7/14/2026

 Tuesday, July 14, 2026

1570 Pope Pius V introduced a standardized Roman Missal (text of the Latin Mass), a reform of the Council of Trent.  It will remain unchanged for 400 years.

1789 The French Revolution began with the storming of the Bastille Prison in Paris.

2025 Twenty-four U.S. states and the District of Columbia filed a joint lawsuit against the  Department of Education in an attempt to reverse the freezing of education funding ahead of the start of the school year. 

In bed at 9:40, up at 5:35; 0545 204.4 138/80/61 97, 0555 128/7762; 71.92/71, sunny

Morning meds at a.m., and Eliquis at a.m. and p.m.

Quagmire, noun, an area of soft, wet ground that you sink into if you try to walk on it; a situation that can easily trap you so that you become involved with problems from which it is difficult to escape.

The U.S. has been trapped in three quagmires during my life: Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.  Will Iran become the fourth?  Will Iran be yet another in the line of America's "endless wars"?  I suspect it is too soon to tell; it's been going on for only somewhat less than 5 months, since February 28th, a blink of an eye compared to Vietnam and Afghanistan, and even Iraq.  Nonetheless, it sure has the feel of another quagmire, another endless war that constantly consumes American military and economic resources, American treasure, and American lives.  Early on, I called it Trump's tar baby, and so it has become, at least so far.

The morning news: 

The new attacks over control of the waterway, which is a crucial transit route for oil and gas shipments, could intensify a conflict that has already roiled the global economy and left many dead. Oil prices soared on Tuesday in one of the biggest daily jumps since the start of the war, as Mr. Trump’s preliminary cease-fire deal with Iran lay in tatters.

Which surprised no one.

President Trump has said that the United States will charge a 20 percent fee on cargo shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, despite his own administration’s position that such fees violate international law.

Demonstrating once again Donald Trump's complete contempt for the requirements of law. 

Trump Backs Off 20% Strait of Hormuz Fee:  The decision comes just a day after the president floated the idea of charging other countries shipping cargo through waterway that Iran has sought to control

President Trump’s Iran strategy abruptly reversed course Tuesday when he announced the end of a plan to charge a 20% fee for commercial ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz.

“Based on highly productive conversations with Middle East leadership, I have decided to replace the 20% United States Reimbursement Fee with Trade and Investment Deals that the various Gulf States will be making into the United States,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Tuesday. 

Demonstrating once again his consummate skill as an extortionist. 

President Trump et al. v. Internal Revenue Service et al.  Judge Williams' ruling is great and is now an official record for historians.  It has gotten a fair amount of attention from the media, but I'm surprised that it is being treated only as a Rule 11 case, a case involving a frivolous, sham, totally non-meritorious lawsuit, and not as a judicial finding of a criminal conspiracy by the president, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.  The judge found that Trump's civil lawsuit was a sham designed to bilk the United States government out of billions of dollars.  Must that not be some species of fraud and of misconduct in public office? 

Tell Me Everything.  I started this Elizabeth Strout novel yesterday and have made very slow progress making my way into it.  I'm only on page 25 of my library copy of the book, having a hard time staying awake as I read it and avoiding tired eyes.  I may break down and buy a Kindle edition with Audible.  Already, in the very first paragraph, I was reminded of why I enjoy Strout's writing:

This is the story of Bob Burgess, a tall, heavyset an who lives in the town of Crosby, Maine, and he is sixty-five years old at the time that we are speaking of him.  Bob has a big heart, but he does not know that about himself, like many of us, he does not know himself as well as he assumes to, and he would never believe he had anything worthy in his life to document.  But he does; we all do.

Strout likes her characters because she likes people.  I suspect the same is true of Ann Patchett, and perhaps Anne Lamott.  She knows we are all flawed, that we all have weaknesses, that we are all subject to "the human condition."  She knows that we all suffer from ignorance and confusion about ourselves and about the people in our lives.   She is deeply compassionate and forgiving.  She knows we are all profoundly affected by our histories, our backgrounds, all the factors that Robert Sapolsky argues make "free will" imaginary.  I don't know that Strout goes as far as Sapolsky, but she goes pretty far along that continuum between "free will" and determinism.  As she writes in opening this novel, we all have some things worthy in our lives to document, though for most of us, virtually nothing is documented,  On page 21 of the book, Lucy Barton on learning of Olive Kitteredge's parents' lives, remarks, "Jesus Christ.  All these unrecorded lives, and people just live them."  It's clearly her purpose to record at least some of them, which, even though fictional, cast light on the lives all her readers live.   Early in chapter 2, she writes about the family backgrounds of Lucy Barton, Bob Burgess and their spouses, including:

Margaret Estaver [Bob's wife] had been raised a Catholic before becoming the Unitarian minister that she now was, and William [Lucy's former husband] had been raised a Lutheran, as his father had come over from Germany after the war.  We like to think that our lives are within our control, but they many not be completely so.  We are necessarily influenced by those who have come before us.

Or, as Emily Dickinson wrote,

In this short Life that only lasts an hour

How much - how little - is within our power

And William Blake,

Every night and every morn

Some to misery are born.

Every morn and every night

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,

Some are born to endless night.  

 On page 5, Strout writes that Lucy had always liked Bob Burgess - "She thought he had a quiet sadness to him, most likely from this early misfortune."  It made me think of my family and how, on my father's side, most had "a quiet sadness" to them that lasted their entire lives.  Grandpa Dewey, Grandma Charlotte, Aunt Monica, my Dad himself, and then Kitty and me.  It wasn't that everyone was a Micky the Mope all the time, but, as  I wrote years ago in my memoir, 

Ironically, I believe  [my mother] was the happiest person in our family.  It is clear to me as I look backwards that my paternal grandparents and Grandpa Dennis were unhappy people.   My poor Aunt Monica was terribly burdened and not a happy person.  Uncles Jim and Bud were heavy drinkers, as was Bim until Aunt Marie straightened him out.  Kitty and I were also unhappy because of what we lived with.  . . . . .  If Kitty and I had not had [my mother's] model for happiness in adversity, had we only had our father, our grandparents, my uncles and my aunt as models, I don’t know that we would have known any real happiness in our lives or that we could have transmitted any sense of happiness to our own children.   It took effort, it took strength, it took heroism for my mother, not to feign happiness, but to be happy in spite of everything.  

She was also a circle-breaker.  Her father, her brothers, her husband, her in-laws, all were unhappy people for one reason or another.  It is easy enough to say that they ‘had every right to be unhappy’ and to wallow in the ‘slough of despond.’  But no one had any greater ‘right to be unhappy’ than my mother.  If she had chosen to live a life of self-pity, however, she would transmitted an attitude of self-pity to her children, and to her husband, and to all around her.  Attitudes are contagious.

 

The conservative Republican talk radio host Dennis Prager wrote a terrific book I read many years ago, titled "Happiness is a Serious Problem: A Human Nature Repair Manual".  One of his major points was that attitudes are contagious, that people who are in the presence of happy people feel happier themselves, and the opposite is true of those surrounded by unhappy people.  He argued that striving to be happy is a moral obligaation.   "We owe it to our husband or wife, our fellow workers, our children, our friends, indeed to everyone who comes into our lives, to be as happy as we can be" because our happiness conditions affects those around us, especially family members.   Persistent unhappiness can make life significantly harder for those around us, so striving for happiness is a way of serving others, not just ourselves.   One of his recurring themes is that grateful people are happier, while chronic ingratitude fosters unhappiness. He argues that cultivating gratitude is one of the principal ways to fulfill this "duty" to be happy.  

All of these thoughts are triggered in me by reading Elizabeth Strout's novels.  

Anniversary thoughts:  First, how well I remember that official missal and how pleased I was to have my own St. Joseph's Missal, with its red ribbon page marker, its "Proper" and "Commons", the parts that varied with the liturgical calendar and the parts that were common to all masses, the original Latin and the English translation.  It was all so exotic, so historical, so well designed to be mysterious and to set us Catholics apart from other religionists who spoke and prayed in their vernaculars.  Vatican II hit as I and millions of other Catholics were moving from youth to adulthood and its changes reduced much of the exoticism and mystery of the liturgy by requiring that the mass be celebrated in the vernacular, having the priest facing the congregation, having the congregation respond to the priests' call in the vernacular rather than altar boys responding in Latin, etc.  Of course, it was inevitable that there would be resistance to all those changes and there was.  It's still going on.  In a long article in the Sunday NYTimes on July 10, 2024, entitled America’s New Catholic Priests - Young, Confident and Conservative"  In an era of deep divisions in the church, newly ordained priests overwhelmingly lean right in their theology, practices and politics, it seems clear that the traditionalists opposing the spirit and the letter of the Vatican II changes are winning the battle within the Church.  Perhaps this is not surprising in our world which seems to be generally moving away from reform and liberalism toward tradition, authority, and conservatism.  Alas.  I wonder what happened to my old missal.  It probably stayed at my parents' home as I grew up and moved away and eventually got trashed.  So it goes.

Second, it doesn't seem right to mark July 14th without acknowledging Bastille Day and the French Revolution which as much as a revolution and rejection of monarchy and aristocracy was also a rejection of the Church, theism, clergy, and hierarchy.  The Church has been fighting the French Revolution from Bastille Day till today.  So it goes.

Milwaukee's official high temperature today - 99℉!!!