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.
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.
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