10/14/23

 Saturday, October 14, 2-23

In bed by 9:30. up at 6:20.  51°, high of 55°, AQI=23, wind NE at 22 mph, 16-24/35,  2" of rain in last 24 hours, 0.5" expected in next 24.  Sunrise at 7:04 at 100°ESE, sunset at 6:10 at 259°WSW, 11+6.

Long discussion with Sarah this morning about Israel, the Palestinians, the history of the founding of the state of Israel, Leon Uris' The Haj and Exodus, the role and effects of religion in life and society.  It made me want to read The Haj.  My daughter is brilliant!  She's such a blessing, so brillian, so talented.

"When you reach 80, you're playing with house money."   That's a quote from an article in this morning's WaPo: 

I’ve noticed some balance issues. And I’ve fallen hard twice recently — once on the steep front steps of the brownstone where Janice’s son, daughter-in-law and grandson live in Brooklyn. And once onto the flagstone terrace in our small back garden. I sustained serious bruises both times. Fortunately, I didn’t hit my head, although I easily could have. . . .

I take more than a dozen pills each day during breakfast and dinner — among them vitamins and prescriptions for blood pressure and my prostate. I now need to take them with applesauce, so that I can swallow them more easily.

Walking in Battery Kemble Park this morning, I realized that I could not call up its name in my mind. Just as I couldn’t remember the name of our flowering star magnolia tree when I was writing about it earlier in this journal, until I asked our neighbor and ardent gardener, Lois — and it took a few seconds just now to remember her last name.

I frequently can’t remember names, although that’s been the case for many years. My brain now also blocks too often on words I’m trying to use in conversation, although happily that rarely happens when I’m writing. 

I fell out of bed this morning. Just a little bruising on a wrist that hit my bedside dresser on my way down. I was reaching for my mobile phone on the dresser and leaned too far over. It would not be worth writing about here, except that I had just fallen harder on a playground basketball court in Brooklyn a few days ago. 

I felt unusually gloomy about mortality yesterday. Barry Sussman, a Washington Post editor who worked with me on the Watergate story, died suddenly at the age of 87, . . .After hearing that news, I had one of my increasingly disturbing accidents. While standing over our open dishwasher and using a towel to dry a very large frying pan, it slipped out of my hands and fell onto a dinner plate in the dishwasher, chipping it. Why am I that clumsy? Why was I stupid enough to be standing over the open dishwasher?  . . . .

It’s a cliché that you are plagued by forgetting little things as you get older, but it’s true! Why did I come into this room? Where are my keys? In my case, it’s often the second or third thing I intended to do. Yes, I moved the wash to the dryer, but I forgot the thing I intended to bring upstairs from the nearby storage room. I did remember to bring in berries from the garage fridge when I took out the trash, but I forgot the kale that Janice also had asked for.

But yesterday, something weirder happened. Janice was leaving the house and could not find her mobile phone. I joined the hunt. I decided to call the phone from my mobile. I could hear its familiar ring — the theme from the old “The Rockford Files” television show — as I was walking into our bedroom. But I still couldn’t find it anywhere as I was walking around the room. While I was calling the phone for a third or fourth time, Janice walked into the room and asked, “Is it in your pocket?” It was indeed in the pocket of the shorts I was wearing. I forgot that I had put it there for her an hour or two earlier when it needed to be rescued from some inconvenient place I could no longer remember.

As we were getting into bed last night, I decided that I should write about the incident in this journal. I scribbled a bedside note: “pocket phone.” When I woke this morning, I could not figure out why I had done that. What pocket phone? Something I wanted to buy? Not until breakfast did I suddenly remember. So, I’m writing this quickly before I forget again. . . . .

Time generally seems to be speeding up for me. Often, it feels like the week had just begun, and then the weekend is upon us. Although the year is far more than half over, it seems as though I was just writing here about the advent of spring. Are my 80s going to accelerate toward my demise? . . .

Maybe the seasonal change accounts for my preoccupation with reading obituaries these days. I’m so familiar with the remarkable lives and careers of many folks in those stories. And I’m paying more attention to their ages. So many of them in their 80s — right around the corner from me. Even those who made it into their 90s were a mere decade or so beyond where I’ve already arrived.  I try not to dwell on it, but the unavoidable truth is that I’m in the late autumn of my life.  . . . 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is being treated for a concussion after tripping and falling last night in the Waldorf Astoria Washington D.C. on Pennsylvania Avenue, where he was attending a fundraising reception and dinner. The Kentucky Republican is 81. Although I believe I am much more physically fit than McConnell appears to be, this is exactly what I am afraid of happening with my occasional balance issues and fear of falling.

I am being increasingly careful while going up and down stairs or encountering uneven pavement and high curbs. when out walking. Inside, I hold tightly on stairwell handrails.  . . . . . 

According to the National Institute on Aging, more than 1 in 4 people 65 or older are injured by falling each year.

It also is becoming noticeably more difficult for me to get up from chairs and out of cars — and then stand up straight without brief muscle soreness. Once up and moving, I’m on my way, but it makes me feel my age, and I resent it. . . . . 

Do\id Leonard  Downie, Jr., formr editor at the WaPo write the above, or did I?

Treadmill:  20.0; 0.50, very tired today for no known reason.  I watched a documentary on dancers preparing to do Merce Cunningham's August Pace on Pace.

Dinner tonight with Andy, Anh and children at HuHot in West Allis.  I'll be dragging myself out the door.

 

 

 

 

 

 

10/13/23

Friday, October 13, 2023

In bed at midnight, awake at 3 & onto brr till 5.  52°, high of 54°, 0.35" of rain in last 24 hours, 1.85" expected in next 24 hours testing the new gutters and downspouts, AQI =24, wind E at 21 mph , 16-24/37.  Sunrise at 7:02, sunset at 6:12, 11+9.

Insomnia and worse.  A very unusual night.  I couldn't get to sleep until after midnight and woke up around 3.  Geri also had much difficulty falling asleep and then suffered some flu-like symptoms during the night.  We each wondered whether all the news of atrocities in Israel and the pending massacre in Gaza triggered the insomnia.  ?!?  Long day and evening ahead.😦

VA today, 'hat trick.'  An 11:45 appointment for my 7th covid vaccination followed by at 12:30 meeting with my Whole Health coach plus I should get my back x-rayed for PM&R doc Chang. . .  All missions accomplished.

Bill Cannon died on October 7th at age 75.  He was one tough hombre, brother of my law school colleague and fellow Marine Vietnam veteran, Tom Cannon, another tough hombre, now 77 years old.  The cause of Bill's death was not given but memorials were suggested to a cancer fund.  Bill and I worked together in the late 80s  on one of the DeRance Foundation cases involving Erica John and Dr. John Gallagher when Tom Cannon was conflicted-out.  I can't remember any of the particulars but I recall flying to Washington (?) with Bill for a deposition.  My friend and former student and colleague at F&F Madeleine Kelly worked for Bill's firm after she departed F&F, where she and they worked late every night.  

Settlers in the West Bank have been targeting Palestinians since the invasion of Israel by Hamas on the 7th.  I've seen virtually no media coverage of these killings until a story today that revealed 35 Palestinians have been killed "by soldiers and settlers" in the West Bank this week.  Three Palestinians were killed by settlers on Wednesday in the town of Qusra.

This perpetual war between Israelis and Palestinians remind me  of "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland between the Catholic IRA and Sein Fein and the Protestant Unionist zealots, and the deep ethnic hostilities in the Balkans, most notably between the Orthodox Serbs and the Muslim Bosnians and Montenegrins and the Serbs and the Catholic Croatians.  These enmities never end.  "We are all tattooed in our cradles .  . ."

Speaker of the House.  Steve (David Duke w/o the baggage) Scalese has withdrawn his candidacy.  The House is paralyzed.

 Israeli-Palestinian conflict needs moral consistency, not moral clarity  From Paul Waldman's column in this mornings WaPo:

So perhaps what we need more than clarity is consistency. I feel Israel’s anguish, fear and rage; I have family and friends there. But I’m horrified by Hamas fighters going house to house and murdering people not because the victims were Jews like me, but because they were human beings. And so are the innocent civilians now being killed in Gaza.

None of us is immune to the tribalistic impulse that was bred in our bones over thousands of generations. But tribalism is the source of most atrocities. If you find yourself thinking that a child killed by a bullet as she cowers in her family’s safe room is fundamentally different from a child crushed by falling concrete when a missile destroys her apartment building based on her religion, then you haven’t found moral clarity. You’ve abandoned moral judgment altogether.

 . . . . . . . . 

My heart is aching watching the news this morning, seeing mothers with their children, reading the leaflets dropped in Gaza City, telling them to move to southern Gaza, watching families on carts drawn by donkeys, with whatever of their possessions they could pile into the cart, heading out of Gaza City, while cars similarly loaded drive past them.  And children everywhere. 

His brother was worse.  One of my favorite old jokes is the one about a town's bad guy, bully, thief, etc., dying and the local preacher asking someone in the audience to share a good word about the deceased.  No one volunteers until the preacher threatens to keep the congregation in church until someone shares some good word about the hated deceased.  At last, one member stands up and says "His brother was worse."

I'm reminded of that joke by the Republicans' thrashing about trying to elect a Speaker of the House.  I remarked to Geri the other day that whenever I'm inclinded to be happy when the Republicans do something positive, like dumping Kevin McCarthy as Speaker, I have to remind myself that they will probably follow up with something or someone worse.  Sure enough, they unseated McCarthy only to nominate Steve Scalese who compared himself with new-Nazi David Duke "without the baggage."  Yippee.  When Scalese withdrew, the proceeded to nominate  the most mean-spirited man in the Congress, Jim Jordan.  Who's next, Marjorie Taylor Greene?  It's like a limbo contest: how low can you go?

 

10/12/23

 Thursday, October 12, 2023

In bed at 10, awake at 5:25, stretched out on brr till Lilly came looking for me at 6:20.  53°, high of 56°, cloudy, windy morning ahead, AQI=24, wind E at 15 mph, 6-18/28, 0.15" of rain expected.  Sunrise at 7:01, sunset at 6:14, 11+12.

Thoughts on the invasion of Gaza.  Every year I  remember that Febrary 19th was D-Day for the amphibious invasion of Iwo Jima.  My father was one of the 70,000 U.S. Marines in the landing force.  He was one of the assault trooops who landed under heavy fire on D-Day.  On most years, I think of my father not just on D-Day, but on D minus 1, the day before the landing.  I don't know what kind of ship he was on, perhaps a troop ship, perhaps an LST that carried troops as well as tanks or an LSD, perhaps on some other type of ship, but I have some slight appreciation for what life was like in the troop compartments the day and night before D-Day.  Everybody was aware that he might die in a matter of hours, or might have a leg or arm blown off by some high explosive weapon.  What I can't know is what my father's exact thoughts were.  Did he think of me, his 3 and 1/2 year old son, or of my sister, 6 months old, his 23 year old wife, his parents, his sister Monica?  What other thoughts would he have had?   I can't know and he of course rarely talked after the war about any of his experiences in the Marines or on Iwo Jima but I think of him now as I see footage of thousands of Israeli soldiers massing along the Gaza border, knowing that many of them will die in the days ahead.  What are they thinking, when they have time to think?  What are the Gazans thinking, both Hamas members and supporters, and others, especially parents of children?  The spectre of Death is everywhere.  And those who do not die will be mutilated, many physically, all emotionally and spiritually.  I think of signs I saw over certain seats on buses and the Metro in Paris the last time I was there, reserving those seats for "les mutilés de guerre," those with war injuries.  I was struck by the term "mutilés' meaning simply 'disabled' but so suggestive of 'mutilated', a term that seems to me to be more discriptively acurate than 'disabled.'

Drawing by Egon Schiele

"We have to be cruel now and not think too much about the hostages" said Bezalel Smotrich, Israel's Finance minister.  “It was a terrible mistake to attack Israel,” Netanyahu said. “What we will do to our enemy in the next few days will echo for generations."

Psalm 137

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and we wept, when we remembered Zion . . .

Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who repays you, according to what you have done to us.

Happy  is he who seizes your little ones and dashes them against the rocks.

A not-so-silly sketch I did some years ago.  "The Church accepts and venerates the Bible as inspired. The Bible is composed of the forty-six books of the Old Testament and the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. Together these books make up the Scriptures.   The unity of the Old and New Testaments flows from the revealed unity of God’s loving plan to save us." Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Treadmill:  8:00 a.m., 21; 0.50

Looking through the storm door at Lilly, on her second outing, doing her usual: standing still surveying the area around her for several minutes before getting about her business, looking at a neighbor walking briskly down Wakefield to County Line.  We are 20 minutes past sunrise and the dusk-to-dawn lightbulbs are still on.  Even in the subdued daylight, the tree colors are striking.  The big maple across the street in a very dark crimson, almost purple.  The euonymous bush in front of the Pandl's is cherry red, cerise.  The leaves on many trees have turned yellow or brown and are being ejected by their hosts, preparing for winter when their leaves become life-threatening instead of life-enhancing.  On other trees, including our locust and berry trees, the leaves are still green and temporarily holding on to their branches and twigs.  The wind is already blowing strong, anticipating the three days of rain expected to start this evening.   The sunflower/safflower seed tube needs filling.  As usual, the chickadees are the first hungry visitors to appear, in numbers.  Why would I not concentrate on the trees and the birds instead of the horrors reported in the morning papers?

Spring and Fall 

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

10/11/23

 Wednesday, October 11, 2023

In bed at 9:40, up at 7:30 with PGM lawn guys, 47°, mostly sunny, high of 59°, AQI=20, wind NW at 5 mph, 2-9/12.  The sun rose at 6:32 at 99°ESE and will set at 6:15 at 261°WSW, 11+15.   Noon alt.=40°

Collateral Damage: Children, Gaza

Herodotus: In peace, children bury their parents.  War reverses the order of nature and parents bury their children.

More on Israel, Hamas, Gaza, the Circles of Hate.

1.  From Tom Friedman's NYT column yesterday:

I have covered this conflict for almost 50 years, and I’ve seen Israelis and Palestinians do a lot of awful things to one another: Palestinian suicide bombers blowing up Israeli discos and buses; Israeli fighter jets hitting neighborhoods in Gaza that house Hamas fighters but also causing massive civilian casualties. But I’ve not seen something like what happened last weekend: individual Hamas fighters rounding up Israeli men, women and children, looking them in the eyes, gunning them down and, in one case, parading a naked woman around Gaza to shouts of “Allahu akbar.”

The last time I witnessed that level of face-to-face barbarism was the massacre of Palestinian men, women and children by Christian militiamen in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982, where the first victim I encountered was an older man with a white beard and a bullet hole in his temple.

2.  “Because we each bear within ourselves the whole of the human condition, in its worst and best aspects, any one of us might be capable of doing anything at all, or nothing, under the right — or rather the most horribly wrong — conditions.” — Alain de Botton 

3.  “Men hate each other because they fear each other, and they fear each other because they don’t know each other, and they don’t know each other because they are often separated from each other.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

4.  The Circle of Hate: Misunderstand→Fear→Hate→Separate→Misunderstand→Fear→Hate→→→

5.  “YOU’VE GOT TO BE CAREFULLY TAUGHT” from South Pacific.

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear, / You’ve got to be taught from year to year,

It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear— / You’ve got to be carefully taught!

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid / Of people whose eyes are oddly made,

And people whose skin is a different shade— / You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late, / Before you are six or seven or eight,

To hate all the people your relatives hate— / You’ve got to be carefully taught!

6.  "“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 superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.” ― Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

6. The canary in our coalmine.  From WaPo article: The Hamas Horror is also a lesson the the price of populism.

No matter what one thinks of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the way populism corroded the Israeli state should serve as a warning to other democracies all over the world.

    The real explanation for Israel’s dysfunction is populism rather than any alleged immorality. For many years, Israel has been governed by a populist strongman, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is a public-relations genius but an incompetent prime minister. He has repeatedly preferred his personal interests over the national interest and has built his career on dividing the nation against itself. He has appointed people to key positions based on loyalty more than qualifications, took credit for every success while never taking responsibility for failures, and seemed to give little importance to either telling or hearing the truth.   Netanyahu’s current governing coalition has been by far the worst. It is an alliance of messianic zealots and shameless opportunists, who ignored Israel’s many problems — including the deteriorating security situation — and focused instead on grabbing unlimited power for themselves. In pursuit of this goal, they adopted extremely divisive policies, spread outrageous conspiracy theories about state institutions that oppose their policies, and labeled the country’s serving elites as “deep state” traitors.

Treadmill: 25: 0.6

T'is the season:  Geri is out with her cart collecting leaves for her path through her marginal garden in our back yard.

In war, the first casualty is Truth.  Some thoughts on truth and deceit I posted on FB on 10/11/21

"I listened this morning to an hour long discussion of Facebook on NPR’s “One A.” I also listened to much of the recent congressional testimony of Facebook ‘whistleblower’ Frances Haugen.  A  good part of the finger-pointing at  Facebook and its now infamous algorithms focuses on the fact that users tend to stay on Facebook longer and to interact more frequently (or “engage”) with postings, and thus to increase Facebooks profits, when what they see and read on Facebook  makes them discontented, or frustrated, or angry, ‘riled up.’   Online disinformation, about covid, or vaccination or facemasks on the one hand, or about political adversaries on the other, is often designed precisely to stir up these feelings of discontent, frustration, anger or resentment.  Thus, disinformation, specifically of a  type to get people feeling bad, tends to increase Facebook’s profit by increasing user “engagement.”  None of this is surprising but it does call to mind the notion that we live in an age and in a culture where the manipulation of information of one sort or another is all around us all the time.  Public relations and advertising firms specialize in it.  Half-truths, and too often lies, are the coin of the realm for politicians and 'spin doctors.'.  We see it most recently in the ubiquity among Republicans of “The Big Lie” about the 2020 election, but we know that Democratic politicians are hardly innocent when it comes to half-truths and lies.  We have long known that the government itself is chronically guilty of misrepresentation and concealment of truth.  Look at Vietnam, Afghanistan, “weapons of mass destruction,” “enhanced interrogation,” and on and on.  In my own profession, lawyering, attorneys are forbidden by their code of ethics from deceit and misrepresentation (no laughter, please), but does it surprise anyone that concealment of truth and creating false impressions may be consideered not only permisible for lawyers, but a matter of duty?  But perhaps the sector of our economy and corporatist and consumerist culture that is most designed to stir up personal discontent and frustration is media advertising, especially television advertising.  Most commercials effectively say “If you buy my product or service, you will be happier than you are now without it.  If you don’t eat my cereal, ingest my medication, or drive my car, you will be less happy than those who do.  Buy, spend, acquire, improve your lot like all these inanely smiling consumers or hucksters (Joe Namath for Medicare Advantage programs???) we have hired to influence your thoughts, emotions, and spending choices.”  So it can come as little surprise that Mark Zuckerberg and his acolytes follow the lead of our political and business leaders in taking advantage of the gullibility and the emotional and intellectual malleability of his fellow citizens to serve his own purposes.  And it comes as even less of a surprise that Congress has been so reluctant to try to regulate the manipulation of “truth” and “facts” and “disinformation” when such manipulation is part of the lifeblood of our political and economic culture."

. . . . . . . 

We will be in for a ton of minipulative information from all sides about the atrocities in Israel and the predictible atrocities in Gaza.  

Picked up Lizzie after rehearsal for Descendents at Bayside Middle School and dropped her off at home.  Watching the many kids leaving the school at 5:30 reminded me of the beheaded infants, toddlers, and children in Israel, and the hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza who are and forever will be haunted - if they survive - by what has happened, is happening, and will be happening.  Many by "the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air," others by all the indirect suffering that war causes, whenever and wherever it occurs.

My reaction to wars.  I often wonder if my emotional response(s) to war are unusual or 'normal.'  I can't forget living with my father when he returned from the Marines after World War II, with PTSD, the effects it had on me growing up and the effects it had on my little sister as she grew up.  I know about them because we talked about them frequently in our old age, the last 6 or so years of her life.  She remembered and I remember.  And we can only guess about the effects on my mother.    My father and I didn't become friends until he was 75 and I was 55.  My sister carried hurts from his emotional distance her entire life.  And I'm never far from guilt and shame over what we did in Vietnam and my pissant role in facilitating the bombing, the strafing, the napalming and white phosporusing, and the Agent Oranging of the human beings who had the misfortune to live 'in country' after we invaded.  As I write this I am remembering the "stranger in a strange land' feeling I had on returning to America after my year in Vietnam, Okinawa, and Japan.  I guess I still have that feeling.

A pencil drawing I did  from a photograph of Tanaka Kio, a mother of 3, nursing her 4 month old son the day after the bombing of Nagasaki.  Her son died a few days after the bomb fell, but Tanaka lived to age 91 and died in Nagasaki in 2006.  In the caption, I wrote the Herodotus quote about war reversing the law of Nature, parents burying their children instead on children burying their parents.  Also a quote for Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five about WWII being 'a Children's Crusade' because of the youth of the soldiers, and General Omar Bradley's assertion "“Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.” —

10/10/23

 Tuesday, October 10 2023

In bed at 9, up at 2:45 from brr to let Lilly out.  45°, high of 55°, cloudy day ahead, AQI=28, wind W at 10 mph, 5-12/21.  Sunrise at 6:50, sunset at 6:17, 11+18.  

An oil I did during the war in the Balkans in the 1990s.  Remember the atrocities?

Weltschmerz und Zeitgeist.  I am profoundly grateful for my liberal arts education at Leo High School and Marquette University.  It has provided comfort to me in my senectitude (fancy word for old age from the Latin senex, old/aged, and defined by Merriam-Webster, rather gloomily, as "the final stage of a normal life.")  I have one minor regret: I wish I had studied German rather than French.  My roommate Joe Daley took German in our freshman year and hated it.  I preferred the mellifluousness of French.  (I have a hilarious memory of one of my fine English professors, Dr. John Pick, illustrating the different sounds of the two languages in one of my English classes,  C'est bon compared to Das ist gut.)  Now my daughter is a long-term resident in Germany with a German husband and mischpuche, but that's not the only reason I wish I had some little ability with the language.  The other reason is that I have come to like German nouns, especially those cobbled-together maxi words like Fahrradscheinwerfer, bicycle + shine + thrower = bicycle light, or even the tongue-twister Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung, motor vehicle liability insurance.  I realized not so long ago that I write a lot of hyphenated expressions in this journal, expressions that wouldn't be hyphenated according to Standard English Usage.  I also notice that I occasionally like to capitalize a noun in the middle of a sentence, perhaps imitating the Germans who capitalize Nouns.  Mostly, though, I like those shorter German words that seem so right, words like schadenfreude, weltschmerz, weltanschauung kulturkampf, and zeitgeist.

The older I get, the more aware I become of my own Weltschmerz.  I think it started when I was starting each day with often-long daily text conversations with Kitty early each morning, beginning I think in 2015, when Trump announced his run for the presidency.  We would grouse with each other about him and became dejected (niedergeschlagen!) of course when he was elected, especially while losing the popular vote.  I had then and have now a very pessimistic view of the direction the U.S. and the world were headed.  We would often confess to "throwing pity parties" for ourselves.  Despite Trump's loss to Biden in 2020, my pessimism has only gotten worse, especially with the events leading up, including, and following January 6th, 2021.  My spirits bottomed out when Russia invaded Ukraine.   That invasion, and the atrocities that followed it, reminded me of our actions in Vietnam.  I know there are differences, of course, but bottom line, our corporate-controlled, capitalist government did not like the kind of government the Vietnamese people as a whole preferred, i.e., one run by their George Washington, Ho Chi Minh, so we sent in our military to force upon them to a government and form of economy that we preferred, and millions of innocents were killed or injured, maimed, burned, poisoned, forced from their homes, or otherwise haunted by loss.   They include not only the killed and wounded but also my mother crying next to her mailbox while reading my letter informing her that I was on my way to Vietnam and then anxious about me until I left the country months later.  And millions of other mothers, fathers, wives, sons, and daughters.  And now I can't forget or excuse my naive complicity in all that.

I have also wondered more than once what I would call our era's  Zeitgeist.  Is my near-despondency if not unique at least not widely shared or is it common?  Is our Zeitgeist a sense of despair, of powerlessness, or loss of agency, disinformation, manipulation, what else?  Niedergeschlagenheit?

Israel's Siege of Gaza.  The CIA estimates that 40% of the population of Gaza consists of children 15 years of age and younger, 50% 18 and under.  Israel has cut off access to food, water, and electricity.  

In the unlikely event that anyone would read my comments about Israel and Gaza, he would think me incredibly insensitive to the suffering of innocent Israelis, or engaged in indefensible false moral equivalency, 'whataboutism,' or God forbid antisemitic, to speak ill of Israel's historic treatment of Palestinians.  Or perhaps morally oblivious to the depravities of Hamas.  I make no excuse for the depraved acts of any Palestinians, whether Hamas, PLO, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, ISIS, or any other group or individual.  I do not excuse them or claim that their acts are justified by misdeeds by Israelis or their government.  Nonetheless, it is a mistake to think these depravities have occurred in a vacuum,  to ignore the sufferings imposed on Palestinians by some Israelis or their government since the founding of the Jewish state.  Even today there are reports of widespread acts of violence being visited upon Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli settlers.  My heart aches for all the victims of injustice within Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and greater Jerusalem.  My heart aches for all the victims of warfare in Ukraine, both Ukrainian and Russian.  What I try to avoid is simplistic, binary thinking that, looking at the history of Israeli-Palestinian relations, paints the Israelis alabaster white and the Palestinians jet black.  As Auden wrote in September 1, 1939: 

“I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.” 

It's the human condition that so weighs me down, the dominance of greed, cruelty, hatred, and the will to power in our species.  It's the pernicious role that religion so often plays in the oppression of people, including the religious claim to the West Bank, and the crazy idea that "this land is mine, God gave this land to me,"  Those are the opening lyrics of the Theme from Exodus song that ends "If I must fight, I'll fight to make this land our own.  Until I die, this land is mine."  Counter this with the footage of so many terrorists in the process of mass murder shouting "Allahu Akbar," God is great!  And consider the role of Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church in supporting Putin's invasion of Ukraine.  

Treadmill:  20:44; 0.50

10/9/23

 Monday, October 9, 2023

In bed at 9:40, up at 7:15 after two spells on the brr, Lilly woke me up to let her out.  40°, high of 54°, mostly sunn, AQI=15, wind WNW at 11 mph, 7-15/24,  The sun rose at 6:59 and will set at 6:19, 11+21.   

Treadmill:  20; 0.45

Lilly at her post, never losing sight of Geri.

Yesterday evening: The tiny figures in the upper right quadrant are Geri and her walking partners Shirley and Tom.  Geri is on the left, next to Shirley in red in the middle, and Tom on the right.  They are barely visible in the photo, but Lilly is locked onto them like a radar beam.  Lilly will maintain her post until Geri returns.

Lilly's General Orders.  

1. To take charge of this post and all Clausen property in view.

    2. To dog my post in a military manner, keeping always on the alert and observing everything that takes place within sight or hearing.

. . .

    5. To quit my post only when properly relieved once Geri is home and sound.

. . .

    7. To talk to no one except in the line of duty.

    8. To give the alarm in case of fire or disorder.

. . .

    11. To be especially watchful at night, and during the time for challenging, to challenge all persons on or near my post, and to allow no one to pass without proper authority.

Thinking of Israel.

1.  Will Netanyahu's government overreact and make things worse?

2.  What were they thinking: why would anyone stage a Jewish music festival drawing thousands of young Israeli Jews to a site only 3 miles from the Gaza border, within mortar and artillery range of Hamas?

3.  Itamar Ben-Gvir is Netanyahu's Minister of National Security.  To what extent is he responsible for the epic failure of intelligence?  To what extent will he be responsible for the reprisals within Gaza?

4.  How will the situation affect relations within Netanyahu's cabinet of secular Likud members, and ultra-nationalists Ben-Gvir and Shostrich, and ultra-orthodox religious party members?

5.  How will the situation affect relations between Netanyahu's government and the secular military and intelligence components of the government?

6.  The first victim in any war is Truth.

7.  Chickens come home to roost.

8.  All the focus now is on the savagery of the actions by Hamas and we oughtn't to lose that focus, but it is a mistake to think that there is not plenty of blame to spread around for hatred of Israel and its supporters by Hamas and other Palestinians.   Israel has become an apartheid, racist state.  There are historical reasons for that, not that made it inevitable, but that explains its development.  Nevertheless, there is some real truth to the proposition that Israel has been at war with the Palestinians for the last 75 years and though Israel has suffered terrible losses during that period, the Palestinians have suffered much more.

9.   Western TV coverage of the situation is almost entirely pro-Israel in the sense of focusing on the terrible suffering endured by the Israeli victims of the invasion, especially the families of the hostages.  But we  ought not, in our humane sympathy for them, become oblivious to the long-term suffering of the Palestinians, in Gaza, the West Bank, and in East Jerusalem.  

10.  I can't help wondering whether we have been watching all the suffering in Israel and Palestine for 75 years because Zionism, at least as played out after the Holocaust, was a bad idea, an impossible dream, an original sin.  Hitler and the Nazis, with the active support of many other Europeans, were guilty of near-extermination of the European Jews and the Palestinians paid the price.  What's wrong with this picture?  If ethnic cleansing was wrong in the Balkans in the 90s and is wrong in Myanmar with the Rohingya, and elsewhere, why wasn't it wrong in Palestine in the 1940s?  If apartheid was wrong in South Africa, why isn't it wrong in the West Bank?

11.  The United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP issued its report  just last month on the Israel's occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, both formerly parts of the Kingdom of Jordan.  It found Israel's 57 year long occupation illegal.

Following a finding of illegality, the study concludes that, according to international law,  the consequences should be the immediate, unconditional and total withdrawal of Israel’s military forces; the withdrawal of colonial settlers; and the dismantling of the military administrative regime, with clear instructions that withdrawal of breach of an internationally wrongful act is not subject to negotiation. Full and commensurate reparations should be accorded to the affected Palestinian individuals, corporations and entities for the generational harm caused by Israel’s land and property appropriations, house demolitions, pillage of natural resources, denial of return, and other war crimes against humanity orchestrated for the colonialist, annexationists aims of an illegal occupant.

12.  I just watched a snippet of Netanyahu's speech to the Israeli public: "What we will do to our enemy in the next few days will echo for generations."

13.  With 130 hostages held in Gaza, I am thinking of Waco and the Branch Davidians.

 

10/8/23

 Sunday, October 8, 2023

In bed by 9, up at 4:50, after a vivid dream in which I was a participant in the wedding of Princess Diana and Prince Charles😳!?!. 42°, high of  54°, cloudy day ahead, AQI=17, wind  NW at 8, 7-11/19.  Sunrise at 6:56 at 97°ESE, sunset at 6;21 at 262°WSW, 41° at solar noon 12:39.

One year ago I woke up after 6 and 1/2 hours of sleep to 34° cold.  Geri bundled up to visit Elise Samson and I worked on my "death dossier" which I need to review and update.  We had dinner with the Goldbergs at the Lowes' home.  I was frustrated that I couldn't obtain a print of the Bachman photo of the stately, beautiful young woman in the full-length green dress facing off the National Guard troops at a demonstration in Baton Rouge, LA.  I lit a candle to memorialize(?) Kitty's 55th anniversary, the first since her death.

LTMW I see the first snowbird, or slate-colored junco,  of the season atop a shepherd's crook.  I suppose I should have mixed feelings about this advent since it signals winter approaching but snowbirds are among my favorites, so pretty, so hardy.  I'm always glad to watch them.  This first one of the season has a darker than usual belly and I'm wondering if that is a season things, as with goldfinches, or just an individual variant.  In any case, while I keep an eye on him or her, a troop of 17 wild turkeys march past my window, one after another.  A few check out the area under the sunflower/safflower tube but most just march past, north to south, on their way to who knows where and what.   And now the house finches and chickadees are predominating the feeders.  The suet cake I put out the other day is finally attracting some visitors, including a red-bellied woodpcker and - uh oh, sparrow.   I'm hoping that suet won't attract a horde of English sparrows again with their aggressive behavior driving other birds away.

Aaron Rodgers is a Fool, from this morning's JSOnline and USA Today, an opinion piece by Mike Freeman:  "Aaron Rodgers is a fool.

This isn't easy to say but it's been established for years now. When this week he called Kansas City tight end Travis Kelce "Mr. Pfizer" he was again dressing himself in a clown suit, with the floppy shoes and red nose, and yes, again, his words are potentially dangerous.

Rodgers joins a loud and equally foolish right-wing chorus that has attacked Kelce, and for once, those attacks have nothing to do with Taylor Swift. The attacks have been vicious and lacking in facts and they do something else. They portray Kelce as someone who is spreading death when he is actually doing something to help save lives.

Kelce and his mother, Donna, launched a new campaign with Pfizer, encouraging people to get their flu shot along with the latest COVID-19 vaccination. Yes, Kelce is likely being paid well by Pfizer, but encouraging people to stop the spread of a deadly disease is (checks notes) a good thing. Only a fool would believe it isn't. Or a legion of fools. . . . So here we are. One of the most popular athletes of our time, a Super Bowl winner, a former quarterback for a storied franchise, and a current quarterback playing in the most high profile market in the nation. Mocking someone who is asking people to get flu and COVID shots that could save lives.  This is where we are. It's all so foolish."

Isn't this a lot worse than simply "foolish"?  Encouraging gullible people NOT to protect themselves against very contagious diseases that kill thousands every year?  Foolish???

Israel (and Ukraine)  Too horrible for words.  One commentator remarked yesterday: 'It will only get worse before it gets worse.'  Israel and the Palestinians are an intractable problem, making me think again that the problem goes back to 1948 and the creation of the State of Israel, Shoah and Nakba.  Israel's Original Sin.  More than 2,000,000 Palestinians live in Gaza and I fear the Israeli response to Hamas' attack will be to turn Gaza into a slaughterhouse.  Perhaps the presence of Israeli (and American?) hostages will temper the bloodshed.  And perhaps not.  The Israeli Defense Force has been embarrassed, even humiliated, by the success of Hamas' attack, even capturing IDF soldiers and civilians, and I'm thinking there will be Hell to pay.

I am hearing talk of the U.S. supporting Israel in this matter more than diplomatically and legally, but also with additional aid, including arms.  I hope this is not accurate.  Israel is a very rich country, certainly in comparison to Gaza and Hamas, even with it's support from Iran.  With so many Republicans already threatening to withdraw support for Ukraine, providing additonal aid to Israel will just give them more ammunition to support thier pro-Putin position, and pardon the pun.

Do bad guys wear bow ties?  I'm not sure of all my prejudices but I am very aware of one: guys in bow ties.  Like the new acting Speaker of the House Patrick McHenry.  I have a less intense prejudice about guys named Jeff.  I can't remember when or why my prejudice against guys with bow ties started but it preceded an iteration that I do remember, when Tom Shriner, a pompous, bow-tiw-wearing, jerk and big Republican at Foley & Lardner sent a letter to Tom Curran, the big Republican federal judge in Milwaukee's suburban school desegregation lawsuit stating that I had done something unprofessional and against the rules in filing an affidavit attaching a number of newspaper editorials showing community support for the settlement position our firm was advocating  in the lawsuit. (Shriner and the judge were also big Catholics and fellow parishioners at St. Robert's parish in Shorewood.)  The judge admonished me😱 and I filed a classic non-apology apology pointing out to the judge (and to Shriner) the applicable law that demonstrated the relevance and propriety of my filing.  I know there have been and are so good guys who wear bow ties (e.g., Daniel Patrick Moynihan), but anyone regularly wearing one today comes with a presumption of jerkiness as far as I'm concerned.

I can't remember the source of my bias about "Jeffs" either except I had a problem with a neighbor's kid named Jeff when my children were young and I served with an A-4 pilot named Jeff in Vietnam and he was another jerk.  I wrote about him in the "Vietnam" chapter of my memoir:

We drank a lot of liquor, smoked a lot of cigarettes and did a lot of gambling in DaNang.  The drinking and gambling occurred at the officers’ club at night.  There was a blackjack table that was privately co-owned by 6 junior officers and a poker table at which high stakes games were played.  When the club shut down at night, there was a craps game in the adjoining officers’ mess hall.  After I had played at the table for some months, I was offered and accepted the right to purchase a departing Marine’s share of the blackjack table.  The six of us owners shared the duty of dealing.  When one dealer got cold and started losing a lot, another would relieve him.  At the end of the night, we would split up the winnings and there were almost always winnings to be split.  Often we would then take the winnings and move to the craps game.  When I did so, I lost whatever I had netted from the evening’s blackjack winning.   When I was transferred out of Vietnam, the other partners determined that an A4 pilot named Jeff Something-or-other, who had lost a lot of money at the table, should be offered my share.  I disliked him a lot.  He had a cold and distancing personality to begin with and he was supercilious and condescending towards those who were not pilots.   Jeff Hotshot was the origin of my long term irrational and regrettable wariness of guys named ‘Jeff.’  But it was not my call who should get the opportunity to buy the share I had to surrender when I left DaNang.  After I had been out of country a few weeks, Headquarters Marine Corps issued a regulation that there would be no privately owned gambling tables in Marine Corps clubs.  We all believed, probably accurately, that there was only one such table in the Marine Corps: our blackjack table at Danang.  Jeff’s investment had gone sour.  I debated whether I should send his money back to him and decided against it.  I was quite legalist and casuistic in my reasoning (I didn’t mislead him, I made no representations, I didn’t issue the new regulation, he assumed the risk, caveat emptor, and so on), but I think the real reason was because I couldn’t stand the guy.  My behavior was certainly not illegal or particularly immoral, but it was stamped with petty vindictiveness and schadenfreude and I have never been proud of it.  On the other hand, I still take a wait-and-see attitude towards guys named “Jeff.”  Prejudices die hard. 

I added a footnote:

Jeff reminded me of the description of Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby: "Now don't think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to say, "just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are."

Eyebrows and Treadmill.  I painted eyebrows on my latest lady this morning, watched Margaret Brennan's program, and then did 20 minutes and 0.40 miles on the treadmill, slow walking.

Her nose has disappeared and I'm inclined to leave it where it is(n't).

The Poor, by William Carlos Williams

It's the anarchy of poverty

delights me, the old

yellow wooden house indented

among the new brick tenements.

Or a cast-iron balcony

with panels showing oak branches

in full leaf.  It fits

the dress of the children

reflecting every stage and

custom of necessity -

Chimneys, roofs, fences of

wood and metal in an unfenced

age and enclosing next to

nothing at all: the old man 

in a sweater and soft black

hat who sweeps the sidewalk -

his own ten feet of it

in a wind that fitfully

turning his corner has

overwhelmed the entire city.

. . . . 

Wonderful images: the old yellow wooden house indented among the new brick tenements; fences in an unfenced age and enclosing next to nothing at all; the dress of the children reflecting every stage and custom of necessity; the old man sweeping his ten feet of sidewalk in a wind that fitfully turning his corner has overwhelmed the entire city.

Williams isn't delighted by poverty and those enduring it, but the disorderly sights reflecting it, disorderly compared to the more orderly, more uniform appearance of the homes, neighborhoods, and non-hand-me-down garb of the well-to-do.  His poetic rule: "Say it: no ideas but in things."  Sensations, sensual perceptions, not ideas or abstractions.  Like his not-so-subtly- erotic The Young Housewife.