RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/08/312542/

I always found the literary critic Harold Bloom (1930-2019) distinctly curate’s-eggish. You ask, “How is your egg this morning, curate?” “Good in parts,” comes the reply. But Bloom made one observation that stuck with me. Lots of literature, Bloom wrote somewhere, deals with the phenomenon of falling in love. But equally poignant is the story of falling out of love.

Bloom was thinking primarily of personal romance. However, the emotional dialectic he limned works itself out on the larger stage of political life as well. There is a certain mystery about both sides of the process. The public’s enthusiasms are as fickle as they are extravagant. What explains the infatuation with figures like Barack Obama? In retrospect, it is possible to offer more or less plausible explanations. Obama’s race, his smooth, non-confrontational manner, and his ability to dress up radical policy proposals in an emollient jelly of seeming common sense all help explain his political success.

Obama has occupied an enviable place in the magic circle of celebrity since his first election in 2008. It persisted through Donald Trump’s first term and for most of Joe Biden’s. There were signs that Obama’s star was fading during the later stages of Kamala Harris’s disastrous campaign. Trump’s resounding victory on November 5 crystallized the eclipse. Speaking at a “Democracy Forum” last week, Obama attempted to wheel out his old standby: that Republicans were in the habit of “weaponizing” the DOJ and other institutions in order to steal elections and cement their hold on political power. “One side tries to stack the deck and lock in a permanent grip on power,” he said, “ either by actively suppressing votes or politicizing the armed forces or using the judiciary criminal justice system to go after opponents.”

There was a time when Obama might have gotten away with such antics. Not anymore. His blatant act of projection was instantly called out and ridiculed. Quoting the remark, Miranda Divine spoke for the Zeitgeist when she observed that “It’s over for Obama. The spell is broken. Donald Trump vanquished him, Biden, Harris, the Bushes, and the Cheneys. All of them, with a spring in his step.” The commentator John Gibson offered a pithier précis of Obama’s comment: “Shorter: I accuse them of doing what we did, and they must be stopped.”

https://www.startribune.com/100-year-old-pearl-harbor-survivor-recalls-confusion-and-chaos-during-japanese-bombing-83-years-ago/601192005

PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (AP) — Ira “Ike” Schab, a 104-year-old Pearl Harbor attack survivor, was so determined to stand and salute during a remembrance ceremony honoring those killed in the Japanese bombing that thrust the U.S. into World War II some 83 years ago that he spent six weeks in physical therapy to build the strength to do so.

On Saturday, Schab gingerly rose from his wheelchair and raised his right hand, returning a salute delivered by sailors on a destroyer and a submarine passing by in the harbor. His son and a daughter supported him from either side.

“I was honored to do it. I’m glad I was capable of standing up,” he said afterward. “I’m getting old, you know.”

Schab is one of only two servicemen who lived through the attack who made it to an annual observance hosted by the U.S. Navy and National Park Service on a grass field overlooking the harbor. A third survivor had been planning to join them but had to cancel because of health issues.

The Dec. 7, 1941, bombing killed more than 2,300 U.S. servicemen. Nearly half, or 1,177, were sailors and Marines on board the USS Arizona, which sank during the battle. The remains of more than 900 Arizona crew members are still entombed on the submerged vessel.

Dozens of survivors once joined the event but their attendance has declined as survivors have aged. Today there are only 16 still living, according to a list maintained by Kathleen Farley, the California state chair of the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors. Military historian J. Michael Wenger has estimated there were some 87,000 military personnel on Oahu on the day of the attack.

Schab agreed when ceremony organizers asked him earlier this year to salute on behalf of all survivors and World War II veterans.

“He’s been working hard, because this is his goal,” said his daughter Kimberlee Heinrichs, who traveled to Hawaii with Schab from their Beaverton, Oregon, home. “He wanted to be able to stand for that.”

Schab was a sailor on the USS Dobbin at the time of the attack, serving as the tuba player in the ship’s band. He had showered and put on a clean uniform when he heard the call for a fire rescue party.