8/16/24

 Friday, August 16, 2024

In bed by 9 and up and out at 4:50 (!!!) though the last couple hours may have been half-sleep.  Usual arthritic pains.   Lilly arrived to be let out at 5:15.  Wet outside.  We received .55" of rain in the last 24 hours with another .65" expected in the next 24.  Rainy spring, rainy summer. I gave her the normal 'coming in treat', which she consumed in the dining room, as usual (go figure), then she came into the TV room to lie down on her mattress and keep me company in the early morning.

Prednisone, day 97, 10 mg., day 4.  I took the 10 mg. at 5:05 and applied a strip of diclofenac to my knee before leaving the bedroom.  Does it help?  I took the morning meds at 7:20 after my breakfast Pink Lady apple.  I injected the weekly 3.0 mg. of Trulicity at 9:25 a.m. and applied more diclofenac to my knee after showering at 10:15.

Donald Trump on the Medal of Honor.  Trump said that the civilian Presidential Medal of Freedom is "much better" than the Medal of Honor for military valor on Thursday. "It's actually much better because everyone [who] gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they're soldiers," Trump told supporters gathered at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Thursday.  "They're either in very bad shape because they've been hit so many times by bullets or they're dead. She gets it, and she's a healthy, beautiful woman, and they're rated equal." "She" is Miriam Adelson, the widow of Sheldon Adelson, one of his billionaire campaign donors, to whom he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018.  The bone-headed remark is consistent with his disparagement of the veterans buried in France during World War I as "suckers" and "losers."  He of course denies saying this but it has been reliably reported by his own Chief of Staff, John Kelly, a 4-star Marine general.   On November 9, 2010, Kelly's 29-year-old son, First Lieutenant Robert Michael Kelly,[90] was killed in action when he stepped on a land mine while leading a platoon of Marines on a patrol in Afghanistan.   The younger Kelly was a former enlisted Marine and was on his third combat tour, his first combat tour as a U.S. Marine Corps infantry officer. 

David Brooks on emotional intelligence.  In this morning's NYT column, Brooks writes of the expanding understanding of the role of emotions in our lives, not just our emotional lives, but also our rational lives.  He writes "[M]ost of us are emotionally inarticulate. If you are going to hire, marry, befriend, manage, or coach people, shouldn’t you know their core affect, the emotional baseline they carry through life? Shouldn’t you know their emotional profile, the distinctive way they construct emotions in diverse circumstances? Shouldn’t you know how good they are at discerning, labeling, and expressing their emotions?"  What caught my eye was the idea of a "core affect" and "emotional baseline."  It made me think of Kitty and myself, and the "core affects" we carried with us through life after growing up with our father and his post-war PTSD.  I thought of his core affect and how different it was from our mother's, despite her PTSD after Hartman's sexual assault.  My Dad's core affect was weltschmerz, a deep sadness grounded in what he saw and could never forget on Iwo Jima.  It wasn't that he could never experience moments of enjoyment, pleasure, and light-heartedness, but rather that, deep down, he was sad because he knew what men and nations are capable of.  He lived it in his time in the Marines, and mostly on Iwo Jima,  He could never entirely forget it.

On the other hand, my mother was subjected to a brutal rape at knifepoint and was slashed with defensive wounds on her hands.  Her children were threatened with stabbing.  Her home was ransacked.  Nonetheless, after a period of painful recovery, she was never a melancholy person, and never suffered from weltschmerz.  She was quite the contrary; the emotional baseline that she carried through life was optimistic, benevolent, and appreciative. 

I think that Kitty and I took on some of the emotional characteristics of both our parents. Kitty venerated our mother and took after her.  She never really recovered from her early death, a death that seemed so grossly unfair.  And she always felt rejected, unloved, and unappreciated by our father, a feeling I shared for much of my life, including the 13 years in which he and I never spoke with each other.  On reflection, though, I think both Kitty and I took on more of our father's "emotional core" than our mother's.  Each of us reminds me of the line apocryphally attributed to Yeats: 'Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.'  Long into our old age, we still talked of the pain of growing up with him,  Kitty theorized that he was jealous of us and that he resented the time, attention, and love that our mother devoted to us.  She was probably right about that but in any case, it was his 'abiding sense of tragedy' that Kitty and I carried into our adult lives, deep down, as our core affect, our emotional baseline.  We were both deeply thankful for the leavening effect of our mother's brighter contribution to who we became.  I'm thankful to David Brooks for alerting me to the notion of 'core affect" and the "emotional baseline' of people.

Trip to the dentist his morning for a cleaning and a filling of a very small cavity.  I enjoyed schmoozing with Anne Neary about our experiences teaching at Marquette, she at the Dental School and I at the Law School.  I was surprised to learn that some of the experiences I had as a faculty member at the law school were similar to hers at the Dental School, especially with respect to minority enrollment and its effect on grading, retention, and attrition rates.

In today's WaPo: Israel is redrawing the West Bank, cutting into a prospective Palestinian state, a report by Louisa Loveluck, Claire Parker, Sufian Taha and Lorenzo Tugnoli.  The facts reported in this story are too depressing for me to repeat here.  They tell the same story that has been known by the entire world since 1967, when Israel's military occupation of the West Bank began, since 1977 when Likud first gained control of the Israeli government under Menachim Begin, but especially since December, 2022, when Netanyahu's fascist, racist, apartheid government came to power and since October 7, 2023.  In all of its opprssive, illegal acts, the government of Israel has enjoyed the brazen complicity of the government of the United States.  Joe Biden has been especially disgraceful, a boot-licking toady.  Quaere:  what is Kamala Harris's position on Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank?  What is her position on the now seemingly impossible 'two-state solution' to the Israel-Palestinian conundrum?  What is her position on the correctness of the recend ruling by the International Court of Justice that Israel's military occupation and civilian settlement of Palestinian lands areillegal and that the settlements and outposts should be depopulated forthwith, with reparations due to the dispossessed Palestinians?  If she follows Biden's lead, will she gain votes or lose votes?  What do American Jews expect (without suggesting that there is one position among America's many Jews!)?

Rampell vs. Moore.  While simmering my beef stock for tomorrow's sweet sour cabbage borscht, I turned on CNN and was delighted to see another of my favorite television events: Catherine Rampell eviscerating Ste[hen Moore, Heritage Foundation economist and right wing mouthpiece.  I haven't seen the two of them together for many moons.  She is so good.  And, BTW, not an Econ major nor a holder of an advanced degree in Econ.  All she has going for her is BRILLIANCE and hard work.