11/12/24

 Tuesday, November 12, 2024

D+7

1775 General Washington forbade recruiting officers from enlisting black troops

1933 Nazis received 92% of the vote in German parliamentary elections

1938 Hermann Goering announced he wanted Madagascar as a Jewish homeland

1948 Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tojo was sentenced to death for war crimes

1952 White Sox placed Jim Rivera on 1-year probation after he was cleared of rape

1960 A Military coup against Republic of Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm failed

In bed at 10:00 and awake and up by 5:00 to let Lilly out.  She is doing a lot of pacing this morning, constant restless pacing until 5:39 when she laid down on her TV room mattress.  She lay there for perhaps 3 minutes before getting up and resuming the pacing.  I struggle with thoughts of having her "put down" or "put to sleep" or euthanized, knowing these are euphemisms for killing.  She is in distress.  Is it from pain, a toothache, her nails, arthritis, or some combination of physical causes?  Or is it dementia,  senility?  We suspect it's the latter.  She looks to us for help.  She is utterly dependent on us for everything, for nutritious food and clean water, to be let out and in to relieve herself, for trips to the vet and to the groomer, for companionship and stimulation and fun.  One basic problem is that we can't fully care for her anymore.  We can't lift her into the car for a trip to the vet or the groomer.  Geri does her best to trip her nails and coat, to brush and comb her thick hair, and I'm next to useless.  The other basic problem is that she is old, a month past her 15th birthday.  I look at her struggling with old age and I see myself.  I look at her failing hips and hind legs and I see Geri's knee and left leg.  How do you decide when it's time to have her 'put down'?  It's so easy to rationalize that it is 'the right thing' to do, the 'humane thing,' but it seems such a betrayal of trust, of invited dependency and reliance, of love.  Plus there is the inescapable problem of mixed motivations.  Am I doing this to spare Lilly distress or because I'm tired of dealing with her nocturnal and early morning pacing and her nervous requests to go outside every quarter or half hour?  Perhaps one of these days the issue will be forced on us.  Perhaps not.

Prednisone, day 182, 10 mg., day 3/5.   Prednisone at 5:25.  An apple at 7:30 and morning meds at 7:45.

My thoughts one year ago today:

Israel and America.  I can't resist it - the thought that Israel became, some time ago, a racist and fascistic country.  But I also entertain the thought that perhaps it was practically inevitable, inexorable.  I have the same thought about the United States: perhaps it is inevitable that we will become if not a racist country (but who knows?) at least a fascistic, authoritarian, right wing country.  Israel has always been a militaristic country but that was due to its being surrounded at all its borders by enemies. The U.S. has become a militaristic country with a homegrown Hessian army, not mercenaries in the same sense as the Hessians, but all-volunteer with many of its members induced to join up because of the valuable benefits that are provided to military members and veterans.  Israel's militarism is rational, existential, and defensible; it needs to defend its citizens.  America's militarism is also rational but less existential and defensible; America defends its markets and suppliers of raw materials.  Israel relies to a large extent on its reserves, citizen soldiers subject to conscription, unless one is too busy studying Torah and Talmud while being supported by the State.  Maybe being an orthodox true believer does have some salvific value?!?!  At least in Israel, it'll save you from the draft!  In large measure Israel is right-wing because of its religious wackos and Jewish nationalists.  In large measure America is right wing because if its religious wackos, Evangelicals and Christian nationalists.

It has become increasingly clear that we have been fooling ourselves thinking that Trump is powerful mainly because of "religious wackos, Evangelicals and Christian nationalists."  The way he swept the board in the last election, increasing his margins in virtually all demographic groups, makes it clear that it is indeed many of our "normal" neighbors, our "ordinary" fellow citizens, who have decided that investing a malignant narcissist sociopath with all the powers of the American presidency is preferable to government by Democrats. 

Slaughterhouse.  From David Ignatius's column in this morning's WaPo:

 If Israel doesn’t help Gaza’s civilians, Biden has to stop supplying weapons: Administration officials speak of U.S. policy failures with anguish and shame. 

. . . The new Israeli steps will help, but they don’t come close to addressing the magnitude of the problem in Gaza. “I don’t think people grasp what a slaughterhouse this is,” said J. Stephen Morrison, who heads global health studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He notes Gaza Health Ministry estimates of about 43,000 dead, 102,000 injured and 25,000 with lost limbs — but says final casualty numbers are likely to be considerably higher. 

Israel keeps taking half steps, which the Biden administration accepts. The administration has told Israel that says a minimum of 350 relief trucks a day are needed. The Israeli cabinet Sunday night approved 250 trucks. How will Biden respond?

Gaza’s suffering might become even worse as the last shreds of the U.N. safety net collapse. The Israeli parliament last month passed a law blocking United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) operations across Israel and East Jerusalem. That could effectively halt the U.N. agency’s role in supplying food, medicine, water and schooling for Palestinian civilians.

The Knesset’s action was a direct repudiation of a Biden administration request.  . . Watching each horror has added to the administration’s anguish — and its sense of powerlessness. For Blinken, an especially agonizing moment was viewing the March 1 aerial video of desperate Palestinians swarming a food convoy and then being crushed under the trucks or shot by Israelis. Another shock was the killing of seven World Central Kitchen workers in Gaza in April.

Biden has demanded Israeli action and set a timetable for Netanyahu to deliver. Words don’t matter anymore. It’s a last test for the outgoing president. If Israel doesn’t take immediate measures to protect civilians in Gaza, the United States is legally bound to stop supplying weapons for a war that should have ended months ago. 

 I comment on only two of today's anniversaries.  First, Jim Rivera.  He was my favorite baseball player when I was a kid and a White Sox fan.  My Uncle Jim would take me and Kitty and probably one or more of my cousins to Comiskey Park at 35th and Shields Avenue to sit in the grandstands and cheer Rivera, Chico Carasquel, Minnie Minoso, Billie Pierce, Luis Aparicio, and Sherm Lollar.  Jim Rivera would come over to the stands where fans would get his autograph and I seem to remember getting one, though I may be imagining this.  I know I stood at the railing and got close to him and was thrilled.  He was a huge fan favorite.  Thus, I am shocked to learn that he was also a convicted sex predator, charged with the rape of an Arrmy officer's daughter, and convicted of attempted rape.   He served 4 or 5 years in the Atlanta Penitentiary (newspaper accounts vary on the number of years served.)  Then he was charged with another rape in Hyde Park not far from Comiskey Park.  This time the accuser was the wife of an Army private.  Rivera admitted to the sexual intercourse but claimed it was consensual.  He took and passed a polygraph and the charges were dropped.  With my mother having been the victim of a knife-wielding sexual predator, and my sister and me victims of his death threats, this discovery about "Jungle Jim" comes as quite a shock.

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Second, I didn't know that Diem was the target of a military coup as far back as 1960.  The coup that resulted in his assassination occurred in 1963, a couple of weeks before JFK's assassination.  From Wikipedia: "The rebels launched the coup in response to Diệm's autocratic rule and the negative political influence of his brother Ngô Đình Nhu and sister-in-law Madame Nhu. They also bemoaned the politicization of the military, whereby regime loyalists who were members of the Ngô family's covert Cần Lao Party were readily promoted ahead of more competent officers who were not insiders."  Diem was a tyrant, not a democratic leader.  He was a devout Catholic whose brother was the bishop of Hué and considered becoming a rm