10/6/24

 Sunday, October 6, 2024

1949 President Harry Truman signed the Mutual Defense Assistance Act (for NATO)

1951 Joseph Stalin proclaimed the Soviet Union had the atomic bomb

1956 Scientist Albert Sabin announced that his oral polio vaccine was ready for testing; it would soon supplant Jonas Salk's vaccine in many parts of the world

1961 JFK advised Americans to build fallout shelters

1976 US President Gerald Ford said there is "no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe" during a Presidential debate against Jimmy Carter

1987 Senate Judiciary Committee voted 9-5 to send the nomination of Robert Bork for a seat on the Supreme Court to the full Senate with an unfavorable recommendation

2002 Pope John Paul II canonized Opus Dei founder Josemaría Escrivá as a Catholic saint

2009 Manhattan Records released "The List", the twelfth studio album by singer Rosanne Cash, with song selections culled from a list of 100 titles that her father compiled and gave her when she decided to pursue a career in music

2018 Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed and sworn onto the US Supreme Court amid protests and after an FBI investigation

In bed at 8:30, up from a long half-sleep at 4:30, dreaming or thinking of MKM and PKR, my long self-defeating anger.    

Prednisone, day 145, 7.5 mg., day 24/28.    Prednisone at 6:15.  Morning meds later, after a breakfast of All Bran Buds w/ berries

One Year Ago:  (10/6/2023)

 Gathering of Friends.  Caren and Dan Goldberg and David and Pip Lowe came over for a gathering before the Lowes depart next Tuesday for their new home outside Tucson.  I was reminded again of how friendship is a privileging conferred by friends.  No one has a right to a friend, except I suppose under the Good Samaritan ethic.  We might think we have earned someone's friendship and that the other's withholding of it is wrong, but we could never make a claim to the other's friendship as a matter of right; it would be preposterous.    If we have a friend, we have been privileged by that friend, voluntarily benefited by his or her benevolent caring about us, his or her willingness and desire to share time, thoughts, activities and experiences with us.  Real friendship isn't transactional, a quid pro quo relationship; it is a voluntary blessing or grace voluntarily and mutually conferred by two people.  The ultimate human friendship is or ought to be marriage, a partnering of two persons in all of life's happenings, a commitment to love and to cherish' for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.'  A mutually shared benevolence like that is a covenant because of its comprehensiveness and commitment to duration.  Non-marital friendships are less covenantal, but equally voluntary, unbargained-for, reciprocal but not transactional, essentially generous.  We and the Goldbergs and Lowes have been making it a point to gather every 3 months to share time and dinner.  We can't remember when we started but I'm told it was when we lived in the Knickerbocker, so between 20 and 25 years ago.  I am the alte kaker with Geri trailing me, the Lowes 10 or more years behind and the Goldbergs more than 15 years.  Caren and David and I worked together at the old F&F law firm, which each of us left at different times and for different reasons.  David had been one of my students at MULS and co-authored a law review article on the state's new (i.e., federal) rules of civil procedure in the mid-1970s.  Our friendship is approaching 50 years duration.  He clerked at the firm before clerking for Judge Myron Gordon and then joined the firm as an attorney.  Caren joined the firm after graduating from UWLS in 1984 and clerking at the Wisconsin court of appeals.  She is the "youngster" of our group.  When I first met her, she was childless; now she is the mother of a doctor, a nurse, and a computer engineer, and on Medicare.  After she left the law firm, she and I regularly got together for lunch every month or two to schmooze.  Perhaps those regular lunches formed the basis of our subsequent family dinners together with the Lowes.   In any event, our gatherings go back many years and there is some sadness associated with today's gathering, with the Lowes moving far away. 

 I'm sure we all realized that with David and Pip moving so far away, our quarterly gatherings to share dinners were at an end.  We were at another 'inflection point' in our lives, especially for Geri and perhaps most especially for me.  I think we have had one get-together since then when David and Pip returned for a visit. There may be another coinciding with an ad hoc visit by the Lowes to Milwaukee, but maybe not.  So it goes.

Work in progress.   I spent a couple hours mixing paints and working on my big canvas.  The entire canvas is now covered with first-coat paint.  The blue hue of the overgarment is deeper than I had wanted and duller but perhaps I can do something with it with glazes.  Not likely with such a dark undercolor, but I may try.  I realized as I finished working on it and was washing my brushes that I could probably spend the rest of my life painting this canvas, working on her face and hair, her belle poitrine, and all the flowers.  

Anniversaries.  NATO may be on its last legs, especially if Trump is elected on November 5th.  Except for the Balkan wars in the 90s, Europe has been war-free from 1945 until Russia's seizure of Crimea and the Donbas in Ukraine, a pretty great record for NATO.  On the other hand, it was precisely or at least probably the stated desire of Ukraine's government to join NATO that precipitated Russia's aggression.  The U.S. gets indignantly righteous about Russia's aggression while forgetting our own at the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, not to mention our subversion of democratically elected governments in the Caribbean, Central and South America.

Soviets got the bomb; JFK told us to build bomb shelters.  We tend to forget how fraught 50s were. (I think) I still remember bomb drills at St. Leo Grammar School in the early 50s.  The Sisters of Providence crammed all of us students in the wide corridor on the first floor of the school and had us kneel down with our foreheads on the floor and our hands over our heads on the theory that that posture would provide some protection from a thermonuclear bomb.  We knew things were serious when President Kennedy advised all of us to build fallout shelters which, we were told, wouldn't protect us from the blast effect of a nuclear explosion, but could provide protection from the radioactive fallout.  I was in the NROTC at Marquette when Kennedy gave the bomb shelter advice.  My Navy roommates and I wondered if we might be activated and commissioned early, i.e., before graduation, because of the threat from the USSR.  Fallout and Bomb Shelter signs were commonplace.  I'm trying to remember if there was one at the old tunnel under Wisconsin Avenue at 13th Street.

Polio was another cause of anxiety in the 50s.  The anxiety was lessened by the development of the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines but I remember kids not being permitted to go to Rainbow Beach at 74th Street and the Lakefront, or to park district swimming pools, ours being at Ogden Park, because of fear of polio.  In the newspapers and on television, there were terrifying images of kids and adults trapped in "iron lungs" because of their inability to breathe.   If the Russians didn't get you, polio would.  And the John Birch Society and Joe McCarthy warned us that we were surrounded by subversive Communists.  An anxious time.

The Ford-Carter Debate.  You could almost hear a collective gasp across the United States when Jerry Ford said that Eastern Europe was not dominated by the Soviet Union - an incredible faux pas.  It tended to corroborate LBJ's comment that 'there was nothing wrong with Jerry Ford except that he played football too long without a helmet."

The Bork nomination.  Republicans were furious over the Bork nomination and his failure to receive confirmation in the Senate.  It led to the incredible mess that Supreme Court nominations have become.

The canonization of the founder of Opus Dei.  A shanda für die goyim.

Roseanne Cash and The List.  One of my favorite albums, but the big question is why did she record so few of the 100 songs her father put on "this list."  Why has there been no The Lest 2"?

The Kavanaugh hearing.  Who do you believe, Brett Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford?    He said she said.  Is there a rapist on the Supreme Court?