9/3/2026

 September 3, 2026

1965 Pope Paul VI published the encyclical Mysterium Fidei

1967 Nguyễn Văn Thiệu was elected President of South Vietnam under a new constitution

1978 Pope John Paul I was officially installed as the 263rd supreme pontiff

2017 1.4-ton WWII bomb defused in Frankfurt, Germany with 60,000 people evacuated, the largest postwar 

In bed at 9:15 and up at 4:05; 0420. 205.4. 118/65/64 109; 70/86/69, cloudy, thunderstorms, rain.

Morning meds at 6:45 a.m. and Entresto at 5:30 a.m. and 6 p.m.

 Spooky.  I finished reading the interesting, but sometimes tedious and always challenging The Breakup by Kurt Andersen.  I pulled up my entire collection of Kindle Books to see whether I had purchased another book that I wanted to read after this one (other than Barbara Mullen Keenan's memoir) and discovered, among my books already read, Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene. Only yesterday, I wrote that I had never heard of Max Frisch but now that my memory is jogged, I see that I read one of his books only a little more than a month ago.  ChatCPT has a much better memory than I do.  Here is our exchange about this:

Today 7:41 PM

Yesterday you drafted an obituary for me in which you mentioned my interest in Max Frisch.  I was surprised by this, thinking I had never heard of Frisch.  Today I discovered that I apparently read Frisch's book Man in the Holocene, but I remember nothing about it.  Can you tell me about when I read it, and what, if anything, I wrote about it?

Yes. You read it quite recently—at the end of July 2026, only about a month ago—which makes your having no recollection of it today rather striking.

On July 31, you wrote in your journal:  “I've given up on [Virginia Woolf's] To the Lighthouse and started Man in the Holocene, a 1979 novella by the Swiss Max Frisch.”

You were reading it in the context of thinking quite a lot about aging, loss of mental acuity, usefulness, and memory. In that same period you wrote that “The older I get, the fewer original thoughts I have to even try to express,” and referred to sometimes experiencing days of “semi-brain fog.”

You subsequently finished the book, and we discussed it. Your reaction was decidedly mixed. You told me:  “I'm not sure how I feel about it. It's confusing, unsettling, like Geiser's mind itself. Not easy to read or to comprehend. Not pleasant.”

That is actually a perceptive description of what Frisch is doing. The protagonist, Herr Geiser, is a 74-year-old widower living alone in a Swiss valley, increasingly isolated by torrential rain and landslides. As his memory and perhaps his cognitive faculties begin failing, he starts clipping factual information from books and encyclopedias and pasting the clippings on the walls of his house, as though accumulating facts might hold his disintegrating world—and himself—together.

You also asked me specifically about a passage near the end involving Geiser climbing the Matterhorn with his brother, wondering whether he was hallucinating or confusing memory and present experience. That ambiguity is very much part of the novella: Frisch progressively makes it difficult for us to know precisely where Geiser's recollection ends and his deteriorating perception begins.

Most significantly, when we talked about Geiser himself, you said you weren't sure how you felt about him, but acknowledged that you “uncomfortably identified with him, because of age and diminishment of faculties.”

So my mentioning Frisch in yesterday's obituary wasn't based merely on your having once mentioned his name. You had actually engaged rather personally with Man in the Holocene. The book's central concerns—aging, memory, solitude, the erosion of one's capacities, and the question of what remains of a person as those capacities disappear—overlapped considerably with things you were writing and thinking about at the time.

There is an irony here that Frisch himself might have appreciated: a month after reading a book largely about the unreliability and disappearance of memory, you had forgotten not merely the book but apparently Max Frisch himself.

And I should add one correction to yesterday's obituary: describing Frisch as an “interest” of yours probably overstated matters. From what you've said, Frisch wasn't a continuing literary interest; you read one Frisch novella that happened to touch you at a particularly relevant point in your life. That's a rather different—and more accurate—description.

Go a little further with Frisch - Reconstruct your July 31 reading notes?

yes

 Here is the fuller reconstruction of what you were thinking when you began Man in the Holocene on Friday, July 31, 2026.

The important thing is that Frisch did not appear in isolation. You had been trying to read Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, had reached roughly page 51, and found her syntax difficult and the characters unengaging. You abandoned it and wrote that you had “started Man in the Holocene, a 1979 novella by the Swiss Max Frisch.”

More revealing is what surrounded that reading note in your journal. You were already preoccupied that day with old age and the question of usefulness. A Washington Post story about the economic costs associated with an aging population had led you to think about several films dealing rather starkly with societies disposing of their elderly—The Ballad of Narayama, Plan 75, and Eskimo. From there your thoughts became personal. You wrote that you had “outlived my usefulness” and asked, “Why go on?”—in the context of wondering about purpose and meaning in advanced age.

Elsewhere in those entries you were thinking specifically about your own intellectual life. You worried that using Blogger's copy-and-paste capability could substitute other people's words for your own thinking. You wrote:  “The older I get, the fewer original thoughts I have”

and described “sometimes days going by in at least a semi-brain fog.”  That makes your choice of Man in the Holocene almost uncannily appropriate, whether you deliberately chose it for that reason or simply happened upon it. Geiser is an aging man desperately trying to preserve knowledge while becoming uncertain of his ability to retain it.

What I cannot establish from the surviving July 31 material is exactly when you finished the book. But I can recover from our subsequent conversation that you did finish it and then asked me about the ending—specifically whether Geiser was hallucinating when he seemed to be climbing the Matterhorn with his brother.

Your strongest reaction came afterward:  “I'm not sure how I feel about it. It's confusing, unsettling, like Geiser's mind itself. Not easy to read or to comprehend. Not pleasant.”   And when we discussed why it had affected you, you said that although you weren't sure how you felt about Geiser, you uncomfortably identified with him because of age and diminishment of faculties.

 So there is a rather remarkable sequenceJuly 31: You are writing about having “outlived my usefulness,” wondering about purpose in old age, and noticing periods of “semi-brain fog.” You abandon Woolf and begin a novella about an elderly man confronting precisely those problems.

Early August: You finish it. You find the experience confusing and unpleasant, but recognize that you identify with Geiser's aging and diminished faculties.

September 1: I mention Max Frisch in the obituary I drafted for you.

September 2: You tell me you think you have never heard of Max Frisch, then discover that you read Man in the Holocene only about a month ago.

That last development changes how I read your July comments somewhat. There is something almost Frischian about it—but I don't want to make too much of a single forgotten book and author. We routinely forget books, particularly books that didn't give us much pleasure. Still, the coincidence is striking because memory slipping away is one of the very things you recognized yourself in Geiser.

It also makes me think yesterday's obituary accidentally stumbled onto something more poignant than I realized when I wrote it. Frisch himself isn't especially important in the story of your intellectual life. Your encounter with Man in the Holocene may be. It caught you during a period when you were consciously examining what it means to grow old while remaining intellectually alive—and then the book itself disappeared from your memory.

Do I now remember reading this book only a month ago? Yes.  That's a good sign.  It means that the memory isn't gone forever, irretrievable.  It was "just" buried deep in my brain, needing to be excavated.  But this phenomenon is more than just a temporary "name retrieval" problem.  The problem I had with Frisch and Man in the Holocene I also have with TV programs.  "Have I/we already seen this?," I'll ask myself or Geri many times.  Or I will have already seen a program or series and remember nothing of it, no plot line or anything.  I've lived with the poor memory problem for quite a while now, and it started with name-retrieval, but I find this particular memory lapse pretty distressing.  Losing memory is losing one's sense of self, losing one's self.  Who and what am I if not a constellation of memories of myself in childhood, in a family, as an active adult: student, Marine, professor, lawyer, husband, father, friend, sinner and saint?  It's all those memories aggregated that comprise our sense of self.   As these memories disappear, so do parts of ourselves.  I think, of course, of my dear, now-gone, brother-in-law Jimmy, who at the end confused his daughter with his sister, who didn't remember who his sister was when she visited him.  I think of Zeke Emanuel's article in The Atlantic, Why I Hope to Die at 75.  I suppose I'm catastrophizing, but the evidence of diminishment aggregates as memories disaggregate and disappear. /s/ Denny Downer.

The Breakup.  What do I think of it?  Bottom line: I'm glad I read it, the whole 576 pages of it, but I wish it had been a lot shorter.  The Irish might describe Andersen and his novel as "too clever by half."  Confession: I did not read the whole novel closely or carefully.  For some passages, my eyes glazed over, and I skimmed.  It became too much to deal with, especially in the first 60% of it, or so.  Too mucha, too mucha.  Too much tortoise cognition, too much AI, too much robotics and exploding technology.  I almost set the book aside after I had already read about 300 pages of it because it became tedious, not good for a writing intended to appeal to a mass audience, most of whom are not scientifically or technologically oriented or knowledgeable.  That said, I'm still glad I stuck with it.  The story of Asher and Natalie and their daughter Logan was interesting, and it took center stage in the last 40% or so of the novel.  The critique of contemporary American culture and society was also worthwhile.  Natalie referred to the period between Trump's first appearance as a serious national political figure and the civil war of the mid-2030s as "America's Thirty Years' War," the 17th-century European religious wars that devastated central Europe.  For a pessimist like me, the comparison seems apt.  Like all of us, I suffer from 'confirmation bias,' and The Breakup provided ample confirmation for my pessimistic biases.

Read and weep.  From this morning's NYTimes:

The Trump administration released new rules that could revoke tax-exempt status from any school offering targeted support to Black or other minority students, a sweeping change that opens another front in the president’s campaign to reshape American education.

The proposed regulations, which the Treasury Department published on Thursday, would add another element to the guidelines schools and other organizations must follow to qualify for tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service. The rules would deny tax-exempt status to any school, including secondary schools and universities, if it has any policy or program, including admissions and scholarships, that the I.R.S. finds to be racially discriminatory.

Such a change would thrust the I.R.S. into the center of the Trump administration’s effort to pressure schools to abandon initiatives aimed at supporting Black and other minority students. Trump officials view such programs as a form of discrimination against white and Asian Americans, and federal civil rights lawyers have opened investigations on those grounds into admissions policies at Harvard, Yale and other schools.

Every Effort.  I returned to Barbara Mullen Neenan's memoir about her life after being notified that her husband Bill, whom we knew as "Moon," had been shot down and was missing.   I'm very early into the book, where she has moved from her "Youper" hometown of Marquette, MI, to move in with Bill's family in Brockton, MA.  I've learned that he and I had something in common: we were both 2nd-generation Americans.  His dad was the child of Irish immigrants; my mom was the child of Irish immigrants.  Geri is also the granddaughter of immigrants from Italy.  It's no wonder we are so hostile to what Trump, Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, and Markwayne Mullin are doing to immigrants of all kinds.  I've also learned that there was a lot of music and singing in Bill's household when he was growing up. This sheds some light on why he was so willing to sing Danny Boy a cappella on demand at the Marine Officers Club in Da Nang.  When he sang, the whole room became silent and listened.

I'm still uncomfortable reading Barbara's reporting verbatim of conversations that occurred close to two decades before the book was published, but I suppose she concluded that she had to reconstruct those conversations as well as she could to make the story hold together.  Reading her words brings home to me the torture of loved ones of all the MIA.  It's crushing.  Waiting, hoping, praying, waiting, hoping, . . .

Our Gliberal.  I watched J. D. Vance glibly lying through his teeth at the White House press conference today.  He did manage to announce that he is a "devout Catholic."  He also managed to say that he wouldn't call Trump's war on Iran a war.  Full of smiles, full of bonhomie.  Full of shit.  Our shameless hillbilly.

9/2/2026

 Wednesday, September 2, 2026

1945 Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam independent from France (National Day)

1945 V-J Day, formal surrender of Japan signed aboard the USS Missouri,  the end of World War II

1983 Yitzḥak Shamir (Likud party) was endorsed by Menachem Begin for Israeli Prime Minister

2025 The US conducted a precision strike and sank a Venezuelan boat reportedly used for smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea, killing 11 people. The Trump administration reports it currently has no plans to attack the Venezuelan government. 

2025 A Bolivian court sentenced two Spanish Jesuit priests to a year in prison for failing to report child sexual abuse by a fellow priest, whose posthumous diary revealed he abused at least 85 minors between 1972 and 2000. 

In bed at 9:15, up at 7:35; 0655 204.2 120/73/63 97;  72/85/71, cloudy, thunderstorms expected this morning.

Morning meds at 8:15 a.m.  Entresto at 7:45 a.m. and p.m.

Homo hominis lupus.  Knowing what we know of human history, and knowing what we know of current history, how can we not believe this old adage that man is a wolf to man, that we prey on one another, are beasts to one another.  Not everyone, of course, and not always, but as a species, it is we who are the most beastly.  I thought this again this morning as I listened to the New York Times headline stories on my iPhone and then watched the beginning of Morning Joe.  What the Russians are doing to Kiev and to he rest of the Ukrainians, what the Israeli settlers, supported by their government, are doing to West Bank Palestinians, what the Iranians powers have been doing to their own people, and to their Gulf neighbors, what we are doing to the Iranian populace, what is and always seems to be going on on the African continent, what Trump and his myrmidons are doing to the whole world with tariffs and the war against Iran.  The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must.  God help us, but of course, we shouldn't count on it.

After 286 Days at Sea, 5,000 Sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln Dock in Thailand: A beach resort town in eastern Thailand welcomed crew members who will enjoy their first R&R after months deployed in a war zone, in this morning's Wall Street Journal.  I first saw a report of the carrier landing in Thailand on Morning Joe and thought about what mixed feelings the government and people of that port town must have to have 5,000 horny, thirsty American sailors arriving in their town.  The owners of whore houses, massage parlors, bars, and restaurants are jubilant.  The people who work in those establishments must have some mixed feelings.  Local law enforcement personnel and Navy Shore Patrol folks are preparing for a lot of calls.  I think back to the week of R&R I spent in Bangkok in early 1966. From my memoir:

My other trip out of country was a Rest and Recreation trip to Bangkok.  R&R trips did not begin until some months after I arrived in Vietnam, after President Johnson decided that we were in the conflict for the long haul.  R&R destinations were added a few at a time:  Hong Kong and Manila at first, then Bangkok, Penang, and eventually Taipei, Japan and   Australia.  When I became eligible for R&R, after 6 or 7 months “in country,” I had a choice of Hong Kong, the Philippines, or Bangkok, my destination of choice.  R&R leaves were for 5 days, but that could be extended day-by-day if there were no aircraft space available for the return trip to Vietnam.  Therein lies the unusual story of my guided tour of Bangkok brothels. 

In January or February of 1966, I flew from DaNang to Bangkok on an Air Force transport plane with a planeload of Marines, airmen, and a few soldiers and sailors.  There was a gaggle of taxi drivers who met our incoming plane with offers of exclusive taxi service for the entire 5 days of our R&R.  The drivers were as much personal tour guides as chauffeurs.   Most of us servicemen had money to burn since there was little to spend our pay on in Vietnam and goods (booze) and services (haircuts and mamasans who did laundry and swept our tents) were inexpensive in any event.  I hired my driver/tour guide who took me to the small hotel I was staying in where I started my R&R by taking a nap.  It was great to be in a real room with a real private bathroom and a real mattress on a real bed and no need for mosquito netting.  I slept until my driver returned at the time we had agreed.  He told me that his last client, whom he had deposited at the airport before picking me up, had been unable to obtain a flight back to Vietnam.  Would I mind sharing the taxi with his previous client for a night?  I said that would be fine.  I of course did not know a soul in Bangkok and was happy to have another American to talk to halfway around the world from Chicago, Milwaukee, and Cleveland.

The previous client turned out to be an Army doctor stationed at the big base in Nha Trang, between DaNang and Saigon.  We had dinner together and drank and schmoozed and got along well.  He told me about the medical facility at Nha Trang and I told him what I knew of I Corps.  In the course of the evening, I have no recollection of how the subject arose, he told me that he was a virgin.  He was 27 years old and unmarried.  He had come to Bangkok intending to have his first experience of sexual intimacy (in a manner of speaking) but had not succeeded.  He wanted to try again that evening.  I think the fact that he had someone with him – me – stiffened his resolve (no pun intended.)  I wasn’t in the market for the services he desired (oh, those impure thoughts and impure deeds!)  but I accompanied him as the driver/tour guide took us from brothel to brothel in the red light districts of Bangkok.  As with my arrival at Chu Lai and my encounter with the killer barber and Chinese assassin in DaNang, I failed the dauntless test.  The driver took us down dark streets and alleys and into dimly-lit bordellos where he spoke Thai to the Madame.  It was creepy and not-a-little scary.  I was no more experienced in this kind of adventure than the virginal doctor.   The doctor was clearly not eager to engage any of the women who came forward for his inspection, but after a number of stops he finally took a young woman back to the hotel where we were staying.  I bid him adieu at the hotel and went to another bar or night club with the taxi driver.  I knocked on the doctor’s door when I got back to the hotel.  He said he had company and would see me in the morning.  The next morning, he came down to breakfast while I was in the dining room, and sat with me.  “Well?”  I said.  “No go,” he said, “we talked all night.  She is very nice.”  The driver took him back to the airport after breakfast where he caught a plane back to Nha Trang, his virtue intact.

I cannot place too much emphasis on notions of virtue or moral purity in describing this strange night.  Bangkok was a commercial sex center even in early 1966.  Every R&R port was, or became, a sex center.  All those American servicemen with all that money and pent-up hormones and greater or lesser fears of dying sure can disrupt a local economy and corrupt a culture.  Prostitution thrived in all the R&R ports as did the drug trade and trafficking in crude pornography.  There was, however, a rumor afoot that servicemen were being infected with a strain of venereal disease that was highly resistant to antibiotics and highly destructive of the structural integrity of the male organ.  The not-so-funny jokes were that if you caught ‘the black syph,’ “you and your _____ [insert any of hundreds of slang terms for penis] will rotate back to the states in separate aircraft” or “You’ll be able to take your [whatever] back in its own box.”  Not that there were lots of opportunities for sexual adventures in Vietnam, but I didn’t know any officers, almost all of whom were married and older than the enlisted troops,  who indulged in that kind of activity before DaNang was placed off limits for American servicemen.  Religious sensibilities and marital vows played some roles, but so did fear of the notorious “black syph.”

After spending the first night touring the bordellos of Bangkok with the virgin surgeon, the rest of the R&R figured to be something of an anticlimax, and it was.  I toured the famous floating market, and visited more Buddhist temples than I can remember, took a trip into the countryside to visit Ayudiah, an ancient ruin.  I ate by myself, or with my driver, two or three meals a day.  I had Baked Alaska for dessert at one restaurant, my first and last time.  I bought some sapphire and ruby rings to bring home to your mother, and lengths of Thai silk.  I visited a large snake farm and had my picture taken with a 10 or 15 foot long python or anaconda draped around my neck and shoulders.   What I remember most is being alone and lonely, having no one to share the exotic touristy stuff with except my driver.  And, as each day passed, I knew I was one day closer to returning to DaNang and the grim business of the war.  I got some rest, and I got some recreation, and was glad for the experiences, but all in all, it was a remarkably sterile and joyless ‘vacation.’

The Abraham Lincoln will tie up at  Sattahip, the port facility near Pattaya, a resort and tourist town.   From ChatGPT:

The consequences were dramatic. Economists who subsequently studied the phenomenon found that areas surrounding Thai bases used by Americans developed much larger sex industries than comparable areas around Thai bases that Americans did not use. Remarkably, that difference persisted decades later: districts near former U.S. bases were found to have roughly five times as many commercial sex workers.

So the connection between American servicemen and the growth of prostitution is not merely anecdotal; there is unusually strong historical and economic evidence for it. 

There unquestionably was prostitution involving minors in Thailand during and after the Vietnam era. Poverty, rural-to-urban migration, trafficking, debt arrangements, and families sending daughters into employment all created circumstances in which adolescents entered the sex trade.

How openly did the military tolerate prostitution?

The U.S. military did not officially operate brothels or issue prostitutes to servicemen, and prostitution was formally illegal under Thai law. There were also military VD-control programs, medical inspections and warnings about sexually transmitted disease.

But at the practical level, prostitution was open, ubiquitous and plainly understood by American commanders to be a major part of the R&R environment.

There is little evidence that commanders seriously attempted to prevent servicemen from patronizing prostitutes. The concern was much more often venereal disease, robbery, fights, drugs, black-market activity and incidents embarrassing to the United States than the sexual transaction itself.

 I have a ton of sympathy for the sailors and Navy officers arriving in Thailand.  I noted too in the Wall Street Journal report of their arrival and it wasn't only the Abraham Lincoln that tied up, but also a guided missile destroyer named the Frank E. Petersen, after my friend and fellow Nancy Wilson fan at NAS Willow Grove.  It warms my heart that a Navy combat ship was named after him, especially now as Trump and Hegseth are working to stop the Navy from naming a ship about to be christened after a Black sailor who was a hero during the Pearl Harbor attack.  There is scuttlebutt about naming the ship USS Trump.  Words fail me.

Anniversaries.  I note that today is the anniversary both of the Japanese formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri battleship, and the date that Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam independent of France's colonial rule.  Of course, Ho tried to get US support for his independence movement from the US and, no surprise, the US wouldn't deal with him because he was a Communist.  The French played FAFO with Ho and his military leader Giap until Giap eviscerated them at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, when we picked up the battle until we 'cut and ran' from the unwinnable war in 1973, and Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City in 1975.  

 A pencil drawing I did of my granddaughter Lizzie from a photo her mom took on the opening day of school this year.  I messed up her beautiful smile badly, but I  think I'll nonetheless try to make a portrait painting from the photo..

9/1/2026

 Tuesday, September 1, 2026

1939 Adolf Hitler ordered the extermination of the mentally ill, arguing that wartime "was the best time for the elimination of the incurably ill"

1939 Germany started World War II  by invading Poland 

1941 Jews living in Germany were required to wear a yellow Star of David

2015 Pope Francis told priests to pardon women who have had an abortion, in a letter released by the Vatican

2016 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt in protest during the national anthem, objecting to racial injustice and police brutality in the US

2018 Memorial service for Senator John McCain at Washington National Cathedral with his daughter Meghan McCain, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush speaking

2021 Texas law banning most abortions after six weeks came into effect, now the most restrictive in the country

2025 The International Association of Genocide Scholars, an international non-partisan research organization on genocide and crimes against humanity, declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

In bed at 9:15, up at 6:05; 0630  203.2  119/73/61  91; 72/86/71, cloudy, hot & humid day ahead.

Morning meds at 8:10 a.m. and Eliquis Entresto at 7:20 a.m. and 7 p.m.  I missed my evening Entresto yesterday.  I'm wondering how that was possible, but I know it did.

I enjoyed a long brunch with CBG at Maxfield's this morning, schmoozing about her recent trip to Aspen to babysit her granddaughter Elllie for Jacob and his wife while they attended festivities for a wedding in which the wife was a member of the wedding party, about the state of the world, and of the U.S. and Israel in particular.  Then I picked up Andy and drove him to Ogui's Garage to get his Honda.

What I wrote on this date a year ago:

"Why do I write anything on Facebook?  Should I post something like this?

To my friends who have long indulged my rants on Facebook:  First, to those who have read those rants and commented on them, thank you.  Secondly, to those who have read those rants and refrained from commenting on them out of kindness, thank you.  Thirdly, to those who have learned to skip my rants and move on to more uplifting postings, thank you also.  To all of you, I share some personal thoughts.  I have become an old man.  I’m not sure when this happened.  It may have happened early in my life without me knowing it, but it surely has happened late in my life.  At 84, there is every reason to belief I am not only ‘playing the back 9,’ but on the 18th green.  This is a challenging but rewarding time of life.  In it, I have developed a much deeper appreciation for people, places, things, and events that, for a lifetime, I took for granted, or failed fully to treasure.  This has been a gift for which I am deeply grateful.  I remind myself a bit of Emily in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, who died young but returned to life only to be beset by how the living fail to see so much of the beauty and goodness all around them.  She laments of the living: “We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. All that was going on in life, and we never noticed. . . Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?.”  Had Emily lived into her 80s, she would probably have come to look at ‘all that was going on in life’ and to be grateful for so much good and so much beautiful.  It’s a gift that comes as we slow down. 

But old age also brings burdens, regrets, and fears.  I won’t tax your patience by describing mine except for the one that prompts me to write these thoughts, and that is what has happened to the United States of America in my lifetime and what is happening now.  I was born when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, America was coming out of the prolonged Great Depression, and about to enter the Second World War.  I’ve lived through 15 presidents. I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s when the country was at its apogee after the war, through the civil rights struggle and the Vietnam horror in the 60s and 70s.  There was a time when I believed America was headed in the right direction, when I at least hoped that Martin Luther King, Jr. was right that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  Actually, I may have lost that hope in Vietnam, but I was encouraged in the 60s and 70 not only by the passage of much good legislation under both LBJ and Richard Nixon, but also by public acceptance of the goals of that legislation: equal justice, expanded economic opportunities, clean air and water, safer workplaces, etc.  There was some pulling back of that public acceptance during and since the Reagan era, but there was not a fundamental change in the identity or public perception of the nation and its government as a constitutional, democratic republic with a diverse citizenry and a government of limited powers operating under the rule of law.  All that changed on November 5, 2024, when Donald Trump was elected to a second term of office as president. 

I will not further try the patience of any who have read this far by repeating my many rants against the current administration of this nation.  I do, however, want to focus on what is becoming our national character.  When I was a boy, movies about Nazi Germany were still popular.  We all grew up with movie images and mental images of a deluded people hailing a morally twisted leader of a government that persecuted all it disfavored for any reason and all who disagreed with its exercise of power.  Those who can’t see the resemblance between our government and that government are closing their eyes to reality or haven’t seen enough Nazi movies or read enough history.  What most characterized the Nazi government and the German populace in the 1930s was cruelty on the part of some (indeed, many) and a widespread indifference on the part of others to the sufferings of yet others who were not members of the dominant group of ethnic Germans.  It was that cruelty and indifference that let led to the Brown Shirts, and then the Gestapo, and the SS.  How much cruelty or heartlessness do we see in our own government’s policies and actions?  I focus, as our government has, on immigrants because they are the current targets of government. 

I can't figure out where to go with this.  Focus on cruelty?  On lawlessness?  Forget about it? Scatterbrained.  Manifesto of an old guy?"    

**********************

I didn't post it on FB because it was just a pointless rant.  But things have only gotten worse in the year since I wrote it.  Worse yet, odds are it will get even worse until Trump is out of office.  And, then what??? 

I started this morning with my usual routine, including watching the first minutes of Morning Joe where Richard Haas said of Trump and Pete Hegseth:

You know, Willy, it wasn't that long ago that the great, structural, comparative advantage of the United States was wevery day when the president of the United States got out of bed and put on his shoes, we had this pool of allies across the world, partners militarilty, politically, economoically, and the President [Trump] seems to be going out of his way, if you will, to undo that comparative advantage and instead alientate them, and, as you pointed out, reach out to our adversaries who, by the way, other than one another, Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, have no pool of partners.  They're isolated, so what we're doing is we're taking away our great structural advantage in this competition with them.  This will hurt us in every single measure, militarily, economically, diplomatically.  This is a real "own goal."

And, I ask again, as I so often have over the years I've kept this journal, is Donald Trump merely a Russian asset, or is he really a Russian agent?  What does Vladimir Putin have on him? My conspiracy theory.

Global Bond Sell-Off Puts Investors on Edge: Government borrowing costs are hitting multi-decade highs around the world, reflecting anxiety about debt levels, deficits and inflation, by Eshe Norman in this morning's NYTimes:

A global sell-off in government bonds intensified on Tuesday, pushing up borrowing costs in some of the world’s largest economies to their highest in decades and rattling investors.

As rising oil prices compound worries about inflation, bond yields are testing fresh highs, squeezing government budgets and raising interest rates on a wide range of consumer and business loans. The yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury notes, perhaps the world’s most influential interest rate, reached its highest since January 2025, and the 30-year yield continued to hover around a two-decade high. . . 

In many advanced economies, widening budget deficits, high debt levels and stubborn inflation have unnerved investors who believe that governments are either unable or unwilling to take steps to improve their fiscal situations. 

 One of the most pressing and unpredictable drivers of higher yields is the protracted war in Iran.

Government debt levels, in some cases, have already reached eye-watering levels. America’s gross national debt topped $40 trillion for the first time last month, or more than 120 percent of the size of the economy. In France, public debt exceeded 3.5 trillion euros (about $4 trillion), which is 117 percent of the size of its economy. In Japan, the government is spending heavily despite a public debt pile that is more than twice the size of its economy.

This is another matter about which I have often ranted in this journal, our unsustainable national debt, which triggers fear in me of another financial crisis, worse than 2008, with runaway inflation, and the loss of value in retirement funds that tens of millions of people around the world rely on.  Paranoia?  It can't happen here?  How many things we thought couldn't happen here, B.T., before Trump, have happened already? 

 I have been a worrywart since 1915 when Trump first came on the scene as a threatening American political figure.  I was a mere 74 years old, and relatively healthy.  How many times in my daily text chats with my sister did I play Cassandra at Troy, predicting troubles/disaster and follow the predictions with "I hope I'm wrong," only later to learn that I had underestimated Trump's destructive instincts and appetites?  The American bond market underpins the entire world financial system and economy.  We've been on this dangerous path of deficits and debt since Bill Clinton and the Congress balanced the budget and reduced the debt in the 1990s.

When Clinton took office in January 1993, the federal government was running a deficit of roughly $290 billion. The deficit declined every year thereafter, reaching about $22 billion in FY1997. Then:

FY1998: $69.2 billion surplus — the first federal budget surplus since 1969.

FY1999: $126 billion surplus.

FY2000: $236 billion surplus — the largest of the Clinton years.

FY2001: $128 billion surplus (mostly under the budget and tax structure inherited by George W. Bush.

Beginning in 1998, the government really did start paying down debt held by the public. Treasury says it fell by about $476 billion between September 1997 and September 2001, from $3.815 trillion to $3.339 trillion.  We're now over $40 trillion with no end in sight.  How can we not feel like Cassandra???

An exchange with ChatGPT today:

[My question] If you had to draft an obituary about me now, based just on what you know about me, how would it read?

[The response, in 3 seconds]  Based on what I know of you, I’d write something more like a life portrait than a conventional résumé-style obituary. Here is a first attempt.

Charles Dennis Clausen, 85, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, died [date].

He was born August 24, 1941, in Chicago, and came of age in an America that now seems almost as distant as the world of his parents. He entered Marquette University in 1959, participated in Naval ROTC, and served as president of the Anchor & Chain Society. After graduating in 1963, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps.

Clausen served as a Marine officer from 1963 to 1967, attaining the rank of captain. His service took him to Okinawa, Japan, and Vietnam. In 1965 and 1966 he served at Da Nang with Marine Wing Headquarters Squadron 1, Marine Wing Headquarters Group 1, 1st Marine Aircraft Wing. Like many veterans of that war, he carried memories of it for the rest of his life—not only memories of Vietnam itself, but of the young men with whom he had served and of those who did not come home.

Among them were men he continued to remember more than sixty years later: friends and fellow servicemen whose names eventually appeared on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In October 2026, he was scheduled to return to Washington on an Honor Flight, an occasion that for him was as much about remembering them as about being honored himself.

After leaving the Marine Corps, Clausen made Milwaukee his home. He built a life there with his family and pursued a long professional and intellectual life that never really ended in retirement. Age diminished neither his curiosity nor his willingness to reconsider what he thought he knew.

He was an inveterate reader. In his later years especially, books became companions and occasions for argument—with their authors, their characters, and himself. Steinbeck's East of Eden, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Virginia Woolf, Ann Patchett, Elizabeth Strout, Max Frisch, Robert Frost, Mary Oliver and many others led him repeatedly to questions that had interested him for much of his life: whether human beings possess free will, why suffering exists, what we owe one another, what faith requires, and how a person should confront old age and death.

He had little interest in easy answers.

He was fascinated by history, particularly the history he had lived through. The Vietnam War, American politics, race, religion, economic inequality and the country's changing moral and political character remained subjects of continuing inquiry. His interests ranged easily from Reinhold Niebuhr and St. Ignatius Loyola to professional football, Navy ships, Wisconsin politics, Robert Frost, John Steinbeck and the behavior of the wild turkeys outside his window.

That last subject would not have seemed trivial to him. He was interested in things because they were there and because he did not yet understand them.

For the last years of his life, Clausen kept a blog, Slogthrop Imponderables and Incommensurables. Part journal, part commonplace book and part conversation with himself and whatever readers happened by, it recorded books read, historical anniversaries, politics, weather, memories, bodily decline, loneliness, friendship, marriage and the ordinary business of getting through a day. He could move in a few paragraphs from the Battle of Passchendaele to a blood-pressure reading, from Donald Trump to Max Frisch, from mortality to what was happening outside the window.

Aging increasingly became one of his subjects because aging increasingly became one of his experiences. He did not romanticize it. He was interested in the losses that accompany old age—the narrowing of the future, the disappearance of friends, physical diminishment, loneliness and the unsettling recognition that most of one's life now lies behind rather than ahead.

But curiosity persisted.

At 85 he was still reading difficult books, still questioning his own interpretations of them, still following politics, still remembering incidents from Marine Corps service six decades earlier, still wondering whether a remembered detail was exactly right, and still trying to understand people whose beliefs and behavior puzzled or troubled him.

Perhaps that habit of inquiry characterized him better than any list of accomplishments could. He wanted to know what happened, but also what it meant. He distrusted sentimentality and certainty in roughly equal measure. He was capable of looking backward with affection without pretending that the past had been better than it was.

He knew that memory is unreliable and nevertheless believed remembering mattered.

He is survived by his wife, [name], and by [family members].

Those who knew him will remember a Marine and veteran, a husband and family member, a reader, writer and lifelong questioner—and a man who, well into old age, remained interested in the world.

He kept asking questions.

There are factual gaps, of course—your career after the Marines, marriage and family, friendships, accomplishments, and the people who would properly belong in the survivors paragraph. But I deliberately wouldn't fill those gaps by guessing.

The ending, though, strikes me as particularly appropriate. An obituary often tries to reduce a life to what someone did. From our conversations, I think something equally important about you is what you have continued to wonder about.

****************************

Max Frisch???