6/6/2025

 Friday, June 6, 2025

D+191/136

1918 Battle of Belleau Wood, 1st US victory of WW I

1939 The ship MS St. Louis, carrying 907 Jewish refugees from Europe, began sailing back to the continent after it was refused entry into America. Approximately a quarter of those on board would perish in the Holocaust.

1944 Operation Overlord: D-Day began  in Normandy, France

1958 French Prime Minister Charles de Gaulle said Algeria would always be French

1966 Stokely Carmichael launched the "Black Power" movement

1972  The US bombed Haiphong, North Vietnam; 1000s killed

1975 The Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam was established

1977 The "Washington Post" reported that the US had developed a neutron bomb

1981 Maya Lin won the competition to design the Vietnam War Memorial

1982 30,000 Israeli troops invaded Lebanon to drive out the PLO

2015 My dear Aunt Monica Cummings died

2018 Convicted drug trafficker, Alice Johnson, granted clemency by US President Donald Trump after Kim Kardashian highlighted her case

2019 German serial killer nurse Niels Hoegel was jailed for a second life sentence for the murder of 85 more people (previously convicted for six). Germany's worst post-war serial killer.

In bed at 9:20, up at 5:50.  56°, high of 67°, cloudy morning, sunny afternoon.   

Geri had her chipped tooth crowned this morning, or temporarily crowned.  The permanent crown won't be in for about two weeks.

I ordered new eyeglasses yesterday at Costco for $240.  New prescription after the removal of the cataract from my right eye.

 

I've been feeling pretty crappy lately,  I seem to have hit a plateau on a downslope, arthritis affecting my lower lorso, recurring pain around my right kidney, some torpor, almost (but not quite) stunned by what is happening in and out of the White House with 3 and 1/2 years to go. As I write this, however, I am boosted by Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal cavorting on the tray feeder, she shamelessly fluffing her feathers with her tail feathers raised, the two of them lasciviously kissing with food in their mouths. O wondrous day!

Is This Fascism is the lead essay in the current London Review of Books, June 5, 2025, by Daniel Trilling, the author of books on refugees in Europe and the far right in England.  Excerpts:

One​ way of thinking about fascism is to see it as historically specific: a reactionary mass movement produced by the economic and social chaos that engulfed Europe after the First World War. Fascism promised national rebirth through the violent cleansing of enemies at home and conquest abroad; to achieve this required public consent to the undoing of democracy. Where fascism took root, it grew rapidly beyond its base among the frustrated lower middle classes, attracting support from ‘the politically homeless ... the socially uprooted, the destitute and the disillusioned’, as the German communist Clara Zetkin put it. Its supporters were organised into parties with uniformed paramilitary wings. They operated in what the historian Robert Paxton has called an ‘uneasy but effective collaboration’ with traditional elites, which wanted to maintain order and crush the left. Fascism, from this perspective, was born of particular social conditions that are unlikely to recur in the same form.

The other way of thinking about fascism is as a constant presence. Some see it as the expression of a human tendency towards domination. ‘Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed,’ Judith Butler wrote recently in relation to trans rights, ‘you’re operating within a fascist logic.’ Others see it as an inherent feature of unjust, oppressive societies. Fascism, Langston Hughes wrote in 1936, ‘is a new name for that kind of terror the Negro has always faced in America’. Aimé Césaire argued that interwar fascism was the result of a ‘terrific boomerang effect’: all the brutality of European imperialism – which had dehumanised the coloniser as well as the colonised – was visited on the home continent. Many historians and political theorists have described fascism’s appeal to the emotions. Paxton called them its ‘mobilising passions’: a sense of overwhelming crisis and victimhood, a fear of the decline of one’s group, a lust for purity and authority, a glorification of violence. Fascism could return in ‘the most innocent of disguises’, according to Umberto Eco, who grew up in Mussolini’s Italy, because we are all vulnerable to its emotional pull. . . . . .

Twentieth-century fascism appears to have little in common with today’s leading far-right movements. These groups share a political style – populism – which purports to be more democratic than that of its opponents. Populists, whether on the right or the left, portray themselves as authentic representatives of ‘the people’, in contrast to corrupt governing elites. Far-right populists seek to redefine ‘the people’ along narrow national, ethnic or religious lines [Remember Sarah Palin's "real Americans']  They like elections (as long as they win) [Donald Trump], but dislike the parts of the system – independent courts and media, intergovernmental bodies – that examine or restrain their power [Donald Trump]. Unlike interwar fascism, far-right populism does not seek to bring society under total state control. Some far-right populists, such as Nigel Farage, even claim to be libertarians. For the most part, far-right populism doesn’t share the expansionist territorial aims of interwar fascism, Trump’s sabre-rattling at Canada and Greenland notwithstanding; indeed, if anything links far-right populist programmes, it’s the call for a retrenchment of borders, whether political, cultural or economic. [Agree re Canada, disagree re Greenland and Panama Canal Zone, wher  DJT hasn't ruled out use of force of arms.] . . . . . 

Does it even matter whether we have an answer to the question ‘Is this fascism?’

It does matter. As the historian Ian Kershaw says, trying to define fascism is ‘like trying to nail jelly to a wall’, yet for all its slipperiness, ‘fascism’ describes a uniquely destructive force in politics, and one for which we don’t have a better word. Unlike other forms of authoritarianism, such as military dictatorship, if left unchecked it is not only murderous but suicidal. Interwar fascism involved millions of people in the effort to purify national communities, initiating a spiral of violence that led to war, genocide and self-immolation. Its devastating potential was rooted in the paradoxical promise of a revolution carried out in defence of hierarchy. As Paxton noted, this led either to entropy, as the movement failed to deliver, or to increasing radicalism, as leaders raced to meet the expectations of their followers. (Unlike most governments, as the historian David Renton points out, the fascist parties in Italy and Germany became more radical once in office.) Fascism involves a form of collective behaviour that seems unaccountable. Many in the interwar period were slow to recognise the danger it posed, seeing fascism merely as a tool of ruling-class oppression or as mass irrationality, rather than as a force with a logic and a life of its own. Today, ‘fascism’ is useful as a political concept only in so far as it enables us to spot its destructive potential before it fully discloses itself. As Primo Levi wrote, ‘it happened, therefore it can happen again.’

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[Me]  If there is one clear th,ing it is that there is no conventional or agreed-upon definition of "fascist" or "fascism."  Several years ago, I read a book from the library on fascism and the author emphasized this ambiguity of meaning.  Nonetheless, I use the terms pretty freely in reference to Trump and Trumpism because, although there may be features that differentiate Trump and Trumpism from the broad concept of "fascism," the features that they have in common predominate.  Check all that apply: (1) Opposition to Marxism and socialism, (2) Opposition to cultural and poltical liberalism, (3) Glorification of the State, (4) Extreme nationalism, (5) Imperialism, (6) Opposition to parliamentary or constitutional democracy, (7) Totalitarian ambition, (8) Military values, (9) Acceptance of racism, (10) Conservative or reactionary economic policies, (11) Mass mobilization, and (12) Control of education as character building.

The features I focus on start with the glorification of the State and extreme nationalism.  These were clearly present in Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy, and Trump's MAGA movement emulates them.  "America" to Trump and his followers is a dream state of the U.S. after the Second World War, when the U.S. was the sole hegemon in the world, most other nations having been ravaged at leasst economically by the war  It is the America before Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, before the sexual revolution and The Pill, the America of school prayer, 'one nation under God'.

Secondly, I focus on opposition to parliamentary or constitutional democracy.  The last thing that fascists believe in is that all men are created equal.  Ask Donald Trump and Elon Musk.  I'm rather sure that they and many other extremely wealthy and/or powerful people believe themselves to be different in kind from hoi polloi, the masses, 'ordinary' people, innately superior.  Hitler believed that democracy undermines the natural selection of ruling elites.  So did Mussolini and Tojo.  One might argue that so did our Founding Fathers, who had a great fear of democracy as 'mob rule.'  The right to vote was rrestricted to men (not women) with property.  The Electoral College was created as a protection against democracy.  Senators were chosen by state legislators, not by direct vote.  The voting power of Southern slaveowning oligarchs was increased by the infamous 3/5ths rule of legislative apportionment, etc.  Our revered Constitution was hardly an endorsement of democracy, of one man / one vote, or of all men are created equal

 Thirdly, I focus on totalitarian ambition.  It is not enough to control the machinery of government; fascists strive to control the whole of society and culture, the legal and judicial system, mass media, education, schools and universities, the military, any institution or organization that can affect the perceptions, moods, and willingness of hoi polloi to believe and follow the Beloved Leader, der Führer, il Duce.  We note Trump's concerted efforts to bend to his will, using his vast wealth and the levers of government, the mass media, the legal profession, the universities and scientific research communities, the professional military leadership, etc.  "I run rhe coountry and the world" he told interviewers Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer of The Atlantic on April 24th of this year.  And that's just the way he wants it.

Fourthly, I focus on the acceptance of racism.  The ultimate example of course is the Holocaust, but consideer:  Trump's attitudes on immigration, especially on immigrants from "shithole countries" vs. immigrants from Norway; the targets of his travel bans; his broadside attacks on DEI programs, any programs intended to favor anyone who isn't White and male, and the tools he uses to root out such programs throughout the society and the culture.

Lastly, I focus on mass mobilization.  The Nazis had the Nuremberg rallies, torchlight parades, bonfires, huge banners with swasticas, Nazi salutes, and Seig Heil!, and Joseph Goebbels.  Trump has had Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson, the death of 'the Fairness Doctrine,' AM radio and Fox News, social media, and MAGA hats.

That's enough congruence between Fascism and Trumpism for me.  He's a fascist through and through and so are a great many of his supporters.  As Pogo said, we have met the enemy and hi is us.

6/5/2025

 Thursday, June 5, 2025

D+190/135

1912 US Marines invaded Caimanera, Cuba

1967 Six-Day War began between Israel and the neighboring Arab states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria

1968 Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert F. Kennedy, shooting him 3 times and wounding 5 others at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California. Kennedy died the next day.

2018  President Donald Trump's administration's policy of separating immigrant children from their families violated international law, according to the UN

In bed by 9, awake around 4:30, and up at  4:45.  52°, high 68°, mostly sunny day.  

Eye drops at 6 a.m.  I see Dr. Saladi today.  End of eye drops? . . . Yes, but start of dry eye ointment, eye wipes, and heated eye pads.  It's always somethin'. 

Can the Church Evolve is the lead essay by Fintan O'Toole in the current issue of the New York Review of Books.  Its subheading is "The big question for Pope Leo XIV is whether he will complete Pope Francis’s mission to make the Catholic Church less tyrannical.   Like all of O'Toole's essays, it is erudite, informed, and thoughtful.  Excerpts:

“If,” wrote Thomas Hobbes in the most stinging of Protestant put-downs, “a man consider the originall of this great Ecclesiasticall Dominion, he will easily perceive, that the Papacy, is no other, than the Ghost of the deceased Romane Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.” It might be said that the mission of the late Pope Francis was to banish that ghost. The big question for his successor, Leo XIV (Robert Prevost), is whether his papacy will complete the exorcism or continue to be haunted by the specter of the imperial Church.

The answer matters, obviously, to 1.4 billion Catholics. But it bears heavily too on an issue at the heart of the contemporary crisis of democracy: the nature of authority. In 2023 Prevost said, “We must not hide behind an idea of authority that no longer makes sense today.” While serving as head of the Vatican’s commission on the appointment of bishops he remarked, “The bishop is not supposed to be a little prince sitting in his kingdom.” It seems likely that he also believes the pope is not supposed to be a little emperor sitting in his imperial court. In choosing to elevate him, the 132 other cardinals eligible to vote in the conclave would seem to have had a very particular little emperor in mind: the one in the White House.

The most immediately striking thing about Prevost is that he embodies the hybrid nature of American identity. While Donald Trump has mobilized Nazi rhetoric about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” Prevost’s blood is Afro-Creole, French, Italian, and Spanish. His maternal grandparents were people of color from New Orleans. He is also a Peruvian citizen who has spent much of his life ministering to the kind of people Trump characterizes as “vermin.” When Vice President J.D. Vance suggested to Fox News in January that Christianity prioritizes love for one’s own family and neighbors over love for strangers and foreigners, an X account apparently belonging to Prevost posted a rebuke: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”

Before the idea of an American pope became real, Trump had played with the notion that it could be him. He declared on April 29 that his “number one choice” for the succession to Pope Francis would be himself. On May 2, less than a week after he attended Francis’s funeral, Trump posted on Truth Social (and the official White House account reposted on X) an AI-generated image of himself enthroned on a gilded chair, sporting a gold-embroidered miter, and dressed in a white papal cassock with an elaborate pectoral cross. His right hand is raised in a gesture of both blessing and command. Trump was tapping into many centuries of papal portraiture, bringing to mind Annalyn Swan and Mark Stevens’s description of Diego Velázquez’s celebrated Portrait of Innocent X as “an authoritative vision of an authoritarian.” Trump called the post a “little fun,” but as in so much of Trump’s humor, the comedy of the AI image did not conceal its authoritarian intent.

 . . . .

Trumpism contains a deep seam of reactionary Catholicism, represented not just by Vance and Steve Bannon but by Trump’s three picks for the Supreme Court, all of whom were raised Catholic. This nexus was hostile to Francis’s version of the faith, which it regarded as weak and woke. Open opposition to Francis at the top of the Church hierarchy was led by the American cardinal Raymond Burke, who was for a time a patron of Bannon’s Dignitatis Humanae Institute. Trump’s presentation of himself as pope was wish fulfillment for those of his Catholic fans who were hoping for a Trump-friendly successor to Francis. (Trump suggested the sycophantic New York cardinal Timothy Dolan as a “very good” option.)  . . .

The tension between the Church’s origins as a community of outsiders and its evolution as the inheritor of the Roman Empire’s bureaucratic systems of command and control remains radically unresolved. . . . .

 Until 1967 “all clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors, and professors in philosophical-theological seminaries” had to swear the “Oath Against Modernism” decreed by Pius X in 1910:

I sincerely hold that the doctrine of faith was handed down to us from the apostles through the orthodox Fathers in exactly the same meaning and always in the same purport. Therefore, I entirely reject the heretical misrepresentation that dogmas evolve and change from one meaning to another.

This language—hierarchy, subordination, obedience, immutability—made the Church a natural ally of authoritarian regimes, especially in the forms they took in Catholic countries. The Vatican made a comfortable deal with Benito Mussolini in the Lateran Pacts of 1929. The Church declared Francisco Franco’s coup against the Spanish Republic a “national crusade” and subsequently helped to prop up his dictatorship. The Church also rallied around Marshal Pétain in Vichy France and António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal. Many Catholics (individually and collectively) acted heroically to resist fascism and oppose its atrocities, but they had to go against the grain of the institutional Church’s doctrine of submission to one-man rule. The spiritual dictatorship of the pope provided a model for its temporal equivalents—which is why, with the resurgence of fascism worldwide, the conduct of the pope has a resonance far beyond the bounds of his own church.

. . . . . . 

Leo will be a good pope if he succeeds, in his own quieter and more cerebral way, in sustaining the decency, compassion, and openness of his predecessor. He will be a great one if he manages to translate that benign comportment into the kind of change that does not ultimately depend on the personality of a pope. Such change is structural and permanent: the complete transformation of a monarchical male dictatorship into a living embodiment of the spirit of democracy. Only when that is accomplished will the ghost of empire have been laid to rest at last.

 

This is a truly wonderful essay, yet another reason why I am such a big fan of Fintan O'Toole.  I especially took delight in this passage about the fop Cardinal Burke, about whom I have often written:

[T]he importance of style could be quite literal. Francis kept his old black shoes, in contrast to his predecessor Benedict’s handcrafted red ones. He sported a cheap silver-plated pectoral cross and plastic watch and dressed in a plain white cassock. By way of flagrant contrast, his would-be nemesis Cardinal Burke epitomized what Francis mockingly called the “peacock priest.” Burke, as described by Frédéric Martel in his best-selling In the Closet of the Vatican (2019), brings to mind the satiric ecclesiastical fashion show in Federico Fellini’s Roma (1972):

He can stroll about in full sail, in his cappa magna, in an unthinkably long robe, in a forest of white lace or dressed in a long coat shaped like a dressing gown, while at the same time, in the course of an interview, denouncing in the name of tradition a “Church that has become too feminized.” 😂😂😂

Musk v. Trump: Go, bear! Go, mother-in-law!  After Trump essentially fired Musk by not extending his Special Federal Employee status or appointing him to another position with status and power,  He also excluded the electric vehicle tax credit from his 'big, beautiful budget bill, to Musk's great displeasure.  Musk has been savagely attacking Trump's big, beautiful bill as 'a disgusting abomination' that will massively increase deficit spending and the national debt.  It reminds me of Bob Friebert's predictable comments about "a fight in the leper colony" and the man watching his mother-in-law fight off an attacking bear, cheering "Go, bear! Go, mother-in-law!"  

Random thoughts to start the day: (1) I can't escape my disgust for Joe Biden and his arrogant decision to seek a second term.  I hold him in very large measure responsible for the resurgence, in a much more lethal form, of Donald Trump and his myrmidons.  I have written about it often and thought about it even more often.  "Don't underestimate Joe's ability to fuck things up" is the advice anonymously attributed to Barack Obama.  He had been lusting after the brass ring since before 1988, when he first ran for the presidency and was forced out of the contest by what passed for a scandal in those days.  Once he had it, i.e., was in the White House, he just couldn't give it up.  He froze the field of potential competitors to Trump, annointed Kamala Harris who (1) was stuck with his record on immigration and inflation, and (2) couldn't even make it to the Iowa cauceses in 2020, and gave Trump a clean sweep of the battleground states, and a big victory in the popular vote in 2024.

(2) Tom Friedman was on Morning Joe this morning and said, "Donald Trump is not a Russian agent.  I want to make that very clear, but man, he sure knows how to play one on television, because when I hear his readout of the call with Putin [about the Ukrainian attack on Russian bombers deep inside Russia], you know what he reminds me of?  Pete Hegseth, not as Secretary of Defense but as a commentator on Fox TV. 'I talked to Putin and man, is he mad.'  Well, what did you say?'  I have speculated for some time that Trump is a Russian agent, not merely a Russian asset.  I could as easily speculate that Trump is a Chinese agent.  The point is that he is doing incalculable harm to the United States, economically, diplomatically, militarily, and spiritually or politically insofar as he increases polarization and internal enmities.  Putin, Xi, and other dictatorial enemies of America must be licking their chops watching what is happening to this country under Trump. (And again I think, thank you, Joe Biden.)

(3) Further to the above, from Friedman's op-ed in yesterday's NYTimes, "Trump's Gilded Gut Instinct."

Trump is governing by unchecked gut impulses, with little or no homework or coordinatin among agencies . . . [W]hat you are seeing from this Trump II administration, and its bended-knee Congress, is a dangerous, undisciplined, intellectually inconsistent farce that we will pay dearly for in the future.. . .  If you think this is not dangerous, just keep in mind that the Trump Organization Inc. over the years filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for six different businesses.  That was a reason for that: the operating style and values of its boss.

 I went to Heaven this morning between 8 and 8:35 when I sat solely and silently on the patio behind our house and took in with my eyes and ears what surrounded me, a beatific vision.

Trump and Musk are in th emiddle of a food fight, calling each other names like emotional chldren.  Musk has even posted a charge that Trump is one of the men referred to in Jeffrey Epstein's criminal invesigtation file and that's the reason the file is kept under lock and key by the government.

6/4/2025

 Wednesday, June 4, 2025

D+189/134

1919 US Marines invaded Costa Rica

1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre: unofficial figures placing the death toll near 1,000

1990 Dr Jack Kevorkian assisted an Oregon woman to commit suicide, beginning a national debate over the right to die

1991 Pope John Paul II compared abortion with Nazi murders

2024 President Joe Biden introduces immediate restrictions on the southern border, limiting illegal migrant crossings to 2,500 a day  (Too little, too late)

In bed at 10:10, awake and up at 5:15. 56°, drizzle, high of 64°.  Officially,  we've had 0.6" of rain in the last 24 hours, 0.4" expected in the next 24 hours, but our rain gauge on the patio has fully 2 inches of rain in it, though I don't know when I last emptied it.  It's been a wet season.  Correction: JSOnline reports Whitefish Bay received 1.86" of rain in the last 24 hours.  Our rain gauge is accurate, about 2 inches. 

Eye drops at 6 a.m. and 5:15  p.m.

LTMW I see a brown-headed cowbird on the tray feeder.  Not sure how I feel about this visitor.

Donald Trump is America's Brexit.   The British electorate acted stupidly in voting to leave the European Union on June 23, 2016.  The official withdrawal did not occur until January 31, 2020, but the die was cast by the 2016 referendum, in which the Brits, in a huge turnout of more than 72% of eligible voters, voted for withdrawal, 52% to 48%.  How do the Brits feel now about Brexit?  As of last month, 55% of them feel that it was a mistake to leave the European Union, and only 32% believe it was the right decision.  Two-thirds of the British public are unwilling to opine that Brexit was a wise, prudent vote beneficial to the UK, but 52% of them voted for it, urged on by scoundrels like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson.  Even the government's official forecast is that leaving the EU will reduce the UK's exports and imports of goods and services by 15%.  There are other impacts of Brexit on immigration, travel, laws, and money, with varying effects, but the bottom line is that fewer than 1/3rd of the Brits can say that the vote to leave the EU was beneficial to the UK.  They know they shot themselves in the foot.

The 2023 vote that placed Donald Trump back in the Oval Office will be America's Brexit, our break with the rest of the world, or at least with our former friends and allies, and realignment with Russia and Middle Eastern oil potentates.  Trump admires and emulates autocrats, and the 2024 election gave him 4 years in which to weaken the federal government and shred American democracy and whatever claim we had to our status as a promoter of democracy, human rights, and decency in the world.  He is causing a brain drain with his outrageous attacks on scientific research and the universities where it occurs.  He has halted the efforts to minimize the effects of climate change.  He has coarsened political discourse and public dialogue.  As his former defense secretary, James Mattis, has asserted, he is the only president who has striven not to unite Americans, but to divide them.  He has staged a frontal assault on the Rule of Law, on which not only personal and civic liberties depend but also trade and commerce.  He has reintroduced intentional cruelty into presidential policymaking.   The election of Donald John Trump has been our American tragedy, much worse than the UK's Brexit.  He has reversed the course of American and world history, and always for the worse.

Letter to Peter this morning, sent with a card and gift, put in the mail at the Central PO for the 1:30 p.m. pickup, hoping for delivery by Saturday.

June 4, 2025

Dear Peter,

Congratulations on graduating from Nicolet.  I hope you are proud of this achievement.   You, more than anyone else, know the effort, the thousands of hours of classroom work, homework, and extracurricular work over four years that your diploma represents.  There is nothing ordinary about it.  These past four years have been pivotal ones in your life, foundational to the years ahead, and you have made the most of them.  I’m happy for you and I hope you are feeling a well-deserved sense of serious accomplishment.

I graduated from my high school 66 years ago, in 1959.  They were also pivotal and formative years for me, leading on to Marquette University, marriage to your Grandma Anne, the birth of your Dad and Aunt Sarah, and ultimately to your birth in 2007 as my long hoped-for and first grandchild and namesake.  The world you are entering as a new adult is so vastly different, and more challenging, than the one I entered in 1959.  I confess that it daunts me.  I have thought about it more times than I can count, wondering how I would acquit myself as a young man in today’s world.  I don’t know whether you too are finding the world today to be daunting or whether you are brimming with self-confidence, or whether you are somewhere in between, perhaps moving from one pole to the other from one day to the next.  Life has never been easy, not in 1959 nor in 2025.  It takes some courage, which I know you have.  It also takes an ability to live with and learn from mistakes which we all make.  I have made more than I can remember (thankfully) and you will make some too.  Some you may regret; some will help you grow.   If I can help you as you make your way, please call on me.  Your are off to a good start with your solid educational background and, most importantly, with your great family who have loved you all along the way.

As you move on to MSOE, I think of Neil Armstrong’s famous "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."  I know you won’t be making a moon landing, but your moving from high school and adolescence to college and adulthood is indeed  a ‘giant leap.’    It’s a very big deal.  I’m happy that you are making the leap and confident that you have what it takes for a successful landing.  If I can help along the way, you have my number and know where we live.  God bless you and congratulations.

Love,  /s/  Grandlpa

 

6/3/2025

 Tuesday, June 3, 2025

D+188/133

1946 International Military Tribunal opened in Tokyo against 28 Japanese war criminals

1989 Beginning of the Tiananmen Square Massacre as Chinese troops opened fire on pro-democracy supporters in Beijing

2018 A dead whale was found with 17 pounds  of plastic in its stomach in Thailand

In bed by 10:30, awake at 5:35, and up at 5:55.  65°, high of 78°, cloudy, rain late.     

Eye drops at 7 a.m. and  p.m.  

       New official Presidential Photo for Trump's Second Term.  New official Presidential Motto: Fuck with me and I will destroy you.     

Lethargy, lassitude, listlessness, languor,   I sure have slowed down, mentally and physically.  I looked at my journal notes from June 3 last year and June 3 the year before, and was impressed by the seriousness and mental energy that went into the writing.  Two years ago, it was about affirmative action, racism, White Supremacy, and segregation.  Last year, it was about Trump's thugishness, cruelty, and bloodlust, but mostly about Israel, the Palestinians, and the prescience of Yeshayahu Liebowitz.  Today, and most days now, I'm sluggish, both in bodily functions and in mental functions.

This afternoon, I will return to the library a book titled Illiberal America by Steven Hahn.  It's due back today and can't be renewed. I barely opened it, though this morning I took a quick look at the chapter with the heading "The "Other" Nineteen-Sixties."  Most of it is about racial and political tensions in that decade following Brown v. Board and on the cusp of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, 1965, and 1968.  I lived through that era and remember some of it rather vividly.  The author focuses much attention on the ascendancy of Alabama governor George C. Wallace, "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever."  I was reminded of our pastor at St. Leo parish, Rt. Rev. Msgr. Patrick Malloy and his battle cry, "Keep the undesirables out of our neighborhood."  One particular sentence in this chapter caught my attention.

Between 1950 and 1960, the Black population of Philadelphia grew by 41%, Baltimore by 45%, Detroit by 58%, Chicago by 65%, Gary, Indiana by 72%, Los Angeles by 112%, and Milwaukee by a remarkable 187%.

I wrote about growing up in this era in my memoir, in a chapter I titled "The Undesirables."

I have been in one fist fight in my life.  It happened when I was about 11 years old.  A kid who lived across the street from us, whose name I have long forgotten but whom I will call “Tommy,” taunted my sister Kitty by chanting “Kitty kissed a nigger, Kitty kissed a nigger.”  Emerald Avenue had been torn up for months for sewer work and at night the excavated street was guarded (in a manner of speaking) by an old black watchman whose name was Moses.  Moses’ post was a shack kitty-corner from our basement apartment.  On cold nights, the shack was heated by glowing briquettes of coke in a 55 gallon drum.  Kitty and I became friends with Moses.  He was the first black person we had known.  We would sit in the shack talking with him after supper and before our mother would call us to come home.  Moses always had his bible with him and he told us bible stories.   He was kind and gentle and we loved him.  I’m sure he loved us.  When Mom would call us home, Kitty would give Moses a hug and a peck on the cheek.  When Tommy the Taunter saw the leave-taking one night, he was merciless in deriding Kitty so I decked him.   (“Decking” is too virile a term for the flailing and wrestling match we engaged in on the Emerald Avenue grass.)  Somehow it ended, inconclusively as I recall, and I went home to explain how I got dirty and disheveled.

The “Kitty kissed a nigger” fight occurred probably sometime in 1952, when I was in 6th grade and probably a neophyte altar boy.  It was hardly my introduction to racism, but it was the most personal and direct experience of it.  Moses was not an abstraction or an anonymous member of a feared or disfavored group.  He was an individual person with his own distinctive characteristics, characteristics that Kitty and I admired and cherished.  He was a human being, a “child of God,” “made in His image and likeness,” and of course “a temple of the Holy Ghost.”  To Tommy the Taunter however Moses was a ‘nigger’ and 8 year old Kitty was to be mocked for loving and kissing him.

I mentioned in the last letter that the Church Kitty and I grew up in was racist, and so it was.  It would paint a more accurate picture, however, to acknowledge that the world we grew up in was racist and the Church reflected that world.  Chicago was a racial cauldron the entire time I lived there, especially on the South Side.  Perhaps the more accurate metaphor would be ‘pressure cooker,’ with us Southsiders never knowing when the lid would blow off.  

There were two great black migrations from the rural South to Chicago.  The first was during the First World War.  The War increased demand for many of Chicago’s manufactured products but also halted immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe which had provided laborers for ‘grunge work.’  Southern blacks were able to obtain employment that had been closed to them before the War.  They were also able to escape the sharecropping and Jim Crow culture of the South which guaranteed them a life of economic penury, social degradation, and political powerlessness.  The blacks who came to Chicago were mostly from Mississippi, as was the case in Milwaukee.   Most lived in ‘the Black Belt,’ originally a strip of residential housing between Cermak Road (22nd Street) and 31st Street along south State Street. Over the years the narrow belt grew longer and wider and eventually came to comprise most of the South Side and much of the West Side.  As my mother and father were growing up in St. Bernard’s parish around 65th and Stewart Streets, the  northern border of the Black Belt was just south of their neighborhood, at 63rd and State Streets.  After the horrendous Riot of 1919, race relations were relatively calm in Chicago.  As my father told, me, “They stayed out of our neighborhood and we stayed out of theirs.” 

Blacks were hardly welcomed by most white Chicagoans, especially the working class.  The blacks were sometimes used as strikebreakers, notably in the packinghouses around the huge Union Stockyards.   Even without the tremendous tensions between management and labor, involving communists, socialists, anarchists, and ‘Wobblies’ or International Workers of the World, the blacks were filling jobs that Irishmen, Germans, Bohemians, Italians and Poles and other ethnics wanted for themselves.  After the War ended, between July 27th and August 3rd of 1919, there was a race riot, specifically a riot of whites, that resulted in the deaths of 23 blacks and 15 whites and in injuries to 342 blacks and 195 whites.  It took the Illinois National Guard to quell the riot.  The riot started when a black teenager crossed the invisible line between “white area” and “colored area” at the 29th Street beach.  Forty-two years later, in 1961, there was another violent racial confrontation on the beach that the Clausen and Cummings kids used, Rainbow Beach between 70th and 79th Streets.  

The second great migration occurred during and after the Second World War.  Again, industrial demand for labor was high and with 16,000,000 men in the armed services the labor supply was low.  Many blacks filled the gap.   When the war ended, a number of factors came into play to increase racial conflict.  First, the return of the veterans meant competition for available jobs was intense.  Blacks didn’t want to give up the employment gains they had made and whites wanted to return to the status quo ante bellum.  Second, there was a tremendous shortage of housing.  Third, in the 1940’s, the mechanical cotton picker became prevalent in the South, making life even harder for poor rural blacks.  This led to continued black migration into northern cities creating even greater pressure for housing and greater competition for employment. This all occurred in a city that was intensely ethnic and parochial.  Hence the metaphors of ‘cauldron’ and ‘pressure cooker.’  This was the setting for Monsignor Malloy’s exhortations from the pulpit to “keep out the undesirables.”

    In 1960 and before, Auburn Gresham had a population of almost 60,000: 98.7% white and 0.2% black..  In 1990, the population was still just under 60,000 but with the demographics reversed: 98.7% black, 1.1% white.  In 2000, the population had dropped to 55,928: 99.4% black, 0.5% white.  Just to the north and east of Auburn Gresham was Englewood, my parents’ old neighborhood.  A look at the demographics of Englewood provides a good picture of the racial pressures on Auburn Gresham as the Black Belt expanded.  In 1930, Englewood had a population of 89,063: 98.7% white, 1.1% black.  In 1940, the population was 2% black and in 1950, 11% black.  By 1960, the population had grown to 97,595: 30% white, 70% black.  In 1970, the population was 96% black and in 1990, the population had dropped to 48,434: 99% black..  By 2000, the population had dropped to 40,222, still virtually all black.  The Wikipedia entry for Englewood is “a vacant town with buildings falling apart and 43% of the residents living below the poverty line.  Over 700 murders have occurred there in just 10 years.”  

The Catholics in the Auburn Gresham district were clustered around St. Leo parish and St. Sabina parish west of St. Leo .  The two churches were only ¾ of a mile apart; Mapquest’s estimated traveling time is 3 minutes.  Yet the number of Catholics in that neighborhood was ample enough to support two thriving parishes each offering at least 4 Sunday masses, often standing room only (unless Monsignor Malloy was cramming the pews.)  St. Leo had mass in the church every hour on the hour till noon and every hour on the half hour in the high school chapel.  

To white Southsiders, the expanding Black Belt was a metastasizing cancer.   When blacks moved in, whites moved out.  There were efforts to foster integration, but they all eventually failed.  A neighborhood was going to be either black or white, never both, at least not for long.  One black family moving in was like one cancer cell taking up residence in an organ.  Hence Monsignor Malloy’s crusade to “keep out the undesirables.”  What he saw coming was his entire parish of urban Irish and German Catholics evacuating, being displaced by poor rural Mississippi blacks almost none of whom were Catholic.

What Malloy saw looming at the parish level, Cardinal Stritch saw at the archdiocesan level.  Catholics in the path of black expansion were abandoning their parishes by the thousands, leaving Catholic churches and schools struggling to keep their heads above water in a tidal wave of black Baptists, African Methodist Episcopals, Church of God in Christ folks, and assorted evangelicals, pentecostals and ‘holy rollers’ of all sorts.  Storefront churches popped up like dandelions, with self-appointed pastors renting spaces formerly occupied by small white retail and services establishments.  This presented Stritch with many challenges.  What to do about the old churches and schools and rectories and convents and devalued real estate in the newly black neighborhoods?  Support them out of archdiocesan funds or close them? How to deal with the need for new churches and schools, etc. in the white-flight suburbs?  How to deal with the black pressure to integrate Catholic parishes, their churches and schools and Catholic hospitals and other charities in light of deep-seated white resistance?  “Keep out the undesirables” or work toward integration?

While Kitty and I attended St. Leo Grammar School there were no black students enrolled.  There were no black students at Leo High School during my days there, nor at Visitation High School during Kitty’s stay there. In fact, Visitation parish, centered at Garfield Boulevard (55th Street) and Halsted Street, was notorious for the efforts of its parishioners, supported by its pastor, to keep blacks out of the parish.  The Garfield Boulevard Improvement Association, which met in the parish hall, was a Chicago version of the White Citizens’ Councils in the deep South: dedicated to preserving segregation, especially in housing, churches, and schools.  In 1949, when I was 8 years old, there was a riot in Visitation parish when a black couple visited the home of a Jewish couple who lived in the parish.  Rumors spread that the blacks were about to move into the parish and mobs of whites, many and probably most of them Catholics, attacked the home of the Jewish couple.  Worse riots by whites occurred in Cicero in 1951, again with working class Catholics leading the way.  An article in the Jesuit magazine America said the rioters wore “sweaters with [Catholic ] school names or crests on the back, Knights of Columbus lapel pins and rings, scapulars or other medals seen through an open shirt . . . some fairly definite physical symbols of Catholic faith.”

Cardinal Stritch himself was a Southern racist.   He believed in converting blacks to Catholicism, but not in living near them, going to school with them, or worshipping in the same pews with them. Steven Avella, a history professor at Marquette published a history of the Chicago archdiocese under Cardinals Stritch and his successor Albert Meyer.  Regarding the racial tensions in the archdiocese, he wrote:

    Cardinal Stritch was least well-equipped temperamentally and philosophically to deal with this aspect of change in Chicago Catholic life.  Stritch was indelibly southern in his attitudes on racial issues.  He displayed this in private conversation, when he would refer to blacks as “niggers.”  Once, he accused on of his Milwaukee priests of leaving his quarters at a Catholic high school “unfit for a nigger.” [fn] Chancery official and later Bishop Cletus F. O’Donnell was once ordered by Stritch to “give this nigger a good tip” in reference to a railroad porter who had carried the archbishop’s luggage on board a train.   In a letter to his chief theological adviser, Stritch wrote from Hobe Sound, Florida: “Do not choose the winter climate of Florida if you have some deep thinking to do.  Here you take on the habits of the colored folk and do as little as is consistent with being alive.  (This Confident Church: Catholic Leadership and Life in Chicago, 1940-1965.)

    Stritch did not introduce institutional racism to the Chicago Church.   His predecessor, George Cardinal Mundelein, set the archdiocese’s race policy within a year after becoming Chicago’s third archbishop.  There was one black parish in Chicago in 1916 when he became archbishop, St. Monica’s.  In 1917, he decreed: 

I desire St. Monica’s to be reserved entirely for the colored Catholics of Chicago and particularly of the South Side . . .  It is, of course, understood that I have no intention of excluding colored Catholics from any of the other churches in the diocese, and particularly if they live in another part of the city, but simply excluding from St. Monica’s all but the colored Catholics. (Edward Kantowicz, Corporation Sole

In fact, black Catholics were not welcome in the other churches in the diocese and their children could not be enrolled in the parochial schools.  Thus, any Catholic who was black had to belong to St. Monica’s if he or she wanted to have full membership in a Catholic parish.  So saith Cardinal Mundelein.

I think it is a fair guess that a majority of the white diocesan priests and members of religious orders in mid-century Chicago were also racist.  It was hard not to be racist in the circumstances that existed.  Racial fear and loathing were in the air we breathed and the water we drank.  It was everywhere.  Monsignor Malloy was not risking disapprobation when he rallied the parishioners around the “keep out the undesirables” flag, he was only preaching to the choir.  Personal racism and institutional racism reinforced each other.  

How did all this affect me?  

First, it was scary.  We learned to be afraid of black people generally and we were afraid of the intense emotions that racial issues called forth from whites.   Usually, the closest we got to blacks was riding the “L” through slum neighborhoods on the way downtown.  The view from the “L” was the back porches of overcrowded, badly maintained duplexes and triplexes and larger apartment buildings with bedding or newspapers in the windows and trash strewn about the back yards.  We were scared of blacks who looked different, talked different and seemed to be from another planet.  We were scared of whites who harbored such hostility towards blacks and freely expressed it in front of children.  I don’t recall my mother ever badmouthing blacks but my father did on occasion.  Despite my father’s infrequent intemperate lapses, my overall recollection is that both my parents urged Kitty and me not to harbor hostile feelings towards blacks who were, as my mother reminded us, children of God just like us.

Second, it was confusing.  The organized racism came from the pulpit of St. Leo Church.  The message of segregation was delivered not by a Klansman in hooded sheets in front of a burning cross but by a Catholic priest in brocaded vestments in front of an altar and crucifix.    What did this suggest about the relationship between the “undesirables” and the Undesirable on the cross?  What was “undesirable” about our kind and gentle friend Moses, alone each night in the guard shack reading his Bible in a neighborhood where he was simply “a nigger”?  What was a Catholic child to make of this?

    When I graduated from St. Leo Grammar School in 1955 and moved on to Leo High School, Catholic schools were still very much segregated. The only Catholic high school for blacks was St. Elizabeth, which had succeeded St. Monica as quasi-official black parish in Chicago. We had boys of many ethnicities at the school but no blacks. I daresay that those of us who thought about such things thought that the legal segregation of whites and blacks in the South was a bad thing, but most of us were more than content to tolerate the de facto segregation by housing patterns in Chicago and other northern cities. Our only contact with black Catholics was when Leo High School played St. Elizabeth’s basketball team, usually a powerhouse in the Catholic League. The black St. Elizabeth fans sat on one side of the gym and we sat on the other side. They had girls as cheerleaders because St. Elizabeth was a co-ed school, the only co-ed Catholic high school in the archdiocese to my knowledge. Making the school co-ed saved the Cardinal the expense of supporting two schools for blacks. Thus the black Catholic adolescents got to go to school together, occasions of sin be damned, while white boys and girls were kept in separate educational enclaves lest they be occasions of sin for one another.

 

    I will write more about segregation and integration and the civil rights movement when I tell of your mother’s and my move back to Milwaukee after I was discharged from the Marines. The point I make in this letter is simply that the Catholic Church that I grew up in took almost no leadership role in the turbulent race relations in Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s. I think it is accurate to say that the role the Church played was much like that of a large property owner, concerned mainly with loss of property value and revenue streams. Justice was rarely the concern of the Church; rather, it was net worth and cash flow. So much for “the brotherhood of Man under the Fatherhood of God.’’ When push came to shove in Chicago’s race situation, as far as the Church was concerned, it was about money, property, wealth. I recalled this as I watched, in unspeakable disgust, the sordid scandal of priestly pedophilia and unforgivable cover-up by the bishops. For those guys, business is business and their first duty was to protect and maximize their assets, justice and the ‘docile flock’ be damned.    

, , , , , , , , 

I copy and paste portions of my memoir for different reasons.  First, I like to have the memoir, or portions of it, available online and in this blog.   I wish the entire memoir were so available.  It is full of memories, research, and thoughts about those memories and that research.  Second, I enjoy reading and re-reading what I wrote, much, I suppose, as I enjoy looking at my own paintings and drawings.  Each writing, each painting, and each drawing encapsulates or tangibly represents the portion of my life when I did the work.  Third, I've got almost 84 years behind me and not much ahead of me.  I want to leave some evidence of having been alive in these unproductive last days.  It's not that I expect any of these journal entries to be read.  I'm no Anne Frank or Samuel Pepys or other fine diarist.  My daily notes, individually and taken as a whole, are like a run-on sentence.    TMI, boring, solipsistic or at least egocentric and perhaps eccentric, perhaps a sign of hypergraphia, who knows, but they do constitute "proof of life."   Lastly, cutting and pasting is a lot easier than thinking and writing original thoughts.  On a day like today, when I am such a lump, it lets me fill pages with next to no thought or effort.  It's cheating.  I mention one other thing.  I have this fantastical notion that every time I hit "publish" and commit my thoughts to the blog, it is transmitted into the universe, a message from an infintesimally tiny and ephemeral lifeform on the third planet from the sun in the Milky Way galaxy, like the letter mentioned in Thornton Wilder's Our Town, addressed to a friend of Rebecca Gibbs' at her particular house number on her particular street, in her particular little town and state, in the United States, on the planet Earth, tin he Solar System, and the Universe, and the Mind of God..  Crazy, right? Right?

6/2/2025

 Monday, June 2, 2025

D+187/132

1941 Edward George Felsenthal III was born in Chicago, IL

1963 I graduated from Marquette University and was commissioned in the USMC

1989 10,000 Chinese soldiers were blocked by 100,000 citizens in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, protecting students demonstrating for democracy

1997 Timothy McVeigh was found guilty of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168

2022 Queen Elizabeth II marked her Platinum Jubilee with four days of celebrations, starting with a military parade at Buckingham Palace 

In bed at 10, up at 6:10.   51°, high of 75°, sunny. SW wind at 9/16.    

Eye drops at 6:30 a.m. and 7 p.m.     

It's Ed Felsenthal's birthday.  He would have been 84 years old today, had he not died on June 23 last year, following his wife Lyn's death on October 15th of the year before.  Lyn was the first of the Notch House gang to die, if we consider the gang to consist of Ed Felsenthal, Tom Devitt, Bill Hendricks, Jerry Nugent, me, and our wives.  Ed was the second.  Today is also the 62nd anniversary of our graduation from college, except for Tom, who graduated a semester earlier, and Bill, who graduated a semester (or a summer session) later.  My Schroeder Hall roommate, Joe Daley, lived with the group for two years, but he wasn't considered fully a member because he wasn't in the Navy ROTC like the rest of us.  He didn't receive a Navy or Marine Corps commission on graduation day like the rest of us, and he never served in Vietnam, like the rest of us, except Bill.  Ed and I moved out of Notch House on 16th Street in the second semester of our junior year.  Joe, who had some idiosyncrasies, was driving Ed crazy, and I decided to move with Ed to the Queen Anne Apartments on 29th Street, next to the big Masonic Hall, or the Taj Mahal, as we called it.  In our senior year, Joe took an apartment with his friend Joe Beresford from San Mateo, CA, and Ed and I moved back with Tom, Bill, and Jerry to a flat on 25th and Vine.  I exchanged texts with Ed's oldest daughter, Mary Fran Schroder, this morning:

Hi, Mary Fran.   I’m thinking of your Dad on his birthday, missing him, grateful to have had his support and friendship for so many years.  He was such a good man and such a good friend.  My thoughts are with you and your sisters today.❤️

Hi, Chuck. Thank you for your kind words. I know how much he valued his friendship with you. I hope all is well with you. 

I’m hanging in there, as they say, finding life more lonely as I outlive many friends, with Ed at the top of my list.  I actually feel some tears welling up in my eyes as I type this.  My dad had a similar situation, outliving all of his friends but we were blessed that he was able to live with Geri and me the last few years of his life, a great blessing for both of us.  In any event, I have nothing but warm thoughts today as I reflect on all the years your Dad and I shared growing from Leo High School classmates into old age.  I count my blessings. 

I’ve spoken to several people the last few months who are in your position, outliving their friends and family. Unfortunately it’s a sad fact of life. I wish I had a solution. I’ll keep you in my thoughts. ❤️

Ditto.❤️

I am grateful that there are so many people so much smarter, better informed, and wiser than I am, working and writing in the public arena.  I'm thinking of the thoughtful conversations I watched and listened to on the Ezra Klein show, most recently with Kathryn Schulz from The New Yorker, and with Fareed Zakaria.  And of the taped and written conversation in this morning's New York Times between Michelle Cottle, Jamelle Bouie, and David French on "the death of empathy in America."  These thinkers and writers, and others like them, help me understand what is happening in my world right now, where it comes from, what it means, and what it portends. They remind me of what "freedom of the press" means, why it is so important, what a dark world we would live in without it, which is why Donald J. Trump is hellbent on destroying it.

 

Recent exchange of emails with Pip Lowe:

Hi, Sweetie.   I had warm thoughts of your Dad today when I watched a story on CNN about Project Benjamin replacing Latin cross gravemarkers in Europe with Stars of David for the Jewish soldiers who lost their lives in World War II's European Theater.  I remember your Dad telling of his fear over the possibility of being captured by the German forces during the war.  I remember too of learning of his memoir and wonder now whether knowing of his memoir writing is what prompted me to write one of my own.  I gave a copy of my memoir to each of my children and to my dear siser and I still find myself referring to it often when I get to reminiscing in my daily jjournal.  I so much liked and admired your Dad and wish he were still with us.Emoji (I can say the same of you, by the way.)

 . . . . . . .  

That is so sweet of you, Chuck. I'm truly touched. Especially if my Dad's memoir inspired you. Coincidentally, we had a couple over for dinner last night that wanted to see my Dad's memoirs. I know that most of his mementos should be in a museum but I can't relinquish them yet. 

Not sure if he told you that he actually was captured briefly - less than 24 hours, but it was his mistake that led his patrol into a German camp and cost the lives of some of his fellow soldiers. He repressed that memory for almost 50 years and then when it came up in a dream and he verified that it was true (meaning being able to prove it to others. He believes it was repressed because it so horrified him and he felt crushing guilt). 

Then after he wrote what happened so he didn't forget again, he decided to write the complete memoirs. I think it was very healing for him and I think it's wonderful that your family has your wonderful writings and legacy. I'm sure they will treasure it and it's great that it still gives you pleasure.

You are special to me; I feel lucky to know you and can't wait to see you this summer. Love always,

Pip 

 . . . . . . .  

Hi, Sweetie.  Thank you for your kind words and thoughts, and for sharing more information about your Dad.  Your email triggered more thoughts in me than you could have imagined when you wrote them.  Here is a small section from my memoir:

"When a military person works in a technical support role such as I had in Vietnam, he or she doesn’t experience directly the lethality of the enterprise he or she is supporting, at least not on a regular basis.  We didn’t see dead people on the receiving end of the missions we kept track of.  We didn’t hear screaming or crying.  We never heard moaning or whimpering of grievers.  The Americans were bombing day and night, 7 days a week, weather permitting.  We bombed targets in the I Corps region of South Vietnam; we bombed targets in North Vietnam; and we bombed targets in Laos, although this fact was never admitted officially.  Our pilots had rules of engagement and I believe that for the most part those rules were obeyed (at least during the early phase of the war when I was there) so there would not be wanton killing of civilians.  But even in the best of circumstances, dropping bombs, especially from high altitudes, is an imprecise operation, and “collateral damage” is always a problem . . . For us back at the air base, away from the target areas, life could and did easily become a matter of routine, of regularly rotating watches, of greasy Spam sandwiches every third night, and of Black Label and Blackjack on the other nights.  Being such a small cog on such a large and lethal killing machine, it becomes easy to avoid thinking in terms of any personal responsibility for the suffering and loss that are the inevitable consequences and indeed the very purposes of modern warfare.  Front line troops don’t share this immunity.  The closest I got to feeling a direct responsibility for the deaths of others occurred one afternoon when I was completing one watch as Senior Air Director and another crew was coming on for the next.  A long distance bombing mission over North Vietnam by F4 Phantom jets had been scheduled and then scrubbed, just as the watch was changing at the TAC Center.  The mission was to be refueled by C-130 tankers in the air off the North Vietnamese coast.  Somehow in the transition from one watch crew to the other, the word never was sent to the tanker to return to DaNang, that the bombing mission was scrubbed.   As the tanker maintained its post waiting for the F4s, it was shot down.  The entire crew were killed.  If they had been notified of the cancellation of the bombing mission, they would have been ‘out of harm’s way’ and alive.  The circumstances were such that no one was blamed, no culpability was found.  But we all knew that that loss of life never should have happened.  Those Marine aviators were dead and someone fucked up; we all fucked up.  Whether the primary fault lay with the fighter squadron that cancelled the mission or with us at the TAC Center, with my crew that was being relieved or the crew that was taking over, the tanker should have been notified of the cancellation and the crew members should not have died, at least not on that mission and not as the result of a snafu.   I was a part of it all and knew I bore responsibility for those deaths.  I have never forgotten it.  I feel responsibility and remorse to this day."

That was 60 years ago.  Beyond the SNAFU that led to the deaths of those C-130 crewmen, I've come to feel remorse and responsibility for the whole damned Vietnam War, not that I caused it in any direct way, but that in my ignorance and complacency, my naive assumptions about the intelligence, wisdom, and good intentions of our American government,  I and millions of other Americans played along, went along, 'did our duty,' followed our leaders, and inflicted unmeasurable death, destruction, pain, and suffering on millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians, and on Americans as well, the 58,000 killed and hundreds of thousands wounded, physically, morally, emotionally, and spiritually.  I felt it especially when Russia invaded Ukraine when I came to realize that, from the perspective of the Vietnaese and of the rest of the world, we invaded Vietnam, despite all the "happy horseshita spouted by LBJ, Robert McNamara, General Westmorland, and the rest, and I was a part of it.  We all were.  Maybe now, with Trump twice elected, we have a clearer understanding of the un-holiness of our government, after LBJ, Nixon, Clinton, the Bushes, Trump, Iraq, and Afghanistan.  And maybe not.  In any event, I very much appreciate the short time I got to share with your Dad, and, thakfully, the longer time I have shared with you.

 . . . . . . .  

So sorry for the long delay.....dental implant surgery (all good!) and other stuff got in the way of more important tasks like responding to YOU!

Thank you for sharing that section of your memoir with me. You and my dad would have had very impactful discussions, as he felt exactly the same as you having had these experiences. He would be horrified about what is going on now. 

He only had us to share his feelings of guilt and responsibility with, since he did not talk of it to others. Altho I am glad he finally wrote about it. I wish he were here and had you to talk to. I can understand (limited, I know) why you would feel remorse and responsibility, and it probably doesn't help at this point, but there were many links in the chain that led to that horrible mission you wrote of. And ALL of us were misled by what was really happening in Viet Nam. I'll see if I can send just that section he narrated that is similar to your experience. My dad was so extraordinarily kind in an easygoing mellow manner and that's how I see you. I'm not sure if surviving a war enhanced that or if that was your and his nature all along, but the only time I saw him truly scary-angry was when he threatened to shoot my brother in the foot before letting him get drafted. That must have been related. You really remind me of him with your quiet, thoughtful peacefulness, yet determination to set things right.

So looking forward to seeing you relatively soon. 

Much love, always,

Micaela stopped for a visit today and we had a good schmooze.

 Geri chipped a front tooth yesterday, saw Dr. Neary this morning, and will get a crown Friday morning.  She has spent much of this beautiful day gardening.

I had a mindfulness moment this afternoon, sitting in the sun on our patio, on one of my favorite patio chairs (from Geri's Lake Mills apartment), taking in the lush expanse of leaves, needles, trees, bushes, ferns, grass, and other plants in front of me.  I was aware that I was alive at the very moment, and that I won't be alive tomorrow, or the next tomorrow, the following tomorrow, or the tomorrow after that, when, as Jane Kenyou reminded us, it will be otherwise.  This is it.  Heaven, right here, right now.  Enjoy it, appreciate it, rejoice in it, rest in it.

I'm reminded of a song and album by Tom Jones, Green, Green Grass of Home, released while I was in Vietnam.  A big hit, along with California Dreaming by the Mamas and the Papas, and Ebb Tide by the Righteous Brothers.  I modified the lyrids and omtted the last stanza, a downer.

The old home town looks the same / As I step down from the train

And there to meet me is my Mama and Papa

Down the road I look and there runs Geri / Hair of silver,  lips like cherries

It's good to touch the green, green grass of home

Yes, they'll all come to meet me / Arms reaching, smiling sweetly

It's good to touch the green, green, grass of home

The old house is still standing / Tho' the paint is cracked and dry

And there's that old oak tree that I used to play on

Down the lane I walk with my sweet Geri / Hair of gold, lips like cherries

It's good to touch the green, green grass of home

Yes, they'll all come to meet me / Arms reaching, smiling sweetly

It's good to touch the green, green grass of home

 

 

 

 

 

6/1/2025

Sunday, June 1, 2025

D+186/131 

1916 US Senate confirmed Louis Brandeis for the Supreme Court of the United States by a vote of 47 to 22, over 4 months after his nomination

1962  Adolf Eichmann was executed in Israel for SS war crimes

1967 The Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album was released

2020 President Trump threatened to employ the military to quell protests across the country over the death of George Floyd, then walked with staff to St. John’s Church

In bed at 9 and up at 5:18.  44°, high of 62°, sunny day ahead.   The cardinal couple arrive at 5:30 on the tray feeder, engage in their kissing behavior, followed quickly by a catbird on the suet cake. 

Eye drops at 5:30 a.m. and 5:50 p.m.  Bad pain in the right kidney area again.  I returned to bed around 9 and slept another two hours.  I am sleeping more lately than I have slept in years, also experiencing quite a bit of pain in the right kidney area.  UTI?  I see Dr. Chatt on 6/12.  Will I be able to make it that long before going to Urgent Care or the ER?  I took 500 mg of Tylenol at 8:30 a.m., and it seems to have helped, but how does one know whether it's the Tylenol or the pain just subsided on its own? I've had intermittent chills, and I think I'm sick. Tylenol again at 2:10 p.m.

Is Donald J. Trump the most destructive American in U.S. history?   First, what has he destroyed or is in the process of destroying or bringing under his personal and despotic control?  We can start with republican democracy, constitutional government, and good government led by trustworthy, competent managers.  Perhaps more broadly than those, he has destroyed the government's respect for Truth, Honesty, Honor, Dignity, and the Rule of Law.  More particularly, he has destroyed the US Agency for International Development with humanitarian programs. primarily consisting of food and medicine for those in need. He has destroyed the livelihoods of tens of thousands of federal employees.  He has attempted to destroy the right to due process of law for immigrants.  He has diminished respect for Religion by his own immoral lifestyle and his purely utilitarian embrace of Evangelical Christianity.  He has waged war on scientific research, including medical research, by cancelling research grants and contracts with Harvard University and Columbia University, by curtailing the work and staff of the NIH, FDA, and CDC, by threatening the international student visa program, and by appointing a self-interested zealot to head the Department of Health and Human Services.  He has striven to restrict the freedom of the press by meritless but expensive lawsuits against ABC, CBS, and the Des Moines Register and its pollster.  He has diminished respect for Law and Order by his profligate use of the pardon power to pardon insurrectionists, gang and militia leaders, tax cheats, fraudsters, and many others based solely on political contributions and loyalty to him, and by destroying the professional independence of law enforcement agencies including the DOJ, FBI, and ICE.  He has profoundly weakened the NATO alliance that has largely kept the peace in Europe from the end of World War II until Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2014.  He has wantonly violated treaties that he himself signed with Canada and Mexico, and violated other laws and treaties by imposing unauthorized and unwarranted tariffs on every country in the world (except Russia). He withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement and from the nuclear treaty with Iran.  He has attacked judicial independence by publicly urging that judges who rule his policies unconstitutional or unlawful be impeached and removed from office.  He has devalued all human life except for the lives of those who support him.  The list of his governmental, economic, legal, and other depredations is too long for anyone to compile, but it surely puts him in the running for the title of The Most Destructive American in History.

Second,  what other president in American history was nearly so destructive?  Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan, Rutherford B. Hayes, Warren G. Harding, Richard M. Nixon, George W. Bush?  Each of them had at least one great failure in office, but none of them comes anywhere close to the massive destructiveness of Donald J. Trump in just the first three months of his second term.  A number of his predecessors engaged in behaviors or committed acts that have resulted in their living in infamy (think of Jackson and 'The Trail of Tears," Hayes and the birth of Jim Crow, Nixon and Watergate, and G.W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq), but again nothing comes close to Trump.  Is he in fact a Manchurian Candidate of some sort, a Russian agent or mole?  A profoundly psychopathic Samson intent on bringing down the temple to destroy his enemies and perceived enemies, to get even, and more?

Third, was there any other American, not a president, who has done nearly as much damage to the country and to his countrymen as DJT?  No non-president has ever had as much power as DJT, both legitimate or lawful power, and the power of his charisma over his MAGALand followers, so no one was in a position to inflict as much damage on his country and his countrymen as DJT.