ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD

On John Ruskin's Stones of Venice: "And the voice in the gondola rolled on, piping melodiously of Effort and Self-Sacrifice, full of high purpose, full of beauty, full even of sympathy and the love of men, yet somehow eluding all that was actual and insistent in Leonard's life.  For it was the voice of one who had never been dirty or hungry, and had not guessed successfully what dirt and hunger were"--Howards End

Saw Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood this afternoon at the Yonge & Eglinton.  Mixed feelings.  It had several good scenes but it brought out creepy feelings in me.  Like Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, it ends with a cartoonish rewriting of history. (But I always like Brad Pitt.)

I've resumed my story translations.  I finished the French translation of David Lewis Stein's "The Huntsman" and started doing a Korean translation of David Helwig's "Streetcar, Streetcar, Wait for Me."

John finished renovating the bathroom and is now working on the dining room, so lately we've been eating outdoors on our new verandah.  Our garden is now producing beans!  

The other week at quora.com I saw the question "What was the most overlooked event of the Cold War?" and offered this answer:

Ronald Reagan’s 1987 post Iran-Contra decision to reflag Kuwaiti tankers in the Persian Gulf just to get in Iran’s face and assert American power in the Middle East.

What does this have to do with the Cold War? The truth is that in terms of US foreign policy, Reagan didn’t end the Cold War but turned it into something permanent that only required a new enemy in the form of Moslems. This reflagging was a crucial step on the road to:

1. the 1991 war over Kuwait.
2. The devastating twelve-year containment of Iraq, accompanied by a long-term US presence in Saudi Arabia that alienated many well-heeled religious residents and (at the very least) gave Osama bin Laden a convenient pretext for turning against the Americans who had formerly armed him and persuading those alienated Saudis to bankroll him in an anti-American jihad.
3. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
4. The ill-starred US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. In other words, more of the same Cold War policies that enrich the Military-Industrial Complex and deplete the USA’s finances and moral “authority,” while demonstrating the opportunism of leading Republicans and the cowardice of leading Democrats. (The Democrats erred disastrously in 1987, sparing Reagan impeachment and guaranteeing that successors like George W. Bush and Donald Trump would repeat his offences. Are they about to repeat that mistake?) Ronald Reagan was a very bad POTUS and a very bad man. Pray for his worthless soul.