Can I Get A Little Sympathy Here?

A couple of days ago I was moved to clean house. Yes, that does happen every so often. (Quentin Crisp once wrote that he never cleaned house because, after four years, the dust never gets any higher.)

It occurred to me while I was in the process of cleaning that, if I were on disability or workman's comp because of the herniated disc in my back, and if any insurance company goons were hiding with cameras to capture what I was doing, I'd probably have to fight like hell to keep my benefits. The fact is that I made a conscious decision to work through the pain and do what needed to be done, knowing full well that I would pay for it later.

I know I've read stories about people losing their benefits because they were photographed washing their car in the driveway or pulling weeds in their garden on their hands and knees. I sympathize, because I now know one can work through pain for a limited time to accomplish a specific object, and that doesn't equate with the ability to work an 8-hour job.

More About My Grandparents

One of the things about my grandfather Stanley that I would like to understand, but probably never will, is the origin of the distance he maintained, I'm guessing, from  more or less everybody, both family and friends. Part of it is certainly generational. I think everybody from that era was much less communicative and much more emotionally distant, regardless of their ethnic heritage. Emotion was almost a luxury in a day when parents, siblings and children frequently died young. In Stanley's case, his parents died in the year that he turned 3 years old. He had four older siblings who all died between the ages of 20 and 28, possibly three in one year, when Stanley was about 18. And those are just the family members. Probably he had childhood friends who also died young. One need not be a big fan of pop psychology to recognize that those are the kind of events that can shape a personality. It would have only been reinforced when Stanley was 48 and his third child died.

Much as I hate pop psychology, I abhor even more generalizations about nationalities and ethnic groups beyond those that can be made from one's own experiences. With that in mind, I will say that I know some people make a personality distinction between northern and southern Europeans, with the northerners seen as colder and more emotionally distant. I am quite certain there have been studies (it's science!) that show northern Europeans, require more physical space than do the people who live on the Mediterranean. It seems reasonable to think they also need more emotional space. Perhaps this has also been studied, but I don't know. (The stereotype of most Asians as being emotionally distant, but requiring very little physical space, if true, pretty much destroys the thesis that I just said sounds "reasonable.")

Louis's granddaughter Diane makes the point that the first generation born in the U.S. (Louis, Stanley and their siblings) were raised in sub-cultures that were still tied to the old world ways. Along with the practical reasons (death) for avoiding close emotional ties, and a possible northern European need for distance, there may have been specific Polish cultural norms that idealized the strong silent type.

Diane has a fabulous story about her grandfather. She remembers when she was a girl and her grandfather, Louis, would visit, that he would come down to breakfast in the morning and not speak a word. He would tap on his coffee cup with his spoon to indicate that he wanted coffee. He would tap on his plate with....does it matter?....to indicate he wanted his bacon and eggs. And Diane's mother, who was Louis's daughter-in-law, instead of telling him to go suck eggs, actually was accomodating enough to adjust to his old-fashioned ways. Perhaps this charming old-world habit was one of the reasons my mother only sporadically invited Louis, in his final years, to have dinner with us in Genoa, even though he lived just a few blocks away. My mother probably didn't consider herself a liberated woman (she did work outside the home on occasion), but I doubt she was very receptive to plate clinking as a way of communicating. There is also the practical consideration of why would you invite a guest to dinner when you know he isn't going to talk. 

In this regard, I would love to know how different Stanley was from Louis, who was ten years older. For one thing, I think it is true that oldest children are more likely to absorb their parents' values. Also, Stanley was orphaned at the age of three, and wasn't raised by his parents. If the Peters family who became the Pilakowski children's guardians had different personalities or if their household had a somewhat different dynamic, Stanley might have absorbed slightly different influences than did Louis. Certainly the one brother who was younger than Stanley, Vincent Joseph, grew up with somewhat different values. After the 1906 earthquake, at the age of about 21, he left rural Nebraska and went west to San Francisco to take advantage of the money to be made in the rebuilding of that city. He later moved to Los Angeles and became a successful entrepreneur and business owner. Pictures of him show no hint of his rural background.

I just can't see Stanley clicking his coffee cup with a spoon to indicate his desire for his morning eye opener. I have to think I would have heard it from someone if he did that. Rightly or wrongly, I like to believe that Stanley and Josephine had a more equal relationship than that.

I remember two things related to Stanley's funeral in 1960. The first was that just before the casket was closed for the last time, Josephine leaned in and kissed Stanley's corpse. It was the first time I had seen that, but then it was also probably the first time I had seen the final closing of a casket. The second was how distraught Josephine was on that day. After the final ritual at the cemetery, the normal procedure was, and probably still is, that the family returned to the church basement for a lunch/dinner that was prepared and served by the good women of the parish. At some point I went out of the main hall into the foyer at the bottom of the stairs, where the bathroom was, and I encountered my Grandma Josephine, just the two of us. My 15 year-old self was somewhat at a loss because I was old enough to know I needed to say something, but inexperienced enough not to know exactly what. I think I settled on something like “Grandma, I'm really sorry.” I do not recall her exact words, but I know I had never been so close to such anguish. She said something about there being nothing left to live for, or words similarly hopeless. And twelve weeks to the day after Stanley's death, she died of a massive heart attack.

The experience of Josephine at the time of Stanley's death tells me that there is a petty good chance they had a relationship that wasn't entirely patriarchal, in the old world sense. I know about the Stockholm Syndrome and I realize that, after living together for 55 years, a wife could be distraught just from the disruption of the only routine she knows. Happiness or unhappiness need not enter into the equation at all. But I don't think that is what I saw in that foyer. I choose to believe they had an intimate loving relationship for 55 years, and I have never heard or seen anything at all to indicate otherwise. Still I have to wonder how much they communicated with each other, and what were the patterns that their communication took. Still, whatever the dynamics of Stanley's and Josephine's relationship, it must have been satisfactory to both of them.

As I said in an earlier post, I never as a child or teenager had any doubts about Stanley's essential goodness. I may have wondered whether or not he knew my name, but I knew he was a good, kind, and fair man. Similarly I always knew that grandma Josephine was a kind and gentle person. When Stanley would drop her off at our house to visit my mother, my siblings and I would be all over her with grandma this and grandma that. Our mother would tell us, perhaps sometimes rather sharply, to leave grandma alone and go outside...or whatever. Grandma would always say something to the effect of “Oh, Isabelle, relax and let them be. They're just being kids.” So even if I don't have a lot of memories of her, I know she was essentially a good person if she told my mother to lighten up.

There is one memory of Josephine that, whatever may have been the dynamics of her relationship with Stanley, indicates clearly that they came from a patriarchal culture. I remember that grandma, when speaking about a husband, would refer to him as “the mister.” I do not recall if she used that term to refer to Stanley, and I so wish I did remember, because it would be important and telling, especially if she did not. As Diane pointed out when I mentioned this to her, using this term was a way of honoring the male head of the household, and it was also an era when people would use titles like “sister,” “brother,” and “cousin” to address each other, both in person and in letters.

But it is also a reflection of a patriarchal culture regardless, as I said, of Stanley's and Josephine's personal relationship. I do hate to cite this, because it reminds me of the old adage that a little bit of knowledge is dangerous, but Google Translator says that the Polish word for “master,” is “mistrz.” and the Polish word for “mister” is “pan,” so it really does make “the mister” sound like it meant “the master.”

Expressions or patterns of speech probably have a certain life cycle. They begin with a very literal meaning. The head of the household is, indeed, the master. There follows probably a period in which the expression remains, but it no longer reflects the day to day reality of relationships. Finally, the expression is just a curiosity. So, after all of this meandering, I have to admit that the fact that Josephine used the expression “the mister” only proves that she came out of a patriarchal culture, and we already knew that. It doesn't mean a thing about her relationship with her husband.

Before I end this, reflecting on the Pilakowski children's life with the Peters family after the deaths of the their parents, it is worth noting that I have no idea what the term “guardian” meant in 1886. Perhaps it meant that the Peters family took in all six Pilakowski kids as foster children. Perhaps it had a much more legalistic meaning. It hardly seems realistic to think the Peters family took in six additional children overnight. Perhaps they were Saints; I don't know. I hope that Diane's research into the family history comes up with more information about this period.

Enough for now. But with this genealogy thing, one keeps coming up with new observations and new questions. You can expect more.

A Long Post About My Grandfather

My immediate family members are aware that, after a lifetime of general ignorance about the genealogy of my maternal grandfather, Stanley Pilakowski, we now know quite a bit. And we well know that recent knowledge is due to the work of my sister Roberta and of a second cousin in California, Diane, that none of us knew existed as recently as a couple of weeks ago.

My mother, who was the youngest of six children, has always claimed to know practically nothing about her father's history. She knew he was an orphan and that there was some connection with the Cleveland, Ohio area, perhaps that he was born there, and that his formal education ended after the fourth or fifth grade. My sister Rosemary says that our mother speculated her father may have been sent west on one of the orphan trains that relocated as many as a quarter of a million youngsters from the east to the midwest from the 1870s through the 1920s. That would fit with a story I have heard my mother tell more than once. As she put it, orphan children were often parceled around to work at various labor intensive farm jobs, no doubt especially at harvest time. As she told the story, at lunch time, when all the workers went to the house to eat, her father, the orphan teenager was told to eat in the barn. The veracity of the story is not the issue. What strikes me is that is the only story I have ever heard her tell about her father's history.

We now know, and again I can't stress enough our obligation to Roberta and Diane, that my great grandparents, Anton and Francisyka Robaskewiec Pilakowski were married in Poland in 1869. We have a copy of their wedding registration. We know that in 1873 they sailed out of Liverpool (!) on the City of Antwerp, arriving in New York City, and that Francisyka was six-months pregrant at the time. They settled in Berea, Ohio where there first three children were born, and where my Anton was naturalized. It is apparently not clear if Francisyka became a citizen at the same time, but she may have. (He was naturalized only three years after their arrival. I guess he must not have looked like a terrorist.) Later they moved to Howell County Nebraska, where my grandfatther was born in 1883. Three years later, Anton and Francisyka both died of tuberculosis, and my grandfather was an orphan, about the only thing my mother had right.

We know that the guardians of Stanley and his even-younger brother Vincent after the death of his parents were a couple named Peters. This jumped out at all of us, because we have always known that my grandmother's maiden name was Peters. Much as I wanted the Victorian-novel effect of my grandfather having married the daughter of his guradians, Roberta assures me it was a different Peters family. He married the niece of his guardians, rather than their daughter.

No doubt life as an orphan was difficult, and there even may be some element of truth in the story about eating in the barn that my mother remembers her father telling, but Diane has evidence that the Peters family did a good job of looking out for the interests of the Pilakowski children, even forestalling a foreclosure at some point on the family property. I look forward to learning more about this from Diane at some point.

My grandfather died in 1960 a few days before my 15^th birthday. Obviously I didn't know him well. Even if I had thought at the time that I knew him well, which I never did, I would have been wrong in the way that teenagers are wrong about almost everything. So this is not an attempt to define or explain my grandfather, even if it might give that appearance at times. This is just some of what I remember about him and perhaps some of what I've constructed in my mind about him based on those memories. I know it isn't the real Stanley Pilakowski.

One of the surprises that I've had as a result of this genealogy research is the discovery that Stanley and Josephine both died in their mid-seventies. I have always believed them to have died in their mid- or late- eighties. In fact I would have sworn it. As a kid I had no sense of adult ages. There were only three ages: my own, my parent's and my grandparent's and everyone had to fit roughly into one of those groups. I remember that in some of those large Catholic families there were nieces and nephews who were older than their youngest uncles and aunts. More than anything else, I think this offended my young sense of order in the world.

We lived on a corner lot in Genoa, Nebraska and I remember grandpa parking on the side street nearest the back door of our house and my siblings and I would all run out to his car to get the candy bars we knew he had brought us. In the summer, he also would bring us watermelons that he had grown. I never saw his watermelon patch, but I think it was some distance away from his house, across the highway and close to the Loup river in a location that had very sandy ground, which I believe is a particularly good soil for raising melons. I know people used to steal his melons, but I have the sense he never got very upset about it.

I don't think he ever got out of his car when he came to drop off our treats. We would go to get whatever he had for us and he would leave. Sometimes he would drop my grandma off and she would “visit” with our mother until he came back to pick her up. I have no visual memory of him ever having been inside our house.

My grandfather and grandmother lived on a farm five or six miles outside of Genoa, Nebraska on the road to Fullerton, the County Seat of Nance County. The farm had two houses. My uncle Bob Pilakowski and his family lived in the bigger of the houses and my grandparents lived in the smaller.

The only other vivid memory I have of my grandfather has stuck with me for 55+ years because of its painful awkwardness. One summer day when I must have been about ten years old, my father drove to Fullerton and dropped me off at the Pilakowski farm on the way, to play with my cousin Ray, who was my age.

My father probably just pulled off the highway into the farmstead, dropped me off and continued on his way.. (There was no long driveway. The highway actually bisected the farmstead; some buildings were on the opposite side of the highway from the houses.) Neither of us knew that Ray wasn't at home. Somehow or other I ended up sitting with my grandfather in his car, in front of his house. Why we were in his car instead of somewhere else, I don't recall. He must have invited me into the car, but I don't remember. Perhaps he arrived home in his car more or less at the same time my dad dropped me off. Maybe he was one of those men who just liked sitting in his car and he was already there when I arrived.

At any rate, there we were, with nothing, and I mean nothing, to say to each other. The clumsiness of the moment was palpable. I probably tried to make a comment or ask a question, because even now I am one of those people who is somewhat uncomfortable with prolonged silence. I have no idea how long it lasted, but I remember how it ended. He said “Ray's home now. You should go play with him.” The odd thing about it is that we were sitting in front of his house, which was next to the road. Any car that arrived with Ray inside would have had to pass us when it turned in off the highway, and I would have been just as aware as grandpa that Ray was now home. Still I apparently didn't know how to extract myself from this awkward situation; I needed him to release me.

Related to that taciturnity I mentioned, I have no memory of Stanley hanging around and shooting the bull with the guys. I don't know who his friends were. When he died, the pallbearers were six of his grandchildren, so I can't get any clue from his funeral. If someone has his funeral notice, it may include a list of honorary pallbearers, which would at least indicate who were his friends. I can picture my grandmother chatting in Polish after church with some of her old lady friends, and I can almost make myself believe that I can see her laughing. But I can't do that with Stanley. I knew he was a nice guy with a good heart; he brought candy and watermelons after all, as well as quarters of beef when a steer was butchered. But I always saw him as extremely serious. I genuinely wondered in those years if he actually new my name or the name of any of my siblings. I knew that he knew my cousins' names, the children of Bob Pilakowski, because they all lived on the same farmstead. Since that thought occurred to me, it must be because at some point I searched my memory and decided I had never heard him call us by our names.

Stanley died in 1960 of prostate cancer. That was in the era when nobody talked about imminent death. The doctors would sometimes tell the family that a loved one had cancer, but they wouldn't tell the patient. And of course the family never told the patient either, supposedly to protect him/her from the bad news, but I now know it was just as much, or more, to prevent themselves from the need for awkward conversations.

I don't know who knew what or when they knew it. Certainly my siblings and I knew nothing because, I assume, we were not considered reliably discreet, no doubt correctly. Presumably Grandma and her adult children knew Grandpa had cancer, but how long they knew it, I have no idea. Prostate cancer is normally a very slow-growing malignancy, but not always. Perhaps Stanley had the more aggressive type. At any rate, I remember a conversation after he died in which I learned that the family had presumed Stanley did not know he had cancer, only to discover from a doctor in Omaha that Grandpa had been making secret trips to Omaha without telling anyone. He knew he had cancer and was keeping it from the family. Now I wonder if his mortality was on his mind that day four or five years earlier when we had nothing to talk about in his car.

This is already far too long for a blog post, so I will end for now. I still want to write more about that laconic quality that almost personifies my grandfather in my imperfect memory, and which all of his children seem to have inherited in spades. But that can all wait for later.

Anthony Lewis / Selfless Wives

When was the last time you read about a man retiring from an important post because he wanted to spend more quality time with his ailing/dying wife? Unless there was a sex scandal involved and he suddenly rediscovered his family, that is.

Ok, there is an actuarial reality that women live longer than men. Presumably that means men not only die sooner, but they get sick and start circling the drain sooner. But it is still a good question.

I'm thinking of Sandra Day O'Connor, who retired from the Supreme Court in 2005 to take care of her husband as he was eaten alive by Alzheimer's. Long before he died in 2009 he reportedly didn't even recognize his wife and children and had in fact found a new love with a fellow patient. So now Sandra Day O'Connor is a private citizen and we're stuck with Samuel Alito for gawd knows how long.

In Massachusetts, the Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court, Margaret H. Marshall, resigned at the end of 2010 to spend more time with her ailing husband, Anthony Lewis, who was suffering from Parkinson's. Or as she is quoted as saying, "so that Tony and I may enjoy our final seasons together."

At least O'Connor is getting up in years, although, at 83, she would still be practically a youngster in Supreme Court lifespans.  Marshall, on the other hand, retired at the young age of 66. As of Lewis's death today, both are now widows.

If I have more than a passing interest in the Supreme Court, it is at least partially due to Anthony Lewis's columns. I regret that I never read any of his books, although they're still in print (and ebook), so there is still time.

In my memory, Anthony Lewis is probably more responsible than any other person for keeping the genocide in Bosnia in the public eye. I haven't read any of the books dealing with the Clinton decision to finally intervene, but I have always believed the intervention was hugely influenced by Lewis who, alone among the opinionaters of the day, refused to let the issue disappear.  And yet, the three-page obituary in the NY Times does not once mention Bosnia or Lewis's personal crusade to get the world to take notice. I am stunned.

The Narratives Inside Our Heads

From an op-ed piece about a week ago called Does China Have A Foreign Policy by Zheng Wang:

Words like “aggressive,” “assertive” and “arrogant” have been used to describe China’s foreign policy, particularly with respect to its protracted war of words with Japan over a set of disputed islands in the East China Sea.

In fact, China’s bark is often far worse than its bite: China has not been at war with another country since a brief armed conflict with Vietnam in 1979, and has been very cautious in its dealings with its neighbors who occupy islands claimed by China in the South China Sea. This explains why Chinese nationalists have at times criticized the government’s foreign policy for being as soft and accommodating (sic).

The part that I have bolded reminds me of a passage I recently read in a book by, of all people, Pat Buchanan, called Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War. While I disagree with all of the assumptions that underlay Buchanan's book, I admit to finding it a bit intriguing, and the fact that I read it from beginning to end shows that I keep an open mind, doncha think?

One of Buchanan's points is that, because history is written by the winners, Kaiser Wilhelm has been treated particularly unfairly.  We often read of the Kaiser's bellicosity and aggressive posturing, but Buchanan compares Wilhelm's foreign policy rants and memos to Nixon's rants and scribblings, which his aids knew how to interpret. Buchanan should know.

Here is Buchanan's tally of wars, by country, for the century from Waterloo (1815) to the outbreak of WWI (1914):

Britain - 10
Russia - 7
France - 5
Austria - 3
Germany - 3

From 1871 to 1914, the Germans under Bismarck and the Kaiser did not fight a single war. While Britain, Russia, Italy, Turkey, Japan, Spain, and the United States were all involved in wars, Germany and Austria had clean records. And if Germany had not gone to war in forty-three years, and the Kaiser had never gone to war in his twenty-five years on the throne, how can one call Germany--as British statesmen did and British historians still do--the "butcher-bird of Europe?"

We accept and perpetuate narratives in our lives all the time without question, and it is probably always worthwhile to bring them up now and again for reexamination.

Here's To Broken Homes

For as long as I have given it any thought, I have always assumed I would never know much about my maternal grandfather's history. My mother, the youngest of his children, always said she knew virtually nothing other than that he was orphaned at a very young age and that there was some family connection with the Cleveland, Ohio area. I came to believe he had been born in the Cleveland area, been orphaned somewhere or other and ended up in Nebraska, who knows how? According to my sister, Rosemary, my mother used to speculate that her father had come to Nebraska on one of the orphan trains that transported as many as a quarter million orphan children westward at the end  of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.

Then my sister, Roberta, using an online subscription site called Ancestry.com, recently discovered a gold mine of information going back to my great grandparents marriage in Poland and their arrival in the US in 1873. She learned the basic outline of my grandfather's family history, and we now know that his parents did settle first in the area of Berea, Ohio and that the entire family was living in Howard County Nebraska by the time of the 1880 census. My grandfather was born in Nebraska in 1883, and both of his parents died in 1886. Roberta learned the name of the family who became my grandfather's guardians, Peters, which just happens to have been my grandmother's maiden name. Roberta says, however, that my grandmother was from a different Peters family. (I was disappointed; she was pleased. I wanted the soap opera story of my grandfather marrying his guardian's daughter.)

At the same time, a second cousin of ours who lives in California, whose existence was unknown to all of us, and probably using some of the same online resources, did the same thing. This second cousin, Diane, then started a Pilakowski Family Group on Facebook which is in the process of becoming a fascinating clearing house for collecting information and filling in the historical gaps in the family record.

Now, believe it or not, all of that is a lead in to the title of this post. My original intention was to record some of my memories of my grandfather, Stanley Pilakowski. I planned to begin by stressing that what I write are only my personal memories and probably have very little to do with the real person that was my grandfather. I was, after all, only 13 years old when he died in 1958, at the age of 75 (I have always thought he was in his middle 80s when he died) and, leaving aside the more profound question of whether anybody can truly know anyone else, how can a kid of that age know his grandfather? Especially a grandfather as taciturn as I remember Stanley to have been (again, I stress, that is just my memory).

Then I reflected on kids today who seem to me to be much more aware of the issues adults deal with than I ever was. I always think of a Brazilian friend and her two sons, Lucas and Caio. When I first met Monica in 2005, her sons were 15 and 13. Monica had gone through an unpleasant divorce from an unpleasant husband and had a long history of bi-polarity that had forced her to give up her teaching job and may have even required hospitalization at one time or another. (Note that, even though the divorce had been unpleasant, the boys retained a relationship with their father as well as with Monica.) One of the sweetest things I have ever seen a fifteen year old do in my life was when that first visit was over and everyone was taking leave. In that muted, mildly-melancholic moment, Lucas, who was already taller than his mother, stood with his arm around her waist and unobtrusively leaned over and kissed her on the top of the head as if to say he understood everything she was feeling. (I am in the way of an old guy who repeats his stories. I can't swear I haven't posted something about this story before.)

It is probably a stretch to say that Lucas's development into a sensitive and virtually ideal teenager was the result of his parents' divorce and his mother's mental issues, but I think it is reasonable to say that his empathetic qualities were given an opportunity to develop early because he wasn't shielded from the world of adult issues.

It's Time. Just Do It

I was just reading a Reuters article about the gay marriage cases that the Supremes will be hearing next week.

There is nothing at all original in the article, and I mention it for only one reason. Naturally, the author recognizes the opposition's argument that the definition of marriage is something that should be left to the individual states. What the article fails to mention, and what proponents of that position never mention, is the full faith and credit clause of the constitution.

If the Supremes decide to leave the definition of marriage up to the states, they are just postponing for a year or two the next inevitable case in which one state refuses to acknowledge a marriage that was made in another.

Of course the Supremes at their best do try to craft extremely narrow decisions, but there are cases where there is an overriding national interest. Imagine if Brown v. Board of Education only applied to Kansas and the four or five other states whose similar cases were all covered by that one decision. The court would have had to do it all over again in the following term.

Why postpone the inevitable? The Supremes need to make a big decision here, and I mean big in the sense of sweeping, as well as important.

NeoCon Morality

Taken from Andrew Sullivan's blog, "The Dish."

Answer Of The Day

Mar 20 2013 @ 4:50pm

It comes (via David Corn) from Richard Perle on NPR:

Montagne: Ten years later, nearly 5000 American troops dead, thousands more with wounds, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead or wounded. When you think about this, was it worth it?

 Perle: I’ve got to say I think that is not a reasonable question. What we did at the time was done with the belief that it was necessary to protect this nation. You can’t a decade later go back and say we shouldn’t have done that.

Neoconservatism: never look back; never question; never take responsibility; always avoid accountability. Just seek power. Then wage war.

You Better Keep Me In Your Prayers

Three successive postings from someone on Facebook. Names have been removed for my protection, and the bold highlights are my own.

First: Update on my mother-in-law...yesterday she seemed really upbeat and visited with lots of her family. Breathing with the help of oxygen was tough but it didn't slower (sic) down too much. X asked her where her tax papers were so that he could take care of them for her and she told him in no uncertain terms that she would take care of that when she gets home. She told us it was just a stage and she'd get through it.

Today wasn't so good. She seems to be weaker and harder to visit although she enjoyed her visitors (especially a surprise visit from her grandson Y from Iowa) We don't know what to expect. Any other person at 101, we would not have much hope but with her...anything is possible. Keep her in your prayers.

 Second: Good news....X's mom is doing better this morning. She had a good night and ate her breakfast this morning. X said he thinks that she is as good this morning as he's seen her since he came back. Her doctor said that if she continues, he sees no reason why she can't be moved to somewhere else. We will see what today brings. Thanks for your prayers. They are working. 

Third: Update....Mom is not doing so well today. Heart rate is slowing and having lots of arthritic pain so on pain meds which make her drowsy.

I just love the comment "Thanks for your prayers. They are working." But I think the third posting needs something along the lines of "Hey, pray harder and better. We're losing ground here."

I really would like a better understanding of these ubiquitous comments about keeping people in one's prayers. Do people make wish lists that they take to the big guy on a regular basis? "Here's what I'm asking for tonight."

Or is it more of a continuous conversation throughout the day? "Hey, don't let that 101 year-old woman die."

Or maybe it just assumes gawd is a mind-reader? All you have to do is think about what you want and he'll take care of it for you....assuming, of course, you know yourself to be one of the chosen.

Really, I'm curious. Having been raised a Catholic, I thought prayers were just repetitious Our Fathers and Hail Marys and Rosarys. And I guess if you wanted a favor, I must have thought you were just supposed to say more of them. Double down, as it were. It's hard to remember.

A Milestone Worth a Bit of Reflection

As we reach the tenth anniversary of our invasion of Iraq, it is important to reclaim some of the history. It wasn't as the Bush/Cheney defenders would have it now...an honest mistake that all the best intelligence experts supported.

The attack on the WTC provided a convenient excuse to the neo-con policy makers to do what they had been wanting to do ever since the end of the first gulf war, take out Saddam Hussein. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith all signed a public letter in 1998 calling for Hussein's overthrow. And I remember being stunned when I read a Sunday NY Times Magazine written by Wolfowitz before the WTC attacks making his case why we should invade Iraq and oust Hussein. An administration official was making a case for preemptive war.

It was obvious to anyone who was paying attention that the so-called debate about whether to attack or not attack Iraq was mere window dressing and the actual decision was as good as made long before the official one.

Completely coincidental is a quote a stumbled upon today attributed to Bismarck: "a preventive war is like committing suicide out of a fear of death."

I lifted what follows directly from Paul Krugman´s column today because it is important to remember what really happened and not to accept at face value the assertions made by those who would rewrite this history. Or, put another way, because it expresses exactly what I remember, and I couldn't say it better.

Ten years ago, America invaded Iraq; somehow, our political class decided that we should respond to a terrorist attack by making war on a regime that, however vile, had nothing to do with that attack. 

Some voices warned that we were making a terrible mistake — that the case for war was weak and possibly fraudulent, and that far from yielding the promised easy victory, the venture was all too likely to end in costly grief. And those warnings were, of course, right.

There were, it turned out, no weapons of mass destruction; it was obvious in retrospect that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into war. And the war — having cost thousands of American lives and scores of thousands of Iraqi lives, having imposed financial costs vastly higher than the war’s boosters predicted — left America weaker, not stronger, and ended up creating an Iraqi regime that is closer to Tehran than it is to Washington. 

So did our political elite and our news media learn from this experience? It sure doesn’t look like it.

The really striking thing, during the run-up to the war, was the illusion of consensus. To this day, pundits who got it wrong excuse themselves on the grounds that “everyone” thought that there was a solid case for war. Of course, they acknowledge, there were war opponents — but they were out of the mainstream.

The trouble with this argument is that it was and is circular: support for the war became part of the definition of what it meant to hold a mainstream opinion. Anyone who dissented, no matter how qualified, was ipso facto labeled as unworthy of consideration. This was true in political circles; it was equally true of much of the press, which effectively took sides and joined the war party. 

CNN’s Howard Kurtz, who was at The Washington Post at the time, recently wrote about how this process worked, how skeptical reporting, no matter how solid, was discouraged and rejected. “Pieces questioning the evidence or rationale for war,” he wrote, “were frequently buried, minimized or spiked.” 

Closely associated with this taking of sides was an exaggerated and inappropriate reverence for authority. Only people in positions of power were considered worthy of respect. Mr. Kurtz tells us, for example, that The Post killed a piece on war doubts by its own senior defense reporter on the grounds that it relied on retired military officials and outside experts — “in other words, those with sufficient independence to question the rationale for war.” 

All in all, it was an object lesson in the dangers of groupthink, a demonstration of how important it is to listen to skeptical voices and separate reporting from advocacy. But as I said, it’s a lesson that doesn’t seem to have been learned.

The Pope and the Dirty War

It really does seem like the old men who run the Catholic church are tone deaf to almost everything, or maybe they can only focus on one problem at a time, and sex scandals are the concern of the day.

Or perhaps this institution that values tradition more than practicality assumes nobody else has a sense of history that goes back much further than the last World Cup.



The NY Times and LA Times both have stories today about Cardinal Bergoglio and the church´s relationship with the military dictatorship and its "dirty war."  I´m betting there are Argentine journalists who are not going to let this story continue to be pushed aside or buried.

From the NYT article:

“The combination of action and inaction by the church was instrumental in enabling the mass atrocities committed by the junta,” said Federico Finchelstein, an Argentine historian at the New School for Social Research in New York. “Those like Francis that remained in silence during the repression also played by default a central role,” he said. “It was this combination of endorsement and either strategic or willful indifference that created the proper conditions for the state killings.”

They Have Their Pope

When everyone is done celebrating the new pope's humility and modest living style, we are still going to have to come back to his relationship with the military dictatorship in the 1970's and 1980's.

We know he has had no trouble criticizing a democratically-elected government. He has been aggravatingly vocal in his criticism of Argentina's recognition of same-sex marriage (Yes, America, that's right. Argentina.) and against the rights of gay couples to adopt children.  The military dictatorship made a point of declaring themselves a Catholic government, and the Catholic church never, in Argentina nor anywhere else, publicly disavowed their actions.

In recent years, Bergoglio has tempered his criticism of the dictatorship with one of those popular false equivalencies are all the rage these days in American politics: the other side did some bad things too.

Interesting that the oath of secrecy taken by all the Cardinals before the conclave was broken almost immediately, and there were instant reports about the process and the votes etc.

Gender Equality

I

I recently started reading:

When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins (Oct 14, 2009)

It documents the amazing gains in the struggle for equal rights for women in the last fifty years. Most people my age probably don´t realize how many aspects of life women were legally debarred from, or how much inequity was legally acceptable fifty years ago. As the title of Collins´ book suggests, she celebrates the progress that has been made in her lifetime.

But this Time magazine cover story is a good reminder that some things still haven´t changed all that much.

As an aside, everyone who wants to celebrate the progress that has been made, should genuflect daily before a shrine to Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who argued and won some of the most important cases before the Supreme Court related to gender equality. There is a very nice profile of her by Jeffrey Toobin in the March 11 issue of The New Yorker.

Funniest Thing I've Read Today

Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist Obituary

Even obituaries of admirable people can be pleasant surprises...when they lived to a ripe old age and you assumed they had been dead for almost seventy years. Who knew one of the German plotters to kill Hitler was still around?

Von Kleist's life is a good reminder of the moral choices involved in opposing one's own government. Before and during the war, the British (especially), and the Americans refused to have anything to do with the Germans who wanted their help in overthrowing Hitler. I remember the story of one British diplomat in Switzerland who wouldn't even meet in the late 1930s with anti-Hitler Germans. To British diplomats of the time, a traitor was too disreputable a type to have any dealings with, even a traitor to a past and likely future enemy.  There were reasons, of course, for these refusals but none of them bear up very well in hindsight.

When one considers the relationship of the west with Germany in the years after the war, and our less than whole-hearted efforts at de-Nazification, the US and British insistence on unconditional surrender and their rebuff of attempts by German military opponents to Nazism to negotiate an end to the war, seem short sighted. It was the inability to interest Britain and the U.S. in negotiations which ultimately forced the plotters to settle on an assassination plan.

One does have to wonder about the accuracy of the following paragraph from the obituary. Surely, even his "aristocratic roots" didn't qualify von Kleist as a sixteen-year old to travel as an emissary to England to solicit support to overthrow the leader of Germany.

Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist was born on July 10, 1922, in the province of Pomerania, in what was then Prussia. His family had aristocratic roots, and his father had opposed Hitler even before he took control of Germany. In 1938, with Hitler well in charge,  he traveled to England to try to convince the British that their support could help German military leaders overthrow Hitler.

A Day in Court. Hallelujah

I finally got around to reading the four-day-old story about the arrest and arraignment of Abu Ghaith, Bin-Laden´s son in law.

It is an understatement to say that I am disappointed in the extent to which Obama has continued Bush policies, for example the continued existence of  the Guantánamo facility, and the war in Afghanistan (against whom, exactly?). But at least this will be treated as a criminal case in a court of law. Reading between the lines, it seems that the case against this guy might be shaky; he has been charged with one count of "conspiracy to kill Americans" but is being described as a "propagandist." But that is why we have trials, and I think we should all be pleased that there will be one in this case.

But we are not all pleased. Mitch McConnell, for one, isn´t at all happy. He reportedly released a statement saying that Abu Ghaith has knowledge of Al Qaeda activities and should have been sent to Guantánimo Bay. He accused Obama of being more concerned with closing Guantánimo than he is with national security.

At Guantánimo, he could be held as a detainee and fulsomely and continuously interrogated without having to overcome the objections of his civilian lawyers.”

Ah, those damn civilian lawyers. How exactly McConnell knows what Abu Ghaith has knowledge of should, perhaps, make McConnell a subject of interrogation also.

I only wish Obama truly were more concerned with closing Guantánimo, and returning to some of the principles which used to distinguish us creditably in the world. Contrary to Bush´s frequent assertion that his number one job was the protection of American lives, the President´s number one job is the protection of the constitution.

This is the Presidential oath:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. 

Guantánimo Bay and the nebulous "war on terror" just don´t fit very well within the scope of that oath.

All Will Be Right With the World When the Baseball Season Starts

I'm going to try to keep a record of humorous things, intentional or otherwise, that I hear during baseball broadcasts this year. And, of course, by that I mean things that I find humorous even if nobody else does.

Yesterday, during a televised spring training game between the Twins and the Pirates, the Pittsburgh announcers interviewed Twins manager, Ron Gardenhire, about his friendship with Pirates manager, Clint Hurdle, which goes back to when they both played for the Mets.

Gardenhire said that once during the playing of the national anthem, Hurdle leaned over to him in the dugout and said "You know, I have a bad game every time they play this song."

GOP Strategizing

In case you missed it.

More on Voting Rights

From Linda Greenhouse's op-ed piece today.  The whole thing is worth reading,

Years from now, when the Supreme Court has come to its senses, justices then sitting will look back on the spring of 2013 in bewilderment. On what basis, they will wonder, did five conservative justices, professed believers in judicial restraint, reach out to grab the authority that the framers of the post-Civil War 14th and 15th Amendments had vested in Congress nearly a century and a half earlier “to enforce, by appropriate legislation” the right to equal protection and the right to vote. How on earth did it come to pass that the Supreme Court ruled a major provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 unconstitutional?

As she says, there is a possibility she's wrong, but that she would bet John Roberts already has his 5-4 majority opinion written to gut the Voting Rights Act.

It so, it should be the final nail in the coffin that lays to rest the right wing complaints about "judicial activism."

The Past Isn't Dead

Some things are just so outrageous, they demand a reaction.

Based on the questions and statements of the Justices during oral arguments, it is highly likely that the Supremes are going to strike down the heart of the Voting Rights Act.

Scalia virtually cast his vote during the arguments when he called the act another example of "racial entitlement," as if protection of voting rights is some sort of favoritism.

Roberts cherry picked data which was both out of date and based on a small sample with a large margin of error, and that PolitFact.org has rated "half true," to argue that Massachusetts has (he used present tense despite old data) a lower black to white voter ratio than Mississippi, as if that were even germane.

Other comments were made by Justices during the arguments to suggest that the bad old days are over. The south has changed. And, no doubt, it has. But we are not yet living in a post-racial world, and I wish the Justices understood what a famous son of the south, William Faulkner, meant when he said "the past isn't dead. It isn't even the past."

Toxoplasmosis and Free Will

While reading one of those science books (The Violinist's Thumb)  that is mostly far above my level of comprehension, I stumbled across an interesting fact about the parasitic microbe Toxoplasmosis. As you may know this is a microbe that infects about 1/3 of the human population and countless other animals, but whose primary hosts are cats. It is because of this microbe that pregnant women and people with AIDS are advised against handling cat litter. But, as I said, about 1/3 of the human population in the world already carries it, and it is quite benign in most cases.

One of the things that is know about this microbe is that it affects the production of dopamine in the brain. Mice and rats who harbor this parasite in their systems are actually attracted to the smell of cat urine, thereby increasing their risk of being killed and eaten by a cat. Why is this?  Somehow (the author says, "don't ask") this parasite is able to reproduce sexually only in the stomach of a feline. As I understand it, it can reproduce asexually in other environments, but it is predisposed to prefer the sexual method. So this parasite actually drives mice and rats to self-destructive behavior to satisfy its interest in sexual reproduction.

It is speculated that, through its effect on the production of dopamine, it has some interesting effects on humans as well.  For one thing, the predilection to like cats may be "controlled" by this parasite. The crazy cat woman in town may just have a serious case of Toxoplasmosis. Another apparently know effect on infected humans is a diminution of the sense of smell. Let it be known that I can't smell a damn thing. Heitor reacts to the kitchen smells with all the excitement a cook could want, but I don't know what he's talking about.

Please don't shun me because I'm a carrier.

Freaking East Coast Liberal Elite

This post is exclusively for the benefit of anyone who still believes reflexively that the NY Times is the house organ of the Democratic Party in the same way that Fox "News" is for the Republicans.

I know, it should not need to be pointed out, but.......

First, is an Op-Ed piece today by Bill Keller called "Obama's Fault."  Keller recognizes the responsibility of the "pigheaded Republican Party," but he also argues that "The large mess we are in is in no small part the result of missed opportunities and political miscalculation at 1600 Pennsylvania."

Yesterday the Times published an editorial entitled The White House Joins the Cash Grab, the gist of which seems to be that the Democrats have sunk to to the level of the Koch Brothers and the the NRA, and should therefore be condemned. As opposed to the other message about money in politics, and not just during the now-elongated election cycle.

There is also an Op-Ed piece from a couple of days ago by Joe Scarborough ,called Singing the Sequester Soap Opera by Joe Scarborough.

I agree with some parts of all of these opinion pieces and disagree with larger parts, but that is beside the point....which happens to be that there really is a news source that is relatively fair and balanced, and it aint Fox "News."

Oh...and I didn't even mention the article in "The Nation" which accuses Obama of selling federal support for a loan to a (North or South) Carolina energy company for the price of supporting the Inaugural ceremonies.

There is a lot more integrity in the supposed left-wing media than there is on the right.

Just saying.

The Favored Daughter

An inspiring woman that most of us have probably never heard of.
Unfortunately, I don´t know if anyone will be able to view this video clip or not.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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