Saturday, February 8, 2025
D+93
1942 Congress advised FDR that Americans of Japanese descent should be locked up en masse so they wouldn't oppose the US war effort
1983 Ariel Sharon resigned from the Israeli government after an inquiry showed he was at least indirectly responsible for the killings of hundreds of people in Lebanon in 1982
2005 Leaders of both Palestine and Israel declared a truce in what many hoped would be a "new era of peace"
In bed around 9:45, awake at 2:20 from dreams of being in Italy at the end of WWII, wreckage and destruction all around, and up at 2:35. As I came out of my bedroom, Geri was returning to her with an ice pack for her knee. I think back to how eager she was to have her old, bad knee replaced and think what a hard journey she's been on for the last few weeks. I nodded off at some point and woke up around 9:30 after a long dream of moving books from various bookshelves in MKMcC and DKMcC's apartment before their divorce.
Prednisone, day 295, 5 mg., day 4, Kevzara, day 4/14. Prednisone at 4:50 a.m. Other meds at 10:50 a.m. 2.5 mg., prednisone at 5 p.m.
Am I paranoid? Denny the Downer? When did I become so pessimistic, cynical, and almost despondent? Did it start when I was a kid, with my Dad's PTSD after the war and Jimmy Harman's crime against my mother, Kitty, and me? Or after Vietnam? Or that extended decade from Kennedy's assassination to the fall of Saigon? Or was it in 2015 with Trump's descent down the escalator with Cruella? That's when I made a record of it with my daily text messages with my sister Kitty, relating my fears about where the nation was heading, always with the closing comment "I hope I'm wrong." But around 3:30 this morning I looked at the headlines in the online The Atlantic including:
"The Government’s Computing Experts Say They Are Terrified" by Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost
"Americans Are Trapped in an Algorithmic Cage" by Adam Serwer
"The Department of Paranoia" by Jonathan Chait
"How the Tariff Whiplash Could Haunt Pricing" by Lora Kelly
"Trump Takes Over the Kennedy Center" by Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker
The New Yorker this morning greets its readers with:
"Elon Musk's Revolutionary Terror" by Susan Glasser
"The Fears of the Undocumenter" by Geraldo Cadava
" Why Was a Climate Activist Put in Prison for 5 Years" by Anna Russell
"Doald Trump's Gaza Delusions" by David Remnick
"Trump's Executive Order Wreckng Ball" by Benjamin Wallace-Wells
"Trump's Federal Assistance Havoc and the Fate of U.S.A.I.D." by Atul Gawande
Among the headlines in this morning's New York Times:
"Musk Wields Scythe on Federal Work Force, With Trump’s Full Blessing" by Erica L. Green and Michael D. Shear
"Trump Says He’ll Dismiss Kennedy Center Board Members and Make Himself Chair" by Shawn McCreesh, Maggie Haberman, and Javier C. Hernánde
" Behind Closed Doors, Trudeau Says Trump Threat to Take Over Canada Is Real" by Vjosa Isai
"Sept. 11 Plea Deal Includes Lifetime Gag Order on C.I.A. Torture Secrets" by Carol Rosenberg
The Wall Street Journal's lead article is headlined "Trump Is Changing the World Order With Unprecedented Speed" with the subheadline 'Global leaders, chief executives, and lawmakers are navigating whipsaw changes touching healthcare, schools, and the global supply chain'.
The Washington Post made things worse:
"NIH cuts billions of dollars in biomedical funding, effective immediate: The move halts a large slice of money for most universities and research institutions virtually overnight, imperiling vital research in everything from cancer to heart disease" by Dan Diamond, Carolyn Y. Johnson and Lena H. Sun1 hour ago
"In Trump’s actions, opponents see a constitutional crisis" by Naftali Bendavid and Hannah Knowles
I can't even get myself to read most of the stories under the headlines anymore. Am I just reading the wrong, "Leftie silo" stuff, or are we really in very deep trouble? Is Xi Jinping clicking heels and laughing as he sees the U.S. self-destruct? Ditto Vladimir Putin watching his 'useful idiot' in the White House?
I browsed through years of daily text messages that Kitty and I shared until her last illness. I was looking for one of my many cynical, pessimistic prognostications that I followed with "I hope I'm wrong" but I stopped browsing when I came across this one from January 7, 2021:
Hi, Sweetie.
Well, unusual for me, but I’m almost at a loss for words. Yesterday’s insurrection and takeover of the Capitol building while the House and the Senate were in joint session to confirm Biden’s win of the presidential election seemed to confirm my pessimism and cynicism. I know it seems perverse, but I’m kind of pleased that America and the rest of the world got to see what right wing politics is all about. The thousands of yahoos (many of whom we may be sure were carrying concealed weapons) with their American flags and Confederate flags and claims that “this is OUR house” and “USA, USA, USA”. And these were the ones who had the money and the ability to get to Washington and pay high hotel fees and all the other costs associated with visiting that very expensive city. There are millions more back in Arizona and Wisconsin and Texas and Mississippi and all over the country. We have now seen in plain sight what Trump supporters have let loose on the country, including all the “good people” who voted for him mainly because he (falsely) claims to oppose abortion, or because he (falsely) claims to love our military, and our law enforcement, and our first responders, or because they didn’t want to give Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or any other “socialist” any appointments to the Supreme Court or any other justification for voting for an obvious racist, fascist president. All this BS about “this is not who we are” is pure political fantasy. This IS who we are, a country with a very strong faction of fascism running through it, represented by the Republican Party. And the fascism is in large measure grounded in pure white racism and white supremacy. We have never escaped the consequences of our nation’s Original Sin: enslavement of ‘black’ people and genocidal policies toward ‘red’ people, native Americans. When those yahoos on TV were screaming about ‘this is OUR country’ and ‘this is OUR house’, they were talking about white, nominally Christian, euroAmericans. That’s what Trump and Trumpism are all about and it is a big mistake, or simple DENIAL, to say ‘this is not who we are.’ As I keep saying, 63 million Americans voted for Trump in 2016 and, after watching his fascism for 4 years, 74 million voted for him in 2020.
I’ll make one more comment and then shut up. It is impossible not to notice the different treatment of these white, right wing rioters and insurrectionists and the demonstrators who gathered in Washington to protest police brutality toward black people, the Black Lives Matter protesters, white and black. Against the BLM protesters, law enforcement and military units and even helicopters were deployed, as was tear gas and rubber bullets. Why was there so much passivity towards these white right-wingers? So forgive me for being so down on so much of American culture and American politics and American government and American distortion of our real history. What we saw yesterday was a BIG, REAL part of “who we are.” And I’m glad it’s out in the open where the whole world, and especially we Americans, can see it. Maybe it will stop the Pollyannaish denial of “who we are.”
In praise of engineers. They do things that are almost unbelievable to me. For example, I am truly amazed that some machines designed by anonymous mechanical engineers can pack delicate little sardine torsos so tightly and perfectly into the cans in which they are packaged for retail sales. How is that possible? I am still moved, literally and figuratively, almost daily by the enormity and complexity of the freeway reconstruction of I-43, all planned and pulled off through the skills and efforts of anonymous civil engineers. I am daily amazed, confounded, and terrified by what software engineers can have, and may do in the future. I am unable to comprehend what my grandson Peter Charles does with his Nicolet FEAR team's robot in local, regional, and even international competitions and soon he will be off to college to study (what else?) engineering. Even though I have come to loathe and fear Elon Musk and his 6 young myrmidons rampaging through the federal government's computer systems, I am astounded by the accomplishments of his companies, especially SpaceX, which can send rockets into space and then have them return to their launch pad like homing pigeons coming home to roost. Mind-boggling! When I was a Liberal Arts undergraduate, we History, English, PoliSci, and Psychology majors used to kind of smirk at the Engineering School students with their slide rules hanging from their belts in those days before Texas Instruments and their scientific calculators. Nerds! How foolishly smug we were! (And I never did learn to master the slide rule and logarithms.)
The Girl With the Needle, Denmark, 2024, co-written and directed by Magnus van Horn. "The world is a horrible place. But we need to believe it is not so. Have some drops. It will take the pain away. Come on." "You've done the right thing." Poverty. Desperation. Women. Class. Abortion. Serial killing. Infanticide. Drugs. Dagmar Overbye. Circus freak show. WWI facial mutilation. PTSD. Erena. Adoption. It has been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 82nd Golden Globe Awards and for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards. Not a pleasure to watch, but worth watching.
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