Weary Wednesday

 I am not sure why, but I was just tired yesterday. Another short day at work, so it is not that I was overworked. When I came home, I ate, watched a little Netflix, and read some of my emails. Then I napped close to the time of leaving for my chiropractor appointment. I did pretty much the same after the chiropractor. No writing of any kind was done, no researching. I gave up the fight around 8. Then I had a nightmare and woke up at 2:33. What was the nightmare? I thought I missed going to work.

Reading CNN's How Trump arrived at his stunning idea to ‘take over’ the Gaza Strip between waking and now made me realize how much we have wronged Donald J. Trump. We have wondered why a Queens, New York, real estate developer wanted to get into politics. Now we know: it's all the same to him because he sees himself as Real-Estate-Developer-in-Chief. 

Dr. Panagiotis Pavlos's Geopolitics and Theology in the Middle East: Democracy versus Messianism  (Public Orthodoxy) has both the most positive spin on our Real-Estate-Developer-in-Chief's plan and its most dire.

In the same press conference, President Trump—quite rightly in my view—fairly admitted and confessed the tragic failure of American foreign policy in the Middle East, which, as he emphatically said, cost the American people several trillion dollars and countless human lives. Thus, it is obvious that the President has decided to replace the destructive U.S. military interventions with a novel economic offensive that will be implemented through gigantic investments and reconstruction programs without precedent.

***

President Trump must therefore not be led—in the name of defending democracy for the sake of which he risked his own life in the U.S.—to contribute to abolishing democracy in the Middle East by implementing a fatal policy. A policy that, in fact, would be a repetition of the holocaust of American indigenous population implemented by the Western European colonists, and of the holocaust of the Jewish people, caused by European Nazism. 

Has anyone not thought about Elon Musk being an immigrant from apartheid South Africa now running our government backed by a bunch of American Firsters? The Real Reason Musk Is Mad at Us from The Bulwark is only one of many articles coming out against Musk. He is another sociopath like Trump, insulated from reality and its consequences by his wealth, whose delusions of competence Americans have fallen for. It is not like he has been in the lab creating electric cars and spacecraft like Edison inventing his light bulb or Henry Ford building his first car.

A novel without dramatic conflict? Esther Kinsky’s Lyrical Elegy for the Movies sounds beautiful.

Writing in the second person, enduring grief: Madeleine Watts Doesn’t Want Closure.

It also became clear how that ending had to be ambiguous. I’ve already had one or two people ask me, “But what happened at the end?” You’re not meant to know. There isn’t meant to be closure. I was thinking a lot about grief and loss and how a lot of those things don’t have clear-cut endings. Grief is sort of cyclical, and it comes up again and again, and it’s got these peaks and flows. It never really ends. There’s no conclusion—your life just begins to grow around grief.

Sounds right to me.

I think I should do the Midwest Writers Workshop this year. I might as well get some good from living in Muncie. 

Joel C (who I need to call) said he was reading one of the Austrians - Joseph Roth? I keep reading about them without having the time to read them. I get done with my research stuff, and I will take a week or two to just read books. Reading Ritchie Robertson's review No Way Home: Silent Catastrophes: Essays in Austrian Literature By W G Sebald (Translated from German by Jo Catling) (Literary Review) has put all this in my mind. When I did read some Central and Eastern European writers while in prison, I came to think they had things to teach us Americans living in the Midwest. One thing was that there was life away from the literary centers. Another was a perspective on how to live away from those centers.

(The Irish that do not decamp for London, Paris, and New York share this quality, too. Although, Ireland is uniquely literary. Was Hapsburg Vienna also so literary? I admit my ignorance. I forgot to mention that read Sebald's Austerlitz while in prison; there are things for Midwestern writers there, too.)

The CrimeReads Brief entry Susan Barker: Why We Need Monstrous Women piqued my curiosity and I finally had time to read it this morning. 

The tariff nonsense may just be on hold, or Trump got the proper amount of ego-stroking to end it. Preparing for the worst, take a look at Trump’s tariff gambit: As allies prepare to strike back, a costly trade war looms and Trump’s opening tariff salvo will hurt US consumers − following through on Canada, Mexico threats will increase the price pain. No country has improved itself through tariffs.

In the long term, it’s unclear whether Trump’s threatened trade war will bring domestic manufacturing back to the U.S. and start a new industrial renaissance. In the meantime, American consumers will likely be stuck holding the bag.

 Almost a man bites dog headline: Muncie woman charged with biting husband, choking dog. 

The family's dog, an 80-pound bulldog, "does not like confrontation," the husband said, and began to bite Hopkins.

According to her spouse, the Muncie woman responded by picking the dog up by its collar and holding it "in the air" for about 30 seconds.

When she released her hold on the collar, the canine was unconscious and was "not breathing on the floor," according to an affidavit.

The dog eventually regained consciousnness.

Beware the women of Muncie!

It is now 5 AM, and I have caught you up with my reading and activities of the past 24 hours. Chiropractor again this afternoon. I might just stay downtown for First Thursday. It has been almost 2 years since I have been able to do that.

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