Sunday, December 1, 2024
D+26
1955 Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to move to the back of a bus and give her seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama
1958 Our Lady of Angels School fire killed 92 students & 3 nuns in Chicago, Illinois
1994 Jim Bakker, American televangelist and convicted fraud was released from jail
In bed at 9, awake at 5, and up at 5:10.
Prednisone, day 201, 7.5 mg., day 16. Prednisone at 5:30. Breakfast of Thanksgiving mashed potatoes and corn. Morning meds at 10ish.
The Common Good. I started my Sunday morning reading the Wikipedia entries for Rerum Novarum, Quadragesio Anno, Mater et Magistra, and Centessimus Annus, the Big Four encyclicals constituting Catholic Social Teaching, the subject that I studied under the guidance of Father Lasance as an undergraduate student at Marquette. I should read the encyclicals themselves but they are lengthy and even with the aid of backlighting and enlarged fonts on the laptop, my eyes can't handle that kind of reading. Also, there is something really tedious about Pope=speak. The encyclicals are decidedly utopian. They are all grounded on the existence of the Scholastic, Catholic God who 'has a plan' and 'acts in history.' There is something for everybody in these writings, except for Marxist Communists. They extol the 'transcendental dignity' of every human being and worker, every worker's 'right' to what has come to be called a living wage sufficient to support a family, and the right to form unions and to engage in collective bargaining. On the other hand, they treat the 'right' to own private property as God-given and 'a natural right.' The right to organize is not restricted to workers and their unions but also extends to shareholders and their corporations. Women, or at least mothers, should work at home. Under the principle of subsidiarity, the government should not interfere unless necessary in the workings of private societies, like families and corporations. The Church has, and governments ought to have, a 'preferential option for the poor', but I can see how right-wing Catholics (of which there are clearly many in the U.S.) like J. D.Vance and the Catholics on the Supreme Court, find support for their political philosophies in these encyclicals. though I'm sure that they, like I, have not read them in ipsis verbis.
Some thoughts worth thinking about. From an essay in the WaPo by Philip Kenncott in yesterday's WaPo titled "In grim times, art finds a way: Artists helped America process the first Trump administration. How will they do it again?" Excerpts:
Ultimately, it became clear that Trumpism threatened the very possibility of art, not because of policy, or funding or freedom of expression issues, but at the existential, philosophical level. Art does many things, and is defined in many ways. Art connects us to each other, to the world, to community. Art refines our senses, sharpens our thinking, trains us in perception. Art helps us see both passionately and clearly; it increases our capacity for empathy and care; it is a kind of moral reasoning; it elicits emotions and tames their destructive power; it draws us deeper into ourselves, helps us sort out the trivial and ephemeral from the essential and eternal; it both consoles us and sharpens our pain.
This list is neither exhaustive, nor prescriptive. Not all art does all these things, and some of these things are contradictory and even paradoxical. But Trumpism seems opposed to almost all of these things, coarsening the country, dividing it, muddying the waters. Trump has called on his followers, and soon will call on the country at large, to harden their hearts as mass deportations begin. When he says things that are demonstrably not true, that rhetoric is a relentless assault on thinking, nuance and ambiguity — all the things that art, at its best, helps to foster.
More than anything else, the omnipresence of Trumpism became the problem in 2016, and stands to be the problem again. Creativity and clear thinking require silence, listening, receptivity and time.
Trump is the master of noise, crisis, chaos. Artists don’t just need money, they need a space apart from the flashing lights, pinging cellphones, the sirens and social media alerts, and the anxieties that Trump creates and exploits. In a 2022 work called “Cursed,” artist Jenny Holzer dealt with the perpetual onslaught of distraction by reproducing Trump’s tweets on torn fragments of stamped lead-and-copper plates, and pinning them to the wall of the Guggenheim Museum, turning the ephemera of digital pollution into a kind of memorial, a fixed, static thing, permanent and terribly sad.
“I’m most worried that this country is not what I thought it was, but someplace much more cruel and nasty and selfish,” wrote Ruth Marcus, one of The Post opinion section’s lead political commentators, after Trump’s reelection. She echoed a sentiment expressed by other pundits, and many ordinary Americans. Most art critics probably feel the same way, but with an even sharper edge. You don’t struggle to make a career writing about the arts without believing absolutely in the power of art to make the world a better place, to make people better, to do all those morally redemptive things on the long list cited above.
In an earlier age, art served power, and many arts institutions today are too closely allied with power. But most of the larger art world, including many of the performing arts, literature and the fine arts, have been in the “resistance” since long before the term took on its current meaning.
They resist meaninglessness and absurdity, naked power and raw destruction. They make and do things to keep darkness at bay, to create spaces where the “lion griefs” nuzzle rather than consume us (to paraphrase W.H. Auden’s extraordinary image). Shadowing all of this is the possibility that none of it is true, that art, too, is meaningless and impotent, that it is at best a distraction or an irrelevance. Artists have served power, have made glorious documents of barbarism, have been purveyors of propaganda.
So, when Trumpism won the day, the disorientation for people committed to the arts may have been even more profound than that of those trying to figure out failures of messaging, demographic shifts or class realignment. It’s not just about trying to understand what happened; it’s the darker possibility that beauty will lose against barbarism, that the nation’s soul is sick, that art will never succeed in doing all the things we think it can do.
I'm not the only one who thinks so. From this morning's WaPo, "Former Defense Minister Accuses Israel of Committing War Crimes in Gaza. " The subheadline Is "The comments by Moshe Yaalon were swiftly denied and condemned by allies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who said that they would hurt the country and help its enemies.: Big surprise: the accused pleads not guilty. Excerpts:
A former Israeli defense minister has accused Israel of committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip, a rare critique from a member of the security establishment at a time of war. The comments by Moshe Yaalon came amid mounting criticism of the Israeli military’s conduct in Gaza.
At an event on Saturday, Mr. Yaalon denounced Mr. Netanyahu’s government for its actions in Gaza “The path they’re dragging us down is to occupy, annex, and ethnically cleanse — look at the northern strip,” he said. He also said Israel was being pulled in the direction of building settlements in the territory, a notion that is supported by far-right politicians in Mr. Netanyahu’s government.
Mr. Yaalon doubled down on his accusations on Sunday, saying on public radio that Mr. Netanyahu’s government was exposing Israeli commanders to lawsuits at the International Criminal Court and was putting their lives at risk. . . . He later said, in an apparent reference to the government: “At the end of the day, they’re perpetrating war crimes.”
He must be an anti-semite, one of those "self-hating Jews. Jews who aren't Zionists = self-hating Jews. Jews who are appalled at the way Israelis oppress Palestinian Arabs = self-hating Jews. Goyim who aren't Zionists = antisemites. Goyim who are appalled at the way Israelis oppress Palestinian Arabs = antisemites.
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