Friday, July 19, 2024
1692 5 more people are hanged for witchcraft (19 in all) in Salem, Massachusetts
1848 First US women's rights convention held in Seneca Falls, NY, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott
1984 Geraldine Ferraro became the 1st US female major-party vice-presidential nominee, officially joining Walter Mondale's Democratic Party ticket
Lights out at 10:30, Trump still bloviating, up for a PS at 1:15 & let Lilly out, but she stood on the sidewalk for a few minutes, turned around and came back in, Awake and up by 4:30 with some pain in my right hip and sharp, stabbing gout-like pain in the joint of my left big toe.
Prednisone, day 68, 15 + 5, day 4. I took my 15 mg. at 5 a.m., followed by some cottage cheese. I had considerable hip pain, making me wonder again whether the pain is caused by something other than PMR.
Anniversaries thoughts. Looking at today's anniversaries, I am reminded of the rap song "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp," except substituting "a woman" for "a pimp." The Salem witch trials in the 17th century were grounded in a misogynistic fear of women that seems to be an inherent characteristic of male nature, as reflected perhaps in the myth of Eve tempting Adam with the apple. At the time of the Seneca Falls convention in 1948, women were not only grouped with slaves, criminals, and children in not being privileged to vote in political elections, but they also were generally excluded from most professions and occupations, deprived of control over their own property, and otherwise oppressed. Life wasn't that bad by 1984 when Geraldine Ferraro was selected as Walter Mondale's running mate against Reagan and H. W. Bush, but she paid a heavy price for being the first woman on a national election ticket. Her personal history - in coming from poverty, being raised by her widowed mother (a seamstress in the garment district of NYC), becoming a teacher, then a lawyer and prosecutor, a member of Congress, and a major party nominee for vice president - was largely ignored as opponents and the media dug into her husband's real estate business and tax records to smear and defeat her. She and Mondale lost in a landslide for Reagan-Bush. The next woman on a national ticket was Sarah Palin, who was not nearly as personally impressive as Jerry Ferraro but was also paid a heavy price for her historic candidacy with John McCain. Next came Hilary Clinton, defeated not only by the worthy Barack Obama but also by Donald Trump, after Republican James Comey gratuitously smeared her right before election day in 2016. Now we have Kamala Harris as vice president and perhaps soon-to-be presidential candidate. What price will she pay?
There is an essay by Cassie Chambers Armstrong, "J. D. Vance Is No Good for Appalachian Women: He has no business speaking for us." Her focus is on the plight of rural women, mostly but not only in Appalachia, and the tremendous hardships they encounter not only in obtaining divorces from abusive husbands but also in terminating a pregnancy that may have been forced on them. J. D. Vance has taken positions opposing abortions even in the case of rape or incest, though he now waffles on this issue. She writes:
Vance has said that nowadays, people “shift spouses like they change their underwear” and implied that they should remain in a marriage even if it is abusive. The idea that leaving a bad marriage that is “maybe even violent” would make you happier, he said, was “one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace.”
Talk about arrogance! A privileged, rich, venture capitalist White man opining that poor women in abusive marriages should eschew divorce for the sake of the children in the abusive marriage. I recall my conversations with my sister about how each of us wished my mother would divorce my father when he was so emotionally distant and abusive to all of us. We were at best disappointed and at worst angry with her for keeping us all together. And what is Vance thinking of in knocking down the strawman of women becoming "happier" after divorcing their abusive husbands? It's hardly a question of happy vs. unhappy, or happier vs. less happy. The woman's lot is often, perhaps usually, unhappy in either event. It's not a choice between good and bad, happy and unhappy, but between bad and worse, or perhaps between life and death. What a presumptuous, arrogant jerk.
Mrs. Charles Bliss from Spoon River Anthology
For the sake of the children,
And Judge Somers advised him the same.
So we stuck to the end of the path.
But two of the children thought he was right,
And two of the children thought I was right.
And the two who sided with him blamed me,
And the two who sided with me blamed him,
And they grieved for the one they sided with.
And all were torn with the guilt of judging,
And tortured in soul because they could not admire
Equally him and me.
Now every gardener knows that plants grown in cellars
Or under stones are twisted and yellow and weak.
And no mother would let her baby suck
Diseased milk from her breast.
Yet preachers and judges advise the raising of souls
Where there is no sunlight, but only twilight,
No warmth, but only dampness and cold —
Preachers and judges!
Trump's acceptance speech last night was a doozy, 92 minutes. First a dramatic recounting of his assassination attempt, including "I knew God was with me," followed by more than an hour of happy horseshit, bullshit, and pie-in-the-sky promises. Geri and I both gave up and went to bed around halfway through, unable to stomach any more. Nothing he said was particularly surprising. I was mostly moved by watching the televised images of the crowd, chanting, crying, clapping, cheering, mesmerized by their Great Leader, now marked by and saved by the Almighty. I marveled that so many thousands of ordinary-looking human beings, people who looked like my neighbors, the people I encounter at the food store or a DMV office, can be so taken by this charlatan, this adjudicated rapist, fraudster, con man, and felon. What kind of world are we really living in? Is this all a terrible dream?
Trump's idea of a "unity" speech:
What this administration has damaged, what this administration has done, and I say it often, if you take the ten worst presidents in the history of the United States, . . ., added them up, they will not have done the damage that Biden has done. . . The damage that he has done to this country is unthinkable, unthinkable . . .
Shack Dye from Spoon River Anthology
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.
The CrowdStrike/Microsoft Canary in our Coalmine. I've avoided thinking much about this matter because it makes so clear what I have been aware of so long: our abysmal vulnerability to computer computerized technology, the internet, and cyberspace. What would happen if Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping exploded an electromagnetic pulse weapon over the US or if one company used by most of the Fortune 500 companies to protect against hackers uploaded a fix to a Microsoft problem and their customers' computer systems all malfunctioned? Now we know, or at least have a forewarning.
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