Tuesday, November 19, 2024
D+14
1863 US President Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg address
2021 Kenosha jury cleared Kyle Rittenhouse (18) of murder for fatally shooting two people and injuring a third during racial justice protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin
In bed at 9:30, up at 5:30.😊 I let Lilly out at 5:45, no hesitation this morning, more pacing once in.
Prednisone, day 189, 7.5 mg., day 6. Prednisone at 5:40 with a slice of cinnamon loaf that I made yesterday. Morning meds at 7 a.m. The right side of my mid-back is very painful. My shoulders are also sore, mostly the right one. Peripheral neuropathy popped up again yesterday, mostly in my fingers. Again this morning. I've also been eating a lot and putting on weight, as when I first started on the prednisone.
Trump has confirmed his intent to use the military for deportations. From the NYTimes this morning:
Congress has granted presidents broad power to declare national emergencies at their discretion, unlocking standby powers that include redirecting funds lawmakers had appropriated for other purposes. During his first term, for example, Mr. Trump invoked this power to spend more on a border wall than Congress had been willing to authorize.
In interviews with The New York Times during the Republican primary campaign, described in an article published in November 2023, Mr. Trump’s top immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, said that military funds would be used to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for immigrants as their cases progressed and they waited to be flown to other countries.
How would I have felt if, as a Marine at MCAS Yuma, I had been ordered to round up immigrants and incarcerate them in "vast holding facilities"? How will this sit with soldiers, National Guardsmen, et al.? I see visions of American soldiers, armed with military assault rifles, knocking on doors or conducting no-knock raids. Ugly.
I haven't been negatively affected by the flood of immigrants seeking asylum or otherwise entering the U.S. illegally. The closest I've come to such immigrants was those working the dairy farms around us when we lived outside of Saukville. My natural sympathy lies with the immigrants both because of the way I was raised, especially by my mother but also by my father, because of my internalization of Christianity, and because of my maternal grandparents, who left Ireland when it was still under the English boot, Cruel Brittania. From my memoir:
The immigration records make it clear that the emigrating Healys were almost certainly poor, landless and with no prospect of acquiring land. Their ‘occupation or calling’ is always listed as ‘laborer’ or ‘servant.’ According to some anecdotal evidence I found on the internet, most of the Healys in Kilgarvin were not native Kerrymen but had migrated to Kilgarvin after evictions by the Earl of Donoughmore during the “Penal Times.” The barony of Donoughmore lay about 25 miles northwest of Cork City, about 40 miles east of Kilgarvin. Kilgarvan is now a town of about 550 people in a mountainous area with scant possibilities for eking out a living. I suspect it had a considerably larger population in 1904 but even fewer opportunities to scratch out a living. There was a workhouse in Kenmare, down the road from Kilgarvan, and chances are the only options Dennis and his siblings saw were the Kenmare workhouse or emigration.
Dennis sailed to New York on the White Lines steamship Oceanic, departing Queenstown (now Cobh), County Cork, May 19, 1904 and arriving May 26th.. On arrival, he gave his age as 24 as that is the age listed on the “List or Manifest of Alien Passengers” in the Ellis Island records. That would have made 1880 the year of his birth. Years later, however, when he executed a Declaration of Intention to become a citizen, he gave his birth date as May 5, 1883, which would have made him barely 21 when he arrived. Adding further confusion to the issue, the ‘holy card’ from his wake and funeral gives his birth date as April 28, 1887, which would have made him barely 17 when he arrived in New York. It may be that April 28th was his date of birth, and May 5th the date of baptism. To complete the confusion, the Itasca County birth register entry evidencing my mother’s birth on April 15, 1922, gives her father’s age as 36, which suggests that he was born in 1886, making him barely 18 when he arrived in the United States. Whether he was born in 1880, as the immigration record declares, or 1883, as the naturalization record declares, or 1886, as my mother’s birth registry declares, or 1887, as the death record states, is anyone’s guess.
At Ellis Island, he stated that his passage to America had been paid by his brother (no name given) and that he was on his way to meet his sister, Mary Healy, who lived in the Lakota Hotel in Chicago. He had a railroad ticket to Chicago and $6 in his pocket. He stated he had never been an inmate of a prison, an almshouse, or of an institution for the insane, nor had he been a ward of charity, an anarchist or a polygamist. According to the manifest, he was able to read and write. I never knew of any siblings of my grandfather, but the Ellis Island records suggest that the Healy clan of Kilgarvan was not small. There were six or seven “Mary Healy”s from Kilgarvan who passed through Ellis Island between 1898 and 1910, all in their teens or early 20s, including one who arrived only two months before my grandfather, in March 1904. Which was the sister in the hotel in Chicago? Who was the brother was paid the passage? I don’t know. (My Aunt Monica told me that her mother told her that my mother lived with “her aunts” for some period before she married my father. My father, on the other hand, said my mother lived with her father and brothers, not with any aunts. Such are the limitations of having to rely on oral histories.)
The Oceanic was only 5 years old in 1904, built in Belfast in 1899 by the shipyard that was later to build the Titanic, the Harland & Wolff shipyard (of Leon Uris’ Trinity fame). When launched, she was the largest ship in the world and was still the longest ship at 705 feet when Dennis boarded her for America. He was a steerage passenger. There was a lively competition among steamship lines for steerage passengers and, in 1904, the steerage fare (on some ships at least) was only 2 ₤ or about $10. Dennis was one of almost 60,000 Irish emigrants that year who departed Ireland for destinations outside of Europe and the Mediterranean, generally the U. S., Canada, Australia or New Zealand.
How did it happen that he ‘left hearth and home’ for a country far away? Did he go alone? Did he walk across the mountains of south Kerry and west Cork to Cobh? Even today there is only one rail line in County Kerry from Tralee to Farranfore to Killarney to Rathmore and points east, all towns considerably north of Kilgarvan. Cobh is only about 70 miles east southeast of Kilgarvin, now only an hour and a half drive along N22, the Killarney-Macroom-Cork highway, but in 1904, traveling that distance over the challenging terrain of counties Kerry and Cork on foot must have been taxing, even for a young man.
I come from humble roots, like the millions of Hispanic immigrants who have become such a political issue now. My 'Boppa' Denny traveled probably on foot the 70 miles from Kilgarvan to Cobh, then as a steerage passenger on a liner, then by train to Chicago. Most of the South and Central American immigrants traveled a much more difficult and hazardous route to get to America, many with small children. I can't forget that they are human beings. Donald Trump would have us believe that most are criminals, escapees from insane asylums, rapists, etc. "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. And some, I assume, are good people." I would reverse the presumption: most are good people seeking a better life for themselves and their children and some bring drugs, bring crime. I don't know how the immigration crisis should be handled. I don't disagree with those who decry 'open borders.' I don't disagree with Trump's assertion that secure borders are necessary for a secure country. But there's a world of policy differences that depend on whether we start out with a presumption that uninvited immigrants are mostly criminals or with a presumption that mostly are ordinary humans seeking a better, safer, more secure life in the U.S. compared to where they are coming from. We know what presumption Trump, Steven Miller, and their 'border czar' Tom Homan embrace.
Last week, while appearing on Donald Trump Jr.'s podcast, the president-elect's son asked incoming "border czar" Tom Homan what border and immigration-related action the public can expect to see on Day 1 of the new Trump administration.
"Shock and awe," Homan responded. "Shock and awe," he repeated with a smile.
Homan, who served as the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the first Trump administration, has suggested he's been waiting more than two years for this moment.
"Shock and awe" was the term used by Donald Rumsfeld and others to describe what was going to happen to Iraq when we invaded in 2003. It portended death and destruction, which of course is exactly what we brought to Iraq. That Homan would smilingly use that term with reference to our government's policy toward noncombatant immigrants tells us what we can expect. Woe.
Say Nothing. We watched the conclusion of this Hulu series last night. The 9-episode series was very intense and dramatic. It depicts Northern Ireland's "Troubles" as seen through and acted out by two Catholic sisters, Dolours and Marian Price, members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. They became murderers in the service of "the cause", driving out the British and (re)unifying Ireland, 26 + 6. As played in the series, the sisters are attractive, and likable, with some admirable qualities, especially Dolours. But any way you cut it, they were cold-blooded murderers of innocents, directly in the case of Marian and complicitly in the case of Dolours.
Email to Jane Casper re Oral History:
Hi, Jane.
I want to thank you again for assisting me in accessing the other interviews in the Oral History Initiative. I have looked at several of them and found them very interesting. Jim Wynn and Joe Donald were students of mine years ago, as were Deb Beck and Carl Ashley. I recall working individually with Carl and going to his graduation party and meeting his wife and parents. Deb Beck was one of several remarkable women in the Class of 1975, including Janine Geske who became a personal friend and then faculty colleague after graduation. May I suggest that she would be an very interesting interviewee for this project although I would set aside a couple of hours for her.
I was every interested in Jim Ghiardi's interview since he was the dominant, or should I say domineering, figure on the faculty during his entire tenure. Many people admred him, many people thought poorly of him, but no one could ignore him. We were not personally close (as I was with Ray Aiken, for example) but I have the distincition of having been appointed to the full-time faculty on three separate occasions and none of those appointments would have occurred without Ghiarid's concurrence. I was a little disappinted that Dan Blinka's interview did not include the years when Ghiardi and I were faculty colleagues or the years when he was the moving force behind the ouster of Dean Seitz and the firing of Bob O'Connell. They were two seismic events in the two years before I started as a student at the law school. Also, there was a serious effort to start a law school at UW-M when I was on the faculty and Marquette mounted an intense counter-effort to defeat that initiative. There were a good many MULS grads of my era who supported the UW-M initiative, believing that MULS's callous attitude towards its students would not exist if there were cross-town competition from UW-M.
I was touched by a couple of the interviews, especially Robert Gorske when he spoke of losing their child shortly after his birth,, and Charles Faran, who seemed to get emotional when he spoke of being wounded on Iwo Jima in 1945 and spending almost a year hospitalized. My father was one of Mr. Faran's fellow Marines on Iwo Jima and he came out of the battle with no Purple Heart but with PTSD that last most of his life, spiritual and psychological wounds, My mother, my younger sister and I suffered with his PTSD as he did. I noted that Mr. Faran identified Jim Ghiardi as his hardest or toughest teacher, even beack in the late 40s/early 50s. I was also strcuk by his identifcation of John Pick as his most memorable undergraduate teacher. Dr. Pick was also one of my most memorable professors I still remember one particular lecture he gave on Keats' Ode on a Gracian Urn and another where he histrionically demonstrated the poetic differences in the French and German languages ('Das ist gut' vs. 'C'est si bon.'_. One of his English Department colleages at the time was Dr. Roger Parr, a Chaucer specialist and another favorite of mine whose son later became one of my students at the law school.
One of the things I noted about the descriptions of life at the law school in the years before I arrived there in 1967 was the apparently greater sense of camaraderie or fellowship or, for want of a better term, esprit de corps. There appeared to be a greater sense of warmth under the Sensenbrenner roof than was the case when I was a student. Student-faculty-staff Christmas parties, student choruses, skits, senior picnics at Ray Aiken's house in Delafield, etc. Mr. Faran mentioned two fellow students singing Ave Maria on the 3rd floor stairwell where the library was when I started law school. He mentioned a law school Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary that met on Sundays after mass in the law library reading room. That atmosphere of cordiality or fellowship (again, for want of a better term) was entirely absent in my student days bwtween 1967 and 1970 and I find myself wondering what happened to it. I wonder how the school got to be such an unwelcoming and almost hostile environment by the time I arrived. I remember Jim Ghiardi reminding my class more than once that "the law school doors open out as well as in" or if you don't like, leave. I confess that I have watched my interview more than once and will probably watch it again wondering if I was too negative, misleadingly so. I certainly seem to be the most dour of your interviewees. I'm a bit embarrassed about that but I think what I stated was accurate, at least to the best of my understanding and memory. If you are at liberty to disclose it, I would be interested in learning who selects the alums to be interviewed and why I was selected.
Again, thank you for letting me access these interviews. I will eventualy watch all of them and be enriched by them.
Gerry Boyle, known for defending Jeffrey Dahmer, has died at 88. I've known Gerry since August of 1959 when he was my dorm floor counselor at Schroeder Hall on 13th Street. He was a law student at MULS at the time. I always liked him though I came to recognize that he had his flaws. His daughter Bridget was a student of mine and practiced with him, which I suspect was not good for her. Gerry was a Chicagoan, like many of us on the 5th floor of Schroeder Hall. He had spent 6 years as an Army officer before coming to MULS. He had the Irish gift of gab and a bit of Blarney. It was almost impossible not to like him. RIP
Marquette University faculty consider no-confidence vote in administration amid budget cuts.
Marquette University faculty members will vote next week on whether they have confidence in university leadership. If passed, the Academic Senate's vote against acting President Kimo Ah Yun and chief operating officer Joel Pogodzinski could send a message of disapproval in the current administration as a search for the next president is underway.
The decision at a Monday meeting to hold the vote on Nov. 25 comes six months after Marquette leaders announced $31 million in budget cuts over the next seven years. The university plans to reinvest some of that money toward top priorities. Faculty voiced frustration with the cuts, the lack of consultation administrators have had with them about the cuts and the way the announcement was handled.
2024 Ukraine for the first time fired American-made longer-range missiles into Russia, after the US eased restrictions on their use and Russia threatened nuclear weapons. From David Sanger's article in this afternoon's NYtimes:
On the 1,000th day of the war in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky took advantage of Washington’s new willingness to allow long-range missiles to be shot deep into Russia. Until this weekend, President Biden had declined to allow such strikes using American weapons, out of fear they could prompt World War III.
On the same day, Russia formally announced a new nuclear doctrine that it had signaled two months ago, declaring for the first time that it would use nuclear weapons not only in response to an attack that threatened its survival, but also in response to any attack that posed a “critical threat” to its sovereignty and territorial integrity — a situation very similar to what was playing out in the Kursk region, as American-made ballistic missiles struck Russian weapons arsenals.
And there was another wrinkle to Russia’s guidelines for nuclear use: For the first time, it declared the right to use nuclear weapons against a state that only possesses conventional arms — if it is backed by a nuclear power. Ukraine, backed by the United States, Britain and France — three of the five original nuclear-armed states — seems to be the country Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, had in mind.
I was only a couple weeks shy of my 4th birthday when the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Over the ensuing 79 years, many nuclear explosions have occurred, but only at nuclear test sites, not against human targets. My dreaded hunch is that before my 84th birthday, nuclear weapons will again be used against human targets, this time by Russia against Ukraine.
Anniversaries thoughts. In the Spring of 1956, my freshman English and homeroom teacher at Leo High School, Mr. Bligh, selected me to represent our homeroom in the school's annual Elocution Contest. Why me? I have no idea. There was no competition or trying out for the 'honor' and I certainly didn't want it but I wasn't given a choice. I picked Lincoln's Gettysburg Address as my elocution, delivered in front of the whole student body, about 1200 boys. When my turn came I stood up and started to speak, with my heart pounding and my mouth as dry as the Sahara. I got out the first couple of paragraphs, forgot the middle portion, got out the conclusion, and sat down, mortified and glad it was over. I've never been good at speaking under pressure and when I feel I'm not up to the task.
The Rittenhouse trial was presided over by my law school classmate Bruce Schroeder. I thought he did a good job but he caught a lot of criticism for one thing or another.
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