Sunday, July 28, 2024
1915 Woodrow Wilson sent US Marines ashore in Haiti leading to occupation until 1934
1965 LBJ sends 50,000 more soldiers to Vietnam (total of 125,000)
In bed at 9, awake around 4, and up at 4:15 with a badly aching right knee, worse than my right hip. Lilly showed up at 5 to be let out.
Prednisone, day 77, 15+5, day 13. I took 15 mg. at 5 a.m. I applied 2 5% Lidocaine patches to my right thigh and another to my right hip area at 8:30 a.m. I took 1,000 mg. of Tylenol at 9 a.m. I have a lot of pain in that hip-to-knee expanse this morning. . . Took my 5 mg. pill at 5 p.m.
At least 39,258 people have been killed and 90,589 injured in Gaza since the war began, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children. Israel estimates that about 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, including more than 300 soldiers, and says 329 soldiers have been killed since the launch of its military operation in Gaza.
Psalm 137:
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
Alan Ginsberg's Howl:
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Jeremiah 32:35:
Herodotus, Book I, ch. 87:They built high places for Baal in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to sacrifice their sons and daughters to Molek, though I never commanded—nor did it enter my mind—that they should do such a detestable thing and so make Judah sin.
In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut:
“It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?”
“I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.”
America's news media. I turned on the television this morning to catch any news about what is happening in Israel, Lebanon, Golan, and Gaza. Will Israel invade Lebanon - again? Can Israel wage a two-front or three-front war? What does this situation mean for the U.S.? What does the Biden administration have to say about all this? Are Biden and Harris on the same page? What was available was coverage of the Olympics in Paris and coverage of the presidential race in the U.S., not meaningful discussion of any substantive issues, but the polls, the horse race, who is leading and who is behind in what demographics, how effective are the negative ads, how are the candidates portrayed as "radical" and "controversial," J. D. Vance's misogyny, Kamala Harris, "a low IQ individual," flunked her first try at the California bar exam, etc. I need always to remember that the news media is part of corporate, capitalist America in the business not of selling commercials to me, but of selling me as an audience, a consciousness to be influenced, to merchants of goods and services. First, build up the audience numbers with entertainment (Olympics, 'news', sitcoms, sex), then sell the audience to other sellers. We are all being pushed and pulled, manipulated and influenced. Think this way, feel this way,fear these people, buy this product, use this service, vote this way, call your congressman, . . .
Shack Dye
Edgar Lee Masters
The white men played all sorts of jokes on me.
They took big fish off my hook
And put little ones on, while I was away
Getting a stringer, and made me believe
I hadn't seen aright the fish I had caught.
When Burr Robbins, circus came to town
They got the ring master to let a tame leopard
Into the ring, and made me believe
I was whipping a wild beast like Samson
When I, for an offer of fifty dollars,
Dragged him out to his cage.
One time I entered my blacksmith shop
And shook as I saw some horse-shoes crawling
Across the floor, as if alive -
Walter Simmons had put a magnet
Under the barrel of water.
Yet everyone of you, you white men,
Was fooled about fish and about leopards too,
And you didn't know any more than the horse-shoes did
What moved you about Spoon River.
Sentenced to Life
Clive James
Sentenced to life, I sleep face-up as though
Ice-bound, lest I should cough the night away,
And when I walk the mile to town, I show
The right technique for wading through deep clay.
A sad man, sorrier than he can say.
But surely not so guilty he should die
Each day from knowing that his race is run:
My sin was to be faithless. I would lie
As if I could be true to everyone
At once, and all the damage that was done
Was in the name of love, or so I thought.
I might have met my death believing this,
But no, there was a lesson to be taught.
Now, not just old, but ill, with much amiss,
I see things with a whole new emphasis.
My daughter’s garden has a goldfish pool
With six fish, each a little finger long.
I stand and watch them following their rule
Of never touching, never going wrong:
Trajectories as perfect as plain song.
Once, I would not have noticed; nor have known
The name for Japanese anemones,
So pale, so frail. But now I catch the tone
Of leaves. No birds can touch down in the trees
Without my seeing them. I count the bees.
Even my memories are clearly seen:
Whence comes the answer if I’m told I must
Be aching for my homeland. Had I been
Dulled in the brain to match my lungs of dust
There’d be no recollection I could trust.
Yet I, despite my guilt, despite my grief,
Watch the Pacific sunset, heaven sent,
In glowing colours and in sharp relief,
Painting the white clouds when the day is spent,
As if it were my will and testament –
As if my first impressions were my last,
And time had only made them more defined,
Now I am weak. The sky is overcast
Here in the English autumn, but my mind
Basks in the light I never left behind.
--TLS, May 2, 2014
The Comfort of Strangers. While Geri was out on household errands at Target and ordering replacement eyeglasses for me at Costco, I watched this first of a collection of Paul Schrader films in the Criterion Collection. I don't recall when I became interested in his work, perhaps when I watched First Reformed or even the later Master Gardener, but he wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver which was released in 1976, so perhaps it was back then. Not likely, though. He was born in Grand Rapids, MI, into a strict Dutch Reformed Calvinist family, attended a Calvinist Reformed Christian Church, and attended and graduated from Calvin College before studying film at UCLA. Knowing his religious background helps to understand, in part at least, his films, which are really into sex and sin, but it also make it difficult. I'm thinking of Marylynne Robinson and her uplifting version of Calvinism revealed in her Gilead novels. It's hard to imagine two artist sharing such similar religious grounding manifested in such different ways in their work.
In any event, I don't know what to say about The Comfort of Strangers other than I didn't get it. "My father was a very big man. And he wore a black mustache. When he grew older and it grew gray, he colored it with a pencil. The kind women use. Mascara." These were the words Christopher Walken's weird character spoke thrice in the movie, apparently suggesting something important but what it was was beyond me. There is a fair amount of sex and nudity in the movie between Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson, and suggestions of it between Walken and his wife played by Helen Mirren, sadism and masochism in the case of the latter two, and an ending life a snuff movie. But what was the point of it all? Beyond me. The screenplay was written by dramatist Harold Pinter which maybe explains something. He is described in Wikipedia as " pugnacious, enigmatic, taciturn, terse, prickly, explosive and forbidding" further: "The historian Geoffrey Alderman . . . expressed his own "Jewish View" of Harold Pinter: "Whatever his merit as a writer, actor and director, on an ethical plane Harold Pinter seems to me to have been intensely flawed, and his moral compass deeply fractured."
That said, I watched Schrader's second film Hardcore with George C. Scott, which starts out with a household scene, a family argument around a dining room table about unpardonable sins and the Pelagian heresy followed by a scene of children leaving from a Dutch Reformed Calvinist Church in Grand Rapids, MI to a Calvinist Youth Convention in California. Nothing subtle about Schrader's Calvinist roots in this movie. Later in the film, he explains the Calvinist belief in TULIP. T= TOTAL DEPRAVITY. U= UNCONDITIONAL ELECTION, L= LIMITED ATONEMENT, I=IRRESISTIBLE GRACE, and P=PERSEVERANCE OF THE SAINTS. Predestination comes from Omniscience. There is a lot of religion in it but I don't know what Schrader's point was in making the film. Roger Ebert accurately pointed out that the end of the story is a real mess. I need to think about it, read some reviews perhaps. Movies like this, and The Comfort of Strangers, remind me of how dull-witted I am about so many things.
Anniversaries thoughts. The Marine's invasion, occupation, and military control of Haiti was done entirely on behalf of American corporate financial and business interests, primarily Nationall City Bank of New York. The use of the Marines to protect financial interests was pointed out most forcibly in General Smedley Butler's War is a Racket.
I had barely arrived in Vietnam before LBJ, Robert McNamara, and the Pentagon announced that another increment of 50,000 troops would soon join us. 9,087,000 military personnel served on active duty during the official Vietnam era from August 5, 1964 to May 7, 1975. 2,709,918 Americans served in uniform in Vietnam. 58,148 were killed in Vietnam, 75,000 severely disabled, 23,214 were 100% disabled, 5,283 lost limbs and 1,081 sustained multiple amputations. Of those killed, 61% were younger than 21 years old. 11,465 of those killed were younger than 20 years old. Of those killed, 17,539 were married. The average age of the men killed: 23.1 years. As in Haiti from 1915 to 1934, our presence in Vietnam was an invasion and occupation. If it wasn't directly done to protect financial interests, it was ultimately done to protect capitalists from socialism and communism, to protect American business's access to raw material and to markets for our goods and services. Money, money, money.
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