Thursday, May 8, 2025
D+183/108
1945 German General Wilhelm Keitel formally surrendered to the Allies represented by the United States, the UK, France, and the Soviet Union in Berlin
1957 South Vietnamese President, Ngô Đình Diệm, arrived in the U.S. on a state visit
1958 President Eisenhower ordered the National Guard out of Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas
1967 Muhammad Ali was indicted for refusing induction into the US Army
1970 Thousands of students protested against the Vietnam War following the Kent State University shootings in Ohio
2024 New York has more millionaires than any other city in the world, one in 24, with 744 centi-millionaires worth more than 100 million and 60 billionaires
In bed at 9, awake at 3:45, and up at 4:04. 42°, wind chill 26°, high 52°.
Prednisone,day 359; 2 mg., day 21/21; Kevzara,day 10/14; CGM, day 6/15; Trulicity. Prednisone at 4:30. Other meds at 1:30 p.m.
The dispute is charged with decades of bad blood between the Republican president and the Pritzker family, a major Democratic Party force. Trump has feuded with the family since at least the 1990s, going back to a Manhattan real-estate fight that included Penny Pritzker’s now-deceased uncle, Jay Pritzker. “You’re a bad guy, Jay. I’m going to kick your ass,” Trump later recalled saying.
We should remember that Trump also had a personal grievance with Columbia University that undoubtedly stoked his decision to cut $400 million in federal grants and contracts to that institution. More than two decades ago, Trump tried to persuade Columbia University to expand its campus on property he owned. He wanted $400 million for the property, and Columbia declined. Trump never forgets, and I have to believe that it was no coincidence that, under the guise of punishing Columbia for failing to deal with anti-semitism, he had the federal government cut $400 million in grants. These cuts in grants and contracts with major research institutions hurt the institutions and the people who run them, but more importantly, they hurt the human beings would may benefit from the health and other research conducted there, i.e., the rest of us, the hoi polloi, 'little people' who are not masters of the universe. It makes me think of Luigi Mangioni and the killing of Brian Thompson, another master of the universe as the head of UnitedHealthCare. Is it surprising that (1) our oligarchic, plutocratic federal government is seeking the death penalty for Mangioni¹ and (2) Mangioni has become a hero to many, with a go-fund me legal defense fund, a fan club, and perhaps a cult? This is the world we are living in, Trumpworld.
¹ I think of the great flick Network from which most of us remember Howard Beale's line "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore," but the ones to recall are those screamed by Ned Beatty, as chairman of the board of the huge media enterprise for which Howard Beale works:
You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, Reichmarks, Yen, Rubles, Pounds, and Shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!
Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.
I was the "enemy." As I have often written, Donald Trump is a bad man, a wicked man, an evil man, but so is his vice president and protégé, D. J. Vance. He is very much complicit in Trump's attack on American universities. In a keynote address at the second National Conservatism Conference on November 2, 2021, he said:
I think in this movement of national conservatism, what we need more than inspiration is wisdom. And there is a wisdom in what Richard Nixon said approximately 40, 50 years ago. He said, and I quote: ‘The professors are the enemy.’” . . . So much of what we want to accompllish in this movement are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of fundamentally hostile institutions specifically the universities which control the knowledge of our society, which control what we call Truth and what we call Falsity, which provides reserach which gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country, . . . we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country. . . . Our universities do not pursue Knowledge an Truth, they purusue deceit and lies, and it's time to be honest about that. .
On the website for his campaing for a U.S. Senaate seat in 2021, under the heading “Protect Conservative Values,” he complained that “hundreds of billions of American tax dollars” get sent to universities that “teach that America is an evil, racist nation” and that train teachers who bring that indoctrination into our elementary and high schools.” He did’t want any tax dollars going to institutions that teach “critical race theory or radical gender ideology” which is Republican code-talk for anything about racism and racial history or women's studies. Instead, he wanted the univerisiteies to deliver “an honest, patriotic account of American history."
I think back to my teaching days at the Marquette Law School when I, and a couple of others, were the only liberal or Democratic professors on the faculty. We were tolerated, but the faculty overall and the entire administration and alumni support organizations were overwhelmingly Republican and conservative, Nixon supporters. I would have been the kind of guy J. D. hated, a Bobby Kennedy Democrat, deeply distrustful of the U.S. government because of Vietnam, well-aware of the nation's history of racism and invidious discrimination against Blacks, Browns, Native Americans, Asians, gays, women, other minorities, and its long history of overtly and covertly interfering in the internal affairs of other countries. Vance wouldn't consider any of that stuff part of "an honest, patriotic account of American history."
Why Trump loves tariffs. (1) They are regressive taxes, with a much greater impact on the poor, the working and middle classes, and minimal effect on the wealthy, like him. (2) They open the door to legal bribery and extortion from or on business interests seeking or needing exemptions. It's already happening and will only accelerate turning the country into a kleptocracy, a process that started the day Trump was elected. Look at the 6- and 7-figure contributions to his Inaugural Committee.
Habemus papam. I was sitting in my recliner, as usual, when the white smoke rose from the chimney above the Sistine Chapel. There were thousands of visitors in St. Peter's Square, all of them appearing to be excited, some of them almost ecstatic. I wondered why, what is it about the replacement of one pope by another should cause such emotion. While everyone waited for the new pope to appear at his customary window in the papal palace, there were a parade the Vatican borgo into St. Peter's Square, first a Vatican band (I didn't know they had one!), followed by a contingent of the Swiss Guards in their colorful striped uniforms with plumed helmets, then another band. I thought of I Love a Parade, and of how important all the imperial traditions are to the Vatican and the Papacy. I was reminded of the lavish funeral ceremonies of Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Diana. I thought of the coronation of King Charles III. All magnificent, splendiferous, reminiscent of Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves, and all ridiculous in light of the United Kingdom's greatly diminished power in the world today. How profoundly similar to the status of the Holy Roman Catholic Church today, at least in the West. Talking heads on TV are speculating about what name the new pope will take. My guess: Paul VII, avoiding John or Francis to avoid scaring the conservatives, and Benedict or John Paul to avoid scaring the liberals. I'll probably be wrong. . . . Leo XIV. Robert Cardinal Prevost, an Augustinian and a native of Chicago. He was born in Mercy Hospital at 31st and Prairie and grew up in Dolton, the suburb adjoining Riverdale, where my mother and father lived before her death, and where my sister and her husband lived. For a time, he attended Mendel High School, which I would have attended had I not been accepted at Leo, which was walking distance from home. He studied at the Catholic Theological Union in Hyde Park, on the campus of the University of Chicago. As a sign of the times, his home parish, St. Mary of the Assumption is closed, as is Mendel High School, victims of the vast downsizing of Catholic schools and parishes in the Archdiocese of Chicago, including my home parish, St. Leo but not my Catholic high school, Leo, though it is no longer a part of the archdiocese's school system. (Quite a run-on sentence!)
The crucifix in the photo rested on the casket of my friend Roland Wright, who died more than 20 yers ago. Roland was my first pick-up on Sunday mornings and Holy Days of Oblligation in the years I drove the church van for St. Francis of Assisi parish. He was a good man and we became good friends. He lived in a little apartment in the public housing high rise for the elderly called Convent Hill. Rolnnd was one of the very few singers in our church choir which sang mostly Black gospel and spirituals from the "Lead Me, Guide Me" songbook. Roland was an alcoholic earlier in his life, before I med him. He lived with this father. there was a fire in their home that resulted in the death of his father. roland was drunk and didnt wake up in time to save his father. I suspect it was that occurence that led hi to sobriety, but it also led to lhis sense of liefelong regret, guilt , and shame. He was very modest and a bit withdrawn. One Sunday, after he had missed a couple of weekly masses and seemed to be out of sorts, I pressed hi to tell me what was troubling him and he reluctantly told me he had esophageal cancer. I became his driver and effectively his next-of-kin to doctor and hoospital appointments, including the visit when his oncologist told him his cancer was inoperable and termnal. When he became unable to swallow, I shared daily duty with the nurse at Convent Hill visiting Roland, grinding his pills, mixing them with his protein drinks, and feeding him through the G-tube in his stomach. The Convent HIll nurse wass a religious sister (nun), also a parishioner at St. Francis, and a saint. I wish I could remember her name. His second- or third-hand furniture was in terrible shape. I brought him the recliner chair from my office. The nurse told me he cried when he told her about it, he was so tounched. Eventually, he couldn't care for himself and had to move into the nursing home at 6th and Walmut, where I continued to visit him until he died. The nurse and I gave the eulogies at Roland's funeral at St. Francis, which was well-attended, but only my friend Father Matthew, one other parishioner, and I, along with Walter Goodwin, my assistant director at the House of Peace, attended the burial, where I was given this crucifix and the folded American flag he earned for his long-ago service in the Army. It's one of two that I have, the other being my father's. I suppose Geri will be given one when it's my turn. Roland was a good man, a good friend, and I miss him. And the dear nursing sister who loved him, too.
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