2/28/2025

 Friday, February 28, 2025

D+113. . . . Bad 

1933 On Adolf Hitler's advice, German President Paul von Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree after the building was destroyed by fire in Berlin; this eliminated many civil liberties in Germany

1953 Crick and Watson discovered the chemical structure of the DNA molecule

2013 The brains of two rats were successfully connected so they could share information

The 2022 UN Landmark climate change report warned that climate change is outpacing human efforts to adapt, with a best-case scenario rise of 1.5C, and 14% of species face a "very high risk of extinction." 

In bed around 9:30, awake at 3:40, and up at 3:50 to do a full load of laundry and repeat the drying cycle on a full load of towels in the dryer that were not quite dry.   I unloaded and put away the dishes, etc., in the dishwasher, reloaded and restarted it with last night's contributions, and refilled the humidifier. I lit a Kitty candle and sat down to type these words and read the morning papers at 4:25.

Prednisone, day 313, 5 mg., day 24, Kevzara, day 10/14.  2.5 mg. prednisone at 4:45 a.m. and 5  p.m.  Other meds at  8:55 a.m.  Trulicity injection at 8:50 A.M.  

Sunset Song  Last night, we watched Terence Davies' beautiful film set in Scotland before and during World War I.  The characters are played by Scottish actors I had never before heard of.  The lead character, Chris Guthrie Tavendale, was played by Agyness Deyn, her father John Guthrie by Peter Mullan, her brother Will by Jack Greenlees, and her husband Ewan Tavendale by Kevin Guthrie.  The plot centers on Chris; she is not only the protagonist but also the narrator.  I described the film as beautiful, and indeed it is, but it is not easy to watch as it depicts the hard lives of small farmers in Scotland (and everywhere? At the start of the 20th century.  More importantly, it depicts the hard lives of their wives and children, with scenes of marital rape and child abuse.  Chris and Will's father is cruel, exercising the prerogatives of the 'king of the castle' on his subservient wife and children.  He rapes his wife, beats his son, and tries to rape his daughter.  His wife poisons herself and her newborn twins rather than continue to live in the only circumstances available to her.  Son Will runs away from the farm to Aberdeen and eventually to Argentina.  Chris stayed with her father, but what else could she do?  What choices were available to her?  The father eventually dies, for which the viewer is thankful, and Chris marries Ewan.  The marriage is initially happy but falls apart after Ewan feels pressured to join the army during the Great War.  His experiences in the army turn him into a bitter, angry, demanding man who, like Chris' father, treats Chris like a servant and rapes her.  He is executed by a firing squad for his unsuccessful attempt to desert from the army, leaving Chris a widow needing to raise their son and tend the farm.  It is hardly a happy film, but it is beautifully and thoughtfully done.  

As I watched the film, I thought of my own history with my sister Kitty and our war-damaged father.  Will's leaving the farm for Aberdeen, leaving Chris to live with her father, reminded me of Kitty telling me late in her life how forlorn, bereft (my words, not hers) she felt when I went away to college in Milwaukee.  I was off on an adventure, leaving her not alone with our father but without her fellow-sufferer and best friend.  She said she was depressed for weeks.  I left home in 1959 at age 18, while Kitty continued to live at home until she married in 1966 at age 22, never feeling loved or accepted by our father.

The scenes depicting Ewan's decision to join the army triggered thoughts of my father being drafted in 1944.  From my memoir:

Of the 16,000,000 men who served in the military during World War II, 6,000,000 were volunteers and 10,000,000 were draftees.  The draft began in October, 1940, a couple of months after my parents married.  The term of service was 12 months, but that changed after the war started.  All men between 18 and 45 were eligible for military service, but occupational and hardship deferments were available.  Farmers, auto workers, munitions workers and many others whose work was important to the war effort were not drafted.  My father’s job at Johnson & Johnson was making sanitary dressings for combat wounds; he was employed in a war industry.  He had one small child and, after November 1943, another on the way.  When I asked him recently why he didn’t apply for a draft deferment, occupational or hardship or both, he just shrugged.  Was his passivity prompted by patriotism or something else?  It may have been patriotism, of course; there was of lot of it afoot during the war and there is no reason to think that he was any less patriotic than the next guy.  It may have been pride and a fear of being considered a ‘shirker,’ one who failed, as the Irish would have said, to “do his bit” while others were fighting and dying.  It also may have been, however, at least in part, a desire to get away, to escape the responsibilities of married life and fatherhood.  He had just turned 23 when Kitty was conceived and he was to be the father of two by age 24.  Did he want to get away, to live among other young men, with no wife or children about?  It certainly would not have been an unusual desire for one who had married and become a parent at so young an age.  If he didn’t desire to be drafted, for whatever reason or reasons, why did he not seek an occupational or hardship deferment, like hundreds of thousands of other draft age men?  Did he and my mother discuss the possibility of deferment, especially when she became pregnant with Kitty?  As it was, when he was drafted, she was left at age 22 with me 2½ years old and Kitty on the way and precious few resources to rely on.  Could either patriotism or pride make up for the difficult situation she was in?  Was he using the draft as a way to run away from responsibilities, rather like walking away from the responsibilities of high school to make a few bucks as an unskilled worker?  If so, each decision represented seizing on a short term solution to an immediate frustration, with long term negative consequences.  Though I am only guessing on the basis of very inadequate evidence, and perhaps projecting, my best guess is that that was what was going on between my parents in 1944. 

In the film, the scenes depicting Ewan's changed personality after his experiences in the army reminded me of course of my father's PTSD after the war and its effects on my mother, Kitty, and me.  Much of the memoir is devoted to reflections on those effects.  I could spend the rest of the day writing about that and copying and pasting sections of the memoir about that, but enough already.  It's sufficent to say the film pushed a lot of emotional hot buttons in me.  

PMR,  PM&R, and Geri.  The results of my blood tests on Monday were good, which is good news and bad news.  The good news is that my PMR seems to be under control and Dr. Ryzka has ordered a supply of 1 mg. prednisone pills for me so I can reduce from 5 mg./day to 4 mg./day for 3 weeks and than 3 mg./day, 3 weeks, and so on, with another apointment with him and blood tests in April.  The bad news is that the persistent pain in my right shoulder and hip must be osteoarthritis, and I'm stuck with it, which raises the question of whether I should see again my young friend Dr. Cheng in the PM&R Clinic and perhaps Dr. England for another hip injection of steroids and lidocaine.  My tendency to pitch forward and take a header keeps getting worse, and it seems inevitable that I will end up on the deck one of these days, at home or away, and probably will be unable to get up.  This is becoming a more serious concern with Geri semi-out of commission with her knee.  I suspect and dread hearing today that the physical therapy has been insufficient to get the degree of flexion she needs to avoid future 'complications' and that a 'manipulation' will be necessary, or at least recommended.  She was so looking forward to getting this knee replacement and getting rid of the persistent pain she had been experiencing because of her 'old knee,' and now she's had nothing but pain, discomfort, and sickness for the last 6 weeks. . . . 10 a.m., bad news, but expected.  No progress in flexion. Geri placed a call to Dr. Graf regarding the next step and left a message.  It was a big disappointment... Dr. Graf called: manipulation will be on Thursday, 3/3/35, at 11 a.m.

SHITSHOW; Trump and Vance vs. Zelensky.

And then they kicked him out of the house w/o lunch.

Wall Street Journal headline:

Trump-Zelensky Meeting Implodes, Threatening Hopes for Peace 

Vance and Trump tell Zelensky he hasn’t been grateful enough for U.S. assistance in war

2/27/2025

Thursday, February 27, 2025

D+112 

q2w

w3e

r5t

In bed by 9:30, awake and up at 6:10 !?!  Calloo callay!   

Prednisone, day 312, 5 mg., day 23, Kevara, day 9/14.  2.5 mg. prednisone at 6:20 a.m. and 5 p.m.  Other meds later this morning.  .

LTMW at 7:30 a.m., I see a gray squirrel engaged in his or her acrobatic feeding on the sunflower/safflower tube while a young male house finch approaches the tube, hovers momentarily, and then does a "wave off" and perches on top of the shepherd's crook, patiently and futilely waiting for the squirrel to complete the meal and move on.  After several minutes, the finch moves to the nearby bush and continues tarrying until s/he gives up and flies away.  Meanwhile, a group of finches gathers on the ground, working on the many seeds I spread there yesterday when I filled the tube feeder.  I wonder why the niger seed tube doesn't attract more goldfinches.  Then the same or probably another squirrel climbs up the niger crook and executes an amazing leap from it to the crook supporting the sunflower/safflower tube.  What strength and agility.  He floats through the air with the greatest of ease, the daring young man on the flying trapeze.  I wonder whether they are the ones who prefer safflower seeds to sunflower seeds; I suspect they are.

Oliver Cromwell: 'I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.'   This famous advice was given by Oliver Cromwell to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland before the Battle of Dunbar in which the English defeated and subjugated the Scots in the Civil War.  The advice is universal; it ought to be heeded by each and all of us.  It ought to be heeded by Trump, Musk, Vance, their acolytes, and their cheerleaders.  It ought to be heeded by the rest of us, including we who despise and fear them and believe that they are taking us on the road to perdition.  They are right about the unsustainability of the national debt and the urgency of the need to address it.  There's a small kernel of truth in Trump's claim that Zelwnaky ns Ukraine provoked Russia's invasion by their tilt to the West, especially their move to join the EU and NATO, too big a poke at the bear.  None of this excuses the ham-handed, disrespectful, cruel, and probably illegal way Elon Musk and his young myrmidons are going about decimating the federal workforce, or Trump's pulling the rug out from under Ukraine, another of his many betrayals.  None of this excuses the cascade of lies that pours from the mouths of Trump and Musk.  Since so much of what they say is deceit, it's hard to believe anything they, and their Republican  defenders, say, but I'll try to follow Cromwell's advice,  

Geri is struggling mightily (painfully) with her straightening and bending exercises in an attempt to avoid a "manipulation," which is not without substantial risks.  Tomorrow is D-Day and it's not looking good

I worked on the tax returns today and shopped at Metro Market, where I had a "Willy Makit" experience.

This Ole House

This old house once knew my children / This old house once knew my wife

This old house was home and comfort / As we fought the storms of life

This old house once rang with laughter / This old house heard many shouts

Now she trembles in the darkness / When the lightnin' walks about

Ain’t gonna need this house no longer / Ain't gonna need this house no more

Ain't got time to fix the shingles / Ain’t got time to fix the floor

Ain't got time to oil the hinges / Nor to mend the window-pane

Ain't gonna need this house no longer / I'm gettin' ready to meet the saints

]

This old house is a-gettin' shaky / Tthis old house is a-gettin' old

This old house lets in the rain / This old house lets in the cold

Oh my knees are gettin' chilly /But I feel no fear or pain

’Cause I see an angel peekin’ / Through a broken window-pane

2/26/2026

 Wednesday, February 26, 2025

D+111

1935 RADAR (Radio Detection and Ranging) is first demonstrated in Daventry, England

1973 Triple Crown horse Secretariat was bought for a record $5.7m

2023 One of the most violent incidents of revenge by mobs of Israeli settlers, who burned 200 buildings in Palestinian villages and killed at least one person after a Palestinian gunman killed two Israelis in the northern West Bank

2025 First death from measles in the US occurred in Texas in a decade, and the first child to die in 22 years amid an outbreak affecting 124 people 

An attempt to capture JPG's sunrise photo

In bed at 9:05, awake and up at 4:52.    

Prednisone, day 311, 5 mg., day 22, Kevzara, day 8/14.  2.5 mg. prednisone at 5 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.  Other meds at 10:15 a.m. 

Browsing Facebook this morning, I see JPG's regular sunrise photo taken with her trusty iPhone.  Sarah Smarsh, a crush bunny for years, announced that she is leaving social media for a year to concentrate on writing a book she has committed to writing.  Her post referred to her writing as "an act of resistance against political and corporate forces that seek to siphon our lifeblood for their profit."  She attached an article on the significance of the U. S Postal Service to rural Americans and adds"As with public schools and every other struggling component of our government system, the main issue behind its struggles is intentional underfunding and onerous burdens devised by those who profit from privatization."  In another post, Heather Cox Richardson quotes Pete Buttigieg: "A defining policy battle is about to come to a head in this country. The Republican budget will force everyone—especially Congress and the White House—to make plain whether they are prepared to harm the rest of us in order to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest.”  He was referring to the upcoming Budget Bill and the basic differences between Democrats and Republicans over (1) how to raise money to support government programs and (2) what to spend the money on.  Richardson notes that "Since the 1990s, when the government ran surpluses under Democratic president Bill Clinton, tax cuts under Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, along with unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have produced massive budget deficits that, in turn, have added trillions to the national debt."  Richardson went on to explain, as she does so well, what exactly is going on in Congress over the Budget Bill, and how the Republicans proposed to fund the tax cuts for the wealthy by cuts to (1) Medicare and Medicaid, and (2) food stamps, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.  It is hard for me to believe what is going on in America now, but it shouldn't be.  For years, we have been unwilling to tax ourselves at sufficiently high rates to pay the nation's bills with only a sustainable level of annual deficits and national debt. Joe Scarborough in one of his morning rants accurately points out that from the founding of the American Republic until 2001, over those 220 years, the United States accumulated $5 trillion in debt.  In the last 20+ years, we have accumulated up to $36 trillion.  The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office tells us that if the Republicans pass what they are proposing to pass, the debt is going to increase another $23 trillion over the next decade.  Scarborough says, accurately, "We are in meltdown mode."  He points out that we spend more money on interest on our national debt than we do on the defense budget, which is the highest war budget in the world.  THIS IS MADNESS.  What kind of world are we leaving our children, grandchildren, and their children and grandchildren?  If Congress and Trump follow through on this budget, America will be less great, less secure, less wealthy, and less healthy - all the "MAGAs" upside down.  More rural hospitals will shut down.  More elderly people will be tossed out of nursing homes while Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Trump will be wealthier and probably living on their massive yachts in offshore Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or perhaps in penthouses in Dubai or Abu Dhabi.

Russian asset or Russian agent?  I've asked this question before about Donald Trump.  In Thomas Friedman's column today, we find this: 

The drama going on between President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine raises one of the most disturbing questions I’ve ever had to ask about my own country: Are we being led by a dupe for Vladimir Putin — by someone ready to swallow whole the Russian president’s warped view of who started the war in Ukraine and how it must end? Or are we being led by a Mafia godfather, looking to carve up territory with Russia the way the heads of crime families operate? “I’ll take Greenland, and you can take Crimea. I’ll take Panama, and you can have the oil in the Arctic. And we’ll split the rare earths of Ukraine. It’s only fair.”

Either way, my fellow Americans and our friends abroad, for the next four years at least, the America you knew is over. The bedrock values, allies and truths America could always be counted upon to defend are now all in doubt — or for sale. Trump is not just thinking out of the box. He is thinking without a box, without any fidelity to truth or norms that animated America in the past.

. . .

[There's] a benign interpretation of Trump — that he is just besotted with Putin, Russia’s Christian nationalist, anti-woke crusader, and not applying the common sense that he promised. But then there is also another explanation: Trump does not see American power as the cavalry coming to rescue the weak seeking freedom from those out to quash them; he sees America as coming to shake down the weak. He’s running a protection racket. 

Black Bart Musk appeared at DJT's first cabinet meeting.  A real shitshow.  One lie after another.

 

2/25/2025

Tuesday, February 25, 2025

D+110

1932 Austrian immigrant Adolf Hitler obtained German citizenship

1994 Israeli extremist Baruch Goldstein massacred at least 55 Palestinians at Hebron Ibrahimi Mosque, with an assault  rifle

2024 President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died fighting in the two years since Russia invaded

In bed before 9,  awake and u[ at 3;30 to put a full load of laundry into the washing machine, fill the empty humidifier, and light a log in the fireplace.  I had dozed on and off in the recliner after 8 while Geri was watching something on the TV.  As usual, my back aches in various places and my right shoulder aches.  I should receive a call today from Dr. Ryzka or one of the rheumatology nurses informing me of the results of yesterday's blood tests for the markers of inflammation, sed rate and C-reactive protein.

Prednisone, day 310, 5 mg., day 21, Kevzara, day 7/14.  2.5 mg. prednisone at 4 a.m. and at 5 p.m.  Other meds at about 8 a.m.      

At 4 a.m. I am thinking of mindfulness, mindful of the flames consuming the log in the fireplace the soft, repetitive sounds of the washing machine, the floating mist from the humidifier, and the Buddha's first fact of existence: impermanence, transience, change.

Today's task: pick up one or more Susan Crawford yard signs at the DPMC office, 2999 S. Delaware Avenue.      

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes.  Commander-in-chief and Chief Magistrate Donald J. Trump.  Director of the FBI Kash Patel.  Deputy Director of the FBI Dan Bognino.  Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.  Übermensch Elon ($400,000,000,000) Musk. 

Trump's Spoils System.  Musk gave $350,000,000 to Trump to get him elected and Trump gave the federal government to Mush in return.  Quid pro quo.  The SEC investigates and fines Musk for Tesla; Musk gets all the computer data of the SEC on his and competing firms.  FAA fines Elon Musk's SpaceX $633,000 for violations during two launches from Florida; Musk gets all the computer data of the FAA regarding his and competing firms and slashes its personnel.  The FDA has vital investigative and approval authority over Musk's Neuralink brain implants; Musk's personnel cuts included about 20 people in the FDA’s office of neurological and physical medicine devices, several of whom worked on Neuralink.  The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration wants information on all crashes involving self-driving cars, including Musk's Tesla; Musk gets all the computer data of the NHTSA, in its own firm and on competitors and cuts personnel whose duties include monitoring Tesla's safety record.

Question:  Does Musk serve at the pleasure of Trump or does Trump serve at the pleasure of Musk?

Our National Shame, Disgrace, and Embarrassment.  At the UN yesterday, the United States joined with Russia, Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Israel, Hungary, Syria, Haiti, and some others in voting against a resolution condemning Russia as the aggressor in the war in Ukraine.  The resolution was proposed by European states including the U.S.'s NATO allies.  Alexander Vindman on Morning Joe this morning asked a question I have long wondered about: what does Putin have on Trump?  His bending over backward to support Putin makes little sense.  He's getting nothing for it, while he gives away the farm to Putin.  I have long suspected that the story in the (in)famous 'Steele dossier' about Trump's 'golden shower' in a Moscow hotel, recorded by the KBG, has some truth to it.  His disgusting liaison with Stormy Daniels is consistent with it.  He is a criminal pervert. 

Semi-busy day.  I went to the HQ of the Milwaukee County Democratic Party in Bayview and picked up 2 Crawford yard signs and then took a very enjoyable ride through Bayview and the 3rd Ward to the Central Post Office to drop off mail, including the check and note to Lizzie about her volunteer work for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.  Later this afternoon, I prepared a pot of auliflower-bacon soup. 

Geri is undergoing some pretty painful stretches in her effort to avoid a "manipulation" of her new knee.  It's had for me to watch her suffer and harder for her to endure it, 3 to 5 times/day.

2/24/2025

 Monday, February 24, 2025

D+109

1208 Francis of Assisi, 26, is said to have received his vocation in the Portiuncula

1803 US Supreme Court 1st ruled a law unconstitutional (Marbury v Madison)

1977 President Jimmy Carter announced US foreign aid would consider human rights

2022  Russia invaded Ukraine

In bed by 9:00, awake and up at 4:02.    

Prednisone, day 309, 5 gm., day 20, Kevzara, day 6/14. 2.5 mg. at 4:10  a.m. and   p.m.   Other meds at 6:30 a.m. 

JPG's daybreak photo yesterday

  

It's like living in one of my bad dreams, wondering when it will become an all-out nightmare.  During the years in which Kitty and I started every morning exchanging news and thoughts, I so often expressed great fear about what Donald Trump and the rightward tilt in the American electorate meant for the United States, thinking we were heading the way of Israel and much of Europe and alsways ending with "I hope I'm wrong."  I wasn't wrong.       

German election results.  Christian Democrats, 208 seats, 28.52%; AFD, 152 seats, 20.8%; Social Democrats, 120 seats, 16.41%; and Greens, 85 seats, 11.61%.   85% of German voters voted, compared to the record U.S. high participation of 66% in 2020.  The extreme right and extreme left parties captured about 1/3rd of the vote so the moderate right/left parties held about 2/3rds, compared to the U.S. where almost 50% of the voters voted for Trump.  A key issue again was and is immigration and the EU's relatively internal and peripheral open borders leading to the surge in far-right voters.  The good news is that AfD didn't win enough votes to become part of Germany's always-coalition government.  The bad news is the fully 1/5th of German voters backed Afd, the neo-Nazis.

Nice chat with Debbie McGregor this morning over the garbage cart.   We spoke of Geri's recuperating, Joe and Joyce Elwanger at Cross Lutheran Church across the street from the HOP, and good neighbor John's progress in treating leukemia.      

Visit to the VA Medical Center.   I started out with my customary drive through Wood National Cemetery on my way to wish a good morning to Stephanie in the Patients Parking Garage.  My visit with Dr. Ryzka was relatively short and, as usual, pleasant.  It was followed, as expected, by a blood draw where I encountered the nice Black lady who normally works in the waiting room.  She said today was her last day at the VA after working there for 23 years.  She received one of Elon Musk's letters requiring her to list "5 things you accomplished last week' and then a termination email.   I also had a good chat with another vet sitting near me, a parachute rigger in the 82nd Airborne in Vietnam and Cambodia, working on C-130s.

Lizzie and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's 2025 Student Visionaries of the Year Campaign.  We received a letter from Lizzie today soliciting a donation to the LLS.  She always amazes me.  School, drama, forensics, volleyball, gymnastics, what else?  

Geri is working hard to get her left leg to bend and stretch out properly.  If she doesn't reach 90° bending and 0° straightness by the end of the weak, "manipulation" will be necessary.

Anniversary thoughts.   Geri and I visited the Portiuncola during our two-week Italian vacation several years ago.  It has long been completely enclosed in the magnificent Basilica of St Mary of the Angels.  I was most struck by the area just outside the Portiuncola where Francis is said to have died.  His remains are kept in a crypt on the small second sublevel of the Basilica of St. Francis on top of the Asissi hill.  I could tell that many of the visitors who were there when we were were deeply moved to be so near his bier.  I had the same feeling in the Chapel of the Miraculous Medal in Paris.

Among us legal types, there is a great reverence for Marbury v. Madison but we need to remember that the Court's self-proclaimed power to declare laws unconstitutional has probably been more often used to strike down laws designed to help ordinary Americans and powerless minorities than to uphold such laws.  For most of its existence, the Court has been anti-democratic, conservative, and even reactionary.

2/23/2025

 Sunday, February 23, 2025

D+108

q2w

e4r

t6y

In bed at 9:15, up at 5:25.  23° outside, high of 37° - some thawing!  First high temperature in more than 2 weeks. 

Prednisone, day 308, 5 mg., day 19, Kevzara, day 5/14.  2.5 prednisone at 5:30 a.m. and    p.m.  Other meds at 8:10 a.     

LTMW this morning at 6:30, I see my Lebanese-American neighbor Garson (sp?) walking his bull mastiff, as he does every morning around this time regardless of the weather.  A half-hour later, I see a lone whitetail deer standing perfectly still, statute-like on the Mequon lawn kitty-corner from us.  Yesterday afternoon, a herd of 12 whitetails were scurrying across this area.  I failed to fill the sunflower-safflower tube yesterday but it is still about 25% full, attracting the normal morning visitors, while I watch a live cam of an Ohio backyard feeding station.  Lots of squirrels, grackles, yellow-winged blackbirds (male and female), cardinals, mourning doves, white-throated sparrows, English sparrows, robins, et al.

Weltanschauung means the way a person looks at the phenomenon of life as a whole  It's one's "big picture" of Life and Existence.  What is Life's purpose and/or meaning?  Does Life have any purpose and/or meaning?  It is what one thinks of "morality," the whole idea of right and wrong, virtue and vice, good and bad, righteousness and evil.  It's what one thinks of the idea of "God," and the notion of "Creation," and mortality, eternity, Heaven and Hell, Alpha and Omega.  What's it all about, Alfie?  Is this all there is?  I got to thinking about this yesterday while paying half-attention to a newscast about Vladimir Putin.  I wondered about his weltanschauung and how he lives with all the deaths he has caused.  I wondered whether he and Trump have the same weltanschauung, materialistic, zero-sum-game, dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest, my-dick-is-bigger-than-your-dick, he who has the most toys wins, etc.  It is directly opposite of the weltschauung of Jesus of Nazareth found in Matthew 25: 31-46: feed the hungry, care for the sick, house the homeless, etc.  Focus on caring for 'the least of these'. "The first shall be last' 'Blessed are the meek, the peacemaker, etc.'   The contrast between the weltschauungen of Putin and Trump on the one hand and of Jesus (and my mother and sister) on the other calls to mind Nietzsche's ubermensch who rejects the otherworldliness of the Christian weltanschauung (your reward will come in Heaven) with the here-and-now focus of the übermenschen.  Life for the latter is a red pill/blue pill situation in which they choose the red pill,  The Putin-Trump-Musk supermen are followers not of Jesus or even of Nietsche, but rather of Machiavelli who taught inter alia in The Prince that (1) the ends justify the means, (2) politics has no relation to morals, (3)  power is the pivot on which everything hinges. (4)  there is nothing more important than appearing to be religious, (5) it is far safer to be feared than loved, especially relevant to one's weltschauung, (6) "How we live is so different from how we ought to live that he who studies what ought to be done rather than what is done will learn the way to his downfall rather than to his preservation.”  WWJD?

2/22/2025

  February 22, 2-25

D+107 

1300 Pope Boniface VIII issued a papal bull (decree) instating a Jubilee Year, granting forgiveness of sins and debts for those who fulfill various conditions

2014 Viktor Yanukovych was ousted as President of Ukraine by the parliament following the Euromaidan revolution

2021 US death toll from COVID-19 passed 500,000, higher than US deaths in World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War combined. 

In bed around 9, awake and up at 4:50.  

Prednisone, day 307, 2.5 mg., day 18, Kevzara, day 4/14.  2.5 mg. prednisone at 5 a.m. and 5w p.m.  Other meds at 7:20 a.m.5

The Habit of Writing.  While reading an old (2.26.2017) New Yorker article about Elizabeth Bishop's life, actually a then-new biography by Megan Marshall, “Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast,” I thought about how long I've been in the habit of writing.  For years after I reconciled with my father in 1995, I wrote him a letter every day.  I suppose I was trying to make up for lost time, but in any case, I didn't call him every day, or even frequently, but rather I wrote to him.  That practice stopped at some point before he came to live with us outside of Saukville in 2003 (?), but it continued for a long time.  Perhaps it was part of what made it possible for him to accept our invitation to live with us; the letters gave him a pretty good idea of our lives, what we did and didn't do, who our friends were, etc.  I don't remember when Kitty and I started having our daily early morning conversations by text messages (2013? 2014?) but those exchanges also involved daily writing down my experiences, thoughts, fears, concerns, etc,, ofter at some length, and we never missed starting each day with those written conversations every morning.  I even continued texting her after she died on March 3, 2022, knowing she was gone but being so habituated to starting each day by writing her that I continued.  I suppose it was that experience of starting each day tapping on the keyboard of my laptop that led me on July 29th or 30th of that year to pull up my old Blogspot blog and type "Am I still here?" and to discover that my blog still existed and provided a place write some thoughts each morning.  Two and a half years later, I'm still writing every morning, sometimes sensibly, sometimes not.

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop  1911 –1979

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

 

On this date last year and 2 years ago.  Last year I was in serious pain with polymyalgia rheumatica and back pains.  I wrote a long letter to Dr. Chatt describing the pain and wondering about solutions, but I think it just pissed her off, as I recall she was pretty curt and nasty on my next visit.  She and Dr. Cheng in the PM&R Clinic were still treating the problem as osteoarthritis to be treated with Tylenol, diclofenac, and physical therapy.  The letter to Dr. Chatt suggests to me that this was when I was thinking again about suicide, especially the question about whether I should expect the pain to continue for the rest of my life.  I'm disappointed now (and then?) that she didn't ask me about a referral to the mental health clinic next door to the Gold Clinic.  It wasn't until May 13th, 81 days later, that I finally got to see Dr. Ryzka in the Rheumatology Clinic who confirmed my self-diagnosis of PMR and prescribed prednisone.   

Two years ago today I was reflecting on the political situation in the U.S. and in Israel and morosely noting the pernicious similarities in the two countries and comparing myself to my former (alas) friend Peter the Pity Partyer.

Facebook posting today.  Charles D. Clausen is  reading The New York Times.

and thinking about the headline and sub-headline "U.S. Presses Tough Demands in Revised Deal for Ukraine’s Minerals: Ukraine would have to relinquish half its revenues from resource extraction with no guarantee of U.S. security aid."  This reminds me of the scene in "The Godfather" in which Amerigo Bonasera asks for and receives a big favor from Don Corleone.  Bonasera thanks the Don profusely and the Don replies "Someday, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me. But until that day, accept this justice as a gift on my daughter's wedding day.". That is to say, you are now in my debt and the debt for which I may call upon you to "do me a service" may be a lot more than you can imagine.  America provided the military and economic aid to Ukraine to help a friendly nation and to prevent a vicious aggressor from gaining from aggression.  Now Trump wants to cash in.  He tried to extort Zelensky in 2019 (the "perfect" phone call), and now he's doing it again.

LTMW I see my good neighbor John out walking in the 27° weather with th 12° wind chill, recovering with chemotherapy from his leukemia, dressed for the weather and all hunched over from his childhood polio.  He's an inspiration, a good man.  Later, at 5:05 in the afternoon, a herd of 12 whitetail deer loped across our front lawn.

Almost did a pitchpole today at Sendik's, giving my grocery cart a hard shove  while holding two shoping bags, topheavy body wanting to follow the cart.  Very close call.

Weltanschauung - Trump's, Putin's, Biden's, my mother's, mine.  Tomorrow.

2/21/2025

Friday, February 21, 2025

D+106

1864 1st US Catholic parish church for black worshippers was dedicated in Baltimore

1965  Malcolm X was shot dead by Nation of Islam followers in New York

1975 Watergate figures John Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman & John D. Ehrlichman were sentenced to 2½-8 years for conspiracy and obstruction of justice

2014 President Barack Obama met with the Dalai Lama

2023  Joe Biden vowed unwavering support for Ukraine in a speech from Warsaw Castle

In bed at 9:30, awake at 3:30, and up at 4:10.  13°, wind chill 4°, expected high of 27° and low of 10°   

Prednisone, day 306, 5 mg., day `17, Kevzara, day 3/14.   2.5 mg. prednisone at 4:50 a.m. and 3:50 p.m.  Other meds at 6:15 a.m.  Trulicity injection at 6:10 a.m.

Telling Headlines and sub-heads.  From the current New Yorker:      

(1) "The Trump Administration Trashes Europe and NATO; Speeches delivered by J. D. Vance and Pete Hegseth were not just verbal lashings of America’s allies but a wholesale rejection of eighty years of U.S. foreign policy."  By Dexter Filkins

(2) "We’d Never Had a King Until This Week:  Donald Trump tries to overturn the most basic meme of American history.: By Bill McKibben

(3) "Distraction and Doomscrolling Under Trump 2.0: The first time around, the President’s bad deeds galvanized people on social media. This time, they’re looking to “flush out their brains.” By Kyle Chayka

Is this or isn't this a poem?   This writing by Frank O'Hara

Having a Coke with You

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne

or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona

partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian

partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt

partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches

partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary

it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still

as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it

in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth

between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint

you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

                                                                                                              I look

at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world

except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick

which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time

and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism

just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or

at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me

and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them

when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank

or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully

as the horse

                               it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience

which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

 . . . . . . . . 

About a week ago, I pulled off my out-of-the-way bedroom bookcase The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara moved it to my throne room, a/k/a my bathroom.  I've been browsing in it while seated on the throne, wondering why his seemingly thousands of poems are called poems.  He was a member of the "New York School" in the 1950s and 1960s and highly regarded as a poet, painter, and curator at MOMA.  What is it that makes his writings poems?

In his preface to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth defines poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, recollected in tranquillity."  He defines a poet as someone who can see the world differently from other people and who can express this vision in their writing. Wordsworth believes that the subject matter and language of poetry should be drawn from everyday life, as this is where and how the poet can connect with his/her audience.  For Emily Dickinson, poetry was something that made her body" so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."  For Dylan Thomas, poetry was something that makes you "laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toenails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own.”.  According to Robert Frost “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”   T.S. Eliot says  “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”  My favorite definitions are Carl Sandburg's:

DEFINITIONS OF POETRY by Carl Sandburg

1. Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.

2. Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.

3. Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say, ‘Listen!’ and ‘Did you see it?’ ‘Did you hear it? What was it?’

4. Poetry is the tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.

5. Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.

6. Poetry is a puppet-show, where riders of skyrockets and divers of sea fathoms gossip about the sixth sense and the fourth dimension.

7. Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.

8. Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for.

9. Poetry is an echo asking a shadow dancer to be a partner.

10. Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air.

11. Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.

12. Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between.

13. Poetry is an exhibit of one pendulum connecting with other and unseen pendulums inside and outside the one seen.

And 25 more (!) leading me to think that looking for a definition of poetry is like looking for a definition of pornography, a futile effort though, like Potter Stewart, "I know it when I see it" or, perhaps more accurately for poetry, I know it when I feel it.  I'm reminded of the story told of Picasso who, when asked what one of his paintings meant, said "You might as well ask a bird what his song means."

So, in sum, who am I to say whether Frank O'Hara's poems are "really" poems.  I think "Having a Coke With You" is, and so is his "Why I Am Not a Painter."

I am not a painter, I am a poet.

Why? I think I would rather be

a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg

is starting a painting. I drop in.

“Sit down and have a drink” he

says. I drink; we drink. I look

up. “You have SARDINES in it.”

“Yes, it needed something there.”

“Oh.” I go and the days go by

and I drop in again. The painting

is going on, and I go, and the days

go by. I drop in. The painting is

finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”

All that’s left is just

letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of

a color: orange. I write a line

about orange. Pretty soon it is a

whole page of words, not lines.

Then another page. There should be

so much more, not of orange, of

words, of how terrible orange is

and life. Days go by. It is even in

prose, I am a real poet. My poem

is finished and I haven’t mentioned

orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call

it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery

I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

 Running errands and great sights this afternoon.  I drove up to Port Washington to drop off the donations I tried to drop off on Sunday when they were closed.  Then I went to Costco, filled up my gas tank, and drove away without replacing the gas cap.  I noticed the sound of the gas cap bouncing off the outside of the car as I drove away, stopped and replaced it.  Executive function?  Cognitive decline?  Dementia?  Then I went to Meijer's in Grafton to get some CBH and other stuff but stuck out on the CBH, none on the shelf.  On Highway C between St. Vinnie's and Costco, I saw a huge aggregation of Canada geese feeding on one farm field and a huge flock of wild turkeys feeding on another farm field.  I thought about stopping and taking photos but didnt do it.  I wish I had, especially the wild turkeys.  What a sight.  Maybe 50 birds, maybe 60 or 70.

2/20/2025

 Thursday, February 20, 2025

D+105

1938 UK Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden resigned, stating Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had appeased Nazi Germany

1939 The American pro-Nazi organization German American Bund held a rally at Madison Square Garden and 20,000 attend

1971 National Emergency Center erroneously ordered US radio & TV stations to go off the air. The mistake wasn't resolved for 30 minutes

2023 President Joe Biden made a surprise visit to Kyiv, Ukraine

In bed around 9, awake at 2 unable to sleep, and up at 2:30.  7° outside, wind chill of -4°, an improvement over the last few days.  The high temp of 23° expected today, looking forward to a balmy high of 38° next Monday when I see Dr. Ryzka at the VA.  I washed, dried, and folded a load of napkins.

Prednisone, day 305, 5 mg., day 16, Kevzara, day 2/14. 2.5 mg. prednisone at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m.   Other meds at 10 a.m.   .   

↑The Good News↑

↓The Bad News↓

The End of NATO, the Western Alliance, and the Pitchpoling of the World Order.  Am I catastrophizing again?  Denny the Downer?  The world going to hell in a handbasket?  Waiting for Caela's arrival yesterday, Geri and I watched Nicolle Wallace's Deadline White House program.  She interviewed Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia, NY Times diplomatic reporter Michael Crowley, and retired General Barry McCaffrey.  I said to Geri after the interviews were completed "I think that was the most depressing half-hour of television I have ever watched."  Perhaps that was hyperbole, considering 9/11, the Cuban Missile Crisis, so much in 1968, Watergate, and so on, but perhaps not.  Donald Trump and his people are turning our world on end.  He has effectively killed NATO as a North American-European defensive alliance that preserved Europe from wars of aggression from the end of WWII until Russia seized Crimea in 2014 (discounting the Balkan wars after the breakup of Yugoslavia).  He has embraced Vladimir Putin despite his record of murdering his opponents, allying with brutal dictators like Assad in Syria, fomenting wars in former Soviet republics, and invading Ukraine.  Now he has invited him to the White House as an honored guest of the United States.  Barry McCaffrey commented on Nicolle Wallace's program that "Vladimir Putin is a gangster.  He is a murderous dictator.  He kills his own internal enemies within eyesight of the Kremlin. He is involved in mass atrocities in Syria and Chechnya, in Georgia, in the invasion of Crimea, and now his continuing war against the civilian population of Ukraine.  There is no question that Vladimir's basic motivation was to recreate the Soviet empire.  Now it's Ukraine, now it's the 20% he holds of the country.  The next step will be the rest of the country, the Baltic States, and Poland.  The Europeans understand this.  So, listening to what's going on in Washington now, it is difficult to process this.  It's utter madness.  It's against the security of the United States and its allies."  I believe McCaffrey is correct.   

Nicolle Wallace did a fact-check on some of Trump's lies about Ukraine. Trump said the US had provided $350 billion to Ukraine.  The accurate amount is $183 billion.  He said the US has provided $200 billion more than Europe.  That is inaccurate. He said the US gets nothing back.  That too is inaccurate.  70% of Ukraine's aid has been spent in the United States or on U.S. forces.  McFaul commented that Trump's lies, all parroting Putin's lies, make it appear to the world that the US president is not in control of the facts, which weakens his allies' bargaining positions vis-a-vis Russia.  "This is a dangerous moment in American history, a really dangerous moment.  This is not a laughing matter.  This could be a pivotal moment when we lose our allies, we lose Ukraine, and then we are weak when we have to take on places like China."

When Wallace asked McCaffrey what happens if Trump continues down this path, he said "The damage is done.  It's now irrevocable.  There's not a shred of rational argument among European powers to trust United States commitment to NATO and Article 5."  The interview went on and on, one piece of bad news after another.

Weirdly I think of my high school civics teacher, Mr. Burke, who was a schvitzer.  He would occasionally ask the class if 'it was warm in here or is it me" to which the whole class would laughingly reply "It's you, Mr. Burke!"  Now I'm thinking it's not only me who thinks we are in real trouble in this country, this world.

Telling headlines:  In the Wall Street Journal, "Trump’s Attack on Zelensky Signals a New World Order Taking Shape," "Trump’s Turn to Russia Spooks U.S. Allies Who Fear a Weakened NATO," "Trump Tilts Toward a Ukraine Sellout (by The Editorial Board)

In the Washington Post: "Trump’s flood of false claims about Ukraine: In remarks and social media posts, the U.S. president echoed Russian talking points," "Experts say Trump comes close to the red line of openly defying judges"

In the Atlantic: "The Trump World Order," "The End of the Postwar World."

The Cost of American Support under Trump.  From Anne Appelbaum's "The End of the Postwar World."

A few days before the Munich conference, the U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went to Kyiv and presented President Volodymyr Zelensky with a two-page document and asked him to sign. Details of this proposed agreement began to leak last weekend. It calls for the U.S. to take 50 percent of all “economic value associated with resources of Ukraine,” including “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure,” not just now but forever, as the British newspaper The Telegraph reported and others confirmed: “For all future licenses the U.S. will have a right of first refusal for the purchase of exportable minerals,” the document says.

  HANDS UP!  STICK'EM UP!

2/19/2025

 Wednesday, February 19, 2025

D+104

1942 FDR ordered the detention and internment of all Japanese Americans on the West Coast

1945  The invasion of Iwo Jima

In bed by 9:3-, awake and up at 5:05 but awake between 1:30 and 2:30 with 2 Low Glucose alarms treated with 2 cough drops.    2° outside with a wind chill of -9°.  It looks like some wild creature(s) found some sustenance from the seeds and suet I left on the front stoop two days ago after the last snowfall when the arctic cold set in.

Prednisone, day 304, 5 mg., day 15, Kevzara, day 1/14.  2.5 prednisone at 5:05 a.m. and 5 p.m.   Kevzara injection at 10:15.  Other meds at 10 a.m. 

Marines from the Graves Registration Unit working with a few of the 5,931 Marines killed in action, died of wounds or missing in action and presumed dead.  An additional 209 deaths occurred among the Navy corpsmen and surgeons assigned to the Marines.   I chose this photograph, and others below, rather than Joe Rosenthal's 'iconic' photo of the flag raising at Iwo Jima because it gives a much truer picture of the slaughterhouse that Iwo became in February and March of 1945.

It's the 80th anniversary of the invasion of Iwo Jima.   From my memoir:

 

    More than the citizens of perhaps any other nation, Americans celebrate military service.  Every night the CBS Evening News has a segment on “Fallen Heroes;” every Sunday morning, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos’ program closes with “In Memoriam.”  This canonization of soldiers is due to the fact that the United States is a military empire. The central idea of empire is the exertion of national power over others who are not part of the nation, the strong over the weak. A recent Paul Krugman column reported that next year the United States’ military expenditures will equal or exceed those of the rest of the world combined.  If true, it is evidence of a level of economic, political, and military imperialism never before seen on earth.  Since all empires are ultimately dependent on military power to ‘project’ their will on others by lethal force or the threat of it, empires must glorify their armed forces.  This is so not only because the empire depends ultimately on the military being able and willing to kill subordinate peoples who resist American hegemony, but also because the military men and women must be willing to be killed to advance the economic and political goals of the empire.  These goals are hard to accomplish with volunteer soldiers and even harder with conscripts who normally have no desire to kill or to be killed and who have little or nothing to gain personally from the fruits of empire     

     To get imperial conscripts to “do their duty,” conditioning is necessary.  First, they must be politically conditioned to believe that the subordinate people’s opposition or resistance to the empire’s will somehow threatens them or their families, “our way of life” or “our freedom.”  This conditioning is seen in many guises, in the nightly “Fallen Heroes” blurbs, in the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ fiasco, back to rallying cries about making the world “safe for democracy” in a “war to end all wars” and changing the name of the “War Department” to the “Department of Defense” between 1947 and 1949.  America must never be seen as waging a war of aggression, only of defending itself (hence the utility of the Pearl Harbor attack) or (when it serves a political or economic interest) defending the innocent victims of ‘tyranny’ or at least defending ‘freedom’ which as our last President reminded us, our enemies hate and we love.  Do our military men believe this?    Lance Corporal Hess, USMC, is quoted in The Proud: Inside the Marine Corps, published in 1992:

“I look at it this way.  If I do have to kill, I will.  And while I’m doing it I’ll be thinking about my family.  My mother.  And, lookit, do I want some raghead Ay-rab dictating the price of gas she buys or some commie-type hardass coming over here, ruling her, telling her what to do, and you know, exploiting her.  It’s for her that you kill.  It’s for us.”

He thinks about it again.

 “Hell yeah, I’ll kill them all.  And not just the communists.  It’s anybody who’s against the United States.  Anybody who wants to say that one man can be a dictatorship and the people don’t have anything to say about it.  And he wants to try that on the United States?  Well, I’m gonna kill him with all the vigor I have in my body.  That’s what it’s all about: preserving our way of life.  That’s my job."

These are the words of one successfully conditioned American fighting man, ready to kill for Mom and her experience at the gas pump.  And of course, there are politicians perfectly willing to send him off to kill for Mom and millions of folks back home who are perfectly willing to have him kill in their names.  Right wing radio and evangelical Christianity regularly fan the flames of bellicosity.  As Yeats wrote A Prayer for My Daughter: 

For arrogance and hatred are the wares

Peddled in the thoroughfares. 

    In addition to the general political conditioning of the populace, it is also necessary to individually condition military persons to the idea of maiming and killing other human beings and to grind down their resistance to making themselves vulnerable to being maimed or killed, or, as we euphemistically put it, being put “in harm’s way.”  For some, this requires little more than the political conditioning that the whole nation is subjected to.  Air Force pilots and crews who flew long-range bombing missions from bases in the U.S. to drop high explosive bombs in Kosovo and then return to base never having seen the results of the bombing didn’t require a lot of extra conditioning.  On the other hand, soldiers and Marines who engage in killing and dying that is ‘up close and personal’ require a lot of conditioning, something very much akin to brainwashing.  

    Our imperial politicians and the mainstream media gloss over the fact that the business of the armed forces is killing and destroying, death and destruction.  Every other mission is subordinate.  Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines exist to deploy and employ weapons of destruction, from rifles to hydrogen bombs, or to support those who do.  The Marine Rifleman’s Creed is  an embarrassingly ‘over the top’ piece of writing, but is also characteristically blunt about the relationship between military people and their weapons:

THIS IS MY RIFLE. There are many like it but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I master my life. My rifle without me is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than any enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will.

My rifle and myself [sic] know that what counts in this war is not the rounds we fire, the noise of our burst, nor the smoke we make. We know that it is the hits that count. We will hit.

My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weakness, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I will keep my rifle clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will.

Before God I swear this creed. My rifle and myself [sic] are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life. So be it, until victory is America's and there is no enemy, but Peace 

    I cringe as I read this “Creed,” knowing that countless Marine ‘boots’ have been forced to commit it to memory and to recite it on command, robot-like.  The weapon is personified, the person is weaponized, identified with the killing instrument, turned into a “lean, green, killing machine.”

    The Marine Rifleman’s Creed was written by Major General William H. Rupertus not long after the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor.  Rupertus was a career Marine infantry officer, not a grammarian.  We can be sure that he did not see the concluding sentence of his creed as a double entendre.  Is “Peace” the goal or the enemy?  It is not difficult to make the case that for Fortress America, peace is the enemy.  Endless war is the goal.  Only with endless war can the neocons and other militarists justify the nation’s military budget and all that goes with it, like arguments for the “unaffordability” of universal health care for our civilian citizens.

. . .

William Manchester, himself a World War II Marine, wrote a memoir, Goodbye Darkness, in which he described the landing beach on Iwo Jima:

It resembled Doré’s illustrations of Inferno.  Essential cargo – ammo, rations, water – was piled up in sprawling chaos.  And gore, flesh, and bones were lying all about. The deaths on Iwo were extraordinarily violent.  There seemed to be no clean wounds, just fragments of corpses.  It reminded one battalion medical officer of a Bellevue dissecting room.  Often the only way to distinguish between Japanese and Marine dead was by the legs; Marines wore canvas leggings and Nips khaki puttees.  Otherwise identification strings of viscera fifteen feet long, over bodies which had been cut in half at the waist.  Legs and arms, and heads bearing only necks, lay fifty feet from the closest torsos.  As night fell the beachhead reeked with the stench of burning flesh.

    I wrote those words about 20 years ago when Geri and I (and for a time, my Dad, and Andy, Anh, and Peter) lived outside of Saukville.  It was during the presidency of George W. Bush and the reign of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and after we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.  I read them now in the era of Donald Trump who has threatened to use military force to take control of the Panama Canal Zone from the nation-state of Panama and to take control of Greenland from its government and the government of Denmark.  He also originally suggested he would use American troops to take control of the Gaza Strip, to "own it", and turn it into the "Riviera of the Middle East."  What has happened to the United States over the course of my lifetime?

LTMW at a tufted tit-mouse vainly trying to extract a sunflower seed from its tube.  It motivated me to put on my fur hat, winter jacket, and warm gloves to fill the sunflower/safflower tube and to replace a suet cake.   The guilt of the empty feeder in this bitter cold weather has been killing me.

Geri has been doing better today but she stretched her new knee too much this afternoon causing some nasty pain.

Micaela is here for dinner tonight, her treat. Culver's burgers and fries.  

Trump called Zelensky a "dictator" today on Truth Social, raising again the long lingering question of whether Trump is merely a Russian asset, or is a Russian agent.  He betrayed our partners=in-arms the Kurds in Syria to the Turks.  He is betraying our friends in Ukraine to Putin and the Russians.  He is betraying us/US to Putin.   Tom Wolfe: You're either on the bus or off the bus.  We're all off his bus an eventually under his bus. Rick Wilson: Everything Trump Touches Dies.