Went to Staples early and had the script bound into a "lie flat" spiral book. This is a terrific service and it cost me only $3.20.
I again viewed the 1963 T.V. version of "Hedda Gabler" on YouTube. Ingrid Bergman and the others are so good, although it's the third translation I've found.
Got a very welcome cam call from the Singapore contingent. Son Mike is recovering from a hernia operation and adorable granddaughters are adorable as ever. Vivian, soon to be five, showed me lots of things, including a toe ring, for heaven's sake. (Next it'll be tattoos.) Little Violet, one next week, was cooing and laughing and precious as ever.
Frank D. stopped in for a few minutes last night to tell Pat the Mets were losing (again!) to the Phillies, which cheered us considerably, but left Frank in the deepest despair. (A joke; he's not that superficial.)
Wider: Today is the fourth of July. I have such conflicted feelings about this holiday. On the one hand, I love my family and the people in my neighborhood and I feel a kind of diffused warmth for compatriots in general. I speak no other languages and have never lived anywhere except New Jersey. I'm as stirred as anyone with "patriotic" music and fireworks and I think I'm luckier than some to have been born an American.
And yet...I believe it's blind patriotism that has people parroting the "this is the best country in the world" tripe. That's the king of cliches, it seems to me, utterly mindless and almost indistinguishable from nationalism. And that's what allows otherwise good and gentle people to accept the horrors we've unleashed on the world.
I subscribe to The New Yorker and am reading an investigative article on a U.S. platoon in Iraq that seems to be overly enthusiastic--or something--with killing "the enemy" instead of taking prisoners. (No fear that there'll be a groundswell of revulsion against this. You'll never, in a million years, see an indepth report on network T.V. where the majority of the populace seems to get its information.)
The whole thing is surreal when you consider that some killing is supposed to be perfectly okay, even laudable. Combatants get medals if they kill in the approved or "legal" ways, but are punished if they--oops!--decide to murder their adversaries otherwise. It's absolute insanity and when we display the red, white, and blue, we indicate our support for the madness.
Hey, everybody knows what the red stands for.