March 25, 2025
D+139/65
1954 Pope Pius XII's encyclical "Sacra virginitas" (On consecrated virginity)
2024 UN Special Rapporteur said there are “reasonable grounds” to believe Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza in a report "Anatomy of a Genocide."
In bed at 10, half-awake at about 4:30. and up at 5:20. 29°, high of 43°. I did a load of laundry, emptied and refilled the dishwasher, cleaned up the kitchen, and enjoyed some Irish soda bread and lavender chamomile tea.
Prednisone, day 339,]; 4 mg., day 20/21; Kevzara, day 7/14; CGM, day 7/15; Trulicity, day 4/7. 2 mg., of prednisone at 5:45 a.m. and 5 p.m. Other meds at 8:10 a.m.
One outrage after another. First, we had the leak of Yemen war plans by National Security Advisor Waltz and Defense Secretary Hegseth to the editor of The Atlantic, and the mere fact that a discussion of top secret war plans would take place on an unsecured platform, Signal, which is hackable by China, Russia, Iran, and who know who else. Then, we had the government's argument in the D.C. Court of Appeals in the case of the hurried-up, secretive deportation to a hellhole prison in El Salvador of alleged Venezuelan gang members without any due process, i.e., notice and an opportunity to be heard before a neutral magistrate. Inhumane, indecent. Third, Steve Witkoff, Trump's personal envoy and negotiator in the Gaza and Ukraine wars, parrots Vladimir Putin's talking points. Excerpts from an editorial in this morning's Wall Street Journal, "Steve Witkoff Takes the Kremlin’s Side":
Steve Witkoff, the Trump Administration’s special negotiator on Ukraine, says he’s not taking sides as he tries to mediate an end to the war Vladimir Putin started in 2022. He could have fooled us after a podcast interview this weekend in which Mr. Witkoff parroted one specious Russian talking point after another.
The biggest howler during a long podcast with Tucker Carlson—we’ve struggled to narrow down the list—is Mr. Witkoff’s claim that Mr. Putin “100%” doesn’t want to overrun Europe. Mr. Witkoff suggested Russia doesn’t even want to control Ukraine, with the exception, that is, of the large areas Mr. Putin already occupies. . . . Mr. Witkoff also continued the Administration’s bad habit of disparaging allies, as when he described Britain’s peacekeeping proposal for Ukraine as “a posture and a pose.” Europeans, he suggested, have a “simplistic” desire to mimic Winston Churchill. It’s more accurate to say Europeans understand what’s at stake in this major war on their doorstep. Europe will be safer if Ukraine is safe, and Washington can at least not mock allies as they finally take concrete steps to provide for their own and their neighborhood’s defense.
I ask again: is Donald Trump merely a Russian asset, or is he rather a Russian Agent? I ask again: what does Putin have on Trump? If it isn't a 'golden shower' tape, it must be something equivalent. He often accuses his adversaries, i.e., anyone who disagrees with him, of 'treason.' He should take a long look in one of his gold-encased mirrors. . . And then there are the tariffs due to come into effect next week
From two years ago:
Finished reading Gilead: "While I am thinking about it - when you are an old man like I am, you might think of writing some sort of account of yourself, as I am doing. In my experience of it, age has a tendency to make one's sense of oneself harder to maintain, less robust in some way." John Ames' frequent description of himself as old and tired, the metaphor being "ember," dull and gray but with an internal heat and fire, ready to be refulgent again when the Lord breathes life on it. I was struck by "one's sense of oneself [being] harder to maintain," how true that seems of old age, the age with little new except daily diminishment, little to look forward to but more diminishment, but filled with so many old memories, 80+ years of memories. The good ones fade away, the regretful ones linger and haunt. The good ones are almost all of the goodness of others - mother, sister, Uncle Jim, Aunt Monica, Brother Coogan, Wally Halperin, Johnny Flynn, Troy Major, Father Matthew, so many nurse-nuns - while the regretful ones are of my own failings, ingratitude, cowardice, selfishness, vanity, pettiness, indifference. It's curious that Marilynne Robinson named her fictional town "Gilead." I suppose she intended her novel to be healing, affirming. "There is a balm in Gilead / To make the wounded whole / There is a balm in Gilea / .To heal the sin-sick soul. / Sometimes I feel discouraged / And deep I feel the pain / In prayers the holy spirit / Revives my soul again" For those without the faith of a John Ames or Marilynne Robinson, hope comes harder.
One year ago, I was in really bad shape with undiagnosed and untreated polymyalgia rheumatica and kvetching about it:
I'm losing the physical and mental energy to write. I suspect I may abandon this journalling project one of these days.⁺⁺ I've never been entirely sure why I do it in the first place except perhaps that I have no attractive alternative, certainly not watching television. Reading is increasingly difficult for me except on a Kindle or on my laptop with its ability to enlarge fonts. There's certainly enough wretchedly bad news to read about, to think about, and to write about but I haven't much energy. I am bowled over by how seemingly fast I have gone downhill with these chronic pain problems, with the interstitial cystitis assortment of pains lasting about a year and a half (?) only to be resolved by surgery and replaced by rotator cuff and various arthritis pains, all debilitating and at least semi-crippling. At least as distressing as the physical pain is the cognitive decline that has accompanied it. It's very noticeable to me, both in terms of executive function and in terms of increasing short-term memory problems and confusion.
About one month later, I stopped writing in these notes for about 16 days. With the PMR, it was too painful to hold my laptop and type. On April 26th, I stopped writing until May 13th, when I was finally diagnosed with PMR and put on prednisone. Daily and nightly thoughts of suicide, similar period to when I was beset with ulcers in my bladder years before.
Major accomplishment today: I mailed the federal income tax return to the feds. I should have done it a month ago, but in any event, I took it to the central post office downtown just to follow my tradition. I drove home along the lakefront, through the upper East Side, and the North Shore suburbs on my way to get some bratwurst at Metro Market, where, as Geri admonished me, they were on sale. The drive home was, as usual, and actually even more than usual, very nostalgic. In my old age, I have become quite enamored of Milwaukee, not just of its history and architecture but of my now-long history here, my connections to the area. I skirted the Marqueette neighborhood and the law school, the neighborhood I came to as a nervous 18-year-old in 1959, living in the Schroeder Hall dormitory on 13th Street, drove through downtown where I practiced law for so many years, up the beautiful lakeshore, which I've long believed to be the prettiest urban lakeshore in the country. I drove past Geri's and my first house on Newton Avenue, her old lower flat on Maryland Avenue, my old upper flat at Don Jones's house on Murray Avenue, my old house on Frederick, and Tom St. John's house on Edgewood. UWM and the old Downer College for women. So many years, so many expereinces, so many memories. Good times and hard times. I felt like 'the ghost of Christmas Past,' an old spectre looking back on an entire, long adult lifetime, from 18 to approaching 84, from earliest adulthood to old age, all of it in the Milwaukee area except for 4 fateful years in the Marine Corps, and also my retreat after the House of Peace to exurban Town of Saukville. I almost understood, accepted, and forgave myself for my mistakes, my failures and inadequacies. Instead of reminating on the 5th stanza of Yeats' Vacillation:
Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.
I felt I was experiencing the 4th:
My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.
It is not often that I am more in line with stanza 4 than stanza 5, but on my long drive home from the post office today, I was. I felt like the professor in Wild Strawberries.
A word on the anniversary of Sancta virginitas. The dour diplomat and protector of all things sacerdotal, Pius XII, continued a long Christian tradition of disparaging both sex and married people as less God-worthy than chastity and the unmarried people in the priesthood or in a religious order. He relied on the New Testament, especially Matthew 19: 10-12 and 1 Corinthians ch 7. It puts me in mind of what I wrote in my memoirs about Saint Maria Goretti.
O
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