Tuesday, September 24, 2024
1938 Adolf Hitler issued ultimatum to the government of Czechoslovakia, demanding Sudetenland be ceded to Germany
1950 Operation Magic Carpet concluded after having transported 45,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel
2015 Pope Francis became the 1st pope to address the US Congress. Named Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day as his American heroes.
2015 A stampede of people during the Hajj killed 717 people during symbolic stoning of the devil at Mina, near Mecca, Saudi Arabia
In bed at 10:30, up at 5:25.
Prednisone, day 133, 7.5. mg., day 12. Prednisone at 5:35 Dave's Bread with blueberry preserves and morning meds at 7:50. I let Lilly out at 8 for the second time.
The CROSSROADS program was a political town hall meeting in Milwuakee, at one of the Pabst Brewery buildings, hosted by Judy Woodruff, longtime host of Newshour, and c0-host with with Gwen Ifill for many years. I didn't think it was very informative. It wasn't surprising that so many Harris supporters were from Milwaukee and so many were Blacks and Hispanics, and that so many Trump supporters were from elsewhere, especially the WOW counties and more especially Mequon, across the street from us. Although everyone was on his or her best behavior, , I detected quite a bit of restrained anger underlying the comments of the Republican particants, many of whom were small business owners, It is not hard to understand why small business owners tend to be Republicans or, for that matter, why so many Whites tend to be Republicans. Democrats are perceived, accurately, as in favor of higher taxes and greater business regulations and Republicans the opposite. Democrats are also perceived, accurately, as pandering to racial minorities, women, and LGMTQers. Running s small business (manufacturing, commerical, service, farming), staying competitive, and making a resonable profit isn't easy. Income, sales, and other taxes and fees come off the bottom line and safety, environmental, and other regualtiosns can be onerous and costly. Why would I as a business owner favor Democrats? On the other hand, how can anyone vote to put in power Republicanss who are becoming ever more authoritarian (fascistic) and reactionary under Trump and the MAGA crowd? How can anyone who calls himself a Christian support a government run by the likes of DJR, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Tom Cotton, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, election deniers, and insurrectionists? This is what America has come to. The country is 'coming apart at the seams' and I don't see much hope to prevent it. I think it more probable than not that the next election will be accompanied or followed by violence if Harris wins at the polls. If Trump prevails, we're in deeper trouble.
Related to the above, Michelle Goldberg has an op-ed in this morning's NYTimes titled "A Leading Law Scholar Fears We’re Lurching Toward Secession." Excerpts:
The Electoral College — created in part, as the scholar Akhil Reed Amar has shown, to protect slavery — has already given us two presidents in the 21st century who lost the popular vote, and it continues to warp our politics. It is one reason Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the U.C. Berkeley School of Law and an eminent legal scholar, has come to despair of the Constitution he’s devoted much of his life to. “I believe that if the problems with the Constitution are not fixed — and if the country stays on its current path — we are heading to serious efforts at secession,” he writes in his bracing new book, “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.”
Chemerinsky’s description of the way our Constitution thwarts the popular will — including through the Electoral College, the growing small-state advantage in the Senate and the rogue Supreme Court — will be familiar to readers of books like last year’s “Tyranny of the Minority” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. The surprising part of his argument is his call for a new constitutional convention, which can be triggered, under the Constitution’s Article V, by a vote of two-thirds of the states.
I agree with Chemerinsky that because of the deep structural flaws in our Constitution, the union is more fragile than many assume. And like him, I can easily imagine America getting to a place where the idea of breaking it up no longer seems unthinkable. . . .
[R]ight now, we’re staring down yet another election in which Trump could win after losing the popular vote. Chances are he’ll have a Republican-controlled Senate, even if most people who go to the polls vote for Democrats. He’ll operate under the protection of a widely distrusted Supreme Court — the only one in any major democracy where justices have lifetime tenure — that has granted presidents broad impunity for crimes they commit in office. “The mistakes made in 1787 are haunting us in the 21st century,” writes Chemerinsky. The question is whether America is capable of fixing them before they destroy us.
I have long railed in these journal pages against our minoritarian Constitution drafted by slaveowners to protect chattel slavery. Despite the Preamble's words "We the People", our slaveowning, plutocratic, oligarchic Founding Fathers distrusted 'the people.' Of the 56 men to sign the Declaration of Independence, 41 were slave owners at some point in their lives. Though only 25 of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention ever owned an enslaved person, those delegates were rich and powerful and their votes were essential to attain the degree of consensus necessart for the passage and publication of Constitution. Hence the Electoral College. Hence the sturcture of the Senate. Hence the 3/5th rule for the House of Representatives. (And hence the fugitive slave clause in Art. IV, Sec. 2)
We are now at great risk of having a third president in this short century installed in the White House having lost the popular vote, George W. Bush once and Donald J. Trump twice. What kind of democracy is this? What kind of republic, representive government?
The AMERICAN EXPERIENCE show was Part Three of a documentary series on Lyndon Baines Johnson, "LBJ: My Fellow American." It focused on his extraordinary domestic dislative accomplishments in the War on Poverty and civil rights and his tragic decisions leading to ever greater involvment in the war in Vietnam. I got up and went to bed about 25 minutes into the history, depressed, watching, remembering, and having lived through that history including my 234 days in South Vietnam and what that cost me and my family. LBJ knew what he was getting into in Vietnam, but he rolled the dice with the lives of millions, being unwilling to be the one who lost Vietnam and Southeast Asia to the Communists. I felt like I wanted to cry going to bed. . . .
I did not know in 1965 just how close the South Vietnamese government and its military were to being defeated by the communist forces. I must have known the war wasn't going well or Johnson wouldn't have ordered the landing of the Marines on March 8th at Danang and on March 29th ??? at ChuLai. But I've since learned that indeed the whole Vietnamese government was on the verge of collapse and defeat in early 1965, the only question being how imminent the collapse was. On March 8th, LBJ authorized the Marines' landing at Danang to protect the airbase and aircraft engaged in Operation Rolling Thunder against North Vietnam. On March 15th, he met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was told by Gen. Harold K. Johnson made a prediction: "To win the war, it could take 5 years and 500,000 troops." He knew the stakes but said "If I don't go in now and they show later I should have gone, then they'll be all over me in Congress. They won't be talking about my civil rights bill or education or beautfication. No, sir, they'll be pushing Vietnam up my ass every time - Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam." Undersecretary of State George Ball sent LBJ a 75 page memo undermining all of the arguments in favor of expanding the war and concluding that the U.S. would lose the war. Nonetheless, LBJ ordered the 3rd MEF to land at Chu Lai in May and on July 28th, less than 4 weeks after I had landed at Chu Lai, he announced that he had ordered the air mobile Army division to SVN and said "additional forces will be needed later and they will be sent as requested." The full scale war was on, alia iacta est. His fate, my fate, the fates of millions of others were sealed. We were on our way to My Lai, to Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, to Watergate, and to ignominious defeat.**
Johnson's story is a tragedy. Though I rather despised him in those days (and even voted for Goldwater in 1964), I have since come to appreciate what a great president, and indeed a great person, he was in terms of domestic policy, his pursuit of a "Great Society" and the ending of poverty in America. His accomplishmnents were huge and praiseworthy. His goals for ordinary Americans were magnanimous and generous and I believe his motivations were generous and magnanimous. Vietnam brought him down. Vietnam brought the nation down in a way from which it has never recovered. By the time it was over, 2.7 million Americans had served there, 58,000 plus had died there, and many others were injured in one way or another there. Worse losses were suffered by the Vietnamese people, North and South. Max Hastings' subtitle on his magisterial hisotry Vietnam is so accurate: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975, and much, though not all of the blame must be laid at the feet of Lyndon Baines Johnson.
We who have from our earliest years had our minds filled with scenes of war of which we have read in the books that we most revere and most admire, who have remarked it in every revolving century, and in every country that has been discovered by navigators, even in the gentle and benign regions of the southern oceans; we who have seen all the intelligence, power and ingenuity of our nation employed in war, who have been accustomed to peruse Gazettes, and have had our friends and relations killed or sent home to us wretchedly maimed; we cannot without a steady effort of reflection be sensible of the improbability that rational creatures should act so irrationally as to unite in deliberate plans, which must certainly produce the direful effects which was is known to do. But I have no doubt that if the project for a perpetual peace which the Abbé de St Pierre sketched, and Rousseau improved, were to take place, the incredulity of war would after the lapse of some ages be universal.
Were there any good produced by war which could in any degree compensate its direful effects; were better men to spring up from the ruins of those who fall in battle, as more beautiful material forms sometimes arise from the ashes of others; or were those who escape from its destruction to have an increase of happiness; in short, were there any great beneficial effect to follow it, the notion of its irrationality would be only the notion of narrow comprehension. But we find that war is followed by no general good whatever. The power, the glory, or the wealth of a very few may be enlarged. But the people in general, upon both sides, after all the sufferings are passed, pursue their ordinary occupations, with no difference from their former state. The evils therefore of war, upon a general view of humanity are as the French say, à pure perte, a mere loss without any advantage, unless indeed furnishing subjects for history, poetry, and painting. And although it should be allowed that mankind have gained enjoyment in these respects, I suppose it will not be seriously said, that the misery is overbalanced. At any rate, there is already such a store of subjects, that an addition to them would be dearly purchased by more wars.
James Boswell, "On War" (1777)
** The American Experience documentary includes news footage of young demonstrators chanting "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today." I remember those marches, demonstrations, and chants and they resonated with me more than they did with most Americans because of my service with the Marines in Vietnam. But as I watched the footage, I thought of Israel's actions in Gaza and the fact that there iare no such marches, demonstrations,or chants in Israel. Of course, Israel was responding to Hamas's lethal attacks on October 7, 2023. It was and is engaged, at least at its inception, in a war of self-defense. However, at what point does self-defense become merely a pretext for revenge killing, group punishment, war crimes or genocide?
Anniversaries. We live in a small, interconnected world. Hitler's forced annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938 led to the expulsion of German-speaking residents after the war, including the Kovacs family who moved to Geretsried in Bavaria where they were later blessed with the birth of a son whom they named Christian who was to become my son-in-law on August 1, 2016.
Some of the Yemeni Jews moved to Israel voluntarily, some because of hostility to Jews after the creationof the State of Israel and the nakba. In any event, it's hard to buy into the notion that Israel is not a settler colonial state, in part because of emigrations/immigrations like this.
I wonder what Pope Francis thinks of the rumor within the Church that Merton was murdered because he was becoming too Buddhist. In any case, Francis has a pretty good list of American heroes though I'm not sure how Merton fits the bill as a hero. I wonder if Francis was as warmly received as Netanyahu has been.
The devil got stoned at Mina and 717 got trampled. Allah has a funny sense of humor.
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