7/2/24

Tuesday, July 2, 2024

Lights out at 10:10, awake at 2:45, and let Lilly out at 3.   I wasup reading the papers till after breakfast and fell back to sleep sometime after 5 waking around 6:15.

Prednisone, day 51, 15 mg, day 15.  I took the 15 mg. pills at 4 a.m. and oatmeal at 4:25.    

I'm grateful that my mother and my sister are not seeing our long downhill ride to Trump, Biden, Congress, and the Court.  I would include my father, but after World War II and Iwo Jima, he had much less idealism left in him than they did, perhaps none.   

Borscht day but little else.  I made the beef stock yesterday and let it set overnight in the garage refrigerator.  Not much fat, lots of collagen.  I made the soup today, and  head a challenge cutting up the head of cabbage but finally managed it.  I added 2 cans of diced tomatoes instead of one because the soup looked way too thick and the extra tomatoes and liquid affected the taste of the soup in a not-helpful way, but the soup is still very edible, with no carbs to speak of.  I had 2 bowls for lunch.  The cabbage is a bit al dente which is how I like it, not mushy or soggy.  The beef shank is very good.  My CGM readings have been going down since I ate the 2 bowls of soup, just what I was hoping for.  I hope to eat the soup mostly for breakfast, to avoid the early morning spike in my readings that seems to affect all later readings during the day.  Making the soup wore me out.  I had a lot of back pain and often had to sit down to rest.  I took a nap mid-afternoon but didn't do much of anything today, but I did find myself thinking of the following unhappy reflection.

    The photo is the broth/stock simmering next to my breakfast eggs, basting and about to be put atop my corned beef hash.

Descensus Averno facilis est,  America's long downward spiral.  It seems to me American has been going downshill ever since my childhood and the euphoric years after WWII and the victories over Germany and Japan.  We were the only superpower after the war.  All the other formerly powerful nations were spent by the war,  the Axis powers, England, and France,   China was undergoing its communist revolution.  Russia was bled dry by the war, and millions of its citizens killed.  We were the king of the world in the late 40s.

Then in the 1950s, we moved into the Cold War and fear of the communists, mainly in Russia but also in China.  We got the John Birch Society, HUAC and Joe McCarthy, a communist under every rock, behind every tree, black lists.

In the 1960s, we had assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK, so-called race riots, and most significantly, our ill-advised invasion of Vietnam that would tear the country apart, and tear families apart, and rightly bring the U.S. down in the estimation of the world.  It was when, as LBJ predicted, the South abandoned the Democrats and became Deep Red Republican.

The 60s brought us Nixon and Kissinger and the 1970s with our invasion of Cambodia, Kent State, the coup against the democratically elected Salvador Allende in Chili, CIA interventions in Central America, Watergate and Nixon's resignation, Attorney General John Mitchell and other going to prison, the Iran Hostage Crisis, the rejection of Jimmy Carter and the election of Ronald Reagan.

The 80s started the electorate and the nation's turn to the Right under Reagan, a trend that would ultimately take us to where we are now with the Trump cult.  It was the era of the Iran-Contra scandal, Ollie North and Fawn Hall shredding so many documents that kept jamming the shredders so Fawn Hall secreted documents in her boots and clothing to keep them from investigators.  It was the era when the Right-Left divide became deeper and more bitter.

The 90s brought us Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinski, the blue dress, and impeachment, and, perhaps most destructively, Newt Gingrich, the great nastiness he introduced into domestic politics, and the further deepening of the Right-Left, Red-Blue polarization.  The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in broadcasting brought us Rush Limbaugh and AM talk radio

The 00s brought us "W," Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, 9/11, the start of the 20 year war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq on false pretenses (WMD, yellow cake uranium), renditions, black prisons, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, waterboarding and "enhanced interrogation" and of course the Financial Collapse of 2008 and the Gread Recession bailouts for the Wall Street and foreclosures for the rest of us.

The teens brought us the backlash to the election of Obama, our first Black president, with the election of Donald Trump and all that has led to since his 2015 ride down the escalator behind Dragon Lady.  Two impeachments, Covid-19, the 2020 election of Biden, the "Big Lie, and January 6th and all that has ensued.

Meanwhile, as a seemingly constant background to all the above, we have had mass shootings in schools, churches, and other places, ever-growing income and wealth inequalities, police shootings of unarmed Black men, and persistent problems attributable to class, caste, and racism.  And we end up where we are today, faced with a choice between a corrupt and sociopathic Donald Trump and an aged and addled Joe Biden, the best our two major parties have to offer America as 'leader of the Free World.'

America is a Gun

by Brian Bilston

England is a cup of tea.

France, a wheel of ripened brie.

Greece, a short, squat olive tree.

America is a gun.

Brazil is a football on the sand.

Argentina, Maradona’s hand.

Germany, a oompah band.

America is a gun.

Holland is a wooden shoe.

Hungary, a goulash stew.

Australia, a kangaroo.

America is a gun.

Japan is a thermal spring.

Scotland is a highland fling.

oh, better to be anything

than America as a gun.