11/21/23

 Tuesday, November 21, 2023

In bed at 9:30, up at 5, mis-ack ache.  Let Lilly out.  39°, raining, high of  41°, wind ENE at 13 mph, 11-16/27, WC is 32°. 0.3" of rain in the last 6 hours, total expected is 0.45". Sunrise at 6:51, sunset at 4:22, 9+31.  "a damp, drizzly November of my soul. . ."   

Treadmill; pain.  I'm following yesterday's advice from the VA doc to take 3 Advil 200 mg. pills 3 times a day.  Started last night, and another 3 at 5 this morning.  I'm experiencing mild tightness and spasms this morning.  Advil: 0530.1330, & 2030.  Pain intensified during the afternoon, quite bad at 4 despite 2 unrestful lie-downs.  Advils seem to be totally ineffective for the pain.  Relief came with MB at 5 pm, but returned 10 minutes later, worse.  Rough day.

Geri down with bronchitis (?)  Heavily congested for the last 2 days, spent the afternoon in bed resting.  I brought her 2 coricidin & water at 5:15.  Not sounding good.

LTMW at a flock of 17 wild turkeys crossing the bend of County Line Road into Wakefield Court and coming onto our front yard.  Sixteen of the birds head south onto the McGregor's property, while one outlier turns around and pecks her way back toward County Line Road until she realizes she is all alone, whereupon she turns around and runs and then flies back to join her posse.  I'm not sure why these birds give me a thrill, but they always do.  I'm reminded that I saw a partridge once in some high grass along a road in Ozaukee County on one of my rides in the countryside. . .  I've seen hardly any birds at our full feeders this morning, even with 2 new suet cakes out, just a couple of goldfinches on the niger tube . . . By nightfall, those two goldfinches and the flock of turkeys were the only birds I saw all day.  I'm wondering if there is a predator in the area.

Ruth Marcus' op-ed this morning is worth reading.  She writes of the generational divide among American Jews regarding Israel, older Jews much more supportive of the Jewish state and younger Jews much less supportive.  

 My childhood memories are of the Six-Day War and the accompanying joy over access to the Western Wall; of the shock of the Yom Kippur War. . .  And, I am obliged to confess, the narrative of Israel’s founding that Jewish children of my generation were offered in Hebrew school and on trips to Israel was deeply misleading at best, tinged with anti-Palestinian bias at worst. This account utterly failed to acknowledge the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 or consider Palestinians’ legitimate claims to a homeland. The tenor of our rabbi’s sermons, the discussions in my childhood home, were that Israel could do no wrong.

My children grew up in a different environment — more honest about the contours of the conflict, more complex in the nature of the political discussion, and more fraught. They have scarcely known an Israel without Netanyahu, which is to say an Israel whose aggressive settlement policy that has made a two-state solution increasingly unattainable, and an Israel that fails to treat Palestinians with fairness and dignity.

It is, in short, an Israel that has made itself hard to love. . .  It is hard to demand that Israel constitute a central part of [my children's] Jewish identity when Israel’s behavior, during their conscious lifetimes, has been so impossible to defend. 

Her essay strikes home with me.   I think of one Jewish friend with whom I was and am close speaking disparagingly of Palestinians, telling me the Palestinians left what is now Israel during the founding war voluntarily, or because of encouragement by the neighboring Arab states, that there was no expulsion.  Very black and white, brought on by her anguish and anger over the Holocaust and historic anti-Semitism, and the situation facing the Jews who survived the Holocaust after their liberation from the camps, her understanding of the need for a safe, secure Jewish homeland, then and now.  I think of our good, dear Jewish friends of a lifetime and how we never speak of Israel in political terms, nor of Palestinians, but only of their memories from trips to Israel, in youth and more recently, without any mention of Palestinian Israelis, or the West Bank, Gaza, or East Jerusalem.  We never speak of Netanyahu, or Ben Gvir, or Smotrich, or the the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi divide, or the secular-religious divide, Likud and the religious parties, or the virtual disappearance of 'the Left' in Israel.  I think too of Marcus' admission of the bias infecting her indoctrination about the founding of Israel and its history (Israel can do no wrong) and how it parallels the bias infecting by indoctrination about the founding of the United States and its history (America can do no wrong), about Jewish superiority in Israel and White superiority in the U.S.

 

11/20/23

 Monday, November 20, 2023

In bed at 9 and up at 4 with CPP.  43°, windy, high of 45°, wind ESE at 15 mph, 9-18/26, w/c- 26°.  Sunrise at 6:50, sunset at 4:23, 9+33.

Treadmill; pain.  I awoke with CPP, seeing the VA urologist at 8:15 this morning, feeling sheepish.  I don't know what he can do that he hasn't done, i.e., prescribe meds I don't want to take b/c of sedative side effects, effects on driving, zombie behavior plus uncertain efficacy. . . Urologist thinks it's an overactive nerve problem and will order a consult with the Pain Clinic.  00:00   0.00

Another dead canary in the mine shaft?  Argentines gave the Trumpist far-right candidate for the presidency a solid victory yeasterday over the incumbent finance minister.  Trump congratulated him, saying he would 'Make Argentina Great Again.'  We'll see.

They're not that into you, Joe.  NBC poll: "Democratic voters on Biden's handling of war between Israel and Hamas:  Approve, 51%, Disapprove, 41%."  "Younger voters on Biden's handling of war between Israel and Hamas:  Approve 20%, Disapprove, 70%."

Biden was 6 years old when Israel became a state.  He was 25 years old during the 1976 war with the Arab states, and 31 years old during the Yom Kippur war with Egypt and Syria.  His impressions of Israel were of a young democratic state governed by Ashkenazi and American  (Golda Meir) Jews defending itself against hostile Muslim neighbors.  The 1967 war was ended 56 years ago and since then Israel has been a strong state, a nuclear power, occupying lands seized from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, and treating the non-Jewish residents of the seized lands as colonial subjects, with no voting rights, with severe mobility restrictions, whose land is ever subject to seizure by settlers and expropriation by Israeli Jews claiming as in the theme from the movie Exodus "This land is mine.  God gave this land to me."

When I saw Biden literally embracing Netanyahu, the warm hug and pat on the back, as he arrived in Tel Aviv, followed by public statements that seemed to give the green light to Israel, indeed to encourage Israel, to crush not just Hamas but Gaza, I knew that was a step too far for many Americans.  NBC poll: Young voters on their presidential pick if the election were today:  Biden, 42%, Trump, 46%.  62% disapprove of Biden's handling of the Israel-Hamas war.  Netanyahu and his religious nationalist settler government are not Golda Meir and her Ashkenazi socialist government.

Today is Joe's 81st birthday.  Happy birthday.

Kristin Welker to WH Deputy National Security Advisor:  Are you confident that Israel is following international law as they try to wipe out Hamas.  Yes or no.  Answer:  We are confident that it is our position that it needs to.  When we have seen issues that are raised based on incidents on the ground, we raised them privately and directly with the government.  Welker:  Are you confident that they are following international law?  Answer:  What I can say is it is not our position, certainly not my position as a policy maker to play real-time judge and jury on the question of any particular of any particular incident.

From Sara Roy's 2008 Edward Said Memorial Lecture: THE IMPOSSIBLE UNION OF ARAB AND JEW: REFLECTIONS ON DISSENT, REMEMBRANCE AND REDEMPTION.

For the last forty-one years, [Israeli] occupation has meant dislocation and dispersion; the separation of families; the denial of human, civil, legal, political, and economic rights imposed by a system of military rule; the torture of thousands; the confiscation of tens of thousands of acres of land and the uprooting of tens of thousands of trees; the destruction of more than 18,000 Palestinian homes; the relentless expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands; the undermining and then the destruction of the Palestinian economy; closure; curfew; geographic fragmentation; demographic isolation.

Occupation is about the domination and dispossession of one people by another. It is about the destruction of their property and the destruction of their soul. At its core, occupation aims to deny Palestinians their humanity by denying them the right to determine their existence, to live normal lives in their own homes. And just as there is no moral equivalence or symmetry between the Holocaust and the occupation, so there is no moral equivalence or symmetry between the occupier and the occupied, no matter how much we as Jews regard ourselves as victims. . . . 

But in the post-Holocaust world, Jewish memory has failed in one critical respect: it has excluded the reality of Palestinian suffering and Jewish culpability therein. As a people, we have been unable to link the creation of Israel with the displacement of the Palestinians. We have been unwilling to see, let alone remember, that finding our place meant the loss of theirs. . . . 

Among the many realities that frame contemporary Jewish life are the birth of Israel, remembrance of the Holocaust, and Jewish power and sovereignty. And it cannot be denied that the latter has a critical corollary: the displacement and oppression of the Palestinian people. We celebrate our strength but at its core lies a counsel of despair.  For Jewish identity is linked, willingly or not, to Palestinian suffering and this suffering is now an irrevocable part of our collective memory and an intimate part of our experience, together with the Holocaust and Israel. This is a linkage about which Marc Ellis, in my view one of the greatest and most courageous Jewish religious thinkers of our time, has pondered long and hard. How, he asks, are we to celebrate our Jewishness while others are being oppressed? Is the Jewish covenant with God present or absent in the face of Jewish oppression of Palestinians? Is the Jewish ethical tradition still available to us? Is the promise of holiness—so central to Jewish existence—now beyond our ability to reclaim?

. . . . Why is it virtually mandatory among Jewish intellectuals to oppose racism, repression and injustice almost anywhere in the world and unacceptable—indeed, for some, an act of heresy—to oppose it when Israel is the oppressor, choosing concealment over exposure?  

Why have I struggled so much with the rectitude of Israel's action in Gaza?  Do I struggle with the rectitude of its occupation of the West Bank, and its degradation of the Palestinians living there?  I don't believe that the IDF and the settlers treat Palestinians humanely or with dignity.  I have to believe that the government's and the IDF's and the settlers' ultimate goal is to make life so miserable for the Palestinians that they will eventually leave, leaving something less than a 'critical mass' to support a Palestinian state.  I draw no significant distinction between the government and the IDF on the one hand and the settlers on the other.  Turning to Gaza, is there not something intrinsically evil in what the Israeli government and the IDF are doing there?  I can't come up with any worthwhile opinion on what other choices have been available to Netanyahu and his subordinates; I am not knowledgeable enough in urban warfare to hazard uninformed guesses.  But one needn't be an expert in the so-called international law (is there really such a thing?) of warfare or in the intricacies and nuances of the "just war" (is there such a thing?) theory to know that a policy of depriving 2 million civilian non-combatants of food, clean water, shelter, and medical care is wrong.  It is not the action of a gute neshama, of righteous people, of menschen.  Israel's answers are a combination of whataboutism - look what Hamas did to us on October 7! - and the Trumpist lie 'we have no choice'.   I think of Tom Freidman's op-ed weeks ago in which he implored the Netanyahu government not to do precisely what it is doing now - the killing of thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children, and the wholesale destruction of Gazan infrastructure, including most significantly the homes and livelihoods of the people who live in that 'open-air prison.'  The photos of the dead and wounded children, especially the 'premies' in the NICU at al-Shifa hospital will persist for years as graphic condemnations of Israel's real attitude toward the Palestinians and of American complicity.  Biden and his minions keep asserting that 'Israel has a right to defend itself" as if any normal human being denies that truism.  Every person and every nation has a right to defend itself.  Biden speaks of it as if that's the beginning and the end of the analysis and the discussion, as if once that simple truth is recognized, Israel was free to do what it will not only to the perhaps 50,000 active members of Hamas but also to the 2,000,000+ civilians among whom they shelter.   This carnage will be a stain on Israel for years, perhaps decades, and on the United States and on Joseph Biden, with his fond memories of schmoozing with Milwaukee's Golda Meir.  One last thought about the futility of Israel's goal to destroy Hamas 'once and for all.'  It is much more likely that the current conflagration will strengthen Hamas as an Idea, a Movement, a Cult, almost a Religion whose central doctrine is that Israel is a predatory racist apartheid state that should be destroyed.  With all the hatred between the Israelis and the Palestinians, who can see any end to this conflict, either a two-state solution - whither the hundreds of thousands of settlers? - or a one-state solution, with equal rights for all?  The Nakba is Israel's Original Sin and the Occupation and Blockade extensions of it.  Slavery is America's Original Sin, the consequences of which we are still living with after 400+ years.  How long will Israel live with the consequences of its Original Sin(s)?

 

 

11/19/23

 Sunday, November 19, 2023

In bed at 11:30, waited for Geri's return, up at 8.  Let Lilly out.  38°, sunny day, high of 46°, wind N at 7 mph, 4-11/18,  The sun rose at 6:18 and will set at 4:24, 9+35.       

Treadmill; pain.  I woke up with back pain but w/o CPP.🙏  . . .  It didn't take long for the CPP to show up.  I'm wondering if sitting is a trigger.  If so, I'm in trouble. . .  Laid down and fell asleep around noon, CPP gone upon awakening, but returned.  

Edward Said.  I watched the second half of a 2-hour interview of Edward Said in 2002, said to be his last interview as he suffered from a terminal case of leukemia.  He was a renowned literary scholar, musician, and advocate for the cause of the Palestinian people in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, where he was born in 1935.  I was interested primarily in what he had to say about Israel and the Palestinians.  His family moved to Egypt and then the U.S. in his youth.  He went to Princeton for his undergraduate education, and to Harvard for his master's and doctoral education, and he taught at Columbia for many years.  He was close to Yasser Arafat for many years and was on the Palestinian National Council from 1977 to 1991.  He split from them after the Oslo Accords in 1993, which he called a disgraceful sellout.  He was not a fan of the Palestinian leadership.  It was interesting seeing this distinguished Palestinian/American scholar speak on behalf of the suffering and mistreatment of the Palestinian people and calling for a single-state solution with equal citizenship for Israelis and Palestinians.  He considered the U.S. brokered "peace process a charade or a meretricious canard.  As I watched, I thought of how much worse matters became in the 21 years since his interview, years dominated by Israel's governance by Likud Party politicians and Binyamin Netanyahu.   I think of Oriana Fallaci: "No matter what system you live under, there is no escaping the law that it's always the strongest, the cruelest, the least generous who win."

Biden editorial in this morning's WaPo.  There is a long piece by Joe Biden in this morning's paper, repetitively asserting Israel's right to defend itself and calling for "a two-state solution" to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people.  In America's unending virtue-signalling, he calls attention to his advice to Netanyahu to observe international law about protecting innocent civilians and hails the fact that some humanitarian relief is being delivered to Gaza.  He levels no criticism at Israeli policies and practices in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Gaza itself, notably the growth of settlements, displacement of Palestinians, thefts of land, and the multi-year blockade of Gaza and now the relentless bombardment and destruction of Gazan life and infrastructure.  Does anyone other than Joe Biden really believe that a two-state "solution" is realistic anymore, with 600,000 to 800,000 Israeli Jews living throughout "Samaria and Judea"?  With perhaps tens of thousands of Israelis (Srugim) believing in  Eretz Yisrael Hashema including all of the West Bank, Gaza, greater Jerusalem, much of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt?  Or is this just more of the charade or meretricious canard about a so-called 'peace process'?  I suspect that the so-called 'peace process', if it ever had a real chance, met its end with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin on 11/4/1995, or perhaps with Yasir Arafat's rejection of the Clinton-brokered deal offered by Barak Ehud's government in 2000.   Give us a break, Joe.  Wake up and smell the coffee.  Stop pissing on our shoes and telling us it's raining.  Other clichés come to mind.  

Santiago, Italia    I also watched this documentary on OVID while Geri was at the symphony.  The first half was about Pinochet's takeover of Chile and his rule from 1973 to 1990.  I think of this as the Nixon-Kissinger-CIA coup that overthrew the democratically-elected socialist government of Chile and installed a fascist, military dictator.  So much for America's belief in democracy and majority rule.  Again we see Fallaci: "No matter what system you live under, there is no escaping the law that it's always the strongest, the cruelest, the least generous who win."  

It was interesting to watch 2 hours of Edward Said stating his views on Israel and the Palestinians, and on colonialism and imperialism, knowing that he was labeled a "terrorist" and a "radical" by many on both sides of the issues and was the subject of a lengthy file maintained on him by the FBI, and then to watch interviews of many Chilians who appeared to be perfectly normal middle-class human beings who also were members of the Communist Party, though certainly not Stalinists.

11/18/23

 Saturday, November 18, 2023

In bed @ 9:15, up at 6, and a couple hours on lzb after mild GERD, and multiple pss.  Let Lilly out.  32°, high of 50°, sunny day ahead, wind WSW at 11, 4-14/26.  Sunrise at 6:48, sunset at 4:25, 9+37.

Treadmill; pain.  25:01  0.52 while watching a YouTube lecture analyzing Yeats' The Lake Isle of Innesfree:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

The lecturer mentioned that Yeats wrote this in 1890 while living in London, then the largest city in the world and filthy with foul air and foul water, loaded with the poor crowded into filthy slums.  That's where he was when he was "stand[ing] on the roadway, or on the pavements gray" yearning for the lake isle of Innisfree.

Then I watched another YouTube lecture by Stephen Cheeke on Yeats' bizarre beliefs in faeries, theosophy the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, life after death, seances, 'automatic writing', reincarnation, and the occult: "The Wonderful and Frightening World of W. B. Yeats'" Bristol Lectures.  At the end of the lecture, the speaker referred to a paragraph in Yeats' prose work "Per Amica Silentia Lunae" that revealed to me where the 4th stanza of his poem "Vacillation" comes from.  From the poem:

My fiftieth year had come and gone, / I sat, a solitary man, / In a crowded London shop, / An open book and empty cup / On the marble table-top. / While on the shop and street I gazed / My body of a sudden blazed; / And twenty minutes more or less / It seemed, so great my happiness, / That I was blessed and could bless.

From "Per Amica":

At certain moments, always unforeseen, I become happy, most commonly when at hazard I have opened some book of verse.  Sometimes it is my own verse when, instead of discovering new technical flaws, I read with all the exitement of the first writing.  Perhaps I am sitting in some crowded restaurant, the open book beside me, or closed, my excitement having over-brimmed the page.  I look at the strangers near as if I had nown them all my life, and it seems strange that I cannot speak to them: everything fills me with affection.  I have no longer any fears or any needs; I do not even remember that this happy mood must come to an end.  It seems as if the vehicle had suddenly grown pure and far extended and so luminous that the images from Anima Mundi, embodied there and drunk with that sweetness would, like a country drunkard who has thrown a wisp into his own thatch, burn up time.  It may be an hour before the mood passes, but latterly I seem to understand that I enter upon it the moment I cease to hate.  I think the common condition of our life is hatred - I know this is so with me - irritation with public or private events or persons.

Shutterfly.  I wasted some time trying to order a coffee mug with the photo of Lilly in the dining room doorway.  I become increasingly incompetent in dealing with digital/computer stuff, including placing orders over the internet

Having a hard time writing today, thinking of Ukraine and Gaza . . . the human condition, human nature, homo hominis lupus, 'He's got a plan for each of us' and "He's got the whole world in His hands."  Daily text messages from Mike Johnson, the Christian nationalists, Ryan Zinke, Mike Pompeo, and assorted fascists.  Joe Biden, Donald Trump, The Big Lie vs. No Big Truth.  Is it really so hard to imagine the U.S. as a fascist nation, controlled by contemporary Confederates, neo-Nazis, homegrown SA, SS, and Gestapo?  Is it really so hard to understand why most Democrats want Joe Biden to get the hell out of the race, why his age, his negative charisma, his VP, his mumbling and bumbling scare the shit out of anti-Trumpers?  He turns 81 on Monday.  Can we even imagine what he will be like at age 82, 83, 84, 85, or 86?  I despair.

I think of the Gazans' holocaust and a Quantico  Basic School memory.

    We worked with and fired or exploded all the land-based weapons in the Marine Corps’ arsenal, other than napalm: M60 air-cooled machine guns that fired 7.62 mm rounds, water-cooled machine guns that fired the larger .50 caliber rounds, hand grenades, anti-tank and anti-personnel land mines, 60 mm and 81 mm mortars, 3.5 inch rocket launchers a/k/a “bazookas,” 106 mm recoilless rifles.  We conducted exercises with tanks, huge roaring monsters on tracks with 105 mm guns.  We fired 105 mm and 155 mm howitzers.  We were bused down to Little Creek to conduct an amphibious assault.  We were helo-lifted by H34 helicopters, the workhouse of the early Vietnam War, in vertical assault and other exercises. We studied nuclear, chemical and biological warfare and endured exposure to tear gas.

In the fall, we were ‘treated’ to “Hell Night.”  Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History, commented during a recent interview on C-Span’s Book TV, “American troops are basically trained to blow things up and kill people.”  His observation was entirely correct, all of that ‘hearts and minds’ stuff notwithstanding.  Hell Night was a demonstration of the sights and sounds and the feel of blowing things up and killing people and of being blown up and killed.  Specifically, it was a demonstration of the defensive firepower employed along a ‘main line of resistance.’ It was conducted after sundown.  We were bused from the Basic School to a clearing in the woods where bleachers were set up.  The lieutenants were required to be present.  Wives were encouraged to be present and Anne attended.  As dusk turned to darkness, an introductory explanation of what we were about to see and hear and feel was given and then all hell broke loose.  Artillery barrages began, white phosphorous flares were lofted to illuminate the battlefield, mortars exploded, machine guns laid down interlocking fields of fire, recoilless rifle rounds hit salvage tanks made visible by the white phosphorous.  It was a relatively low-tech, 1963 version of the obscene 2003 Shock and Awe show that Bush and Rumsfeld and their military myrmidons put on in Baghdad, but it was terrifying to imagine oneself on the receiving end of the weaponry.  It was scary just to see the tracer rounds from the small arms and the flash and blast of the high explosive weapons, to hear the infernal noise, and to feel the concussions from the explosions.

I have two thoughts remembering that night in the woods.  First, I am reminded of what my father experienced on the beach of Iwo Jima.  He and the other Marines and hospital corpsmen had unimaginable firepower unleashed on them for days on end.  Japanese howitzers, rockets, mortars, mines and machine guns in front of them and the Navy’s 16 inch guns on the battleships, 8 inch guns on the cruisers, and 5 inch guns on the destroyers behind them.  An inferno, with dead and dying and wounded Marines – and parts of Marines’ bodies - all around.

I think too of the fact that Anne was there, that wives were encouraged to attend.  I wonder what the thinking was behind that.  To give spouses a clearer idea of the danger of combat?  To bring home the reality of what Marines do?  To scare them?  To make them more supportive of their husbands’ work at the risk of them becoming less supportive of their husbands’ work?  Marine Corps training is thoroughly thought-out; nothing is done without a specific set of objectives.  I wonder just what were the objectives of having the wives present.  I wonder about it more now than I did then.

Every time I see a news report showing explosions in Gaza I think of the fact that almost certainly civilians on the receiving end of the bomb or rocket are being killed, injured, maimed,  burned, broken apart, or crushed.  Men, women, children, young, old.  My Jewish friends would probably object to my use of the term 'holocaust' to describe what is being done in Gaza now, but in what sense is it not a holocaust?  Old men and women, disabled people, mothers and fathers with infants, toddlers, and children are targeted if not intentionally, at least knowingly.  Fish in a barrel.  "The horror, the horror."

Geri is off to the symphony with Micaela tonight.  Brahms 4th Symphony, Shostakovich Cello Concerto performed by Andrei Ioniƫa, Ruth Reinhardt conducting.  I would probably enjoy this concert more than Geri but (1) Caela invited Geri, and (2) the process of getting to the symphony hall and getting seated would not be an easy one for me,  and then there's the problem of pit stops.  Alas.

       

11/17/23

 Friday, November 17, 2023

In bed at 9:45, awake @ 4, up at 4:40.  46°, drizzle, high of 56°, wind NNW at 15 mph, 6-16/26, WC is 39°.  Sunrise at 6:46, sunset at 4:26, 9+39.

Treadmilll; pain.  Another morning with CPP.  I'll be seeing the urologist a 8:15 on Monday.  I'm thinking levator ani syndrome but probably just another term for CPP, interstitial cystitis, etc.

Lilly at the dining room doorway waiting for a treat after an outing

It's dark and a fly is attracted to my laptop screen.  We have a flying critter in the house, taking shelter from the dropping temps?  It reminds me of Emily Dickinson:

I heard a Fly buzz – when I died – 

The Stillness in the Room

Was like the Stillness in the Air – 

Between the Heaves of Storm – 

The Eyes around – had wrung them dry – 

And Breaths were gathering firm

For that last Onset – when the King

Be witnessed – in the Room – 

I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away

What portions of me be

Assignable – and then it was

There interposed a Fly – 

With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz – 

Between the light – and me – 

And then the Windows failed – and then

I could not see to see – 

. . . . . . . 

That reminds me of Psalm 46: "He says 'Be still, and know that I am God.'"  A strange sequence of early morning thoughts when I woke up thinking of Lonnie Donegan's 1961 hit song:

Does your chewing gum lose its flavor

on the bedpost overnight?

If your mother says don't chew it,

Do you swallow it in spite?

Can you catch it on your tonsils,

Can you heave it left & right?

Does your chewing gum lose its flavor

on the bedpost overnight?

. . . . 

Also thinking of yesterday's mindfulness discussion and the idea of STILLNESS.  "The three stillnesses are stillness of body, speech, and mind. . .  You are not doing things like moving, talking, or following thoughts and it is important you notice these non-actions as a union of an absence and a tangible clear presence. They are not just nothing; by noticing the three stillnesses you bring stillness to life and directly experience a new dimension of your being."

Dickinson, the Psalmist, Lonnie Donegan, and the Buddha.  Good morning.

"Donald Trump is the biggest danger to the world in 2024." Thus editorializes The Economist.  "In our 38th annual predictive guide to thecoming year, and in all that time no single person has ever eclipsed our analysis as much as Donald Trump eclipses 2024. . . . This is a perilous moment for a man like Mr. Trump to be back knocking on the door of the Oval Office.  Democracy is in trouble at home.  Mr. Trump's claim to have won in 2020 was more than a lie: it was a cynical bet that he could manipulate and intimidate his compatriots, and it has worked.  America also faces growing hostility abroad, challenged by Russia in Ukriane, by Iran and its allied militieas in the Middle East and by Cina across the Taiwan Strait and in the South China Sea.  Those three countries loosely co0ordinate their efforts and share a vision of a new international order in which might is right and autocrats are secure. . . A second Trump term would be a watershed in a way the first was not.  Victory would confirm his most destructive instincts about power.  His plans would encounter less resistance.  And because America will have voted him in while knowing the worst, its moral authority would decline.  The election will be decided by tens of thousands of voters in just a handful of states.  In 2024 the fate of the world will depend on their ballots.

. . . . . 

And Wisconsin is one of them.  This ominous warning reminds me of my moaning to Kitty about America falling into fascism following Trump.  I didn't get into that in this text message, but it's the one I sent to her 2 years ago today:

Good Morning, Sweetheart,

      Two nights ago, for no reason known to me, I lost all the text messages saved on my laptop.  Hundreds, thousands just disappeared overnight.  And now I can’t type new messages so I am now using my phone with my clumsy fingers on the tiny keyboard.  I’m very displeased by this, very very displeased.

    I got a call from Kelly yesterday and I am always eager to hear from her but. She is not very informative.  I wish I could be with you in Arizona but I don’t think it’s in the cards.  I’m not in very good shape myself these days, feeling like I’m 90 years old rather than 80.  Long distance travel just about does me in.

    I am hoping beyond hope that Michael and especially Chrissi will be able to provide all the help you need but this COVID situation sure makes life more difficult for all of you.  I have the sense that neither Jim nor Chrissi is very symptomatic and I sure hope that is true.

    Geri learned yesterday that her good friend who lives across the street is building a new house and will be moving away, not all that far but still not in the neighborhood.  Its a big disappointment for Geri and will be a big loss.

 I hope you are bearing up under all your challenges.  I’m sure you know you are in my thoughts and prayers every day, every night, and every in between time.❤️🙏🏻❤️ 

What a blessing she was to me; what a blessing she still is in my memory.  I'm thankful that I've been able to save years and years of messages we share with each other every morning for so many years.  More blessings.  I'm reminded to back up onto my external hard drive this laptop again tomorrow as I try to do every Saturday now (wow, that's some awkward sentence.😝)

David and Ellis dropped over at 5.  Ellis brought a print of this year's school picture and David lifted the window over the kitchen sink whiich I could raise more than 3 inches or so.  We had to lift it to close the storm window.  While Geri and David schmoozed about Thanksgiving dinner, Ellis and I identified movie and book references in the moving ROKU graphic on the TV screen: a Harry Potter, King Kong, Showboat, Jaws, Rear Window, The Birdman of Alcatraz, Around the World in 80 Days, Diner. Sleepless in Seattle.

11/16/23

 Thursday, November 16, 2023

In bed at 10:45, up at 6:34, let Lilly out, 46°, high of 60°, mostly cloudy, AQI=95 (PN2.5), wind SSW at 11 mph,  2-19/35, windy afternoon expected. Sunrise at 6:45 at 115°SE, sunset at 4:27 at 245°SW, 9+41 .  Solar noon at 11:36 a.m., alt. at 28°   

Journaling and my 'asshole epiphany.  It's odd the things we remember from long ago, and perhaps odder the things we partially remember.  Many years ago when I was a young professor at the law school, I drove to work one day along Lake Drive and Lincoln Memorial Drive on the lakefront.  There was to be a faculty meeting that day and I was thinking about my position on some matter that would be coming up.  I knew that my position would not find favor with my older, much more conservative colleagues, and I recall thinking to myself, "If I say such and such, they'll think I'm an asshole."  That thought was immediately followed by "Maybe I am an asshole on this issue, so what."  The words aren't exact but I recall pretty vividly the epiphanous insight that on some issues I might be an asshole, out of sync with most others, and even maybe wrong but also perhaps right and the others wrong and that I could live with that, being outé was OK.  The thought sequence occurred as I was turning from Lake Drive onto Lincoln Memorial Drive at Lake Park.  What I don't recall is what the issue was on which I would be the outlier, the asshole.  There were many issues over many years on which I differed from my older, Republican, traditional Catholic colleagues.  I'm thinking back on that experience now in connection with the practice of journaling, attempting to put in writing my thoughts on any number of matters on which my thoughts may be incoherent, unclear, perhaps contradictory, uninformed or misinformed, perhaps "tattooed in my cradle" with tribal falsities, biases, and prejudices, etc., or simply wrong.   I'm also thinking of my many thoughts of my complicities, my weaknesses, guilt, all that Yeatsian 'responsibility so weighs me down' and 'my conscience or my vanity appalled' stuff.  I realize that this paragraph itself is incoherent, without a clear sequitur between its beginning and this ending, but so be it I guess, maybe I am an asshole.

Meditation and Mindfulness Awareness.  This morning for the first time, I dialed in to join this group, moderated out of Green Bay.  There were perhaps 8 veterans in the group [ plus Lou, a peer counselor out of Green Bay, and Mary, a Whole Health health coach out of GB.   It was interesting and I will probably stick with it.  I'm about to leave to go to the North Shore and WFB libraries to check out some Mindfulness materials. . .  I picked up 2 DVDs on mindfulness practice and one book "Beginning Mindfulness: Learning the Way of Awareness."

Fintan O'Toole: Biden's Selective Outrage in the November 14 issue of NYRB  O'Toole is one of my favorite, perhaps my favorite, essayist.  He writes great stuff for NYRB and The Irish Times.  He's a 'youngster', only 65 years old, born in Dublin to working-class parents, educated (like me) by the Irish Christian Brothers (a/k/a ICBs or International Child Beaters), and at University College-Dublin, not Trinity or Oxford or Cambridge.  Also, like me, he is not a big fan of Joseph Robinette Biden.  He's not utterly condemnatory, like MAGA morons, but he isn't taken in by Biden's schtick.  His most recent offering in NYRB about Biden's selective outrage is subtitled "The rhetorical choice to pair Israel and Ukraine has not created a common moral cause. It has exposed a double standard."  He writes:

The pairing of Israel and Ukraine has not created a single moral cause. It has exposed a double standard. From the early days of Putin’s war on Ukraine, as evidence began to emerge of the extensive war crimes committed by his forces, it was clear that there was a weak spot in America’s accusations of Russian depravity. The US has a history of deep ambivalence toward war crimes—evident in, for example, its refusal to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Its inconsistency on this score has long threatened to undermine the belief, so important to the struggle being waged by the people of Ukraine, that Putin is violating not just territorial borders but moral boundaries. For Putin it is good news indeed that the US, so fierce in its denunciation of his attacks on civilians, has been so forbearing in its attitude to similar assaults on Gaza. His cynical belief that ethical standards are just weapons in the propaganda war is being vindicated. . . . 

There has been nothing secret about Israel’s intent to punish the whole population of Gaza by depriving them of electricity and water. On October 9 the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, announced a “complete siege” of the Strip. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel.” The following day the Israeli Army’s coordinator of government activities in the territories, Major General Ghassan Alian, addressed the population of Gaza in Arabic: “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water. There will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” 

We do not have to guess how the Biden administration would have responded to such statements had they come from Moscow rather than Tel Aviv. In November 2022 Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the United Nations, spoke to the security council about Russia’s destruction of civilian infrastructure in Ukrainian cities, which had left millions of people without power or clean water: . . . 

ILater that month the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, used even stronger language to condemn Russian attacks on vital infrastructure: “Heat, water, electricity—for children, for the elderly, for the sick—these are President Putin’s new targets. He’s hitting them hard. This brutalization of Ukraine’s people is barbaric.” . . . . 

In July, when the US began to share evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine with the ICC, The New York Times reported that “American intelligence agencies are said to have gathered information including details about decisions by Russian officials to deliberately strike civilian infrastructure in Ukraine.” Assuming such reports are accurate, this means that the Biden administration has been actively helping the ICC prepare a possible indictment of Putin for deliberately depriving civilians of electricity and clean water. 

Each recorded fatal Israeli airstrike on Gaza since October 7 has reportedly caused an average of ten civilian deaths. The Biden administration has acknowledged that killing innocent people at this rate is unacceptable. As Blinken put it on a visit to India, “Far too many Palestinians have been killed; far too many have suffered these past weeks.” By the logic it applied to Iran, the US has to take responsibility for its indirect part in those deaths. Yet there is no evidence that it is willing to hold itself to the moral standards it insists on for others—and very little evidence either that the influence it seeks to wield behind the scenes in its dealings with Netanyahu has had much effect on the ground in Gaza. The administration’s tacit moral case—that its backing for Israel’s war allows it to save Palestinian lives by restraining what Biden, on his visit to Tel Aviv, called “an all-consuming rage”—seems more and more like wishful thinking.

As the conflict in Ukraine looks increasingly attritional and settles into a bloody stalemate with no obvious endpoint, it has become harder for democracies to sustain the idea that this is not a proxy war between power blocs but a genuine struggle for decent values and an international order based on universal laws. What will those Western governments say this winter when Putin again tries to destroy Ukraine’s power grids? Can they say, as they have before, that these attacks are horrific and barbaric? Or must they now preserve an awkward silence because such language has lost the power to express a shared sense of revulsion at all inhumane acts, whoever perpetrates them? 

O'Toole wrote another piece in NYRB two weeks ago: "No Endgame in Gaza: After weeks of bombardment and thousands of deaths, what are Netanyahu’s political and ethical limits?"  There he wrote:

Peacemaking is a political process. Wars may shape the circumstances in which it is done, but they do not make it happen. Rabin, one of Israel’s most accomplished warriors, understood that truth. With his assassination and Netanyahu’s rise, it was deliberately unlearned. Politics—the negotiation of a just settlement with the Palestinians—was abandoned and replaced by the illusion that security could indeed be created and maintained by planes, tanks, fortifications, and surveillance technology. That illusion has died a terrible death, but it retains a zombie existence. It persists because the first condition of a return to politics would be the admission that Netanyahu’s whole approach has been a disaster, not just for the Palestinians, but for Israel. . . . 

The idea of controlled carnage ended in the unrestrained slaughter of October 7. Netanyahu was forced to abandon overnight the scheme that had been the touchstone of his whole approach to the Palestinian question: keeping Hamas strong enough to deny authority to the Palestinian Authority, but weak enough to pose no more than a sporadic and limited threat to Israeli citizens. . . .

The failure of Israel’s Plan A was acknowledged with its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. The even more catastrophic collapse of Plan B has been conceded, as it had to be, after Hamas’s attacks destroyed the illusion of literal and political containment. But the only response of which Netanyahu seems capable is a completely incoherent mix of Plan A and Plan B. There will be, for an unknown period, a military occupation. But it will end in some kind of reversion to the situation that followed the 2005 withdrawal: power without responsibility. Israel will exert complete power over Gaza. But it will take no responsibility for Gaza. This is not a plan. It is a fusion of two failures.

Netanyahu is Trump in a kippah, but much smarter, more politically astute, and never buffoonish.  He has led his country to disaster and chaos, just as Trump will lead the U.S. to disaster and chaos if he is returned to the White House, which now is looking more like a probability than a mere possibility.  Joe Biden provided an escape from Trump's treacheries in 2020 but he may lead the U.S. and the world to a more disastrous Trump return in 2024.

 

Death and Destruction on tracks

 A start

 

 

 

 

11/15/23

 Wednesday, November 15, 2023

In bed at 10, up at 5:45, let Lilly out, 46°, clear, high of 59°, wind SW at 13 mph, 3-14/25,  Sunrise at 6:44, sunset at 4:27, 9+43.

Treadmill; pain.  I'm having CPP this morning, worrisome.  I took an Advil, keeping my fingers crossed. . . .  Pain still here at 10 a.m., called the VA Urology Clinic to see about moving up my 1/25/24 appointment since this pain seems to be more testicular than pelvic floor.  Got on the treadmill at 11 a.m.   25:00  and 0.60 while watching Dana Bash on CNN.

Thinking about my 'stick' collection.  I have 4 canes and one walking stick.  The walking stick I personally crafted many years ago from a sapling at Bean's Lake.  I keep it near the front door to our house.  My oldest cane is one I bought for my father almost 20 years ago at a pharmacy on Port Road, across from Kopp's.  Perhaps it was presumptuous of me because he never wanted to use it, but I dreaded every time he had to step down from stairs or a stoop.  Now I use it very often but not always when I am out and about.  I keep it in the Volvo.  It has sentimental value for me.  My favorite cane however is one that Andy purchased on a trip to the UK more than 30 years ago.  It's solid wood, unlike my other canes, and is topped not by a handle like the other ones but by a very smooth knob.  Until I bought a rubber cane tip from Amazon, the bottom was capped by a thin metal wrapping that made for hazardous footing.  My Dad once told me not to love anything that can't love me back so I guess I can't say that I love this old wooden cane, but I rely on it every day, especially in the middle of the night and on my early morning wake-ups and it's come to seem like an old friend. I keep it next to me on the library recliner during the day and next to my bed at night.   I have another cane I keep at the bottom of the basement staircase in case I need some support down there.  So far I haven't.  I can't remember why I bought it.  My fourth cane is a metal foldable staff that is taller than the other three.  I saw an old guy at the VA using one and thought it might be useful for strolling, which I never do.  Nonetheless, I got one from Amazon and use it only when I walk outside around our house, on the (to me) treacherously uneven grass-covered ground that can throw me off balance.  I keep it next to the back doors to the house.  I also have two 'rollators' provided to me by the VA because of my balance and gait challenges.  One I call "Judy" and the other "Rachel".  One is taller than the other and keeps me from leaning down on it while walking, stressing my shoulders.  When I used them, which I haven't in a long time, I would say to Geri, "I'm going for a walk with Judy (or Rachel)."  I think I stopped going for walks on Wakefield and environs because I'm embarassed to be using a rollator.  False masculine pride, foolish.   I've wondered recently whether I should put the shorter of the two in the back of the Volvo to use on my many trips to the VA.  I haven't done it yet in part because it seems like an admission of defeat to use it rather than relying on my cane for stability and support.  Plus, walkers and wheelchairs take up a lot of space in the VA waiting rooms, like the many loooonng trucks that are too big for the parking spaces in the VA patients' garage.  They stick way out into the traffic lanes in the garage requiring cars to stop and wait when another car approaches going the other way.  The wheelchairs and rollators are a bit  like that in the waiting rooms, obtrusive.  Of course their users need them and no one begrudges them their use, but I wonder about those trucks in the garage.  Do their owners really need those big trucks or is it a macho thing, real men drive big pickups?  Just wondering.   Also thinking that when the parking garage was built, I suspect the architects weren't contemplating widespread use of pickup trucks by mostly old vets.  (I can be pretty damn snooty, a nasty fault.😢)

Thoughts while reading this morning's WaPo.  (1) What ever happened to Ukraine?  That was went from everyday news to hard to find news. (2) I've mentioned my thought that one major concern in Washington about a bigger, multi-front war in Israel is that Israel would use 'tactical' nuclear weapons if its leaders believed Israel's existence were at risk.  Netanyahu has suspended from his cabinet Amochay Eliyahu, a member who has publicly mentioned such use in an interview on Hebrew radio, saying there is no such thing as noncombatants in Gaza. (3) On Saturday,  the Israeli agriculture minister, Avi Dichter, said that the military campaign in Gaza was explicitly designed to force the mass displacement of Palestinians. “We are now rolling out the Gaza nakba,” he said in a television interview. “Gaza nakba 2023.” (4)  Since Oct. 7, according to the United Nations, Israeli soldiers have killed 150 Palestinians, including 44 children, in clashes. Jewish settlers, some of whom are armed and informally allied with the military, have killed eight people, one of them a child, according to the United Nations.  Three Israelis have been killed in attacks by Palestinians since Oct. 7.  (5)  With much of the dehumanizing language employed by Israeli leaders, it's impossible to tell whether they are refering to Hamas or to Palestinians generally.  Most of them would say it's the former, but one must wonder.  (6)  I wonder how does a society, a culture, or an individual, Israeli or Palestinian, recover from what has been going on since October 7th. 

Journalling/Blogging.  This is my 487th day of writing a daily journal using Google's  Blogger/Blogspot app.  I started at the end of July last year. thinking I would try it for a week and then a month.  I mentioned my journalling to Jody, the occupational therapist and Healing Touch practitioner at the VA yesterday, saying that I often wonder why I do it, but that one of the reasons is that writing requires mental activity, activity as opposed to receptivity or passivity, like watching a movie or a sporting event (as if😊) or listening to music.  Ditto with my painting.  Even typing the journal entries requires maintaining a skill, coordinating finger movement, relying on muscle memory but using all the fingers and thumbs on both hands.  But mostly I use it to try to keep tabs on my cognitive decline with age: can I still compose coherent sentences and string them into a coherent paragraph?  Each journal page is evidence of what is or is not going on in my aged brain.  Geri asked me the other day whether I was concerned that some malefactor might use the publicly available blog for identity theft and I said 'no,' largely because of my confidence that no one reads my ponderings and musings other than moi seulment.  I learned that with my memoir.   I suppose this is true for most or perhaps all writers other than those who write for a living (reporters, novelists, poets, professors, et al.) or those who write to a correspondent, an interlocutor; we write for ourselves, to clarify our thoughts (like Flannery O'Connor), to simply blow off steam, or for some other reason.  I print off each day's journal entry so I have a hard copy, probably because of my old timer's need for a paper record, something tangible not digital.  I have a pile of these paper pages on my desk in the basement and the other day I had a vision of someone looking at them after my death and tossing them into the recycling bin or perhaps the trash bin.  So it goes.  Sic transit gloria mundi.  Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.  Or as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer would have  it:   “In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our brother Charles (his journal and his memoir); and we commit his body (and his papers) to the ground; earth to earth; ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless him and keep him, the Lord make his face to shine upon him and be gracious unto him and give him peace. Amen.”

RE Trump's use of Hitler rhetoric.  Excerpt from Vanity Fair, :After the Gold Rush", by Marie Brenner, September 1,1990:

by Donald Trump appears to take aspects of his German background seriously. John Walter works for the Trump Organization, and when he visits Donald in his office, Ivana told a friend, he clicks his heels and says, “Heil Hitler,” possibly as a family joke.

Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.

“Did your cousin John give you the Hitler speeches?” I asked Trump.

Trump hesitated. “Who told you that?”

“I don’t remember,” I said.

“Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew.” (“I did give him a book about Hitler,” Marty Davis said. “But it was My New Order, Hitler’s speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”) 

Later, Trump returned to this subject. “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”

Is Ivana trying to convince her friends and lawyer that Trump is a crypto-Nazi? Trump is no reader or history buff. Perhaps his possession of Hitler’s speeches merely indicates an interest in Hitler’s genius at propaganda. The Führer often described his defeats at Stalingrad and in North Africa as great victories. Trump continues to endow his diminishing world with significance as well. “There’s nobody that has the cash flow that I have,” he told The Wall Street Journal long after he knew better. “I want to be king of cash.” 

I remember reading this long and fascinating story when it was published, or perhaps reading about it, especially about the book of Hitler's speeches on or near his bedside, and believing it then, as I believe it now.

Two trips to Port Washington today, one yesterday.   Yesterday to Walmart and Duluth Trading Company for 2 pairs of sweatpants.  Today to True Value Hardware for driveway reflectors and to drop off  some offerings at SVDP on CTH C then again to drive Andy up to Costco to pick up the Subaru after its punctured tired was repaired.  Nice conversation with Andy all the way up.