Wednesday, August 26, 2026
2018 Archbishop Carlo Vigano, former US Vatican Ambassador, claimed Pope Francis knew of and ignored sex abuse allegations against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick
2021 Two bomb blasts from suicide bombers at Kabul Airport, Afghanistan, killed at least 60 civilians and 13 US soldiers amid efforts to evacuate citizens out of the country
2025. 1 person was killed, 6 others wounded in a mass shooting near Interstate 35 in Minneapolis
In bed at 9:10, up at 5:1; 0530 203.2 115/70/69 XXX; 66/79/66. Another beautiful, sunny day ahead, but the sun rose at 6:10, and at 6:30 it's still a little dark outside because of cloud cover over Lake Michigan. Nonetheless, the birds, chipmunks, and squirrels are arriving in numbers for breakfast at the Clausen Cafe.
Morning meds at 8 a.m. and Entresto at 6:25 a.m. and 6:20 p.m.
The Breakup. I'm up to page 165, or 30% through the book, and beginning to think I may finish it, that I'm not doing a close reading of all of it, especially portions devoted to the thoughts of a tortoise. These lines on pages 16-161 sure caught my attention last night:
The reaction in America to the Vietnam War and to civil rights blew open the fissures that grew into the chasm that finally produced our second civil war, the twist-ending callback to the first.. I saw it all coming. All the obvious big things in Trump's second term . . . When I visited [the Lincoln Memorial] as a kid, I didn't read the whole Second Inaugural Address on the wall next to giant Lincoln, which he'd delivered at the Capitol five weeks before the war ended and six weeks before one of the performative losers killed him. I do remember searching for the error carved in stone - his "high hope for the eufure," and thinking then, Wow, here I am in the future. This time I read every word . . . "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds."
The lines brought back memories from sometime in the 1980s of my former student Bob Berman, then an attorney in the Justice Department's Voting Rights division, picking me up at National Airport. I was there with Tom Hooper of Channel 6 to study a consumer law clinic at George Washington University Law School, operated as a partnership between the law school and a local DC television station. Bob took us to the Lincoln Memorial at night, when we were the only people there, and I remember standing next to the huge statue of Lincoln, contemplating the iconic words of his Second Inaugural engraved on one of the walls. One of my warmest memories. Bob Berman left the DOJ early in the George W. Bush administration, when Bush's people eviscerated the Voting Rights division, transferring Bob and the other highly experienced voting rights litigators to divisions totally alien to their interests, experience, and expertise. Sound familiar, Pam Bondi?
I am enjoying The Breaksup more as I get into it. I like the principal characters, Asher Zimbalist and Natalie Frederick. He's an economist and a scientist; she's a poet. Perhaps not surprisingly, I like her character better than his, though he's not unlikeable. In one chapter I read early today, Natalie cited the Moloch section of Alan Ginsberg's 1955 poem Howl as anticipating Artificial Intelligence:
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
I say, truthfully, that I'm increasingly enjoying this novel, but I don't mean to diminish its brutal aspect, which is that it ruthlessly chronicles what a sick, deeply divided society we are living in today. It is set in 1945 America, and refers often to a civil war of sorts in 1936 America, but what it depicts most vividly is how screwed up we are today with our identity politics, polarization, social and political pathologies, mutual hatreds, dis- and misinformation, inability to distinguish between truth and fantasy, commonplace violence, etc. It's bone-chilling.
I started reading this book with the notion that Kurt Andersen was a nouveau novelist, a journalist dipping his toe into novel-writing. I was very mistaken. He's an accomplished writer and a deep thinker. I'm very impressed by this knowledge of both scientific matters and literary matters. He's very much 'for real.'HI, Katie. I think you probably remember me from when you were a little tyke. I saw on Facebook that today is your Mom's birthday and I've been hoping to contact her since I first became aware of her Facebook presence and location somewhere in the Milwaukee area. I tried unsuccessfully to send her a message on FB, got no response, and wondered whether she might prefer not to connect again with me. I hope that's not the case, but if she would like to reconnect after many years, I would love to see her again. Would you please let her know I'm still kickin'. I celebrated my 85 birthday two days ago and have outlived too many of my family and friends. The older I get, the more I cherish friendships, especially one as old as I had with both your Mom and your Dad. Thanks, Katie.
Hi Chuck! It is great to hear from you and I’m sure that my mom would LOVE to hear from you! I will pass along your information to her. Please also feel free to call or text her. Her number is 414-339-4099 and I will let her know that I have given you her number.
I hope that all is well with your family! My daughter, Finley, is 13 and loves hearing stories of my childhood. Many stories involve your family, and especially your kids and Geri’s, who were all my favorite babysitters!
Wishing you a very happy birthday and I hope that you and my mom can connect soon!
Best, Kate
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