1208

 Thursday, December 8, 2022

Feast  of  the Immaculate Conception

In bed at 10, awake @ 6, up at 6:30, 3 or 4 pss, 1 snifter of cognac, and some IC discomfort, not pain.  32 degrees, high of 36 predicted.

Blessed Pio Nono, Mariolatry, Impregnation  Today is the day many practicing Catholics go to Mass (a 'holy day of obligation") to celebrate the wrong thing.  They think it's a celebration of Mary BVM being impregnated by the Holy Ghost so as to produce the ManGod without the necessity of semen and sperm.  Once at Mass, they will be reminded by the priest that no, that celebration is the Feast of the Annunciation, which will be observed in March.  Today's feast celebrates the fact that Mary, though conceived by the normal union of her father's sperm with her mother's egg, was spared the burden of Original Sin which infects every other human being since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.  Mary's primal sinlessness goes along with her purity, another word for chastity or virginity, the notion that she not only gave birth to Jesus without the necessity of carnal relations with a man, to wit, her husband Joseph, she also never had sexual relations with him to produce those bothersome 'brothers' and 'sisters' of Jesus referred to in the New Testament.  They are explained away as Joseph's children from a prior marriage, or as cousins.  Some has explained them as 'half-siblings' on the theory that Joseph and the BVM consummated their marriage after Jesus was born, but that theory was disfavored by those who wished Mary to be "ever-virgin."  It's all very messy and most Christians do themselves the favor of simply not thinking about it.  In any event, the Immaculate Conception is not about Jesus' conception and birth, it is about his mother's conception and the intrinsic sinfulness that Adam and Eve passed down to the rest of us.  

The Church has long been concerned about the general tendency of men and women to interact with one another carnally.  It was clearly important to the evangelist Luke to have Jesus the only human being in the history of the species born without the necessity of a male sperm interacting with a female egg.  How could the Son of God also be the son of a blue-collar carpenter and his teenage bride?  Much better to have God Himself, the Big G, impregnate the human who would bear his Son. (Don't get confused by all those pagan stories of gods having sex with humans; they're irrelevant.) And best to keep the Divine Impregnation a secret from the world for the period of the pregnancy and another 30 years or so, except for the Magi and a guy named Simeon, who praised the Big G and asked to die as soon as he recognized what had happened.  God's ways are not Man's ways.

It was the redoubtable indefatigable Pope Pius IX, or Pio Nono, who in 1854 declared the Immaculate Conception a DOGMA of the Church, not just a theory or a tradition or even a doctrine but rather a DOGMA, doubt it at your own peril.  He was a bit of a Mariolator himself, supposedly raised that way by his mother who was, as we would say in the Church, "devoted to Mary."  It's a nice way of referring to what, despite all the explanations to the contrary, is the problem of polytheism in a professedly monotheistic religion.  It starts with the "mystery" of the Trinity, the Three in One Godhead, but it is compounded by the status of Mary in Christian and especially Catholic cosmology.  Officially, Mary is never adored, only venerated but in practice, it is often Mary who gets all the attention, not the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.   It is Mary who makes appearances on the planet Earth to the faithful, not Jesus.  It is Mary who many Catholics pray to, not Jesus.  "Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thine intercession was left unaided.  Inspired by this confidence, I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins, my mother; to thee do I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy mercy hear and answer me.  "Amen.  Adoration, veneration, iceberg, Goldberg.

The Hippopotamus by T. S. Eliot

The broad-backed hippopotamus

Rests on his belly in the mud;

Although he seems so firm to us

He is merely flesh and blood. 

Flesh and blood is weak and frail

Susceptible to nervous shock'

While the True Church can never fail

For it is based on a rock.

At mating time the hippo's voice

Betrays inflections hoarse and odd,

But every week we hear rejoice

The Church as being one with God.

BTW, Pius IX who made it a religious duty for Catholics to profess belief in the Immaculate Conception, drove the point home later, at the 1st Vatican Council in 1869-70,  with his pushing of the DOGMA of Papal Infallibility on matters of Faith and Morals, when issued ex cathedra.  Pius was nothing if not self-assured.  The best thing to come out of Vatican I and the myth of papal infallibility was the opposition it stirred in a Catholic British nobleman (not many of those) Lord Actor who wrote in a letter his famous truth: "I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King, unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they do no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way against holders of power . . . Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority."  I note that this famous quote is very often, perhaps most often, misquoted as "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely."  Acton was correct, I think, is saying only that "power tends to corrupt" whereas "absolute power corrupts absolutely."  Much of human relationships consist of power relationships, where one person has power and another doesn't.  Parent-child is I suppose the simplest example.  The exercise of power can ennoble an actor as well as corrupt him; 'it all depends,' as we say.  It was only absolute power that Acton says, without a qualifier, corrupts, power like that that Pius IX sought at Vatican I and that Donald Trump seeks when he urges 'termination' of the Constitution and his reinstallation as 'the Decider' [pace George W. Bush}

One last point about the Blessed Virgin Mary,  the Immaculate Conception, Virgin Birth, perpetual virginity, the Church and sex.  The Marian doctrines and traditions and dogmas all fit in nicely with the Church's attitude towards sex and sexuality.  In a word, they were against it.  I remarked on this in the memoir I put together some years ago:

     "I remember the prayers recited by rote and in unison and I remember the nun’s large rosary beads, worn as a cincture, clacking as they moved.  In June of 1950, as I approached my 9th birthday and entering 4th grade, Pius XII canonized the Church’s youngest ‘saint and martyr,’ St. Maria Goretti.  Maria was stabbed to death in 1902 at age 11 years, 9 months, and 21 days, by Alessandro Serenelli, a 20-year-old neighbor who attempted to rape her.  She resisted at the cost of her life.  This terrible crime was a cause celèbre in Italy and was picked up by some Church people as evidence of what was wrong with Modernism and Worldliness (Alessandro) and of the value and the primacy of Purity (Maria.)  Maria’s canonization was more significant than most because she was made not only an official saint but also an official martyr.  “Martyrs” were traditionally those who were killed “for the Faith.”  They were the Christians in the Coliseum, the Vietnamese martyrs, and the like. Alessandro killed Maria not because she was a Catholic or a Christian, but because she refused to “put out.”  Designating this young victim of murder and attempted rape a martyr carried the message not that sexual assault was evil, a given, but that sex was evil.  It was better for Maria to suffer the fatal penetration of 14 stab wounds than to suffer the unwanted but nonlethal sexual penetration. Maintenance of virginity was exalted over maintenance of life.  The ‘sex is bad’  message was not lost on those of us growing up in the American, which is to say Irish Catholic Church.  Pictures of St. Maria Goretti joined pictures of St. Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower who entered the convent at age 14 and died of tuberculosis, a virgin, at age 24, on the walls of St. Leo Grammar School and countless other Catholic schools around the world.

The Chapel of Love by William Blake

I went to the Garden of Love

And saw what I never had seen;

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut

And "Thou shalt not" writ over the door,

So I turned to the Garden Love

That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tombstones where flowers should be;

And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys and desires.

I cannot write of Maria Goretti and Alessandro Serenelli without thinking of my mother and [her rapist] James Hartmann.  My mother suffered slashes rather than deep punctures and Hartmann, unlike Serenelli, had his way with her.  If she had resisted unto death and he had killed her with his knife, as he did with Gracelyn Bush, would she have become St. Mary Clausen?  The answer clearly is ‘no,’ because Mary, unlike Maria, was not a virgin.  Mary Clausen, unlike her namesake the BVM, was not a virgin.  Mary Clausen, unlike the primitive church “virgin martyrs,”  was not a virgin.  She was 25, married with two children, and living in the world when she was assaulted, not a child like Maria when she was killed or an adolescent like Therese when she entered the convent.  So my mother, as a woman living in a dangerous and complicated and inhospitable world was hardly a candidate for sainthood in the Church, even if she had died fighting James Hartmann and his knife.  The Church prefers virgins and celibates and assorted wackos for sainthood, not moms and dads."

Notorious American fop and member of the College of Cardinals Raymond Leo Burke, former bishop of LaCrosse, Wisconsin, and archbishop of St. Louis, MO, and former member of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, notorious for his very expensive clerical garb: robes, trains, lacy gowns, etc.  The subject of a piece by Mike Barnacle in The Daily Beast aptly entitled "Meet Cardinal Raymond Burke, Catholicism’s Most Offensive Mansplainer.''   "Cardinal Raymond Burke is a 66-year-old guy who lives in Rome, dresses like Queen Elizabeth, and talks like someone who majored in misogyny at some bogus, backwoods, Bible-banging tent school. Until Pope Francis stripped him of the powerful Vatican post Pope Benedict had handed him, Burke behaved like the Catholic Church’s version of Ted Cruz, operating with an ego and an attitude that proclaimed him to always be right on matters of doctrine and dogma. "

1207

 Wednesday, December 7, 2022

A day that will live in infamy

In bed by 9, awake at 3:30, up at 3:50, 2? pss, no toddy.  Woke up thinking of Reservation Dogs, attitude toward religion, the underlying story of sadness, despair, and 'California dreaming'.   30 degrees out, high of 38.

The War that would affect my family so devastatingly started 81 years ago this date with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  I was 105 days old, 3 and 1/2 months.  My father was 21 years and 3 months old.  My mother was 19, still a teenager.  The war that started that day affected their lives and their marriage and their children's lives in ways they couldn't have imagined that day.  They had been married for 16 months.  Two years and two months later, he would be drafted into the Marine Corps.  Thirteen months after that he would be on a volcanic island in the Western Pacific Ocean, trying to stay alive, probably wetting and shitting his trousers for the first time since he was a baby, 24 years earlier.  There were no urinals and commodes for Americans on Iwo Jima.  When he came home in November of 1945, he had a bathroom and a head full of the sights and sounds and smells of Death. He was 25 years old.  His wife was 23.  His son was 4 and the daughter he had never seen before was 15 months old.  All of them carried emotional wounds from that war for the rest of their lives.  Only the son still lives and he recoils at the description of the war, of any war, as a "Good War."

Herschel Walker Lost as did Mehmet Oz, Blake Masters, Don Bolduc, Leora Levy, Kari Lake, Doug Mastriano, Tudor Dixon, Lee Zeldin, Tim Michaels, Mark Ronchetti, Derek Schmidt, and so on.

“We’re going to win so much that you’re going to be sick and tired. You’re going to say, ‘Please, please, Mr. President, we’re sick and tired of winning. Please let us have at least one loss. It’s no longer exciting to win.’ And I’m going to say, ‘No way, we’re going to keep winning, and I don’t care if you like it or not." Donald Trump, 2016.

The New Built-in Oven arrived but- oh, no! - couldn't be installed without some electrical work being done first, relocate the junction (?) box.  Call to Roman Electric, first service date available is next Tuesday, 8 a.m.  Meanwhile, the oven sits in only kind-of out of the way spot on dining room floor.

Local Goldfinches Set Record of minimum 12, maximum 13 chowing down on the long tube niger feeder at the same time.  Flew away with the noisy arrival of a male downy woodpecker.

1206

Tuesday, December 6, 2022

In bed at @ 10, awake at 3:30, up before 4, unk. pss, one B&B.  No PP overnight.  Woke up thinking of Jeanne Dielman, wondering if the 3 day structure of the film intended to parallel the Triduum, Jeanne a Christ figure, whoring a crucifixion sacrifice for her son, Day 2 in the grave, all the fastidious, repetitive rituals a way of masking pain, Day 3, the resurrection from the grave, starting with the partially-buttoned robe, ending with the murder, the long contemplative meditative scene at the dining table.  32 degrees, high of 39, cloudy all day.

Western Wisconsin's small-town voters fear for America     JSOnline:

"They are farmers and business analysts. They are stay-at-home mothers, graphic designers and insurance salesmen.  They live in communities where crime is almost nonexistent and Cub Scouts hold $5 spaghetti-lunch fundraisers at American Legion halls.  And they live with something else.  Sometimes it’s anger. Sometimes sadness. Every once in a while it’s fear. . . And weapons are a big part of their self-proclaimed “patriot” movement. The Second Amendment and the belief that Americans have a right to overthrow tyrannical governments are foundational principles.  “I’m not a big gun guy,” says Carlson, whose weapons include pistols, a shotgun, an AR-15 rifle, 10 loaded magazines and about 1,000 additional rounds. “For a lot of people that’s just a start.”  That cocktail of weaponry and politics concerns plenty of people outside of their circles. . . But news in this world doesn’t come from the Associated Press or CNN. It only rarely comes from major conservative media, like Fox News.  Where does it come from?  “The internet,” said Scott Miller, a 40-year-old sales analyst and a prominent local gun-rights activist. “That’s where everybody gets their news these days.” . . . It’s hard to overstate how much cultural changes have shaped the right wing of American conservatism.  Beliefs about family and sexuality . . ."

Add "about race" The sentence about guns and the right to overthrow tyrannical governments reminds me of the eerie feeling I experienced stopping off at a local bar in Tigerton, WI, during the heyday of the Posse Comitatus movement in this state.  I was on the way with fishing buddies to Three Lakes on one of our annual muskie early Fall muskie adventures and we stopped at the bar for I'm not sure what reason.  I have no recollection of it now, many years later, but recall the news items of Posse members refusing to pay taxes, to recognize the legitimacy of all levels of government, and suing and filing liens against the property of government officials.   I wonder whether we may have underestimated the extent of rural radicalism in the state and the country, then and now -perhaps not now when the red-blue lines are so clearly drawn across the country.  In any case, it's hard for me to believe that there won't be some killing, arson, and bombing growing out of the right-wing anti-government movement afoot in our countryside.  A lot of anger, a lot of hate out there beyond the burbs.

Writing and Thinking

Read a piece, an advice column actually, in The Atlantic today about the challenges of writing.  It reminded me of my teaching days and reviewing students' writing with them, remembering how astounded I was in my first year of teaching Legal Writing to a class of about 120 1Ls at the poor writing ability of students generally.  Also remembering how abusive it was of the dean and the faculty to place that burden on me right out of law school myself.  A baptism by fire, or better yet by ordeal.  I reviewed writing assignments with students individually, dividing the large class into 5 groups, one for each morning of the week.  It must have been 10 groups, so I would meet with 12 students individually each morning.  I also was teaching a 4 credit-hour Property Law class and, I think, a 3-hour course on Agency and Partnership Law.  I may be wrong about the Agency class which may have been in the second semester.  What I do recall is working day and night preparing for the next day's class(es), reading and marking up student papers, and meeting with students every morning to go over the papers.  After a couple years of this, the faculty must have agreed that it was cruel and unusual punishment to inflict that teaching load on a young newbie so they spread the Legal Writing load among several members of the faculty for a year.  That adjustment worked, as I recall, for all of one year because it consumed so much time of my senior faculty.  The course went through some other permutations to get to the point many years ago where the school appointed a small cadre of Legal Writing Instructors which is the situation that obtains now.  In later years, I taught courses in Pretrial Litigation focused on pretrial discovery: interrogatories, RPDS, and depositions.  I advised the students in the first class that my goal was simply to help them to learn how to ask a question.  When reviewing their assignments of drafting written interrogatories, the usual challenge was to address circumlocutions and legalese.  "What do you want to know?" I would ask the students and they would answer in plain English.  "Then why not ask that?"  All those experiences over so many years taught me that writing - and thinking - don't come all that easily to most of us. And that writing is a crucible for thinking clearly and speaking clearly.  I recall students after classes telling me "I know [this or that legal concept or doctrine] I just can't express it" and  my suggesting to them, 'If you can't express it, you don't really know it."  The problem for most of us is that words come too easily to us when we speak.  They have no persistence; they are spoken and they are gone.  When we write them down, however, they stare back at us and cause us to wonder "is that really true or accurate?"  "Is that what I really mean?" "Is that word too broad, too inclusive, too blurry?"  and "Have I buried a diamond of a thought or perception in a dungheap of unnecessary verbiage?"  I violate my own teachings in these daily journals (do you want the word "daily" modifying "journals"?  "Jour", root word of "journal" means "day" in French.  Is "daily" necessary?)   But (do you really want to start a sentence, as you so often do, with the conjunction "but'?) journal writing, if not very careful writing, is still writing, still trying to express a thought with some accuracy even when the thought itself may be a very blurry one.  C'est la vie.

Saute Ma Ville, the precursor of Jeanne Dielman, is on the Criterion Channel.  It's 13 minutes long.  I watched it today and saw it was not only the precursor of Jeanne Dielman but it also in its way foretold Akerman's death by suicide.  It also may have answered my question in an earlier entry about whether Jeanne Dielman is a comedy or a tragedy, indicating the latter, i.e., that the protagonist was essentially ending not just her way of life, but her life itself.  A big difference in the 2 films is that in the shorter one, the death is almost slapstick, and lighthearted.  In the longer film, it's quite the opposite.

And speaking of suicide  . . . ]

What Euthanasia Has Done to Canada   Ross Douthat had a column in this morning's NYT about euthanasia and assisted suicide in Canada.  He's against both and calls Canada a dystopia because both are legal there.  He mentioned but did not expatiate on my biggest concern: pressure on terminally ill patients to voluntarily end their lives.  He wrote of "health care workers allegedly suggesting euthanasia to their patients" which is a real concern but perhaps not as great as family members suggesting euthanasia to preserve the value of the estate they will inherit, or the patients wanting it for the same reason.

Trump Corporations Found Guilty on All Counts of Tax Evasion  Oh frabjous day, calool allay.

1205

 Monday, December 5, 2022

In bed at 9, awake around 3,, and up at 3:30, thinking of crime against my mother, Kitty, and me.  It was 75 years ago, my memory of it is mostly repressed and still I think of it in the middle of the night.  Some form of PTSD, triggered by news of the remorseless 10-year-old who shot and killed his mother???  or am I just a little nuts?  In any case, it's 3 and 1/2 hours before sunrise and I'm in my recliner typing and thinking when I should be sleeping.  

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Buxulles

6 years widowed, fastidious, housecoat, repetitive, OCD?, habit-driven, monotony, flat emotion, a place for everything and everything in its place, silence, sound of her footsteps, perfect hair except when it isn't, back to camera, uncommunicative, does everything for son, daily shoe shining, lights on and off, controlled and controlling, 3 days, Day 3, habits breakdown, button on robe, light in bathroom, bureau kantoor closed, stamp machine out of stamps, uncomfortable scene just sitting in chair waiting, making the meatloaf, johns bourgeois regulars, prostitution the means of supporting life for her and son, facial expressions in elevator, especially Day 3, waiting in housecoat, crying baby, missing button, someone at her table in cafe, different waitress, package under mailbox, last john

These were notes I made about Jeanne Dielman.  It's hard to know what to make of this 3-hour film.  An early thought that came to me was that it is not surprising that Akerman died a suicide, although Akerman made this remarkable film at age 25 and she didn't die until age 65.  It is a bleak film.  Depressing.  Unable to say whether it would be classified as a tragedy or a comedy.  A viewer looking at the back of the last john in the act of intercourse or at his front, sitting on the bed afterward, thinks of him as at best a lout, at worst an ugly male exploiter of a woman who relied on his weekly 'paycheck' to survive.  Was killing him an act of liberation or the opposite.  Once I was really 'into' the film, I thought it was a work of philosophy, of psychology, a character study but also a study of humankind.  It seemed a mirror on the lives of everybody.  In what ways are we like Jeanne Dielman?  In our acts of habitude, in emotional deadening, in doing work in which we exploit or are exploited.  I wonder why Akerman's Jeanne had a son rather than a daughter considering Akerman's close bond with her own mother.  Was it simply to show the son as a bit of an ungrateful, exploitative lout in his own right, a commentary of men being serve(ice)d in all kinds of ways by women?  I thought as I watched the movie 'I need to watch this again', the only drawback being its 3 hour length.  Maybe the next time I get up at 3 in the morning thinking of my own exploited mother. In any event, I will be thinking of this film for a long time.

Reservation Dogs

We watched the closing episode 8 of Season 1 tonight.  I like this series very much.  It's a comedy in that it ends well, by most lights.  Willie Jack bows out of the plan to go to California to stay with her loving parents, Chees also to be available to his non-grandmother, Bear we're not sure about.  He is clearly not comfortable with the idea of moving away from his mother, but it's not clear that he wouldn't do so if Eloras hadn't dumped him for Jackie.  Elora takes off in her grandmother's car for California with Jackie and there seems to be something resembling peace between the remaining RezDogs and the NDN Mafia.  Brownie chases a tornado away from the town/tribal area and is visited by the Spirit on horseback.  There is no comic undertone to the series.  Flora's boyfriend Daniel has hanged himself.  Her mother died in a drunken car crash.  All the young people are unhappy living on the reservation, in the town that 'eats people,' where crime and alcohol and drug abuse abound.  The moral/ethical underpinnings of the series is interesting, with the Dogs feeling no compunction about stealing the property of others to fund the proposed move to California, including Flora's appropriating her grandmother's car to the California trip.

1204

 Sunday, December 4, 2022

In bed around 9, up around 4:20, multiple pss, no toddy.  Made it through the night with no distress after a rough day and rougher night of IC-type pain.  21 degrees out, wind chill 9, expecting high of 36, sunny skies.  Wind at 14 mph, range from 10-15, gust to 28 mph.  Yesterday wind hit 46 mph in Milwaukee.  Not saying much considering the limits of my memory, but I don't remember a year that was this windy here.

Countering Happy Horseshit with Happy Horseshit From Heather Cox Richardson's most recent post: "Today, one of former president Trump’s messages on the struggling right-wing social media platform Truth Social went viral. In the message, Trump again insisted that the 2020 presidential election had been characterized by “MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION,” and suggested the country should “throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or…have a NEW ELECTION.” Then he added: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone False & Fraudulent Elections!” In other words, Trump is calling for the overthrow of the Constitution that established this nation. He advocates the establishment of a dictator."  This is, as we used to say in RVN, pure happy horseshit.  No surprise from Trump.

Then she added: "White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement: “The American Constitution is a sacrosanct document that for over 200 years has guaranteed that freedom and the rule of law prevail in our great country. The Constitution brings the American people together—regardless of party—and elected leaders swear to uphold it. It’s the ultimate monument to all of the Americans who have given their lives to defeat self-serving despots that abused their power and trampled on fundamental rights. Attacking the Constitution and all it stands for is anathema to the soul of our nation, and should be universally condemned. You cannot only love America when you win.”  This of course is also pure happy horseshit.  

We need to get clear-headed about the Constitution and stop revering it as "sacrosanct."  It was created by wealthy white males to protect the wealth and interests of wealthy white males, one of those interests being race-based human slavery.  The wealthy white men who created it distrusted democracy, witness the Senate and the Electoral College which are still vital components of American 'democracy'.  And the 'rule of law' is, I believe, nowhere mentioned in the Constitution.  To the extent it was valued by the Founders, it was as a protection of private property interests, i.e,. wealth.  Especially in Southern states, wealthy white males bristled at the exercise of federal authority from the get-go which ultimately consummated in our deadliest war.  That bristling continues today in many of this nation's citizens, witness Trump's happy horseshit posting, the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, the January 6th mob, the current Republican Party, and the current culture wars.  In addressing the many vital challenges facing the nation, it would be helpful to start by not spouting happy horseshit but I know that is unthinkable.  We swim in a sea of happy horseshit every day, coming from politicians, news media, religious leaders, powerful corporations, commercial advertisers and marketers,  and social media.   Misinformation, disinformation, lies, half-truths, fantasies and wishful thinking: the mental junk food we are fed each day of our lives.   I think of a sentence from the end of Fintan O'Toole's We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland:  " “What is possible now, and was entirely impossible when I was born, is this: to accept the unknown without being so terrified of it that you have to take refuge in fabrications of absolute conviction.”  Fabrications like the Constitution is "sacrosanct" and that it guarantees "freedom and the rule of law."  Let's get real.

(And what do I read next but . . .  )

Why We Can’t Tell the Truth About Aging: A long life is a gift. But will we really be grateful for it? The New Yorker, 11/4/2019

"Walt Whitman, who never married, made it to seventy-two, and offered a lyric case for aging. “youth, large, lusty, loving—youth full of grace, force, fascination,” he intoned. “Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace, force, fascination?” It’s pretty to think so, but biology suggests otherwise. The so-called epigenetic clock shows our DNA getting gummed up, age-related mitochondrial mutations reducing the cells’ ability to generate energy, and our immune system slowly growing less efficient. Bones weaken, eyes strain, hearts flag. Bladders empty too often, bowels not often enough, and toxic proteins build up in the brain to form the plaque and the spaghetti-like tangles that are associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Not surprisingly, sixty-eight percent of Medicare beneficiaries today have multiple chronic conditions. Not a lot of grace, force, or fascination in that. In short, the optimistic narrative of pro-aging writers doesn’t line up with the dark story told by the human body."

Earlier in the essay, the author made reference to Cicero's famous essay on old age, De Senectute.  Out of curiosity, I looked up synonyms for senectitude, or old age, in the Merriam-Webster Thesaurus: "geezerhood, senescence, decrepitude, feebleness, infirmity, anility, caducity, dotage, second childhood, senility." I'm not familiar with 'anility' and 'caducity', but the other words are only too familiar,   

Later in the essay, there's a reference to "William Ian Miller’s eccentric “Losing It: In Which an Aging Professor Laments His Shrinking Brain”(2011)."  That's surely a book I should get.  Later yet, the author observes: "At the moment, we seem to be compensating for past transgressions: far from devaluing old age, we assign it value it may not possess. Yes, we should live as long as possible, barring illness and infirmity, but, when it comes to the depredations of age, let’s not lose candor along with muscle tone. The goal, you could say, is to live long enough to think: I’ve lived long enough."  What a lovely thought - "Let's not lose candor along with muscle tone."  Down with happy horseshit about old age!

The author, Arthur Krystal, ends eloquently with an homage to Ecclesiastes: "But what do I know? I’m just one person, who at seventy-one doesn’t feel as good as he did at sixty-one, and who is fairly certain that he’s going to feel even worse at eighty-one. I simply know what men and women have always known: “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever.” If only the writer had stopped there. Unfortunately, he went on to add, “In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. . . . The fate of the fool will overtake me also. What then do I gain by being wise? This too is meaningless.” No young person could have written that."  As they say, it's not for wimps.

Sunday Morning Blather rarely interests me since Trump left office and 'Sleepy Joe' took the nation's helm, but the lineups on Fox News Sunday shows caught my attention: Kevin, McCarthy, Herschel Walker, Mike Pompeo, Ron Johnson, and Mike Pence.  Stunning collection of bad guys.

Chantel Akerman's South is a documentary about the1998 murder of James Byrd, Jr., in Jasper, Texas near the Louisiana line. I have watched it before but I watched it again this afternoon.  It's understated but powerful, chilling in its long stretches of silence and long panning shots of the city of Jasper and the lonely country road where Byrd was dragged to death for 3 miles behind a pickup truck.  I thought to re-watch it when I read in the morning paper that Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was recently voted the greatest movie ever filmed by an esteemed group of film experts.  I've watched that movie as well and would have watched it today but it's not available on my streaming service Ovid.  I'll look at other services.  In South, the long tracking sequences of the city remind me of the long tracking shot of the checkout lanes in Godard's Tout Va Bien. 

1203

 Saturday, December 3, 2022

In bed at 9, up at 5:45, but much IC pain throughout the night, many pss. no alcohol, soda, or coffee but a couple cups of herbal tea and pizza for dinner; bladder, stomach, lower abdomen, continuing.  25 degrees outside with a wind advisory.  Wind chill is 9 degrees, with wind out of the west at 24 mph.  High of 46 expected, then many days of highs in the 30s.

Thomas More Society is in the local news this morning, representing the former deputy director of the Milwaukee Election Commission who is charged with fraudulently requesting military absentee ballots for the midterm election.  This should be an interesting case since the defendant will plead that she was doing a good deed, demonstrating how easy it is to obtain these ballots fraudulently, i.e., she had no mens rea, no criminal intent.  What interested me in the news story was the connection between Thomas More Society and former Wisconsin supreme court associate justice and right-wing whack job Michael Gabelman, who I discovered is "senior counsel" to Thomas More Society.  This news story calls to mind so many thoughts about our disgraceful supreme court, about elected judiciaries, about Gabelman's disgraced 'investigation' of the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin, and about the Thomas More Society.  To the best of my knowledge, it has always been a predominantly Catholic organization of lawyers and judges, the traditional sponsor of the annual Red Mass in Milwaukee and many other cities.  I never joined it since for many years I was not a practicing Catholic, nor was I ever invited.  I did however, presumably by request, deliver a speech to the local Thomas More Society on October 17, 2000.  I suspect it was not the kind of speech they had expected, entitled as it was "The Practice of Law as Occasion of Sin." I reread the speech this morning and (he said modestly😉) it's not bad though it certainly does not paint a pretty picture of my chosen profession, as the title suggests.  I had delivered a similar speech earlier that year at a State Bar seminar,  that one entitled "The Ethics of Legal Ethics," another downer.  The conclusion was a quote from Bertolt Brecht.  Shen Te, the Good Woman of Setzuan, says:  "I’d like to be good, it’s true, but there’s the rent to pay.  And that’s not all: I sell myself for a living.  Even so I can’t make the ends meet, there’s too much competition."    I guess it wasn't too politic of me to suggest to my fellow lawyers that we were, at bottom, whores,  It seems I have some Kamikaze genes.

1201

 Thursday, December 1, 2022

In bed around 9,  up at 5:45, several pss, no toddy, hard time opening eyes for one ps from CPAP leakage, problematic in light of chronic dry eyes & increasing presbyopia.  18 degrees under mostly clear skies, high of 35 forecast.  IC discomfort overnight, line between discomfort and mild pain pretty fuzzy.  Eyesight also pretty fuzzy.

‘Absolute family tragedy’: 10-year-old Milwaukee boy charged as an adult in the fatal shooting of his mother

This story in this morning's Journal Sentinel kink of knocked me for a loop, not only because of its intrinsic horror (a 10-year-old psychopathic matricide) but because it calls to mind the 15-year-old psychopath who sexually assaulted my 25-year-old mother in 1947, threatening to kill my sister and me to try to get her to stop resisting.  He too was a murderer, having stabbed to death a 32-year-old woman in a local parking lot the week before.  From all the newspaper accounts, and there were many, in the Tribune, the Sun, and the Daily News, he never manifested any remorse, either for the murder or for the assault of my mother and of my sister and me, aged 3 and 6 then.  Though I was 6 years old and present during the savagery, I have no memory of any of it, or rather only a repressed memory that I can't pull up.  I wonder if the memory may return to me sometime before I die, but probably not since it has lain hidden for 75 years now.  Nonetheless, I know it has had bad effects in my life because of the one memory that has never left me from that night, my father yelling at me and frightening me as I sat on the floor in my overcoat, and because of the recurrent nightmare, I had for years, i.e., that someone was in the bedroom threatening to hurt . . . who? me? my mother? and I was powerless to do anything except to moan loudly, trying to . . . what?  scare him away?  warn whoever was with me?  Always the same nightmare, always the same terror, always the same response, loud moaning, trying to do what?  So the story of the 10-year-old who seemingly pretty casually shot and killed his mother for refusing to buy him VR goggles and felt no regret, no remorse, no emotion over what he had done reminded me of the 15-year-old neighbor boy who also killed, and raped, and threatened to stab children with the knife he used to force himself on my mother.  Reading the news item was a chastening way to start this day.