Thursday, July 25, 2025
306 Constantine I is proclaimed Roman Emperor by his troops
1941 FDR banned selling benzine/gasoline to Japan
1968 Pope Paul VI published the encyclical "Humanae vitae (Of Human Life)" which rejects any artificial forms of birth control
2019 US Justice Department announced the resumption of the use of the death penalty, scheduling five executions
Prednisone, day 74, 15+5, day 10. I took my 15 mg. of prednisone at 4:55 a.m. It was disappointing that I didn't hear from either the PM&R Clinic or Dr. Cheng yesterday. If I haven't heard from either by 10 a.m. or so this morning, I will call. I have very noticeable bi-tonal tinnitus this morning, a high-pitched hissing sound, and a low-pitched hum. I turned on YouTube for some "brown noise" hopefully to get some masking.
At 8:30, Dr. Cheng called and asked a series of questions and then informed me that my hip pain may be either bursitis or pain from the hip bones themselves. If the latter, only Dr. England, who injected my right hip back in 2021, does the ultrasound-guided cortisone injections. If it's the bursa, Dr. Cheng could examine me and inject me tomorrow. I opted to see Dr. England and will await his call, hoping he can see me without too much delay.
Waking thoughts of Netanyahu. As I sat on the bed and in the LZB, I thought of Netanyahu and his speech in Congress yesterday. Despite my knee-jerk dislike of him, especially after his speech to our Congress in March 2015 opposing Obama's nuclear treaty with Iran, I wondered whether he may be correct, or at least reasonable, in his long-term opposition to a two-state solution and his so far successful efforts to undermine all efforts to attempt such a policy by supporting settlements in the West Bank and earlier in Gaza. I'm mindful (at least on occasion, of Oliver Cromwell's famous exhortation to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1650: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken." Cromwell's Rule in probability theory is to always leave some room for the possibility of error. How would I feel if I were an Israeli Jew, having lived through the 1946-48 'War of Independence,' the 1967 Six Day War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Hezbollah wars in Lebanon, the rocket attacks from Gaza, the intifadas, the Achille Lauro, the Munich Olympics, the bus bombings, and on and on? It's easy to sit in my recliner in Bayside and judge Netanyahu, his Likud allies, and the increasingly conservative Israeli public when neither I nor any members of my family are at any significant risk of death or injury from Hamas, Hezbollah, an Iraqui or Syrian militiamen, or cruise and ballistic missiles from Iran, or now even drones from Yemen. Netanyahu has never been a "chicken hawk," like all the yuppies in the George W. Bush administration who avoided military service in Vietnam but were neocons in supporting military adventures carried out by others. Netanyahu served ably in a Special Forces unit in the IDF and sustained combat injuries. His brother Yonathan, also an IDF Special Forces officer and commander, was killed in the 1976 raid on Entebbe, Uganda. Benjamin and his family have shed blood in defense of Israel and its people. I don't know where to go with these thoughts because they lead me back to the fundamental question of the wisdom and legitimacy of Israel itself as 'the Jewish homeland' on territory that had been overwhelmingly Arab before colonization or settlement by mostly European Jews, by people like Netanyahu's father, who moved to Tel Aviv in 2020 as an ardent Zionist. The idea of Zionism has "baked into it' if not the expulsion of the indigenous Arabs in Palestine, at least their subordination to Jewish hegemony. In his speech yesterday, Netanyahu conflated the State of Israel with Jewry but we know that not every Jew is a Zionist, much less a supporter of the modern government of Israel. There were Jews on the streets outside the Capitol demonstrating against Zionism as he spoke. Theodor Herzl's touting of Zionism was opposed by most assimilated Jews in Germany at the time, and perhaps even by Jews in the shtetls to the East. The fear was that if Jews were seen to have a homeland in Palestine, they could be seen as not belonging where they were, in Europe. And Zionism raises the perplexing problem of who is a Jew and whether there is a Jewish nation. Yeshayahu Leibowitz argues that the only halakha that ties Jews together is the observance of Jewish law, the written law and the oral law. What does a Jew living in Singapore have in common with a Jew living in Los Angeles and a Jew living in Morocco or Ethiopia? Not language geographical ties race or allegiance to a nation-state or customs other than halakha. Where do secular Jews, like Netanyahu and his birth family, fit into this taxonomy? How about Reform Jews? Atheist Jews? Leibowitz wrote: "The Jewish people, as it existed in history, is definable only by reference to its Judaism - a Judaism that was not a mere idea in the mind but the realization of a program of living outlined in the Torah and delineated by its Mitzvoth. This way of life constituted the specific national content of Jewishness or, in other words, the uniqueness of the Jewish people. The Jew practiced a way of living that was exclusively his." Unique dietary behavior, unique marital laws, unique butchering behavior, unique Sabbath behavior, etc. The point is that it is the uniqueness of behavior, practice, or way of living that defines Jewishness, and that way of living is provided in halakha, Jewish law. Where do all these thoughts take me in terms of Netanyahu and yesterday's speech? in terms of Zionism? and in terms of the military and settler occupation of the West Bank? the war in Gaza? Always back to the question of the defensibility of Zionism itself. What do I make of this muddle of thoughts? That I am not a Zionist. That Zionism is understandable but not defensible. That Zionism, long term, has not been good for the Jews and indeed is a leading cause of antisemitism around the world, for which diaspora Jews pay the heaviest price. That Zionism is just another form of pernicious nationism very much akin to the White Christian Nationalism that plagues America.
Harry Wilmans
I was just turned twenty-one,
And Henry Phipps, the Sunday-school superintendent,
Made a speech in Bindle’s Opera House.
“The honor of the flag must be upheld,” he said,
“Whether it be assailed by a barbarous tribe of Tagalogs
Or the greatest power in Europe.”
And we cheered and cheered the speech and the flag he waved
As he spoke.
And I went to the war in spite of my father,
And followed the flag till I saw it raised
By our camp in a rice field near Manila,
And all of us cheered and cheered it.
But there were flies and poisonous things;
And there was the deadly water,
And the cruel heat,
And the sickening, putrid food;
And the smell of the trench just back of the tents
Where the soldiers went to empty themselves;
And there were the whores who followed us, full of syphilis;
And beastly acts between ourselves or alone,
With bullying, hatred, degradation among us,
And days of loathing and nights of fear
To the hour of the charge through the steaming swamp,
Following the flag,
Till I fell with a scream, shot through the guts.
Now there’s a flag over me in
Spoon River. A flag!
A flag!Henry Phipps
I was the Sunday-school superintendent,
The dummy president of the wagon works
And the canning factory,
Acting for Thomas Rhodes and the banking clique;
My son the cashier of the bank,
Wedded to Rhodes’ daughter,
My week days spent in making money,
My Sundays at church and in prayer.
In everything a cog in the wheel of things-as-they-are:
Of money, master and man, made white
With the paint of the Christian creed.
And then:
The bank collapsed.
I stood and hooked at the wrecked machine—
The wheels with blow-holes stopped with putty and painted;
The rotten bolts, the broken rods;
And only the hopper for souls fit to be used again
In a new devourer of life,
When newspapers, judges and money-magicians
Build over again.
I was stripped to the bone, but I lay in the Rock of Ages,
Seeing now through the game, no longer a dupe,
And knowing “the upright shall dwell in the land
But the years of the wicked shall be shortened.”
Then suddenly, Dr. Meyers discovered
A cancer in my liver.
I was not, after all, the particular care of God
Why, even thus standing on a peak
Above the mists through which I had climbed,
And ready for larger life in the world,
Eternal forces
Moved me on with a push.
Anniversaries thoughts. First, Constantive's accession to the emperor's position in 306 A.D. and his desire to unify the Roman Empire led eventually to his supposed "conversion" to Christianity and the development of Christendom. His desire for unity in religion led to his convening of the First Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Nicene Creed.
Second, FDR's banning of the sale of gas to the Japanese on this date in 1941 was only one of the last acts of economic warfare that the U.S. waged on Japan before Japan attacked the U.S. at Pearl Harbor on December 7th of that year. In 1939 the United States terminated the 1911 commercial treaty with Japan. “On July 2, 1940, Roosevelt signed the Export Control Act, authorizing the President to license or prohibit the export of essential defense materials.” Under this authority, “[o]n July 31, exports of aviation motor fuels and lubricants and No. 1 heavy melting iron and steel scrap were restricted.” Next, in a move aimed at Japan, Roosevelt slapped an embargo, effective October 16, “on all exports of scrap iron and steel to destinations other than Britain and the nations of the Western Hemisphere.” Finally, on July 26, 1941, Roosevelt “froze Japanese assets in the United States, thus bringing commercial relations between the nations to an effective end. One week later Roosevelt embargoed the export of such grades of oil as still were in commercial flow to Japan.” As children, we were all taught that the "Japs" attacked Pearl Harbor completely unprovoked. Wrong.
Third, Humanae Vitae! Another terrible event in 1968. From 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 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 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, Paul VI rejected the recommendation and adopted the dissenting position, undoubtedly fearing that any change in the Church’s position would weaken the claim to papal authority. What happened, of course, was precisely what Paul and the Vatican conservatives 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 its shepherds than in the welfare of the flock.
Lastly, Donald Trump finally got his wish to have governments empowered to kill miscreants in cold blood. I'm recalling his full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the restoration of the death penalty in connection with the wrongfully convicted Central Park 5.
