8/30/2025

Saturday, August 30, 2025

D+294/223/-1239

1956 Lake Pontchartrain Causeway opened in Louisiana, the longest continuous bridge in the world

2021 America ended its 20-year war in Afghanistan as the last military evacuation plane flew out of Kabul

2022 In Jackson, Mississippi, the city's largest water treatment plant failed, leaving 150,000 people without safe running water and closing schools and businesses

In bed around 10 after a late drowse-off, awake at 4:10, and up at 4:35.  60°, high of 69°, mostly cloudy day.e

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 10:15 a.m.   Injected Trulicity at 10:10 a.m., a day late.

How fortunate I am to have grown old with Geri.  We married in our 40s, energetic, active, strong, knowing nothing of what lay ahead, including some hard times that we had to get through, and now we are in our 80s, an elderly couple, old people.  We have partnered through 38 years, our children are in their 50s, and the oldest grandchild is now off to college.  We are in our 4th home, not counting Lake Mills and Seattle, each one a treasure. We were able to provide a home to my Dad for a few years and to Andy, Anh, and Peter when he was a toddler.  'O fortunati, quorum iam moenia surgunt!' Aeneas ait, et fastigia suspicit urbis. Vergil, Aeneid, I: 437-438.  I remember Brother Birmingham in our Latin 4 class, emphasizing these lines,  "O you fortunate ones, whose walls are rising," referring to the Carthaginians who had a home while Aeneas had none.  I not only had these lovely homes, but also Geri to share them with.  O fortunatus!  Indeed.

Among men aged 65 and older, about 10% are widowed; among women, the figure is about 30%.  Among those in their 80s, the figures are, of course, much higher.  O fortunati!

Why I  despair.  Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is a kook, but also a malicious, malignant, and malevolent kook.  Pam Bondi is a kook, but also a malicious, malignant, and malevolent kook.  Kash Patel is a kook, but also a malicious, malignant, and malevolent kook.  Kristi Noem is a kook, but also a malicious, malignant, and malevolent kook.  Tulsi Gabard is a kook, but also a malicious, malignant, and malevolent kook.  Russell Vought is a kook, but also a malicious, malignant, and malevolent kook.  Their boss and cult leader, Donald Trump, is a kook, but also a malicious, malignant, and malevolent kook.  The government of the most powerful nation in the world is in the hands of malicious, malignant, and malevolent kooks.   We are living through the destruction of our democracy, imperfect as it is, at the hands of bad people, who are not only bad, but kooky and maliciously so.  We are watching a catastrophe happening before our very eyes, the destruction of the American republic.  Ben Franklin reportedly said that the Constitutional Convention had created "a republic, if you can keep it."  We now know that we were able to keep it for just under 250 years.  It's over, goodbye, brought down not just by the nasty, malicious buffoon at the top, but by the electorate who knowingly empowered him.

Musée des Beaux Arts

BY W. H. AUDEN

December 1938

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, 

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

 

Auden's poem moves me.  It's about disaster, catastrophe, perdition being personal to the loser, the one who experiences it.  It's the opposite of "I feel your pain" and 'love your neighbor."  Icarus fell from the sky, drowned, died, and the world went on,  oblivious.  Is it a disaster or a tragedy if you are unaware of it, or indifferent to it?  So it goes, said  Kurt Vonnegut.  I am reminded of this poem by what I wrote earlier about what is happening to the United States, which, like Icarus, is falling to its death as a somewhat liberal democracy.  God knows there is much to condemn about the U.S. pre-Trump, including the power of Big Money and the powerlessness of everyone else.  My Facebook post on October 5, 2021:

George Carlin and Emma Goldman: they own you

Food for thought from George Carlin:

“Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations that've long since bought and paid for, the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pocket, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and the information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them.”

A bit reminiscent of the notorious anarchist Emma Goldman: 

"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." 

That said, what we had pre-Trump was vastly superior to what we have under (a word I use advisedly) Trump.  I bitched and moaned about Barack Obama and Tim Geithner and their response to the financial crisis of 2008, but I missed BO when he was replaced by Trump.  

The main news of the day (and the month, and the year, so far): Our bathroom, basement, and kitchen floor contractor, Chris, arrived at 8:30 this morning with his moisture meter and confirmed our fear that there is moisture under all the vinyl flooring in our basement, and it will probably have to be ripped up and removed.  We paid close to $8,000 to have the floor installed in 2021, and to have it replaced will surely cost more than $10,000, an uninsured loss.  Beyond that, it raised the question of whether it makes sense to replace the flooring when flooding could occur again.  Should we replace it with the cheapest indoor-outdoor carpeting we can find?  But beyond all that is the question that has been looming over us for some time, which is whether we should sell our home and move to someplace where someone else is responsible for maintenance.  I sensed on that Sunday morning, August 10th, that the basement flooding would be a life-altering event in our lives, and Chris's visit confirmed it.  I am 84 and next-to-useless around the house; Geri is 81.  We discussed this very briefly after Chris left, and she discussed it briefly later with David and Sharon, both of whom think we should sell the house.  I dread the thought, as does Geri, but I think this is where we are in life, and we need to address it and all it will entail.

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