8/7/24

 Wednesday, August 7, 2024

1957 Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

1964 US Congress approved the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.

In bed around 9, awake at 1:45, up and out at 2:30, unable to sleep with hip, leg, and knee pain.  I let Lilly out at about 3.     

Prednisone, day 87, 15 mg., day 9/14.  I took the 15 mg. at 4:50 a.m. with a Pink Lady apple.  I took 1300 mg. of Tylenol at 8:30.  I took my morning meds at about 5 p.m. and saw that the only meds left were for Monday.  I think I have missed taking these daily meds for at least a couple of day - not good.  I've moved the new weekly pill box to the TV room to remind myself to take them.

Text message to Sarah:  I’m ashamed that I missed your anniversary.  It’s on my calendar yet it still got past me.  I’ve been in bad shape for almost a month now.  I woke up with a nasty pain in my right hip on July 12th and it’s been with me ever since, spreading down my leg to my right knee.  Yesterday I received an ultrasound-guided injection of cortisone in the hip at the VA hospital but I won’t know if it’s effective for 2 to 5 days.  If it is, great; if not, the docs will look for a cause other than hip arthritis:  spinal stenosis, sciatica, who knows.  In any case, I’ve been unable to stand on my feet for longer than a minute or two without quite a lot of pain for the last 27 days and may have actually developed a bed sore on my butt from all the sitting.  The combination of persistent pain and immobility have me more than a little distracted from much of everything else in life, including your anniversary, for which I apologize.  I’ve been on prednisone for 3 months now and while it helped the polymyalgia rheumatica in my shoulders, wrists, and hands, it’s done nothing for the hip and knee pain and created some side effect problems of its own.  Arrghgh! but belated Happy Anniversary to you and Christian.  (And the LIVE ANIMALS ON STAGE just about takes my breath away!)❤️❤️❤️

    

Anniversaries thoughts:  The 1957 Civil Rights Act was a national disgrace.  Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, our most wicked state, led the longest one-man filibuster in Senate history, longer than 24 hours.  Lyndon Johnson was the majority leader and wanted the bill passed and to get it passed, he had all of its most effective parts stripped from it to make it palatable to Southern and conservative Democrats.  There was another civil rights act in 1960, but no effective legislation until after the assassination of JFK, the presidency of LBJ, and the strong civil rights acts in 1964, 1965,, and 1968.  It reminds me that from the time I was born and for my first 13 years, I lived in Jim Crow America when African Americans were subject to invidious discrimination in housing, employment, health care, education, government benefits, and access to public accommodations.  They were considered second-class citizens, but it would be more accurate to think of them as non-citizens since they were accorded virtually none of the rights and privileges of citizenship/  Indeed, for many White Americans, Blacks were considered not merely non-citizens, but subhumans, a lesser race or species, different in kind from White people.  Whites are reluctant to admit this, but I've long suspected it is true.  The economic system of chattel slavery reinforced this thinking over 2 and 1/2 centuries and Jim Crow for almost another century until the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.  It is still with many of us in the 2020s despite the progress made in the last half-century.

Less than a year after Congress gave LBJ the Gulf of Tonkin resolution broadly authorizing him to use whatever military force he chose to assist the former French Indochinese colonies in fighting communist aggression, Johnson sent the Marines, and then much of America's military forces, into Vietnam, the biggest mistake in his political career.  The day I left Cleveland for Japan and Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson spoke with Robert McNamara about the situation in Vietnam:

. . . it’s going to be difficult for us to very long prosecute effectively a war that far away from home with the [political] divisions we have here and particularly the potential divisions.  And it’s really had me concerned for a month and I’m very depressed about it because I see no program from either Defense or State that gives me much hope of doing anything except just praying and grasping to hold on during [the] monsoon [season] and hope they’ll quit.  And I don’t believe they’re ever goin’ to quit.  And I don’t see that we have any plan for victory militarily or diplomaticall

 How prescient.

. . . . 

IN RETROSPECT

Robert McNamara

I have heard it said about the difference between results and consequences that results are what we expect, consequences are what we get.  This certainly applies to our assumption about Vietnam in the summer and fall of 1965.  Reality collided with expectations.  We had no sooner begun to carry out the plan to increase dramatically U. S. forces in Vietnam than it became clear there was reason to question the strategy on which the plan was based.  Slowly, the sobering, frustrating, tormenting limitations of military operations in Vietnam became painfully apparent.  I had always been confident that every problem could be solved, but now I found myself confronting one – involving national pride and human life – that could not.

FALLING THROUGH THE EARTH, ch. 14

Danielle Trussoni

. . . My father had recently read Robert McNamara’s book [IN RETROSPECT].  Dad was never much of a reader; although he was quick-witted and intelligent, he had a hard time staying with a book.  That one, however, got his attention.  I don’t know if he finished it or not, but the parts he had read were memorized.  He would rattle off sentences between sips of his drink, quoting McNamara’s admission of his miscalculations in Vietnam.  I tried to understand exactly what made Dad so angry, but after a while he went silent and would answer my questions tersely.  Finally, he turned to me and said, “Do you know what this book means?  Do you know what this guy is saying?”

I didn’t know anything about Robert McNamara back then.  I had never even heard his name before.  At that point in my life – before I studied the war, Vietnam was not a historical event.  It was just something that happened to my family. 

My father shook his head, disgusted.  “NcNamara’s saying they didn’t know what the hell they were doing over there.  We were wrong from the goddamned beginning."

A thought on Israel and its enemies; the U.S. and its 'friend.  I'm still in an overall condition of emotional numbness about the state of the world and of the U.S., but I'm feeling some intellectual outrage that Biden, Austin, and Blinken are sending American warships, aircraft, and troops to Israel to defend it in a mess that it has made for itself, but which it expects the U.S. to finance and spill American blood over.    Again I think 'With a friend like Israel, who needs enemies?'

A further thought on Joe Biden's fantasy of a second term.  It's almost hard to believe, but very encouraging, to see the enthusiasm growing around Kamala Harris's anointed campaign for the presidency.  In the 2020 election, she couldn't even make it to the Iowa caucuses before having to drop out; now she is seen as the nation's savior from a second and potentially catastrophic Trump term of office.  Virtually the entire Democratic party was in a deep funk when Biden insisted on running for a second term, wanting to remain in the Oval Office until he was on death's door at age 86; now the party is energized, invigorated, donative, and almost joyous to support Harris and the Minnesota governor most Americans had never heard of.  I wonder still whether Biden can admit to himself that his decision to seek a second term was selfish, narcissistic, and blockheaded.  I'm avoiding the words "dumb" and "stupid" though, although I must admit to his legislative and diplomatic 'smarts', he has always struck me as having a deficit of smarts that accounts for his poor performance in schools, including at Syracuse Law School.  Also his inability over a lifetime of public speaking to become a better public speaker.  Also, his unwillingness to stop telling the same lies and exaggerations long after they have been exposed by the press.  I can't help thinking that there is something about the man that is, as we used to say, NTB, not too bright.  And of course, I can't forget the words anonymously and apocryphally attributed to Barack Obama: "Don't underestimate Joe's ability to fuck things up."  If Harris loses the election in November, we'll long remember those words.  So will Joe Biden.

Larry Anderson's visit.  Larry was here from noon to about 2:30 and brought lunch: ham and cheese sandwiches and chips.  A very pleasnt, consversation-filled visit.  Much discussion of medical stuff, especially bone surgeries, very little poltics.  I told him I was honored that he came so far to visit.    I wasn't his only stop, but he always makes it a point to see me when he is in town and I do consider it quite an honor.  Larry is now my oldest living fired, with EGF and TSJ gone.

Sarah's coming to town.  The weedend of 9/14 & 9/15.

J. D. Vance is attacking Walz's 24 military record in the National Guard.  I'm rapidly growing to hate this guy.  Walz served 24 years in the National Guard.  He retired as a Master Sergeant E-8 two months before his unit received orders to Iraq in 2005.  He successfully ran for Congress after retiring.  His unit actually went to Iraq in 2006.  Vance accuses Walz of "abandoning" his unit to avoid service in a combat zone.  Vance and the Republicans will make every effort to smear Walz and it will undoubtedly work with many, maybe most, Republican voters.  Meanwhile, Trump keeps smearing Kamala Harris's intellignece,, which will also be accepted by many of his folllowers.  Is it possible not to hate American politics?

Boeing's Spaceliner astronauts may not return to Earth on thier spacecraft, and not until next year. From the NYTimes today:

For weeks, NASA has downplayed problems experienced by Starliner, a Boeing spacecraft that took two astronauts to the International Space Station in June.  But on Wednesday, NASA officials admitted that the issues might be more serious than first thought and that the astronauts might not return on the Boeing vehicle, after all.  The agency is exploring a backup option for the astronauts, Suni Wiliams and Butch Wilmore, to instead hitch a ride back to Earth on a spacecraft built by Boeing’s competitor SpaceX.  The astronauts’ stay in orbit, which was to be as short as eight days, could be extended into next year.

This is VERY bad news for Boeing, bad news for NASA, and bad news for America's aviation and space industry.  What kind of future does Boeing have with its record over  the past several years?  What does it say about management of aviation manufacturing companies by MBAs and consultants rather than by engineers?

 

8/6/24

Fur Tuesaay, August 6, 2025

1945 HIROSHIMA

1965 LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act.

2018 Chicago police appealed for help after 66 people were shot in the city in one weekend

In bed around 10, up and out around 4:15 when I lit Lilly out into light rain, 21 mph wind with 33 mph gusts.  We've had .45 " of rain in the last 6 hours, and another .25" is expected in the next 24.  Last night at bedtime, perhaps 3 doors south of us.  Geri saw a gurney being wheeled toward the house. ??? 🙏.  . The ambulances turned out to be for our next-door neighbor John McGregor who had been in great pain for a week, much like mine, i.e., hip and leg.  John and I are the same age.  His wife Debby says the docs think he is suffering from spinal stenosis at L4, the same area where I have what x-rays revealed as "severe arthritis."  Hopefully, we will know more about John's condition, and mine, later.. Today is my PM&R appointment with Dr. England.🙏 . . . Dr. England said it takes between 2 and 5 to 7 days for the cortisone injection in my hip to relieve the pain and then only if the cause is arthritis in the hip  If I don't obtain pain relief over that period, they will look for another source of the pain.  Stenosis?  Sciatica?  Fingers crossed but worried, especially after learning of John M.'s situation.

Prednisone, day 86, 15 mg., day 8/14.    Today is day 26 of hip/thigh/knee pain.  I took my 15 mg. at 4:45., followed by some Dave's Bread.

An archival photo of a Hiroshima baby too weak to draw

milk from the mother’s breast.  The baby was

reported to have died three days after the photo.    

Hiroshima.  In July 1965, on my way to Vietnam, I visited the Peace Memorial at Hiroshima with my Marine buddy, Ron Kendall.  From my memoir:

It was hard not to feel some responsibility, even guilt.  I was (forgive the expression) blown away by the photographs and artifacts and the realization of where I was.  I was a couple weeks shy of my 4th birthday when the bomb was dropped, but I am connected with Hiroshima by the fact that I am American.  By the fact that my father shared a killing field with Japanese soldiers.  By the fact that the justification for dropping the bomb was to obviate the necessity of invading the home islands, an invasion my father had been in line for.  By the fact that I was a Marine on my way to another Asian killing field.  By shared humanity.   The Japanese government would have resisted invasion to the bitter end, as the Germans had, and the cost in lives would have been appalling.  There doesn’t seem to be much doubt about that.  Indeed, the battles on Iwo Jima and Okinawa had been ‘designed’ to make it clear to the Americans how high the cost of invasion of the home islands would be.  But was it necessary to bomb the city?  Two cities?  Could the power of the Bomb have been shown by dropping it atop Mount Fuji or in Tokyo Bay or on the big naval base at Yokusoka?  The U. S. had inflicted perhaps hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties by the fire bombing of Tokyo, Yokohama, Kawasaki, Kobe, Nagoya, and Osaka starting in March of 1945 while the battle was raging on Iwo Jima, and then on Okinawa.  The destruction already inflicted on the home islands narrowed the choice of ‘suitable’ targets for the A-bombs but I believe it is naïve to think that Truman and the generals and the American public did not wish to inflict maximum civilian casualties.  The firebombing raids proved otherwise.  The feeling had to have been widespread that, as the song said, ‘we’re going to have to slap the dirty little Jap, and Uncle Sam’s the guy who can do it.” 

I couldn’t know it at the time, of course, but visiting the Peace Memorial and seeing evidence of the devastation wrought by American bombing was a fitting introduction to my impending work in Vietnam.  The Japanese suffered hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties from American strategic bombing, mostly from B-29 missions from late 1944 through the August, 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The human toll in Vietnam was to be worse.

. . . .  

The best book I have read about modern war is Chris Hedges’ War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,  including this passage:

There is among many who fight in war a sense of shame, one that is made worse by the patriotic drivel used to justify the act of killing in war.  Those who seek meaning in patriotism do not want to hear the truth of war, wary of bursting the bubble.  The tensions between those who were there and those who were not, those who refuse to let go of the myth and those that know it to be a lie, feed into the dislocation and malaise after war.  In the end, neither side dares to speak to the other.  The shame and alienation of combat soldiers, coupled with the indifference to the truth of war by those who were not there, reduces many societies to silence.  It seems better to forget.

“I, too, belong to this species,” J. Glenn Gray wrote [in The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle].  “I am ashamed not only of my own deeds, not only of my nation’s deeds, but of human deeds as well.  I am ashamed to be a man.”

. . . .  

From: You have misunderstood the relevance of Hannah Arendt - The thinker has been pillaged by those seeking to denounce Trump. They overlook her most vital insight  by Samuel Moyn,  Prospect, October 20, 2020

"In 1945, in an extraordinary essay entitled “Organised Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt warned that it would not be easy to tell the good from the bad German.  In her 1945 essay, Arendt wrote that when she met people who told her they were ashamed of being German, she was always tempted to reply: “I am ashamed of being human.”  " In America, there is going to be immense pressure to exact apologies, if not from Trump (who is incapable of them), then from those who enabled him. Not generalizing responsibility, as Arendt demanded, but othering and scapegoating is how the mainstream will proceed, in an attempt to bracket the Trump era as if it never was, for the sake of a new zero hour. Her former aficionados will stop citing Arendt precisely when she is relevant. Not only will they skirt embarrassment at being human; few will even say that they are ashamed of being American."

Other anniversaries thoughts:  The Voting Rights Act was a great step forward in America's reluctant journey toward racial justice and a truer democracy.  What Congress and LBJ created in 1965, the Republican Supreme Court took away in 2013, on a 5-4 vote, in Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529, when it ruled that the preclearance provisions of the Act concerning jurisdictions with a history of denying voting rights to minorities were unconstitutional.  The majority opinion was delivered by Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justices Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito.  What more needs be said?  The Republicans, now led by Trump, continue to assault voting rights by minorities always under the pretext of combatting 'voter fraud,' an almost nonexistent problem in American elections.

66 people were shot in one weekend in Chicago in 2018.  USA!  USA!  USA!  

 

 

8/5/24

 Monday, August 5, 2024

1964 US begins bombing North Vietnam in response to the real and imagined attacks on US Navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin

1966 Protesters threw rocks and bottles at Martin Luther King Jr. during a fair housing protest march at Marquette Park in Chicago 

1966 The Beatles released single "Yellow Submarine" with "Eleanor Rigby" in the UK

In bed at 10 p.m., awake at 2 a.m., and up and out at 2:30, with badly aching hip, thigh, and knee.  I let Lilly out at about 3.

Prednisone, day 85, 15 mg., day 7/14.   I took my 15 mg. at 4:30 a.m. and followed it with 2 slices of Dave's Bread at 4:50. 

1968,   After waking at 2, I lay awake thinking of the fact that I don't have the Volvo back yet for my PM&R procedure at noon tomorrow and thinking of the first two episodes of the 4-part CNN series on 1968 and what a traumatic year that was.  It started with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam when it became clear that the U.S. would fail in Vietnam.  The Offensive started on 31 January throughout the country, including in Saigon and at Danang.  It lasted at Danang until the middle of February and resulted in 124 Marines KIA plus 480 WIAs.  Army forces in the Da Nang area suffered 18 dead and 59 wounded. South Vietnamese and Korean casualties probably equaled or slightly exceeded the U.S. losses. U.S. estimates of PAVN/VC casualties ranged between 1,200 and 1,400 dead. I was back in Milwaukee at the time of the Tet Offensive, starting the second semester of my first year of law school, only 6 months out of the Marine Corps, and less than 2 years out of Vietnam.  I was still licking some emotional wounds I experienced on returning to the States from the Far East.  I still recalled the feeling of "this isn't going to end well" that I shared with other Marines at the Danang airbase at the end of 1965.  I very much felt like "a bird alone," unable to identify either with the war protesters or the war supporters.  On February 27th, Walter Cronkite announced his now-legendary judgment about the war:

 Tonight, back in more familiar surroundings in New York, we'd like to sum up our findings in Vietnam, an analysis that must be speculative, personal, subjective. Who won and who lost in the great Tet Offensive against the cities? I'm not sure. The Vietcong did not win by a knockout but neither did we. .  .  We've been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders both in Vietnam and Washington to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. For it seems now more certain than ever, that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.

To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, if unsatisfactory conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations.

But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.

Cronkite called it the "last big gasp" before negotiating our way out of Vietnam but it was of course far from that.  Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger sabotaged the peace negotiations that occurred in Paris at the end of LBJ's presidency and Americans wouldn't stop killing and being killed in Vietnam until March 29, 1973, 5 years later.  By that time, more than 58,000 Americans had been killed there and we will never know the number of Vietnamese killed.   During that entire period, as best I can recall, I felt emotionally numb, as in Neil Diamond's song ""I am"... I said  / To no one there / And no one heard at all /Not even the chair. / "I am"... I cried / "I am"... said I / And I am lost and I can't / Even say why / Leavin' me lonely still."  I learned that feeling of numbing myself as a child, as a defense mechanism, growing up in our claustrophobic tiny basement apartment with my father and his PTSD from combat and then my mother and her PTSD from sexual assault.  I would rely on it throughout 1968 as tragedy piled atop tragedy, bad news atop more bad news.  Indeed, it has stayed with me throughout my life as a protective measure in times that would ordinarily call for a strong emotional response.  Instead, I tend to go numb and to 'soldier on.'  Sometimes it serves me well, sometimes not.  In any case, the year of 1968 called for a lot of emotional numbing.  Before the year was over, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, leading to riots in many American cities including Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Baltimore.  On June 5th, the first anniversary of Israel's Six-Day War, Bobby Kennedy was shot by Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and died the next day.  I considered both men heroes.   Their murders led to the later election of Richard Nixon to the White House in November and the continuation and expansion of the Vietnam War.  At the end of August, the Democratic National Convention led to what the Walker Report termed "a police riot," an early reminder of the unrestrained lawlessness and brutality that law 'enforcement' personnel are capable of, especially against racial minorities and political foes.  Later yet, the country experienced the bizarre trial of "the Chicago Seven" before Judge Julius Hoffman.  The criminal convictions of the trials were all overturned by a 3 judge panel of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals including Tom Fairchild, with whom I worked years later as the Research Reporter on the Wisconsin Supreme Court's Commission on Judicial Campaign and Election Ethics.  

I was particularly struck by the introduction to the last episode of the series which was a clip from one of Richard Nixon's campaign speeches in 1968, parts of which could be used again today in 2024. 56 years later:

We look at America and we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame.  We hear sirens in the night. We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad.  We see Americans hating each other, fighting each other, killing each other at home.

We still have all-too-regular uprisings from police killings of unarmed Blacks, as we had in Kenosha in 2020 over the shooting of Jacob Blake, shot 7 times in the back at close range.  We still hear sirens in the night from thousands of shootings in American cities every year.  We don't have Americans dying on distant battlefields today, but we have tens of thousands of American sailors and Marines, soldiers and airmen preparing to defend Israel - and themselves - against massive attacks from Iran, Hezbollah, and perhaps others in the Mideast.  Just today, Iran-backed forces fired rockets into an American base in Western Iraq and wounded several American servicemen.  Mostly however we have so many Americans hating each other, fighting each other, and killing each other at home.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 by Max Hastings (2018).  I've been listening to this history on Audible and reading the paperback I just bought on eBay.  This afternoon I read the chapter on planning and execution deliberations in 1964, the year of the Tonkin Gulf incident and the year that it was very clear to leaders in Washington that the communists were winning the contest and that "we" were losing.  1964 was the year I spent working in Yuma, Arizona, at the Marine Corps Air Station, working and hanging out with a group [ of other lieutenants at the Officers' Club swimming pool, rock climbing in the Sonoran Dessert with Dave Cooper, taking painting lessons from a local art teacher with fellow Chicagoan John Kroll, socializing with them and their wives Matha and Nancy, and with Bill and Bonnie Space, generally enjoying life.  Anne was working at a small TV and radio station KBLU for Carl Witte, doing everything from receptionist work to on-air radio hosting a program at the Yuma County fair.  In Washington, a fight was going on in the Pentagon between the 2 joint chiefs who favored a massive increase in attacks on the North ( Marine Commandant Greene and Air Force leader Curtis LeMay) and the leaders of the Army and the Navy who favored continued restraint.  General Westmoreland was put in charge of MACV.  Any Vietnam veteran, and anyone who lost a loved one in that war who reads Hastings book, or reads the Pentagon Papers, can hardly help having the deepest distrust of their government.   I wonder whether Vietnam was the birthplace of my anger, pessimism, cynicism, and distrust of power structures, 'the Establishment', or what Trumpies call 'the Deep State' or has it always been a part of my character, maybe from the 6th grade when I worried about confessing my sin of Doubt - when I couldn't understand why none of the adults in my family went to church though they sent us kids to Catholic schools that taught us that not attending mass on Sundays was a mortal sin that would send one to Hell for eternity?  In any case, in my old age, I've been focused on my time in the Catholic schools, my time in the Marines, my time in Vietnam, and my homecoming, ever since I started working on my memoir, and for the last two years that I have been writing my daily journals.  I guess this is what happens to folks in their mid-80s who don't have work, volunteer, or hobby activities to occupy their thoughts; it's all backward-looking, retrospective, nostalgia, regrets, trying to make sense of the life I've lived, the time I've spent living it.  How did I go from this Catholic boy in his Confirmation uniform with his prayer book

to that Marine sitting on the sandbag bunker in Vietnam 12 years later?

Anniversaries thoughts:   The Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Less than a year later, I was landing in Chu Lai

MLK's open housing march in the Marquette Park neighborhood that my parents and Kitty lived in after they fled the blockbusting, overnight racial changes in their Englewood and Auburn-Gresham neighborhoods on the South Side.  None of them would have participated in the hostilities toward Dr. King and his fellow demonstrators but I'm sure they weren't surprised by the violence.  I was in Vietnam at the time, as part of the phony effort to "win the hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese peasants.  What a sick joke it all was.

What are the saddest songs I know?  Old Ship?  Eleanor Rigby?  What else?

Ah, look at all the lonely people

Ah, look at all the lonely people

Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been

Lives in a dream

Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door

Who is it for?

All the lonely people

Where do they all come from?

All the lonely people

Where do they all belong?

Father McKenzie writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear

No one comes near

Look at him working, darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there

What does he care?

All the lonely people

Where do they all come from?

All the lonely people

Where do they all belong?

Ah, look at all the lonely people

Ah, look at all the lonely people

Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name

Nobody came

Father McKenzie wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave

No one was saved

All the lonely people

(Ah, look at all the lonely people)

Where do they all come from?

All the lonely people

(Ah, look at all the lonely people)

Where do they all belong?

8/4/24

 Sunday, August 4, 2024

1919 Rodin Museum opened in Paris containing works left to the state by the sculptor Auguste Rodin

1925 US Marines left Nicaragua after a 13-year occupation

In bed at 9, awake at 2, and up and out at 2:15.  Lilly showed up around 3 to be let out.  She stood on the stoop and then the sidewalk for quite a long time before stepping onto the south lawn to relieve herself (or not?).  She constantly looks back through the storm door to see that I am still waiting there, just as she used to frequently look back when she would get ahead of us at the dog park, always maintaining eye contact with us.  She is losing more control over her hind legs when she is standing without moving.  They collapse under her until she decides to move, at which time they become functional, allowing her to walk and run normally.  I dozed off at some point and I woke up, or Lilly woke me up with her heavy breathing and staring to be let out, at 6:40.  Glucose has been holding steady at about 143 since my drumstick and Dave's Bread breakfast - no surge. . . . I dozed off again at some point and woke up at 10:45.

Prednisone, day 84, 15 mg., day 6/14.  I took the 15 mg. at 4:30, followed by a chicken leg and a piece of bread.  

The Zionist Wars, Herzl's War, or The Second Hundred Years War.  The world teeters on the brink of a major conflagration in the Middle East between Iran and its Muslim proxies and Israel and its Christian patron, the United States.  One-third of the world's oil supply comes from this region.   Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Qatar belong to the world’s top suppliers of fossil fuel.  Almost half a billion people live in the Middle East: Egypt with 100M,  Iran with 83M, Turkey with 80M, Iraq with 37M, Saudi Arabia with 28M,  and Yemen with 27M,  Lebanon and Israel are among the least populated nations, Lebanon with about 6M people and Israel's population depending on who gets counted.  According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, the country's population is 9.9M, but . . . (from Wikipedia) "The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics ("CBS") definition of the Area of the State of Israel:  includes East Jerusalem since 1967, which Israel unilaterally annexed;  includes the Golan Heights since 1982, which Israel unilaterally annexed; and excludes the West Bank other than East Jerusalem.  The CBS' definition of the Population of Israel, however: includes non-Israeli Palestinians (as well as Israeli Arabs/Palestinians) in East Jerusalem who have permission to live there; including Israeli settlers and others with Israeli residency permits living in Area C of West Bank; excludes Palestinian/Arab/other residents of Area C and East Jerusalem who do not have Israeli citizenship or residence; and excludes persons who are not registered (from 2008 on) and/or entered illegally, and foreign workers.  The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics defines the population of Israel as including Jews living in all of the West Bank and Palestinians in East Jerusalem but excluding Palestinians anywhere in the rest of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and foreign workers anywhere in Israel.  How many Arab Palestinians live under Israeli occupation depends on where the Arabs live and who is doing the counting, but the number appears to be at least 5M.  Israel's population consists of about 1/10th of 1% of the world's population but for the last 100 years or so, it has contributed mightily to the world's troubles because of Zionism.  Thus I wonder whether we ought to consider this current crisis, or these current crises, as the Zion Wars, Theodor Herzl's Wars, or the Second Hundred Years War, and not as just the October 7th war in Gaza, following, e.,g. the 2014 war in Gaza, the 1st and 2nd intifadas, the 1982 Lebanon war, the 1973 Yom Kippur war, the 1967 Six Day War, and the 1948  War of Independence.

The 'original' Hundred Years War lasted about 116 years, from 1337 to about 1453.  It was fought between powerful dynasties in England and France, all claiming the right to the French throne.  It was grounded in a form of medieval nationalism and greed, a lust for power and riches.  My proposed Second Hundred Years War started after the British conquered Ottoman Palestine in 1917, issued the Balfour Declaration, and encouraged Jews to move there.  Arab violent resistance was almost immediate and the resistance continues to this day.  The Second Hundred Years War is may well be longer and more deadly than the First Hundred Years War, but, who knows?, perhaps we are on the verge of a cataclysm, perhaps nuclear, that will bring it to a close, one way or another.  Netanyahu perhaps believes the cataclysm will produce an irredentist Eretz Yisrael, from the Euphrates to the Nile and from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.  Many Palestinians believe it will finally result in the destruction of Israel as a Jewish State, already badly fractured and weakened, and the return of the Muslim, Arab, Palestinians to their Holy Land.

Anniversaries thoughts.  Rodin Museum, pleasant memories of our last visit to Paris,  

Occupation of Nicaragua - "War is a Racket", Smedley Butler.

Feeling low today, brain fogged.  Unable to think clearly, or write.

8/3/24

 Saturday, August 3, 2024

1940 Charles Edward Clausen, age 19, married Mary Norma Healy, age 18, at St. Bernard's Catholic Church at 65th and Harvard Avenue in the Englewood district of Chicago.  

In bed around 9:15, awake around 4:30, and up and out at 4:50 with a very painful knee, thigh, and hip.  Are these pains sharp or dull, throbbing, burning?  They seem to be all of the descriptions.  I can't lay the laptop on my right leg because of the pain.   Four days until I see Dr. England and perhaps get some relief - perhaps. . . . Lilly has been sleeping on the floor in front of me, breathing so lightly I keep looking at her stomach to see whether she may have died overnight.  Is she breathing at all?  She is, and she wakes up at 5:30 to move into the living room without asking to be let outside.  How long before she returns?

Prednisone, day 83, 15 mg., day 5/14.   I took 15 mg. at 5 a.m.  Breakfast of 2 cold chicken legs around 6a.m.  I took 1300 mg. of Tylenol at 8 a.m.

84th Anniversary thoughts. From my memoir:

 

      

My father was slender and good-looking and took pride in his appearance.  Each Sunday, he and his lifelong friend Al Braley put on their suits, spats, fedoras, and gloves (I’m not making this up; I have this information ‘from the horse’s mouth.’) to go to Mass at St. Bernard’s and then to hang out in front of a drugstore on Wentworth Avenue watching the girls stroll by, with my father hoping that one of them would be Mary Healy, by whom he was thoroughly smitten. 

My parents married at St. Bernard’s Church on August 3, 1940.  My mother was 18 and my father a month shy of his 20th birthday.  They were practicing Catholics and they were virgins.  They were not only virgins; my father had never “touched” my mother, a fact he shared with Geri during one of their long intimate conversations.  If Charles and Mary were to embrace and physically love each other, according to the laws of the Church, they would have to be married and married they became, still teenagers, only a few years beyond childhood, unable to conceive of the challenges, the extraordinary hardships they were to experience in the years ahead of them.  They married as German troops were sipping good French wine in recently occupied Paris, as the first Jewish and Gypsy prisoners were being sent to Auschwitz, and as Japan was occupying coastal cities in China and in French Indochina, now Vietnam.  The threatening international picture isn’t reflected in their wedding photographs, and indeed they were oblivious to it, as my father confirmed in his 80s when I asked him about it.  He didn’t say it but we know the truth: they wanted to fall asleep next to each other at night and to wake up next to each other in their mornings, to make love to each other when the Spirit moved, to face life together, to draw strength from each other, to be supported by the love of each other, all without facing the eternal hell fires threatened by the Church.  And so they got married in their youth, their adolescence.

The wedding was formal, with my mother in a beautiful bridal gown and formal dresses on her bridesmaids and tuxedos for my father and his attendants.  Where in the world did they get the money to fund the wedding?  My father’s tuxedo was rented, I’m sure, and my mother’s dress, I’m sure, was borrowed.  The wedding reception was in an apartment or a rented room, perhaps theirs for the term of the rental, They were married in any event by their favorite parish priest, Father William Cousins, who later become an illuminatus, Archbishop Cousins of Milwaukee, the eponym of  “The Cousins Center,” soon  to be sold to cover some of the costs of the sins of the Church that drove my parents, at such a young age, to marry, to commit themselves under pain of eternal damnation to staying together no matter what.

After the marriage, Chuck and Mary Clausen lived in very modest circumstances, i.e., a succession of furnished rooms with Murphy beds, which is to say, their home consisted of a single room with a fold-up bed built into one of the walls.  They took a room on the north side of Chicago once, for reasons never explained to me by my Dad, but felt out of place there and quickly moved back to the South Side, in or near Englewood.  When they ‘scouted out’ rooms to rent, my mother could tell as soon as she entered a room whether it was infested by bedbugs; they had a special smell and she was sensitive to it, undoubtedly from living with bedbugs during her young life.  My mother’s sensitive nose, however, did not work with cockroaches, at least of the Oriental type, for the three small rooms at 7303 S. Emerald Avenue that we lived in for the first twelve or thirteen years of my life were always infested with those large black shiny cockroaches that cracked when we were rarely able to step on them and that we euphemistically called “water bugs.”  We lived with them for years.

    My mother was a beautiful woman, with milky white skin, dark and bright blue eyes, and long, thick, coarse dark hair.  My father and my Aunt Monica have often referred to how beautiful she was and my childhood memories of her confirm their judgment.  When she would come to school to visit the nuns, my classmates remarked to me how pretty my mother was.  

Emily Dickinson:

Pain — has an Element of Blank — / It cannot recollect

When it begun — or if there were / A time when it was not —

It has no Future — but itself — / Its Infinite realms contain

Its Past — enlightened to perceive / New Periods — of Pain.

. . . . . . 

I've started my third year of maintaining this daily journal so I am not so oblivious of the start and stopping of pain as Miss Dickinson was.  I know, for example, that the hip pain that may have developed a concurrent sciatica pain started on July 12th of this year.  I made a note of it in my journal.  I know I woke up with it.  I know that it didn't start with an injury.  I know too when I first noted what eventually was diagnosed as polymyalgia rheumatica, i.e., the bilateral pains in my shoulders, wrists, hands, and hips (?).  It was on Christmas morning, 2023.  Again, I woke up with it and made a note of it.  I don't know when my various bouts of chronic pelvic started during the last maybe 15 years or so, but I know when they ended, i.e., after surgery on my bladder cauterizing the painful ulcers.  Most recently that was on March 5th of this year.  Before that, it was after the traumatic 3rd fulguration at the Rawson Avenue Surgery Center.  What I don't know is whether, how, and when I may expect the current disabling chronic pain to end.  The call from Dr. Cheng yesterday afternoon was very welcome but not at all reassuring.  He tells me it sounds like my leg and knee pain are probably sciatica and that it is most commonly treated with psychotropic chemicals, i.e., either gabapentin or Cymbalta.  Both those drugs have very nasty side effects, including drowsiness (zombification) and insomnia along with several others, all bad.  I'm reluctant to take either one.  I watched some YouTube videos on sciatica pain relief from stretches and I wondered how I can do the stretches when I am unable to stand for more than a couple of minutes.  Plus it looks like I may be in for some more physical therapy sessions at the VA.  The outpatient PT Clinic in the basement of the VA seems like my second home.  I love the therapists but I've developed a resistance to more PT, so I am resisting taking the usual medications and resisting taking advantage of what is surely expert PT treatment and advice.  Not a good situation.   Shape up or ship out, Bozo.

On the other hand, today is the 23rd consecutive day of serious pain and inability to be on my feet for more than a couple of minutes, 23 days of using my rollator to move between recliner and bathroom, between recliner and kitchen, between recliner and front day to let Lilly in and out.  I'm weary, worn out, or as David Bedbill wrote in his Poem About Pain

I can feel myself slipping away, fading away, withdrawing

from this life, just as my father did. When the pain you're in

is so great you can’t think about or pay attention to anything

but your own pain, the rest of the world, and all other life

don't matter.

I think about my friends with dementia, cancer, arthritis, and

how much more pain they are in than I am, but it does no good,

their pain is not mine, and therefore, no matter how magnanimous

I might want to be, their pain is not as important to me as my own.

. . . 

Pain is selfish, almost narcissistic.  It pays attention only to itself.  it demands attention.  Indeed its whole raison d'etre is to bring attention to itself, shouting "Something is wrong.  Pay attention to me and fix me or get me fixed!"  But fixing it isn't so easy.  It may require introducing noxious chemicals into your body, undergoing surgery, waiting many days or weeks to see one of the too few doctors in our capitalist medical system, or simply waiting and hoping for it to go away, as most pains do (if we're lucky.)  But some pains are unlucky; they signal that "Time's up!", like an exam monitor at some qualifying and competitive examination.  "Pencils down!"  I'm reminded of taking the NROTC scholarship test -where?- in 1958 or 1959, and of taking the LSAT at Villanova in 1967, getting lost trying to find the place, frantically arriving on time.  For the NROTC exam, I was first fingerprinted.  Did I have to identify myself somehow for the LSAT?  In any case, pain asks for no ID before settling in its visit.  The visited one is The Chosen One.  Why me Lord?  Why not you, fella?

Is Israel our tar baby?  If so, why?  Is Israel just a way for the American government to support its war industry, the military-industrial complex?  Both Tony Blinken and Lloyd Austen have said, probably truthfully, that the United States government had no foreknowledge of and no participation in the assassination of the Hezbollah commander in Beirut or the assassination of the Hamas leader in Teheran.  Those assassinations, each surely a violation of international law, have led to a promise of dire retaliation from Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,  Why is it that almost the first words out of Biden's, Blinken's, and Austin's mouths is that the U.S. will defend Israel from the consequences of its illegal acts?  Suppose the American government has no foreknowledge, control over, influence on, or participation in the actions of the Israeli government under Bibi Netanyahu, Itamar Ben Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich. Why are our sailors and Marines standing by in the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Oman ready to engage Iranian forces retaliating against Israel in their never-ending game of tit-for-tat?  With a friend like Israel, who needs enemies?  Why are America's sons and daughters risking their lives for Israel?

The United States government has expended an extraordinary treasure and political/diplomatic capital on Israel for years.  Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid since its founding, receiving about $310 billion (adjusted for inflation) in total economic and military assistance. The United States has also provided large foreign aid packages to other Middle Eastern countries, particularly Egypt and Iraq, but Israel stands apart.  Egypt is the second largest recipient of US aid, and that is only as an inducement for its peace treaty with Israel in 1979 as part of the 1978 Camp David Accords.  From the Camp David peace accords in 1978 until 2000, the United States has subsidized Egypt's armed forces with over $ppp38 billion worth of aid.  Egypt receives about $1.3 billion annually.  This is an expenditure by the US that is, as near as I can tell, simply a continuing cost of supporting peace with Israel.

Most of the aid to Israel —approximately $3.3 billion a year—is provided as grants under the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program, funds that Israel must use to purchase U.S. military equipment and services.  

Transfers of U.S. military equipment to Israel, as to other foreign governments, are subject to relevant U.S. law.  The United States cannot provide security assistance to foreign governments or groups that commit gross human rights violations, a red line enshrined in the so-called Leahy Law. Moreover, the Biden administration announced in February 2023 that it would not provide arms to recipients deemed likely to commit serious human rights violations. Some legal scholars and other critics have alleged that the United States has not applied the Leahy Law with regard to Israel as it has with other Middle Eastern countries.  Indeed, the Ronald Reagan administration banned transfers of cluster munitions to Israel for several years in the 1980s after it determined that Israel had used them on civilian targets during its invasion of Lebanon.  In May of this year, the Biden administration issued a report that found it “reasonable to assess” that Israel has used U.S. weapons since October 7 “in instances inconsistent with its IHL [International Humanitarian Law] obligations.” Days later, the White House said it was pausing a shipment of large bombs to Israel ahead of a pending assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah, although it noted it would continue other military assistance. “Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which [Israel goes] after population centers,” President Biden said in an interview with CNN.  Biden has also criticized Israel's "indiscriminate bombing."  The International Court of Justice has found it is "plausible" that Israel has committed acts that violate the Genocide Convention.  The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for "war crimes" in Gaza.  Yet the supply of arms to Israel from US military contractors goes on undiminished.  Why?  Because the military-industrial complex controls the government, not vice versa.

My phone watches and talks to me.  It regularly tells me that I am a high fall risk with "very low walking steadiness."  Just now it told me I burned far fewer calories over the last 5 weeks than the period before that. No surprise! In the last week, I have averaged 460 steps per day, a far shot from the usual target of 10,000 steps a day.  Today I have taken 150 steps, some of them painful.  All the health and exercise information my phone gives me is bad news and distressing.  

8/2/24

 Friday, August 2, 2024

1790 1st US census conducted; population is 3,929,214, including 697,624 slaves

1865 Lewis Carroll published "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

1939 Albert Einstein wrote to US President FDR informing him of recent research on fission chain reactions making possible the construction of "extremely powerful bombs"

1964 North Vietnam fired at the destroyer USS Maddox in what became known as the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

1990 Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait,  US President George H. W. Bush ordered troops to Saudi Arabia

2018 Pope Francis declared the death penalty unacceptable in all cases, reversing church teachings..

In bed by 8:40, awake around 1:10 unable to sleep, with knee pain, up and out to BL before 2 a.m.  My knee and thigh have been sensitive to the pressure of my laptop for some time, making it painful to browse and type.  I let Lilly out at 2:30.  She engaged in her normal staring into the distane for several minutes before stepping onto the grass to 'do her business.'  After coming in, she paced and paced back and forth around the house with her now-normal heavy breathing, and signs of senility.  I let her out again at 4 after much pacing.  Necessary?  Who knows?  . . .  I nodded off for an hour or so between 4;30 and 5:30, and was awakened by Lilly's noisy pacing and panting.  . . .  We have had more than an inch of rain overnight, with a little more expected today.

Prednisone, day 82, 15 mg., day 4/14.     I took my 15mg. at 5:45 a.m.  I had a slice of buttered bread for breakfast at 7.   I took 1300 mg. of Tylenol later in the morning. . . . Dr. Cheng called at 12:45 p.m. and, after asking a number of questions about my knee and thigh pain, said that it sounds like I have developed sciatica for which either gabapentin or Cymbalta is usually prescribed.  I said the gabapentin made me 'like a zombie' the last time I took it for chronic pelvic pain, and I couldn't get to the pharmacy to pick up Cymbalta in my condition, so I'll wait till Tuesday's appointment  with Dr. England and see what he suggests and/or does then.  Maybe a mistake; should I have found a way to pick up some Cymblata?  I just looked up Cymbalta and see that it is an antidepressant with nasty side effects, similar to gabapentin.  One of them is insomnia, that last thing I need more of.  I may be in trouble  I also looked up sciatica and see that it results from pressure or effects on the nerve root coming from between L4 and S1 vertebrae which is where my X-rays revealed "severe arthritis."  I also see that sciatica may cause incontinence problems, which I experienced a couple of days ago.  I am in trouble.  I'll try to talk to Dr. England about this on Tuesday.

LTMW  Anne Lemott has an essay in this morning's NYTimes titled "Do Not Mess With the Very Old."  In it, she writes of "the elderly, whose days are quieter, who gladly ruminate and gaze out windows a lot."  It's the story of my life now: I'm either gazing out my window a lot, or looking at the screen on my laptop or the screen of a television monitor.  I described myself to Micaela as 'the lump on the recliner.'  I'm largely immobile, a lump.  I get up to go to the bathroom or to quickly grab something to eat or to let Lilly out, but I use my lowboy rollator Judy to move anywhere and I'm on my feet as for only a minute or two before sitting down.  My knee and thigh seem to be a bigger problem for me now than my hip.  It's especially bothersome that I can't even rest my laptop on my right leg anymore without experiencing pressure pain.  

Lamott, who says she is "about 70," writes of her friends who are 'very old,' and it appears that at almost 83, I am among her 'very old' for she writes:

Do not mess with the very old and their gangs. I see them live with grace and (sometimes cranky) humor, along with infirmity, pain, wobbly brains and the scar tissue of decades enduring the blows and losses splattered through human life. They laugh gently at me when they hear me once again in do-or-die mode: They’ve seen over and over that most things will be okay as long as we’re tender with each other. They are whom I want to be in 10 years, if I am alive and can remember this one thing.

I don't have a gang anymore, unless it's the Lowes and the Goldbergs, but the Lowes have moved to Tucson where David plays a lot of golf in his early 70s and the Goldbergs keep busy with their children and grandchildren around the country and with playing pickleball back home.  Tom St. John, David Branch, Ed Felsenthal have all died.  The group that used to play golf together in Wautoma is disbanded.  "For my days vanish like smoke, and my bones burn like glowing embers.  My heart is afflicted, and withered like grass . . .  I lie awake; I am like a lone bird on a housetop."  Psalm 102.  A bird alone,, like Sean O'Failain's novel.  It reminds me of my days as an altar boy at St. Leo's church, reciting the Latin mass.  The priest would mutter: Judica me, Deus, et discerne causam meam de gente non sancta: ab homine iniquo et doloso erue me and I would reply Quia tu es, Deus, fortitudo mea: quare me repulisti? et quare tristis incedo, dum affligit me inimicus?  All from Psalm 42, though I didn't know it, or care.  All recited rotely by me, and almost certainly by the priests.

Master of the universe - Bibi Netanyahu.  Tom Freidman's op-ed in the Times this morning is daunting, pointing out that we are on the brink of a major regional war in the Middle East and that whether it occurs or not is largely in the hands of Bibi Netanyahu.  Does he want such a war?  Does he want to force a war between Iran and the United States so that Iran's nuclear weapon infrastructure can be destroyed and so that he can continue to hold on to power in Israel (and stay out of prison) as long as possible?  I am struck by how much of world history is determined by the wishes and acts of single individuals.  Speaking of which . . .

Kamala Harris's campaign raised more than $300,000,000 in July.  I wonder whether Joe Biden is finally ready to admit he was a hopeless candidate and would have lost to Trump.

Notes from YouTube's The Settlers. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention provides: "An Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."

 Early settlers:  Rabbi Kook, Rabbi Levinger, Rabbi Porat made settlement a religious matter, hastening the coming of the Messiah. The movement was known as Gush Emunim. The opponent was Yitzhak Rabin who maintained that settlements were illegal.  Once the issue became religious rather than political and legal, Rabin's opposition wasn't simply wrong, it was Sin.  And once the government was opposing what God wanted, the government was illegitimate and could be opposed by force and violence.  

The first intifada erupted in December, 1987, and lasted for years.

In 1992, Rabin was elected prime minister for a second time and froze all settlement construction.  A year later, Rabin and Arafat engaged in a peace process.  The Oslo Accords included a commitment by Israel not to build any new settlements.  In February 1994, Dr Baruch Goldstein went to the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and killed dozens of Moslem worshippers and wounded dozens more, all in an attempt to stop the Oslo peace process.  Among the true believers in Zionism and Greater Israel, he was believed to be a friend of Arabs and Moslems as well as Jews because he was hastening the coming of the Messiah.  One of those attending Goldstein's funeral was Yigal Amir who on November 4, 1995, murdered Rabin.

The second intifada, between 2000 and 2005, was more lethal, and more brutal than the first.  More than 4,000 Palestinians and more than 1,000 Israelis were killed, among them 200 settlers.  It led to the construction of separate roads for Israelis and Palestinians, and other checkpoints and barriers between the settlers and the Arabs.  Apartheid.

Today, settlers who settled for economic opportunities and less expensive suburban lifestyles comprise about 80% of West Bank settlers, compared to 20% who settle for religious reasons.

2005 Ariel Sharon withdrew from Gaza and leveled the Israeli settlements, but while 7,500 settlers were removed from Gaza, 150,000 new settlers moved to the West Bank.

"We are facing an irresolvable paradox.  The Greater Land of Israel, the democratic State of Israel, and the Jewish state of Israel cannot be reconciled.  One of the sides of that triangle has to be dropped."  Either Israel will maintain its sovereignty between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, and then it won't be Jewish, or it won't be democratic, because the demographics will be the deciding factor.  Or the state of Israel will limit itself to the 1967 borders and will preserve its Jewishness and its democracy"

Anniversaries thoughts.  First, Today's population is 336,855,250 and growing.

Second, “When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’   ’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’  'The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass.  Different book, also great.

Third, from Einstein's letter to FDR to Hiroshima - 6 years.

Fourth, the Gulf of Tonkin incident led to the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on August 10th and the game was on.  Eleven months later I was landing on the SATS strip at Chu Lai on my way to Danang.  58,000 dead Americans and millions of dead Vietnamese later, we had our asses kicked good.

Fifth, the invasion of Kuwait led to George H. W. Bush's flexing his muscles after Margaret Thatcher 'gave him a spine transplant'..  Bush later crows "It’s a proud day for America. And, by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all."  Tha“t kind of thinking led his beloved son "W" to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq to add to our list of disastrous national failures. 

Lastly, Pope Francis said it's morally wrong to murder people as punishment for crime.  Better late than never. 

"It’s a proud day for America. And, by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!"

Could it really have been more than 30 years ago that I painted this???

8/1/24

 Thursday, August 1, 2024

1959 Pope John XXIII publishes encyclical Sacerdotii nostri primordia

In bed at 9:40, awake around 4 but lay in bed till near 5, unable to sleep.  Burning pain in right hip and knee, persevering on Salve, salve, salve, Regina and Come Holy Ghost, Creator blest, and in our har-arts take up thy rest, remembering a book I used to own Why Catholics Can't Sing about our dirge-like hymns.   One of the reasons I became a member of St. Francis of Assisi parish, where Whites were a decided minority, was the enjoyable and moving gospel music at the Sunday masses, mostly good Protestant songs that had some real emotional impact, songs in the Lead Me, Guide Me hymnals.  Many were classical 'White Songs', like How Great Thou Art, but others were Black spirituals, gospel songs, like Wade in the Water.  How I loved the and still do.  So here I am approaching age 83 perseverating on Come Holy Ghost.  Egad! 

Come, Holy Ghost, Creator blest,

And in our hearts take up thy rest;

Come with thy grace and heav’nly aid

To fill the hearts which thou hast made,

To fill the hearts which thou hast made.

I have memories of myself in 4th, 5th, and 6th grade, kneeling with my classmates in St. Leo Church, wearing my school uniform navy blue trousers and navy blue tie and tan shirt, singing that song that meant next to nothing to me.  Chances are I was thinking of my sinfulness, my spiritual unworthiness, my lack of holiness.  I took the Catholic religion seriously as a child, very seriously.  Maybe I still do if I'm focused on Come Holy Ghost on a morning as I approach my 83rd birthday.😰😇😱

Note to PM&R.  Sent at 7 a.m., this morning.  

"Please direct this to Dr. England and Dr. Cheng. Thank you

I have an appointment on August 6th with Dr. England for persistent right hip pain that keeps me off my feet. The pain has been with me every day since July 12th and I reported it to Dr. Cheng. Since July 12th, the pain has worked its way down my right thigh to my knee and the knee pain has become as disabling as the hip pain. I also have pain in the thigh between the hip and knee. I don't know whether this extension of the significant pain from my hip to my knee should be reported to you before my appointment or not, so I report it 'just in case.' The pain is such that I can't stand for more than a couple minutes before needing to sit and take the weight off my right leg. I can't engage in any activity that involves standing or walking. Thank you."

Larry Anderson called today and we agreed to meet next Wednesday when he's in town.

Prednisone, day 81, 15 mg., day 3/14.  I took my 15 mg. at 5:10 a.m.  Breakfast of cottage cheese and raspberries around 6:15.  1300 mg. of Tylenol around 6:30.  The hip-leg-knee pain is very bad this morning, a 7? 8?  It's impossible to quantify pain this way though the docs haven't come up with a better one.  If 10 = ER level, there have been times over the last 21 days since 7/12 when I would readily have gone to the ER hoping for some pain relief, but when I did go to the ER on 7/14, I was told after x-rays and a CT scan that there was nothing they could do for me, other than the 5 mg. of oxycodone they gave me which was ineffectual.  So it goes.  Mid-day meal of 2 slices of high fiber bread, one with butter, the other with peanut butter, plus one apple at 10:45.  1300 mg. of Tylenol at 2 p.m., with 2 cold chicken thighs.

Snap out of it!  Yesterday afternoon, after I had finished my journal entries for the day, and as I sat in my recliner reading the last epitaphs in Spoon River Anthology, I thought how foolish I am, mumbling and grumbling and feeling sour and nasty over the pain and limitations I've been experiencing.  "Mickey the Mope", my mother would say.  "Snap out of it! my sister would say.  I've outlived both of them and had more undeserved good fortune than either of them, yet they refused to get down on life, despite the challenges and misfortunes they encountered.  I never entirely forget the deep wisdom of the "Why me, Lord?", "why not you?" story, but I lose sight of it too often.  Why not me?  I know I will die one of these days.  I know I will have a last illness or an accident or some occurrence that makes me just a memory, and that it may be painful or not.  Nonetheless, I have discrete pains but only in my right hip, right thigh, and right knee.  I can move between rooms in our comfortable home with the help of my rollator Judy, and I'm able to read and write and watch television and lectures and documentaries on YouTube.  I did a big load of laundry this afternoon, carrying the dirty clothes hamper on Judy's seat from the bedroom to the kitchen laundry space.  I took a shower shaved and put on clean clothes after a nasty accident.  I'm looking forward to eating crispy air-fried chicken tonight that Geri will cook for me and serve me.  She will clean up the kitchen, the dishes, silverware, and cooking utensils that I heretofore cleaned up and she won't complain.  She helped me deal with my laundry's big load of compression socks that needed to be air-dried.  As I sit here reading poetry and writing my thoughts, she stands at the kitchen counter making dinner for the two of us as she does day after day, year after year for more than 40 years.   If I die in my sleep tonight, or from some cause tomorrow, I mustn't let my last day be owned by Mickey the Mope, spent on throwing a pity party for myself.  I need to focus on my extraordinary good fortune in having been loved and supported by a mother like mine, by a sister like mine, and by a wife like mine.  SHAPE UP, Buster!  Count your blessings!

Anniversaries thoughts.  I included the anniversary of Pope John XXIII's encyclical only because he was my favorite pope.  He succeeded the dour Pius XII whose picture was found on most Catholic classroom walls and in many Catholic homes.  John XXIII liked a cigarette and some wine to relax, which I thought was a mark in his favor.  He was supposed to be a transitional pope because he was already 76 when he was elected and wasn't expected to have a long tenure, and indeed he didn't but he convened the Second Vatican Council that led to big changes in the Church.  It was a gutsy move by the old guy, one that is still causing big disagreements, if not schisms, within the Church.  Much of the good that came from Vatican II is being undone by the actions of John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and the reactionary hierarchs and priests who have taken over the Church in the years following the Council.  More's the pity.  Come Holy Ghost!   And, BTW, the encyclical John XXIII issued was about St. John Vianney, the Curé of Ars,  the priestly life and the relevance of  "the Evangelical Counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience."  I read most of it online and note that it is mostly "happy horseshit" like we used to be fed in Vietnam.  

I'm not writing much today because I'm not thinking much today, too distracted by hip-leg-knee pain, body all achin' and racked wid' pain, but brain dead.