3/1/2025

Saturday, March 1, 2025

D+114

743 The Council at Estinnes decreed that Christian slaves could not be owned by Jews, fearing that the slaves might convert to Judaism

1562 Blood bath at Vassy: Francois de Guise's troops open fire on Huguenot congregation, first event in Wars of Religion

1692 Sarah Goode, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba were interrogated after accusations that they were practitioners of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts Bay Colony

1845  President John Tyler signed a resolution annexing the Republic of Texas

1872 Yellowstone became the world's first national park

1953 Joseph Stalin suffered a stroke and collapsed. He died four days later.

1954 4 Puerto Ricans opened fire in the House of Representatives, injuring 5 members

1955 An Israeli assault on Gaza killed 48

1958 Samuel Alphonsus Stritch was appointed Pro-Prefect of the Propagation of Faith and thus became the first American member of the Roman Curia

1970 The end of US commercial whale hunting

1982, The New York Times raised its price from 25 cents to 30 cents

1985 The Pentagon accepted the theory that an atomic war would cause a nuclear winter

2014  President Barack Obama warned Russian President Vladimir Putin over involvement in Ukraine

2016 Forbes Richest List was released with Bill Gates No. 1 with $75 billion and the  number of the world's billionaires dropped to 1,810

2022 US President Joe Biden, in his State of the Union address, said Vladimir Putin has "badly miscalculated" by invading Ukraine 

In bed at 9:15, awake at 5:00, and up at 5:10. 18° outside with a wind chill of -3°, March coming in like a lion. 

Prednisone, day 314, 5 mg., day 25, Kevzara, day 11/14.  2.5 mg prednisone at 5:20 a/m and 5 p.m.  Other meds at   .

À la recherche du temps perdu.  I started the day printing the last two days of journal entries, thinking that perhaps I make these daily efforts simply as "proof of life,' proof that I am alive despite my relative reclusiveness, inactivity, and diminishing number of friends.  Kidnappers and hostage-takers are usually required to provide proof that their captive is alive before their ransom or other demand is met.  Perhaps I write in a journal to remind myself that I am still alive.  I had this thought as I lit my Kitty candle and thought that I am 2 days away from the 3rd anniversary of her death, the remembrance of which stops me in my tracks as I type these words.  In her last days, when she couldn't communicate with me anymore, and even for a while after she died, I kept texting her every morning as I had done for many years.  She was so much a presence in my every day: text message conversations every morning, sending her photographs occasionally during the day, or copies of articles, or books or candles ordered from Amazon, where her address was one of my listed delivery addresses.  Now I light my candles in the morning, think of her, and write in this meshugge journal because I can't write to her.  I can't schmooze or do stuff with TSJ, DSB, or EGFIII; I can't pet or enjoy the company of Lilly or Blanche, so I start my days with my laptop à la recherche du temps perdu.  Proust sat in bed writing a great novel that hardly anyone reads; I sit on my recliner typing disconnected thoughts that nobody will read.  Tsvey meshuggenahs.

Telling headlines:  Washington Post, "Fiery meeting with Zelensky upends Trump’s Russia-Ukraine peace deal", "Ukraine reels after Oval Office fracas, fears what’s next," and "Blistering encounter reverberates around the world."  New York Times, "Showdown Points to Trump’s Foreign Policy Revolution,: In Showdown With Zelensky, Trump Takes Offense on Putin’s Behalf," "Behind the Collision: Trump Jettisons Ukraine on His Way to a Larger Goal," "Trump Is Rootin’ for Putin," and "Flow of U.S. Weapons to Ukraine Has Nearly Stopped and May End Completely."  Wall Street Journal, "Trump, Zelensky Both Suffer Setbacks After Oval Office Blowup,"  and "Putin Wins the Trump-Zelensky Oval Office Spectacle." The Atlantic, "It Was an Ambush: Today marked one of the grimmest days in the history of American diplomacy" and "The Real Reason Trump Berated Zelensky: He simply likes Vladimir Putin better."  The New Yorker, "The Peril Donald Trump Poses to Ukraine: Some analysts hoped that Trump might end the war; they are stunned that the U.S. has now 'changed sides'.”

Yesterday afternoon, Liz Cheney posted: 

“Generations of American patriots, from our revolution onward, have fought for  the principles Zelenskyy is risking his life to defend. But today, Donald Trump and JD Vance attacked Zelenskyy and pressured him to surrender the freedom of his people to the KGB war criminal who invaded Ukraine. History will remember this day—when an American President and Vice President abandoned all we stand for.”

The sky is falling, the wolf isn't at the door, it's in the house.  I have been asking myself whether Trump is not merely an asset of Vladimir Putin but rather his agent.  I have wondered whether Putin 'has something on him,' like the 'golden shower' report in the Steele dossier.  It's becoming clearer to me that I've been naive, thinking that Trump acts the way he does because he is being blackmailed by Putin.  That theory is grounded on the assumption that, but for the blackmail, Trump would be acting differently.  It's clear now, however, and it should have been clear to me about initio, that Trump acts as he does because he wants to act that way.  His friends and heroes are the autocrats of the world: Putin, Orban, Xi, Kim, national leaders he calls "tough guys," "very smaart and very strategic," men with whom "I have a very good relationship."  He wants to join their club.  Everything he has done in the last 5 weeks demonstrates it.  He has gotten rid of institutional impediments to strongman rule, rule without respect to the rule of law, like inspectors general, principled cabinaet level department heads,  high-ranking generals at the Pentagon, the top three judge advocates in the military, DOJ officials, US attorneys, and on and on.  We are well on our way to an undemocratic autocracy.

[Thooms Friedman's concluding paragraph in this morning's NY Times, referring to Trump's alliance with Puiin: "This is a total perversion of U.S. foreign policy practiced by every president since World War I. My fellow Americans, we are in completely uncharted waters, led by a president, who — well, I cannot believe he is a Russian agent, but he sure plays one on TV.​"

Posting on Facebook today:

Charles D. Clausen shared a memory.

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I think I first learned of Babi (or Bobyn) Yar when reading the 1981 novel The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas.  I've never forgotten it, or what I later learned of the Russian ambivalence (at best), when Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union, about building the great memorial there to the nearly 34,000 Jewish victims.  The Soviet authorities strove to mask the fact that the victims were Jews, not merely 'victims of Nazi aggression.'  I think of Babi Yar today, and of the quote attributed to Hannah Arendt, after yesterday's disgraceful show in the Oval Office and the seismic shift in our nation's relations with post-Soviet Afghanistan now led by its Jewish president, and with Russia and Putin, imitating Germany's 1941 invasion with their own.  Words fail me.

3 Years Ago

Charles D. Clausen was  thinking about life.

March 1, 2022  · 

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A U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs staff psychiatrist named Jonathan Shay wrote a book entitled Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming.  He wrote:

  Everyone knows that war can wreck the body, but repeatedly forgets that it can wreck the soul as well.  The sacrifice that citizens make when they serve in their country’s military is not simply the risk of death, dismemberment, disfigurement, and paralysis – as terrible as these realities are.  They risk their peace of mind – please, hear this familiar phrase, ‘peace of mind,’ fresh again in all its richness!  They risk losing their capacity to participate in democratic process. They risk losing the sense that human virtues are still possible.  These are psychological and morl injuries – war wounds – that are no less of a sacrifice that the sacrifice of the the armless, or legaless, or sightless veteran.

 It’s reported that the Babyn Yar Memorial has been damaged by Russian weapons.  I’m reminded of a saying attributed to Hannah Arendt when an interlocutor was said to have said he was ashamed to be German.  Arendt was said to reply: “I’m ashamed to be human.”

Some anniveresary thoughts:  (1) With all that we know of Religion's record in human history, how is it that so many of us still believe in one or another of its incredible varities?  And BTW, Cardinal Stritch, the Pro-Prefect of the Propagation of Faith and member of the Vatican's curia or court, was my bishop and successor of the Apostles when I was a kid in Chicago.  I remembered him in my memoir:

Cardinal Stritch himself was a Southern racist.  He believed in converting blacks to Catholicism, but not in living near them, going to school with them, or worshipping in the same pews with them.  Steven Avella, a history professor at Marquette published a history of the Chicago archdiocese under Cardinals Stritch and his successor Albert Meyer.  Regarding the racial tensions in the archdiocese, he wrote:

Cardinal Stritch was least well-equipped temperamentally and philosophically to deal with this aspect of change in Chicago Catholic life.  Stritch was indelibly southern in his attitudes on racial issues.  He displayed this in private conversation, when he would refer to blacks as “niggers.”  Once, he accused one of his Milwaukee priests of leaving his quarters at a Catholic high school “unfit for a nigger.” Chancery official and later Bishop Cletus F. O’Donnell was once ordered by Stritch to “give this nigger a good tip” in reference to a railroad porter who had carried the archbishop’s luggage on board a train.   In a letter to his chief theological adviser, Stritch wrote from Hobe Sound, Florida: “Do not choose the winter climate of Florida if you have some deep thinking to do.  Here you take on the habits of the colored folk and do as little as is consistent with being alive.  (This Confident Church: Catholic Leadership and Life in Chicago, 1940-1965.)a

(2)  In 1845, the U. S. annexed Texas.  Now Texas Republicans talk of seceding.  There are many times I wish we could just give Texas back to Mexico.

(3)  I was 11 yeares old when Joseph Stalin died.  There was great happiness in America over his death, but the cold war and threat of nuclear annihilation continued under his successors.  We developed the atomic bomb in 1945; the Russians got theirs in 1949.  We exploded the first hydrogen bomb in 1952; the Russians followed in 1955.  In 1985, the Pentagon acknowledged what had long been known to scientists and most people with common sense; i.e., that a nuclear war would be catastrophic with global cooling, global crop failures, and global famine.  And still we build bombs and missiles with a European arms race expected now that Trump has broken NATO and made the U.S. an unreliable defense treaty partner elsewhere in the world.