6/17/24

Monday, June 17, 2024

1954 CIA exile army lands in Guatemala, organized by the CIA and United Fruit Co.

1963 Supreme Court rules against Bible reading/prayer in public schools

1965 1st bombing by B-52 (50 km north of Saigon)

1969 "Oh! Calcutta!" opens in NYC (almost entirely in the nude)

1972, five burglars were discovered in DNC offices in the Watergate 

1996  The Irish Constitution was amended to remove the prohibition on divorce.

2015 Nine  people were shot and killed inside Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.

In bed a little after 10 and up at 2:50 to let Lilly out.  71°, humidity 84%, and dew point 66° on the way to a predicted high of 85°, the first of three warm, humid days.    

Prednisone, day 36, 20 mg., last day.  My 5 a.m. glucose reading is 125.  My breakfast at 5:30 was CBH, 4 breakfast sausages I wanted to get rid of, and 3 basted eggs,  2 hours later, my reading was 179->.  by 10 a.m., I'm up to 247->..  I am unexplainably fatigued today, sleeping most of the morning, indeed until 1 p.m.  By 6 p.m., my glucose reading is down to 151.

Last evening, the Father's Day Gathering at Andy's house was wonderful and heartwarming.  Andy, Anh, Lizzie, Drew, Trucker and John Price, Anne, Geri and me.  Lots of warm, spirited conversations including a conversation with Trucker about the Hoang family's history in Vietnam, their shipboard travel to a refugee camp in Thailand in 1975 when Truc was 9 years old, the trip to and stay at   Camp Pendleton where for a time my good friend, now deceased, Pat Townsend was OIC.  I also enjoyed a long conversation with Lizzy about her summer camp experience in Indiana, near Louisville, and her courses and extracurricular activities next school year when she starts high school.  She amazes me, smart, beautiful, courageous, and adventurous, our Supergirl, Wonder Woman.  I shared many memories of fishing with Andy and of fishing with Peter and I thought of but left unmentioned memories of holding him sleeping in my arms when Anne sang with the Symphony Chorus at Carnegie Hall and of holding him sick in my arms when we visited the King Tut exhibit at the Field Museum in Chicago  Now he is a 52-year-old lawyer, proud .husband and father of three fine children and I rely on his steadying help in mounting the two steps to get into his house to use the bathroom.   I was saddened to learn that Anne has been really suffering from arthritis and some other challenges.  Andy grilled the best-tasting, most moist pork chops I have ever enjoyed along with tender large asparagus spears.  It rained for a while as we stayed under the patio umbrellas and continued to eat.  It struck me as sort of European and cosmopolitan but didn't interfere with our enjoyment of the meal and the conversations.  Truly, a warm, wonderful,  and memorable family gathering.

Anniversaries. First,  I've written before in this journal of Marine General Smedley Butler's book War is a Racket in which he points out how the Marines have been used to protect the financial interests of big corporations and plutocrats.  The 1954 coup d'etat in Guatemala was of a different sort.  It involved recruiting a small army of mercenaries from Guatamala and other Central American countries to overthrow Guatamala's democratically elected government which was heavily involved in land reform that favored peasant farmers and labor reform that favored employees.  Both of these practices affected the United Fruit Company ("I'm Chiquita Banana and I'm here to say . . .   ).  UFC had close ties to Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother CIA Director Alan Dulles who were former partners at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell which represented UFC.  They organized and financed the coup that led to the overthrow of the Guatemalan government, the installation of a dictatorship, and the reversal of the land reforms and labor laws that favored the country's small farmers and employees and reduced UFC's huge profits exploited from the country.  I mention this as but one example of America's immense hypocrisy about "defending democracy", respect for national sovereignty and for a "rules-based international order," and for the identification of the nation's 'vital interests' with the commercial and financial interests of big corporations and plutocrats.  And lest we forget, the Catholic Church was generally aligned with the interests of UFC and the right-wing government.

Second, from When the Court Took on Prayer and the Bible in Public Schools by Michael D. Waggoner in LAW AND RELIGION, June 25, 2012:

On June 25, 1962, the United States Supreme Court decided in Engel v. Vitale that a prayer approved by the New York Board of Regents for use in schools violated the First Amendment by constituting an establishment of religion. The following year, in Abington School District v. Schempp, the Court disallowed Bible readings in public schools for similar reasons. These two landmark Supreme Court decisions centered on the place of religion in public education, and particularly the place of Protestantism, which had long been accepted as the given American faith tradition. Both decisions ultimately changed the face of American civil society, and in turn, helped usher in the last half-century of the culture wars.

The country has been fighting about these cases ever since they were decided with opponents arguing that the liberal Court has "taken God and prayer out of our schools."  This in turn, it is said, has led to the secularization of our society and the mess we have been in ever since.  For the Make America Great Again crowd, MAGA includes more government-supported religious involvement, and of an evangelical Protestant kind, witness many provisions in the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025.  God help us.

Third, B-52s were bombing Vietnamese targets even before I arrived in country in the summer of 1965.  These strategic bombers were designed to carry atom bombs to threaten (or destroy) the Soviet Union or Communist China, but they could also carry up to 70,000 pounds of the conventional weapons we used in Vietnam.  How ridiculous it seems now that the U.S. was deploying these strategic bombers against insurgent guerrillas, 'little men wearing black pajamas.'  The writing was on the wall.  Lyndon Johnson knew it, and so did a lot of the troops.  Still, we persisted.

Fourth, "Oh, Calcutta" on Broadway featured a bunch of totally naked people cavorting on stage in front of packed audiences.  See what you get when you take God out of schools!

Fifth, Richard Nixon's burglars were caught early in the morning wiretapping telephones and stealing documents.  After months of unsuccessful coverup activities by Nixon and White House aides, disclosures by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the Washington Post, and unsuccessful attempts to prevent disclosure of Oval Office tape recordings, Nixon resigned from the presidency on August 8, 1974.  I well remember the era and saving certain newspapers in my basement office of our home on Newberry Boulevard, especially the one with the banner headline NIXON RESIGNS, but the newspapers eventually became brittle, brown, and musty and I discarded them, along with many of the unpleasant memories of that historic era.  In a later interview with David Frost, Nixon defended his criminal actions by arguing "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal, by definition."  Donald Trump is arguing essentially the same thing in his now-pending Supreme Court immunity case which will be released any day now.  We'll see what our radicalized, right-wing, Republican Supreme Court has to say.  I am hopeful but not confident that at least a majority will reject the claim of general immunity but the case may well end up moot if and when Trump becomes president again after the November election when he and the American electorate will halt all pending criminal prosecutions against him.

Fifth, can it really be that it took until 1996 for Ireland to legalize divorce?  What pernicious influences the Irish Catholic Church had on the Irish people, especially on Irish women!  Marriage and divorce, family planning, mother and baby homes for unwed mothers, Magdalene laundries. for 'fallen women' and 'problem children,' like Sinead O'Connor at age 14.  Official Irish government reports revealed the long collusion between the Irish government and the Church hierarchy and religious orders that ran these institutions.  Unfortunately, it was the Irish Catholic culture that dominated the American Catholic culture, including in my parish of St. Leo the Great, pastored by Msgr. Patrick J. Malloy.

Lastly, Mother Emanuel church, only 9 years ago.  America's long list of mass shootings in houses of worship includes, among many others, the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex.  One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.

Out of Africa.  I've been rewatching this movie and enjoying it even more than I did in earlier viewings.  Meryl Streep is superb in it, and as beautiful as she has ever been in any movie.  I enjoy just about everything about the film, the acting, the scenery and settings, the dialogues, the costumes, the depictions of the Kikuyu and the Masai, and the depictions of nationalism and settler colonialism in early 20th century Kenya, where decades later the Mau Mau rebellion occurred.  The slow-motion love affair between Karen and Denys and the breakup.  I have long enjoyed the soundtrack by John Barry and often listen to his station on Pandora.  I had forgotten that the film is almost 3 hours long and I am only halfway through it after two partial viewings.  It is a love story, love between Karen and Denys, Karen and Africa, Karen and the Kikuyu.  It's also a story of imperialism, nationalism, settler colonialism, and White Supremacy.  She left British East Africa in 1931 for Denmark and by 1952, the Mau Mau Uprising of the Kikuyu had started and eventually Kenya gained independence from Britain in 1963.  During the Mau Mau era, the British committed major crimes against the Kikuyu, including concentration camps, torture, and other abuses.  Cruel Britannia, Britannia rules the waves . . .

At the 1:45:40 mark of the film, Karen is having dinner with Berkeley Cole (Michael Kitchen) and acknowledges her affair with Denys Finch Hatton.  Cole remarks:  "Be careful.  When the old mapmakers got to the edge of the world, they used to write "Beyond this place there be dragons."  It reminded me of where we are in the U.S. politically and socially with the real likelihood that Trump will defeat the increasinly decrepit and unpopular Biden come November.  Beyond this place there be dragons.