11/24/24

Sunday, November 24, 2024

D+19

1922 Italian parliament gave Benito Mussolini dictatorial powers "for 1 year"

1948 "Bicycle Thieves", Italian film directed by Vittorio De Sica, starring himself and Cesare Zavattini, was released (Honorary Academy Award 1950)

1979 Senate report proved US troops in Vietnam were exposed to the toxic chemical defoliant Agent Orange

2015 Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke was charged with first-degree murder of 17-year-old African American Laquan McDonald in 2014

2020 My TIA or ocular migraine

2021 Three men were found guilty by a jury of felony murder of black runner Ahmaud Arbery, with Travis McMichael also convicted of malice murder in Brunswick, Georgia [

In bed at 9, awake and up at 3:35.   Lilly showed up at 4:15.  Long hesitation before leaving the doorway.  Pacing for a while when she returned.

Prednisone, day 194, 7.5 mg., day 10.    Prednisone at 5 a.m.  Soda bread at 6.   I have my normal persistent, right-side, mid-back pain and shoulder pain, especially in the right shoulder. 

Presumptuous Poppycock?  Peter Wehner, a respectable, intelligent, accomplished, humane, Republican, Presbyterian columnist for the NYTimes and a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush.  He occasionally writes in The Atlantic and elsewhere.  I usually read whatever he offers up in his essays.  This morning his Times column is an interview with Richard Hays,a respectable, intelligent, accomplished, humane, United Methodist minister who is an emeritus professor at Duke Divinity School, and is "one of the world’s leading New Testament theologians."  The specific topic of Wehner's column is the morality of gay marriage but the broader topic is about changing interpretations of the Bible and understandings of God.  Here is one exchange from the interview:   

Wehner:  The central argument of “The Widening of God’s Mercy” [one of Hay's books] is that God often changes his mind in Scripture. And you and your son Chris cite many examples of that happening in the book. Is it your view that God has gotten wiser and more merciful as history unfolds?

Hays: I wouldn’t put it that way. It would be presumptuous for me or anyone to say God has gotten wiser. I think the way I would put it is that for reasons that I don’t understand, God has chosen to act in ways that gradually, over time, unfold the wideness of mercy. And that over time, God reaches out to embrace more and more folks in the scope of the people that he regards as his own people.

 Another exchange:

Wehner: Let me ask you about God on this cluster of issues. Is it your view that in A.D. 30 and before, God did believe homosexuality was sinful and that he’s since changed his mind? And if so, would you say that God was wrong in the views that he held in A.D. 30 and during the time the Hebrew Scriptures were written and that God has since evolved into the correct view. Or do you have another understanding of God on this question?

Hays: Well, I certainly wouldn’t presume to say that I know better than God, that God was wrong. I think I would say that God had reasons for telling the children of Israel in the wilderness to observe a limitation of sexual relations to heterosexual relationships. And it was tied very much, I think, to the command, from the creation story in Genesis, that human beings are charged to be fruitful and multiply and in the perilous circumstances of life in the desert. Maybe God had very good reasons for promulgating such a law. I think it’s wrong to say that we can presume to say that God was simply wrong.

I don’t understand the purposes of God fully, but the way I understand it is filtered in part through the stories in the Book of Acts about how the church is impacted by the experience of seeing that the gentiles are given the gift of the Holy Spirit. And so even though there would have been previously a lot of restrictions in place about the ways in which Jewish people could or couldn’t have table fellowship with gentiles, a new thing was happening.

And Peter and Paul, along with the whole church, finally came to recognize that that was the case. So if my son Chris were in the interview — he’s fond of quoting the passage from Isaiah where the prophet, speaking in the persona of God, says: See, I’m doing a new thing. Do you not perceive it? And that’s the way I understand it. God is doing a new thing. And it’s beyond me to understand why things are different now. But that’s God’s prerogative. It’s not mine to judge one way or the other.

The immutability of God (His quality of not changing) is clearly taught throughout Scripture. For example, in Malachi 3:6 God affirms, "I the Lord do not change." (See also Numbers 23:19; 1 Samuel 15:29; Isaiah 46:9-11; and Ezekiel 24:14.)  Also, James 1:17: "Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows."  Thomas Aquinas also taught that God is immutable and that the only way to understand this and to square it with His effects in time (like the Incarnation, miracles, answering prayers, etc.) is to accept His existence in Eternity, i.e., his timelessness and pure Actuality, not Potentiality.  This is hard stuff for us poor earthlings to grasp and it raises yet again my questioning of how one can believe in the God of the Bible, the God of the Summa and the Catechism, the God of the Evangelicals and Pentecostals.  We speak of God as if "He" (masculine singular pronoun) were a "person," indeed 3 "persons. "  (1) The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct Persons, (2) each Person is fully God, (3) there is only one God.  Jews and Muslims, the other People of the Book, can't understand this and most of the rest of us can't either.  It's another of those 'mysteries' we were taught about in Catholic grade school and high school religion classes and in Catholic university theology classes.  All very philosophical and metaphysical and Scholastic and incomprehensible.

 ...........

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.

Isaac Asimov 

Decade of Descent?  On Friday, the anniversary of JFK's assassination,  I ruminated about America's 'decade of descent (not the right word)" between 1963 and 1973/75.   I struggled to pull from my aged brain the right word and got fixated on "d" words: descent and deconstruction,"  I'm still looking for the right word and still a bit fixated on 'd' words: dissolution, disintegration, deterioration, debilitation, decline, or decay.  They all seem suitable in one way or another and perhaps descent is less suitable than the others but then there's Descensus Averno facilis est so perhaps not.  In any case, this morning I am wondering whether we are in another protracting decade of decay (I'll settle on that 'd' word), from Trump's descent (whoops!) down the escalator in 2015 to the present.  Was there something symbolic in the fact that he was descending, not ascending?  I suppose that's a reach but it was the opening scene leading to his announcement speech smearing immigrants and calling Mexicans 'rapists', later to his inauguration speech and "American carnage." and the fact that this wicked, nefarious man has succeeded in noxiously living in our heads virtually every day for almost a decade with more to come.  He has degraded political discourse and normalized so much that in the pre-Trumpian Era would have been shameful, unacceptable, unthinkable political conduct.  OMG, there's another "d" word: degradation.

. . . .

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

Isaac Asimov

Anniversaries thoughts.  First, Mussolini's dictatorial powers grants "for one year"" reminds me of Trump's claim to dictatorial powers only for the first day of his administration.  Ha ha.  I wonder whether, at the first sign of some civil disturbance or threat of any kind, he will demand that Congress give him the equivalent of dictatorial powers, e.g.,. the suspension of some civil rights or normal restrictions on the use of the military or constitutional limitations on police practices.  My guess is that he will.

                Second, for many years I considered  Bicycle Thieves my favorite movie,  Eventually, there were so many excellent films that I enjoyed or admired (it's hard to say I 'enjoyed' Bicycle Thieves or The Passion of Joan of Arc) that I gave up on calling any one film my favorite.

                Third, there's no doubt that I and my fellow Marines at the Danang airbase were exposed to Agent Orange.  The 'Marine side' of the airbase is where the toxins were delivered, stored, loaded, unloaded, etc.,   That whole area where we lived and worked was designated a pesticide "hot spot" in the years after the war when efforts were made to clean up the toxins.  I wonder about the two little boys from "Dogpatch" whose photo I took in late 1965 or early 1966.  They probably lived in that area for years and would have had greater exposure than I had.  My exposure to Agent Orange over 234 days and my subsequent development of diabetes was enough to get me a disability rating and benefits from the VA.  Those little guys, their families, and their neighbors were not so fortunate.

                  Fourth, Chicago cop and the cold-blooded murder of an unarmed, Black 17-year-old.  It seemed like it took forever to charge the cop with the crime and for the CPD in Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration, to release the body cam evidence.  Emanuel appropriately lost the next election because of the cover-up.

                  Fifth, my TIA or ocular migraine manifested as an inability to see the last portion of words on my computer and on the television screen.  Very weird.  The TIA specialist from Froedtert reviewed the CT scans and other records and concluded it was most probably a TIA.  I've been taking 325 mg. of aspirin every day for the past 4 years because of that diagnosis.  

                 Sixth, the Ahmud Arbery murder occured in Brunswick, Georgia, where I was stationed for a couple of months of air control training after graduating from Basic School in Quantico..  I loved being down there, not because of the "locals" or the city of Brunswick, but because of the barrier islands off the salt marshes between them and the mainland:  St. Simon's, Little St. Simon's, Sea, and Jekyll islands.  Arbery was killed for 'jogging while Black' in an all-White neighborhood in a Brunswick suburb.  It reminds me of my kids referring to Black drivers being stopped by the Shorewood police when we lived in that desirable suburb for the suspicious act of  "driving while Black."

Christmas is a-coming and the goose is getting fat.  I know because Geri is digging out the Christmas decorations from the basement and starting to put them up.