Saturday, June 28, 2025
D+213/145/1301
Day 15
1914 Assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, and his wife Sophie by Bosnian-Serb assassin Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo
1934 Jimmy Aquavia was born
In bed at 8, up at 5:45. 61°, high of 76°, sunny.
Kevzara, day 5/14; Trulicity, day 2/7; morning meds and Blink pill at a.m.; Eye wipes at 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 .
Resisters who won in court: Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Jenner & Block, and Susman Godfrey. Capitulators: Paul Weiss; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; Kirkland & Ellis; Latham & Watkins; Simpson Thacher & Bartlett; A&O Shearman; Milbank; and Cadwalader.
Last year on this date, I was crying the blues about the debate between Trump and Biden, realizing that the game was over, or the game was up, or whatever the correct expression is. I repeat again what I have often written in these pages, the apocryphal quote of Barak Obama: "Don't underestimate Joe's ability to fuck things up."
Today I'm feeling pretty crappy again, head tight, throat congested, coughing, trying to clear my throat, slighty headachy, no energy. I went out onto the patio around 1 p.m., sat and looked at the trees and bushes, and groundcover while listening to Richard Strauss' Tod und Verklärung, Death and Transfiguration. I intended to listen to Four Last Songs inadvertently hit upon Tod. As the title tells us, it is a composition about a dying man. The other day, I was encountering The Death of Ivan Ilyich; today, it's Tod und Verklärung. Strauss was 25 years old when he composed it. Why in the world would someone at that age be thinking of death? He was 84 when he composed Vier Letze Lieder. Tolstoy was in his late 50s when Ivan Ilyitch was published in 1886; he lived for another 24 years until his death at age 82 in 1910. In the 1870s, he went through a wracking spiritual crisis - a midlife crisis? - that led to radicalizing changes in his lifestyle, religious, and political beliefs that lasted for the rest of his life. I'm interested in him again in large measure because of his radical Christianity, his anarchism, and his reflection on his own life and grief about it as he grew ever nearer the end of it.
I wanted to reflect some more on old age, death, and on the process of reviewing one's life in old age, the long painful (for me at least) examination of conscience, living with intense feelings of guilt, shame, sin, weakness, failure, stanzas IV and V of Vacillation, but I've lacked the mental, physical, and emotional energy to engage in that kind of activity. I don't know if it's because I'm entering the third week of feeling sick and tired of feeling sick and tired, or if it's because I'm old and I've dropped down to a significantly lower plateau on the erratic descent to 'pencils down, imes up.', but in any event, I have run out of steam.
St. Augustine has nothing on me!
Everything that follows is some of what I wrote on his date two years ago, and seems pretty pertinent to my thoughts above. I was two years younger then and clearly had a lot more energy that I do today. I do a 'copy and paste' to ensure that I read these thoughts again.
What then must we do? and Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner. I'm reminded of these New Testament lines by an essay I've been reading by Christopher Hitchens on the time he spent interviewing Saul Bellow in Chicago in 1983. The essay is the concluding one in a collection of his essays titled The Moronic Inferno. At one point during the interview, Hitchens wrote that he asked Bellow "What then must we do?" undoubtedly referring, without saying so, to either the line in Luke 3:10-14 or to Leo Tolstoy's nonfiction book of that title (or something like it, depending on the translation.) The other line - Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner - is also from Luke, but in ch. 18:13. The first line was uttered by people seeking baptism by John the Baptist, Jesus' first cousin (who today we would call a lunatic) as he was scaring the shit out of them about the coming doom and damnation - 'the axe lies ready at the root of the tree . . .'. They were asking how to avoid the terror to come. The second line was uttered by a despised tax collector on the margin of a crowd of Pharisees who were bragging about how observant/holy they were with Jesus saying saying the tax collector "went home justified, for he who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted." I think of both of these lines in connection with Reinhold Niebuhr's An Interpretation of Christian Ethics and its chapter entitled 'The Relevance of an Impossible Ethical Ideal." In Luke 3:10-14, John answered his questioners that they should share all that they have with the poor, anticipating Jesus' teaching in Matthew 25: 31-46 and elsewhere. Niebuhr points out that this Christian ethical ideal of subordinating one's own interest to benefit others runs counter to human nature, i.e., that it is impossible to follow.
I think about those followers of John the Baptist asking 'what then must we do?' These people had to be a little nuts to begin with. Why else would they be down at the River Jordan seeking answers about the meaning of life from John in his camel hair tunic and diet of locusts and honey? Who are their counterparts today? I think too of that loathed tax collector, who he was, why he was so conscious of his sins, why Jesus said he was 'justified,' and who are his counterparts today. I suspect today's Jordanaires (not the backup singers for Elvis and Patsy Cline, but John's groupies) are the whacko followers of whacko evangelical prophets of all sorts, but mostly of the fraudster/grifter sort, the likes of Jimmy Swaggert, Jerry Falwell, Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, Joel Osteen and on and on. They believe that we are doomed, that Armageddon is on the way, and that they need salvation and that if they do what is required they will be 'saved' while those who aren't in the know and who don't do "what then must be done" are doomed to perdition.
On the other hand, the penitent tax collector is Modern [Hu]Man and his progeny are the many people who are troubled by their own inadequacy to live a 'clean' life in the society and culture in which they live, conscious of their own moral and ethical frailness, their own complicity in what they see as life's depravity, those who are kicked in the stomach by the lines in Yeat's 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.
. . . .
But for Jesus' tax collector and today's progeny, it's not just the acts and omissions 'long years ago' that beset their consciences, it's everyday wrongs, everyday compromises, all the moral and ethical problems that Niebuhr recognizes as permanently grounded in human nature. They never feel innocent because they know they are not innocent. They are not sure of how to assess individual guiltiness because they know they have been born to live in a guilty world, a guilty society, a guilty culture. While they would like to feel like victims of this wicked, nasty, world, this society, this culture, they know full well that they are also sustainers of those systems, beneficiaries of them, "limousine liberals" and NIMBYs.
And speaking of Niebuhr, there is a very interesting op-ed piece in this morning's NYT by Thomas Edsall titled "This Is Why Trump Lies Like There’s No Tomorrow." Excerpts:
-- "In 2008, Kang Lee, a developmental psychologist at the University of Toronto, published “Lying in the Name of the Collective Good” along with three colleagues: Lying in the name of the collective good occurs commonly. Such lies are frequently told in business, politics, sports, and many other areas of human life. These lies are so common that they have acquired a specific name, the “blue lie” — purportedly originating from cases where police officers made false statements to protect the police force or to ensure the success of the government’s legal case against an accused.
-- "In a 2017, a Scientific American article building on Lee’s research, “How the Science of ‘Blue Lies’ May Explain Trump’s Support,” by Jeremy Adam Smith, argues that Lee’s work highlights a difficult truth about our species: we are intensely social creatures, but we are prone to divide ourselves into competitive groups, largely for the purpose of allocating resources. People can be prosocial — compassionate, empathetic, generous, honest — in their group and aggressively antisocial toward out-groups. When we divide people into groups, we open the door to competition, dehumanization, violence — and socially sanctioned deceit."
This 'modern, scientific' insight seems to come directly from Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society which was published in 1932.
Niebuhr and God. I've wondered for some time about Niebuhr's faith, i.e., his belief in God. What "God" means to him. How he understands "God" to be. How he feels, e.g., about Thomas Aquinas' notion of the "All"s: all-good, all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful, all-this and all-that. While looking for something else in my LOA edition of Niebuhr's major writings, I found his "Notebook of a Tamed Cynic" and this entry from some unstated day in 1026:
"I had a letter from a young preacher today who told me how he was suffering for truth's sake. He had merely been telling his congregation that Jesus was a great spiritual teacher, as was Confucius and Laotse, and that the Christ idea was the product of Greek legend and ancient mythology. His good people were so ignorant, he thought, that they failed to show proper appreciation for his learning and resented his iconoclasm."
. . . .
"It is not easy to define the God idea. Scientifically I suppose God is "the element of spirituality which is integral to reality," but for all practical and religious purposes I find it both helpful and justified to define him by saying that "God is like Jesus." The ultimate nature of reality cannot be grasped by science alone; poetic imagination is as necessary as scientific precision. Some of the supposedly ignorant peasants against whom my youthful friend is drawing his heroic sword may have more truth on their side than any fresh young theologue could possibly realize."
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