6/21/24

 Friday, June 21, 2024

1788, the US Constitution came into effect when New Hampshire was the 9th ratified it.

1879, Frank Woolworth opened his 1st successful "Woolworth's Great Five Cent Store." 

1945, the US defeated Japanese forces on Okinawa.

1963, Cardinal Montini elected Pope Paul VI, succeeding John XXIII.

. . . . . . 

At 10:30 this morning, after I had written almost all of the following in today's journal, I had a voicemail from Mary Fran Schröder, Ed Felsenthat's eldest daughter.  She asked me to call her, which I knew signified bad news.  Ed is dying from pancreatic cancer which has spread to his liver.  He has refused all treatment and is resigned to dying.  The news brought tears to my eyes.  I'll write more about this probably tomorrow.   Now I need to stop writing and grieve.

 . . . . . 

In bed at 10 and up at 3:05 with nasty pain in my mid-back, thankful to have the walker to help me from the bedroom to the TV room and the power recliner.  I let Lilly out at 4:30 into the cool morning air (63°) and listened to the competition between the robins and the cardinals, thinking I could also identify the call of a Carolina wren.    

Prednisone, day 40, 15 mg., day 4.   I am struggling with what to eat for breakfast.  The glucose spike I experienced the other day from Raisin Nut Bran and berries persuades me I have to give up that morning treat, but I had quite a rise also from oatmeal and berries.  I can't believe it's a good idea to have CBH and eggs every morning.  I'll try McCann's steel-cut oatmeal and berries again this morning with some Icelandic thick yogurt and see how it goes.  I took my 15 mg. at 5:13 and ate the oatmeal at 5:30 but with Activia Vanilla which has 9 grams of carbs including 5 grams of sugars, 'none added' whatever that means. At 5:50, the reading is 135^.   At 7:010, 223->.  I took my BP 1 hour after medications and it's high, 159/84 with a half-tab of HCT.

Dystopia: I-43 shooting.  The lead story on the 5 o'clock news was an exchange of gunfire on I-43 and Keefe Avenue that led to a crash, with one person dead, and another wounded.  There was little information available at that time, but by the 10 p.m. news, it was reported that an 18-year-old pregnant woman was shot by the police during a chase and her unborn child was killed in the incident.  Additionally, a 17-year-old man was wounded. The chase started after an armed downtown carjacking at Jefferson and Clybourn Streets.  Six Black teenagers, 15 to 18 years old, were involved in the carjacking and all were arrested.  I looked for the news report in this morning's JSOnline and found none, only a video of the crash scene with no audio or print report.  What does this say about Milwaukee?  Was Trump right in calling Milwaukee a "horrible city," regardless of whether he was talking about the city generally or just its crime situation?  I drive through I-43 and Keefe every time I go to the VA and every time I go downtown for any reason, e.g., to drop off clothing at Repairers of the Breach.  Thousands of other drivers pass that site every day.  The freeway was shut down for 6 hours during the police investigation and many drivers were trapped on the freeway for two hours before they could get off it.  Yet the crime, the police shooting, and the death of the in vitro baby merited no story in the next morning's newspaper?!?!  I found the information only by going to the recorded 10 o'clock news on YouTubeIV.  I guess by 4 o'clock this morning it was considered "old news," not worth reporting.

Anniversaries.  First, on June 2, 1963, I raised my right hand and said "I, Charles Clausen, "I, having been appointed an officer in the United States Marine Corps in the grade of Second Lieutenant, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter; So help me God."  I gave no particular thought to that oath or what it meant to 'support and defend' the Constitution.  I wonder about it now because I have come to know much more about the Constitution and its origins and the financial, social, and political interests of those who drafted it back in 1787.  I have come to see it not as a governing document promoting democracy and majority rule, but rather as the opposite, a bulwark against democracy and majority rule.  I have come to see it as the protector of minority interests, rural over urban and suburban, Republican over Democratic, radical rightwingers over democratic believers in "the common good."  The U.S. Senate, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court are all anti-democratic and perhaps never more brazenly than in recent years.  There have been 5 U.S. presidents who have lost the popular vote: John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George W. Bush in 2000, and Donald J. Trump in 2016.  Overall, Al Gore received about half a million more votes than "W" but the Supreme Court and the Electoral College gave us Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Iraq, and Afghanistan, renditions, "enhanced interrogations," and Abu Ghraib.  Hillary Clinton received 2.8 million more votes than Trump, but Trump won the Electoral College 304 to 227 so we got Trump, Pence, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, "the Wall," immigrant family separations, the pandemic response imbroglio, intense polarization, and January 6th.  And we oughtn't to forget that Hayes was elected by the House of Representatives in 1876 despite losing both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote, due to a dirty deal in which the Republicans agreed to pull federal troops out of the defeated Confederate States and to end Reconstruction, opening the door to Jim Crow America.  In any event, the reverence we show the Constitution is unearned.  It has lasted as long as it has in large measure only because it favors entrenched political, social, and economic interests and because it is practically impossible to amend in any way that disfavors those interests.

Second, why do I note Frank Woolworth's with what became the 'five and dime store'?  Because it reminds me of the criminal period of my childhood.  There was a time when I was a shoplifter at our local dime store.  I'm embarrassed admitting it and I can't explain it except to say that I think it coincided with a traumatic time in my life and that of my family when my father and mother were both suffering from PTSD, he from the horrors of Iwo Jima in 1945, she from the horrors of sexual assault in 1947.  In any case, developed a case of 'sticky fingers' which I still remember.  I remember the shame and guilt I felt while doing it but my doing it despite the shame and guilt.  Worse yet, I once took a $20 bill from my mother's purse.  I wrote of this theft in my memoir:

When I was still quite young, maybe 6 or 7, sometime after the Hartmann crime, I took a $20 bill from my mother’s purse.  That amount of money was huge in our circumstances; it may well have been all we had to live on till the next uncertain payday.  I went to a couple of neighborhood stores and bought items that were attractive to a kid of 6 or 7 – candy? a small toy?  I actually still remember, though vaguely, this guilty shopping expedition.  I knew that what I had done was wrong and I don’t know why I did it.  I suspect – and probably hope - that it was somehow related to the Hartmann trauma and the infectious misery in our home, but I did it in full knowledge that it was wrong.  I couldn’t have spent much of the $20 and as I think back on it, I’m surprised that a store owner in those days wouldn’t have questioned a kid with a $20 bill buying junk.  In any event, my mother of course soon knew that her $20 bill was missing and asked me if I had seen it.  My face must have radiated what criminal lawyers call “guilty knowledge” and I cried.  I felt awful and I remember the feeling to this day.  This is my third discrete and conscious memory from my early childhood, after the VJ Day parade and my Dad’s return: the theft, the consciousness of wrongdoing, and my mother’s reaction.  I remember lying in bed in the bedroom, crying, guilty, indeed morose, and my mother comforting me: not excusing the wrongness of taking the money, but loving me despite it.  I have to pause, quite a long time actually, as I recall this and try to write about it, because it was such a significant event in my life.  If she had not been the kind of person she was, God rest her soul, I surely would not have been the kind of person I am, or Kitty the kind of person she is, or my Dad finally the kind of person he became.  In my own case, I did not become sinless, but Deo gratias I continue to be burdened and blessed by consciousness of wrongdoing – shame and guilt and contrition – and I have never forgotten the lesson of love and forgiveness my mother gave me.  Tears come to my eyes as I write this.  

Before I 'straightened up and flew right," I engaged in other wrongdoing in my childhood when I hung out with older guys at the PineCrest dry cleaners on 73rd Street.   Tom 'Pete' Peterson, Gordon Zarenheusen, 'Butch' Mannix, 'Skipper' and 'Pudgy' Adamson, and Johnny Nelson, who ended up being arrested and sent to JDH, the Juvenile Detention Home.  What strikes me now is my consciousness of guilt, of wrongdoing, whenever I did something I shouldn't have done.  Why did I nonetheless do it? Was I just "acting out" because of the deep sadness and loneliness at home" I don't know and suppose I never will but I think of another epitaph from the Spoon River graveyard:

Aner Clute

OVER and over they used to ask me,

While buying the wine or the beer,

In Peoria first, and later in Chicago,

Denver, Frisco, New York, wherever I lived,

How I happened to lead the life,

And what was the start of it.

Well, I told them a silk dress,

And a promise of marriage from a rich man—

(It was Lucius Atherton).

But that was not really it at all.

Suppose a boy steals an apple

From the tray at the grocery store,

And they all begin to call him a thief,

The editor, minister, judge, and all the people—

“A thief,” “a thief,” “a thief,” wherever he goes.

And he can’t get work, and he can’t get bread

Without stealing it, why the boy will steal.

It’s the way the people regard the theft of the apple

That makes the boy what he is.

Third, blood-soaked Okinawa, where I would live as an American occupier two decades later.  I devoted a chapter in my memoir to that experience.

And finally, Pope Paul VI succeeded Pope John XXIII, my favorite pope, the one who convened Vatican II 'to open the windows of the Church and let in some fresh air.'  Paul VI's contribution to life in the Church was almost entirely negative, as I described in my memoir:

The Catholic Church also revealed its feet of clay during 1968.  Cardinal Spellman was spouting his murderous nonsense about ‘a war for civilization’  without restraint by the Vatican and Catholics were generally as resistant as any other group to much of the civil rights demands.  The big difference maker in terms of Church authority however had nothing to do with war and peace or civil rights, but with sex, Paul VI’s encyclical banning contraception, including birth control pills.  In 1963, John XXIII had established a commission to study population and birth control issues.  Paul VI appointed 15 cardinals and bishops and 64 lay experts to the commission.  The commission provided a report in 1966 saying contraception was not intrinsically evil.  The vote among the clergy was 9 to 6; the lay commission vote was 60 to 4.  One of the dissenters was Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, later John Paul II.  The dissenters feared that a change in the Church’s position would call into question the pope’s teaching authority.   The report was leaked to the press in 1967 and there was a very favorable reaction among modern Catholics, who expected the pope to adopt the commission’s recommendation.  Instead, on July 25, 1968, Paul VI rejected the commission’s recommendation and adopted the dissenting position, undoubtedly fearing that any change in the Church’s position would weaken the claim to papal authority.

The opening lines of Humanae Vitae were priceless, words that could have been written only by a celibate and childless male who had spent his entire adult life in a misogynistic power structure, i.e., the self-proclaimed Holy Apostolic and Roman Catholic Church:

To His Venerable Brothers the Patriarchs, Archbishops, Bishops, and other Local Ordinaries in Peace and Communion with the Apostolic See, to the Clergy and Faithful of the Whole Catholic World, and to All Men of Good Will

Venerable Brothers and Beloved Sons [quaere:  how about the sisters? daughters? mothers?]  The most serious duty of transmitting human life [humanae vitae], for which married persons are the free and responsible collaborators of God the Creator, has always been a source of great joys to them, even if sometimes accompanied by not a few difficulties and by distress.

The words of the encyclical as well as its substance were patronizing and arrogant and essentially untrue.  What happened, of course, was precisely what Paul and the Vatican conservatives (like the future John Paul II) wanted to avoid: widespread rejection of the Church’s teaching authority, especially by American and Western European Catholics. The pope and his conservative curial apparatchiks were seen as, at best, mired in medievalism, and, at worst, more concerned about the power of the shepherds than in the welfare of the flock.

6/20/24

 Thursday, June 20, 2024

Summer solstice, 3:50 p.m., CDT

1919, The Treaty of Versailles was signed.

1967, Mohammed Ali was sentenced to 5 years for refusing to be inducted into the armed forces during the Vietnam War

1977, Menachem Begin formed the Israeli government

In bed around 9:20 and up at 2:20 with a painful lower back on the left side.  Let Lilly out at 3:15. I nodded off between 6:12 and  7:24.  I woke up thinking I should sit on the patio, watch the wildlife, and listen to the birds with Merlin as I did last summer, but that became more difficult with my canes and walker.

Prednisone, day 39, 15 mg., day 3.  Pills at 5:05, and had breakfast of Grape Nuts & berries at 5:15.  At 7:39, my reading was 317 and by 8:00, I had a high glucose alarm ringing at 351.  BP 1 hr. test:  137/77.

Our Town is a dystopia.  This morning's headline on JSOnline: "One teen killed, one injured in shooting at Washington Park after Juneteenth Peace Day event"  From the story:

 "The Milwaukee County Sheriff's Office said the shooting took place at about 8:53 p.m. in the northeast corner of the park, at 1859 N. 40th St., on the city's west side. The shooting followed a report of 50 young people about to fight near the playground.

MCSO chief deputy Daniel Hughes provided a briefing at the scene late Wednesday night. He said a MCSO detective encountered a suspect indiscriminately firing a fully automatic, or fully automatic converted, weapon from the intersection of North 42nd and West Lloyd streets, toward the playground of the park.

The suspected shooter is a 17-year-old Milwaukee boy.

"Coincidentally, on May 20th, our sheriff's office previously arrested this suspect for a charge of felon in possession of a firearm," Hughes said. The suspected shooter was out on $750 cash bail, he added.

The Juneteenth Peace Day event took place at the Washington Park bandshell from 5 to 8:30 p.m. after organizers decided to end the event early. The event was organized by a group, This 4 the City, and was billed as "a day of peace and unity" and a chance "to give Milwaukee youths a safe outlet after this year’s Juneteenth festivities."

"At approximately 8:25 p.m., the T4TC, or This is 4 the City event, hosted by MK Music Agency in celebration of the Juneteenth holiday, was ended early by event organizers," Hughes said. "This was due to unruly attendees and multiple fights involving large groups of unsupervised youth. Attendees started to leave. However, fights continued throughout the exit."

Hughes said the MCSO recovered five firearms during the event and another three during the homicide investigation.

It's the third year in a row that there was gun violence on the Juneteenth holiday. Last year, six teenagers were injured in a mass shooting near the conclusion of the Juneteenth festival on King Drive. 

Summer solstice in Milwaukee.   It's a day early this year because of imprecisions in our calendar system, the fact that it takes, on average, about 365 days, 5 hours, and 49 minutes — or 365.24219 days, for the Earth to orbit the sun.  Sunrise is at 5:12 a.m. and sunset at 8:34 p.m. giving us 15 hours, 21 minutes, and 58 seconds of daylight. At solar noon at 12:53, the sun's altitude will be 70°.  It's a cloudy morning with a good chance of rain so we won't see the solstice sunrise.  Or is the solstice sunrise tomorrow morning, with the solstice sunset this evening?  Did druids gather at Stonehenge this morning or will they do so tomorrow morning?  I think of the old joke: 'Ask me 2 questions: what do you do for a living and what's the hardest part of your job?  Q: What do you do for a living?  A: I'm a standup comic.  Q: What's the . . .  A: Timing."  Thinking of Stonehenge at summer solstice reminds me of Newgrange at winter solstice and of my trip there with Sarah years ago.

A year ago I wrote "Untethered Thoughts about Hunter and Joe Biden.  News stories are reporting that Hunter Biden and his attorneys have struck a plea bargain with the Trump-appointed US Attorney in Delaware under which Hunter will plead guilty to 2 tax misdemeanors and participate in a 'diversion program' for his gun-purchase-related falsehood.  I know little of Hunter Biden other than the bits I have heard in the media but here are some impressions.  First, he seems like a very unadmirable guy who has traded on his father's position as a US senator and then as US vice president to make a lot of money for doing nothing other than being Joe Biden's son.  Second, his problems with drugs and women also make him pretty unadmirable, at best.  Third, I don't think I would like this guy or want him as a friend.  Fourth, I can't help feeling sorry for him precisely because he is Joe Biden's son and not the favorite son.  Fifth, I have mixed feelings about Joe Biden's decision to keep the Senate seat he had recently won when Hunter's and brother Beau's mother and sister were killed in a vehicular collision.  If small children ever needed a loving parent's presence after such a tragedy, it was Beau and Hunter.  How much time could Joe make available to his children, even as a commuting US senator?  Sixth, can there be much doubt that Hunter, compared to Beau, was the 'spare', much like Prince Harry was to Prince William?  Beau was so favored and so accomplished compared to Hunter, who seems like a psychological train wreck.  I always cringe at least a little when Father Joe speaks of Son Beau almost as his heir apparent with Hunter the misfit ne'er-do-well child in the background.  When an adult child ends up as thoroughly screwed up as Hunter did, mustn't we at least wonder about the job his one natural parent did during the child's early and later life?"

Am I too harsh in my judgment of Joe?  I suppose so, but I can't get over my thinking of him as an extremely ordinary guy who has aspired for most of his life to extremely extraordinary power, a guy who is a habitual bullshitter, a glad-hander and a back-slapper, and the guy who after thankfully preventing a second Trump term in 2020 is doing his best to give the Oval Office back to him 4 years later.  He's too old to be running again.  The polls have told him that for years.  His own Democrat and independent voters have told him that for years.  The mirror, the films and videos, and his body have told him that. But having lusted after the office for years, he can't give it up voluntarily and the rest of the world will pay the price for his lust, one way or the other.

 Anniversaries.  First, the Treaty of Versailles, by which the Allies, their own nationalisms having contributed to causing World War I, contributed to the arguably inexorability of World War II.

Second, three weeks after my discharge from the Marines, a federal jury in Houston convicted Muhammed Ali of refusing to the drafted.  Having served in Vietnam two years earlier and having seen the devastating costs the war was imposing on the Vietnamese and the American people,  I supported Ali who argues: ""Man, I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong.  Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?"  The federal judge gave Ali the maximum sentence of 5 years imprisonment and a $10,000 fine.  By this time, public opinion in America was already turning against the war and Ali was accurately seen as a national security threat for encouraging draft resistance.  At the time of Ali’s conviction, media reports suggested that 1,000 Vietnamese noncombatants were being killed each week by U.S. forces, one hundred U.S. soldiers were dying every day, and the war was costing $2 billion a month. The Supreme Court later overturned Ali's conviction on technical grounds and Ali eventually came to be regarded as a hero by many Americans, including me.

Third, on this date in 1977, Menachem Begin became the first Likud prime minister of Israel, initiating a line of such PMs including Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, and culminating in Benjamin Netanyahu.  Begin was a murderer and a terrorist in the Irgun, as related in Wikipedia:

Two of the operations for which the Irgun is best known are the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946 and the Deir Yassin massacre that killed at least 107 Palestinian Arab villagers, including women and children, carried out together with Lehi on 9 April 1948.

The organization committed acts of terrorism against Palestinian Arabs, as well as against the British authorities, who were regarded as illegal occupiers.  In particular the Irgun was described as a terrorist organization by the United Nations, British, and United States governments; in media such as The New York Times newspaper; as well as by the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, the 1946 Zionist Congress and the Jewish Agency.  Albert Einstein, in a letter to The New York Times in 1948, compared Irgun and its successor Herut party to "Nazi and Fascist parties" and described it as a "terrorist, right wing, chauvinist organization".

Yitzhak Shamir waa the leader of anoher terrorist group, Lehi, orr "The Stern Gang."  Again, Wikipedia:

The group referred to its members as terrorists and admitted to having carried out acts of terrorism.

Lehi split from the Irgun militant group in 1940 in order to continue fighting the British during World War II. It initially sought an alliance with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.  Believing that Nazi Germany was a lesser enemy of the Jews than Britain, Lehi twice attempted to form an alliance with the Nazis, proposing a Jewish state based on "nationalist and totalitarian principles, and linked to the German Reich by an alliance".  After Stern's death in 1942, the new leadership of Lehi began to move towards support for Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and the ideology of National Bolshevism, which was considered an amalgam of both right and left.  Regarding themselves as "revolutionary Socialists", the new Lehi developed a highly original ideology combining an "almost mystical" belief in Greater Israel with support for the Arab liberation struggle.  This sophisticated ideology failed to gain public support and Lehi fared poorly in the first Israeli elections.[25]

In April of 1948, Lehi and the Irgun were jointly responsible for the massacre in Deir Yassin of at least 107 Palestinian Arab villagers, including women and children. 

Ariel Sharon was the 11th prime minister of Israel.  Again, Wikipedia:

 As Minister of Defense, he directed the 1982 Lebanon War. An official enquiry found that he bore "personal responsibility" for the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian refugees, for which he became known as the "Butcher of Beirut" among Arabs. He was subsequently removed as defense minister.  From the 1970s through to the 1990s, Sharon championed construction of Israeli settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. He became the leader of the Likud in 1999, and in 2000, amid campaigning for the 2001 prime ministerial election, made a controversial visit to the Al-Aqsa complex on the Temple Mount, triggering the Second Intifada.  Sharon remains a highly polarizing figure in Middle Eastern history. Israelis almost universally revere Sharon as a war hero and statesman, whereas Palestinians and Human Rights Watch have criticized him as a war criminal,

This is the political provenance of Benjamin Netanyahu whose racist, right-wing, genocidal government is even worse than those of his Likud predecessors.Nonetheless, the United States Congress, including the Democrat-led Senate aitst's majority leader Chuck Schumer, have given Netanyahu the high privilege of addressing it in a joint session.

Yeshayahu Leibowitz in a YouTube interview:

Interviewer: To wonder if Israel is a democracy is sterile?

Leibowitz: It is a sterile question. It is willfully that the state deprives these two million people of civil and political rights. South Africa was not a democracy either. But the people are governed by a very great statesman whose name should go down in history, de Klerk, who in stages but quite rapidly is indeed giving the population including the blacks, all the civil and, it would seem, political rights. This is happening today through the world in practically all countries that are considered enlightened. But the State of Israel is the only dictatorship that exists today in the enlightened world. So it is not a coincidence that Israel is the only state in the world, in the enlightened world, in which the president of the Supreme Court was capable of saying that torture could be used in order to make Arab prisoners talk. Everyone knows full well that everywhere in the world those in the power use torture, but it is illegal. All the states in the Western world abolished it in the 18th century, even before the French revolution. 200 years ago. they abolished the use of torture during police interrogations, all the western countries, even Tsarist Russia. But the State of Israel represents the backwardness of a state body. in which there is a monster who exercises the functions of president of a Supreme Court only to say that the use of torture is permitted when it is necessary in the interests of the state. That shows that a Nazi-like mentality, because it is a Nazi mentality, also exists in our country. That is a fact. Admittedly you can find it anywhere. No human group is safe from such a character But the fact is that in the Israeli legal system neither the judges nor the lawyers challenged this man. That says a great deal about the Nazi mentality that is dominant here.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM2fXTkjU2E 

 

 

6/19/24

 Wednesday, June 19, 2024

1865, U.S. troops arrive in Galveston, "Juneteenth"

1921,  Turks and Christians of Palestine signed a friendship treaty against Jews

1964, Civil Rights Act of 1964 passes 73-27

1982, The body of 'God's Banker', Roberto Calvi is found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London

In bed around 8:15 and up at 2:15 with lower back pain and a slight headache.  I let Lilly out at 3:45 and emptied the dishwasher, hobbled by my back, and had to rest before cleaning up the kitchen from last night's dinner.  I need to do some chores in phases.  I dozed off at some point and woke up at 5:12 to load the dishwasher and clean Geri's coffee station.

Prednisone, day 38, 15 mg., day 2.  At 3 a.m., my reading was 100.  At 5:45, when I took my 15 mg. of prednisone, the reading was 98. (It's now conceivable to me that I could reach a critically low reading (<70) overnight.). . .  I took my other meds at 8:30 and need to check my BP at 9:30 though it will be without the half-tab of HCT, which I just remembered I need to take.  9:30 reading - 155/79.

Another fall; North Shore Fire Department.  While standing between the glider chair and my recliner in the TV room, I reached for my water bottle to fill it.  As I moved it toward me, I knocked over a container full of pens and pencils, scattering the contents on the floor.  I bent over and squatted a bit to pick up the spillage and when I squatted too deep, my center of gravity shifted and I fell over backwards, hitting my head against the cabinets behind me.  I called out to Geri for help and she called 911.  Two young paramedics from the North Shore Fire Department arrived a few minutes later, asked some questions about my condition, and then lifted me to my feet and seated me in the glider chair.  I had an abrasion on my left elbow that left some blood on the floor which Geri cleaned up, but no bone, scalp, or skull injuries.

This happened after my rather long trip to Costco and its gas station, Wild Birds Unlimited, and Senkik's with my lower back tightening up all afternoon and my gait mighty unsteady.  Indeed, I had brought my walker out from my bedroom into the living area of the house because of my back pain and difficulty walking.  Geri was outside doing some yard work and I had intended to tell her when she returned to the house that it was getting harder and harder for me to walk because of my arthritic back.  Instead, I had to call to her for help as I lay on the floor like a beached walrus.  My back pain and a slight headache continued during the evening and night until I got up from bed at 2:15 a.m. and took 1,000 mg. of Tylenol, which, as usual, seemed to help very little.

I've been concerned for some time about "taking a header" and now I am equally concerned with "taking a butt-er."  I regularly use a cane even inside the house now and I use my walker when I wake up in the middle of the night to move to the TV room.   I tend to lean backward climbing the steps from the basement, raising a serious risk of a backward tumble down the stairs and a "Help, I've fallen and I can't gt up" experience.   And, BTW, neither my MedAlert around my neck nor my AppleWatch detected my fall, perhaps because it was a short distance and backward.  Who knows?

The fall reminds me of my precarity, of our precarity.  I am one trip or stumble or lean away from falling to the ground, hitting my head, and what?  Breaking a hip, fracturing some other bone(s), suffering a concussion?  I had a slight headache after the fall and found myself wondering if perhaps I had a subdural hematoma or some other slow hemorrhage and whether I had made a mistake in not accepting the EMTs' offer to drive me to the VA ER.  Of course, what I know, almost surely, is that I will fall again, perhaps because of dizziness, perhaps because I barely lift my feet while shuffling walking, perhaps because I turn my head too quickly, or perhaps because, as sometimes happens to me, I lose my balance while standing still and have to catch myself before falling.  Perhaps I will be at home as I was yesterday, relying on Geri, or perhaps at Sendik's or Costco or even the VA, relying on the kindness of strangers. Or perhaps, as with my mother, it will be an aneurysm.  Or like TSJ, a 'cardiac event.'  Or perhaps it won't be a fall at all, but my time will be up as I know it will be one of these days.  It reminds me to be grateful for the time I have left, long or short, and for the awareness and functionality I still have, my appreciation of Geri, family, friends, home, Lilly, trees, birds, rain, snow, sunshine, music, painting, reading, writing,  . . .

Anniversaries.  First, will Juneteenth ever be anything other than a Black holiday, an ethnic holiday?  Or is it like Martin Luther King Day, a holiday with an appeal to many Whites?  Juneteenth has been a national holiday only since 2021.  There are 11 federal holidays, from New Year's Day to Christmas Day.  Three honor specific individuals:  MLK's birthday (1983), Washington's birthday (1879), and Columbus Day (1937).  MLK is celebrated for his civil rights leadership leading to the end of Jim Crow and the lessening of racial barriers to Blacks' fuller participation in citizenship and freedom., all at the predictable cost of his life.  Washington is celebrated for his leadership in the Revolutionary War and as the first president.  Columbus is celebrated (or denigrated by some) for the discovery of the Americas by Europeans.  New Year's Day (1885), Thanksgiving Day (1941), and Christmas Day (1885) are traditional holidays that were so widely observed that they became legal holidays.  Veterans Day (1926) and Memorial Day (1967) honor those who have served and/or died in the nation's armed forces.  Labor Day (1894) honors the nation's labor force.  Independence Day or the 4th of July (1870) celebrates democracy and independence from foreign royal rule.  Juneteenth Day celebrates the end of slavery in Texas, but more broadly the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment that ended slavery throughout the U.S.  It was traditionally celebrated only in Black communities in Texas and then throughout the South and then, with the Great Migrations, in the North.  It is the only holiday specifically associated with only one ethnic group, although Columbus Day used to be and perhaps still is especially celebrated by Italians.  Will Juneteenth ever catch on more broadly?  I doubt it.

Second, the alliance between Ottoman Turks and Christians against Jews reminds us that religious and ethnic hostilities have been going on in Palestine for well more than a century with ots of deaths, destruction, and displacements.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.  Historically, what has most exacerbated it has been Zionism as settler colonialism, still going on in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.

Third, it's hard to believe now that the revolutionary Civil Rights Act of 1964, backed by LBJ, passed overwhelmingly in the Senate 73-27. The Democratic supermajority in the Senate split their vote 46 (69%) for and 21 (31%) against. The Republicans, on the other hand, split their vote 27 for (82%) and 6 against (18%). Thus, the no vote consisted of 78% Democrats. Further, the infamous 74-day filibuster was led by the Southern Democrats, who overwhelmingly voted against the act.  The House voted 290 to 130 in favor. Democrats split their vote 152 (61%) to 96 (39%) while Republicans split theirs 138 (80%) to 34 (20%).   Soon all those Dixiecrats became Republicans and we have been living with the results ever since, Red America, Blue America, the never-United States of America grounded in a very large measure on racism.

Fourth, the anniversary of Roberto Calvi's death by hanging reminds us inescapably of the Vatican's connection with big money.  Calvi was chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano which was closely tied in with the Vatican Bank scandals of the 1970s and 1980s when the bank was headed by Calvi's friend, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, a native of Cicero, Illinois.  Money makes the world go around, the world go around, the world go around, . . .

6/18/24

 Tuesday, June 19, 2024

1983, The first American woman to fly into outer space, Sally Ride, was launched with four other astronauts aboard the space shuttle Challenger.

2006, Katharine Jefferts Schori was elected presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the U. S., becoming the first woman chosen as a churchwide leader in the 400-year history of the Anglican Communion.

2019, US President Donald Trump announces his campaign for re-election

In bed at 9, and up at 3:20.

Prednisone, day 37, 15 mg., day 1.  At 4:40 as I prepare breakfast, my glucose reading is 113.  I let Lilly out into the 71° morning air with the Cardinals and the Robins competing for dominance of the airwaves and a Carolina wren chirping in.  I spilled several 5 mg. pills onto my hand with a 10 mg. pill, creating confusion.  I selected what I thought was 10 10 mg. pill along with a 5 and poured the remaining pills back into the 5 mg. container, maybe compounding the problem.  I hope I picked up the right pills for a 15 mg. dosage.  Rats!  Live and learn.  Breakfast of CBH & eggs at 5:15 - 5:30.  At 6:15, the reading is 105->.  At 7:15, 163->.  At 8:18, 186->.

More thoughts on Out of Africa.  The most challenging aspect of the film, for me, director Sydney Pollack, and protagonist Meryl Streep, was Karen Blixen's characteristics as a wealthy, aristocratic, White, plantation-owning settler in Black Africa.  The character is admirable in her independence and courage in dealing with the challenges of beginning and running a big business with what was for her an almost entirely 'foreign', though Indigenous, workforce in the early 20th century, long before women's liberation.  On the other hand, she is an imperialist, a settler colonist, and an exploiting, racist, White supremacist who treats her Black workers imperiously.  Both her husband and her lover were aristocratic big game hunters, and her lover was an ivory hunter, a killer of African elephants, whose activities contributed to the devastation of the African elephant population from 26 million in 1900 to about a million today.  The movie depicts her as greatly concerned with the welfare and cultural advancement (reading lessons in school) of her Kikuyu, Masai, and Somali servants and field workers and perhaps she was, but she was a plantation owner, not a farmer.  The scenes of Black workers harvesting and then processing coffee beans are reminiscent of African slaves harvesting cotton in the U.S.  Her attitude seemed to be at best paternalistic while imperious.  Pollack and Streep did a good job of portraying her complexity in relation to the Blacks she employed while perhaps 'jumping the shark' with her on her knees begging the British colonial governor as she was leaving Kenya to preserve for her workers the land they lived on when she employed them.  I wonder whether that scene represented an event she wrote about in Out of Africa or elsewhere, or if screenwriter Kurt Luedtke made it up to make the heroine's character more benevolent, gracious, and noble.

The movie is a love story, a romance. intended in large part to reflect Karen Blixen's/Isak Dinesen's admirable qualities and those of Denys Finch Hatton.  The characters are beautiful (Streep), handsome (Redford), likable, and admirable.  But we oughtn't to ignore the society, culture, and economic/political world of which they were a part, the world of European empires and of settler colonies intended to benefit the White settlers and to subordinate, exploit, or replace the indigenous people and to exploit the land where they lived.  I can't help but think about these matters and life in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.

Anniversaries.  The coinciding anniversaries of the achievements of Sally Ride and Katharine Jefferts are interesting, illustrating how much sooner women were able to advance in secular professions than they were in religious leadership, where the Catholic Church still and possibly forever refuses to admit them to the priesthood.  In 1994, Pope John Paul II issued an "apostolic letter" (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis) declaring  "So that all doubt [...] may be removed, I declare by virtue of my office [...] that the Church has no authority whatsoever to ordain women to the priesthood and that all the faithful of the Church must definitively abide by this decision."  His intent was forever to put an end to discussions within the Church about the ordination of women as priests.  It was claimed that, as a matter of the Church's magisterium, or teaching authority, the statement was "infallible," so as to prevent any future pope or council from changing it.  That was the purpose of the carefully chosen language in the letter: "all doubt . .  removed," "by virtue of my office," "no authority whatsoever," and "all the faithful . . . must abide by this decision."  JPII's authoritarian desire to end all talk of women as priests within the Church hasn't worked as he intended.  There is much dissent on the issue, especially in Europe and the U.S.  Moreover, the letter never stopped discussions about women as deacons, the lowest level of ordination (deacon, priest, bishop).  In 2023, the World Synod convened by Pope Francis discussed the topic.

I am reminded of two things.  First, in my law school entering class in 1967, there were 114 men and 5 women.  Admissions to Marquette's law school were handled by the school's chaplain, a Jesuit priest whose name I omit because of de mortuis nil nisi bonum.  I wonder how much of that gender disparity may have been caused by the Jesuit's selection criteria rather than by gender differences in application volumes.  Second, who was a friend of mine and who baptized Sarah, in a conversation with me, once referred to Black basketball players as "jigaboos," showing that ordination to the priesthood doesn't preclude all sorts of bigotry.  Secondly, I recall the terrific homily on the Transfiguration delivered by a female Episcopal priest at the National Cathedral at a mass that Geri and I attended in 1994 or 1995 when we were in Washington for me to testify before a Senate subcommittee.  On leaving the Cathedral after mass, I remarked that the reason the Catholic Church didn't ordain women was that the male priests couldn't stand the competition.

Regarding Trump's 2019 announcement for reelection, little did we realize how fateful that bid would become. However, the writing was on the wall with Trump's many pre-election references to "voter fraud" and his refusal to commit to honoring the results of the election setting up his "heads I win, tails you lose" election strategy.  Ultimately we got a massive conspiracy to steal the election, the January 6th insurrection, all the legal actions that are currently pending, and abysmal political polarization throughout the country.

Today's project was a shopping outing to Costco (gas, etc.), Wild Birds Unlimited (suet), and Sendik's (fruit, oatmeal, herring, yogurt, cheese, etc.)  My lower back was challenging me the whole time, making the mission difficult.

6/17/24

Monday, June 17, 2024

1954 CIA exile army lands in Guatemala, organized by the CIA and United Fruit Co.

1963 Supreme Court rules against Bible reading/prayer in public schools

1965 1st bombing by B-52 (50 km north of Saigon)

1969 "Oh! Calcutta!" opens in NYC (almost entirely in the nude)

1972, five burglars were discovered in DNC offices in the Watergate 

1996  The Irish Constitution was amended to remove the prohibition on divorce.

2015 Nine  people were shot and killed inside Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.

In bed a little after 10 and up at 2:50 to let Lilly out.  71°, humidity 84%, and dew point 66° on the way to a predicted high of 85°, the first of three warm, humid days.    

Prednisone, day 36, 20 mg., last day.  My 5 a.m. glucose reading is 125.  My breakfast at 5:30 was CBH, 4 breakfast sausages I wanted to get rid of, and 3 basted eggs,  2 hours later, my reading was 179->.  by 10 a.m., I'm up to 247->..  I am unexplainably fatigued today, sleeping most of the morning, indeed until 1 p.m.  By 6 p.m., my glucose reading is down to 151.

Last evening, the Father's Day Gathering at Andy's house was wonderful and heartwarming.  Andy, Anh, Lizzie, Drew, Trucker and John Price, Anne, Geri and me.  Lots of warm, spirited conversations including a conversation with Trucker about the Hoang family's history in Vietnam, their shipboard travel to a refugee camp in Thailand in 1975 when Truc was 9 years old, the trip to and stay at   Camp Pendleton where for a time my good friend, now deceased, Pat Townsend was OIC.  I also enjoyed a long conversation with Lizzy about her summer camp experience in Indiana, near Louisville, and her courses and extracurricular activities next school year when she starts high school.  She amazes me, smart, beautiful, courageous, and adventurous, our Supergirl, Wonder Woman.  I shared many memories of fishing with Andy and of fishing with Peter and I thought of but left unmentioned memories of holding him sleeping in my arms when Anne sang with the Symphony Chorus at Carnegie Hall and of holding him sick in my arms when we visited the King Tut exhibit at the Field Museum in Chicago  Now he is a 52-year-old lawyer, proud .husband and father of three fine children and I rely on his steadying help in mounting the two steps to get into his house to use the bathroom.   I was saddened to learn that Anne has been really suffering from arthritis and some other challenges.  Andy grilled the best-tasting, most moist pork chops I have ever enjoyed along with tender large asparagus spears.  It rained for a while as we stayed under the patio umbrellas and continued to eat.  It struck me as sort of European and cosmopolitan but didn't interfere with our enjoyment of the meal and the conversations.  Truly, a warm, wonderful,  and memorable family gathering.

Anniversaries. First,  I've written before in this journal of Marine General Smedley Butler's book War is a Racket in which he points out how the Marines have been used to protect the financial interests of big corporations and plutocrats.  The 1954 coup d'etat in Guatemala was of a different sort.  It involved recruiting a small army of mercenaries from Guatamala and other Central American countries to overthrow Guatamala's democratically elected government which was heavily involved in land reform that favored peasant farmers and labor reform that favored employees.  Both of these practices affected the United Fruit Company ("I'm Chiquita Banana and I'm here to say . . .   ).  UFC had close ties to Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother CIA Director Alan Dulles who were former partners at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell which represented UFC.  They organized and financed the coup that led to the overthrow of the Guatemalan government, the installation of a dictatorship, and the reversal of the land reforms and labor laws that favored the country's small farmers and employees and reduced UFC's huge profits exploited from the country.  I mention this as but one example of America's immense hypocrisy about "defending democracy", respect for national sovereignty and for a "rules-based international order," and for the identification of the nation's 'vital interests' with the commercial and financial interests of big corporations and plutocrats.  And lest we forget, the Catholic Church was generally aligned with the interests of UFC and the right-wing government.

Second, from When the Court Took on Prayer and the Bible in Public Schools by Michael D. Waggoner in LAW AND RELIGION, June 25, 2012:

On June 25, 1962, the United States Supreme Court decided in Engel v. Vitale that a prayer approved by the New York Board of Regents for use in schools violated the First Amendment by constituting an establishment of religion. The following year, in Abington School District v. Schempp, the Court disallowed Bible readings in public schools for similar reasons. These two landmark Supreme Court decisions centered on the place of religion in public education, and particularly the place of Protestantism, which had long been accepted as the given American faith tradition. Both decisions ultimately changed the face of American civil society, and in turn, helped usher in the last half-century of the culture wars.

The country has been fighting about these cases ever since they were decided with opponents arguing that the liberal Court has "taken God and prayer out of our schools."  This in turn, it is said, has led to the secularization of our society and the mess we have been in ever since.  For the Make America Great Again crowd, MAGA includes more government-supported religious involvement, and of an evangelical Protestant kind, witness many provisions in the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025.  God help us.

Third, B-52s were bombing Vietnamese targets even before I arrived in country in the summer of 1965.  These strategic bombers were designed to carry atom bombs to threaten (or destroy) the Soviet Union or Communist China, but they could also carry up to 70,000 pounds of the conventional weapons we used in Vietnam.  How ridiculous it seems now that the U.S. was deploying these strategic bombers against insurgent guerrillas, 'little men wearing black pajamas.'  The writing was on the wall.  Lyndon Johnson knew it, and so did a lot of the troops.  Still, we persisted.

Fourth, "Oh, Calcutta" on Broadway featured a bunch of totally naked people cavorting on stage in front of packed audiences.  See what you get when you take God out of schools!

Fifth, Richard Nixon's burglars were caught early in the morning wiretapping telephones and stealing documents.  After months of unsuccessful coverup activities by Nixon and White House aides, disclosures by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the Washington Post, and unsuccessful attempts to prevent disclosure of Oval Office tape recordings, Nixon resigned from the presidency on August 8, 1974.  I well remember the era and saving certain newspapers in my basement office of our home on Newberry Boulevard, especially the one with the banner headline NIXON RESIGNS, but the newspapers eventually became brittle, brown, and musty and I discarded them, along with many of the unpleasant memories of that historic era.  In a later interview with David Frost, Nixon defended his criminal actions by arguing "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal, by definition."  Donald Trump is arguing essentially the same thing in his now-pending Supreme Court immunity case which will be released any day now.  We'll see what our radicalized, right-wing, Republican Supreme Court has to say.  I am hopeful but not confident that at least a majority will reject the claim of general immunity but the case may well end up moot if and when Trump becomes president again after the November election when he and the American electorate will halt all pending criminal prosecutions against him.

Fifth, can it really be that it took until 1996 for Ireland to legalize divorce?  What pernicious influences the Irish Catholic Church had on the Irish people, especially on Irish women!  Marriage and divorce, family planning, mother and baby homes for unwed mothers, Magdalene laundries. for 'fallen women' and 'problem children,' like Sinead O'Connor at age 14.  Official Irish government reports revealed the long collusion between the Irish government and the Church hierarchy and religious orders that ran these institutions.  Unfortunately, it was the Irish Catholic culture that dominated the American Catholic culture, including in my parish of St. Leo the Great, pastored by Msgr. Patrick J. Malloy.

Lastly, Mother Emanuel church, only 9 years ago.  America's long list of mass shootings in houses of worship includes, among many others, the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex.  One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.

Out of Africa.  I've been rewatching this movie and enjoying it even more than I did in earlier viewings.  Meryl Streep is superb in it, and as beautiful as she has ever been in any movie.  I enjoy just about everything about the film, the acting, the scenery and settings, the dialogues, the costumes, the depictions of the Kikuyu and the Masai, and the depictions of nationalism and settler colonialism in early 20th century Kenya, where decades later the Mau Mau rebellion occurred.  The slow-motion love affair between Karen and Denys and the breakup.  I have long enjoyed the soundtrack by John Barry and often listen to his station on Pandora.  I had forgotten that the film is almost 3 hours long and I am only halfway through it after two partial viewings.  It is a love story, love between Karen and Denys, Karen and Africa, Karen and the Kikuyu.  It's also a story of imperialism, nationalism, settler colonialism, and White Supremacy.  She left British East Africa in 1931 for Denmark and by 1952, the Mau Mau Uprising of the Kikuyu had started and eventually Kenya gained independence from Britain in 1963.  During the Mau Mau era, the British committed major crimes against the Kikuyu, including concentration camps, torture, and other abuses.  Cruel Britannia, Britannia rules the waves . . .

At the 1:45:40 mark of the film, Karen is having dinner with Berkeley Cole (Michael Kitchen) and acknowledges her affair with Denys Finch Hatton.  Cole remarks:  "Be careful.  When the old mapmakers got to the edge of the world, they used to write "Beyond this place there be dragons."  It reminded me of where we are in the U.S. politically and socially with the real likelihood that Trump will defeat the increasinly decrepit and unpopular Biden come November.  Beyond this place there be dragons.

6/16/24

Sunday, June 16, 2024

1858 Abraham Lincoln:  "A house divided against itself cannot stand."  

1904 Bloomsday ("Ulysses")

1944 S. Car. executed George Stinney, a 14-year-old Black boy.

1954 Ngô Đình Diệm elected Prime Minister of the South Vietnam.

2000 Israel withdrew from Lebanon after 22 years.

2015 Donald Trump launched his presidential bid at Trump Tower

His and Her's walkers; life in the 80s

In bed at 9 and up at 2:20 to let Lilly out.

Prednisone, day 35, 20 mg. day 13.  Glucose reading at 5 a.m. is 120. Breakfast consists of one serving of steel-cut oatmeal with 6 blackberries, 6 raspberries,  12 blueberries, and Activia vanilla yogurt.  Reading at 6:20 is 233 up arrow.  At 7:15, it is 239-> compared to 366 two hours after yesterday's breakfast of Raisin Nut Bran + fruit.  Lesson learned.  Tomorrow CBH and eggs.

Anniversaries.   Abraham Lincoln, speaking of the slavery issue in a speech, referred to the story in Matthew 12: 22-28 in which Pharisees accused Jesus of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub and Jesus replied about a house divided.  Is that not where the not-United States is/are now?  Have we not reverted to the 1850s?  Isn't Donald Trump as threatening, or more so in some ways, than Jefferson Davis, John C. Calhoun, and the slave labor oligarchs?  Jesus said “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand."  We were warned by Jesus and warned by Lincoln, but nothing will stop our descent into desolation.  Descensus Averno facilis est.  Aeneid, Book 6.

Around the world, fans of James Joyce observe "Bloomsday," the one day in the life of Leopold Bloom related in Ulysses.  It's also the date of Joyce's first date with Nora Barnacle.  Fans will attend festivals, readings, dramatizations, and pub crawls to celebrate the 1922 novel and the man who changed literature so radically.

Is South Carolina the worst state in the Union?  It was the first state to secede from the Union and home to the first battle of the Civil War at Fort Sumter.  More recently, it has given us Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott in the U.S. Senate, the Mother Emanuel murders in Charleston, and the Murdaugh family killings that revealed the entrenched social and power structure of the state.  It flew the Confederate flag in front of its capitol until 2015 when Gov. Nikki Haley had it removed after the Mother Emanuel murders.  In 1944, it electrocuted George Stinney, a 14-year-old Black boy, for killing 2 White girls.  His defense counsel conducted no cross-examination of any witness, called no witnesses of his own, and offered little or no defense.  The all-White jury returned a guilty verdict in 10 minutes.  The judgment of conviction was vacated in 2014 because of the gross violations of Stinney's constitutional rights, but the case reminds us of South Carolina's history of enslavement and Jim Crow and supports my wondering whether South Carolina may lay claim to having the darkest history of all our states.

In a country whose population is overwhelmingly Buddhist, how did a Catholic become its first president?  His family had been among the earliest Vietnamese converts to Catholicism in the 17th century.  His father was a high-ranking functionary in the French colonial government and a daily communicant.  His brother was a Catholic priest, later archbishop of Hué, and he himself was a celibate.  After the Japanese occupation of Vietnam, he was an anti-communist and anti-colonialist activist.  He became a self-imposed exile and a lobbyist on his own behalf in Washington with Mike Mansfield, former director of the OSS Bill Donovan and with congressman John F. Kennedy to whom he was introduced by Francis Cardinal Spellman.  He lived at the Maryknoll Seminary in Ossining, NY, and Maryknoll Junior Seminary in Lakewood, NJ, during his exile. and was strongly supported by Cardinal Spellman, a rabid anti-communist himself.  Largely because of his harsh treatment of Buddhist opponents during his presidency, Diem lost popular support in his country and Kennedy, now president himself, authorized a military coup against him in which he and his authoritarian brother, Ngô Đình Nhu were assassinated.  Madame Nhu ("Dragon Lady") remarked "“Whoever has the Americans as allies does not need any enemies.  I can predict to you all that the story in Vietnam is only at its beginning.”   A little over two years later, in February 1966, when I was serving in Vietnam, President Lyndon B. Johnson was candid about the role of the American government in the coup and the murder of Diem: “[W]e killed him. We all got together and got a…bunch of thugs and we went in and assassinated him. Now, we’ve really had no political stability since then.”  Sic transit gloria mundi.

The history of Israel's military engagements and occupation in south Lebanon is even more complex than Diem's history in Vietnam, and seemingly never-ending.  Current polling reports 62% popular support for a full-scale war against Hezbollah now, even while the Gaza campaign goes on.  

Lastly, we have the anniversary of Donald and Melania's fateful ride down the golden escalator in Trump Tower, which ties in with Lincoln's warning about a house divided and Jesus' warning that  “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation,"  I dread the coming months and years.

6/15/24

 Saturday, June 15, 2024

1864 Robert E. Lee's plantation home became Arlington National Cemetery

In bed by 9, awake at 3:30, and up before 4 after a good night's sleep, unlike the night before.  Nonetheless, I'm tired and sleepy this morning and nod off at some point, waking up again at 7:15.   

Prednisone, day 34, 20 mg day 12.  I took my 20 mg. and ate my breakfast of Raisin Nut Bran, banana, blackberries, raspberries, milk, and yogurt at 7:30, anticipating the glucose spike that would show up on my freestyle Libre3.  How long will it take?  How high will it go?  How much have I been hurting myself with my big breakfasts loaded with fruits each morning?  Continuous glucose monitoring will be like having a spy watching me 24/7 and I will probably overreact.  I saw that my reading in the middle of the night was as low as 116 after yesterday's high of 389 with its bothersome alarm beeps. . .   Two hours after breakfast my reading is 366->.  Over time, it goes down to 192-> when I had a lunch of corned beef hash and basted eggs at 12:30 p.m.  By 2:30, the count is up to 329->, at 3;00, it is only 319, and at 3:30, it's 312->->.  No more Raisin Nut Bran breakfasts for me.  Tomorrow I'll try oatmeal.  Dinner at 5:30,, reading at 221: baked salmon, one fingerling potato, crunchy salad, beets, spinach.  1 hour: 264;  2 hours 237->  Two thoughts: (1) I'm having difficulty reading again.  Giant cell arteritis? (2) Unexplainable fatigue today after a good night's sleep.

Anniversary.  This is the date in 1864 when the Union Army's quartermaster general formally ordered that the plantation of Confederate General Robert E. Lee be used as a cemetery for dead Union soldiers.  The need for additional burial space for soldiers was occasioned by the Battle of the Wilderness the month before,  20 miles west of Fredericksburg VA and not very far from where I lived in Stafford Courthouse VA during Basic School.  It was the first battle between Ulysses S. Grant's Army of the Potomac and Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and resulted in many casualties on both sides.  Grant's army suffered 2,246 KIA, 12,037 WIA, and 3,383 MIA, quite a bloodbath.  Lee's losses were fewer but still very large.  President Lincoln and his generals must have experienced some schadenfreude in turning General Lee's home into an expansive graveyard.

I have mixed feelings about our national cemeteries.  On the one hand, they symbolize our nation's willingness to sacrifice the lives of its youth to accomplish political goals.  Nearly 400,000 people are buried at Arlington alone and the cemetery conducts between 27 and 30 funeral services each weekday and between six and eight services on Saturdays.  Wood National Cemetery here in Milwaukee is full now, with 36,000 dead, current burials occurring at the Southern Wisconsin Veterans Memorial Cemetery at Union Grove in Racine County where 25,000 more graves are located.  

I drive through Wood National Cemetery almost every time I have an appointment at the Zablocki VA Medical Cemetery and I always have a sense of respect, perhaps reverence, doing so for it reminds me of my time in military service and of the men I served with, including my college roommates.  Ed Felsenthal and Bill Hendricks, Navy officers, and Tom Devitt and Jerry Nugent, Marine officers.  All my fellow Marines in Quantico, Yuma, Vietnam, Okinawa, and Willow Grove.  All of us such ordinary people, not ordinary in the sense of fungible or cut from the same cloth, for we were each unique, but ordinary in the sense of being like the mix of people you would encounter at Sendik's or at a Brewers ballgame.  Not heroes, not monsters, ordinary Americans who, for a period, wore a uniform and subordinated their personal life goals to the nation's requirement of a powerful military to protect our interests.  "Our interests" were often the interests of American business enterprises, from the United Fruit Company to Standard Oil or Goldman Sachs, but hardly any of us thought about that.  We were told we were serving "to defend freedom," "to protect democracy," and so on.   My generation grew up with the exaltation of the victories over Hitler, Hirohito, and Mussolini, the service and sacrifices made by our parents in World War II and then again in Korea.  All that would be changed by Vietnam.  We weren't the heroes of D-Day and Iwo Jima, where "uncommon valor was a common virtue," but rather 'baby killers.'  "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"  But good wars and bad wars, winning wars and losing wars, the dead soldiers lie side by side in our national cemeteries, each under a standard upright granite or marble headstone 42 inches long, 13 inches wide and 4 inches thick weighing approximately 230 pounds.  Each displays the veteran's name, rank, branch of service, war served in (if any), dates of birth and death.  The headstones are perfectly placed in rows and columns, ranks and files, much as those veterans lined up in formations while they were in the service,  'Dress right, dress!'  It's all very formal, symmetrical and orderly, and it creates an atmosphere of disciplined peace and serenity, an atmosphere very different from that the veterans may have experienced on active duty.

Arlington National Cemetery is the system's crown jewel with its Robert E. Lee provenance, location overlooking the nation's capital, and famous 'residents.'  But Wood National has its own claim to special significance because of its history and connection with the adjacent Old Soldiers Home, authorized by President Lincoln at the end of the Civil War.  The modern VA Medical Center, the historic Old Soldiers Home, and Wood National Cemetery are all located on the same large campus between I-94 and National Avenue, Brewers Boulevard and 55th Street.  On that campus are the thousands of gravesites of veterans going back to the War of 1812 as well as the hospital and medical center providing services every day to living veterans like me.  It's a reminder of America's military history and military power and of the willingness of the country's rulers to use that power to enforce its political will on others.  I say 'the country's rulers' to make the point that it is rarely the hoi polloi who opt for warfare, the people from whose ranks soldiers volunteer or are conscripted,  but rather the rich and powerful whom war will make richer and more powerful.  There are 18,300,000 living veterans in the U.S., 43% from the Gulf War era and 30% from the Vietnam War era, but in the current Congress, only 18% of representatives and 17% of senators are veterans.  The last president who served on full-time active duty was George H. W. Bush in WWII.  Before him, presidents Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, and of course, Eisenhower all served tours of active duty.  Working class stiffs are always expendable, not so with the 'swells' like Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and all the 'chicken hawks' of that era.  We snicker as we say 'no one is above the law' in America but we know that the law itself is rigged to favor the rich because of The Golden Rule:  He who has the gold makes the rules.  These are thoughts that come to mind as I drive through Wood National Cemetery, along with thoughts of the many still-living vets I will encounter once I arrive at the Medical Center., a motley crew of sick, lame, halt, and withered, mostly old guys like me.  I have often said I feel a kinship with these men and women.  I'm sure there is more friendliness and interaction in this hospital devoted to veterans than we would find in most general-purpose hospitals, more helpfulness and communication in the corridors and waiting rooms.  I am grateful for all the good experiences I have had there both with the medical staff and with other vets.  I'm grateful to Ed Felsenthal for encouraging and helping me to get enrolled in the program.  I'm a lucky guy.  With mixed feelings, I wish "Happy Birthday" to Arlington National Cemetery.

  I have often thought that if war should cease over all the face of the earth, for a thousand years, its reality would not be believed at such a distance of time, notwithstanding the faith of authentick records in every nation. Were mankind totally free from every tincture of prejudice in favour of those gallant exertions which could not exist were there not the evil of violence to combat; had they never seen in their own days, or been told by father or grandfathers, of battles, and were there no traces of the art of war, I have no doubt that they would treat as fabulous or allegorical, the accounts in history, of prodigious armies being formed, of men who engaged themselves for an unlimited time, under the penalty of immediate death, to obey implicitly the orders of commanders to whom they not attached either by affection or by interest; that these armies were sometimes led with toilsome expedition over vast tracts of land, sometimes crouded into ships, and obliged to endure tedious, unhealthy, and perilous voyages; and that the purpose of al this toil and danger was not to obtain any comfort or pleasure, but to be in a situation to encounter other armies; and that those opposite multitudes the individuals of which had no cause to quarrel, no ill-will to each other, continued for hours engaged with patient and obstinate perseverance, while thousands were slain, and thousands crushed and mangled by the diversity of wounds. . . 

 Were there any good produced by war which could in any degree compensate its direful effects; were better men to spring up from the ruins of those who fall in battle, as more beautiful material forms sometimes arise from the ashes of others; or were those who escape from its destruction to have an increase of happiness; in short, were there any great beneficial effect to follow it, the notion of its irrationality would be only the notion of narrow comprehension. But we find that war is followed by no general good whatever. The power, the glory, or the wealth of a very few may be enlarged. But the people in general, upon both sides, after all the sufferings are passed, pursue their ordinary occupations, with no difference from their former state. The evils therefore of war, upon a general view of humanity are as the French say, à pure perte, a mere loss without any advantage, unless indeed furnishing subjects for history, poetry, and painting. And although it should be allowed that mankind have gained enjoyment in these respects, I suppose it will not be seriously said, that the misery is overbalanced. At any rate, there is already such a store of subjects, that an addition to them would be dearly purchased by more wars. 

   How long war will continue to be practised, we have no means of conjecturing. Civilization, which it might have been expected would have abolished it, has only refined its savage rudeness. The irrationality remains, though we have learnt insanire certa ratione modoque, to have a method in our madness.

James Boswell, "On War" (1777)

Knowlt Hoheimer, from Spoon River Anthology

I was the first fruits of the battle of Missionary Ridge.

When I felt the bullet enter my heart

I wished I had staid at home and gone to jail

For stealing the hogs of Curl Trenary,

Instead of running away and joining the army.

Rather a thousand times the county jail

Than to lie under this marble figure with wings,

And this granite pedestal Bearing the words, “Pro Patria.”

What do they mean, anyway?