7/17/24

 Wednesday,July 17, 2024

1917 Royal Proclamation by King George V changed name of British Royal family from German Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor

Lights out at 10:55 p.m. and up at 3:40 a.m., unable to sleep and continuing hip pain. I let Lilly out at 4.

Prednisone, day 66, 15 + 5, day 2.  I took my 15 mg. at 4:50 a.m. followed by a breakfast of cabbage borscht.  I'm on the 6th day of considerable hip pain and the 5th day of increased prednisone, 2nd day of 15+5, and still in pain, hunched over, and using the walker.  This has me wondering again if perhaps the pain is not a recurrence of the PMR but rather something else.  1,000 mg. of Tylenol at 1 p.m. 5 mg. at 5 p.nm.

Shouldn't Joe Biden wonder why so many people over so many years and based on so much of his behavior underestimate him?  He has been a high-ranking public official or public figure for more than half a century and followed by the news media and public attention over all those decades. There is no paucity of evidence demonstrating who and what he is.  Yet he bristles at being 'underestimated.'  Wake up, Joe, and smell the coffee.  You have been in over your head since you were elected to the Senate at age 29.  You are the Peter Principle.  By standard measures, your first administration has been a success, indeed a big success, but you are blowing it with your hubristic choice to run for a second term that would have you in office to age 86.  Instead of being admired for your accomplishments, most notably ousting Donald Trump from the White House in 2020, you will loathed for letting him back into the White House in 2024.  You are a vain fool.  Mike Murphy in this morning's NYTimes: "This presidential campaign has become entirely about age because Mr. Biden decided to run for re-election at 81. It was an act of hubris and guaranteed that instead of a campaign about Donald Trump, we would have one about Joe Biden."  BO: Don't underestimate Joe's ability to fuck things up." 

Sophie's Choice.  I watched the last half of the film this morning before Geri woke up.  I was gobsmacked as expected by Meryl Streep's performance and emotionally affected by the denoument.  I remembered very little of the plot, except of course for the choice Sophie made at Auschwitz.  I had largely forgotten the roles that Nathan and Stingo played in her life, and even the terrible concluding scene on the bed as Stingo narrated Emily Dickinson's "Ample make this Bed / Make this Bed with Awe / In it wait till Judgment break / Excellent and Fair. // Be its Mattress straight / Be its Pillow round / Let no Sunrise' yellow noise / Interrupt this Ground.  As usual, I am unclear about the poem's meaning, especially the concluding line, or how William Styron, who wrote the novel, intended it to relate to the story of Sophie, Nathan, and Stingo.  Some thoughts: (1) The 'ample bed' may be thought to refer to the emotional ménage à trois of Sophie, Nathan, and Stingo; (2) The bed itself seems a metaphor for Life in all its complexity, its wonders and the terrors which it may ultimately beget (3)  "Awe" when "Judgment break[s] excellent and fair."  Quaere what she meant by "sunrise' yellow noise'.   That the complicated relationship of the threesome was troubling to the narrator Stingo was clear when he told Sophie that if she moved to Virginia with him they would have to get married because 'the country was Christian' and wouldn't tolerate an unmarried couple cohabitating.  I was struck by the fact that Sophie had many choices to make, not only the one at Auschwitz.  She chose to live after Auschwitz, at least until she chose not to.  She chose to move to the U.S.  She chose to maintain her relationship with the paranoid and bipolar Nathan and then with Stingo.  She chose not to stay with Stingo and not to move to his farm in Virginia, but rather to return to Nathan.  And finally, she presumably chose to end it all with Nathan.

Anniversary thought: Another example of the Golder Rule, or, He who has the gold makes the rules.  If you don't care for your name anymore, change it by edict.  It's also a reminder of the often incestuous relationships among the rich and powerful, not just among royalty and aristocracy.  They are great at marrying their cousins.

Olivier's Hamlet.  I'm watching this film this afternoon and enjoying it more than I thought I would.  I was just struck by Hamlet's joining Ophelia after seeing his father's ghost as she reports "Then goes he to the length of all his arm.  And with his other hand thus o'er his brow, he falls to such perusal of my face as he would draw it."  It reminds me of how I came to study faces, and other things, differently after I started taking photography seriously, and even more, after I started drawing and painting.  It can be almost embarrassing at times but it comes naturally from the attention one pays to form, shape, shade, and shadows as a draftsman or painter.  Nonetheless, it looks like lechery.

The Republican National Convention and George Orwell.  I heard precious little of the speeches at the RNC yesterday, but I heard enough to be reminded of George Orwell's 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language" in which he wrote:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. 

We are long past the British rule in India, the Russian purges, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but we are in a time when the Republican Party has rallied around a national leader who promises mass deportations, separation of immigrant children from their parents,   treason trials for Liz Cheney, Hilary Clinton, General Milley, and others, retributions and imprisonment of political adversaries, a "bloodbath for the country" if he is not elected, termination of the Constitution to overturn election results, encouraging Vladimir Putin to do whatever he wants to any NATO nation not spending 2% of the GDP on its defense budget, etc.   These realities are ignored, lost among the lofty words, the "happy horseshit,"  being spoken at the convention and the chants of USA, USA, USA!

"Donald Trump, Man of Destiny" is the title of Russ Douthat's op-ed in the NYTimes 2 days ago.  He's a Republican-favoring, conservative Catholic and not one of my favorite columnists, but this essay strikes me as right on.  

Having lived through eight years of [the Trump] era, I feel comfortable making one sweeping statement about the moments when Trump shifted his head fractionally and literally dodged a bullet, fell bleeding and then rose with his fist raised in an iconic image of defiance. The scene on Saturday night in Pennsylvania was the ultimate confirmation of his status as a man of destiny, a character out of Hegel or Thomas Carlyle or some other verbose 19th-century philosopher of history, a figure touched by the gods of fortune in a way that transcends the normal rules of politics.

Why talk about Trump in these sweeping terms, the anti-Trump reader might say, bringing in God and history and building him up to be something more than just a charlatan and demagogue? Because otherwise you’re just not dealing in reality. The man has survived self-disgrace and countless political near-death experiences, he’s poised for the greatest comeback in American political history, he just turned an attempted assassination into a Renaissance painting of bloodied defiance … you either see him as the defining figure of the age or you don’t see him at all.