6/27/2025

 Friday, June 27, 2025

D+212/144/1302

Day 14? Allergies?  Hay Fever? Hex? Punishment for sin?

 1905 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was established at "The Continental Congress of the Working Class" in Chicago, Illinois;

1950 The US sent 35 military advisers to South Vietnam

1977 A 5-4 Supreme Court decision allowed lawyers to advertise

2018 Joseph Crowley was defeated in New York by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

2019 US Supreme Court ruled the Constitution doesn't prohibit partisan gerrymandering, allowing a ruling party to redraw electoral boundaries

In bed at 9:40, up around 5.  69°, high of 80°, cloudy

Kevzara, day 4/14; Trulicity, day 1/7 st 9:15; morning meds and Blink pill at 9:15 a.m.; Eye wipes at 9:30 a.m. and  p.m.; Eye mask at p.m. and   p.m.; Ketoconazole wash and cream at a.m. and  p.m.  Eye ointment at bedtime.  Zyrtec at 8:30.

Da miz'ries.  It was two weeks ago tonight that I woke in the middle of the night with a raw throat and went through the following day, and the next two weeks, blowing my nose, coughing, and trying to clear my throat.  This seems a bit long for a head cold, but who knows?  Do I need to be tested for allergies at my age?  COSMIC INJUSTICE, UNFAIR, INTOLERABLE!!!  I blame Agent Orange and demand disability pay!

Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Ilyich.  Yesterday was a day of blur for me: the 13th day of going through one Kleenex after another, wondering how my nose could produce so much nasty fluid, wishing that my throat would stop wheezing and clacking, wishing that bothersome pain would stop roaming around my body looking for a place to settle, and generally feeling crappy and very sorry for myself.  Poor me!  Why me, Lord? and all that.  Wimp.  Crybaby. Micky the Mope.

I had been intending for some time to get a copy of Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich from the library, but yesterday I found the full text online, read some of it, and copied some of it into this journal rather than engaging in any original thought (assuming I'm capable of any original thought.)  I had read the novella many years ago, along with Tolstoy's Confession, perhaps as a substitute for attempting War and Peace, or perhaps because I was going through some spiritual or emotional struggle of my own at the time, as Ivan Ilyich was as he lay dying.  In any case, I cut and pasted the sections that dealt (1) with Ilyich's days in law school, becoming socialized or conditioned to professional life in imperial Russia, and (2) with his final illness and deathbed redemption (conversion?  salvation?  what's the right word?)

In the law school segment, I noted especially:

In lawschool he was already what he would later be during his entire life: a capable, cheerful, good-natured,and sociable man, but one who strictly did what he considered his duty , and he considered his duty to be everything that it was considered to be by his superior.

and

At law school he had done things that previously had seemed to him quite vile and had filled him with self-disgust while he did them; but later, seeing these things were done by people in high positions and were not thought by them to be bad, he didn’t quite think of them as good but completely forgot them and wasn’t at all troubled by memories of them. 

 

 In the deathbed scene, the images that stand out are (1) his son kissing Ilyich's hand that had unintentionally hit him, (2) his wife weeping, (3) Ilyich feeling sorry for them and wishing to spare them suffering, and so (4) accepting or welcoming death.

The law school description reminds me of O. W. Holmes, Sr.'s "We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribes . . ." and of Roger Cramton's "The Ordinary Religion of the Law School Classroom," a 1978 article in the Cornell Law Review in which, after analysis, he concluded:

Modern dogmas entangle legal education - a moral relativism that tends toward nihilism, a pragmatism tending toward instrumentalism, a realism tending towards cynicism, an individualism tending towards atomism, and a faith in reason and democractic processes tending towards credulity and idolatry. . . Our indifference to values confines legal education to the "what is" and neglects the promise of "what might be."  It confirms a bias deeply engrained in many law students - that law school is a training ground for technicians who want to function efficiently  within the status quo. 

I don't for a moment think that Ivan Ilyich's law school education (?) or training (?) was similar to late 20th-century American legal education (?) or training (?),  but I fully suspect that it served much the same socialization function of American legal education and thus had much the same risks of nihilism, instrumentalism, and cynicism.  The sentences I quoted above clearly suggest this.  Ilyich consider his professional duty to be what his superiors said his professional duty was.  Follow the leader.  To get along, go along.  Don't buck the establishment.  I read this sentence with the other that I quoted about 'things that  previously had seemed to him quite vile and had filled him with self-disgust' becoming untroubling because they "were done by people in high positions and were not thought by them to be bad."  Those of us raised in a religious tradition may have had a rather simple, or primitive, sense of right and wrong and of the teachings, for example, of Jesus Christ, as children.  As we grow older, questions of right and wrong, and of what Christianity requires, become less simple or primitive.  As I used to tell our law clerks at the law firm, 'nothing's simple, nothing's cheap.'  Everything is complicated (and expensive) is contested legal matters, including what lay people may think are simple questions or right and wrong.  Witness the decison released today by the U. S. Supreme Court in the so-called Birthright Citizenship case.  The opinion of the Court, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, is 26 printed pages long.  Justice Thomas filed a 5 page concurring opinion.  Justice Alito filed a 4-page concurrence, in which J. Thomas concurred.  Justice Kavanaugh filed a 12-page concurrence, Justice Sotomayor filed a 44-page dissenting opinion, joined in by Justices Kagan and Jackson, who filed her own 22-page separate dissenting opinion.  Quaere whether Ilyich in his legal education and in his professional service as a lawyer and as a judge lost some of his simpler, more primitive, purer sense of right and wrong, and of the requirement of Christianity, and became more nihilistic, instrumentalist, and cynical.

It is harder for me to know what to think of Ilyich's deathbed conversion, redemption, salvation, epiphany - what is the correct term? Until he had seen and felt his son kissing his hand and his wife weeping at his suffering and piteous state, he was full of anger and of often conflicting thoughts. He was angry at those who were not dying, who were living and healthy, not beset with pain and disability.  Except for his peasant manservant Gerasim, whom he loved, he was separate from and separated from, distant from everyone.  When he experienced his son kissing his hand and his wife weeping, he experienced empathy.  He felt sorry for their suffering and wanted to ease it, though it could come only with his death, which he finally accepted.

America's right turn.  Today's  Supreme Court's decision in the so-called Birthright Citizenship case is another shocking development in the country's lurch toward dictatorship and fascism.  The Court didn't address the underlying issue of the constitutionality of Trump's Executive Order purporting to limit birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment.  Rather, it limited the authority of lower courts to issue "universal injunctions", i.e., injunctions against the Executive Branch of government that enjoin not only unlawful or unconstitutional action against plaintiffs in the lawsuit, but also against all other similarly situated persons or entities.   Under the ruling, a District Court's injunction would be the law only within the District Court's geographical jurisdiction.  The Executive Branch actor would be obliged to respect the court's injunction only within the court's jurisdiction and not beyond.  As Justice Katanji Brown-Jackson put it in her dissenting opinion

Make no mistake: today's ruling allows the Executive to deny people rights that the Founders plainly wrote into our Constitution, so long as those people have not found a lawyer or asked a court in a particular manner to have their rights protected. . .  As a result, the Judiciary - the one institution that is solely responsible for ensuring or Republic endures as a nation of laws - has put both our legal system, and our system of gevernment, in grave jeopardy.

Consider this decision together with the United States v. Trump, the presidential immunity case, and consider how far we have moved toward an all-powerful Dictator.