1110

Thursday, November 10, 2022

In bed  @ 10:39, up at 11:30 with GERD, handfuls of cookies with 2 glasses of red during the evening, up till @ 1:30.  Last day of summer: 62 sunny degrees outside,  high of 72 expected in Bayside, then 57 tomorrow and thereafter highs in the 30s.  247th Marine Corps birthday, Marines around the world celebrate at Birthday Balls in dress blues or 'mess dress.'   Hit the sack with the control of the House and the Senate still uncertain.   The heat expected today to be followed by cold, cold weather, reminding me of Hank Williams and Cold, Cold Heart.

Trump Blames Melania for Endorsement of Dr. Oz

Maggie Haberman reports that Orange Julius is furious about the elections results among his endorsees, especially Dr. Oz.  He blames Melania for recommending that endorsement.  Maybe I'm wrong in using Agent Orange for my maladies, misfortunes, and mistakes.  Maybe I should be blaming Geri!  Julius' invariable habit of never taking responsibility for anything that didn't work out as desired, for always naming a scapegoat, worked for him, at least until 2016.  GERD last night?  Why did Geri let me eat those cookies before going to bed, dagnabit!?!?!?

Hank Williams Died at 29

Fame and fortune, talent and celebrity don't always bring longevity.  From a list I started to compile as I noticed so many talented people who died young:

Janis Joplin, 27, OD;  Jean-Michel Basquiat, 27, OD; Judy Garland, 47, OD;  Frankie Lyman, 25, OD;  Marilyn Monroe, 36, OD;  Michael Jackson, 50, OD;  John Belushi, 33, OD.  Alan Turing, 41, suicide; Sylvia Plath, 30, suicide;  David Foster Wallace, 46, suicide;  Anne Sexton, 45, suicide; John Kennedy Toole, 31, suicide; Kurt Cobain, 27, suicide;  Vincent van Gogh, 37, suicide; Amadeo Modigliani, 35, TB;  George Orwell, 46, TB;  Henry David Thoreau, 45, TB;  Simone Weil, 34, TB;  John Keats, 25, TB; George Gordon, Lord Byron, 36;  F. Scott Fitzgerald, 44,  heart attack, booze; Jane Kenyon, 47, leukemia;  Bob Marley, 36, melanomas;  Charles Baudelaire, 46, syphilis;  Arthur Rimbaud, 37, bone cancer; Gerard Manley Hopkins, 45, typhoid fever; Gilda Radnor, 42, ovarian cancer; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 35, illness; Frederick Chopin, 39, TB; Blaise Pascal, 39, TB?; Georges Seurat, 31, unk;  Flannery O'Connor, 39, lupus; Elvis Presley, 42,heart failure; Loraine Hansberry, 34, pancreatic cancer; Patsy Cline, 30, plane crash; Buddy Holly, 22, plane crash; Frank O'Hara, 40, dune buggy accident; Kobe Bryant, 41, helicopter crash; Roberto Clemente, 38, plane crash; et alia.

What's Your Favorite Movie?

Then-new friend Don Shane asked me that question several years ago  on a golf outing when we had first met and I didn't know how to answer.  Afterwards I thought it has to be Casablanca, but then, no, no, it probably is Bicycle Thief (or Bicycle Thieves) by Vittorio de Sica, which tugs at my heartstrings so strongly.  But then I thought of High Noon with its plangent theme music and then The Third Man with its haunting zither theme.  Over time, I compiled a list of movies that I really have enjoyed:

The Grapes of Wrath, Cabaret, Son of Frankenstein, The Producers, Manhattan, Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Goodfellas, On The Waterfront, Meek's Cutoff, Dr. Strangelove, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Blues Brothers, Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather, Three Colors: Blue, The Decalogue, Out of Africa, Alexander Nevsky, Pandora's Box, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Apostle, Tokyo Story, Chocolat, The Year of Living Dangerously, Life Lessons, True Grit (the original), The Muppet Movie, Absence of Malice, Metropolis, . . . 

How does a person pick a favorite?

Ken Burns &Lynn Novick The Vietnam War; notes

"It was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War miscalculations.  And it was prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through than admit it had been caused by tragic decisions, made by 5 American presidents, belonging to both political parties.  Before the war was over, more than 58,000 Americans would be dead. At least 250,000 South Vietnamese troops died in the conflict as well.  So did over a million North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Long guerrillas.  Two million civilians, North and South, are thought to have perished, as well as tens of thousands more in the neighboring states of Laos and Cambodia.  For many Vietnamese, it was a brutal civil war; for others, the bloody climactic chapter in a century-old struggle for independence.  For those Americans who fought in it, and for those who fought against it back homes well as for those who merely glimpsed it on the nightly news, the Vietnam War was a decade of agony, the most divisive period since the Civil War.  Vietnam seemed to call everything into question - the value of honor and gallantry, the qualities of cruelty and mercy; the candor of the American government; and what it means to be a patriot.  And those who lived through it have never been able to erase its memory, have never stopped arguing about what really happened, why everything went so badly wrong, who was to blame, and whether it was all worth it"

"The French conquest of Indochina began with an attack began with an attack on the ancient Vietnamese port of Danang in 1858.  It took 50 years to lay claim to the whole region, Laos and Cambodia, as well as the 1,200-mile-long area that would come to be called Vietnam."

"By 1940, much of the world was at war again.  Germany had seized most of Western Europe, including France.  Imperial Japan threatened most of the European colonies in Asia and occupied Vietnam, where they permitted their allies, the collaborationist French, to continue to oversee their colony.

"On September 2, 1945, the same day the Japanese formally surrendered,  hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese streamed into Da Dinh Square in Hanoi to see for the first time the mysterious leader of the Viet Minh and hear him proclaim Vietnam's independence.   With an OSS officer standing nearby, Ho Chi Minh began with the words of Thomas Jefferson: 'All men are created equal.  They are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'

DeGaulle threatened Truman that if the US supported independence of the French colonies, France might have no choice but to get in bed with the Soviets.  Originally, US was 'neutral.'  Agreement that Nationalist Chinese (Chiang Kai Shek) would oversee the North, Brits would oversee things in the South.  Brits wanted French control re-established, Brit OIC considered US OSS efforts (Col. Dewey) to broker a deal between Viet Minh and French 'subversive'.  Dewey was killed mistakenly by Viet Minh.  In Fall of 1945, fresh French troops started arriving in Saigon, taking over from the Brits.  Set about re-occupying entire country.  In June, 1946, Ho Chi Minh returned to Paris in fruitless attempt to get the French to live up to a promise they had made of increased autonomy.  While Ho was away, General Giap began consolidating communist control of the revolution.  Conducted a merciless purge of members of rival nationalist parties and people he called 'reactionary saboteurs' -landlords and moneylenders, Trotskyites and Catholics, men and women collaborating with the French.  Hundreds were shot, hung, buried alive.

By 1950, Mao had won China, Red China and USSR both recognized Viet Minh as legitimate government of Vietnam, North Korea invaded South Korea.  Trumans signed $23,000,000 aid package for the French in Indochina.  US no longer neutral.  Cold War. Planes and jeeps and 'advisors' sent to Vietnam.  American dollars eventually financed 80% or more of the French war.

July 1953, Korean War ended with a truce and still divided country.

March 1954, attack on Dien Bien Phu started; on May 7th, French surrounded after 55 days of siege.  Eisenhower had used civilian crews on aircraft to resupply French troops during the siege.  'We should have seen it as the end of colonialism in SE Asia and instead we saw it as a victory for China and communism, which cost us very dearly.'

Geneva: country divided at 17th parallel, DMZ, election in 2 years

"In the end, some 900,000 refugees, including more than half of all the Catholics living in the North, fled to the South, many of them aboard American ships"

Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic and a Confucian, a celibate bachelor who had once planned to become a priest, in a land largely populated by Buddhists, became president.