6/14/23

 Wednesday, June 14, 2023

Flag Day 😖

In bed at 10:30, up at 4:55.  Let Lilly out.  55℉, high of 69℉, cloudy morning, sunny afternoon, N wind at 4 mph, 4 to 7 mph today, with gusts up to 13 mph, no rain today.  Sunrise at 5:11, sunset at 8:32, 15+21.

Tom Friedman's Op-ed this morning.  Re Trump: "It is impossible to exaggerate what a dangerous moment this is for our country."

And we've seen it coming since November 8, 2016.

Brain dead day.  Frank Sinatra,  Why Was I Born, Why Am I Living

Why was I born, why am I living?

What do I get, what am I giving?

Why do I want a thing I daren't hope for?

What can I hope for? I wish I knew.

That kind of wasted, useless day.  Not depressed, not anxious, not sick, just feeling half-dead.

6/13/23

 Tuesday, June 13, 2023

In bed at 10:30, and up at 5:00.  51℉, expected high of 61℉, wind NW at 9 mph, 7 to 16 mph during the day, gusts up to 32 mph, and almost half an inch of rain is expected in the next 24 hours.  Sunrise at 5:11, sunset at 8:32, 15+21.

Approaching the Summer Solstice.  The earliest sunrise of the year is 5:11 on 6/15.  The latest sunset is 8:35 on 6/30.  On June 21, the longest day of the year, the Sun will rise at 5:12 AM and will set 15 hours, 22 minutes later, at 8:34 PM, while on December 22, the shortest day of the year, it will rise at 7:20 AM and will set 9 hours, 0 minutes later, at 4:20 PM.

Hoping for rain.  It has been a very dry Spring around here.  Our berry trees along County Line Road have been dropping yellow leaves, a sign of distress.  I'm wondering what effect the dry weather has been having on SE Wisconsin farmers during this planting season. 

Driveway Resealing.  Merit Asphalt has declined to reseal our two driveways.  The message: "Dear Charles or Geri,  After an inspection of your driveway, it is my professional opinion that the driveway is in too poor of condition to seal coat.  Overall surface condition, extensive cracking, and base failure are all factors in determining whether a seal coat can be properly applied. It is the policy of Merit Asphalt Inc. not to repair or seal coat any driveway which does not pass an on-site inspection.  It is the intention of Merit Asphalt Inc. to protect the homeowner and the reputation of our company by not doing ill-advised repair work.  If you would like to discuss the replacement of your driveway please give me a call. I thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Phil Schuyler  

414-581-6644

Quid nunc?  Asphalt or concrete?  Adjust the grade of the garage driveway?  Sidewalk/stoop in front of the house? $$$$$😩😪😬

Celebrations, American-style.  At least nine people were shot in downtown Denver as people celebrated the Denver Nuggets’ NBA Finals victory early Tuesday, police said. Three of the victims are in critical condition, and a suspect is in custody, police said.  All nine of the gunshot victims, as well as the suspect, were transported to a hospital, Denver police spokesman Doug Schepman said early Tuesday.  The shooting took place around 12:30 a.m. on Denver’s Market Street, where crowds had gathered to celebrate the Nuggets’ first NBA title, police said.

Milwaukee 2021: Three people were injured in a pair of shootings in Milwaukee following the Bucks’ NBA Finals win on Tuesday night, police confirmed on Wednesday morning.  The shootings, per the Associated Press, took place in two locations across the Milwaukee River near Water Street around 12:42 a.m. on Wednesday.  Multiple shots were heard on local TV broadcasts, including on TMJ4, which was covering the celebrations when “dozens of gunshots” were heard. The scene, reporter Ben Jordan said, was “incredibly frightening.”

Three guesses what almost all such shootings have in common.

Pat Sajak's Last Dance.  OMG, the next season of Wheel of Fortune will be Pat Sajak's last!  How will we manage?  What does this mean for Vanna White?  For America?  Will Wheel of Fortune go the way of Jeopardy after Alex Trebek?  Why am I thinking of Carole King: "So far away / doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore?"

Wheel of Fortune with Pat Sajak is hugely popular, on air for 40 years and drawing as many as 40,000,000 viewers in the 1980s, the era before ubiquitous cable and internet offerings were available.  It still draws more than 8,000,000 viewers each day.  News reports say he earns $14 or $15 million a year for working 4 days a month taping 6 shows a day with Vanna White who earns $10 million a year.  They both earn MORE money from licensing their images on Wheel of Fortune slot machines in casinos around the world.  Sajak's net worth is probably in nine figures.

Why does this guy make my skin crawl?  Because he's a weatherman.  Merv Griffin hired him onto Wheel of Fortune from his former job as a full-time weatherman at KNBC-TV in Los Angeles.  He wasn't a meteorologist but he was physically attractive and suave.  CAMBRIDGE DICTIONARY: suave -  A suave man is very polite, pleasant, and usually attractive, often in a way that is slightly false.  Doesn't that describe our typical TV weathermen?  Suave.  "Smooth as greased owl shit" (as a former law partner of mine used to cryptically say) and slightly false.  Debonair, to give it a French twist.  Or, perhaps more accurately, PLASTICMAN,  INSIPID, SOULLESS, VAPID,  Aren't these prime requisites for a TV weatherman?  Vapidity and the ability to suavely talk to the viewing audience as if addressing a kindergarten class?  And of course the first requisite for any "personality" on a local TV news show: the ability to feign perpetual happiness, cheeriness, ebullience, indeed joyfulness.  "A two-year-old toddler was shot in the head  and killed by a driveby shooter while sitting on her grandma's lap last night in the Harambee neighborhood but, hey, Mark, it looks like we'll have great weather for the Harambee Festival this weekend."  "Yes, Debbie, [flashing a big happy smile] you can keep the umbrella in your closet the whole weekend . . ."  That's what I see when I see Pat Sajak, the KNBC-TV weatherman, a three-time Emmy winner and the recipient of the Daytime Emmy lifetime achievement award.  He's the same age as Donald Trump, a lot better looking, and a lot smoother.  Maybe HE should run for the Republican nomination.  He's got what it takes!😱

Squirrels lose, and chipmunks win.  With the squirrel baffle raised, the squirrels can't jump on top of it to access the tube feeder and suet cake feeder, but the little chipmunks can now climb up the shepherd crook and leap over to the niger tube feeder, climb it, and leap back to the shepherd crooks above the baffle, thence to the sunflower tube.  Amazing acrobats.

Pro-Trump demonstrators in Miami.  Large flags with 'Trump 2024,' 'Soros Criminal,' ''Free Trump,' 'Trump Won,' 'In God We Trust,' 'Anti-communist' etc.  Many flag-carrying women lined the streets leading to the federal courthouse.  Many people were in the plaza in front of the courthouse.  They all look like normal human beings like they could be our next-door neighbors.  What is it that motivates these supporters?  What is it about our contemporary American world that makes them so willing to support a guy like Donald Trump?  For some reason, I'm wondering what gestalt are they responding to.  I say gestalt in the sense of the whole being more than the sum of its parts.  It's not just that these folks are, like Trump, anti-immigrants, anti-NATO, anti-China or pro-Russia, or anti-regulation, anti-tax, pro-this and anti-that. I think it is a general contempt or hatred for government, at least the federal government, the "Deep State," the administrative state that Steve Bannon promised to 'deconstruct.'  It's that generalized contempt or hatred that supports and sustains all the conspiracy theories, and all the conspiracy theories support and sustain the generalized contempt or hatred, all aided by confirmation bias.

 

6/12/23

 Monday, June 12, 2023

In bed by 9, awake and up at 4:54. 44℉, almost cold enough for a fire in the fireplace, high of 65℉, wind NW at 9 mph, 5 to 11 mph today, gusts up to 18 mph.  Sunrise at 5:11, sunset at 8:32, 14+20.

Katherine is leaving after a wonderful 4-day visit.

Ode I. 11

BY HORACE

TRANSLATED BY BURTON RAFFEL

Leucon, no one’s allowed to know his fate,

Not you, not me: don’t ask, don’t hunt for answers

In tea leaves or palms. Be patient with whatever comes.

This could be our last winter, it could be many

More, pounding the Tuscan Sea on these rocks:

Do what you must, be wise, cut your vines

And forget about hope. Time goes running, even

As we talk. Take the present, the future’s no one’s affair

Weltanschauung, Cult, and Trump.   "We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them, he will still feel as the famous woman did about ghosts, Je n'y crois pas, mais je les crains,—"I don't believe in them, but I am afraid of them, nevertheless".  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

How is it that so very many of the Russian people believe Vladimir Putin's spin on the"special military operation" against Ukraine?  How is it that so very many Americans believe that (1) the 2020 presidential election was stolen by Democrats, and (2) Donald Trump is guilty of nothing in his attempts to subvert the election that ousted him or in looting classified and other documents from the White House?  For that matter, how is it that most Americans so readily believed that we were 'protecting our freedoms' and 'protecting Democracy' when we invaded Vietnam and Iraq?  How is it that so few Americans see the necessity for militarism and economic imperialism to sustain a vigorous American capitalism's need for raw materials and markets?

Two feature pieces in this morning's WaPo caught my eye.  The first is a review of two recent books by Jade McGlynn: "What we’ve misunderstood about Russian motivations for the war in Ukraine."  The books reviewed are RUSSIA'S WAR and MEMORY MAKERS.   The second feature by Rachel Zimmerman is "How does trauma spill from one generation to the next?  Intergenerational trauma has become a hot topic as people seek to explain the poor state of mental health among younger generations."  McGlynn's books, especially the memory book address the widespread sense of grievance, lost stature and dignity, and victimization by 'the West' in Russia.  The Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union, once great, mighty, and hegemonic over its European neighbors have been brought low, unfairly diminished by 'the West.'  It reminds me of attitudes I've heard expressed by Serbs, by "Lost Cause" American Southerners, and by Trump, his MAGA Republicans, and White Nationalists generally.  That sense of frustrated entitlement, vulnerability to hostile neighbors, and of being violated and threatened by them, subordinated to and victimized by them is also widely seen among Israelis Jews and Palestinian Arabs. 

The article on intergenerational trauma interested me in part because of the research I did on 2nd generation PTSD while working on my memoir, but also because of its relevance to the idea of collective or social memory, weltanschauung, mass delusion, and confirmation biases.  While reliving childhood experiences growing up with my father's combat-based PTSD and my mother's sexual assault-based PTSD, I wondered about the effect of all that trauma on my sister and me.  In my 80s, I still wonder.  "It’s not the traumatic experience that is passed on, it’s the anxiety and world view of the survivors, said Ed Tronick, a developmental and clinical psychologist at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School in Worcester. Many Holocaust survivors developed a view that the world is a dangerous place where terrible things can happen anytime. Their children intuitively sensed this fear. “Children are like anxiety detectors,” Tronick said, and they pick up and adapt to these cues.  Even the great-great-grandchildren of enslaved people can experience the anxiety their parents feel about the danger of sending them out into the community. In response to parents’ behavior, a child’s “body has already begun to experience the world as dangerous, even though he doesn’t understand the dangers at that young an age,” Tronick said."

"“Collective” intergenerational trauma and “racial trauma” refer to the psychological distress passed through generations as a result of historic events, including colonization, slavery and other forms of oppression.  This type of trauma reaches far beyond individuals and families and is a shared experience among a particular group, such as descendants of the 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals who were detained in incarceration camps during World War II.  Such trauma can manifest in many ways, from heightened anxiety, depression, and insomnia to other mental and emotional health problems."

I'm not at all sure how all these thoughts fit together in terms of the Russians' belief in the justness of the assault on Ukraine or in terms of the utterly different perceptions of reality by the MAGA Republicans and the rest of us.  I'll try to think about this some more today.   I guess what I am thinking is that nations or groups of related people suffer injuries, disappointments, setbacks, or traumas in some of the same ways that individuals do.  Groups can come to feel injured, disrespected, cheated out of some perceived benefit that the group was entitled to, etc., and the injury can be traumatic and lead to some sort of psychic or emotional stress in the form of a deep-seated grievance.  Many Russians believe that Ukraine 'belongs' to Russia and has no right to an independent, separate existence.  White nationalists believe that the U.S. is a White, [Protestant] Christian nation being taken over by non-White, non-Christians fixed upon subordinating Whites to an unAmerican culture.  Many, perhaps most, Israeli Jews believe that Israel belongs to them despite the long history of Palestinian Arab Muslims who lived there.  Palestinians believe the land belongs to them precisely because of their people's long history of living there.  The Serbs and Kosovo, the French and the Germans and Alsace-Lorraine,   I'm thinking perhaps foolishly that where we find a strong sense of Nationalism especially when coupled with Revanchism we will find some sort of collective PTSD, a sense of frustrated entitlement and grievance and that the same is true of race and class-based nationalism as of state-based nationalism.   The MAGA people, like their cult leader DJT, believe they have been cheated out of the power and respect, the hegemony that they are entitled to.  Like Howard Beale in "Network," they're mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore.  The belief is deep-seated and they see the world with the help of confirmation biases through grievance lenses.  

6/11/23

 Sunday, June 11, 2023

In bed around 11, awake at 3:10 unable to sleep, back and pelvic pain, up at 5:15.  52℉, high of 58℉, rain, wind NNE at 17 mph, 10 to 20 mph during the day, gusts up to 32 mph.  The sun rose at 5:11, sunset at 8:31, 15+19.

Bulwer-Lytton: It was a dark and stormy night.  It looks nasty outside, with wet streets and considerable wind.  Beach Hazards Statement issued by the National Weather Service, life-threatening waves of 4 to 8 feet and dangerous currents are expected today through 4 a.m. tomorrow.  The total rainfall expected today is 0.2 inches.  Not enough.

The Mary Trump Show on YouTube.  We watched the last two shows yesterday.  Mainly it's just a group of Trump-hating Lefties (like me) schmoozing and reinforcing their own beliefs about what a serious danger Trump and Trumpism and the contemporary Republican Party are.  Since we are birds of a feather, they also reinforce my beliefs and fears for the country, especially for our children and grandchildren.  I like it too that the folks on the program call a spade a spade, or more precisely, they call Fascism Fascism, not 'authoritarianism.'

When the looting starts, the shooting starts.  On May 28, 2020, following clashes between Minneapolis police and demonstrators protesting the murder of Geroge Floyd, President Trump tweeted:

I can’t stand back & watch this happen to a great American City, Minneapolis. A total lack of leadership. Either the very weak Radical Left Mayor, Jacob Frey, get his act together and bring the City under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right......These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!

I've been thinking of that line Trump used (but didn't originate)  'when the looting starts, the shooting starts.'  Isn't he a looter?  Isn't that exactly what he did when he left the White House?  Pack up and carry away hundreds of boxes of documents and other stuff that, under the Presidential Records Act and other laws, did not belong to him.  He and his minions looted, plundered, and pillaged the place.  How is he different, e.g., from someone who is hired to watch a store for a period of time and who, at the end of the period, simply steals the contents of the store on his way out?  It's hardly a secret that he has the heart of a gonif.  The Mar-a-Lago indictment proves it.  The unanswered question that hangs over the whole sordid scandal is WHY.  Why did he do it?  Not so much why he took stuff, but why he exerted such efforts not to turn the stuff over after lawful demands on behalf of the government.  I can't believe his actions were prompted by sentimental concerns, a desire to hold onto souvenirs.  I believe he is not only a gonif and a paskudnyak, but also a traitor.  I believe the super top secret compartmented intelligence reports were things of monetary value to him, especially in dealing with the Saudis and the Russians.  If he could make money off the information, he would and I suspect he did.

Out of Sorts Today, as usual on the day after a bad sleep night.  Plus the weather is really bleak.

6/10/23

 Saturday, June 10, 2023

In bed at 10:15, up at 6:10., watching a bunny forage under the bottle brush buckeye.  61℉, a high of 78, W wind at 9 mph, 3 to 16 mph during the day with gusts up to 29 mph,   Sunrise was at 5:11, sunset at 8:31, 15+19.

The Cult of Trump.  I started the morning going to YouTube and tuning into Mary Trump's podcast addressing the federal indictment of her Uncle Donald.  (Why am I thinking of Huey, Dewey, and Louie Duck, and their Uncle Donald?)   I hadn't known there was such a podcast but, surprise!  I thought I would perhaps see her as a guest on some talk or news show, but instead watched this podcast with her, Dahlia Lithwick, Norm Ornstein, and others discussing the indictment.  The most chilling parts were the references to Trump as a cult leader and a sort of good and innocent Jesus figure being crucified by evil Deep State forces and the references to the mobilization of diffuse militia-type actors preparing to go to war against ubiquitous evildoers, i.e., anyone supporting the government's persecution of 'the real POTUS,' from whom the election was stolen.  Republican congressman Clay Higgins from Lafayette, LA, tweeted: "“President Trump said he has been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM. This is a perimeter probe from the oppressors. Hold. rPOTUS has this. Buckle up. 1/50K know your bridges. Rock steady calm. That is all.”  This cryptic message is apparently militia talk for 'get ready to do battle', just the sort of thing I've been worried about with my thoughts of Timothy McVeigh, Waco, and the OKC bombing.  "Though Higgins did not respond to a request for clarification, author, journalist, and professor Jeff Sharlet took his words as a call for war. Sharlet's latest book, "The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War," is an in-depth look at right-wing extremism.   “Take this seriously,” Sharlet wrote Friday. “’ Perimeter probe’: Higgins thinks indictment precedes bigger attack. ‘rPOTUS’: real POTUS, Trump. ‘Hold’: stand back & stand by. ‘Buckle up’: prepare for war. ‘1/50 k’: military scale maps (mostly publicly available that show nearby military installations). ‘Know your bridges’: militia speak for prepare to seize bridges.”"  Which brings us to  . . .

Lord Brougham and Queen Caroline's Case.  From the editorial page of this morning's WaPo: "[I[t is the Justice Department’s duty to assure that no person, not even a former president, is beyond the reach of the law — regardless of the discord or division doing so could sow." In 1820, the notorious English Queen Caroline was tried for adultery in the House of Commons and was represented by Henry, Lord Brougham who had evidence that Caroline's husband, King George IV had, before his marriage to Caroline, been married to a twice-widowed Roman Catholic, a marriage that would have disqualified him from the throne under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, the 1689 Bill of Rights, and the 1770 Act of Settlement.  Brougham threatened to use the evidence and to call into question the legitimacy of the King's sovereignty.  

"[A]n advocate knows but one duty, and, cost what it may, he must discharge it. Be the consequences what they may, to any other persons, powers, principalities, dominions or nations, an advocate is bound to do his duty" to his client" 

and also

 "[A]n advocate, by the sacred duty of his connection with his client, knows, in the discharge of that office, but one person in the world, that client and none other. To save that client by all expedient means -to protect that client at all  hazards and costs to all others, and among others to himself - is the highest and most unquestioned of his duties; and he must not regard the alarm, the suffering, the torment, the destruction, which he may bring upon any other; nay, separating even the duties of a patriot from those of an advocate, he must go on reckless of the consequences, if his fate it should unhappily be, to involve his country in confusion for his client."  

This conception of a lawyer's duty of zealous advocacy is, not surprisingly, controversial but it seems to be embraced today by the Editorial Board of the WaPo.  Quaere whether the Board will feel the same way about future issues of trial or plea bargain and sentencing if a conviction is obtained.  In its dealings with Trump, when if ever should the Department of Justice modify action it would ordinarily take precisely because the defendant is Trump and precisely because of concern over 'the discord or division' that may result from the Department's actions?  The schadenfreude that I and millions of others feel over Trump's finally getting a bit of comeuppance in his lifetime of wrongdoing has to be tempered by serious concerns posed by right-wing thuggery, by the Timothy McVeighs of our world.

LTMW at one of the chipmunks that live underneath the stoop by our front door.  I don't know how many of them live in that burrow, but it's at least two because sometimes I see the two of them together on top of the stoop and then scurrying back underneath when I open the screen door.  

Earlier today and once before I think I may have seen a blue-gray gnatcatcher checking out our nesting materials cage.  I'm pretty sure it was gray, bigger than a hummingbird and smaller than a chickadee.  

I used a couple of wood shims to raise the squirrel baffle on the triple shepherd's crook.  It's working, at least for now.  The squirrels are beside themselves.  I'm feeling some guilt (or compassion.)

6/9/23

 Friday, June 9, 2023

In bed around 9:30 after watching the news re: Trump's indictment, awake at 5:05 and up at 5:20  to let Lilly out and clean up the kitchen, a full load for the Bosch plus the hand-washed.  52℉ on the way to a high of 72, sunny day, low winds, gusts up to 18 mph.  The sun rose at 5:11 and will set at 8:30, 15+18.

The Squirrel-proof feeder I hung from 2 S-hooks on the tree off the patio turned out to be not white-tailed deer-proof.  When I went outside yesterday to see if any of the seeds in it had been eaten, it was gone, missing.  I thought perhaps Geri had moved it (very unlikely) or someone had come into our backyard and stolen our expensive bird feeder full of seeds (even more unlikely.)  Even the S-hooks were missing.  The mystery was solved later when Katherine found the feeder lying on its side in the hosta garden that Geri has planted under the tree.  She also found one of the S-hooks.  A whitetail must have stood on its hind legs and knocked the feeder off its hooks and onto the ground and proceeded to eat every seed in it.

Patio time with Merlin.  It's chilly this morning.  Even with a heavy flannel shirt on I got uncomfortable sitting with a fresh cup of coffee on the patio.  Plus I confess to some eagerness to read the morning papers about the Trump indictment.  While I was on the patio I had my normal patio thought: how fortunate I am.  How comforting it is to sit quietly, to see the sea of green before me, to hear the soft sound of rubber tires passing over County Line Road carrying neighbors to work, to listen to the neighboring birds.  At first, I hear no birds except perhaps a cardinal.  Then I activate Merlin on my iPhone and Merlin says it hears a mourning dove, a great crested flycatcher, a blue-gray gnatcatcher, a black-capped chickadee, a robin, a house sparrow, and a house wren.  What, no goldfinch?  no house finch?  The longer I sit quietly in the chair I realize I do hear many bird calls, but they are not loud, sotto voce, except for the cardinals and a blue jay.  I think of W. H. Davies' Leisure: "A poor life this if, full of care, we have not time to stand and stare."  Or sit and listen.

Yesterday's Apple Store tutorial on my Apple Watch SE was a disappointment.  There were 2 of us 'students,' both elderly.  The instructor was 54 and a fast talker.  He was very familiar with the Apple Watch features and seemed pleased to tell us about them whether they were of interest to us or not, especially the physical fitness and various health apps.  What my fellow student and I needed was slow, steady, hands-on instruction on the basics of setting up and using the device.  Neither of us could keep up with the instructor, even on features as important to each of us as the SOS feature, 911.  The session was scheduled at 3:00 on a Thursday afternoon and was supposed to end at 3:30 though the instructor was kind enough to keep the session going until a little after 4:00, but alas not nearly as useful as either of us learners had hoped for.  [There must have been 15 to 20 Apple Store employees in the store during this session and only a handful of customers.  Surprising.]

Trump's indictment came as no surprise.  It appears another one will be coming in August in Atlanta regarding his efforts to subvert the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.  Perhaps another will come in connection with the effort to subvert the counting of the electoral votes of the states on January 6.  One hopes.  It's hard even to conceive of Trump in handcuffs walking between two deputies or federal marshalls or wearing an orange jumpsuit.  An indictment is one thing, trial and conviction quite another, and sentencing yet a third thing.  I can imagine, and even hope, for a number of convictions of various kinds and a sentence of home confinement in the luxury of Mar a Lago, guarded (in a new sense) by his retinue of loyal Secret Service toadies.  What I was thinking about last night during all the schmoozing on Erin Burnett and Alex Wagner and Lawrence O'Donnell's programs was Timothy McVeigh, the Waco tragedy, and Oklahoma City.   I don't expect to see crowds of thousands of screaming protesters storming the federal courthouses in Florida or Washington or the Fulton County Courthouse in Atlanta a la January 6.  What I do fear are the Timothy McVeighs in America, not too smart, not well educated, but smart enough to buy enough fertilizer for a bomb or accelerant for an arson, nourished for years by right-wing hate speech on AM radio, Fox News, and Newsmax, and on the internet, and moved to 'set things right' in America, to make America Great Again. to start a race war or a righteous war against Communists or Globalists or against George Soros and the Jewish cabal that runs or world, or . . . or. . .   I realize on the other hand that my pessimism about America's future knows few bounds and, thank God, I am so often wrong in my thinking.  But sometimes I'm right and these fears seem to me to be at least not irrational.  Time will tell.  [I'm remembering too the well-to-do, well-educated Timothy McVeighs of the Left, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the bomb-making Weather Underground, the bombers of UW-Madison's Sterling Hall on my birthday in 1970, Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army,  H. Rap Brown and the Black Power movement in the 60s: "Violence is as American as cherry pie."]

6/8/23

 Thursday, June 8, 2023

In bed by 10:30,  up at 4:56 thinking of a 1967 letter from Ron Kendall and Katherine's arrival.  Chilly 50℉, high of 67℉, clear skies all day, NNE wind at 9 mph, 3 to 10 mph today, gusts up to 17 mph.  Sunrise at 5:12, sunset at 8:29, 15+17.  Let Lilly out.  Through the kitchen window, I saw a lone white-tail doe nibbling on low-hanging leaves or berries on the middle of the County Line trees.

Swedish Death Cleaning is a well-known concept in Swedish and Scandinavian culture, where you work on eliminating unnecessary items from your home, so loved ones won't be burdened with the task after you pass.' That's what I got into when I opened those mildewed boxes in the basement.  It continues to be a rather emotional process which I guess is to be expected if one has put off the initial foray into the process for half a century or more.  Lots of books, lots of documents, lots of photographs, lots and lots of recorded history, a lifetime, boxed up, hidden away, and preserved for what?  For this - to be opened like Aladdin's lamp, releasing memories and emotional genies.

    First, I found a snapshot I had never seen before, significant because it is the happiest and most at-ease image I have ever seen of my father and the most affectionate image of him and my mother.

If only they had known more moments like that.  If only once life had become easier for the two of them she hadn't died.

    Second, I found many, many photographic slides I took during my year overseas in 1965-66.  I had forgotten about them.  In fact, I've often wondered over the years why I have only a few photos from Vietnam and Okinawa and none from Japan.  I'm hoping they are well preserved after almost 60 years.

    Third, I found photos I snapped at our law office decades ago, photos of my colleagues.  Five of the photos I looked at were of friends who have already died.  First, David Branch, a good friend, died on March 19, 1999 at age 53, of amyloidosis.  Second, Bob Friebert, friend and mentor, died September 5, 2014, age 75, of heart attack following lung cancer.  Third, William S. Roush, died July 3, 2013, at age 59, of uncertain cause.  Fourth, William B. Guis died on November 25, 2019 at age 74, of cancer.  Fifth, Thomas W. St. John, law school classmate and long-term friend, died January 18, 2023, at age 77, of a heart attack.  The only colleague older than me and still surviving is John Finerty, with whom I have no contact, now 83 or so.  

    Fourth, wonderful, treasured photos of Sarah and Andy during childhood.  Words fail me.

    Fifth, a note my Dad sent Geri & me after he and his friend Art flew up to visit us in 2004 or 2005 prior to his moving in with us, driven in large measure by loneliness.  Also, a 2-page, 4-sided letter from 1967 from my Marine buddy Warrant Office Ron Kendall from somewhere in Iowa telling me that our mutual friend in DaNang, 'Catfish' (last name not remembered) had died in a training accident in the Navy's Blue Angels precision flying squadron.  One of my many regrets is that I never returned Ron's letter, one of several relationships in my life I shouldn't have let lapse.  1967 was not a good year for me.  I remember to this day Ron and me in Vietnam talking about the war and persuaded even its first year that it wouldn't end well and Ron's sharing with me some wisdom from his high school football coach: 'You might fool the spectators but you won't fool the players.'  The first page of Ron's letter is water-damaged and illegible.  Alas.

    Also, photos of Northwoods muskie fishing trips, golf outings with friends, and other photos, captured moments, captured memories.
    I made the mistake of thumbing through books I had packed away, books I had amply highlighted and check marked, including Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, Kathleen Norris' Amazing Grace, and C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity.  I'm tempted of course to reread at least those portions I have highlighted.  What was it about those passages that struck me as noteworthy so many years ago?

    I found a couple of old Dove Notes letters I composed and sent to supporters of The House of Peace back in 2002, around the time of several murders in the HOP neighborhood, including the vicious murder of Charlie Young by a mob of children on 9/29/02.  I wish I knew how to digitize those 2 letters.  If I could I would include them in this journal.

    Looking at all this 'stuff' packed away in these sealed boxes, some of it mildewed, some not, reminds me again that although my life seems to me to be very ordinary and un-noteworthy, it is nonetheless because of the times and circumstances in which I have lived a bit noteworthy, at least in what I have lived through and observed: growing up in the aftermath of WW II with a battle casualty of the war, growing up in the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church, living through the 1960s, Vietnam, the civil rights movement, 6 years at St. Francis of Assisi in the 1990s, three years at the House of Peace in the 2000s, Watergate to Reagan, Reagan to Newt Gingrich to the Tea Party to Trump wit Obama intervening.  Now in my 80s, I have lived out the apocryphal Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times and some of the evidence has been packed away in those boxes in the basement supplemented in part by my memoir and supplemented again in these journal/blog entries.

Katherine arrives today, the oldest of Jim and Nancy Aquavia's three children.  She and her husband Jordan are very close to Geri.  We visited them when Jordan was stationed at Ellsworth Air Force Base outside of Rapid City, SD.  Katherine was one of my students at MULS.  When Nancy Aquavia was at home in her final illness, Geri drove down to Tennessee to help Jim and Katherine and her brother Steve. After Nancy's death, Geri persuaded Jimmy (and Katherine and Steve) that moving to Mequon to be close to her might be a good idea, and of course, so it was.  Jimmy was a part of our lives for almost 4 years before moving to Alexandria to be closer to Katherine and Jordan.  The bond between Geri and Katherine and Jordan (and Steve and his wife Maggie) is strong, witnessed by Kaherine's taking precious vacation time to fly out here for a long weekend with her aunt.