1/5/25

 Sunday, January 5, 2025

D+61

1531 Pope Clement VII forbade English King Henry VIII to remarry

1886 "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson was published

1895 French Captain Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason

1957 US President Eisenhower asked Congress to send troops to the Middle East

1968 Dr Benjamin Spock was indicted for conspiring to violate draft law

In bed at 9, awake at 2:30, up at 3:10, lit my Kitty candle thinking of her and of Tom's upcoming 2nd yartzeit.  9° outside with a wind chill of  -3°.  As usual, the thermostat shows 71° but I am cold even in my sweat pants and long-sleeved turtleneck. . . Now I've wrapped my green ngingey around my shoulders like some old geezer (oh, wait, I am an old geezer) and I'm still cold.  I brought up two thermometers/hygrometers from the basement to put in the TV room and my bedroom, which seems to be the coldest room in the house.

Prednisone, day 236, 7.5 mg., day 51.  Prednisone at 5 a.m., with some soda bread.   Other meds at 4!!!

Ann Telnaes has resigned from the Washington Post after Jeff Bezos spiked this editorial cartoon she submitted for publication.  It shows Bezos and other billionaires on their knees groveling at the feet of an imperial Donald J. Trump.  Mickey Mouse, i.e., Disney Corporation, owner of ABC television network which cravenly settled Trump's defamation suit against it for $15 million, is shown prostrate.  The editorial page editor cravenly denied that the cartoon was spiked because it offended Bezos and said it was rejected simply because it was repetitious of stories it had run and was about to run, as if editorial cartoons aren't always related to current news stories.    

Europe Against the Jews I started reading on Kindle this book by German historian Götz Aly. I am reminded of the excellent Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews by James Carroll.  Both authors are non-Jews and both honestly relate the sorry history of Christendom's centuries of persecution of Jews.  The two books remind us of Mankind's capacity for cruelty, savagery, and evil (homo hominis lupus) and that Christianity did nothing to prevent it; indeed, Christianity was a precipitating cause of it, the main point of the book by Carroll, a former Catholic priest in the Paulist Order.   “If you think of religion as a great lake,” he warns, “it’s a lake of gasoline, and all it’s going to take is someone to drop a match into it for a terrible conflagration.”

On a related note, this afternoon I watched two items on YouTube about Winston Churchill, Jews, Zionism, and the Palestinians.  The first was a dicussion by a British commentator on the book "Churchill: His Times and His Crimes."  He focused his comments on the book's chapter dealing with Hitler's admiration for Jews generally, not an attitude widely shared by his peers in England, and his disdain for Arabs.  

Even though he was wary of communist Jews, Churchill strongly supported Zionism and he described Jews as "the most formidable and the most remarkable race", whose "first loyalty will always be towards [Jews]". . ." We owe to the Jews a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all wisdom and learning put together."

Churchill described the Arabs as a "lower manifestation" than the Jews, whom he viewed as a "higher grade race" compared to the "great hordes of Islam"

Regarding Zionism and Jews controlling lands occupied for centuries by Arab Muslims, he said:

I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, though he may have lain there for a very long time I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race or at any rate a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, 'American continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here'. They had not the right, nor had they the power."

This statement is of a piece with William F. Buckley's statements in 1957, when he wrote National Review’s most infamous editorial, entitled “Why the South Must Prevail.” Is the white community in the South, he asked, “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?”  His answer was crystal clear: “The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because for the time being, it is the advanced race. " . . . “It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.” He added: “The claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.”  It is in large measure this kind of thinking and this value system that we are still fighting about in 2025, but referring to the conflict between "voter fraud" and "voter suppression."

In any case, the other YouTube video I watched was a speech by Andrew Roberts titled "Winston Churchill - The Great British Zionist" at the Jewish Learning Conference in 2019.  Roberts is a conservative historian, journalist, and member of the House of Lords.  He wrote a biography of Churchill, Churchill: Walking With Destiny.  Before his Jewish audience, he extolled Churchill's long and early embrace of Zionism, which comported with his British and White European imperialist values.  I stopped listening to his lecture before its conclusion, but I suspect he did not make a point of Churchill's racist contempt for Arabs.

David came over to help his mother disassemble the Christmas tree and get it and other Christmas paraphernalia down to the basement.  He is a blessing.  I drove up to Sendik's to get some white vinegar to put in the dishwasher running the 'sanitize' cycle after Geri cleaned out the machine's filter.

Anniversaries.  The high and mighty pope told the high and mighty king he couldn't do something.  We know how much good that did.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde reminds of my 'monster story' binge-reading phase.  I read the classics: Mary Wollstonecraft's 1818 Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, and Bram Stoker's 1897 Dracula and lastly, Stevenson's 1886 Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde.  Poor Frankenstein was just a lonely guy looking for love in our cruel, rejecting world.  Dr. Jekyll thirsted for power and Mr. Hyde was his raging libido.  Dracula of course lusted for blood.  I enjoyed each of the books, perhaps Dracula the most of the three.  I had other binge-watching era, like whale books after reading Moby Dick, and an epic saga period, with El Cid, Chanson de Roland, and Beowulf after reading The Iliad.  I think I enjoyed all of them, but probably The Iliad the most.

Captain Dreyfus was yet one more victim of vicious European, Catholic, anti-semitism.  He and Julia Louis-Dreyfus are distant, indirect relatives. 

In 1957, President Eisenhower, himself a 5-star general, asked Congress to send troops to the Middle East.  How quaint.  How far we have moved from those days in terms of presidential powers.

1968, the world was falling apart and the United States was indicting the nation's baby doctor for conspiracy because of his, and much of the world's, opposition to the Vietnam War.  I was about to start my second semester of law school, trying to forget about Vietnam but reading about it, hearing about it, and watching it every night on the nightly news from Walter Cronkite on CBS, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC, or Peter Jennings andFrank Reynolds on ABC.  There was no escaping Vietnam,  There is still no escaping Vietnam.

1/4/25

Saturday, January 4, 2025

D+ 60

1965 LBJ's "Great Society" State of the Union Address

1974 Richard Nixon refused to hand over tapes subpoenaed by Watergate Committee

1975 Boston Bruins Dave Forbes became the 1st athlete indicted for criminal assault for excessive violence during play; stick butt-end the face of Minnesota North Star Henry Boucha caused permanent vision damage; court case ended in a hung jury, and a civil settlement was eventually reached

1995 Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House of Representatives

2007 The 110th United States Congress elected Nancy Pelosi as the first female Speaker of the House

2010 The Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building at 829.8 m (2,722 ft), officially opened in Dubai, with exterior lighting provided by Sarah Clausen et al.

In bed by 9, awake and up by 4:10 with a nasty dream of a school year starting and missing the first two classes of the semester, disorganized, out of touch.  By 6 a.m., I've emptied and refilled the dishwasher & gotten the kitchen shipshape.  It's 10° outside, wind chilll -7° .  By 7:30, it's down to 9° and a wind chill of -8°, and a cold week ahead.     

Prednisone, day 235, 7.5 mg., day 50.  Prednisone at 5 a.m.   I've been on this steroid for 8 months now and will see Dr. Ryzka on Monday.  Both shoulders have been sore for the last two months and my hips are stiff.  Is the PMR returning despite the prednisone?   

Obscenity in America.  de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America; I wish he were around to write Obscenity in America.  Our daily newspapers and other media provide plenty of examples.  Here's one from this morning's NY Times:  "Trump Has Reeled in More Than $200 Million Since Election Day: The president-elect has boasted about the donations for his inauguration, library and political activities from those seeking favor or perhaps in some cases, atonement" by Kenneth P. Vogel, Maggie Haberman, and Theodore Schleifer.  "The total haul for the committee financing his inaugural festivities — at least $150 million raised, with more expected — will eclipse the record-setting $107 million raised for his 2017 inauguration . . . Inaugural committees can accept unlimited contributions from individuals and corporations, but not foreign nationals. . . Donations of at least $1 million grant access to the top package of perks related to several days of festivities in the run-up to the inauguration on Jan. 20, including what are touted as “intimate” dinners with Mr. Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance, though often with many attendees, as well as black-tie balls after the swearing-in."

Nota bene.  Special Forces Master Sergeant Matthew Livelsberger, who shot himself as he blew up the Tesla cybertruck he was in in Las Vagas this week, wrote in a note "“Why did I personally do it now? I needed to cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.”  How much attention will be devoted to his need to "relieve myself of the the burden of the lives I took"?  What lives did he take during his time in the Army?  On his three tours in Afghanistan?  Elsewhere?  How did he take them?  What were the circumstances?  We have to believe that information about his service, including combat deaths he was involved in, is available in his Army records or from interviews of fellow Special Forces soldiers he served with.  Will the Army look into this?  Will anyone in the Mainstream News Media?  Anyone?  

Alicia Arritt, a former Army nurse who dated Sergeant Livelsberger in 2018 and was a friend of his until he died, said that he had been a generous person who leaned conservative but was rarely overtly political.  After years of deployments, she said, he struggled with mental health issues that he tried to conceal so that he could continue to serve in the Special Forces.  “He needed help, and he was afraid to get it," she said, “which is very common for guys who do his job.”  Will the Army look into this?  Will anyone in the Mainstream News Media?  Anyone? 

My wife is a blessing in my life.  Her cousin Sue, who, God bless her, has purchased a ticket to fly up from North Carolina to help Geri during her first week after knee replacement surgery, called her this morning to schmooze.  Just listening to Geri on the phone with Sue, or with other good friends, reminds me of how alive she is, how much she lives in the moment and is engaged with day-to-day life, unlike me who spends so much time ruminating about the past or fretting about the future.  When I started keeping a list on my iPhone of what I love about her, the first item was her mellifluous laugh which I so often hear when she is on the phone with Sue or another friend.

18 Questions, 40 Israeli thinkers.  Yesterday and today I've listened to the interview of Haviv Rettig Gur, an Israeli journalist.  Like the others in the series, at least so far, he is very knowledgeable, intelligent, and articulate.   Today I started listening to Einat Wilf, an Israeli-born, IDF veteran, former Labor member of the Knesset, and writer.    She received a BA from Harvard, an MBA in France, and a Ph.D. at Cambridge University.  She is a 'hard-liner' about the War in Gaza, asserting that the Netanyahu government has made 4 mistakes.  First, accepting Biden's fiction that Hamas does not represent the Palestinians and "Palestinianism" the position that Jews have no right to a Jewish state in their ancestral homeland. Second,  we should not be resupplying our enemy until they surrender.,  Third, we should not have dealt with Qatar as some useful or benevolent element rather than realizing that they are an enemy. Fourth, Egypt's role vis-a-vis Gaza, with their common border.  She is brilliant.  I want to listen to this interview again.  I have had somewhat similar thoughts about other interviews I have listened to if for no other reason than because the thoughts, assertions of facts and opinions, and analyses are expressed so rapidly that it is hard for me to follow and assimilate them.  She has me rethinking the Gaza War issues.

   

1/3/25

Friday, January 3, 2025

D+59

1972 Andrew Charles Clausen was born

In bed at 9, awake around 1, and unable to sleep with bait bucket thoughts, up at 1:40.  It's a cold day, 17° at 8 a.m., wind chill of -2°.   

Prednisone, day 234, 7.5 mg., day 49.   Prednisone at  5:30.  Other meds at 7:30.   

Again?  So soon?  A story in this morning's NY Times reports that if human-to-human transmission of the H5N1 bird flu virus becomes commonplace, experts fear a pandemic that could be far more deadly than Covid-19.   In mid-December, the C.D.C. confirmed the nation’s first “severe case” of H5N1 in a southwest Louisiana patient who was exposed to sick and dead birds in a backyard flock. Last month, California declared a state of emergency over bird flu in dairy cows.  Scores of people in the United States have contracted bird flu over the past year, most of them from infected cows or poultry. The overwhelming majority of the cases have been mild.

The case involving the Louisiana patient, however, was followed by an unsettling finding. Some of the genetic samples from the patient contained gene mutations that might help H5N1 infect people more easily. The patient remains in critical condition.

Experts know that each time the virus infects another person, it has another opportunity to mutate in a way that might increase its capability of spreading among people. In another troubling finding, one of the mutations identified in the Louisiana patient also turned up in a viral sample taken from a teenager with a severe case of bird flu in British Columbia. 

There can be little doubt that funding for research on bird flu detection, testing, therapeutics, and vaccines will be cut under the Trump administration, especially if RFK, Jr., becomes Secretary of Health and Human Services.  Trump 1 brought us the Covid-19 pandemic; will Trump II bring us a bird flu pandemic?   Should I stop filling the bird feeders?  Should I start another set of watercolor notebooks for Trump II?

 The End of the Golden Age.   Last night and early this morning, I listened to this article in The Atlantic by Franklin Foer from the April 2024 print edition.  As one would expect from him and from anything printed in The Atlantic, it was an excellent piece of writing, loaded with historical information and analysis and triggering many memories.  The golden age of which he wrote was a period when American Jews were widely accepted within American society and culture and anti-semitism was low.  It was also a period when Liberalism dominated political and cultural life in the country and the State of Israel was widely accepted as legitimate, democratic, and allied with America and Western Europe in values and international allegiance.  Today American Jews are vulnerable to increasing anti-semitism from the Left and the Right and Israel, identified by many Americans with Benjamin Netanyahu, is increasingly considered a fascist, racist, apartheid state. 

Lunch with CBG was wonderful.

1/2/25

 Thursday, January 2, 2025

D+58

1905 Conference of 23 industrial trade unionists in Chicago issued the "Industrial Union Manifesto," calling for a convention to be held in June, laying the groundwork for the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)

1999 A brutal snowstorm caused 14 inches of snow in Milwaukee and 19 inches in Chicago, where temperatures plunged to -13°F; 68 deaths were reported

2018 US Senator Al Franken resigned

2021 President Donald Trump said to Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger "I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have” 

2023 Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin collapsed in cardiac arrest and was revived by CPR on the field in an NFL game against the Bengals in Cincinnati

In bed at 9, awake around 3, and up around 3:30, thinking about Daniel Gordis and Michelle Fraenkel on Eighteen Questions, 40 Israeli Thinkers speaking faster than I could follow.  I lit a log in the fireplace and my Kitty candle thinking of loneliness and age-related vulnerabilities.  Dozed off at some point and woke up near 8. 

Prednisone, day 233, 7.5 mg., day 48.   Prednisone at 4:45 with some pretzels.   Other meds at 10 a.m. 

Alice Munro's Passive Voice is a very long essay by Rachel Aviv in the December 23, 2024, online edition of The New Yorker and in the December 30, 2024, and January 6, 2025, print edition. The title in the print edition is You Won't Get Free Of It.  I listened to it online because of my decreasing ability to read print, even with adjustable font size on my laptop, and read along parts of it.  It has knocked me for a bit of a loop because it describes the sexual abuse of Alice Munro's then-9-year-old daughter Andrea and reminds me of my having learned late in life of the childhood sexual abuse of someone dear to me.  She had also been subject in her childhood to other forms of emotional abuse and neglect.  She never told her mother of the sexual molestation by a relative for many reasons.  She was very young.  She didn't know how.  She was frightened and confused.  She knew her mother loved the molesting relative and didn't want to hurt her mother.  All the abuse and neglect in her childhood had an effect on her personality development and thus she carried the effects of it throughout her life.  Despite the damage done to her, she became a good and loving person, a blessing to all around her. How many women have been sexually abused or somehow traumatized in childhood?  How little we know of the formative experiences in the lives of others, even those close to us.  How little men know of women's lives.  A year or more ago at a family gathering, I mentioned feeling vulnerable walking to or getting into my car in a supermarket parking lot and a young female in-law said "Now you know what it's like being a woman."  Women are so much more vulnerable than men because most predators are men and they prey on those who are vulnerable.  The strong do what they will; the weak suffer what they must.  Who is weaker than a child, especially a female child preyed upon by a powerful and sometimes trusted adult?  Hard thoughts to think in the predawn darkness.

Phil Klay, Pete Hegseth, J.D. Vance, Suckers & Losers.  Phil Klay was a Marine officer in the invasion of Iraq.  In 2004, after graduating from Dartmouth, he went through Officer Candidate School in Quantico, or what was called Training & Test Regiment or T&T when I went through it  42 years before him.  After his discharge from the Marines, Klay wrote two award-winning books, Redeployment, a collection of short stories, and Missionaries, a novel.  In this morning's NY Times, he has an op-ed titled "Trump, Hegseth and the Honor of the American Military."  Excerpts;

In September 2016 I went to a televised forum with the two leading presidential candidates and asked Donald Trump about military policy in Iraq, where I’d served with the Marine Corps several years earlier. He told me America should “take the oil.” Then he said it again: “Take the oil.” . . . A few years later, explaining our military presence in Syria, Mr. Trump said he was keeping troops there “only for the oil.” What a thing to ask soldiers to fight for.

When it comes to articulating a vision of American warfare, Donald Trump is the least hypocritical president of my adult life. He does not promise to spread democracy, or human rights, or a liberal, international rules-based order. He does not claim we’re a shining city on a hill. “We’ve got a lot of killers,” he’s said instead. “What? You think our country’s so innocent?” 

But [Trump's] sort of amoral pragmatism, especially in matters of war, has its limits and dangers. It will inevitably run up against a core belief in America’s identity as a nation, the belief in the moral obligation to strive to conduct and fight wars honorably. It’s a belief I still hold, and that millions of Americans do, too. 

 Later, Klay assesses Trump's nomination of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense which is:

most notable to me because it strikes at the core of the honor of the American military, is his signature achievement as a political advocate — helping persuade Mr. Trump to intervene in the cases of three men accused or convicted of war crimes. Afterward, Mr. Trump publicly heralded the men as “great warriors,” and later invited two of them, including Clint Lorance, onstage at a private fund-raiser.

Here’s how Mr. Lorance earned that invitation.

In 2012, he was sent as a new commander without combat experience to lead a platoon of young soldiers deployed to Afghanistan with the largely hopeless mission of defeating the local Taliban and winning over the local population. One day he threatened to kill a farmer and his son, a 3- or 4-year-old boy, and a day later ordered his men to shoot within inches of unarmed villagers, including near children. “It’s funny watching” the villagers “dance,” he said. Mr. Lorance’s men, combat veterans, eventually balked at his orders, and refused his instructions to make a false report about taking fire from the village. The next day he ordered fire on unarmed Afghans over a hundred yards away from the platoon, killing them, and radioed a false report claiming the bodies couldn’t be searched.

And here the difference between an idealistic and an amoral vision of America becomes concrete. Because those soldiers, who’d seen combat and watched their friends suffer terrible wounds, turned Mr. Lorance in that same evening, 14 of them eventually offering testimony against him in the court-martial that found him guilty of second-degree murder.

That testimony meant nothing to the elite media personalities like Sean Hannity and Mr. Hegseth who took up Mr. Lorance’s cause, though. Mr. Trump’s pardon of their former leader was a final betrayal for the troops who served in that platoon.

When I was in Vietnam I heard stories of American soldiers and Marines collecting body parts of dead VC, mostly noses and ears.  I heard rumors of captured VC being taken up in helicopters and pushed overboard if they wouldn't provide information sought by ARVN intelligence agents.  I had no way of knowing what was true and what may have been fanciful 'scuttlebutt,' bullshit.  One thing I know for sure is that we Americans have committed war crimes in every major conflict in which we have participated.  Some of the crimes have been prosecuted by military courts; most have not.  See the article in The New Yorker, "The War Crimes That the Military Buried" by Parker Yesko in its series "In The Dark," Series 3.  I also know for sure that the United States has refused to submit itself to the International Criminal Court where war crimes are prosecuted by an international tribunal.  Five other countries are not members: Russia, China, Israel, Libya, and Qatar.  I also know that Trump and Hegseth by their actions have virtually encouraged the commission of war crimes by American combatants.

One of the Eighteen Questions for Forty Israeli Thinkers is "Is the IDF the most moral army in the world?"  The responses I have heard so far though only from a small minority of the 40 thinkers,  have been intelligent and thoughtful.  I can't summarize them but I suspect that, if the same question were put to most Americans, their immediate inclination would be to answer affirmatively.  In a real sense, the question isn't a serious one, but rather one that invites other questions.  It's hard to think of any organization whose primary purpose to to kill people and destroy stuff as 'moral' but that's the world we live in, one in which nations must maintain such organizations.  In any event, we Americans are brought up to think of our military as comprised of heroes, guys (mostly) who protect us from evildoers who would steal our wealth, destroy our freedoms, violate our women, and corrupt our children, not as guys who kill and destroy to protect the major economic interests in the country.  They wouldn't agree with Marine Medal of Honor winner General Smedley Butler who wrote that "War is a Racket" designed to protect Wall Street and corporate America.  I note that while Israel has seized and occupied land immediately adjacent to the 1948 UN-created borders of Israel, they have not sent the IDF to lands thousands of miles away from Israel proper.  Over 156,000 active-duty US troops were serving overseas as of March 2024.

"Thoughts and prayers"  Many, perhaps most, of the political and law enforcement officials who have spoken at press conferences about the terrorist slaughter in New Orleans have uttered what has become the trite words "Our hearts go out to the families" and "our thoughts and prayers" are with the victims and their families.   The words have become clichés, worse than clichés.

1/1/25

 Wednesday, January 1, 2025

D+57

A thing of beauty is a joy forever.  I start this new year - perhaps my last, perhaps not - reflecting on how much beauty surrounds me, beauty in nature, beauty in things, beauty in people.  In searching for this photo of an exquisite mushroom that I espied serendipitously in our front yard one day, at one moment, I passed hundreds of other photos of things and people of beauty, of Geri, or Geri and Lilly, of Andy and his children, of Sarah and Christian, of Ed Felsenthal, of birds, of trees, and so much more.  As I type this, I also watch a gray squirrel with his beautiful white belly and ear tufts performing an acrobatics show for me on a suet cake holder.  Extraordinary! and common!  I think of Mary Oliver's When Death Comes: "I think of each life as a flower, as common / as a field daisy, and as singular."  My hope is that, despite my cynicism, pessimism, and dejection at the wrongs and miseries of the world, I remember that, as I've told my children and still believe, we are surrounded by saints and miracles.  We just have to open our eyes wide enough to see them.

1946 Emperor Hirohito of Japan announced he was not a god

1950 Ho Chi Minh began the offensive against French troops in Indo-China

1951 Chicago broadcaster Paul Harvey began his national radio program "Paul Harvey News and Comment" from WENR-AM for the ABC network

1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect

In bed at 10, awake and up around 5:10.      

Prednisone, day 232, 7.5 mg., day 47,  Prednisone at 5:30.   Other meds at 8:15.  

Our New Year's Eve was quiet, as usual.  I managed to stay awake until 10 o'clock watching Random Hearts, starring Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas with minor luminaries in supporting roles (Edie Falco, Kate Mara, Bonnie Hunt, Peter Coyote, and even the great director Sydney Pollack [Absence of Malice, Out of Africa]).  I baled out at 10, a half hour before the end of the movie because I was already an hour past my target bedtime of 9.  I looked up reviews of the movie and its Wikipedia entry to learn of its ending and found it got pretty bad reviews, surprising for a Sydney Pollack film with a good cast.  Roger Ebert noted that Harrison Ford showed the emotional range of a brick, as usual. . .  Our New Year's Eve dinner was weisswurst, German sauerkraut, and green salad. followed by much Sendik's popcorn during the movie.  I was up and about around 5, Geri at 8, and back in bed before 9.   

Recent history of resolutions: 

2022:   This year I should try. 1. Try not to be a jerk, selfish, self-centered, judgmental, supercilious, intellectually vain,  pity partyer.   2. Try to be kinder, more understanding, more open, more accepting of differences (except for MAGA types and dangerous Republicans.) 3. Try to paint more, be more communicative,  draw more, walk more.  OTOH: Emily Dickinson "In this short life that only lasts an hour  / How much - how little - is within our power?"

2023:  Stay more in touch with Ed Felsenthal and Larry Anderson.  Try to maintain some semblance of the Clausen/Lowe/Goldberg dinners.  Those resolutions (or goals) came to mind quickly but I got to thinking more about the passing year and the upcoming one on the way to Costco with Geri.  The past year saw two good, very long-term friends leave us - TSJ by his unexpected death and DPL by moving far away.  It had me move one year closer to my own death, and all of us marching along the same route.  I'm thinking about my life this past year and my reflections on some of it as reflected in this journal.  How much of this year have I wasted with negativity?  How many opportunities to do some good, both for others and for myself, have I squandered?  How much, by sins of commission and more by sins of omission, have I lived out the words of Yeats' Vacillation?  Things said or done long years ago, / Or things I did not do or say / But thought that I might say or do, / Weigh me down, and not a day / But something is recalled, / My conscience or my vanity appalled.  Today and tomorrow are days for some self-reflection.

2024:  1. Make a new friend or revive an old one.  Why?  Reduce loneliness, improve my outlook on life, mental health, and mood. 2. Try chair yoga again.  Why?  Improve mobility, flexibility, agility, mood. 3. Work on living, not dying before I die.  Why? Why not?  "I'm gonna live till I die! I'm gonna laugh 'stead of cry.  Before my number's up, I'm gonna fill my cup.  I'm gonna live, live, live, until I die!"  Mickey the Mope.  4. Work on kindness and forgiveness, including for myself.  Why?  Kindness and forgiveness make life better, easier, brighter, more tolerable even on hard days.  I can't undo my sins and failures but I can try to atone.

On New Year's Day last year, I wrote:

I'm grateful that 2023 is finished.  It was in some ways a rough year, starting with TSJ's death and the long ordeal of the eulogy.  Considerable pain challenges, IC, CPP, RP, Meijer's parking lot, the 11/25 visit to VA ER and Dr. Uilein, visits to Dr. Chatt, Dr. Cheng in PM&R, Dr. Shankar in the Pain Clinic, visits to the Urology Clinic, PT Jennifer Garrison in Physical Therapy, OT Melinda Matusewic in Whole Health Clinic. LPN Jody Kressin with Healing Touch, Lou and Mary with the Mindfulness Meditation group, etc.  This month alone starts the year with Jody on 1/8, hypnotherapy on 1/9, Eye Clinic on 1/11, Urology on 1/25, acupuncture on 1/29, PM&R on 1/31, plus 5  separate 'video connects', some with Melinda, some with I'm not sure whom.  I'm grateful to the VA for the comprehensive medical care they provide and for Ed Felsenthal's help in enrolling me.  I look at a list like this and wonder if I'm a hypochondriac, a Munchausen misfit, but I don't imagine the pain and discomfort, the failing eyesight, diabetes, etc.  As my Dad used to say, "My parts are failing."  If we were cars, the parts could be replaced.  As it is, they can realistically only be treated, but nonetheless, I'm grateful.

Today is a bit similar, in some ways a rough year, including Ed Felsenthat's death and my inability to attend his funeral, though Tom Devitt flew i.n from California for it.  Again I experienced considerable pain challenges but also considerable relief.  The chronic pelvic pain/interstitial cystitis that has been a recurring challenge for years was resolved, for a time at least, by fulguration of lesions in my bladder on March 5th.  That surgery was followed however by persistent crippling pain in both shoulders, both wrists, and hands that had me sleeping on my recliner rather than in bed for a couple of months  The pain was severe, intense, a 10 out of 10.  It was finally diagnosed as polymyalgia rheumatica or PMR by the VA rheumatologist, Dr. Ryzka,  on May 13th.  He put me on prednisone which finally provided pain relief after about 10 days, but the shoulder pain returned on November 11th and has been with me ever since. I see Dr. Ryzka next Monday and I expect that he will order another blood draw to look for heightened markers of inflammation.   If it's PMR again, I suspect he will increase my dosage from the current 7.5 mg./day, which I have been on for a month and a half.  If it's not PMR, it looks like osteoarthritis.  Last year in January, I had 5 visits to the VA medical center plus 5 video visits.  This year, I have only 2 visits scheduled, Dr. Ryzka and a regular eye exam for glaucoma, macular degeneration, etc.

Our Town, Our Country.  A man identified as Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, a native of Texas who had served with the U.S. Army, drove a rented pickup truck into a crowd of revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans early this morning, killing at least 10 of them and injuring more than 30.  He also shot 2 NOPD officers and was himself killed in the exchange of gunfire..  The occurrence is being described as a terrorist incident.  An ISIS flag was found on the vehicle and two IEDs were found on the flatbed.  Grover's Corners.  Bedford Falls.  Riverdale.  USA!  USA!  USA! 

Eighteen Questions, Forty Israeli Thinkers.   I watched and listened to Daniel Gordis answering the questions today...  Brilliant, articulate speaker.

12/31/24

 Tuesday, December 31, 2024

D+56

1930 Pius XI's encyclical Casti connubii against mixed marriages and artificial birth control and abortion, predecessor of Paul VI's Humanae Vitae

1946 US President Harry Truman officially proclaimed the  end of WW II

1965 There were 39,092 III MAF Marines in South Vietnam, of a total US deployment of 181,000.  Since March 8, 1965, 342 Marines have died in action, 2,047 have been wounded, and 18 are missing.  They claim to have killed 2,627 enemy.   Only God knows how many Vietnamese had been killed, wounded, bombed,  burned, poisoned, or otherwise harmed.

1970 President Allende nationalized the Chilean coal mines

1999 Boris Yeltsin resigned as President of Russia, leaving Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as acting President

2015 US law enforcement killed 1,134 in 2015, young black men 9x more likely to be victims

In bed at 9:15, after sleeping on the recliner for an hour or so, awake at 4:10,  and up at 4:30   

Prednisone, day 231, 7.5 mg., day 46.  Prednisone at 5, other meds around 10.    

Jimmy Carter, 10/1/1924 - 12/29/2024, a mensch.

Happy New Year?  What got better in 2024?  What got worse?  In some measure or in large measure because of Joe Biden's arrogance and hubris, the American electorate put Donald Trump back in power, this time with Neo-Nazi-supporting Elon Musk.  With their combined political and financial power, they can to cow every single Republican legislator and probably many Democratic ones as well.  Elon Musk is virtually lining at a $2,000 per night cottage at Mar-a-Lago while homelessness in America set a new record.  We became more vulnerable to a world controlled by Wall Street, Silicon Valley,  algorithms and Artificial intelligence,  "Open the door, Hal."   We saw a year of humans slaughtering humans in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan.  Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons as his 'special military operation' against Ukraine nears its third year.  Original MAGAs who want the government to expel immigrants and elevate white evangelical Christian men are facing off against the new DOGE MAGAs who disdain original MAGA culture and want the government to turn the tech billionaires loose from regulations and taxes to create their own global oligarchy.  America's national debt has grown to $36 trillion, the annual budget deficit is more than $2 trillion,  The debt to GDP ratio was 35% in 1960, 55% in 1980, and is 123% now, and Trump and the Republicans will cut taxes and increase these numbers.  The DOGE twins, if they have their way, will cut food stamps, aid to education, veterans benefits, medical research, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security and increase Defense/War spending.  In the November election, 89% of American counties shifted rightward.  Non-White voters shifted more than a dozen points in favor of Trump.

What got better?  What is getting better? . . . The popularity of women's sports soared, thanks largely but not solely to Caitlin Clark.  Notre Dame was repaired, restored, and reopened.  Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria fell.  Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran were weakened.  AI is helping in health care.  Some states banned or restricted legacy admissions.  Joe Biden acknowledged and issued an official apology for the government’s role in Indian boarding schools.  Israel's war on Gaza has brought fresh attention to its apartheid policies and practices in the West Bank.  Trump lost his appeal in the $5 million E. Jean Carroll case.  I became aware of beautful clouds and the daily sky.

Resolutions?  1. Make a new friend or revive an old one.  Why?  Reduce loneliness, improve outlook on life, mental health, mood. 2. Try chair yoga again.  Why?  Improve mobility, flexibility, agility, mood. 3. Work on living, not dying before I die.  Why? Why not?  "I'm gonna live till I die! I'm gonna laugh 'stead of cry.  Before my number's up, I'm gonna fill my cup.  I'm gonna live, live, live, until I die!"  Mickey the Mope.  4. Work on kindness and forgiveness, including for myself.  Why?  Kindness and forgiveness make life better, easier, brighter, more tolerable even on hard days.  I can't undo my sins and failures but I can try to atone.

Distrust/skepticism/cynicism.  I grew up in the Irish American Catholic Church.  I grew up in Chicago. I served in the Marine Corps in Vietnam.  I lived through 'light at the end of the tunnel' and Watergate and "weapons of mass destruction" and the Wall Street bailout.  Why would I accept "on faith" or "on authority" anything the faithful or authorities say?  If I can't believe 'my' clerics or 'my' government, why would I believe those of any other religion or any other government, including any plausibly accused of genocide?

A passing New Year's Eve thought.  When most of your life is behind you and you get feebler and less able each day, the coming of another year isn't entirely a thing to celebrate.  Will this be the year that I die?  Will this be a year when I take another fall?  Is it even conceivable that I won't take another fall?  Will the next one result in a trip to the emergency room?  to a broken hip or shoulder?  hospitalization?  When the New Year initiates 4 years of power plays by a wicked, selfish, malignantly narcissistic hegemon, one wishes for the Old Year, bad as that was.  How much human misery will he cause in his first year back in power, this time surrounded by his people, not traitors like Jim Mattis, Mark Milley, and John Kelly.  What havoc will be wrought by Stephen Miller, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth?

Alice Munro. I am listenting to this story in the current New Yorker about Alice Munro,and her daughter Andrea who was sexually abused by Alice's boyfriend.  Alice knew of the abuse and continued to live with the man.  Very creepy.

12/30/24

 Monday, December 30, 2024

D+55

1972  Richard Nixon halted bombing of North Vietnam & announced peace talks

1993 Vatican recognized Israel

1996 Proposed budget cuts by Benjamin Netanyahu sparked protests from 250,000 workers who shut down services across Israel.

In bed at 9:00, awake at 12:45, and up at 1:15, unable to sleep.  I wrote in this journal until I turned the lights out at 3:30 because of trouble focusing my eyes.  No luck falling back to sleep; lights back on at 4:25, then off again at 6:25 and very slowly awake at 7:45, and up at 7:50.  Dozed off again at some point and woke up at 10:20.

Prednisone, day 230, 7.5 mg., day 45.  Prednisone at 5 a.m.  Three slices of Dave's Bread with blueberry preserves.  Other meds at 8:15.  

Further to my last, . . . "  I did a 'copy and paste' job on Larkin's "Church Going" yesterday and because of the lack of enough formatting options in Blogger, i.e., the inability to print poems with single spaces between lines, it made my daily journal longer than usual, six pages instead of my normal maximum of four.  I discovered the Larkin poem while reading an op-ed piece by Mary Townsend in yesterday's NY Times, "What I Am Looking for in Empty Churches."  She is a philosophy professor at St. John's University in New York.  She wrote of her need for, and delight in silence:   

I’m after a certain kind of silence. . . . I first discovered this kind of quiet some years back, when I’d gone to Italy for what seemed to be no reason at all. Without any sort of plan, I decided to go inside every church I came across, no exceptions.

 She reminded me of course of myself and my desire to visit churches, a desire so dominating that when, back in 1998, I went to Paris for the Easter Triduum, Geri gladly opted out, having no desire to bounce from one church to the next which is exactly what I did from Holy Thursday through Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday, and even Easter Monday.  Professor Townsend is a believer, raised a Catholic though "a teen atheist in Catholic high school," and now apparently an Episcopalian whose church is the magnificent Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, one of my favorite visiting sites.  In her essay, she cited the atheist poet Philip Larkin's Church Going," mentioning Larkin's desire to go into empty churches.  She wrote that she and Larkin both seek

 To find what is left after the services, the people, the Sunday clothes and the pageantry — something big and empty and acoustically live — as Larkin describes it, a “tense, musty, unignorable” silence. 

Larkin's poem has a very different 'vibe' than Townsend's essay.  She is a regular church-going believer and one who acknowledges being a pray-er.  The experiences she describes inside quiet empty churches seem like contemplation, meditation, and/or mindfulness, quietly and beneficially getting in touch with herself in spaces set aside for getting in touch with God.  Though Larkin, like Townsend, is drawn to step inside empty churches, he does so as an observer, a thinker, and a wonderer.  He checks out the seats, the 'little books,' the wilting flowers, the "brass and stuff up at the holy end," the organ, the pulpit, the baptismal font, and even the roof/ceiling.  None of it means anything to him except to cause him to reflect on the disappearance of religious Faith.⁰  As he leaves the church, he 

Reflect[s] the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,

And always end much at a loss like this,

Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,

When churches fall completely out of use

What we shall turn them into,    

He is a non-believer/disbeliever.  I am struck by lines in the poem: 

But superstition, like belief, must die,

And what remains when disbelief has gone? 

Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognizable each week,

A purpose more obscure. 

Can both belief and disbelief be gone?  What would remain would be nothingness, nihil.   In any case, Larkin, like Townsend, reminded me of how I too am drawn to churches though, like Larkin, I am not a believer.  Have I ever been a believer?  I agonized over 'the sin of Doubt' as an 11-year-old altar boy and never stopped struggling with Doubt.  Larkin ruminates that, even "when churches fall completely out of use," when "superstition, like belief,  must die,"  even a church in ruins will draw men in, because

It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

Churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples are all places where life's most serious dimensions and events are centered in attention: birth, marriage, sickness and death. joy and loss, beginnings and endings, Alpha and Omega.  Much like Larkin and Townsend,  I am a someone "surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious / And gravitating with it" to empty churches.  At some times in my life, I gravitated to full churches, St. Leo, Gesu, St. Peter and Paul, St. Francis of Assisi, though always dubitante, never as a full-fledged believer.  At best, I was like the father of the boy with an unclean spirit in Mark 9:24: "The father of the child cried out and said with tears, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”

Thinking about these matters led me to look at the pocket notebook in which I made 88 pages of notes during my 1998 Easter trip to Paris.  My empty and full church itinerary over four days was: HOLY THURSDAY, St. Germain des Pres (Last Supper mass); GOOD FRIDAY, St. Thomas d'Aquin (prayer service); Chapel of the Miraculous Medal (Catherine Labouré private devotions); unsuccessful attempts to visit Sainte Chapelle and Notre Dame (line too long); St. Gervais-St. Protais (eucharistic adoration); St. Eustache (choral singing): St. Germain L'Auxerrois (passsion service); St. Sulpice (passion service); HOLY SATURDAY,  Notre Dame (noon,  musical liturgy); St. Gervais-St. Protais (again, arrived after the office de la descente aux enfers); Notre Dame (3 hour Easter Vigil service); St. Serverin (after the Vigil, quiet, empty); EASTER SUNDAY, St. Eustache (solemn high Easter morning mass); St. Roch (mass ending); Polish church of the Assumption; St. Marie de Madeleine(ah, Fauré); St. Augustine (decrepit but lovely, an organ and trumpet concert); EASTER MONDAY, St. Francis Xavier chanting service of some sort); St. Clotilde; St. Pierre du Gros Caillou; and last, St. Pierre de Chaillot,

 

⁰ I was reminded of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach:

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.