9/26/23

 Tuesday, September 26, 2023

In bed by 10, up from brr at 4:40, shooting back pain.  Let Lilly out.  64°, high of 68°, cloudy day, Beach Hazard Alert, 3 to 6' waves and dangerous currents.  AQi=33, wind ESE at 10 mph, 10-14/24, 50% chance of rain, 0.25" in next 24 hours, DPs 61-63°.  Sunrise at 6:43 at 91° and sliding south.  Sunset at 6:42 at 269, 11+58.    

Dora Carrington, painting.  Most of my paintings of persons have the subjects looking like cartoon characters but I'm OK with that.  I've tried to draw cartoon characters and almost always fail, but I do enjoy my paintings even though they are flat and cartoonish.  The biggest favor I've done myself is to accept that I am not skilled or talented at either drawing or painting BUT that I do very much enjoy drawing and painting despite my lack of talent.  "Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly."  I was the same way at golf, so for the last years when I was still able to play, I just didn't keep score, not in it to compete or win anything, just to enjoy the activity, companionship, and surroundings.  Is it a mistake to be so cavalier about my abundant inabilities, to set so low a bar, or no bar, for myself?  Perhaps.  I was never tempted to take golf lessons from a pro or to take the activity seriously, worthy of spending a lot of money or of getting upset over a bad stroke or a bad round, or worthy of knowing how 'handicaps' are computed, that sort of thing.  On the other hand, I do wish I had been able to take art lessons, drawing and painting lessons.  I know I could draw better drawings and paint better paintings if had instruction from knowledgeable teachers.  I got into painting at age 24 back in Yuma, AZ, taking lessons with Anne and our friends John and Nancy Kroll from a lady who gave basic lessons in her home.   And then, perhaps 4 years ago, I took some lessons from a lady in Riverwest who gave lessons in her attic.  They were helpful and I enjoyed them but I had to climb outdoor stairs to get to the attic classroom and it became too much for me, especially in the winter.  So I forge on in my untutored ineptitude, thankful for the pleasure I get from this pastime and for the distraction it provides from my curmudgeonry.

    The older I get, the more aware I become of the wide ambit of my ineptitudes, not just in pastimes like drawing, painting, and golf, but in seemingly everything, including my major life callings.  I never quite 'fit in' in the Marine Corps, or at the university, or at the law firm, or even at the House of Peace, always a bit of a square plug not fitting the round hole I was in.  A VA counselor recently asked me a routine question on a list of questions they use to assess suicide risks,  'do you ever think of yourself as a failure'' or something like that.  It's one of those standard NIMH suicide assessment questions like 'Do you ever think of harming yourself or harming others?'  that the VA nurse asks at every semi-annual visit with my primary care doc.  (And my standard smart-ass answer tends to be 'If I were, I probably wouldn't tell you, would I?)  But on feeling like a failure question, I answered truthfully "Yes."  I had a 'regular' as opposed to a 'reserve' commission in the Marine Corps but I resigned it at my first opportunity.  I was hired onto the full-time MU law faculty on 3 separate occasions, but I also left voluntarily each time.  I never felt 'at home' in the law firm, never was entrepreneurial in developing a clientele, never comfortable about representing clients able to pay big legal fees to the exclusion of people like my own family, never comfortable with the built-in conflicts inherent in fee-for-service billing, etc.   And never fully 'at home' working for the Capuchins for various reasons.  I left all of those pursuits for various reasons.  I left my first marriage, though it almost killed me.  I resigned as president of the Milwaukee Ballet Foundation, where I regularly rubbed elbows with 'the swells.'  I've never devoted myself to making a ton of money or being 'a big deal' as we used to say.  I wonder about that now, was it a mistake, a series of mistakes, the way I lived my life.  Have I failed my children?  My family?  How could I have let so many enriching friendships wither?  How could I have been so oblivious of my mother before she died so young?  of my father for so long?  And not a day but something is recalled, my conscience or my vanity appalled.  The Last Judgment mirror, all-seeing, all-revealing.  Kyrie eleison.

LTMW at a gray, drizzly morning.  No moms or dads with strollers.  No neighbors walking their dogs.  No sun and no shadows.  Bird visits to our feeders are reduced too, mostly chickadees and nuthatches.  Looking through my bedroom window I see that all the leaves on one branch of the bottle-brush buckeye shrub have turned yellow and dissicated.  No walkers, joggers, or cyclists.  A day for naps & reading.  On the other hand, a flock of close to 20 wild turkeys is spending a lot of time in my front yard.  Love'em.

Lizzie the Intrepid missed a landing at gymnastics yesterday and broke her ankle.😩  She really is intrepid, an adventurer and a trooper.  Gymnastics, volleyball, stagecraft, art - our Renaissance granddaughter.  She'll be wearing a boot for a while.

..

Another book by a Trumpkin.  On July 22, 2022, I posted on Facebook the following:

Donald Trump is a bad man. He was a bad man on January 6, 2021. He was a bad man on January 20, 2017, when he was inaugurated and on November 8, 2016 when he was elected. He was a bad man on June 15, 2015 when he magisterially rode down the escalator to announce his candidacy and to denounce Mexicans as criminals and rapists, though "some, I assume, are good people." Trump's personal wickedness, dishonesty, and perfidy have been open and notorious throughout his adult life. I am mindful of that every time I watch the Republican witnesses called by the January 6th Committee. They are all Trump enablers. Pat Cipollone, his White House counselor, is the most flagrant, successfully fending off Trump's first impeachment in 2019-2020, enabling Trump to stay in power, to run for reelection, and to put all of us through the wringer of the 2020 election and its aftermath, especially January 6th. That said, while I acknowledge the testimonies of Cipollone, Pottinger, Matthews, Hutchinson, and the other Trump administration officials, I never lose sight of the fact that they were all voluntary Trump enablers. Ditto the 'Christian first, conservative second, republican third' Mike Pence.  Each hitched his or her wagon to the evil star of a bad man, a very bad man. Forgive me if I don't applaud them.

I am reminded of this as I see the brouhaha over Cassidy Hutchinson's new book. She was a featured guest on CBS Sunday Morning yesterday and will appear on Rachel Maddow's show tonight and Lawrence O'Donnell's show tomorrow.  She follows in the tradition of former Trump enablers, most notably Michael Cohen, but also Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, John Bolton, Kayleigh McEnany, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Jarad Kushner, Mike Pompeo, Peter Navarro, Bill Barr, Omarosa Manigault Newman, Kellyanne Conway, Stephanie Grisham, Sean Spicer, Mark Meadows and a few others who chose to assist Donald J. Trump in his perfidious occupancy of the Oval Office and then benefited from book contracts and the royalties they generated.  Lest we forget.

 

9/25/23

aakeTjos Monday, September 25, 2023

3 months till Christmas madness😩

In bed by 10:30, after S2 E15 of This is Us, awake at 4:52 and up at 5:09, with nasty back pain.  65°, mostly cloudy, high of 70°, 40% chance of rain 0.1", AQI=40, wind SE at 10 mph,  6-13/22, DPs 59-62.  Sunrise at 6:42 at 90°E, sunset at6:44 at 269°W, 12+1.

The view as I return to the house after putting the garbage cart out for Monday's pickup.  Look at that moon - incredibly bright and blue, looking like a cold sun illuminating the sky arund it.  Perversely, it reminded me of a 1957 song by Teresa Brewer 'Dark Moon'.  She was a huge pop music star in the 1950s, very pretty, very perky, and I had a tremendous crush on her.  She had many big hit records, including Music, Music, Music (Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon), Richochet Romance, Till I Waltz Again With You, and Let Me Go, Lover.  I knew the words to all of them and remember many of them still.  Funny what an old guy thinks about coming bacf from taking out the garbage.

Dora Carrington. with easel, canvas, and palette.  I came across a photograph of Carrington, as she preferred to be called, serendipitously while doing some random reading about the Bloomsbury Group.   I thought she was gorgeous especially with that magnificent bobbed hair and especially as she was engaged in the act of plein air painting in her smeared smock so I'm going to see if I can do anything pleasing on my own canvas from this photo. (Quite a run-on compound-complex sentence😨) It may have too many elements for me to be able to pull it off but I'll try.  I looked her up on Wikipedia and was surprised to read that she was not considered beautiful by her contemporaries.  She was 'queer' and in an 'open marriage' with her husband, but the one true love of her life, a platonic relationship of soulmates, was Lytton Strachey, the gay Bloomsbury member famous for writing Famous Victorians.  Strachey died of stomach cancer in 1932 and Carrington committed suiciede by gunshot a couple months later at age 39.  She didn't sign or date her paintings.  She didn't paint them to sell to others, but rather to please herself.

Rough sketch with blue chalk, working off center point grid

Phase 2

Being There is the title of David French's op-ed essay in this morning's NYT.  French is not the kind of writer or thinker I tend to gravitate toward.  He is a conservative Christian in the evangelical Church of Christ, which believes in the Bible as the guide to proper living and baptism as necessary for salvation.  He graduated from and teaches at Lipscomb University in Nashville, a 'Christ-centered', Church of Christ institution.  He also graduated from Harvard Law School, cum laude, is a respected lawyer, and has served as senior counsel for conservative Christian legal advocacy groups supported by the likes of Amy Coney Barrett, Mike Pence, Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions, and Josh Hawley.  He is a very bright guy and a serious thinker, which is how he became a regular columnist at the NYT. 

     His piece in this morning's edition is about friendship and loneliness.  He wrote:

Last week I read a poignant piece arguing that the male loneliness epidemic was afflicting a surprising group: American fathers. In one sense, these were men who were surrounded by love. They were typically married. They had children. Yet they still felt alone. They struggled to make friends.

The longer we march through these anxious, sad and divided times, the more I’m convinced that the bigger story, the story behind the story of our bitter divisions and furious conflicts, is our loss of belonging, our escalating loneliness. And one of the markers is the extraordinary decline of friendship.

According to an American Perspectives Survey, between 1990 and 2021, the percentage of Americans reporting that they had no close friends at all quadrupled. For men, the number had risen to 15 percent. Almost half of all Americans surveyed reported having three close friends or fewer.

His essay strikes home with me.  In my senectitude I find myself often regretting the friendships that I let lapse.  Larry Stack, Ara Cherchian, Vicki Conte, Troy Major, my nun friend at St. Francis who helped me care for Roland Wright and whose name I can't even recall, Bob Hillary, Ron Kendall, Andy Furlong, nd others.  All of them were people who had enriched my life, made my life better,   I admired all of them and shared affection and appreciation with them but I let our relatinships get away for various reasons but mostly because of my own tendency toward withdrawal, or my 'aloofness' as Ed Felsenthal and Cam Wakeman informed me.  And now in old age I have regret.  I looked up synonums for "regret' and found remorse, guilt, shame, sorrow, sadness, self-reproach, and other dire words, all of which accurately reflect my feelings about how foolishly I let friendships slip away.  Those thoughts and feelings haunt me in my vulnerable, crepuscular times, before falling asleep and in the half-awake, half-dreaming waking hours.  French quotes C. S. Lewis: 

 “Friendship is unnecessary,” he wrote, “like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

Amen. 

The Navy Bean Soup I made on Saturday has turned out to be not as bad as I feared.  It has thickened up after two days in the garage refrigerator and tastes like real navy bean soup cooked with a generous ham bone.  I let the beans get overcooked and mushy but the taste is good and I'm enjoying it as a brunch today.

Nasty sharp shooting pain day, lower and mid-back.

9/24/23

 Sunday, September 24, 2023

In bed by 10:39 up at 5:48, Lilly sleeping on the floor of my bedroom again.  62°, high of 68°, partly cloudy, Beach Hazard Alert, waves 3 to 5', currents.  AQI=46. wind SW at 12 mph, 5-13/22.  Sunrise at 6:40, sunset at 6:45, 12+4.

Daybreak is beautiful this morning, with big puffy clouds hanging over Lake Michigan and the shoreline, the open skies around them the palest cerulean blue imaginable, almost white, and the clouds a blue-gray.  Autumn is clearly upon us; the front yards are full of fallen ash tree leaves, probably partly due to the diminishing daylight but also to the long drought.  Normally I expect the honey locust leaves to drop first.

I had quite a cleanup job this morning, because of last night's dinner of BBQ ribs and scalloped potatoes and because of my disappointing soup-making.  And because we ate after Geri's walk at Virmond Park with Shirley and Tom Mara and got engrossed in This is Us, leaving the kitchen mess unattended.  I had the dishwasher loaded and running by 8.

Cassandra Sanders, the prophet at an oasis  Bernie Sanders spoke at a public gathering at the UW-Madison Memorial Union yesterday, promoting his new book "It's OK to be Angry About Capitalism" written with co-author John Nichols, an editor of The Capitol Times and Madison resident.  "Hundreds of Sanders admirers packed the University of Wisconsin Memorial Union's Shannon Hall to hear the democratic socialist critique corporate concentration in "sector after sector" including Wall Street and in the media, and declare that "in many ways our nation is becoming an oligarchic form of society . . . The people who own America, the ruling class in this country, they are not nice guys," Sanders said."  Sanders and I were born about two weeks apart in 1941 but he's in a lot better shape than I am.  I was one of his supporters in the 2016 Wisconsin Democratic primary in which he beat Hillary Clinton.  I still wonder whether he could have defeated Donald Trump in the general election that year, or at least garnered more of the popular vote than Clinton did.  The DNC under the leadership of Debbie Wasserman Schultz did its best to ensure that Clinton would win the nomination cementing my belief that the Dems are only the lesser of two evils.  Last night Sanders  declared "One of the weaknesses of the Democratic Party has been not only that they have not done enough for the working class of this country, is they refuse to acknowledge the reality and the pain that tens of millions of people are living through right now."  Hear, hear.

Virgin sturgeon.   In the summer of 1961, I spent 3 weeks at the naval amphibious base at Little Creek, Virginia, the East Coast headquarters of 'the 'gator Navy.'  The officers' club there was kind of famous for its songbook and for the singing that occurred. regularly there.  One of the popular songs, a juvenile sex song, was "The Virgin Sturgeon" sung to the tune of "Reuben, Reuben."  When I retired and we moved to rural Saukville, I did a lot of volunteer work, helping with 'hippotherapy' for disabled kids in Darien, Wisconsin, and then in northern Ozaukee County and also at the Riveredge Nature Center outside Newburgh, WI.  One of my volunteer activities at Riveredge was helping to raise lake sturgeon as part of a project to restore a wild, self-sustaining lake sturgeon population in the Milwaukee River.  For two or three years starting in 2006 (I can't remember how many now) I drove once a week to a spot in the maple forest, Riveredge's sugar bush, near the Milwaukee River to a trailer with water tanks loaded with hundreds of baby sturgeon at different stages of development.  In teams of three, we carefully cleaned the tanks, checked the pumps, measured and recorded critical values of the water in the tanks, and fed the 'youngsters' a carefully controlled diet.  The whole process was carefully controlled and we volunteers, almost all retirees, were trained and supervised, our main supervisor being a terrific Riveredge staffer, Mary Hollenbeck, shown in the center of the photo following this recollection.  In the autumn, the young sturgeon were mature enough to be released into Lake Michigan with the hope that they would eventually return to the Milwaukee River to spawn.  This year's release will be tomorrow, a big event and celebration.  I had to stop this volunteer work when chronic pelvic and bladder pain problems became so disabling I couldn't manage the weekly trip to the trailer.  A big loss in my life.  This morning's JSOnline has two feature stories about the Riveredge Sturgeon Project.  It's great that the project is ongoing and successful.

Mary Hollenbeck, still working with dedicated volunteers.

An elaborate system of pumps, pipes, storage tanks, and filters deliver Milwaukee River water to the growing sturgeons in order to imprint the water characteristics on them so they will return to spawn.

9/23/23

 Saturday, September 23, 2023

In bed by 10, up at 5:30 with Lilly sleeping on the floor near me, let her out into the warm 66° morning, high of 70° today, cloudy/partly cloudy day, AQI=47, Wind SE at 9 mph, 5-14/26. DPa 58-62.  Sunrise at 6:39 at 89°,  sunset at 6:47 at 270°, 12+7.

Daybreak, 6:47 a;m.

The autumnal equinox occurred at 1:50 a.m. CDT when the Earth's axis was perpendicular to a line between the center of the Earth and the center of the Sun when the Sun's rays shone directly on the Equator as the Earth's axis tilted the Northern hemisphere away from the Sun and the Southern hemisphere toward the Sun.

    It's a breezy morning and 'falling leaves drift by my window, autumn leaves of red and gold, . . .'  It's 8:30 before I see the first chickadee arrive at the feeders.  Soon they arrive in numbers.  Then a male house finch savoring safflower seeds.  A young mother in white short shorts and a black sweater walks her dog and pushes her youngster in a stroller from Wakefield Court onto County Line Road reminding me of a subtly erotic poem by William Carlos Williams, The Young Housewife:

At ten AM the young housewife

moves about in negligee behind

the wooden walls of her husband’s house.

I pass solitary in my car.

Then again she comes to the curb

to call the ice-man, fish-man, and stands

shy, uncorseted, tucking in

stray ends of hair, and I compare her

to a fallen leaf.

The noiseless wheels of my car

rush with a crackling sound over

dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling. 

South Beach, Port Washington, yesterday, 3 adults, 2 juveniles, northernmost sighting, probably due to Hurrican Idalia

The Patriot is a very long feature piece appearing in The Atlantic online and scheduled to appear in the November 2023 print edition.  It is about Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who will retire and be replaced on September 30.  The story details the contentious relationship between Milley and Donald Trump.  I have quite a bit of confidence in senior military officers, 3 and 4-star 'flag officers' as generals and admirals are called.  I specifically have confidence in the judgment and courage of Mark Milley and I am thankful for his efforts, often successful, to dissuade Donald Trump from following through on a number of his worst impulses and for his persistent successful effort to remind his subordinate military officers that the military would have no role in assisting a Trump-led civilian coup.  I noted that his father, like mine, was a participant in the assault on Iwo Jima and that his father, like mine, endured PTSD from his wartime experiences.  I appreciate Milley's unsuccessful efforts at dissuading Trump from reversing military justice decisions punishing our troops, including the notorious SEAL Eddie Gallagher, for war crimes, the military considering the soldiers and SEALS criminals, Trump calling them 'patriots' and 'heroes.'  On the other hand, I have reservations about Milley's thoughts on the American imperial hegemon, revealed in this excerpt:

“World War II ended with the establishment of the rules-based international order. People often ridicule it—they call it ‘globalism’ and so on—but in fact, in my view, World War II was fought in order to establish a better peace,” Milley told me. “We the Americans are the primary authors of the basic rules of the road—and these rules are under stress, and they’re fraying at the edges.  That's why Ukraine is so important. 

Here's what your military’s doing: There are 5,000 sorties a day, including combat patrols protecting the U.S.A. and our interests around the world. At least 60 to 100 Navy warships are patrolling the seven seas, keeping the world free for ocean transport. We have 250,000 troops overseas, in 140 countries, defending the rules-based international order. We’ve got kids training constantly. This military is trained, well equipped, well led, and focused on readiness. Our readiness statuses are at the highest levels they’ve been in 20 years. So this idea of a woke military is total, utter, made-up bullshit.

What is meant by the 'rules-based international order'?  Basically, an international order that protects international business interests which, at the end of World War II meant, for the most part, powerful and extensive American corporate business interests.  The other countries of the world were decimated by World War II; only America got stronger economically and militarily more dominant.  When Milley refers to "combat patrols protecting the U.S.A. and our interests around the world," he is talking about American, corporate, international business and finance interests.  That's why we have 250,000 troops overseas in 140 countries, not to protect the locals from 'bad guys,' but to protect the financial interests of our corporate capitalists who need or want what is located in those 140 countries.   Decades ago while eating lunch in our law firm lunchroom, I mentioned to my co-workers that America is inherently the biggest threat to world peace because we are more reliant on overseas nations for imported raw materials for our manufacturers and for markets for their exported goods and services.  The reaction was general disagreement and disbelief, indeed shock that I would voice such thoughts.   Perhaps it is noteworthy that I was the only military veteran in the room and the only Vietnam veteran, or maybe not.  In any event, those money interests are what America's vast, lethal, military machinery is created and maintained to protect, not "freedom" or "democracy" or 'the American people' generally.  That was the entire point of Marine General Smedley D. Butler's War is a Racket, published in 1935.  So it was then, so it is now, and so it will ever be in a "rules-based international system" run by global capitalists.  We need to remember the Golden Rule that he who has the gold makes the rules and ultimately only to benefit himself.

"My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." Grover Norquist, 2001;  Our goal "is the deconstruction of the administrative State" Steve Bannon, 2017; “This is a whole new concept of individuals that just want to burn the whole place down,” Kevin McCarthy, 2023.   Chickens come home to roost.

Making Navy Bean Soup this afternoon.  Ingredients a bag of inexpensive dried navy beans, a stalk of celery, a couple of small carrots, an onion, a can of petite diced tomatoes, and a ham bone that cost more than $13.  Outrageous! but I'm lucky that I can get one even though I have to go to Wauwatosa to get it.  

5:00 p.m.   A disappointment.  Some time ago I got to thinking of all my painting endeavors and my bread baking and soup making endeavers as 'experiments' which either work out or not.  Today's soup has not worked out, way too thin, 'soupy', lacking texture and character.  I used the immersion blender to try to thicken it a bit but the navy beans were so soft already that they pretty much disappeared.  The ham is good and though the soup has basically turned into a ham soup in a bean broth, the broth isn't terrible and I will probably eat/drink all of it.  I'm wondering what recipe I have used in past 'experiments' that all turned out well.  Drat.

This is Us.  I have watched 22 or 23 episodes of this program and obviously like it enough to watch that much.  I'm into Series 2 and am thinking that the stories and dialogue may be getting a bit hokey.  The story of the Pearson family, the parents and grandparents, the 3 siblings, their partners and their adventures is interesting and I'm sure I'll keep watching it for awhile though I am having the same feeling I had with AppleTV's Morning Show with Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon; the first series was terrific but the second (and now the thired) couldn't maintain the same quality.  We'll see.  I do find the issues that are addresed in the series interesting, including drug addiction and alcoholism, bad relations between sons and fathers [Jack and his dad] and daughters and mothers [Rebecca and her mom], reestablished relationships within a family, especially Randall and his father William, racism, our sense of identity, especially Kevin's when he stopped being a football hero. Kate's as a "fatty," Randall as an child left on a fire station's doorstep, women's sacrifices to raise children, Rebecca's wise to be a singer, etc.  A lot of the issues addressed remind me of myself and my own family(ies) which is perhaps why I have stayed with the show this long and expect to stay longer.

I am disappointed that the Randall character who was so capable and self-assured throughout the 1st series has turned into someone less admirable in the 2nd.  Ditto for Jack and for Kevin.  The characters that I like the most are Rebecca and Kate and Randall.  I can't get into Kevin.  We have been introduced to Deja and her incarcerated mother and I suspect we will see more of them in future episodes.  In any case, all of the prinicipalecharacters are three dimensional and well-developed by the writers.   The 'identity issues' have made me wonder about how I think and have thought of my own identity; how I think of myself, see myself.  In my old age I know that I often think of myself pretty negatively, pretty much the character that Yeats wrote about in Vacillation, 'thing said or done long years ago, or not done or said, weigh me down and not aday but something is recalled, my conscience or my vanity appalled. (I wonder how close I just got to Yeats' original.}  

9/22/23

 Friday, September 22, 2023

In bed by 10, up from brr at 4:55.  Lilly sleeping in front of brr.  63°, high of  72°, cloudy day ahead, AQI=40, wind ESE at 6 mph, 2-9/15, Sunrise at 6:38 at 89°E, sunset at 6:49 at 271°W, 12+10.

The Legacy of John Calvin. I don't know how I got into Calvinism yesterday but it had something to do with cynicism and Calvin's notion of 'the utter depravity of man' since Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden.  In any case, I watched a speech on YouTube by Steven Lawson, a True Believer, a very earnest and energetic evangelical, on The Legacy of John Calvin.    I wasn't surprised that he started with Calvin's theological and eclesiological contributions, but I was a bit surprised that he followed up with Calvin's contributions to Free Market capitalism, limited republican government, checks & balances within government,  the Protestant Work Ethic, increased economic productivity & general prosperity.  He sounded like a traditional, old-school Republican politico.  I was a little surprised that he spoke so disparagingly of the Roman Catholic Church in Calvin's era, but of course, I shouldn't have been since it was precisely the corrupt practices of the Church that Luther and, more prominently Calvin, Knox, et al. were dedicated to reforming.  I guess what surprised me was his association of Calvinism with Capitalism and human progress and Catholicism with economic, social, and political stagnation with an unspoken suggestion that the same situation obtained throughout history, i.e., that the Protestant countries brought energy and progress to the world while the Catholic countries lagged behind.  It was eye-opening for me to see the clear connection between today's Evangelicals and right-wing politics., even as corrupted by Trump.  He clearly preached that conservative political, social, and economic policies were favored by God Himself (or Ω ), that they reflected God's Will and comported with the Sovereignty of God.  Hence the political zealousness of the Calvinist Evangelicals and their belief in the need to squash Liberalism as the work of the Devil.  He most probably considers me and Lefties like me as tools of the Devil.  This is not good.  On the other hand, I consider him and his fellow True Believers to be delusional and profoundly dangerous to the people of the United States, my children and grandchildren, and indeed to the whole world,  Is this good?   Is it accurate?

BTW, who is Steven Lawson?  "Dr. Lawson has served as a pastor for over 40 years in Arkansas and Alabama and is currently the lead preacher at Trinity Bible Church of Dallas.  Dr. Lawson is a graduate of Texas Tech University (BBA), Dallas Theological Seminary (ThM), and Reformed Theological Seminary (DMin)."

And BTW(2), prominent rightwing politicians seem to be right at home with Calvin's ideas about the Sovereignty of God.  Marjorie Taylor Greene wants the Republican Party to rename itself the Christian Nationalist Party.  Lauen Boebert (of Beetlejuice infamy) favors repealing the "no establishment of religion" clause of the First Amendment and says 'the church is supposed to direct the government' and that she's "tired of this separation of church and state junk."  Chip Roy, a leader of the House Freedom Caucus, says his religious faith informs his political positions, including his opposition to the Equality Act, which he has characterized as trying to prevent his family from being able to "carry out our beliefs without penalty." Roy is a member of Hyde Park Baptist Church in Austin; the church is part of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention.  Louie Gohmert is also a deacon in the Southern Baptist church.

I am reminded that Marilynne Robinson who wrote Gilead and Homecoming, both of which I enjoyed reading, and Jack, which I did not enjoy, is a big fan of John Calvin.  Robinson was raised as a Presbyterian, thus a Calvinist through John Knox.  In Iowa City, where she lives, she belongs to the Congregational church which is also Calvinist in its beliefs, descended from the Puritans, Separatists, and other non-conforming dissenters from the Church of England.  In an interview with the Church Times in 2012, Robinson said: "I think if people actually read Calvin, rather than read Max Weber, he would be rebranded. He is a very respectable thinker."  Probably no one would take issue with Calvin's respectability as a thinker nor with his amazing productivity as a revolutionary writer, especially in his Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536) which he wrote at age 25 and 26.

On the other hand, his thinking and his writing are both grounded on his belief in the Christian God and on the Bible as the sole authority, sola scriptura, the only rule for faith and practice.  If one doesn't believe in the Christian God, if one doesn't believe in the Bible as believers do, the magnificent edifice that Calvin built on the foundations of those beliefs crumbles.  And so it is for nonbelievers and for many non-Calvinist Christians.  Thus it is hard for me to understand Robinson's devotion to Calvin except by noting that, as she is a Congregationalist, an heir of the Puritans, she presumably shares their belief in the Christian God and in the Bible.  

In case there is any doubt about the 'total depravity of Man" this morning's WaPo tells us that the Chinese are harvesting DNA and genetic information from around the globe.  "Beijing’s drive to sweep up DNA from across the planet has occasionally stirred controversy, particularly after a 2021 Reuters series about aspects of the project. Chinese academics and military scientists have also attracted attention by debating the feasibility of creating biological weapons that might someday target populations based on their genes. Genetic-based weapons are regarded by experts as a distant prospect, at best, and some of the discussion appears to have been prompted by official paranoia about whether the United States and other countries are exploring such weapons."

America's dystopia.  Pres. Biden had a big Rose Garden gathering to announce the creation of a NEW White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention to be overseen by Vice President Kamala Harris.  This comes in a year when the nation has already seen 506 mass shootings and more than 31,000 Americans killed by gun violence.  If you can't 'solve' a crisis by appointing a commission or a committee, create a new 'office' charged with solving the crisis.  What a sick joke.

Annual maintenance visit for the Volvo.  Total cost over $400.  If I got a new Volvo sticker attached to the grill - another $122.00.  I declined and bought a ham bone for $13 (also outrageous!)  at the Honey Baked Ham store in Wauwatosa instead on the way home.  Hard to believe food costs today.

9/21/23

 An  Thursday, September 21, 2023

In bed by 10, awake on the brr at 5, up from bed at 5:15, unable to sleep, thinking thoughts of eulogies, TSJ's, Jessie's partner, Roland, RJA, Dad.  Let Lilly out at 5:45.  60°, high of 73°, cloudy all day, AQI=65(PM), wind NE at 2 mph, 1-6/10, DPs 59-63.  Sunrise at 6:37, sunset at 6:51,  12+13.  

Atheism/Calvinism?  I got to wondering this morning whether I am a bit of a Calvinist, at least with respect to one of his core beliefs, i.e., the utter depravity of mankind,  and perhaps to other of his beliefs, like predestination,  Calvin taught that we are unavoidably enslaved to Sin, fated to prefer our own selfish interests rather than to adhere to the will of God.  I have thought for a long time that instead of teaching the views of Thomas Aquinas in the Philosophy of Man course that was required at Marquette in the late 50s and early 60s, they should have taught H. L. Mencken, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Thomas Hobbes, and St. Augustine and John Calvin who wrote that human nature is corrupt and radically sinful and has been since the Fall of Adam & Eve, i.e., Original Sin.  These thinkers and writers didn't mess around with notions of human beings having been created "in the image of God."  Doesn't all of human history tell us that our species is predatory, exploiting, and self-seeking?  That we do good when it is in our interest to do so.  It's the stuff of Niebuhr's An Interpretation of Christian Ethics with its acknowledgement that the ethical life as taught by Jesus is literally impossible for men to follow, and his thoughts in Moral Man and Immoral Society.  In Leviathan, Hobbes wrote: "Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, . . . the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."  Twain put it more pithily: "The more I know about men, the more I like dogs." St. Augustine and John Calvin don't seem to fit easily in a grouping with Mencken, Twain, Bierce, and Hobbes, but they all seemed to share the same jaundiced view of human nature.

And I'm also a getting a bit partial to Calvin's notion of predestination, the total Sovereignty of God, and the myth of 'free will', personal responsibilitiy for our own destinies, the 'meritocracy.'  If God is ever-present, omniscient, and all-powerful, He/She/It/They (let's just say Ω) willed the shitstorm we know as human history including wars, crimes, disease, suffering, disasters, etc.   Calvin's preaching on 'Unconditional Election' asserts that God has chosen from eternity those whom he will bring to himself, i.e., be 'saved,'  not based on foreseen virtue, merit, or faith in those people; rather, his choice is unconditionally grounded in his mercy alone. God has chosen from eternity to extend mercy to those he has chosen and to withhold mercy from those not chosen.  In Ken Kesey's lingo, you're either on the bus or off the bus and you have nothing to do it; it's all up to Ω.  Or as William Blake put it Every Night & every Morn  / Some to Misery are Born  / Every Morn and every Night  / Some are Born to sweet delight  / Some are Born to sweet delight  / Some are Born to Endless Night.  The lottery of birth.  A few are big winners, most are losers.  Or as the Anglican hymn, 'All Things Bright and Beautiful' put it (in verses rarely sung anymore):  All things bright and beautiful, / All creatures great and small, / All things wise and wonderful, / The Lord God made them all./ The rich man in his castle, / The poor man at his gate, / God made them, high or lowly, / And ordered their estate.  Flip Wilson's Geraldine character used to say 'The Devil made me do it!'; she should have said, 'Ω made me do it!'

I recall sitting in Tom and Sue Clark's kitchen one day discussing Ω and saying I just couldn't buy the description of Ω that I was forcefed in my many years of Catholic education/indoctrination - the All Good, All Powerful, All Knowing, All Loving Father stuff.  The party line never changed from grammar school through college, but it seemed to me that a pretty good case could be made that Ω is a mean prick, not a loving Father.  Rather than blaming Ω for all the human suffering Ω created, I opted to stop believing in Ω and rid myself of the anger I would otherwise feel.  Of course I understand that on that point, John Calvin and I part ways.  It's the classic problem of theodicy and I can't buy any of the proffered explanations from the theologians.  Maybe it's one of those many conumdrums the nuns and brothers and priests disposed of with the always available answer: "It's a Mystery."  You don't have to understand it, just accept it and believe it, like the bodily Assumption of the BVM into Heaven, the Trinity, and Transubstantiation.  Pray, pay, and obey!  Or, ss Pope Pius X wrote in his 1906 encyclical  Vehementer Nos:

It follows that the church is by essence an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful.  So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end  of the society and directing all its members toward that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the pastors.

No thanks, Pius.  Baaa basss.

Cognitive decline, memory, confusion.  Yesterday, I went to the VA without a half dozen Trulicity injection pens to be deposited in the 'Sharps disposal' container at the hospitalls entry.  I also couldn't remember if I had taken a HCT pill in the morning.. Today I forgot to inject myself with Trulicity after breakfst, as I have done for years on Thursdays, or has it changed to Wednesdays?  This afternoon I wondered whether I had indeed injected myself, hoping that the number of pens in the Trrulicty container would provide me with a reliable clue since I was loathe to miss a week's dosage and more loathe to double on a weeklu dosage in one day.  And I couldn't remember whether I had applied the Ketoconozole cream this morning.   I am experiencing more and more of these short term memory and confusion problems, aw well as some other problems with 'executive function,' especially doing processes in the proper order.  Worrisome.

Another CPP day. 'nuf said.

Disappointing trip to Blick.    I went looking for 2 36 inch canvas stretches or, failing that, a pre-stretched  28 X 25 inch canvas.   Struch out on both, but picked up a few liner brushes.

This is Us.  We've been watching this long, long series on Hulu.

9/20/23

 Wednesday, September 20, 2023

In bed at 9"40, up at 6:30, 60°, high of 74°, cloudy day, AQI=31, wind S at 11 mph, 5-12/20. 0.15" of rain in last 24 hours,  Sunrise at 6:36 at 88°, sunset at 6:;53 °, 12+16.

LTMW a little after 6:30, I see good neighbor John McGregor out walking Dorothy.  The lawn service folks are here shortly after 7 and the chickadees arrive for some breakfast about the same time.  I need to fill the sunflower/safflower tube.

2 VA appointments this morning and wondering why I made them.  . . .  Then at about 7:15, the PT nurse called to say the therapist is home sick today and rescheduled me to the 29th on 1 p.m.  

Casting Blossoms to the Sky is a 2 and 40 minutes 2012 film  written, directed, and edited by Nobuhiko Obayashi which I've been watching on OVID.     Obayahsi was born in Onomichi in Hiroshima province in 1938 and survived his childhood during the war.  Onomichi is 83 miles from Iwakuni where I was briefly stationed 20 years after the war, before I flew to Vietnam on w C130 Hercules cargo plane.  The story is set in Nagaoka, a city on Honshu that was reduced to ash and rubble by a raid by 125 B-29s dropping 163,00 incendiary cluster bombs weighing 925 tons in a raid on August 1, 1945 lasting an hour and forty minute, killing 1,486 residents including 280 school age children.  The Americans suffered no casualities.  Since 2003, a fireworks display is held every August 1st at 10:30 p.m. to commemorate the bombing.  One of the minor characters in the film is an 87 year old woman who survived the firebombing and says:  "The fireworks remind me of the bombs,  That's why I cant enjoy them from the bottom of my heart.  War terrorizes so many more people than the ones who die on the battlefields or in air raids."   I was struck by her statement not because I ever endured anything like what the victims of the firebombing suffered, but because I have a similar dislike for firework displays, knowing they simulate exploding weapons of death; they remind me of Hell Night at Quantico's Officers' Basic School.  Later in the film, this character says 'fireworks are light and sound, just like war.'  In any event, by the end of the film the fireworks come to have a deep emotional and spiritual significance to the people of Nagaoka, representing 'the souls of the faithful dearly departed' as we used to pray in Catholic services.

The lead character in the film is the reporter Reiko Endo, a young woman born in Nagasaki.  At the end of the film she says to her friend, the local taxi driver "There are so many things we have to do over.  I'm returning to Nagasaki.  And I've decided to become a mother.  I feel brave.  Of course, my baby will need a father first.  But first, I'll go to the disaster areas of east Japan.  Nanaoka, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Bikini Atoll and Fukushima.  The connection between Japan's towns and me . . . the U.S., the world, yesterday, today, and tomorrow . . . I want to think about everything that connects into my life.   Mr. Akiyoshi Muraoka, be friendly to others."  The end of the film is beautifully filmed and profoundly hopeful, hopeful of a world without war and without nuclear weapons, a world with peaceful relations between the two former bitter enemies, the U.S. and Japan, and throughout the world.  

A striking image that Obayashi employs throughout the film is that of sailor-suited schoolgirls and others on unicycles darting about the city's residents, especially one such girl who looks into the camera after various survivors of the bombing describe various horrors and says "I know him (or her or them)"  Was she meant to represent the dead child, Hana, of the 87 year old woman whose daughter died on her back in the river, or did she symbolize the youth of the world, or what?  And what was with the unicylcles all over?  I'm not astute enough to catch on to symbols like this.  As I watched the film, I thought to myself that I should re-watch it to see if it becomes clearer to me on a second viewing, but at almost 3 hours long, I suppose it's unlikely that I will.

One thing that was very clear to me, however, was the horror and terror of Curtis LeMay's and Harry Truman's firebombing of Japanese cities even on virtually the eve of dropping the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, knowing that the Japanese would surely surrender after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Could the purpose of firebombing Nagaoka on August 1, 1945 been anything other than vengeance on the Japanese civilians who were killed?  We oughtn't to forget that Curtis LeMay remarked that if the U.S. were to lose the war against Japan, he and others would be tried for war crimes for the deliberate targeting of Japanese civilian targets.  It's something to think about as we all nod our heads in agreement that Putin and his myrmidons should be tried for their targeting civilian targets in Ukraine.  From Chapter XIX of my memoir:

I found this letter from Winston Churchill ["It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be revised."]  while doing some research on strategic bombing.  It is notable for its bald acknowledgment that a prime purpose of strategic bombing of cities was “increasing the terror, though under other pretexts” and for its reluctant abjuring of “mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.”  The German military of course were past masters of Schrecklichkeit or terrorism at least from the inception of World War I and its invasion of Belgium, the bombardment of historic Louvain and torching of its priceless university library.  However, it did not take long for the British and Americans to get into their own brand of in terrorem tactics on civilians, especially the firebombing of cities in Europe and Japan, including the precious medieval city of Dresden which Churchill mentions as a “query against the conduct of Allied bombing.”  The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki represented the pinnacle of terror bombing.  

A survivor of the death and destruction visited on Japan by the United States after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, Obayashi was a pacifist, a critic of militarism in Japan and elsewhere.  In one scene, the old lady who hates fireworks is seen hiding in a crude bomb shelter with her father on the night of the firebombing.  He urges her to look up at the B-29s and the falling napalm bombs and says "See what human beings are capable of."  Not just Americans, but 'human beings,' as observed by Solzhinitzen and his comment about the line between good and evil running through every human heart.  Another character says to her daughter "War takes away people's dreams."  Obayashi refers to Japan's conscription of Korean women as "comfort women" for Japanese soldiers with a character saying "In war, people both cause and incur harm."

Re: Nagasaki, one survivor who speaks in the film is a Japanese Catholic priest from the Catholic community in Nagasaki, one of long-standing.  The "Fat Man" plutonium bomb did most of its damage on that Catholic community. killing 8,500 of Nagasaki's 12,000 Catholics.  Ground zero was almost a direct hit on the Catholic cathedral, significantly north of the city's commercial center and the Mitsubishi shipyard which would be the 'natural targets,' leading some to argue that the attack was intended to destroy Japan's largest Catholic community, where 95 % of the country's Catholics lived.