Another celebrated South Bender

Last Sunday was cold, and our church met indoors, but today’s service was held in the parking lot, in balmy weather. After Karin and Samuel and I went home and ate lunch, Samuel refused to sleep, so I pushed him in his stroller around the block. “Enjoy the last day of good weather,” one neighbor said. Sure enough, the temperature is supposed to fall by twenty degrees.

Another sign of summer’s end: people have been towing their boats back into the neighborhood.

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Recently widowed, Karin’s mom went on holiday to Beaver Island in Lake Michigan, a two-and-a-half-hour ferry ride from the northern town of Charlevoix. Beaver Island seems to be a hideaway for the rich. The residents kept telling Karin’s mom not to walk on the beaches (which may well be their private property) or on the roads (which probably aren’t).

“You’re lucky you didn’t get shot,” her brother said.

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Pete Buttigieg’s failure notwithstanding, a South Bender will become a very high federal official. I mean the Notre Dame professor, the Catholic charismatic, conservative Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s SCOTUS choice. This is hardly the nomination that Pete’s fans would have wished for. As for me, I don’t mind Barrett like I minded Brett Kavanaugh. Although Barrett is both a textualist and an originalist, she might rule as justly as any SCOTUS judge could do (it’s U.S. constitutionalism and judicial review themselves that are problematic, I’ve come to believe).

But the hypocrisy! What was it the Republicans were saying four years ago, when Obama wanted to install a judge before an election?

I’m surprised that I continue to be surprised.

Here are some interesting remarks by a friend of a friend. (As always, to enlarge an image: click on it; then, right-click on it; then, open it in a new tab; and, finally, click on it again with the magnifying cursor.)

Diagnoses

So, the clinic called today. The tests confirm that I have SEVERE sleep apnea. The clerk who relayed the news didn’t know how to pronounce “apnea” – hup-NEE-uh, she said – but I asked her to spell it, and A-P-N-E-A, indeed, is what I have. I was told to buy a CPAP machine at my pharmacy. Would I like to schedule a “titration” at the sleep clinic? Yes, please, I said, but what was I supposed to do first? Buy the CPAP machine, or have the “titration”? After more phone calls it was determined that I’d do nothing further before going in for the “titration” on January 20. (Really, the slowness of this process is baffling.) I’m still not sure I understand what to do; I plan to investigate further.

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Our coffee pot broke a week ago. Karin & I have been keeping awake with sodapop and storebought iced mocha. But by this morning, those supplies had run out; moreover, after two days of relative calm, Samuel decided to shriek and shriek. By the time I’d prepared his bottle and gotten him suckling, I could hardly stay awake. I dozed off watching a TV show about heinous Australian crimes. Samuel slept in my lap. I dreamed I was visiting certain professors in Ithaca – ones under whom I didn’t prosper. My dreams were vivid; my wakefulness, hazy; but, all the while, I was aware of Samuel’s breathing.

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Yesterday, I was more alert (I had two glasses of iced mocha), and I read a terrific essay by Nathan J. Robinson analyzing the memoirs of various staffers of Barack Obama’s White House. Robinson isn’t a columnist I ordinarily seek out. On several occasions, though, I’ve admired his work without realizing he was the author of something I’d admired previously (one piece I’ve highlighted in this blog is his assessment of Brett Kavanaugh’s judicial credentials). Now I’m attending more closely to how Robinson connects his political dots.

Interestingly, his condemnations of Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren (whom he used to esteem more highly) seem to hinge on similarities that he perceives between those candidates and Obama. Robinson really doesn’t like Obama’s political style, and I increasingly agree with him. (I put more stock in reasonableness than Robinson does – I’ve written a dissertation about that governmental virtue – but I also lament the manner in which Obama employed reasonableness as an ideal.)

The best thing about Robinson’s analysis of those fanboys’ memoirs is that it conveys what’s dangerous about the allure of a leader who styles himself as elite. Such a person will likely be a technocrat who considers himself above his electorate and his party, or else a panderer to financial elites who play him for a sucker (or both).

Read the article about Obama and his fanboys.

Weep.

Ask how we can do better.

Small world

A lot of articles about South Bend’s mayor, Pete Buttigieg, have been appearing in my Facebook feed – especially now that he’s running for U.S. President.

One Facebook friend recently shared an article from The Daily Caller, a conservative news site founded by Tucker Carlson of Fox. What caught my eye was the reporter’s name. I did a little investigating. Sure enough: she’d been my “Introduction to Ethics” student at Cornell.

This is the second student of mine I’ve come across, in one way or another, in the national news.

The first has been serving as the mayor of Ithaca since January 1, 2012 – the same day Mayor Pete assumed office in South Bend.

The vanilla method

Karin took two days off from work, and so we did quite a lot of shopping and appointment keeping.

At a thrift store, I bought eleven books.

We took Jasper to the vet’s for a follow-up appointment. When we brought him home, little Ziva again attacked him; but this time, we’d been advised by the vet to put vanilla on Ziva’s nose so that she wouldn’t smell Jasper’s oddness.

The tactic succeeded after three applications of vanilla. The kitties were kind to each other for the rest of the evening.

Today, Karin went to a friend’s house to bake cookies, and I stayed at home to read whatever I could about U.S. Senator and presidential aspirant Cory Booker (a New Jersey Democrat).

Liberal-leaning people of my age in South Bend are gung-ho about our mayor, Peter Buttigieg, whose forthcoming book depicts him rolling up his sleeves to repair our city (as if he himself were going to fill in the potholes). They want him to run for President. And, indeed, he’s just announced that he won’t seek mayoral reelection; it’s presumed he’ll aim higher.

I don’t know if I’d want Buttigieg or Booker to be the next U.S. President. If I were talking to Hank Hill, he’d tell me that both of these guys have too much “flash.” (I’d much rather have a leader like Bertie of The King’s Speech, which Karin & I watched last night: one who appreciates the burden of leadership well enough to stammer when confronted with it.) But it strikes me that Buttigieg and Booker are very alike with respect to ideology (centrist liberalism), formative background (well-to-do middle class; Ivy League; Oxford), and political experience (largely mayoral); only, under each category, Booker has the better credentials.

So, I say to my South Bend friends (if any of you read this): if you like Buttigieg, support Booker instead.

Otherwise, cast your net elsewhere.

(See, that’s the trouble with having studied moral philosophy: one finds oneself unable to make categorical recommendations; one can only make conditional ones. Vanilla. Earlier today, I was rereading Luther’s On the Bondage of the Will, which was in a collection I’d bought at the thrift store, and Luther was upbraiding Erasmus for exhibiting the same tendency, i.e., for not being unconditionally assertive. I don’t think Luther and I would have gotten along.)