow Marine officer I encountered in 4 years of active duty in the mid-1960s.  I hadn't thought of it before, but he was not only a friend during my last year of active duty, he was also a hero.

Going downhill, a pity party.  There are times when my right knee hurts more than my right hip.  The intestinal problems yesterday were significant, making me scurry as fast as  I could with my walker or cane to make it to the bathroom.  I'm not eating properly because of my inability to stand for more than a minute or two and to prepare food; hence so much cottage cheese & berries.  I haven't been out of the house in days. I have to rely on Geri to fill the bird feeders and get the mail.  I don't get the mail because of fear on not mounting that one step onto our front stoop.  I haven't been to the basement in about 2 weeks because I can't be sure of my ability to climb the stairs back up.  I don't see Dr. England for a possible ultrasound-guided hip injection until August 6 and I wonder whether I will end up in the ER again before that, because of intense pain, or a fall, or inability to rise from a chair, stand on my feet, or walk.  What I am reasonably sure of is that the chronic and spreading pain will not improve between now and August 6th, 12 days from now, when the pain, disability, and immobility will have persisted for 26 days.  

More on the apotheosis of Joe Biden.  First, from an interview with John Meacham in the current New Yorker online:

Q: The historian Adam Tooze recently wrote, “I honestly don’t get what is heroic here. … Biden and his team around him made a historic mistake with disastrous implications. Why, after the shambles of the last few weeks, are we giving ‘big-boy’ merit badges for this belated admission?” What do you make of that argument?

A: We live in a fallen world. All of us are imperfect. Most of us make the wrong decisions all day long. What's remarkable about human nature and history is that people get to the right decision at all. And so I find that criticism overly glib.

Q: If you look at news reports from the past weeks, and even some of Biden’s own comments, it seems to me that the national interest was not front and center in his mind. And his ultimate decision could work out, and Kamala Harris could win the Presidency, but there wasn’t a real nominating contest. This is all very rushed. She starts at a disadvantage in the polls. And so it does seem that the way Biden and his people have dealt with the past few weeks, and indeed maybe the past year, the unwillingness to step aside , has really potentially put the country at risk.

A: It’s a totally fair argument to make, and we should wrestle with it. It would be intellectually dishonest not to. My position, my view, personal opinion, is that what matters is where you get in the end. And this is why Reinhold Niebuhr is so important. Right?

Q: I was just saying that to myself.

A: Niebuhr said that “the sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.” My view is that we are imperfect people. We are fallible people. And I think what’s remarkable about human history and politics is that just enough of us get to the right place at all, much less early and all the time.

Q:  I think the difference between George H. W. Bush and Harry Truman is that there was no concern that if they lost, or paved the way to a loss, to Eisenhower or to Clinton, that American democracy would be at risk in some way, which I think that Biden himself, and you, think is at risk with Trump. And so the importance of having the political skill or ability or just motivation to be able to win this election and making sure that that happens does seem like it will be a bigger part of Biden’s legacy, and not just for policy reasons.

A: We just don’t know yet. We’re in the middle of it.

And in the current The Atlantic online, Mark Leibovich's What Biden Didn't Say, excerpts:

Reaction to the (Oval Office) speech was warm, fawning at times, and a bit eulogistic. Biden was praised for his patriotic act. “‘The sacred cause of this country is larger than any of us,’” former President Barack Obama wrote on X. “Joe Biden has stayed true to these words again and again.” The actor and director Rob Reiner gushed over “one of our greatest Presidents,” exactly one week after publicly pleading with Biden to leave: “The handwriting is on the wall in bold capital letters,” he’d said. . .

They all conveniently left out the words “kicking and screaming,” “took him long enough,” and “after stewing and dillydallying for nearly a month.” . . .

All’s well that ends well, you could say. In fact, this all could have ended a lot better. Or, certainly, sooner: three weeks, if not three years, sooner. In the end, Biden’s drawn-out hemming and hawing after his debate disaster on June 27 left Democrats in a hell of a bind. . .

As it stands, Biden left time for only a late scramble. And little room to heal the rifts that have arisen from this awkward affair. If Harris loses to Trump, Biden will come in for a healthy dose of the blame. . .

But the full story of Biden’s legacy and his performance through this chapter will be incomplete until a big cliff-hanger is resolved—in November.

To all of which I say, as did (apocryphally) Barack Obama: Don't underestimate Joe's ability to fuck things up.   I am angry at Joe Biden who is and has been for some unknown time at least somewhat addled.  I am especially angry (Freudian slip: I first wrote 'addled'?) with Jill Biden and Hunter Biden and any other Biden who must have known of his condition and nonetheless encouraged him to stay in the presidential contest with Trump.  I am angry with CofS Zients, Ron Klain, Anita Dunn, Robert Bauer, Steve Ricchetti, Mike Donolon, Jennifer O'Malley Dillon, Cedric Richmond, and any other 'inner circle; Biden advisor who, knowing the stakes in the game and the requirements of the job over the next four years, encouraged Biden to stay in the race.  They are all worthy of contempt and should be condemned,  not praised, as Jill Biden did her her handwritten note, "for never wavering, never doubting."  Shame on all of them.  

I am reminded of Lord Acton's statement following his famous "All power tends to corrupt . . .".  He said, "Great men are almost always bad men."  He also said "“A public man has no right to let his actions be determined by particular interests. He does the same thing as a judge who accepts a bribe. Like a judge he must consider what is right, not what is advantageous to a party or class.” or, as was the case with Biden's second term.  I was immediately struck by his claim in his speech that all he had done in his first term had "merited" a second term, in other words, that he had earned it, that he was entitled to it, he was owed it.  He, he, he.  I say again what I have long thought, that Biden is an egoist, a narcissist, self-centered, self-promoting, and selfish and it's that selfish characteristic that has put the Democrats, the anti-Trumpers, and the nation at increased peril this election.  

Today's projects.  (1) I took a shower despite the risks.  (2) I brought in "Judy" to see if I can navigate with her in the house.  With 4 wheels, she's easier to get around with than the lighter, thinner walker, but she's wider and bulkier.  What I need is the seat so I can sit in the kitchen. (3) I changed my glucose sensor.