Saturday, August 23, 2024
D+288/216/-1246
1903 Sixth Zionist Congress: Theodor Herzl declaresd a Jewish state
1939 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact and secretly divided Poland between themselves, setting the stage for World War II
1943 Battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history, ends after 50 days as the Soviet Union defeats Germany; over 10,000 tanks take part, and nearly 250,000 combatants are killed
1946 Ordinance No. 46 of the British Military Government constituted the German state of Schleswig-Holstein
1958 People's Republic of China resumed bombardment of the Quemoy and Matsu islands in the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis
1989 Two million people formed a human chain across Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania in a peaceful pro-independence demonstration against Soviet occupation
2005 Hurricane Katrina formed over the Bahamas and later became a Category 5 hurricane
2020 Black man Jacob Blake was shot in the back by police in front of his children in Kenosha, prompting violent protests
2022 Two men were found guilty of plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer
In bed at 10, an hour and 1/2 into The Brutalist, up at 3:35, feeling old and weary, about 20 years into retirement. 65°, high of 77°, clear.
Meds, etc. Morning meds at about 8:30 a.m.
The modern world's assault on happiness. How is it possible not to go through each day weeping, on the inside if not visibly? The news carries graphic stories of famine and starvation in Gaza and Sudan, war in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine, and almost steady drift to authoritarianism or fascism in Europe, Israel, and America. The passage of Trump's 'One Big Beautiful Budget Bill created about 10,000 new slots for ICE agents to track and capture "illegal aliens," most of whom are law-abiding people working on American farms, in sweatshops, and in factories doing work that needs to be done but which few Americans are willing to do. Within two weeks, the Department of Homeland Security had more than 100,000 applications for those jobs. America is ruled by men with no hearts: Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Kash Patel, Tom Homan, Mike Johnson, and, not to be outdone by the men, Kristi Noem.
There was a period in my life when I read a lot of the writings of C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, Surprised by Joy, including his 1943 book, "The Abolition of Man," in which he argued in favor of natural law and absolute values and against moral relativism or subjectivism. He used the metaphor of "men without chests" to describe those lacking the internal drive to act - what? honorably, properly, righteously, conscientiously, unsinfully? Excerpts:
It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.
In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism … about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use.
We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat . . . of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man.
It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal. The operation of The Green Book (a book promoting relativism) and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. … A persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment... It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.
And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
I take note of Lewis's references to "magnanimity," "truth," "honor," and "self-sacrifice," and I think of other highly-regarded human values like responsibility, respect for others, humility, prudence, gratitude, and sensitivity. Which of these values characterize our national leader, the person who serves as a public exemplar for us and for our children. Think of the business and personal history of Donald Trump and consider whether he is not the avatar of the exact opposite of these values. Think of what he has been doing to our government and our country, and think of what this means as to those whose choose to serve him, only some of whom I mentioned above.
Favorite lines from this morning's papers. From Maureen Dowd's NY Times column, "Trump's Slavish Stupidity":
Trump whitewashing slavery is the ultimate act of white privilege from a nepo baby who is the apotheosis of white privilege. . .
Abe Lincoln . . . urged Americans to move past the Civil War “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” Trump has malice for all, charity toward none.
Anti-semitism, Zionism, and Humpty Dumpty. From the September 2025 issue of Harper's Magazine, excerpts from "An Outrage to Common Sense: On the meanings of anti-Semitism," a review by Daniel May of Mark Mazower's ON ANTISEMITISM:
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."
Mazower is the author of many books, including seminal works on the destruction of Salonica’s Jewish community and the infrastructure of Nazi imperial rule. He also happens to be on the faculty of Columbia University, which has been shaken by charges of anti-Semitism and the debate over what constitutes it. As he works to unravel how we arrived at such a state, he is guided by the intuition that Alice’s question cannot be answered without Humpty Dumpty’s. To understand how the meaning of “anti-Semitism” has changed, we need to look at how the word is used, by whom, and to what ends. Who or what gets called “anti-Semitic”? What are the consequences of the charge? How is it that the decline of anti-Semitism as a political force has given way to the fight against it becoming such a profoundly powerful one? We should, Mazower suggests in a characteristically measured tone, “view antisemitism in its historical context as a term that has been used to mean different things at different times.” This is hardly a radical proposition. But the effect of his rather modest aim is something close to revelatory.
Lists. Do I suffer from OCD? My dear sister said she did, certainly about household cleanliness and I'm wondering about my list-making. Why do I keep track of how many days since Trump was elected, how many he has been in office, and how many days remain before his term expires? Why do I keep track of anniversary dates, like the many anniversaries listed above? Why the long lists in the Notes app on my iPhone: what I love about Geri, favorite movies, shopping lists, years of our European trips, famous artists who have died young, grandchildrens' birthdays, passwords, homes we have owned, addresses where I have lived, Paul Schrader movies, movies available on Netflix, Hulu, etc., personal heroes, transparent acrylic colors, favorite poems, favorite classical music, Trump's superlatives and Trumpisms, members of the Kovacs family, this list of lists. It's a habit developed late in life, since I retired. It's a habit developed since I started using iPhones, with its Notes app. Did it have anything to do with Don Shane asking me years ago what my favorite movie was, and my never having thought about it? Or, did I start while I worked on the memoir? I don't think so. Or was it journaling, and writing reflections? I don't know how or when it started, nor whether I do it often enough to be considered OCD behavior, but I think not. I don't even know whether it is accurate to describe the behavior as habitual, except for my shopping lists. I remember when and why I started listing daily anniversaries at the top of my daily journals: it was when I was running dry of things to write about. The day's anniversaries usually provided food for thought, and for journal entries. Maybe my list-making is normal, at least for contemporary Americans, who may be a bit obseessed with lists: the 10 (or 100) best movies ever, the top 40 pop songs, the best (and worst) American presidents, the best movies available on Netflix (or Hulu, Amazon Prime, etc.), you name it and we can usually Google a best and worst list for it. I shouldn't forget the newly popular (for me, at least) "bucket list" of things one hopes to do before dying. I don't have one. Never did.
The view from our mailbox, looking down Wakefield Court, in a gentle breeze and 73° weather, with the clouds moving slowly west to east.
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