9/26/24

 Thursday, September 26, 2024

rr5

In bed at 9, awake at 4:22, and up at 4:45 with Lilly, who beat me to the front door.  I loaded my new sweatpants and the bath towel into the washer and started to read the papers.  When I get up this late, I feel like the day is half over before it's begun.  I spend too much time on the laptop each day, especially in the morning, but what else does an old ferkrympter guy do in the middle of the night/early morning hours?  Watch TV?😡  . . . Let Lilly out again around 6.

Prednisone, day 135, 7.5 mg., day 14/28.   Prednisone at 5:00.  Two buttered Dave's Bread slices with marmalade around 6. "Morning" meds at 1 p.m.

Random, rambling, inchoate, undeveloped thoughts today:

1.  How long have I been cannon fodder?  My 4 years of active duty?  My 2 years of Ready Reserve?  My 234 days in Vietnam?  Ever since the USSR developed the atomic bomb and ICBM delivery vehicles?  

2.  My friends and family have all been imperfect.  We are all imperfect.  I am imperfect.  Why am I so hard on myself and my flaws and failings?  Forgiveness theory is great but hardest for forgiving others who have harmed or hurt our loved ones rather than ourselves, and for forgiving ourselves.

3.  Reading an article on The Atlantic about Sam Altman and OpenAI going public, I had an image of a guy who retreats to a cabin in the North Woods to get away from the world: no cell phone, no internet, no computer.  He lives à la Walden but one day forest fires caused by climate change threaten him, as does a deadly pandemic in a different way.

4.  We are all born into circumstances that condition us, our complicity in our times.  O tempora, O mores.  "We are all tattooed in our cradles, . . ."  Thoreau did not have to worry about too much screen time, or how to deal with our relations with Israel.

5.  Running out of steam, lessening hypergraphia?

6.  Are the last ten years the worst, the era since Trump followed Melania down the golden escalator to his possible win on Nov. 5?  From "The American Amnesia: byJohn H. Schaar in the June 24, 1976 issue of The Atlantic:

The last ten years or so have surely been the most bewildering in American history. During that time the nation seemed to become a stranger to itself—unsure of its own purposes, divided and angry, its projects and hopes reduced to confusion. Nothing seemed to come out right, and nobody really knew why, though lots of people had lots of theories, ranging from the terminal crisis of capitalism to the hair styles of the young. Disaster followed upon disaster, each adding to the confusion of the one before it. The movement for racial justice ended in bitterness. The program to end poverty ended with the poor still poor. The New Left fell apart and the “cultural revolution” dissipated. The parties splintered. Lyndon Johnson left office bewildered and saddened. Thousands of people met violence and jail in protests against a war that the nation did not want but could not end. Nixon swept into office promising peace and unity, and immediately expanded the war abroad and opened hostilities against the opponents of the war at home. Congress lost all ability to shape events while more and more power was concentrated in the small circle of men around the president.

"Nothing seemed to come out right, and nobody really knew why, . . " sounds like Marilynn Robinson's words in the July 18, 2024 issue of the NYRB in her essay "Agreeing To Our Harm" - "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." 

7.  In light of what is happening in Gaza and Lebanon and in Ukraine now, and what looms over Taiwan and the South China Sea, the concluding paragraph in Schaar's 1976 article written during the presidential contest between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter rings a bell today in light of the presidential contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump:

It is clear now that the strategic doctrine which has guided our policies during recent years is a catastrophic failure. It is equally clear that this nation is not facing up to that failure. The costs of that evasion might well exceed even the costs of the recent catastrophe [i.e., Vienam], for every one of the realities—and, above all, the reality of nuclear weapons—underlying the ruinous experiences of the Vietnam years is still present. As Schell says in the final lines of his excellent book, the questions raised by those realities are unprecedented, boundless, unanswered, and “wholly and lastingly ours.” Seen in that light, the mindlessness and triviality of public discussion in this presidential year appear as a sin against humanity.

8.  I have grown weary of beating on the same old drums, day after day, week after week, especially Israel's behavior in Gaza and the West Bank, Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich. the disappearance of any Left in Israel, the seeming inevitability of some negotiated end to the war in Ukraine and of Russia's keeping Crimea and the Donbas.  My increasing decrepitude: vision, mobility, cognition.  What's the point?      

9.  I watched the documentary Israelism on Ovid this afternoon.  It reminds me of how precarious my relationship with Jewish friends may be in light of my revulsion with how the government of the State of Israel treats Palestinians.  The political state of Israel is not Judaism, is not Jewry.  Israelism is a form of paganism, of idolatry.  I think this is the point of Yeshayau Liebowitz.  I was surprised to see the name of Lex Rofberg as the first name on the "Special Thanks" list.

10.  Lex Rofberg led me to Peter Rofes which led me to the MLS faculty directory which led me to the thought that I'm so grateful I'm not a part of that world anymore.