Wednesday, July 31, 2024
1917 World War I: The Battle of Passchendaele (Third Battle of Ypres) began and caused approximately 500,000 casualties.
1961 Israel welcomed its one millionth immigrant.
1972 Senator Thomas Eagleton withdrew as Democratic vice presidential candidate at George McGovern's request after news Eagleton had sought treatment for depression.
In bed at 8:30 p.m., awake at 2:45 a.m., up and out to the BL by 3:00 with pain in the lower right back, right hip, thigh, and knee. I let Lilly out around 4. I'm a bit discombobulated this morning, unable to focus my thoughts on Paul Elie's article on J. D. Vance's religion, bouncing from pillar to post mentally, distracted by nasty pain from my hip through the thigh to the knee. I'm getting a bit "mental" over it. The pain and inability to stand for more than a couple of minutes without it has persisted since July 12, 3 weeks as of tomorrow, with almost another week before I see Dr. England and receive, or not, a steroid injection which may provide relief, or not.
Prednisone, day 80, 15 mn., day 2 of 14. I took my 15 mg. at 5 a.m. with cottage cheese, blueberries, and blackberries. I took 1300 mg. of Tylenol later in the morning.
First, an aside rfrom Elie's article elated to a point I made in an earlier journal entry, about all the right-wing Catholics who supported Trump in his first administration:
After President Ronald Reagan took office, in 1981, he stocked his Administration with conservative Catholics steeped in the Church’s history of fervid anti-Communism—the Secretary of State, General Alexander Haig; the C.I.A. director, William J. Casey; and the national-security adviser, William P. Clark—who then helped shape policies backing Church-allied oligarchies in El Salvador and Nicaragua as necessary for the Cold War “containment” of Communism.
Increasingly, traditional, authoritarisan, top-down, anti-democratic, hierarchical Catholicism is the religion of choice for right-wing Republicans.
Now about Vance. First, he has moved from a fervent never-Trumper ("an American Hitler") to an acolyte, a disciple, and a true believer. "“President Trump’s vision is clear and powerful—we’re putting America first, not catering to Wall Street or globalist interests,” Vance said in his acceptance speech at the RNC in Milwaukee. That's quite a swing.
Second, Vance purports to be a spokesman for blue-collar America, like factory workers in Middletown, OH and miners in Jackson, KY, but he has spent most of his life getting far away from those places and their people. First, he completed high school and enlisted in the Marine Corps, then went to college, and then to arguably the most elite law school in the U.S., Yale. alma mater of the Clintons and almost countless senators, ambassadors, cabinet members, and luminaries of all sorts. Then he clerked for a federal judge, a gateway job leading to employment by silk-stocking law firms, like Sidley Austin, where Vance took a job working for the monied interests of the world rather than, for example, the interests of factory workers or miners. Then he lived in San Francisco while serving for a time in a Silicon Valley venture capital firm led by billionaire Peter Thiel before moving back to Ohio, starting a 501(c)4 advocacy nonprofit, as well as investment firms, Revolution LLC and Narya Capital. Eventually of course, with $15 million backing from Petr Thiel, he ran for and won a seat in the U.S. Senate, a rarified venue far from Midddletown OH and Jackson KY.
Vance is famous, or more accurately notorious, for boosting stay-at-home moms raising their children, but he married Usha Chilukuri, a fellow Yale Law graduate who clerked for then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts and worked for a white-shoe law firm in San Francisco. She resigned from the law firm only this month, i.e., when J.D. was selected as Trump's vice president running mate. What Vance preaches for others he and his wife don't practice at home. Moreover, though he rails against the "elites," he has made himself one of them and he married another. Usha's family is Brahmin caste Hindu. Her father is a mechanical engineer and a lecturer at San Diego State University and her mother is a molecular biologist and provost at the University of California, San Diego.
How does his conversion to Catholicism affect Vance? Is it sincere or opportunistic? In a 2020 article in The Lamp, a Catholic journal, he claimed to be influenced by the teachings of the polymath René Girard, another convert to Catholicism.
One of his most influential ideas is that society is enslaved to a process of “mimetic desire” whereby people learn to want the things that others have, strive to have them for themselves, and then regard themselves as rivals when in fact they’re just imitating one another. Vance looked into Girard’s work, and over time, he writes in The Lamp, he came to see “mimetic rivalry” as an apt description for what goes on not only in places like Yale Law but in the meritocracy generally. The thrust of the essay is that becoming a Catholic was a means of defying the patterns of imitation fostered by the “meritocratic master class”—and, not coincidentally, what he saw as its way of inducing its members to believe that “Christians are rubes.”
Yet it could be said that in the years after law school Vance simply moved out of one élite and into another—and that he has thrived through mimetic rivalry. In Silicon Valley, he worked for Mithril, a venture-capital firm co-founded by Thiel. He wrote “Hillbilly Elegy,” appeared as a contributor on CNN, and wrote opinion pieces for the Times and The Atlantic. He ran for the U.S. Senate and won, bolstered by fifteen million dollars from Thiel. As a senator, he pivoted from harsh criticism of Trump to positions so closely akin to the former President’s that Steve Bannon suggested to Politico’s Ian Ward that Vance could be, as Ward put it, “St. Paul to Trump’s Jesus—the zealous convert who spreads the gospel of Trumpism further than Trump himself ever could.”
So who is this guy? Champion of the downtrodden, the forgotten, the ignored factory worker and miner, Joe Lunchbucket and Betty Babushka, or just a different and more intellectually gifted version of the narcissistic, self-serving Donald Trump? How does his purported Catholicism comport with his support of Trump's political positions like mass deportations, leaving abortion regulation to the states, capital punishment, "retribution," personal disparagement of adversaries, etc.? Finally, what are we to make of his demonizing childless women and marriages and fetishizing families with children?
Sociopathic, mentally unstable, deranged, psychotic? My daughter and her husband? Our daughter-in-law and son? My Aunt Mary and Uncle Bud? Friends? Neighbors? Infertile couples? Those who rationally choose not to bring children into this 'vale of tears'? If I were capable of bringing a child into this world today, it's inconceivable to me that I would. I think of the Salve Regina from my youth: "Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears." How bizarre that we were required to mouth these words of woe as children!“There are just these basic cadences of life that I think are really powerful and really valuable when you have kids in your life,” Vance said on the Chris Buskirk podcast. “And the fact that so many people, especially in America’s leadership class, just don’t have that in their lives. You know, I worry that it makes people more sociopathic and ultimately our whole country a little bit less, less mentally stable. And of course, you talk about going on Twitter—final point I’ll make is you go on Twitter and almost always the people who are most deranged and most psychotic are people who don’t have kids at home,”
Escalating escalation. Some Iranian-backed force killed many children on the soccer field in the Golan Heights on Saturday, July 27. Yesterday, Israel killed Hamas's political leader Ismail Haniyeh in his residence in Teheran. The day before it killed Hamas's military commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut, Lebanon. Two lethal strikes within two national capitals. Will Iran repeat the barrage of rocket, cruise and ballistic missile, and drone attacks on Israel? Will Hezbollah open a northern front and stretch the IDF's already overstretched resources? Will there be an attempt at another intifada in Israel and the West Bank? What does it all mean for America and how will the Biden administration react now that Biden himself is the lamest of lame ducks, with Kamala Harris carrying the torch? Which country is most powerful in the drama, which is the dog and which is the tail? The U.S. is clearly powerless to stop this conflict. Will Russia or more likely China step into the breach and work toward some solution, showing America's fecklessness in the process?
Most notable about the killing of Hamas's political leader in Teheran by Israel is that Israel has killed the ceasefire negotiations that were occurring. This comports with Netanyahu's and his most extreme cabinet members' (Ben Gvir and Smotrich) wish for the war to go on in Gaza. So much for Joe Biden's ceasefire initiative. Another international embarrassment.
Anniversaries thoughts. Passchendaele. In his Memoirs of 1938, Lloyd George wrote, "Passchendaele was indeed one of the greatest disasters of the war ... No soldier of any intelligence now defends this senseless campaign ...". Meatgrinder, slaughterhouse, but aren't all battles in all wars variations on the Passchendaele theme? What leads men to fight in them as soldiers? Shouldn't we all be deserters, draft dodgers?
Dulce et Decorum Est
Second, and Israel's leaders assured that one millionths immigrant that Israel is not a settler colony.
Third, McGovern claimed to be behind Eagleton "1,000%" before dumping him. So it goes.
No comments:
Post a Comment