5/31/2025

 Saturday, May 31, 2025

D+185/130

1900 US troops arrived in Beijing to help put down Boxer Rebellion

1912 US Marines landed on Cuba

1921 A large-scale race riot broke out in Tulsa, Oklahoma, later described as the worst incident of racial violence in American history with 150-300 African Americans killed 

1969 John Lennon and Yoko Ono recorded "Give Peace a Chance" in a Montreal hotel, during their second 'bed-in' for peace;

In bed between 7:30 and 6 p.m. because of recurrent dull pain around my right kidney, and up at 4:25 with that pain resolved, but both hips aching, along with a stiff lower back.  By 5 a.m., the kidney area pain is starting to return.  I nodded off and fell back to sleep for perhaps more than an hour, waking up near 7.

Two years ago today, I was journaling about the 3,000 sexual abuse cases filed against the Catholic Church in California, including the Diocese of Santa Rosa, where I interviewed for a job as Director of Communications.  I included a page from my 'Life in the Age of Covid' watercolor sketchbooks.

Eye drops at 4:45 a.m. and 4:15 p.m.   I see Dr Saladi on Thursday for my 4-week post-op check-up.

Life in America.  In Sendik's yesterday, I chatted with an Army veteran of the Vietnam war.  He noticed 'Vietnam' on my baseball cap but not 'Marine  Airwing', and chided me, good-naturedly, about being a Marine rather than a soldier.  He had been 'in country' for exactly one year in 1969, about 3 or 4 years after me.  It reminds me of how long that g-d war continued long after it was clear to everyone that it was futile and a waste of tens of thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of SE Asian lives.  At the end of our chat in the cookies aisle, he mentioned to me that he has a nephew who moved to New Zealnnd because he was so unhappy living in America,   I was about to respond that it wasn't too hard to understand that feeling, but I realized that the chances were at least 50-50 that the fellow was a Trump supporter, a MAGAman.  He wasn't speaking sympathetically of his nephew's expatriation, but critically, or at least bewilderly.  I wonder whether one's attitude toward life in America has become a bit like one's attitude towards abortion, politics, and religion, a topic to avoid bringing up in polite company, so I mumbled something meaningless and we went our separate ways.

Food for thought.  I pay attention to the journalist Ezra Klein.  He has both smarts and wisdom.  Today I watched his show in which he interviewed The New Yorker writer Kathryn Schulz, author of a 2022 book, Lost and Found: A Memoir.  There was much food for thought in their discussion, and I may watch the podcast again, but today I'm focused on the part of the discussion in which Klein said the following:

One of my most inconvenient belliefs is about the world is that we know too much about it, and that the human mind is not meant to be stretched over this much threat and danger and tragedy at all times.  I work in the news.  My show is part of this dynamic I'm about to describe, but the news can seometimes be an engine for finding and bringing you whatever is going to most upset you, that is happening literally anywhere on Earth exactly at that moment . . . I think probably the healthy medium was to be able to pick up a newspaper once a day and find out about terrible things happening elsewhere and important things happening elsewhere and sometimes wonderful things, but less often wonderful things happening elsewhere.  As opposed to being with your kids in the park and your phone buzzes and it's just something terrible that you cannot affect.  It's not happening to anyone you know and you definately don't have power over it, but somebody somewhere thought it would grab you to know about it.  It both make you aware of suffering but also, I think it has some other quality, some numbing and exhausing quality that is not healthy.

I think of that Vietnam veteran I chatted with in Senkik's yesterday and his complaint or bewilderment over his nephew who kissed off living in America and moved to New Zealand.  He didn't say where in New Zealand he moved to, whether an urban or a rural area, nor how the nephew was supporting himself there, or what it is about life in America that he found so intolerable, but it wouldn't surprise me if at least part of what he wanted to escapte from was what Klien described, constant exposure to terrible news about which one can do nothing.  There is much more about curent American culture, including politics of course, that can make one feel like the man on the bridge in Edvard Munch's The Scream, but Klein has put his finger on a significant cause of modern misery, the daily awareness of human suffering, of death and destruction, about which we can do nothing.  Klein says it tends to make us numb and exhausted, but I suspect it's even worse.  It coarsens us and makes us indifferent to the suffering of others. After a while, it becomes boring.  We can become like Donald Trump when he says of the Ukraine War or the Gaza War, as he did before professing to be concerned about the slaughter in those places, "it's not my problem."  Or, as J. D. Vance said to Steve Bannon during his campaign for the Senate, "I gotta be honest with you, I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another."  The hard question, for Ezra Klein and the rest of us, is what to do about this dystopian situation we live in, especially we relatively highly-educated, highly-informed individuals who religiously follow 'the news.'

I suspect I may be thinking more and writing more about this discussion between Kathryn Schulz and Klein.

The Federalist Society is not loyal enough for Trump.  In a Truth Social post yesterday, he called Leonard Leo "a sleazebag:"

“I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations. This is something that cannot be forgotten!  I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use the Federalist Society as a recommending source on judges.  I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real ‘sleazebag’ named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions.”

He has also reduced the role of the American Bar Association in reviewing judicial candidates for integrity, professional competence, and judicial temperament.  Attorney General Pam Bondi said in her letter to the ABA that Mr. Trump’s second-term nominees would not be instructed to sign waivers, nor would they fill out questionnaires or sit for interviews. 

In MAGALand, loyalty and subservience are not only the highest values and virtues, they may be the only values and virtues, although cruelty, vindictiveness, and vengeance should be included.   Ave, Caesar, moituri te salutamus!  Do or die. L'etat, c'est moi.  Anyone who is not loyal to and subservient to Trump is a nothing at best and "a sleazebag" or "scum," and probably a "sucker" and a "loser," someone to be held in contempt by members of MAGALand.