10/20/24

Sunday, October 20, 2024

1998 Comedian Richard Pryor received the first-ever Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor

2015 US Vice President Joe Biden confirmed he will not run for President in 2016

In bed at 9:15, awake at 4:27, and up at 4:44.  I let Lilly out at 6:30.  She has become very cautious about going out in the darkness.  She stands for minutes in the doorway staring (at what?) with her nose twitching while I hold the storm door open for her.  Eventually, she stepped outside and eventually pee'd but never moved more than a few feet on either side of the sidewalk, keeping within eyesight of me standing in the doorway.  As soon as she emptied her bladder, she came back into the house.  For the first time, she didn't go to one of her post-outing posts: the dining room/kitchen doorway or next to the kitchen island, waiting for a treat.  She moves around the house, nervously pacing.

Prednisone, day159, 5 mg., day 10/28.    Prednisone at 5ish. Three slices of toasted and buttered Dave's Bread with blueberry preserves at 8ish.  Morning meds at 8:30.

Group memory.  There is a New Yorker 'weekend essay' by Lydia Davis dated October 19, 2023, titled "Do You Remember School?"  In it Davis recounts her experience as a 'co-agent' with another alumna gathering and editing memories of her classmates at Brearley School.  According to the New York Times, "The Brearley School, an all-girls school on the Upper East Side, is one of the most competitive, academically rigorous private schools in the city and also one of the most expensive; tuition runs $64,100 a year."  It is described as a college-preparatory school though it runs from kindergarten through 12th grade.  College prep kindergarten?  Grade school?  This tells us something I suppose of the ferocity of competition among parents to have their children admitted to the school, their ambitions for those children, and perhaps the effects on the children.  But in any event, Davis initially focuses her essay on what she calls 'group memory' and how inconsistent it is.  Of course, groups don't have memory, only individuals do, but I take her point.  I recall a reunion of the Notch House group at Ed Felsenthal's house on Marco Island several years ago.  At some point in our meanderings conversations, Ed and I referred to the drama in our senior year at Marquette in which Father John Holbrook, S.J., threatened to prevent our graduation because we refused to attend an annual weekend religious 'retreat' required of all Catholic students.  Ed and I had self-identified as "Catholic" when we were accepted as students and thus were subject to the retreat rule.  None of our classmates at that reunion, all of whom were Catholics, at least during our Marquette years, remembered the rule.  Indeed, they were sure there was no such rule and did not remember attending weekend retreats during our years in undergraduate school. Ed's memory, and mine, of our meetings with Father Holbrook were vivid and accurate, not fantasies.  How odd it seemed then, and it seems now, that our dear friends had no memory at all either of the rule or of the annual retreats themselves.  The retreats were conducted by members of the Jesuit Community at Marquette and were held in classrooms on weekends when there were no classes scheduled. The only one I specifically recall was conducted in a MULS classroom.  I don't recall who the "retreat master" was.  The most popular retreat master (and confessor) for male students was Father McAvoy, the chaplain and cafeteria manager in the School of Dentistry.  Three Our Fathers, Three Hail Marys, and keep your pecker in your pants.  

Lydia Davis and her classmates are 76 or 77 years old.  The Notch House gang are 83 or 84 years old, those of us who are still alive.  Ed, who was our 'social chairman' and my near life-long friend, has died, the first of us to pass on though after his wife Helen.  I suppose our 'group memory' at our age is even more inconsistent or varied than Lydia Davis's classmates.  We communicate less frequently than she and her classmates do.  I emailed Tom, Bill, and Gerry when Ed died last June.  Tom and Ronnie flew into Chicago for the wake and funeral but they were the only ones able to do so.  Except for sporadic emails occasioned by some news story, our last shared experience was the gathering at Ed's house on Marco Island and the 2013 get-together at our house for the 50th Reunion of the MU Class of 1963.  The longest conversation I had at that meeting was on our patio with Phyllis Nugent.  Thinking of that gathering, of Lyn's wake, and of Ed's funeral reminds me that I should contact Cam Wakeman to see about sharing a breakfast or lunch.

From "How Alarmed Should We Be If Trump Wins Again?  Even many of the ex-President’s opponents haven’t grasped the scale of the man’s villainy" by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, October 14, 2024

Think hard about the probable consequences of a second Trump Administration—about the things he has promised to do and can do, the things that the hard-core group of rancidly discontented figures (as usual with authoritarians, more committed than he is to an ideology) who surround him wants him to do and can do. Having lost the popular vote, as he surely will, he will not speak up to reconcile “all Americans.” He will insist that he won the popular vote, and by a landslide. He will pardon and then celebrate the January 6th insurrectionists, and thereby guarantee the existence of a paramilitary organization that’s capable of committing violence on his behalf without fear of consequences. He will, with an obedient Attorney General, begin prosecuting his political opponents; he was largely unsuccessful in his previous attempt only because the heads of two U.S. Attorneys’ offices, who are no longer there, refused to coöperate. When he begins to pressure CNN and ABC, and they, with all the vulnerabilities of large corporations, bend to his will, telling themselves that his is now the will of the people, what will we do to fend off the slow degradation of open debate?

Trump will certainly abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and realign this country with dictatorships and against nato and the democratic alliance of Europe. Above all, the spirit of vengeful reprisal is the totality of his beliefs—very much like the fascists of the twentieth century in being a man and a movement without any positive doctrine except revenge against his imagined enemies. And against this: What? Who? The spirit of resistance may prove too frail, and too exhausted, to rise again to the contest. Who can have confidence that a democracy could endure such a figure in absolute control and survive? An oncologist who, in the face of this much evidence, shrugged and proposed watchful waiting as the best therapy would not be an optimist. He would be guilty of gross malpractice. One of those personal-injury lawyers on the billboards would sue him, and win.

What any plausible explanation must confront is the fact that Trump is a distinctively vile human being and a spectacularly malignant political actor. In fables and fiction, in every Disney cartoon and Batman movie, we have no trouble recognizing and understanding the villains. They are embittered, canny, ludicrous in some ways and shrewd in others, their lives governed by envy and resentment, often rooted in the acts of people who’ve slighted them.  . . . Trump is a villain. He would be a cartoon villain, if only this were a cartoon. Every time you try to give him a break—to grasp his charisma, historicize his ascent, sympathize with his admirers—the sinister truth asserts itself and can’t be squashed down. 

Villainy inheres in individuals. There is certainly a far-right political space alive in the developed world, but none of its inhabitants—not Marine Le Pen or Giorgia Meloni or even Viktor Orbán—are remotely as reckless or as crazy as Trump. Our self-soothing habit of imagining that what has not yet happened cannot happen is the space in which Trump lives, just as comically deranged as he seems and still more dangerous than we know.