8/20/24

 Tuesday, August 20, 2024

1953 General Fazlollah Zahedi arrested the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in a CIA-supported coup d'état

1968 During the night, 250,000 Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia to put down the Prague Spring

In bed at 9, awake at 4, and up and out at 4:10.  Lilly showed up to be let out at 5:30.   

Prednisone, day 100, 10 mg., day 7/28.  I took the 10 mg. at 5:15 a.m. followed by some banana bread.  Morning meds plus 650 mg. of Tylenol at 7 a.m.

Major accomplishment!  I went down the stairway into the basement this afternoon, holding my 'hard copy' daily journal entries from July 13th through yesterday and, more importantly, I was able to get UP the stairs, though it was iffy.  While I was done there I tried unsuccessfully to get the Roku remote controls to turn on the television.  No luck.  I painted over an 18" X 24" canvas with a geometric painting that I never liked and had sitting in the workroom.  I covered the canvas with opaque titanium white so I could reuse it.  I enjoyed listening to La Boheme while repainting the canvas and while drawing grid lines on a photocopy of Klimt I've been meaning to try for months, the one for which I had vainly hoped Peter would help me stretch a canvas onto the expensive stretcher bars I bought for it.  Now I'm thinking I'll try it first on the painted-over 18"  24" canvas.  I suspect I am not capable of stretching canvas over the longer stretcher bars by myself.  (While in the basement,, I checked the water softener and saw it was almost out of salt.  The extra bag of salt I had down there was too heavy for me to lift to the top of the water softener.  I'll need help from one of the 'boys.') 

Genocide vel non.  There is a long essay on the definition of "genocide" in last Sunday's NY Times Magazine.  The author points out that only the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in which Bosnian Serb fighters took roughly 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys to predetermined sites before killing them and throwing their bodies into mass graves, and the Rwandan massacres of Tutsis by Hutu militias in 1994 have been found to fit the legal definition of genocide.  The issue is salient because of what has been happening in Gaza since October 7th, but, regardless of how the International Court of Justice resolves the issue in South Africa's case against Israel, genocide for most of us is like pornography was to Potter Stewart in Jacobellis v. Ohio - we may not be able to define it, but "[We] know it when [we] see it."  Israel fails that test, not only for the almost total destruction of Gaza's infrastructure necessary to sustain life but especially for its blocking of humanitarian aid from reaching Gazan civilians and the use of starvation and famine as a military strategy.  The ICJ may find Israel not guilty, but the world doesn't.

Banana bread.  I had three quite ripe bananas staring at me and daring me to try to make banana bread, which I did.  The bananas were not quite as ripe as I thought and it took a bit of force to get them properly mashed.  I chose a recipe pretty much at random from a bunch of them on the internet. . .  It turned out delicious, the best I've ever made.

1 ¾ cups all-purpose flour

1 cup white sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon baking soda

1 cup mashed bananas

2 large eggs

½ cup vegetable oil

½ cup chopped pecans

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions

Step 1

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour two 8x4-inch loaf pans. Set aside.

Step 2

Sift together flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and baking soda. Stir in bananas, eggs, oil, pecans, and vanilla. Pour batter into the prepared pans.

Step 3

Bake in the preheated oven for 45 to 60 minutes. Cool on a wire rack for 10 minutes before removing from the pans.

A Handful of Dust.  We watched the opening scenes of this movie adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's novel last night.  I remembered reading some Waugh in Father Bruckner's elective English course on The English Catholic Literary Revival, along with Chesterton, Greene, and who else?  I knew early on that I wouldn't enjoy the film, despite Kristin Scott Thomas and Judy Dench, because its characters are upper-crust Brits living in a palace.  I have a knee-jerk antipathy to British 'swells', perhaps because of my peasant Irish roots.  In any event, we turned it off and moved on to something else before I went to bed.  I wondered about the title and turned to Google to be reminded that it came presumably from T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, in Part 1, "The Burial of the Dead": "I will show you fear in a handful of dust."  The allusion is to death and mortality and perhaps the meaningless of life after World War I.  " I could not / Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, / Looking into the heart of light, the silence. "  The epigraph to the poem is from The Satyricon by Petronius, and refers to the Sybil:

The speaker sees the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage or bottle, and when he asks her what she wants, the Sibyl replies, ‘I want to die.’ She wants to die because, according to the myth, she asked the gods for eternal life or, more accurately, to be able to live for as many years as she had grains of sand in her hand.

But she forgot to ask for eternal youth, with the result that the Sibyl was destined to live effectively forever, but to grow older and frailer and weaker, a decaying shadow of her former self. She had managed to evade the usual short human lifespan, but at what cost?  

As I read of the Sybil, I thought of Micaela's visit yesterday, and of Tom's shocking death while snorkeling off the Virgin Islands.  I thought, though I would never say it, that Tom was fortunate to have avoided many of the ravages of old age, like chronic pain, arthritis, internal and external ulcers, inflammations, etc. Pity party stuff.  And I recalled the discussion Tom and I shared many years ago before attending the Rep's A Christmas Carol about whether we would like to live forever, he saying "yea" and I saying "nay."  Tom's 'yea' was predicated on avoiding the Sybil's mistake; he conditioned his assent to everlasting life on a healthy, vigorous, pain and disease-free body and mind.  Even with Tom's precondition, I opted out of eternity precisely because of its unendingness, its stasis.  Isn't it the fact that it is temporary that gives life value?  I think of Peter Cook on top of the mailbox in Bedazzled bored with the Beatific Vision.  "You're so great, you're so good, you're so marvelous, . ."  How often when in intense pain I have wished to be dead.  To be or not to be?  Not to be, when to be is dreadful.  Is this unusual?  or common?

I'm so glad we skipped the Democratic National Convention coverage last night.  It's unforgivable that Biden's speech didn't start until about 11:30 at night, Eastern time, an hour and a half past my bedtime and maybe Biden's bedtime too.  Biden's speech lasted 52 minutes, and Michelle Goldberg described it as his "shouted speech." 'His shouted speech left me relieved he's not the candidate.'  Ruth Marcus in this morning's WaPo: " I have to say, listening to Biden, I felt gratitude for his service, but even more, gratitude for the fact that he is not the nominee and is edging out of the spotlight.  Dana Milbank: "I did have a sense midway through it that I am very happy this is not his acceptance speech."  Is there a worse public speaker than Joe Biden?  He's had a long lifetime to polish his speaking skills and never succeeded.  Is this because of his stuttering challenge or something else?  In any case, I knew I would skip his speech last night whenever it was given.  From what I've read, it was sameo, sameo Joe.  Apparently, Hilary gave a rousing speech as did Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.  I'll try to find AOC's speech on YouTube.

Anniversaries thoughts.  Lest we forget who started the fight between the U.S. and Iran.  Lest we forget how good the U.S. is at interfering with the internal affairs of other sovereign nations.  Lest we forget that the U.S. government was acting on behalf of its owners, the oil industry and the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower was to warn us about on his way out of office in 1961 and that Eisenhower was president when the CIA and the Brits plotted to oust  Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had nationalized Iran's oil industry, and to install Shah Reza Pahlavi.

Second, we were horrified when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956 and invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 and invaded Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022, but we forget the Monroe Doctrine and our invasions of Central American countries in the Banana Wars and of Caribbean countries over the years, our support of military coups in South America, as well as the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, Vietnam, and Iraq.  USA, USA, USA!!!!

Geri's MRI of her knee was this morning.  Fingers crossed, hoping for some relief.  The knee pain has deprived her of the whole summer of gardening, enjoying riding her bike, walking Lilly, etc.  

AOC's speech at the DNC.  I watched it on YouTube.  I love her, the Bartender from the Bronx.  Bernie Sanders speaks tonight.  I'll watch him on YouTube as well.  Dies in the wool Lefties.