7/21/24

 Sunday, July 21, 2024

1925 John T. Scopes found guilty of teaching evolution in the “Scopes monkey trial”

1930 US Veterans Administration formed

1940 Soviet Union annexed Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania

1954 Geneva Accords for Indochina divided French colonial territories into the countries of North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos

2024 Joe Biden drops out of presidential race, endorsed Kamala Harris

In bed by 8:45 p.m., up at 3:20 with bad pain in my right hip area and down my right thigh, and in my lower back (arthritis).  I moved to the LZB but was unable to sleep, I moved to the recliner in the TV room where I took 1,000 mg. of Tylenol and checked my glucose at 137 mg/ml and GMI up to 7.5% for the last 7 days, 7.4% for last 14 days.

Prednisone, day 70, 15 + 5 mg,, day 6.  I took 15 mg. of prednisole at 5:20 a.m. with some cottage cheese and blueberries.  

As I sat in the LZB, I thought of Anthony Newley's Stop the World - I Want to Get Off, and of its concluding song, What Kind of Fool Am I, and how it applied to Donald Trump and, to a lesser extent not in its focus on Littlechap's inability to "fall in love," but rather in its focus on his solipsism:    

What kind of fool am I / Who never fell in love

It seems that I'm the only one / That I have been thinking of

What kind of man is this / An empty shell

A lonely cell in which / An empty heart must dwell

What kind of lips are these / That lied with every kiss

That whispered empty words of love / That left me alone like this

Why can't I fall in love /Like any other man

And maybe then I'll know / What kind of fool I am.

Masha Gessen had an op-ed in today's NYTimes titled "Biden and Trump Have Succeeded in Breaking Reality."  She wrote:

[B]oth campaigns are creating a sense of unreality, in presenting politics as formulaic spectacle, abstracted from the actual politics each candidate represents and from people’s lived experiences. . .

No, most American cities are not in fact teeming with murderers and drug-dealing terrorists, but we do live in a world of profound economic anxiety, routine violence and an opioid epidemic. It is not true, as speakers at the Republican convention claimed, that Biden’s policies are to blame for the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, but we do live in a world of unrelenting news of war carnage. Nor is it true that the United States is overrun by millions of dangerous immigrants, but we do live in an era of mass displacement, of what Hannah Arendt described as “homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.” She was writing about preconditions for totalitarianism in the 20th century.

The Biden campaign’s approach to these anxieties is to insist that Americans are wrong — that experts’ objective economic data disproves ordinary people’s subjective sense of precarity. Rather than listen to their lived experience, which tells them that they are insecure despite all the job creation and economic growth, or accept what they see and hear, which tells them that the president is too old for the job, Americans should fear only Donald Trump, the Democrats insist — and put their trust in Biden, the only leader who can save us from the autocratic abyss. 

As the week drew to a close, rumors circulated that Biden would soon announce the end of his candidacy. It was a hopeful possibility, not just for the Democrats’ electoral prospects, but also for the end of the gaslighting, the re-establishment of a shared reality. But those rumors have circulated before, and yet here we still are.

As for Trump, despite the gestures he made in his speech on Thursday night toward national reconciliation, tolerance and unity, the convention reflected the ultimate consolidation of his power. If he is elected, a second Trump administration seems likely to bring what the Hungarian sociologist Balint Magyar has termed an “autocratic breakthrough” — structural political change that is impossible to reverse by electoral means. But if we are in an environment in which nothing is believable, in which imagined secrets inspire more trust than the public statements of any authority, then we are already living in an autocratic reality, described by another of Arendt’s famous phrases: “Nothing is true and everything is possible.” (My bolding)

Anniversaries thoughts: (1) The fight over religion in the classroom goes on.  Alabama (?) now wants the Ten Commandments posted in every classroom in the state.  The two big tribes in the U.S. - so-called Christians, including Evangelicals and right-wing Catholics, and the rest of us.

(2)  I'm grateful for and to the VA.  It's Vietnam disability benefits and health care program have made a big difference in our lives.

(3)  After Hitler and Stalin entered into their non-aggression pact in 1939, it was only a matter of time before both engaged in aggression against its weaker neighbors.  If NATO fails post-Ukraine, it's a matter of time before Putin retakes control over the Baltic states, one way or another.

(4) I was a month shy of my 13th birthday when the Geneva Accords were signed.   Eleven years later, about a month shy of my 24th birthday, I would land on the airstrip at Chu Lai on my way to Danang.

(5) Finally, Joe Biden accepts reality.