9/25/24

 September 25, 2024

1981 Sandra Day O'Connor was sworn in as the first female US Supreme Court Justice

1986 Antonin Scalia was appointed to the US Supreme Court

1988 Pope John Paul II beatified Friar Junípero Serra (founder of 1st Californian missions)

1996 Last of the Magdalene laundry asylums for "fallen women" closed in Dublin, Ireland

2015 Caitlyn Jenner officially changed her name from Bruce and her gender to a woman

2017 Ex-New York congressman Anthony Weiner sentenced to 21 months in jail for sexting underage girl

2017 First-ever woman graduated from the US Marine Corps Infantry Officer Course

2018 Comedian Bill Cosby sentenced to 3-10 years in jail for 2004 sexual assault, the first celebrity to be jailed in the #MeToo era

2018 US President Donald Trump criticizes Globalism and Iran speaking at the UN General Assembly

In bed at 8:45, awake at about 4:30, and up at 4:42 from a dream about Dan and Caren G. and David L., a dentist's office, scraping ice from Dan's car windows, thinking about Rosh Hashanah.  I let Lilly out around 5.    

Prednisone, day 134, 7.5 mg., day 13/28.  Prednisone at 5:05.  Bran Buds breakfast later with banana, raspberries, and blueberries. Morning meds at 8:40.

LTMW at the dark, cool morning at a car pulling onto County Line Road from Mequon, wondering whether it's a neighborhood physician on his way to a hospital to make his rounds, or to prepare for surgery, or is it the man from Random Lake in Sheboygan County who delivers our newspapers   What different lives the two supposed drivers live!  I think of my Dad who delivered newspapers with his wife Grace in and around North Port to supplement his pittance pension from Continental Can Company and his Social Security.  He also worked as a school crossing guard.  Whether that was at the same time he was delivering papers or at a different time I don't know; it was during our 13-year estrangement between 1982 and 1995, a rough time for each of us.  I think of what meager resources he relied on those days and start feeling guilty over not sending him money, but it mostly flows from my tendency to self-flagellate over my failings.  Realistically, we never had the kind of father-son relationship that permitted candid or vulnerableizing communication between us, at least not until 1995, and especially once he came to live with Geri and me.   

Vulnerableizing isn't a word as far as I know, but I made it up with the meaning of making oneself vulnerable to another, a neologism.  I'm sure there are already existing words that express what I had in mind when I wrote 'vulnerableizing' but none came to mind.

Marilynne Robinson, Agreeing to our Harm is an essay in the July 18, 2024 edition of The New York Review of Books.  When I received it I put it aside meaning to read later whatever in it interested me.  Then I moved it into my bedroom and put it next to my LZB recliner intending to read its essay by Fintan O'Toole "Friendless Trump" but I finally picked it up this morning and saw the essay by Marilynne Robinson which I read because she was the author and because she wrote about Trump and Trumpism. The NYRB format with four columns pages and small type is quite a challenge for my blearing eyes so I moved back to the den to read it online on my laptop.  Some excerpts and thoughts:

I have devoted a good part of my life to studying American history and literature. And I have regretted the habit of self-disparagement that has caused things of great worth to be undervalued, including the habits of respect that make debate possible. I mention this because there is a baffled cynicism abroad in the country, a sense that we will and must fail at everything except adding wealth to wealth and influencing other countries to their harm. We have the war in Gaza to remind us how suddenly horror can descend on a region, how a provocation can unleash utter disaster, and how the contending pathologies of a few men can destroy lives by the scores of thousands. A profound alienation has set in, regularly expressed on both sides in contempt—contempt for Trumpists and those who vote with them on one side, and on the other side Trump and his allies’ contemptuous rejection of the entire project we have called America.  In contemporary parlance this rejection is called conservatism. . . 

More than 4,400 American military personnel died in the Iraq War. Say their average age was twenty-five and their life expectancy was seventy-five years. Then our civilization was deprived of some 220,000 years of productive life—soldiers are healthy and competent people in the vast majority of cases. I am not speaking here of economic loss—our tendency to bring this measure to bear on virtually everything is a disheartening and destructive habit. I am speaking of everything they might have done to enjoy and enhance life, charming us, dazzling us, simply sustaining us in the course of finding occupations and rearing families. The death toll among Iraqis was vastly higher, and a calculation of the cost to civilization  

 I used her rough calculation of 50 years X number of KIAs and MIAs and applied it to our Vietnam War, which resulted in a loss of 3,000,000 years of productive American lives and an incalculable number of Vietnamese lives.

[M]y subject is the rage and rejection that have emerged in America, threatening to displace politics, therefore democracy, and to supplant them with a figure whose rage and resentment excite an extreme loyalty, and disloyalty, a sort of black mass of patriotism, a business of inverted words and symbols where the idea of the sacred is turned against itself. I will suggest that one great reason for this rage is a gross maldistribution of the burdens and consequences of our wars. If I am right that this inequity has some part in the anger that has inflamed our public life, in order to vindicate democracy we must acknowledge it and try to put it right. (All italics are mine.)

I don't understand much of what Robinson writes in her essay. I have trouble grasping or following her thoughts.  This may be simply because I'm not smart enough, or perhaps not well-educated enough to understand her expressions, or perhaps it's specifically a result of age-related cognitive decline.  There is much that I read that I don't understand.  Sometimes reading slowly and rereading helps; sometimes it doesn't.  In any case, there is enough in her writing that I do understand that I don't let the other stuff deter me from continuing to read.  One thing I'm sure of is that it's not Robinson's excellent writing that is the cause of my incomprehension, it's my sludgy brain.

I will suggest that, in the very fact of making no sense, the movement has enormous meaning. Something has enraged a great many Americans, and a democracy worthy of the name should make a serious effort to understand what it is. The pocketbook metric we apply to everything is not sufficiently respectful to be of use.

I agree with her big points, that there is what she calls a "baffled cynicism" abroad in the country, a profound alienation, and that 'something has enraged a great many Americans.'  I also agree with her that there is a gross maldistribution in the burdens and consequences of our wars though I'm not so sure of her judgment that that maldistribution is "a great reason for the rage and rejection that have emerged in America."  In any case, I don't think she makes the case for her judgment in the balance of her essay.  The all-volunteer Army has had a huge impact in reducing the gross maldistribution of burden and consequences that existed during the Vietnam War.  As she wrote:

Vietnam and the protests it provoked brought an epochal change. Richard Nixon ended the draft. This formalized a state of things that had already created a sharp division in American society. The system of deferments generally meant that college students would not be called up. Even at its best this amounted to favoring the fortunate. However, deferments had to be renewed at intervals, and they could expire. So the war was real to the whole population, and the scale of the protests against it became overwhelming. Nixon did not end the war. He did end the threat it posed to the relatively prosperous and their children.

Americans, when they try to understand the past, usually take a prosecutorial stance. They want to place blame. This can lead to oversimplification. It can amount to declaring a moral superiority to those singled out as malefactors that is not consistent with objectivity. But some things simply cry out for blame, in this case the widespread tendency at the time to treat soldiers returning from Vietnam as if they were at fault for what had happened there. They were stigmatized by the polemic against a war that they did not have the means to evade—no doctor to find bone spurs for them, no money or qualifications to keep them in school. Family or personal pride might not allow them to slip off to Canada. 

I looked again in the essay for Robinson's evidence in support of her argument that a gross maldistribution in the burdens and consequences of war accounts for the anger and fury in the MAGA crowd but I didn't find any.  The draft was ended half a century ago, long before many, and probably most of the MAGA crowd would have been subject to it.   Perhaps I need to reread the whole essay to see if I can follow her train of thought.

Anniversaries. First, did Sandra Day O'Connor's gender affect her judicial judgments?  I suspect it made her less conservative than her conservative brethren.  She was a "swing vote" in many cases.  Each of the three women currently on the court occasionally votes with 'the other side.'

Second, Reagan gave us Scalia.  Scalia gave us George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore, and Bush gave us the invasion of Iraq and all its baleful consequences.

Third, Junipero Serra was a religious zealot and a tyrant.  He didn't bring Christianity to the California indigenous people, he imposed it on them, doing much damage to their culture and to their persons in the process.  Apparently this made little difference to John Paul II.

Fourth, the Magdalene Laundries were essentially prisons or reformatories run by the Church, where 'fallen' Irish women were often mistreated.  It was all part of the great misogyny of the Irish Catholic Church and its insanity about sex.

Fifth, Bruce/Caitlin Jenner brought gender dysphoria to the forefront of American consciousness.  

Sixth, Anthony Weiner was a huge disappointment.  Very talented, mostly good political values, an effective advocate in the House, but a sicko.  

Seventh, women in Marine Corps infantry units.  I have mixed feelings.

Eighth, Bill Cosby, pervert and rapist.  I tend to have mixed feelings about comedians also.  I've long thought that many of them are just mean-spirited bullies, often highly intelligent, indeed brilliant insight into human nature and the human condition, but mean and nasty.  I started feeling this way with Jerry Lewis and still feel this way about Jimmy Kimmel.  Cosby of course was much worse than a mean-spirited bully.