5/7/2025

 Wednesday, May 7, 2025

D+182/107

1824 Beethoven's 9th (Choral) Symphony premier in Vienna, Austria

1945 Unconditional surrender of the German Third Reich to the Allies was signed by General Alfred Jodl at Reims in northern France

1975 US President Gerald Ford declared an end to the "Vietnam Era."

1984 $180m out-of-court settlement was reached in the Agent Orange suit

2020 Father and son were arrested for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia, after video of the killing surfaced

In bed at 9:40 after LO'D monologue, up at 5:40, 48°, high of 54°, windy again.

Prednisone, day 358; 2 mg., day 20/21; Kevzara, 9/14; CGM, day 5/15; Trulicity.   Prednisone at 6:05 a.m.  Other meds at 6:20 a.m.  No empagliflozin today, tomorrow, and Friday.

Boor, lout, thug, brute, lummox, pig, moron, vulgarian, sadist, charlatan, rapist, conman, fraudster, fascist,  lowlife, liar, pagan, narcissistic, avaricious, and seditious,    What a wealth of words there is to describe the curent president of the United States of America.  I thought of what a vile, despicable human being he is as I watched his Oval Office Q and session with Mark Carney, the new prime minister of Canada, yesterday.  Trump has had the office redecorated with a lot of gold features on the walls and the fireplace.  He has given the room a cheesy, over-the-top, Mar-a-Lago look.  His former chief of staff, John Kelly, said of him: "The depths of his dishonesty just astounding to me. The dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, though it’s more pathetic than anything else.  He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.”   He also called him "unhinged." Rex Tillerson, his first secretary of state, called him "a moron."  James Mattis, his first secretary of defense, said he has "the understanding of a fifth or sixth grader."  Other former high-ranking aides are reported to have called him "an idiot" and "like an 11-year-old."  But it's not so much his IQ that is a national embarrassment as it is his moral character and boorishness. his churlishness, his uncouthness, his classlessness and vulgarity, his lack of decency and respectability.  As I watched him seated next to Mark Carney yesterday, I envied the Canadians for having a political leader and head of state with class and dignity, unlike ours. 

It's getting harder to think.  I had a hard time understanding the discussion in this morning's NYTimes among Ross Douthat and two other conservative Catholics, Dan Hitchens (First Things) and Michael Brendan Dougherty (National Review), about the 'stakes' in the upcoming conclave to elect the next pope.  They toss around terms like modernity, liberalism, and progress as if they have meanings shared by all three of them.  I'm never sure exactly what these terms mean.  They appear to see "the grand scheme of things", like Western history and civilization, better than I do.  After reading their discussion, I read Dan Hitchens' essay on "The Last Modern Pope" in the Times, and I didn't do much better with that one either.  Part of my ineptitude must be my education, which didn't equip me to engage with guys like these, and part of it is old age and lack of energy to engage in close reading, maybe lack of interest, too.  A small part of it may also be my difficulty reading, which I hope will be helped by my cataract surgery on Friday.  I can't remember the last book I read cover to cover.  I get books, but only read parts of them.  The last books I read significant parts of were one on the writings of Yeshayahu Leibowitz on Judaism and the State of Israel, and Max Hastings's epic book on Vietnam.  I doubt that I will ever read another entire book.  I wonder often about cognitive decline, not whether I have any as I move toward my  84th birthday, but how much I am experiencing.  As the rest of my organs wear out, so does my brain.  I don't think I have dementia yet, at least none that is very noticeable, but my short-term memory and 'working memory' stink.   As I write this, I think of Zeke Emanuel's article in The  Atlantic, "Why I Hope to Die at 75."

Doubtless, death is a loss. It deprives us of experiences and milestones, of time spent with our spouse and children. In short, it deprives us of all the things we value.  But here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.

Neatnik or packrat?  I received a call from the ophthalmologist who will do my cataract surgery on Friday, asking what kind of lens was implanted when I had cataract surgery on my left eye about 10 years ago.  For many years, I had saved the package of stuff with which I was discharged from that surgery, probably including information that the doctor wanted.  Unfortunately, in a fit of 'getting organized' and ridding myself of stuff I had no use for, I threw it out about a year ago. The same fit of madness overcame me when we moved from Saukville to Bayside 14 years ago.  I gave away a ton of books I had been holding onto for many years, books that were worth keeping, but not worth packing and moving, or so I thought.  Since then, I have many times wished I had held onto this book or that, like, e.g., Constantine's Sword by James Carroll,  and The Arms of Krupp by William Manchester.  My natural tendency is to be a packrat, not a neatnik, but when the clutter gets to be too bad, I start throwing away stuff that I know I will eventually wish I had held onto.  So it goes.

Andy's family photo to ASC.  I ran it down to Shorewood this morning and had a very nice chat with Anne.  It was a bit of a jolt to see the fine furniture we had bought together at Paul Weise 40 or more years ago, still looking great, undiminished by age, unlike Anne and me.  

 The Oven Bird  BY ROBERT FROST

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

 

More from Zeke Emanuel's article, the stuff that makes me wonder about suicide:

[O]ver the past 50 years, health care hasn’t slowed the aging process so much as it has slowed the dying process. . . .  [T]he contemporary dying process has been elongated. Death usually results from the complications of chronic illness—heart disease, cancer, emphysema, stroke, Alzheimer’s, diabetes.

Take the example of stroke. The good news is that we have made major strides in reducing mortality from strokes. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of deaths from stroke declined by more than 20 percent. The bad news is that many of the roughly 6.8 million Americans who have survived a stroke suffer from paralysis or an inability to speak. And many of the estimated 13 million more Americans who have survived a “silent” stroke suffer from more-subtle brain dysfunction such as aberrations in thought processes, mood regulation, and cognitive functioning. Worse, it is projected that over the next 15 years there will be a 50 percent increase in the number of Americans suffering from stroke-induced disabilities. Unfortunately, the same phenomenon is repeated with many other diseases

So American immortals may live longer than their parents, but they are likely to be more incapacitated. Does that sound very desirable? Not to me.

The situation becomes of even greater concern when we confront the most dreadful of all possibilities: living with dementia and other acquired mental disabilities. Right now approximately 5 million Americans over 65 have Alzheimer’s; one in three Americans 85 and older has Alzheimer’s. And the prospect of that changing in the next few decades is not good. Numerous recent trials of drugs that were supposed to stall Alzheimer’s—much less reverse or prevent it—have failed so miserably that researchers are rethinking the whole disease paradigm that informed much of the research over the past few decades. Instead of predicting a cure in the foreseeable future, many are warning of a tsunami of dementia—a nearly 300 percent increase in the number of older Americans with dementia by 2050.

Half of people 80 and older with functional limitations. A third of people 85 and older with Alzheimer’s. That still leaves many, many elderly people who have escaped physical and mental disability. If we are among the lucky ones, then why stop at 75? Why not live as long as possible? 

Even if we aren’t demented, our mental functioning deteriorates as we grow older. Age-associated declines in mental-processing speed, working and long-term memory, and problem-solving are well established. Conversely, distractibility increases. We cannot focus and stay with a project as well as we could when we were young. As we move slower with age, we also think slower. 

I  think of that last paragraph in connection with my earlier entry about "It's getting harder to think."  I don't think it's what Emanuel calls "age-associated declines in mental processing speed," etc., that would cause me to end my life.  On the other hand, I think the fear of total or near-total incapacity and dependency from a devastating stroke, Parkinson's, or severe dementia, could.  I think of my grandmother in the nursing home in Port Charlotte until age 95, and of my Aunt Mary Healy in the nursing home in Phoenix, wanting to die and saying to God: "What's the matter?  I'm ready."  I think of the op-ed in the Times on  April16th, ""There’s a Lesson to Learn From Daniel Kahneman’s Death." about the assisted suicide of the man who chose to die at age 90 for the simple but sufficient reason that his life "was complete" and it was time to end it.  Serious thoughts, a serious subject.