Francis Wheen's STRANGE DAYS INDEED

Lis is reading Francis Wheen's history of the 1970s, which is subtitled "The Golden Age of Paranoia". It is a history of the 70s, mainly in the United States, but also in the UK (where Wheen is from), and around the world.

Lis just told me that she's just got to the part where Wheen makes the argument -- and backs it up -- that the reason Richard Nixon was ABLE to go to China was because Mao and Nixon were both psychotically paranoid -- and they thought of each other's fears as reasonable. Mao and Nixon had actual sympathy for each other, because nobody else actually BELIEVED that there were conspiracies out to topple and/or kill them, but they found kindred souls in each other, people who actually ACKNOWLEDGED the dangers that the other one lived under, and lived under similar ones themselves.

It sounds like an amusing and terrifying book.

One thing that keeps me from despair and apocalyptism is studying history. You think it's bad now? What about in the 1930s, when criminals ruled most of America's cities, and organized crime literally ran the justice system? Or the 50s, when there was a real clear danger of nuclear annihilation, and fascist elements in the United States ran witch-hunts against dissidents? Or the 1970s, when a real good chunk of the world's population was under the governance of people who were literally, clinically insane, and heavily armed?

When you study history, it puts today's problems in perspective.

Father just pointed out an error we made in his swim.

We'd worked out his feeding schedule ahead of time, based on feedings every 20 minutes. When we talked this over with some of his friends the day before, they said that that was far to often, and that we should do feedings more like every 45 minutes. So we took that advice.

Dad just pointed out that we forgot to increase the caloric content of each feeding. So his caloric intake was less than half what we'd planned for. No wonder he ran out of energy.

So, we won't make that mistake again.