2/16/23

Thursday, February 16, 2023

In bed at 9, awake at 3, up at 3:19, and let Lilly out.  Snow day ahead, depth a question mark,  Weather Service predicting 6 to 10 inches, highest near the lake.  Winds gusting 35 to 40 mph, near blizzard conditions in the afternoon and early evening.  The wind is NNE now at 16 mph, expected to be 6 to 24 mph with gusts near 40.  The current wind chill is 18, expected to range between 17 and 29℉,  Sunrise will be at 6:48, 3 hours from now, and sunset at 5:24, 10+35.

Insight  Every now and then I am blessed with the knowledge that I am living in Heaven, that this is it. that this is as good as it gets and that this is heavenly.  I silently shout Hallelujah! and am grateful.  Sometimes I reach for my iPhone and take a photo of Geri on the sofa watching tv or knitting something for someone or studying something on her iPad with Lilly stretched out next to her or lying on the floor between us.  I take the photo because I know I am in Heaven and I suppose I can capture the moment in pixels as if I could rekindle the momentary insight simply by looking at the photo.  I can't of course - pains, worries, or other distractions get in the way - but I am thankful for these moments when they come.  I had one this morning while making a pot of half-caf, half-decaf coffee, anticipating the coming snowstorm, and grateful for the gift that my dear wife and life partner is,  and for my dog.

Me and my abortion pills  I have for many years taken 3 misoprostol pills every day.  Misoprostol is an abortifacient.  It is also used to prevent stomach ulcers from developing during treatment with aspirin or an NSAID.   I take this drug for an "off-label" use, i.e., to prevent a recurrence of Hunner's ulcers in my bladder.  About 15 years ago and for some time I was beset by those ulcers in the lining of my bladder. The ulcers were constantly bathed in the urine my body produced.  The pain I experienced from these lesions was so severe that not a day went by when I did not contemplate suicide and how I could do it and make it look like an accidental death.  I rued the fact that protective barriers were emplaced before bridge abutments on the freeways, foreclosing one available 'way out.'  On a trip through Glacier National Park with my daughter, I found myself thinking that driving off the Going-to-the-Sun Road would probably work though there was always a risk - not of death but of survival.  Eventually after a number of chemical infusions and 3 or 4 surgeries involving general anesthetics and cauterizations, AND after taking misoprostol to prevent the recurrence of the ulcers, I was cured.  My bladder lining was scarred and less flexible than it had been, but the excruciating pain was gone and the suicidal ideation with it.  Within the last year or so, misoprostol became unavailable for some reason.  My VA pharmacists speculated that perhaps the manufacturers had simply stopped making it because the profit margin was too small.  In any event, I was much more than a little concerned until the drug became available again.  Now there is a movement afoot to ban the drug or to at least prohibit it's being provided by mail (as mine is) because it can be used as an abortifacient by pregnant women.  20 Republican attorneys general earlier this month sent letters to Walgreens and CVS warning them against making the abortion medications available by mail. The drugstore chains had said they planned to seek approval to dispense the abortion medications that way after the Biden administration dropped the requirement that they be dispensed in person, and only at medical offices.  If Republican 'right to life' zealots get their way, it may soon be the case that manufacturers of my ulcer medication will find it economically not worthwhile to produce misoprostol when there is so much money to be made by producing more profitable drugs, like Viagra and Cialis and Botox.  In that case, I will simply have to hope that my ulcers don't recur and make me contemplate once again driving off mountain roads next to steep cliffs.  All lives are equal, but some are more equal than others.

LTMW I see good neighbor John out for his first walk of the morning before the snow arrives.  I also see 10 or 11 goldfinches on my tall niger feeder enjoying breakfast.  I filled the niger feeder and the sunflower seed & millet feeders around 7 to ensure that daily visitors have a food supply during the storm.  I saw a video on FB this morning of a red-bellied woodpecker calmly perched on a human hand filled with seeds and nuts, carefully choosing his preferred munchies.  It reminded me of the chickadee(s) feeding off Geri's hand in the woods outside of Rhinelander many years ago during a camping trip with Tom and Micaela and reminded me of my desire someday to place a lawn chair near the feeders. to sit in with my outstretched hand full of seeds, trying my luck.  Will our woodpeckers and chickadees be as trusting?

Geri nourishing a chickadee, a chickadee nourishing us.

Haley sounds her dog whistles as she makes a play for the MAGA base  Excerpts from Jennifer Rubin's op-ed in the WaPo this morning:    (1) "Haley’s appeal to the MAGA crowd was also evident in a campaign ad released on Tuesday. It begins with Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, describing her hometown in South Carolina. “The railroad tracks divided the town by race,” she says. The railroad did it? Or was it the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow laws and the resistance to integration by Whites? As is typical among Republicans these days, she blurs over the real roots of American division to avoid reminding Whites of the original sin of slavery."  (2) "In her speech on Wednesday, she echoed the GOP’s nasty war on “wokeism” — an all-purpose slur against efforts to advance inclusion and racial equality. On President Biden and Vice President Harris’s watch, she said, “a self-loathing has swept our country. It’s in the classroom, the boardroom and the backrooms of government.” . . . She added, “Every day, we’re told America is flawed, rotten and full of hate. Joe and Kamala even say America is racist.” (3) "Just like her potential competitors, Haley is channeling the base’s fear of losing White power. Those defending American pluralistic democracy and the promise to form “a more perfect union” should not be confused about the opposition they face."

There is something especially deeply offensive about Nikki Haley using racist dog-whistles to appeal to the Republican-White Grievance-MAGA base voters.  Haley was born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa to immigrant Indian Punjabi Sikh parents at Bamberg County Hospital in Bamberg, South Carolina. Her father, Ajit Singh Randhawa, and her mother, Raj Kaur Randhawa, emigrated to the United States from Amritsar District, Punjab, India.  Haley's parents moved to Canada after her father received a scholarship offer from the University of British Columbia. When her father received his PhD in 1969, he moved his family to South Carolina to be a professor at Voorhees College, a historically black institution.  Haley and her family have benefitted from the U.S.'s move away from its earlier racist immigration policies favoring White immigrants and excluding immigrants from Trump's 'shithole countries like India.  Now she puts herself into the "Great Replacement Theory" crowd whipped into a frenzy by the frenzied Tucker Carlson. She is light-skinned, doe-eyed, and conventionally attractive.  She can and does pass for "White." And we know now, if we didn't before, that she enhances her pseudo-Whiteness with shameless race-baiting.   Shamelessness seems to have become a sine qua non political requirement for today's Republican office-seekers.

CREDO: “...I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it again.” ― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

"I write for months and months, stuff I have to toss but . . . I don't know what I can do until I have found out the hard way what I can't do." Ditto.

Starting 2 new projects on this Snow Day.  (1) another Vietnamese girl on a chair, and (2) Fabiola portrait.

I can't draw, must rely on grid lines every 2 inches

14X18 canvas -Rough drawing with a #6H pencil

 8&1/2X11 printer paper - Fabiola portrait with 1 inch grid lines

Slow Horses  I watched the conclusion of Season 2.  Great thriller, and as usual I am not swift enough to understand the plot as it unfolds, but I enjoyed the series nonetheless.

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Signing Off at 4 p.m. to work on projects ## 1&2.  Snow continues to fall but doesn't seem to be as much as predicted.  We'll know by later tonight.

2/15//23

 Wednesday, February 15, 2023

In bed at 8:45, awake at 2:40, up at 3:10, incoherent dreams of Mike and Janine, and thoughts of my visit with Dr. Chatt this morning.  45℉ with temps falling all day and strong SSW winds 8 to 23 mph and gusts up to 41 mph producing wind chills between 22 and 41℉. Sunrise at 6:49, hours from now, sunset at 5:22, 10+32.

Starting the day with Ta-Nahisi Coates. Pretty strong broth for the middle of the night.  Coates grew up in Baltimore, the Baltimore of The Wire, of We Own This City, of the rogue Gun Trace Task Force, and of Freddie Gray.  Coates describes a world of fear for Black people, a world in which the possibility of violence directed against your body was an everyday reality, from the police or from anyone on the street, even from your parent.  He notes that the American Dream is a White myth, not for Blacks like him in Baltimore or Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO, or his Howard University buddy, Prince Carmen Jones, gunned down by a Prince George's County cop.  In an article in The Atlantic about Jones' homicide, Coates wrote something that reminded me of myself: "I have a weird way of dealing with big, emotional events. My brain moves slow, and I tend to experience things in waves--it took weeks for me to understand, emotionally, what Obama's election meant. Ditto for 9/11, except longer."  I suspect this is a result of emotional deadening that occurs as a psychological defense mechanism developed during his harsh childhood on the streets and with his father, ever ready with his disciplining belt.  What his story mostly reminds me of is our inability to fully understand the lives of one another, both on the individual level and on the group level.  Some time ago at a family dinner I mentioned that I had felt very vulnerable as I put groceries into my car in the Sendik's parking lot, old, weak, slow-moving, cane-reliant.  A daughtr-in-law remarked 'Now you know how women feel frequently' or words to that effect.  Of course she was right.  I don't  know the feelings of vulnerabiltiy that women often feel in this world, and never can.  I don't know the feelings of vulnerabilty that Jews feel in this world, even in the U.S., sometimes especially in the U.S. of Squirrel Hill's Tree of Life shul and I never can.  I don't know the vulnerability that Blacks regularly feel, deep down, in an American society that has denigrated, devalued, and marginalized them for more than 400 years, and I never can.  I can have some appreciation for my privileged status as an American White Christian-cultured Male, but I fall way short of having any real appreciation of what it is like to be Otherwise.  My life turned in 1959 when I was awarded a 4-year, all-tuition-paid, NROTC scholarship that permtted  me to go to a pivate university in another state, led to an officer's commision in the Marine Corps, ultimately led to GI Bill-funded law school, and a privileged position as a licensed attorney.  That scholarship that led to all those life-altering events was open only to males.  Was it also open only to Whites?  Probably not, but in the 8 years I lived as a midshipman and as a Marine officer, I remember only one Black Marine officer, Major Frank Peterson at NAS Willow Grove, PA, who became a friend.  I encountered a lot of Southern Baptists and Catholics in the Marines, but no Buddhists, Hindus, or Muslims that I recall.  I have been only too conscious of having lost the Lottery of Birth in terms of my war-damaged father, but too unappreciative of how I won that Lottery in the ways that counted most: White, Male, Christian.   Between the World and Me is not easy reading for a White reader for the same reason listening to Malcolm X speak was not easy listening for a White listener: the truth hurts.

VA Visit with Dr. Chatt.  The doc ordered a pelvic floor physical therapy consult for the chronic pelvic pain and a counseling consult in connection with the sleeplessness and deaths of Kitty and Tom this year.  I am hesitant about the counseling but will probably go for at least one visit.  I'm suspect this is all part of the hypersensitiviity about veteran suicides, which is certainly nowhere near where I am now though I acknowledged to her that I did engage in almost daily 'ideation' when I suffered through the CPP 15 years ago or so.  In any event, I'm always impressed by Dr. Chatt's caring nature during my visits with her.  She's been my primary care doc for more than 5 years now and I think I lucked out with her.

2/14/23

 Tuesday, February 14, 2023

In bed after 10, awake at 5:50, up at 6:05, searching for Valentine's Day cards, very runny nose from CPAP, nasty midback ache.  33℉, wind S at 10, wind chill at 25℉.  Winds today 4 mph to 22 mph, with gusts up to 42 mph and wind chills from 24 to 37℉.  Sunrise at 6:51, sunset at 5:21, 10+30.

Capitalism run amok: Ascension "Health Care"  U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin on Monday called on Ascension Health to invest some of its billions in cash into struggling hospitals in Milwaukee and questioned whether the national health system was putting its bottom line before patients.  In a letter to Ascension chief executive Joseph Impicciche, Baldwin, D-Wisconsin, wrote that she is concerned Ascension Health, based in St. Louis, Missouri, is not putting the money it earns from investments back into hospitals in Wisconsin, some of which are struggling with severe staffing challenges.  “In fact, I am concerned that the opposite is occurring – that by operating like a private equity fund, Ascension is squeezing staff, closing facilities and extracting cash from its member hospitals for dubious ‘management fees’ all to advance its investment activities and provide compensation to its executives,” she wrote, referring to multimillion-dollar fees that Ascension charges its hospitals.  Duh!

Day lost to pain?  Approaching 1 p.m. and feeling some relief from CPP, back pain, and pain in the area of the right kidney.  A lousy way to live.  Earlier took my regular 325 mg aspirin for stroke protection plus 2 8-hour Tylenols.  

Ta-Nahisi Coates.  I've been listening to my Audible copy of Between the World and Me.  Coates tells his son that though they live in very similar worlds based on persisting Racism, neither can fully understand or experience the other's world.  I perked up when listening to him describe his appreciation of Malcolm X, the only one who spoke the Truth.  I had a very similar experience when Malcolm X was alive and driving White people nuts with anger and fear.  I found it much easier to accept his description of the real world that Black people lived in than MLK's turn-the-other-cheek Christianity.  

Teens living in the Greatest Country in the World.  CDC reports that 'nearly 3 in 5 teen girls feel persistently sad or hopeless.'  30% say they seriously considered attempting suicide. 1 in 5 girls say thay have experienced sexual violence within the past year, 14% say they have been forced into having sex.

2/13//23

 Monday, February 13, 2023

In bed about 9:30, awake at 4:48,, up at 4:56 with text message purportedly from Amazon telling me my account has been suspended and 'click here' for information.'  Let Lilly out at 5.  32℉, wind W at12 mph, ranging from 5 to 15 mph, gusts up to 29 mph, high of 43  ℉ expected, with wind chills from 21 to 37℉.  Sunrise at:52, sunset at 5:20,10+27.

American Capitalism & 'the best health care system in the world.'  From this morning's WaPo: "A recent investigation by the New York Times revealed that many American hospitals have spent years pursuing an “industrywide movement” of keeping labor costs low by wringing “more work out of fewer employees.” Indeed, hospital administrators often measure success by determining how much they can lower operating expenses by reducing the number of “employees per occupied bed.” In other words, low staffing levels are not a result of the coronavirus pandemic, staff burnout or a tight labor market — they are a business model.  Simultaneously, as hospitals save money by cutting staffing, hospital marketing budgets have skyrocketed. According to a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association, between 2004 and 2016, direct-to-consumer advertising by hospitals and health-care systems jumped 74 percent to $1.4 billion per year" . . . ."If spending on advertisements is nonnegotiable but hiring enough nurses to save patients’ lives isn’t, who is our health-care system truly serving? At what point can it be said that this system has lost its way and the [profit] margin has, in fact, become the mission?"

UFOs?  Balloons, 'octagonal object,' 'cylindrical object??  Alaska, Yukon, Lake Huron, South Carolin coast?  Wazupwidat?  

Hope in Israel, Hope for Israel.  Huge demonstrations in Israel for 'rule of law,' independent judiciary.

CPP  All day, hobbling.

2/12/23

 Sunday, February 12, 2023

In bed around 9:15, awake at 4:50, and up at 5:15, thinking of Middletown.  30 degrees outside, clear skies expected for most of the day with a high of 43, winds WSW today 6 to 10mph, gusts up to 18 mph producing wind chills between 21 and 38 degrees. Sunrise at 6:53, sunset at 5:18, 10+24.

When Americans Lost Faith in the News  The formidable Louis Menand wrote this piece for The New Yorker issue on 1/30/3023.  "The press wasn’t silenced in the Trump years. The press was discredited, at least among Trump supporters, and that worked just as well. It was censorship by other means. Back in 1976, even after Vietnam and Watergate, seventy-two percent of the public said they trusted the news media. Today, the figure is thirty-four percent. Among Republicans, it’s fourteen percent." . . . "By the summer of 1968, when the Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago, the Cold War modus vivendi had largely been shredded. Reporters felt that they were being used to publish the White House’s lies about the progress of the war in Vietnam, and they struck back. Even before the Convention began, the Times, the Wall Street Journal, CBS, and NBC had run stories saying that the war was unwinnable, in contradiction to what the Johnson Administration was telling the public. So when the Convention was being planned—Lyndon Johnson did not attend, having withdrawn from the race in March, but he was very much in charge—pains were taken to incommode the news media as much as possible.  The story of the 1968 Convention—where Johnson’s Vice-President, Hubert Humphrey, won the nomination despite not having entered a single primary, and where the Party’s antiwar forces were defeated at almost every turn while police and the National Guard manhandled demonstrators and cameramen in the streets, and two correspondents, Dan Rather and Mike Wallace, were roughed up by security on the Convention floor—has been told many times." . . . "After Chicago, as Hodgson explains, coverage of political unrest, the civil rights movement, and the war was vastly reduced. By the end of 1970, people had almost forgotten about Vietnam (although Americans continued to die there for five more years), partly because they were seeing and reading much less about it. The networks understood that most viewers did not want to see images of wounded soldiers or antiwar protesters or inner-city rioters. They also understood that the government held, as it always had, the regulatory hammer."   . . . "It would make sense for the press to lose credibility if it had delivered biased or sensationalized news. But it hadn’t. It had barely covered the protesters at all. Something else was going on. . . . . "That something was the war. Vietnam was the beginning of our present condition of polarization, and one of the features of polarization is that there is no such thing as objectivity or impartiality anymore. In a polarized polity, either you’re with us or you’re against us. You can’t be disinterested, because everyone knows that disinterestedness is a façade. Viewers in 1968 didn’t want fair and balanced. They wanted the press to condemn kids with long hair giving cops the finger.  We are still there today. It is said that objectivity is what we need more of, but that’s not what people want. What people want is advocacy."

A Yale Professor Suggested Mass Suicide for Old People in Japan. What Did He Mean?  The Ballad of  Narayama lives on in New Haven!  "In interviews and public appearances, Yusuke Narita, an assistant professor of economics at Yale, has taken on the question of how to deal with the burdens of Japan’s rapidly aging society. “I feel like the only solution is pretty clear,” he said during one online news program in late 2021. “In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly?” . . . While he is virtually unknown even in academic circles in the United States, his extreme positions have helped him gain hundreds of thousands of followers on social media in Japan among frustrated youths who believe their economic progress has been held back by a gerontocratic society. . . .  “There is criticism that older people are receiving too much pension money and the young people are supporting all the old people, even those who are wealthy,” said Shun Otokita, 39, a member of the upper house of Parliament with Nippon Ishin no Kai, a right-leaning party."  Out with the geezers!  Hurry up and die already!  Outathaway, boomers!

Middletown/Muncie, IN.  We watched this documentary's 5th and 6th episodes last night and this afternoon.  The 5th episode, Second Time Around, concerned a couple entering into a second marriage for each of them.  I'm not sure what the point of the episode was, perhaps the once-burnt-twice-shy hesitation each of the partners felt about the permanence vel non of their relationship, their knowledge of the risk inherent in entering into such a 'permanent' legal relationship.  The film also made very clear the financial difficulty of finding a suitable house to live in in the early 80s when Fed Chairman Volker had raised interest rates so high that mortgages carried 16 and 17% interest rates, unthinkable today but obviously possible.  The 6th and last episode, Seventeen, is the most difficult and interesting in the series, focusing on race relations, threats of race-based violence, gun ownership, raging hormones, high emotionality, and all that we associate with adolescence and the transition from childhood to adulthood.   The protagonist of the story is a good-looking, vivacious, 17-year-old female high school student, Lynn, who likes to date and hang out with her Black classmates.  She also likes to smoke weed and drink beer, as all her peers do.  The episode is 2 hours long and, to my old eyes, presents a very dystopian portrait of Middletown, America.  The high school seniors shown in the film were 17 or 18 around 1981 when the film was shot; they would be approaching 60 today.  They were born around 1963 when I graduated from Marquette and was commissioned in the Marine Corps.  The world they lived in ad lived out was radically different from the world I lived in, the life I led in high school.  My friends and I didn't drink alcohol in high school, we didn't smoke marijuana, we didn't have sex with our girlfriends, and we weren't disrespectful towards our teachers.*  We all had aspirations for some kind of good future, first in college and then after college.  Wikipedia tells us that a "cohort" is "a group of subjects who share a defining characteristic (typically subjects who experienced a common event in a selected time period, such as birth or graduation)."  I wonder what the "defining characteristics" are that make my cohort so radically different from that of the high school students in Seventeen.  Some come to mind quickly like growing up in the 1950s versus the 1970s, going to one-gender Catholic high school rather than co-ed public schools, having as the most recently experienced war the 'heroic' and victorious World War II versus the shameful, disgraceful defeat in Vietnam.  The sexual revolution and the women's liberation movements also come to mind, but I wonder whether the underlying difference in our cohorts lay in the attitude toward Authority, respect in my era, for the Muncie kids, skepticism, or contempt.  In any case, I found the film scary and depressing.  I wondered how these adolescents would turn out.  Probably Republicans, probably Trump voters, some of them insurrectionists on January 6th or wishing they were.  Or am I just showing my bigotry?

[[ I  make my 'generation' sound like something out of an old Andy Rooney-Judy Garland movie, a bunch of Goody Two-Shoes.  We weren't.  I was introduced to pornography in an alley in Englewood by some other kid who had found an "8 pager" and s "French postcard" somewhere in his home. Our natural interest in matters sexual was only heightened by the Church's treating of all things sexual as TABOO!!! Before I 'straightened up and flew right', I hung out with the neighborhood gang who got into 'joy-riding' cars and engaging in vandalism, including arson.  When one of my neighborhood pals, Johnny Nelson, was arrested by the CPD and sent to JDH, the juvenile detention home, I saw the light and became a Goody Two-Shoes as a member of a group of 4 Catholic high school friends, 2 of whom joined the Catholic religious order that taught at our high school - Johnny Flynn and Jack O'Keefe.  The other 2, Larry Stack and I, went on to attend Catholic universities and to receive military commissions upon  graduation.]] 

2/11/23

 Saturday, February 11, 2023

In bed at 9:15, awake at 5:20, and up at 6:10, brain inactive except for John Prine's Hello in There, sotto voce. 23 degrees outside, high of 41, wind chill is 11 with a SW wind of 12 mph, windy day ahead with wind speeds up to 16 mph and gusts up to 30 mph and corresponding wind chills.  Sunrise at 6:55, sunset at 5:17, 10+22.

"AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY IS DUE FOR A REVIVAL:Our society is secularizing, and Christianity seems to be in long-term decline. But renewal is possible." This is an article I am reading in the February 5, 2023 issue of The Atlantic by Timothy Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in NYC.  It's a fairly long article and pastor Keller clearly put a lot of thought and some research into its drafting.  I read it in part because it seems rather out of place in The Atlantic, which is a secular publication, not visibly connected with any religious orientation, and certainly not noticeably Christian.  Its readership is more highly educated than most Americans and almost certainly 'lists to port' and gives a wide berth to contemporary Republicanism and its attachment to Evangelicalism.  How does an article about a coming Christian Revival find its way into this magazine?  More interestingly, the article seems to ignore what seems to me to be defining characteristic of Modern American Secularism: a lack of belief in God, if not atheism at least a deeply-held agnosticism.  Keller writes that Christianity will experience its coming revival (1) if the Church learns how to speak compellingly to non-Christian people; (2) if it learns how to unite justice and righteousness; (3) if it embraces the global and multiethnic character of Christianity; (4) if it strikes a dynamic balance between innovation and conservation; and (5) if Christianity 'offers grace and covenant' in lieu of modern individualistic, soul-less secularism.  Nowhere does he mention a resurgence in Faith, a belief in God, and not only a god, but the Judeo-Christian god reflected in the 2 testaments as elaborated over 2 millennia by Church elders, theologians, philosophers, and a wide variety of cocksure whackos.  He acknowledges that in traditional Protestantism, including his Presbyterianism,  "We are adopted as sons and daughters of God, so the cosmic ruler becomes our unconditionally loving heavenly father. And all who unite with God as father are brought into a family of faith."  All that 'unconditionally loving heavenly father' stuff is awfully hard to swallow for the millions of people who make a point of not attending church on Sundays.  I wrote in yesterday's journal entry of watching the episode of the Middletown documentary entitled "Community of Faith":  'a somewhat incoherent study of a family of evangelical Pentecostal Christians who were, to me and to Geri, simply delusional, people living in a dream world with an imaginary Friend in the Sky who has a plan for them and who died on a cross to redeem them from their sins.'  One thinks that for Christianity to enjoy a revival it will be necessary for someone to come up with a better solution to the Problem of Evil and Suffering in this world   ("theodicy") despite the supposed existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, all-benevolent God than we have seen so far over the last couple of millennia. Pastor Keller ignores this little challenge as he focuses on stuff like 'speaking compellingly to non-Christian people,"  "striking a dynamic balance between innovation and conservation, " etc.

In this morning's NYT, there is a piece on Jinger Duggar Vuolo, the sixth of the (in)famous Duggar children of TV fame,  "A Duggar Revisits Her Religious Upbringing."  Jinger has written a memoir, “Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear,”  in which she recounts a childhood in her evangelical, fundamentalist family defined by cycles of anxiety, exhaustion and guilt.  Jinger seems to have inherited her parents' love of sharing their story with the rest of the world.  In addition to the memoir, Jinger ha 1.4 million followers on her Instagram account.  While she has rejected, or 'disentangled' herself from some of her parents' whacko beliefs (e.g., no music containing any syncopation), and has become liberated enough to wear pants and shorts, she still belongs to a conservative Baptist congregation that adheres to traditional teachings on gender, homosexuality, and women in church leadership roles.  The apple may fall from the tree, but not too far.  We are indeed 'tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe."

Jehovah's Witness, Los Angeles

Photo by Robert Frank, THE AMERICANS (1955/1956)

Introduction by Jack Kerouac

For Older Americans, the Pandemic Is Not Over  For older Americans, the pandemic still poses significant dangers. About three-quarters of Covid, deaths have occurred in people over 65, with the greatest losses concentrated among those over 75.  In January, the number of Covid-related deaths fell after a holiday spike but nevertheless numbered about 2,100 among those ages 65 to 74, more than 3,500 among 75- to 84-year-olds, and nearly 5,000 among those over 85. Those three groups accounted for about 90 percent of the nation’s Covid deaths last month.  Hospital admissions, which have also been dropping, remain more than five times as high for people over 70 than for those in their 50s. Hospitals can endanger older patients even when the conditions that brought them in are successfully treated; the harmful effects of drugs, inactivity, sleep deprivation, delirium, and other stresses can take months to recover from — or can land them back in the hospital.

SuperBowl LVII - The Nation Celebrates chronic traumatic encephalopathy.  How many Super Bowls have I missed now?  5? 6?  How many Sunday afternoons, Sunday evenings, Monday evenings, and Thursday evenings have I done something other than watching NFL football?  Work on a painting?  Read a poem?  Watch a movie or a documentary?  Go for a drive in the country? Make some soup or bake some bread?  Take a nap?  Daydream? How much of my life, before 5 or 6 years ago, did I spend watching NFL players bash one another, throw one another to the ground, run into one another reminding us of the sometimes deadly equation Force=MassXVelocity?  Ingfei Chen has an article in today's online New Yorker titled "The Forgotten History of Head Injuries in Sports."  "To a great extent, we collude as consumers of violence for the sake of entertainment. Damar Hamlin’s terrifying cardiac arrest reminded viewers that N.F.L. players aren’t action figures; Tua Tagovailoa’s multiple concussions, and their consequences, have shown that the N.F.L.’s much-touted concussion protocols have left plenty of danger in the game. And yet we keep watching—and, in some cases, signing our children up to play. As Casper sees it, American society is engaging in a self-deception rooted in old attitudes about the punch-drunk syndrome. He notes that the old street slang applied to afflicted boxers—“slug nutty,” “punchy,” “slaphappy”—was largely pejorative; in surveying oral histories, literary works, and other similar sources, he has found that suffering athletes have often been stigmatized as lower-class, semi-deranged malingerers. Getting hit over the head became the stuff of jokes, as in the physical comedy of the Three Stooges." . . . "Casper is writing a book about the history of concussions, to be published by Johns Hopkins University Press. I asked him what he thinks should be done about football and other contact sports. He and his colleagues have called for a broader diversity of views on the expert panels that write clinical concussion guidelines, and for more transparency about industry conflicts of interest. Other advocates have argued for promoting flag football, banning American youth tackle football, or delaying the age when kids start playing it; heading has been eliminated in some age groups of youth soccer in the U.S. and the U.K. Casper is skeptical about reforming the actual practice of football: he thinks the game can probably never be “neurologically viable.” At the same time, he said, “football’s way too woven into the fabric of American culture at this point to talk about something like banning it.” USA, USA, USA!!!

What a cruel country we live in!  I am reminded of it every time the subject of Universal Health Care comes up.   Every advanced industrial country in the world has some form of Universal Health Care, but not us.  We can't afford it!  The richest country in the world, but we can't afford it?  Denmark can afford it, Canada can afford it, and America can't afford it.  I'm reminded of our cruelty every time the subject of true family-friendly social policies comes up, like governmental support for child care.  We can't afford it!  Plus, it's a form of the dreaded Income Redistribution - Socialism!  Communism!.  I'm reminded of it every time the subject of progressive taxation of the wealthy comes up or fair taxation of corporations.  I'm reminded of it every time the subject of adequate funding for mental health care comes up, or when I'm reminded of the states, like Wisconsin, that reject expanded Medicaid coverage that would provide insurance for tens of thousands of people who are marginally poor.  And it's not so much that we are consciously wishing to hurt other people with our national stinginess.  It's rather that we are indifferent to their plight, living on the margins of wellness.  Plus, we have all been infected with the myth that those who are not well off are where they are because it's where they want to be or because of some personal deficiencies that keep them on the margins of wellness.  Of course, there are many self-defeating personal behaviors that contribute to marginalization in our economy: avoiding schooling, drug and alcohol use, unwanted pregnancy, etc.  And poverty and near-poverty are in large measure heritable: the children of poor and near-poor parents will probably end up poor or near-poor themselves.  The children of well-off parents will probably end up well off themselves.  But it is a which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg situation.  Which is more causative, the lottery of birth or the self-defeating behaviors?  As William Blake put it 'Every morn and every night / Some are born to sweet delight. / Every night and every morn /  Some to misery are born. / Some are born to sweet delight, / Some are born to endless night.'  Despite the celebrity of some rags-to-riches stories, there is precious little significant social mobility in the United States anymore.  There was a period coming out of the Great Depression and World War II when The American Dream had some traction, due to America's position as the world's only great economy, the only post-war thriving manufacturing economy with unionized, high-paying jobs, and programs like the G.I. Bill that funded home ownership and educational advancement for millions of returning vets (though mainly Whites).  There was in those days a greater sense of shared purpose in the country, a sense that led to the building of the interstate highway system, the enactment of the great civil rights laws of the 1960s as well as significant environmental legislation like NEPA, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, OSHA, etc.  These legislative accomplishments occurred not only in Democratic administrations but also during the Nixon years.  That sense of community, of shared purpose, is long gone.  It started disappearing at its apogee during the Johnson/Nixon years, continued with Reagan's defeat of Jimmy Carter in 1980, and peaked  with Newt Gingrich's leadership of the Republicans in the 1990s, with the emergence of the Tea Party in 2010, and ultimately with the election of Trump in 2016.  And now we are where we are, probably on the road to some form of fascism.  Somehow, the brutality of our national sport, football, with its knowing acceptance of and indifference to the risk of serious, permanent, life-altering brain damage for the players, makes all the sense in the world.  Further your Rabid Ranter saith not.

2/10/23

 Friday,  February 10, 2023

In bed after 11, awake at 4:41, up at 4:50.  Random minnows darting around the bait bucket: refrain in 'Take On Me,' wondering about Chrissi and Jim Reck, up so late because of good sleep the night before?  30℉, high of 35℉,  wind NNW at 13, 7 to 15 mph today, gusts up to 25 mph producing wind chills today between 11℉ and 27℉.  Sunrise at 6:56, sunset at 5:15, 10+19.

Middletown: Muncie, Indiana is a 6 part documentary filmed in the late 1970s, and early 1980s deriving from sociological studies by Robert and Helen Lynd resulting in 2 books published in 1929 and 1937, all based on American life in Muncie, Indiana as a small, Midwestern, American city, presumably at least somewhat typical of American life elsewhere.  We have watched the first 3 films in the series: Campaign, The Big Game, and  Community of Faith.  What was notable about the 1980  mayoral race followed in Campaign was the lack of hyperpartisanship that is so prevalent today.  The supporters of the Democratic and Republican opponents had their strong preferences, but there was none of the apocalyptic doom-talking that we see today.  The very different personal and campaign styles of the 2 candidates were also an interesting study: the Democrat a glad-handing professional 'pol', the Republican a younger, 'good government' type, reluctantly involved in politics.  The Big Game focused on a basketball game between 2 rival high schools, the hard-charging style of the 2 coaches, the significance of sports in the lives of the players, the pressure on the players, the comparison of the stars of the 2 teams, one White and bound for college, the other Black and (maybe) squeaking through high school.  The focus was on the great importance of WINNING, on not being a LOSER in sports or in life, and the pressure on the young players was palpable. It reminds me of Vince Lombardi and his celebrated if nonsensical statement that "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing."  Huh???  Community of Faith was a somewhat incoherent study of a family of evangelical Pentecostal Christians who were, to me and to Geri, simply delusional, people living in a dream world with an imaginary Friend in the Sky who has a plan for them and who died on a cross to redeem them from their sins.  A lot of driving out demons (some leaving via farts) and Satan, a lot of exorcisms and talking in tongues.  Reminded me of Robert Duvall in The Apostle working on the chain gang and chanting "Victory is mine, victory is mine, victory is mine today.  I told Satan, get thee behind, victory today is mine."  Creepy, and frightening in light of how powerful the evangelical Christian Nationalism movement has become today, giving us Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis and our hyper-polarized culture and society rationally concerned about a new civil war.  Thank you, Jesus. Hallelujah!

The Wobblies is another documentary that I watched on OVID, a history of the IWW, International Workers of the World.  I became familiar with the IWW by reading all the books in John Dos Passos' USA trilogy a million years ago.  I remember enjoying the novels immensely and feeling a natural sympathy for the working-class people described by Dos Passos.  I also enjoyed the documentary film which included many interviews with members of the IWW, 'unskilled' workers who suffered oppression at the hands of their employers, including big mining companies and logging companies, and at the hand of the government, especially during WWI.  The A.F. of L existed only for 'skilled' laborers, and craftsmen, not for copper miners, lumberjacks, and hod carriers, who had no organized power except through the IWW.  When the Wobblies struck for an 8-hour workday during the War to Make the World Safe for Democracy, the War to End All Wars, American government turned on them at all levels, federal, state, and local, calling them 'agents of the Kaiser.'  Cops, soldiers, and national guardsmen were freely used to break the union, just as they are always used to defeat any movement that threatens the hegemony of our oligarchs, our plutocrats, our 1%.   Mah nishtanah.  As Kurt Vonnegut would say, 'so it goes.'  He who has the gold makes the rules.

CPP was bad yesterday, and nasty again this morning.  Feeling semi-sick all morning.  5 hours and 39 minutes of sleep last night, but a good mask seal score with my CPAP, 20/20. 

A bit of wisdom from Tennessee Williams  "You have to realize that the vast majority of things attempted in the arts aren't good. They are attended by great hope and ambition and good intentions, but it is very hard to create anything of value in the arts. Accept this. It is also the reason we love so much the great play or the exquisite piece of music or the work of art that speaks to all people. These are big and rare and wonderful things. Most things are bad. Somehow you have to ignore and erase the effects of these bad attempts while also supporting and caring for the well-meaning siblings who did the bad work. Something good may eventually happen; something of merit may appear. Shield yourself while at the same time extending kindness. This is, I think, one of the hardest and noblest acts of the artist."  Tennessee Williams/Interview with James Grissom/1982.  

If I had let my constant failures in drawing and painting deter me from continuing to draw and paint, I would have deprived myself of hundreds of hours and countless days of pleasure.  There is truth to the notion that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.  Worth doing is worth doing.  My Vietnamese girl is something of a disappointment but before I painted it, there was a blank canvas, all white, no colors, no image, nothing suggestive of any human activity, the canvas having surely been constructed and stretched by machine.  So it's a disappointment, but it's MY disappointment and it gave me great pleasure working on it, so it was worth doing despite my failings.