Thursday, October 16, 2025
1946 10 Nazi leaders were hanged as war criminals after the Nuremberg war trials, including Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Alfred Jodl
1962 Cuban Missile Crisis began as US President John F. Kennedy was shown photos confirming the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba
1968 Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave the Black Power salute on the 200m medal podium during the Mexico City Olympics to protest racism and injustice against Blacks
1973 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were controversially awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam that later failed
1978 Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was elected Pope John Paul II
1982 Secretary of State George P. Shultz warned that the US would withdraw from the UN if they voted to exclude Israel
1984 Desmond Tutu, South African Anglican Archbishop, won the Nobel Peace Prize
In bed at 9, and up at 4:45. 53°, high of 63°. Cloudy day ahead.
Meds, etc. Morning meds at 5:40 a.m.
An unsuccessful haiku
I hope for the day
When my angry leg, ankle, and foot
Match their match.
Is Trump the Evangelicals' Messiah and an Anti-Christ? This was a thought I had while reading David French's column in this morning's NY Times, "Something Is Stirring in Christian America, and It’s Making Me Nervous." The thrust of his essay is that there is something deeply not only un-Christian but anti-Christian about Donald Trump, Trumpism, and its Evangelical supporters. He offers several examples that illustrate his point, including the words of Trump and of Stephen Miller at the Charlie Kirk memorial service. His examples, however, also struck me as showing that for many Trump-following Evangelicals, Trump is like the Messiah that many Jews were looking for at the time of Jesus' life, the leader who would expel the enemies (Romans/Liberals) of the chosen people (Jews/Evangelical Christians), suppress and punish wrongdoing ("I am your retribution) and wrong thinking, and establish the Kingdom of God, governed not by a democracy (mob rule) or by evil elites (priests, Pharisees, Sadducees/coastal and international elites), but by the Messiah ("I am the only one.)
One of the telling points that French makes is that among many Evangelicals, empathy has become a sin. He doesn't cite them but note the emerging prominence of two Evangelical leaders who champion this view. The first is Allie Beth Stuckey, author of “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion,” and the second is Joe Rigney, a professor and pastor who wrote “The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits.” Rigney’s conservative Evangelical denomination counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth among its members. I should add Trump's one-time key advisor, financial supporter, and almost temporary co-president, Elon Musk, who told podcaster Joe Rogan: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
For some of us who were raised "in the bosom of the Church," empathy for others is a key calling of Jesus, inherent in his teachings about loving our neighbors, including 'Samaritans' and our enemies, the Sermon on the Mount, and Matt. 25:31-46. What we see from Trump is rancor and retribution, name-calling and denigration, humiliation and harming all who resist him. At the Charlie Kirk memorial, he admitted, "I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them." In a PBS interview in 1992 hosted by Charlie Rose, he said “I love getting even with people.” In a radio interview, when asked for his favorite Bible passage, he said, "I don't know, I suppose an eye for an eye." Where Christ preached love and brotherhood, Trump preaches hate and discord. If he isn't an anti-Christ, who is?
Just this morning, the NY Times carries a news story about Trump, at an Oval Office news conference, informing his attorney general Pam Bondi, deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, and FBI director Kash Patel, that he wants the Justice Department to pursue, i,e., persecute and prosecute, former Special Counsel Jack Smith, former FBI official and DOJ prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, and Lisa Monaco, former deputy attorney general under Joe Biden. "Deranged Jack Smith is in my opinion a criminal." "I hope they're going to look into Weissmann, too. Weissman's a bad guy." "I think [Lisa Monaco] should be looked at very strongly too." The persecutions continue and the prosecutions will probably follow. Christ-like? Is this what CHRISTIAN nationalism looks like?
We should consider too his non-retributive acts, those where he is not "getting even" with those who have harmed him, but rather just harming gratuitously, like the destruction of the Agency for International Development. A study in The Lancet this year estimates that due to sharp cuts to USAID programs, there could be more than 14 million additional deaths globally by 2030, including over 4.5 million children under five. An estimate by Brooke Nichols (Boston University) suggests that about 96,000 adults and 200,000 children (“infants and children”) have already died because of the aid cuts that began early in 2025. Mercy Corps notes that six months after major cuts, millions had been cut off from essential services (food, water, healthcare) and estimates are that the cuts could result in 2.4 million preventable deaths annually — if the status quo continues. We can quibble about the numbers, but what is clear is that millions of the world's poor - people some refer to as "Christ's poor" - will die by the stroke of Trump's pen on executive orders and elsewhere. What are people who call themselves Christians to think of this?
Thoughts on the anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. On this date in 1962, I was 21 years old, in my last year of undergraduate school, living in a 1st floor flat at 24th and Vine Streets in Milwaukee, with Tom Devitt, Bill Hendricks, Jerry Nugent, and Ed Felsenthal. Each of us was a midshipman in the U.S. Navy Reserves and expected to be commissioned as officers at the end of the school year, Ed and Bill as Navy ensigns, Tom, Jerry, and me as 2nd lieutenants in the Marine Corps. Of course, I can't recall what we did on that date, but probably we carried on our normal activities. Ed, Bill, and I worked overnight stuffing Milwaukee Sentinel newspaper boxes at bus stops throughout the city, slept when we could, and went to classes when we had to. Tom was busy with an overload of coursework that would permit him to graduate a semester early and to marry his fiancée Veronica Colby. Jerry was tending to his coursework and keeping tabs on his 2 years younger brother, Pat Nugent, also at Marquette, who would soon start romancing and eventually marry his girlfriend from Texas, Luci Baines Johnson.
What we didn't know was that, on that morning, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy informed President Kennedy that a U-2 reconnaissance light over Cuba photographed Soviet medium-range and intermediate-range ballistic missile sites under construction and that the CIA analyzed the photos on October 15 and confirmed that the sites were capable of launching nuclear weapons. The Cuban Missile Crisis had begun, but it wasn't announced to the public until October 22. I remember sitting in our living room on that date, watching the president on our cheap, black and white, television, as he announced the existence of the Russian missile facilities in Cuba, the ability of nuclear armed Russian missile to reach American cities in minutes, his demand that the facilities be removed, and the existence of an American quarantine on all shipping headed to Cuba. Only the year before, during the Berlin crisis in July 1961, Kennedy had had delivered another Oval Office address in which he said:
“In the event of attack, the lives of those families which are not hit in the nuclear blast and fire can still be saved if they can be warned to take shelter — and if that shelter is available.
We owe that kind of insurance to our families and to our country.
The government will soon begin to identify and mark space in public and private buildings which could be used for fallout shelters. I am requesting that Congress appropriate funds to provide these markings, improve shelter facilities, and stock them with food, water, first aid kits, and other necessities for survival.”
In addition, I am asking Congress for the authority to make shelter construction and improvement loans available to individuals and to provide technical guidance to all who wish to build shelters on their own property. The time is not long, and the need is urgent. We cannot prevent, in all circumstances, a nuclear war; but we can provide for our survival if it should occur.
All of my roommates and I were active reservists. All of us wondered whether Kennedy would activate the reserves during the Cuban crisis, whether we would be commissioned early and be deployed before graduation. That didn't happen, of course, as the crisis was ended on October 28th by the Russian agreement to withdraw its missiles, reciprocating Kennedy's public promise not to invade Cuba and his secret agreement to remove American Jupiter missiles from Turkey.
I think back on those days, how stressful they were, and how close to home they hit. The risks of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union were real. Fallout Shelter signs were seemingly everywhere. The Navy destroyer on which I served during the summer of 1960, the USS Coney, DDE 508, intercepted a Russian submarine, the B-59, armed with nuclear torpedoes, commanded by Capt. Valentin Savitsky, with flotilla chief Vasily Arkhipov aboard, headed to Cuba during the 1962 quarantine. The Coney and supporting aircraft dropped non-lethal depth charges in an effort to force the submarine to surface. The submarine's commander, out of communication with his Soviet superiors, believed war had started, and ordered his crew to launch a nuclear torpedo. He was overruled by the flotilla commander, and eventually the submarine was surfaced and escorted from the area. The encounter was declassified only in the 1990s and is now recognized as the Cuban Missile Crisis's most perilous submarine warfare moment, and the closest we came to the hostile use of a nuclear weapon.
The crisis ended on October 28th, my roomies and I graduated and were commissioned in the Navy and the Marines, and eventually were deployed to another crisis, Vietnam, which ended much less successfully than the Cuban crisis. But today I think back to those days more than 60 years ago and recall what stresses we have lived through, back in the days “when America was great.” McCarthy and John Birch in the 1950s, Berlin in 1961, Cuba in 1962, Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, the fateful deployment of Marines to Danang in 1965, the election of Nixon in 1968, and so on. Somehow, we survived all that history with at least a semblance of our very flawed democracy and the rule of law intact. I fear that I won’t live to see us survive the current threats.
Diane Keaton, Zeke Emanuel, and my pneumonia vaccination. It was announced yesterday by her family that Diane Keaton died of pneumonia. I was reminded that Zeke Emanuel, in his (in)famous Atlantic article about wishing to die at 75, wrote that, at that age, he will stop taking vaccines designed to extend his life and that I just opted to receive a pneumonia vaccine at age 84. I need to start thinking.
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