Saturday, August 31, 2024
1928 Bertolt Brecht & Kurt Weil's "The Threepenny Opera" premiered in Berlin
1941 "Great Gildersleeve," a spin-off of "Fibber McGee & Molly", debuted on radio
1946 Foghorn Leghorn, a Warner Bros. cartoon character first debuted
1997 Diana, Princess of Wales, dies in a car crash in a road tunnel in Paris
In bed at 9:50 p.m. after dozing for an hour on the recliner, woke up around 2:30, and out of bed at 3:10 to let Lilly out.
It is hard not to believe that the government of Israel is using disease, along with hunger, as weapons in its war against Hamas, or is it its war against Gaza. Its bombing, artillery, and infantry attacks on varying sections of Gaza, accompanied by evacuation orders, have displaced most of the Gazan civilians from their homes, forcing overcrowding in displaced persons camps with no clean water, no plumbing, no toilets, no sanitary sewage systems, and grossly inadequate health care systems. Cheek-by-jowl living conditions mean bacteria and viruses, air-borne and water-borne, are always and everywhere spreading from person to person. It's not even possible for people to wash their hands with soap and clean water. Raw sewage runs through the streets and even into the Mediterranean Sea, turning parts of the coastline brown instead of blue. Dysentery and diarrheal diseases are common, as is jaundice presumably from hepatitis, pneumonia, and severe skin diseases, especially among children. All of this is the predictable and therefore the presumably intended result of almost a year of unrelenting warfare in the very densely populated region. There is fear of a cholera outbreak and now of course polio. Israel is concerned not only about the spread of polio among the Palestinians but of its infecting the Israeli troops serving in Gaza and its spreading into Israel proper.
How often have I posted this photograph I took almost 60 years ago, two skinny little Vietnamese boys, residents of the village across the road from the Marine side of the big airbase at Danang, carefully holding on to the barbed wire fencing that separated 'them' from 'us,' the Vietnamese villagers from the Americans. It is hard to see in the photo, but the shorter of the two boys has his arm around the shoulders of the taller, who might have been his brother or a cousin, or simply a friend. I took the photo from far away; this is a cropped and enlarged copy of the original. I don't know what moved me to take it but I have held on to it for nearly 60 years and am haunted by it. What happened to these boys? How did the American War, as the Vietnamese call it, affect them? Did they survive it? Were they affected by the years of Agent Orange storage on the Marine side of the airbase, which became a "hot spot" requiring years of remediation? Did they survive the takeover by North Vietnam and the communists? Was their mother a 'moma-san' for the Marines living in tents on our side of the barbed wire? How many hundreds of thousands of other skinny little Vietnamese boys and girls were affected by what we did in the war: how many killed, maimed, burned, poisoned, genetically corrupted? How much thought did any of us Americans give to the effect of our actions there, on the ground and in the air, have on the children of Vietnam? What difference did it make to us? For most of us, it made no difference; we didn't hate them, we were simply indifferent. Shame on us. Shame on me.
This painting and the one below I did in the 1990s during the breakup of Yugoslavia and the wars between Serbs and their former countrymen: Croatians, Bosnians, Montenegrins. I used news photographs as my subjects, each showing a child affected by the combat.
Why I have no reverence for the Constitution and our 'Founding Fathers.' From this morning's NYTimes, an article by Jennifer Szalai titled "The Constitution is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous? - One of the biggest threats to America’s politics might be the country’s founding document.
Trump owes his political ascent to the Constitution, making him a beneficiary of a document that is essentially antidemocratic and, in this day and age, increasingly dysfunctional.
After all, Trump became president in 2016 after losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral College (Article II). He appointed three justices to the Supreme Court (Article III), two of whom were confirmed by senators representing just 44 percent of the population (Article I). Those three justices helped overturn Roe v. Wade, a reversal with which most Americans disagreed. The eminent legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, worried about opinion polls showing “a dramatic loss of faith in democracy,” writes in his new book, “No Democracy Lasts Forever”: “It is important for Americans to see that these failures stem from the Constitution itself.”
Back in 2018, Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley’s law school, still seemed to place considerable faith in the Constitution, pleading with fellow progressives in his book “We the People” “not to turn their back on the Constitution and the courts.” By contrast, “No Democracy Lasts Forever” is markedly pessimistic. Asserting that the Constitution, which is famously difficult to amend, has put the country “in grave danger,” Chemerinsky lays out what would need to happen for a new constitutional convention — and, in the book’s more somber moments, he entertains the possibility of secession. West Coast states might form a nation called “Pacifica.” Red states might form their own country. He hopes that any divorce, if it comes, will be peaceful.
The damages of Constitution worship extend to the structure of the political system itself. National politics gets increasingly funneled through the judiciary, with control of the courts — especially the Supreme Court — becoming a way to consolidate power regardless of what the majority of people want. This disempowerment of majorities, combined with political gridlock and institutional paralysis outside the judiciary, fuels popular disaffection. The document that’s supposed to be a bulwark against authoritarianism can end up fostering the widespread cynicism that helps authoritarianism grow.
Anniversaries thoughts. I can't ignore Brecht and Weill, The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage, and Brecht's poem To Those Born Later: Truly, I live in dark times! / The guileless word is folly. A smooth forehead / Suggests insensitivity. The man who laughs / Has simply not yet had / The terrible news.
Fibber McGee and the Great Gildersleeve, how warmly I remember listening to these and other popular radio shows in the 1940s and early 1950s. Amos n' Andy, The Shadow, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, George Burns and Gracie Allen. The great sound effects
Foghorn Leghorn, one of my favorite cartoon characters, a Southern gasbag politician. I sometimes think of him when I listen to Senator Kenndy of Louisiana.
Princess Diana's fateful day. It just seems right to at least mention it since the whole world, at least the developed, capitalist Western world, seemed to stop in its tracks for her death and the grandiose funeral with all its drama.
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