Wednesday, July 30, 2025
D+264/192/1269
1945 After delivering the atomic bomb across the Pacific, the USS Indianapolis was sunk by the Japanese submarine I-58. 880 of the crew die, many eaten by sharks.
1965 US President Lyndon Johnson signed the Medicare bill.
1967 'Race riot' in Milwaukee (4 killed)
1988 Jordanian King Hussein renounced sovereignty over the West Bank to the PLO, hours after dissolving Jordan's House of Representatives
2022 I wrote the first entries in this journal that is now 3 years running
In bed at 9:40 and up at 5:15 after a very discontinuous sleep, interrupted by pits stops, hip pains, and insomnia. Rough night. 69°, high 75°, rainy day ahead.
Meds, etc. Morning meds around 10 a.m.
The first entries in this journal, notebook, or whatever were about Jimmy A's then impending move from Newcastle Place in Wisconsin to Silverado in Alexandria, his confusion about it, his bladder problems, etc.
Two years ago I entered Hopkin's God's Grandeur, reflected on my long drive through wealthy neighborhoods in Mequon, recalling my life's journey and concluding with " I also thought of a metaphor I read just this morning, a writer saying he wondered whose shoes he was wearing when he felt out of place among some 'swells.' The thoughts were all disquieting, reminding me as usual what a limousine liberal I am, about to turn 82 and still wondering whose shoes I have on."
Last year, I wrote about the anniversary of the "riot" in Milwaukee in 1967, Medicare's 59th birthday, the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, and the death of William Calley, including these thoughts:
What struck me in reading the story was the similarity between My Lai and Hamas's actions in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. but also what has been happening for the 9 months thereafter in Gaza, i.e.,, the killing of women, children, and elderly noncombatants, although on an industrial scale in Gaza. I was also struck by how, by the beginning of 1968, less than 3 years after the 3rd Marine Division landed in Vietnam, the military was so hard up for leadership. Calley was about 5' 3" tall and 130 pounds, child size. He had to repeat 7th grade. He graduated in the bottom quarter of his high school class. He flunked out of Palm Beach Junior College after which he worked as a hotel bellhop and a restaurant dishwasher. With that background, he was selected for Officer Candidate School where he graduated 120th in his class of 156. What is most striking about Calley and his men and the My Lai massacre is that these American soldiers were ordered to kill hundreds of Asian civilians - women, children, and old men - and they did it. They did it, much like the Hamas "terrorists" did it on October 7th, just like the Russian soldiers did in Bucha, north of Kyiv, in 2022, much like the Marines who killed 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq, did it in 2005 - men, women, elderly people and children as young as 1-year-old. Many thoughts are darting around my brain as I reflect on the military and war and what they do to people but I'm too tired and in too much distracting pain at 6 o'clock this morning as I write to say much about it except for one thought: I wonder how many civilians of all ages were killed or wounded, incinerated or poisoned, by the thousands of air missions we kept track of in the TACC during my time there. How much did we think of them? What did we think of them? How connected to them, spiritually, and emotionally, as nominal Christians, Jews, and people of the Book, were we as we lived behind our barbed wire fencing? I think the honest answer is "Not at all." What does that say about us? About me? And finally, what are we to think of our government's, i.e., Joe Biden's, providing 14,000 2,000-pound bombs to Israel since Hamas's October massacre, knowing their immense destructive power and knowing that they would be used against Palestinian civilians in one of the world's most densely populated areas?
Would You Pay $20,000 to Try to Live Longer? - At longevity clinics, people are shelling out for exhaustive medical tests and treatments like plasma exchange and peptide therapy. How much does it benefit them? This is a feature story in this morning's NY Times by Dane G. Smith. When I saw the headline, I immediately thought I would gladly pay $20,000 to try to live less long. On most days, I think I'm ready to go now, though perhaps I'm kidding myself. I think again of Ezekiel Emanuel's 1974 article in The Atlantic, Why I Hope to Die at 75. He wrote it when he was 57; will he feel the same at 73? 74? 75? My big fear is not death, but continuing to live with chronic pain, the likelihood of falling, decreasing mobility, and increasing dependencies, inability to take care of myself, cognitive decline if I'm lucky, dementia if I'm not, inability to live at home, and worse. No thanks.
JJA's Facebook post & my comment yesterday.
Is it conceivable that he would pardon a person guilty of such heinous, life-altering, sex crimes against hundreds of young women? The January 6th pardons give us a clue, but I think also of his pardon of his son-in-law's father, Charles Kushner, who hired a prostitute to ensnare Kushner's sister's husband and had the video tape sent to his sister. Chris Christie described it as the 'most loathsome crime' he prosecuted while US Attorney, Our president saw fit not only to grant a full pardon to Kushner, but also to appoint him American ambassador to France. If he succeeds in obtaining the desired trump-exculpating statements from Maxwell, perhaps he will not only pardon her, but name her our ambassador to the UK, where her father embezzled between $900 million and $1.2 billion from his employees' pension funds before drowning himself (presumably.) The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Trump said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters. Pardoning Maxwell might test that theory, but I suspect he's shameless and arrogant enough to try it.
David Remnick's Letter from Israel, July 27, 2025, in The New Yorker. Excerpts:
Since the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the rise of the second intifada, the activist left has almost vanished. Labor, the party of Yitzhak Rabin, is a shell of what it was, holding just four seats of the Knesset’s hundred and twenty. The other left-leaning parties barely register. Public debate, especially on television, is often marked by racist and reactionary rhetoric.
“Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence,” George Orwell wrote after fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. “Unfortunately the truth about atrocities is far worse than that they are lied about and made into propaganda. The truth is that they happen.”
“What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians,” Ehud Olmert, a former Prime Minister, wrote in Haaretz. He said that his country was guilty of war crimes. “We’re not doing this due to loss of control in any specific sector, not due to some disproportionate outburst by some soldiers in some unit. Rather, it’s the result of government policy—knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated.”
In the seventeen years that Netanyahu has been Prime Minister, he has waged a culture war against those to his left and transformed Israel’s political climate. Backed by secular conservatives, Russian émigrés, settlers, religious nationalists, and the ultra-Orthodox, he has been the main force behind the creation of right-wing media outlets. He has pushed to diminish the Supreme Court’s power and has forged a ruling coalition with the help of far-right zealots. Above all, he has postponed any reckoning with an occupation that has lasted fifty-eight years. Netanyahu and his circle speak maga fluently—“deep state,” “wokeness,” and “fake news” have all made their way into political Hebrew—while his son Yair, an Israeli version of Donald Trump, Jr., rails against “post-national, globalist” leftists and lauds Viktor Orbán, Nigel Farage, and Jair Bolsonaro. Netanyahu’s outlandish obeisance to Trump, from posing with a “Trump Was Right About Everything!” cap to nominating him for a Nobel Prize, underscores the alignment.
It's a very long report, and provides no reason for hopefulness, indeed quite the opposite. I read all of it and I''m glad I did, among other reasons, because it introduced me to the short-story author Etgar Keret.
A world of kindness? I am remembering this morning the man who held the door for me at the downtown post office He was a stranger and he went out of his way to get to the heavy door and hold it open for me when he saw me approach it with my cane, waddling and shuffling and concentrating on maintaining my balance so I wouldn't 'take a header.'. As I always do, I said, 'Thank you, sir. Thank you kindly," as I thought there is a lot of kindness in the world, our everyday world. The frailer I become, the more I am a recipient of it. I'm grateful for that and thankful that, if our roles had been reversed, I would have held the door for him. Am I a kind person? I think of myself as one, though I know I am hardly perfect in that regard. I need to think about this; perhaps it would make me feel better about myself, something I could use now and then.
Geri and Micaela are having a girls' night out at Harry's tonight.
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