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273rd verse, same as the first.

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I had planned to write some more about my trip.

But as has so often been the case this year and last-I woke up to yet another incident of domestic terrorism. The worst mass shooting yet in America. Yet another disgusting commentary on America’s inability to better itself as a nation. Once again, it’s time to point out the blatant evidence of our failings as a nation:

 

Of course, even the biggest Pollyanna’s among American citizenry know that nothing will be done. Mr. C. Pierce explains why:

On July 4, 1854, William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist firebrand, burned a copy of the Constitution of the United States of America at a gathering of anti-slavery activists in Framingham Grove in Massachusetts. Garrison called the document, “a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.” Almost 100 years later, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, writing in dissent in the case of Terminiello v. City of Chicago, opined rather famously:

“The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”

Both of these men have been proven wrong, most recently by the events Sunday night in Las Vegas, when a 64-year old man named Stephen Paddock opened fire on a crowd of 22,000 people gathered for a country music concert. At this writing on Monday morning, 50 people were dead and several hundred wounded. (Editor’s note: As of 11:42 a.m., 58 people are dead and 515 wounded.) The number of the dead almost assuredly will rise. This makes Paddock’s unfortunate exercise of his Second Amendment freedoms the deadliest mass shooting in history. This makes Paddock’s unfortunate exercise of his Second Amendment freedoms the 273rd mass shooting in the United States this year………

We hear serious arguments about all the other parts of the Bill of Rights: that the First Amendment has limits on what T-shirts high-school students (“Bong Hits 4 Jesus!”) can wear; that the Fourth Amendment has limits that allow wiretaps without warrants; that the Fifth Amendment has limits that allow drug-testing without cause; that the Sixth Amendment has limits that allows the states to poison convicts to death. But only with the Second Amendment do we hear the argument that the only tolerable limit on its exercise is that there are no limits. Only with the Second Amendment do we hear that the price of freedom is the occasional Stephen Paddock, locked away in his own madness on the 32nd floor of a luxury hotel and casino, deciding coolly whose brains he will blow out next a few blocks away in the 273rd such unfortunate exercise of Second Amendment rights this year.

After all, America is an “exceptional” nation, correct? ( Please see figure (1) above).

I was working on a rather long post, during my trip, a post about how disappointing, now at the long side of the journey-about how much the future for the country of my birth has ended up disappointing me, and many, many others. What’s especially frustrating is that it never had to be this disappointing or be this much of a failure. Arguments supporting my disappointment can be found here,  here, here, and here.

A far better man than the current occupant of the White House showed us the despair we have every right to feel:

The people who needed to listen to that conversation didn’t. And so 2017 dawned with a madman about enter the White House. Who later has proven himself every bit as bad as I said he would be.

Nothing ever changes.

We have become a nation that accepts the blood sacrifice of our children as an ineffable part of our constitutional order, one of those things you have to tolerate, like pornography and the occasional acquittal of an unpopular defendant, in order to live in a free society. Better that one Stephen Paddock go free than a hundred law-abiding gun owners wait a week before buying an Uzi. This is a vision of the nation that has been sold to us by a generation of politicians who talk brave and act gutless, and by the carny shills in the employ of the industries of death. Better that one Stephen Paddock go free than a hundred law-abiding gun owners wait a week before buying an Uzi. We are all walking blood sacrifices waiting to happen.

Disgust isn’t enough.

Sorrow isn’t enough.

Nothing is enough because, if Newtown wasn’t enough, then how can Las Vegas be enough? And if Las Vegas isn’t enough, then how can anything be enough?

God help us all.

Rest the clock and start the countdown till the next big shooting.

Oh and spare me the bullshit commentary about Chicago or elsewhere. It misses the point. Like so many things, the US has the ability to be better. It willfully chooses not to. I have a right and an obligation to be angry about it.

Comments are closed.


A leprosy spreading across the globe….

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Lost in the noise about Trump’s self -congratulatory tour of Puerto Rico, Congress letting health insurance expire for 9 million children, the suffering of the people of Puerto Rico, Russia investigations and the Secretary of State quite correctly calling the President what he is, was this news item:

WASHINGTON — Three United States Army Special Forces were killed and two were wounded on Wednesday in an ambush in Niger while on a training mission with troops from that nation in northwestern Africa, American military officials said.

“We can confirm reports that a joint U.S. and Nigerien patrol came under hostile fire in southwest Niger,” Lt. Cmdr. Anthony Falvo, a spokesman for the United States Africa Command in Stuttgart, Germany, said in an email.

All five American soldiers were Green Berets, said two United States military officials. The attack took place 120 miles north of Niamey, the capital of Niger, near the border with Mali, where militants with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, an affiliate of Al Qaeda, have conducted cross-border raids. Niger’s troops were also believed to have suffered casualties, but details were not immediately known.

Senseless and tragic this is. 16 years after 9-11 the US military remains overcommitted. What exactly where these Soldiers doing in Niger anyway?

In his first eight months in office, Mr. Trump’s top military officials have shown few signs that they want to back away from President Barack Obama’s strategy to train, equip and otherwise support indigenous armies and security forces to fight their own wars instead of deploying large American forces to far-flung hot spots, including the Sahel, a vast area on the southern flank of the Sahara that stretches from Senegal to Sudan.

And that is what is happening in Niger, a desperately poor, landlocked country twice the size of California that is struggling, even with assistance from the United States and France, to stem a flow of insurgents across Niger’s lightly guarded borders with Mali, Nigeria and Libya.

But unlike recent commando raids in Somalia or Reaper drone strikes in Libya, the deadly ambush on Wednesday in a remote desert area came during what American military officials said was a routine training mission — not a combat operation — and yet the casualties by both American and Nigerien forces underscore the inherent risks of operating in a potentially hostile environment.

The Grey Hair, in committing the US to the “War on Terror”, without knowing it, committed the United States to a war that will never end. For the US, it’s the modern-day equivalent of British and French colonial struggles; struggles that in the end saw the colonial powers lose their colonies and their prestige on the world stage.

16 years after 9-11 US troops remain committed to:

Afghanistan
Iraq
Deterrence efforts in South Korea
Somalia and Djibouti
Kenya
Qatar
UAE
Syria
Turkey and other NATO commitments
Various spots in Asia

And that is not even a complete list. The question every American should be asking him or herself is this: Where does this end? And when can we devote resources to fixing our own problems in the United States?

Since taking office, President Trump and his defense secretary have approved an increase in both forces and operational tempo in the fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria; committed to an enduring presence in Iraq after the defeat of ISIS; are considering an imminent increase of at least 4,000 troops to Afghanistan as part of the advise and assist mission to Afghan National Security Forces; are reviewing an Afghan war strategy that could make weightier demands of long duration to that country; have increased the military assets assigned to deter and if necessary engage North Korea; are providing greater intelligence and special-operations support to allied operations in Yemen; and are pushing back assertively on Iranian naval activity. Those are non-trivial expansions of demand to place on an already over-stretched force.

Chief of Staff of the Army, General Mark Milley, assesses current requirements at 540,000 active-duty soldiers, which appears to be the Army’s favorite round number: It was also what the Army believed it needed in the mid-1990s, and what the Army believed it needed mid-term of the Obama administration. So it’s likely an institutionally comfortable number rather than a rigorously derived one.

But-and it is an important “but”, the United States has no way to pay for all this activity. Especially with massive tax cuts on the horizon.

If Congress will not find a way out of the dysfunctionality of sequestration—and the unwillingness to compromise that triggers it—the only other way to bring our requirements into line with our spending is to reduce those requirements. If Congress won’t provide adequate funding, it should at least provide guidance to the administration about which obligations we have undertaken for our security that we as a country should pare back. Where should the administration accept greater risk? Maybe instead of producing an “unfunded requirements” list, the secretary of defense should write his strategy in incremental spending thresholds that show what would have to be sacrificed in order for DOD to have confidence it could meet the strategy’s requirements. That way, Congress could choose the nation’s fate by choosing its level of spending.
This war is a leprosy spreading across the globe.

When is a crime just a crime?

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It has been a month since I have posted. I have been busy. No excuse to be sure-but its the truth.

During that time a lot has happened, much of it comment worthy-and if you are a big reader like I am, you have probably read a lot of the commentary on it already. So I will try not to repeat it.

What I do want to do is take a couple of moments to comment on,  is the Chattanooga shooting yesterday. As soon as I heard that the shooter had a Muslim name, I said to myself, “Oh boy, here we go.”

And true to form, the Town Hall Harlot proved me right.

Of course, the fact that the shooter was a naturalized American citizen is immaterial to this conclusion.  Now, mind you this is just a month after a mass shooting in Charleston S.C. occurred. That we are told is not “terrorism”, but this is. Can’t they both be equally despicable?

Apparently,  in the eyes of some, not.

I think its important in this time of national tragedy to not be a Malkin or a paranoid American, but to step back and look at some actual facts.

Because, whether you want to admit it or not the events of Charleston and the events of Chattanooga are more alike than they are different. When boiled down to its base facts, as we know them so far: An American had a grudge. So he obtained a firearm and attempted to rectify his grudge by using that firearm on his fellow citizens. The grudge may have been fueled by irrational ideas from abroad-but it does not erase the fact that the killer was an American citizen who decided that killing fellow American citizens was the way to go.

Americans are killing each other again. That is the fundamental—if politically less useful—lesson of what happened in Tennessee yesterday. An American citizen got his gun and he went to a strip mall and he killed four of his fellow citizens, killed them as dead as Michael Brown or Eric Garner, as dead as the people who were killed by Dylann Roof, who’s awaiting trial, or as dead as the people who were killed by James Holmes, who was convicted of killing them just yesterday. By all the criteria of which we boast of our exceptionalism to the world, Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez was as much of an American as the four people he allegedly murdered. His motivation doesn’t matter. He was a citizen. His victims were citizens. Americans killing other Americans. It’s an old story being rehearsed again with unfortunate frequency.

 

It troubles me that so many people are trying to tie in unrelated issues to this tragedy. Do we need to enforce our borders? Of course, we do. Do we need to restrict immigration quotas from Islamic nations? Much as it pains me to say it, perhaps we might-but before we do so, we need to have a bigger conversation about American ideals and the laws of unintended consequences. Because the same people who are advocating this course of action, are descended from possible nations where their ancestors were considered terrorists just the same as Mr. Abdulazeez was. Is America a beacon of liberty or not?

That said, Islam has some real problems right now, problems that collectively it refuses to deal with. I’m not blind to that. Nonetheless, I am having a hard time making the distinction between how denying immigration rights now to qualified immigrants, would have stopped an immigrant family from spawning a criminal some 20 years ago. Someone is going to have to explain to me how that works.

I’m willing to bet you a quart of your favorite Scotch that :

1) The weapon(s) used yesterday were obtained legally, at any one of America’s 129,817 gun dealers.

2) Mr. Abdulazeez may or may not be linked to some overseas terrorist group. I, at this point, do not know. But I also would like someone to tell me how that would have stopped him from legally obtaining a gun to commit his heinous deeds. Evidently, his family had already been investigated and cleared.

Eventually, we’ll learn more about Mohammed Youssuf Abdulazeez, but one thing is certain: The Marines who were killed yesterday were equally as much as victims of the American culture of violence as the victims in Charleston.

Let’s not forget too that:

  So far in 2015 , 27000 times an American chose that same course of action. They all had problems they had decided they could not solve. They all had grudges. They all had something that made them angry enough. And, as a result, almost 7,000 of our fellow citizens are as dead as the people in Tennessee. This is not an explanation that satisfies any particular agenda but, unquestionably, we are a very fearful nation with an unacknowledged history of violence that also has armed itself very heavily. Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, an American citizen, chose a very American course of action.  He had a problem he couldn’t solve so he reached for the most American of solutions. He reached for a gun and he killed some of his fellow citizens.?

We will be told over and over again, “this is different, we are at war.”  I beg to disagree. Whatever wars we are fighting beyond our borders, here at home-this was a crime. Every bit as much a crime as a contract hit ordered by a mob family in Ukraine, China or Sicily.  You have to fight it the same as any other crime. It’s tragic that the nation lost four of its finest, but its losing fine citizens every day. We need to remember that.  When you boil it down to brass tacks, this yet another case of an American with a grudge, who obtained a weapon inside the US and took out his rage with it. If this is terrorism than most gun violence is terrorism.

And I call it a crime, not an act of war. Terrorism is a violent tool used for political reasons to bring pressure on governments by creating fear in the populace. In the same way, I have never thought it helpful to refer to a “war” on terror, any more than to a war on drugs. For one thing that legitimizes the terrorists as warriors; for another thing terrorism is a technique, not a state. Moreover terrorism will continue in some form whatever the outcome, if there is one, of such a “war”. For me what happened was a crime and needs to be thought of as such. What made it different from earlier attacks was its scale and audacity, not its nature.

And we are back.

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Spent the last five days in France. It was outstanding-especially as we went to visit the Normandy Beaches. Pix to follow over the next few days.

So here is where I spent my 4th-no fireworks, but a lot of sincere feeling for the folks who can never leave this place:

“Not for the dead, not for the more than fifty million real dead in the world’s worst catastrophe: victors and vanquished, combatants and civilians, people of so many nations, men, women and children, all cut down. For them, there can be no new earthly dawn. Yet though their bones lie in the darkness of the grave, they will not have died in vain, if their remembrance can lead us from the long, long time of war to the time of peace. ” -Herman Wouk

The darkness that always lies beneath the surface.

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I wanted to write a quick note about the tragic loss of Robin Williams. His death will most probably be ruled a suicide. And I expect ( and in some of the worst corners of the internet-we are already seeing) the holier than thou brigades are already spouting venom-not understanding in the least the struggles one must deal with, once you get the Scarlett “AA” tagged upon you.

Its common knowledge that Williams struggled with issues from addiction. What most of the do-gooders seem to ignore, is the heavy burden America’s system of shoving you into the hell that is AA does to you. Addiction treatment is not about stopping drinking. Plenty of people do that for protracted periods of time with no effort. It is the idea that they foist upon you that you can never do it again-that creates the inner conflict that grows and grows and grows. Especially since it is complete and total bullshit-most alcoholics recover on their own, and do perfectly fine drinking again, once they realize that there is personal responsibility. The treatment industry is about control-not fluids. It’s about their iron clad demand that you cede control of your life to someone who in all probability is more fucked up than you are. And they stick a double whammy on you in that they tell you, that you can never take that control back.

Only by rejecting their ideas-and demanding to live your life on your own terms can you ever get some peace back. I know, because I lived through the hell of having a worthless bastard tell me how I had to live my life. It took luck and a great deal of anger and planning to escape from the shackles of the “program” he abandoned me into. I don’t think I can ever forgive him for his callousness and indifference.

What does this have to do with Robin Williams? Well, a lot I think. The conflict of being a talented individual, knowing you are talented, and then being forced to be subjected to an idea that you are worthless and powerless-is a huge conflict. It creates inner struggles and a feeling of futility at being told you are not “like everyone else”. Even when you are. it takes a great deal of struggle to break free.

Not everyone is up to the struggle-no matter how successful they are.

So all the people who so easily dismiss his struggle-I have no use for. The trolls who have been coming out and writing really reprehensible things-I also have no use for. They may think it can never happen to them-trust me, it can. And don’t kid yourself, your so-called friends and allies will abandon you in heartbeat. Such is the nature of America’s coerced treatment machine.

So God rest the soul of Robin Williams, and if he is any just will grant him access to glory. To all those who attack him after the fact-I spit upon you.

I loved a lot of his movies and I think he was a gifted and talented man. Since I was aware of him from my college years-his work literally spanned the length of my adult life. And he was great.

He deserves peace and a place in heaven. Those who think otherwise, can leave my sight now.

Busy week.

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And what a sad week it has been too.

The news from Paris is sad, tragic and sadly, all too expected in this day and age. In solidarity with the right of a free press to publish what it wants to and not be subject to censorship at the point of a gun- I am republishing one of the Charlie Hedbo cartoons. Oh, and fuck Mohammed too.

And maybe I’ll publish another one too.  And while I am at it, fuck Islam. (Click to see properly).

As angry as this apostate religion makes me; as disgusted as I am with their stupid dietary laws, the shitty way they treat women, the clothing things they make women wear-and how frustrated I am that these people will not assimilate into European society, I also have to think hard on what the facts really are.

Contrary to the assertions of some, Islam is not overrunning Europe:(click to see properly)

A disgruntled and radicalized minority is indeed a problem as this week has once again shown us. But one needs to remember the world has over a billion Muslims. They are not going away and we can’t kill them all- no matter how much some of our neocon masters would like to try. And I also have to remind myself that it is a minority. Most of the Hijab wearing set here in Germany just want to live their lives. (and they speak better German than I do).

So yea, I am disgusted and angry. I’m tired of Islam’s sickness infecting parts of the world I like. I want the women to take off the hijabs and abayas, put on some dresses and shoes and dress like a Western woman.  But in the end, cartoonist Joe Sacco may have it right. And with his cartoon I will close. My deepest and heartfelt condolences to the families of those who lost their lives this week in and around Paris. The Western World HAS to prove that it is better than these thugs. ( Click to see the cartoon properly-its worth reading).

American Sniper

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An FB friend posted a link to the following blog post: entitled “Why I almost walked out of American Sniper“. No, it’s not a quote from Michael Moore-its a quote from a supporter of the country and the military. I can agree with her logic, up to a point :

Stated plainly, we complain about dumb things most of the time. We live in comfort and freedom, and for the most part, we’re blessed beyond measure. We complain about bad hair days and people who get on our nerves and when we run out of coffee or get cut off in traffic and the fact that we hate Mondays. And yet we have the opportunity to live in peace. Meanwhile, all over the globe, children are born into war zones and suffer unimaginable torment at the hands of Evil.

This is why I almost left during the movie. As a Social Studies teacher and a student of the world, I’m well aware of the atrocities committed throughout the world historically and in present day. But I’ve only read about them. I’ve only heard about them. I’ve never had to witness them with my own eyes. Sure, American Sniper is a movie and it’s a dramatization of events, but it’s realistic. It’s horrible. And it truly shows how Evil is alive and working in our world.

Not only was I sobbing at various points throughout this movie, I found myself praying, “Come, Jesus. Come.” I almost couldn’t take it– this realistic depiction of evil. I don’t want to believe that people are capable of doing such horrible things to each other, but they are. Oh, they are.

The bubble around me popped. You can’t watch a movie like this, see the horrible things that man is willing to do to another man (or woman or child), not just in the name of a god or of an organization, but in the name of hatred, and go back to your cushy life and pretend the horror doesn’t exist.

Our soldiers face this evil every day on the battlefield and they persevere. They press on. They fight it and try to protect freedom because that’s one of our basic rights as humans. And they make split-second decisions that we pray we never, ever have to make. This is why we are grateful– because they have to make the decisions and carry out the actions we never, ever want to have to face.

It is right there at the end where her logic breaks down. Evil? Really? Then why are we not dispatching legions of American Snipers to the remaining six continents?  Evil things are happening there every day but we do not stage armed interventions by equally brave men. And why don’t we you ask?

Because we don’t have the resources to solve every problem on the planet.

And because most of the time-its not in our national interest.

Evil exists all over this world. As we were fighting in Iraq, un-counted 1000’s were dying in other wars in Africa of the twin evils of neglect and lack of resources to fight problems such as disease, bad infrastructure and starvation. Yet not once did the President rise to the podium in front of Congress and challenge us to go fight them. Chris Kyle and those like him were never sent out to help them. Nor should they have been.

And on those two points I must disagree with Jennifer Hale. Chris Kyle went through a lot. Of course his service should be honored as should that of every other soldier who served in this despicable and unnecessary conflicts throughout the first decade and a half of the 21 st century. If anything it proves James Fallow’s point regarding “The tragedy of the American Military”, namely that, “the American public and its political leadership will do anything for the military except take it seriously. The result is a chickenhawk nation in which careless spending and strategic folly combine to lure America into endless wars it can’t win.

If we don’t follow the statement through the logical question, namely “Why was Chris Kyle there in the first place and why did the nation so callously send him into a war the country had no business plunging into?” then we really are not honoring his sacrifices or worse yet learning real lessons from them. Cue Fallows again:

Too much complacency regarding our military, and too weak a tragic imagination about the consequences if the next engagement goes wrong, have been part of Americans’ willingness to wade into conflict after conflict, blithely assuming we would win. “Did we have the sense that America cared how we were doing? We did not,” Seth Moulton told me about his experience as a marine during the Iraq War. Moulton became a Marine Corps officer after graduating from Harvard in 2001, believing (as he told me) that when many classmates were heading to Wall Street it was useful to set an example of public service. He opposed the decision to invade Iraq but ended up serving four tours there out of a sense of duty to his comrades. “America was very disconnected. We were proud to serve, but we knew it was a little group of people doing the country’s work.”

“Either war is finished or we are”  , says Herman Wouk.  I fully agree with the sentiment. But I question whether the majority of Americans do. I think not. They will see the movie in a “yellow ribbon” kind of way- “the people at the [movie theater will] feel good about what they’ve done to show their support for the troops. ” But they will never think the problem all the way through. They will never rise in righteous anger that Chris Kyle had to be sent there in the first place, endure the things he had to endure-and have it all matter for nothing. That’s right nothing. Iraq is still a basket case, no better than when we found it. Because in the end , Chris Kyle was failed by his leadership, he was failed by his country and he was failed by the people of his country who never asked the probing questions that might have prevented the entire ordeal in the first place. As Kipling wrote after his son’s death in the disaster that was the First World War, “If any question why we died/ Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

We do the veterans no good service if we choose not learn from the effort-and solemnly resolve not to repeat the  mistakes that placed them in such a harsh place to begin with. Without those questions, its not worth the time or the effort to contemplate the rest. We have to think it though to the end.

I have been and shall always be, your fan.

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And yes I stole that line from Wonkette.

Leonard Nimoy died today. For a true Star Trek fan like me-its kind of like the end of the world. Yes you knew this day was coming, but you did not want to think about it, and now that it is finally here, you just can’t seem to believe it.

I am a fan of the entire Star Trek enterprise (how is that for a play on words?), but I was really enraptured with the Original Series, DS-9 and Enterprise. Next Generation was Ok. Voyager was a bridge too far, and the less said about Star Trek 5-the movie-the better. I still have not forgiven JJ Abrams for ripping the Star Trek canon to shreds, just so he could make his rather shallow, and scientifically ridiculous Star Trek re-boots, but I did like Zachary Quinto as Spock. ( I still have to come to terms with the whole “nailing Ohura” thing, but hey, things change right?)

While he is best known for his role as Spock, the truth was, Leonard Nimoy wanted to be a lot of other things. And the amazing popularity of the original series made that somewhat impossible. In the New York Times, they have a wonderful tribute to the man pointing out that there was much more to the man than just the logical alien.

The actor who won a permanent place on the altar of pop culture for his portrayal of Mr. Spock on “Star Trek,” was almost as famous for wanting to be remembered for other things.

And that is, of course, highly illogical.

It’s hard to think of another star who was so closely and affectionately identified with a single role. Even George Reeves, the first television Superman, was also one of the Tarleton twins in “Gone With the Wind.”

It’s even harder to think of a television character that so fully embodied and defined a personality type. Just as Scrooge became synonymous with miser, and Peter Pan became a syndrome, Spock was dispassion personified.

He could not escape the role- and I think ( but do not know) that as the years passed he came to terms with it and resolved to have fun with it. I have no real proof of that save for some examples of his other work. This commercial he did a couple of years ago when the second JJ Abrams movie came out with Zachary Quinto, is a good example. He appears to be having a lot of fun making fun of himself and the whole genre. I never get tired of watching it.

I love that he was still doing fun stuff like this at a point in life when many people would be sitting around doing nothing.  ? And actually, if you go back to the Times article he had quite a solid body of work to lay claim to besides Star Trek. For example, did you know, that Leonard Nimoy directed “Three Men and a Baby”? He also was in a mini-series about Golda Meir, with Ingrid Bergman in it, no less. He had lots of poetry to his credit and an award-winning photo exhibition in 2010. He got typecast as Spock-but he turned it around and made something wonderful of it.

May God grant him rest and peace. And of course, may he live long and prosper in the heavens.


USS Liberty

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As I have mentioned I travel to the land of milk and honey quite a bit. One of the messages I continually hear is about how Israel is surrounded and always under attack. And I don’t really dispute it-having been on the road twice when the sirens went off and rockets were inbound. ( True Story).

But there was also the time that Israel was the attacker. Yesterday being June 8th, it is probably worth remembering:

In 1967, at the height of the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War, the Israeli Air Force launched an unprovoked attack on the USS Liberty, a US Navy spy ship that was monitoring the conflict from the safety of international waters in the Mediterranean.

Israeli jet fighters hit the vessel with rockets, cannon fire and napalm, before three Israeli torpedo boats moved in to launch a second more devastating attack. Though she did not sink, the Liberty was badly damaged. Thirty-four US servicemen and civilian analysts were killed, another 171 were wounded.

Later Israel apologized for what it claimed to be a tragic case of mistaken identity. It said that it had believed the ship to be hostile Egyptian naval vessel. US President Lyndon Johnson was privately furious but publicly the White House chose not to challenge the word of its closest Middle East ally and accepted that the attack had been a catastrophic accident.

In the years since then, there has been a lot of talk of conspiracies and cover-ups. I don’t know who is right, but I know Israelis don’t like to talk about it.

As for the truth about a cover-up, I don’t know and will not speculate. But it is worth remembering that 34 men died that day. God grant them rest and peace.

The 11th day of the 9th month of the 17th year.

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The 17th year since the disaster of 9-11 occurred. Today, of course, will be a day of remembrances and memorials to the 3000 Americans who perished on that day, and the many more both in and out of the service who perished as a result of that day and the actions taken afterward. The timeline of American progress stopped on that particular day, and the slow, steady slide, into the current gloomy age began on the 11th day of September in the first official year of the 21st century.

Now, according to the conventional wisdom of the age, I am supposed to remember the fallen and then cheer the country on to renewed resolve in the endless war that the opening of the 21st century bequeathed to us. At the same time, I am supposed to ignore the 20-20 vision of hindsight that clearly shows the damage we did to ourselves as a nation because of our reaction the events of that particular day. 

There is only one problem. I can’t just ignore the damage that was done, particularly the way the day was hijacked by certain members of a President’s administration, a course of action that led to the biggest foreign policy disaster of the last 50 years and wastage of 4,497 American lives in Iraq-all sacrificed for nothing.

Yes, you read that right- all sacrificed for nothing. Mr. Pierce explains why:

With the intelligence all pointing toward bin Laden, Rumsfeld ordered the military to begin working on strike plans. And at 2:40 p.m., the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying he wanted “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H.”–meaning Saddam Hussein–”at the same time. Not only UBL”–the initials used to identify Osama bin Laden. 

Now, nearly one year later, there is still very little evidence Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. But if these notes are accurate, that didn’t matter to Rumsfeld. “Go massive,” the notes quote him as saying. “Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

Things related.

And not.

While most people were thinking and praying for friends and relatives in New York City, and just generally walking around stunned and hurting, there were people in government already planning to use the attacks as an opportunity to carry out the imperial projects about which they’d been dreaming for decades. (, the attacks as a chance to put in place authoritarian measures that had been gathering dust on the shelf since COINTELPRO was exposed in 1971.)

For all practical purposes, the Iraq War, with all its terrible consequences, intended and unintended, was launched on September 11, 2001. Four planes that morning. A country’s grief and pain was hijacked later that day.

I firmly believe that most of the current problems of the world, and of the United States can be directly traced to March 19, 2003. And March 19, 2003, can be directly traced to September 11th, 2001.

And ever since that day, the United States has been involved in a war that is going to go on and on and on and on, probably for the rest of my life. The war is sucking away the resources of our nation at a time it desperately needs them. On these pages and others has been argued back and forth the pros and cons of that war repeatedly. Follow the tags for the post and you can get a sense of how I felt back in 2006 and I how I still feel now. Go to other pages and you can read odes to our “victory” in Iraq and how with just more time – after the longest war in US history – American will “win” in Afghanistan.

Except, we won’t. The only way we could have won was not to play.

Especially with the current charlatan who acts as President.

But it’s too late for that. And unlike in the 70’s, the impeachment of a President will not save us from a war that will go on and on and on.

American has gotten it’s revenge for 9-11 many times over. Well over 500,000 people have died as a result of that one event.

As I wrote in two different posts in different years, 

I will always remember and will never forget. But in doing so, it also means that I will never forget what came in its aftermath, much of which was- to put it bluntly-misdirected effort, in response to a unique event, the likes of which most of us had never seen before.

It is important, therefore, to look at 9-11 for what it is, a deliberate act of cold-blooded murder. The fact that it is so,  does not, however, provide a blanket absolution for the myriad of flawed events that followed in its wake.  We have extracted our vengeance for that horrible day a 100 times over.  The cost of doing so has been huge-and we will debate the wisdom of those subsequent decisions for years.

Guys like Dick Cheney, and George Bush and others-believe the horror of 9-11 gives them a pass on responsibility for flawed decision making subsequent to the event. I say no. The rat holes of the wars that have been pursued in the years following, and the very avoidable -and equally tragic-costs, cannot be just wiped away just because we were the victims on a particular day.

We can though, remember that day with honor- and vow to move forward into a better future than what those murderers tried to inflict upon us. All of our worlds changed that day-and I for one wish that day could be undone.  I want my world of September 10, 2011 back. But its never coming back.

There is a line in a Tom Clancy novel, Red Storm Rising that goes something like this:
“The whole world seemed like it had caught fire, and because of them[the hijackers] the world literally would.”

I want my world back. My world of September 10th back. 

Comments are closed on this post.

Kaddish

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Today, the funerals of Cecil and David Rosenthal were held.  Cecil Rosenthal, 59, and David Rosenthal, 54, both of Squirrel Hill, in Pittsburgh, were among the 11 people killed Saturday during a shooting at Tree of Life Congregation in Squirrel Hill.  During the course of this week, the remaining funerals for the 11 victims will be held.

I applaud my home city for doing what it could to make its unwanted guest today, feel as unwanted as possible, refusing to meet with the man who lit the fuse on a senseless violence.

This senseless tragedy is considered by some to be an isolated incident. It’s not. It was the culmination of a disastrous hatred that was incited by the one man in America who is supposed to rise above that. The President of the United States has their blood on his hands. He, of course, denies it. However as one of the writers at Haaretz pointed out, his glib and selfish denials – backed by his demented supporters- cannot escape responsibility.


While none of these acts came at the direct instigation of the president or the leadership of the GOP, it is undeniable that they were manifestations of a changed climate in America of which the current U.S. president is the most prominent author.  Indeed, in the same week they took place, the president and those closest to him in his party, held rallies at which the fury of crowds was deliberately stoked with chants targeting two of the targets of the bombing, Clinton and CNN. The president’s own rhetoric targeted others, like Representative Maxine Waters and George Soros


The mention of Soros is, of course, part of an 
anti-Semitic trope that is heard across Europe, these days, with Soros standing in for past Jewish bogeymen like the Rothschilds in the eyes of conspiracy theorists. So too, are attacks on “globalists,” one of which came from Trump just moments after the pipe bombing case was wrapped up.  

Now the usual suspects at the Liars Club and the Fox News State Propaganda network are working overtime to try to explain away the fact that Trump’s particular brand of politics, as poisionous as it is to the national character, somehow are not his fault. It’s not working.


There is no denying that Trump has sought to inflame divisions in America as no president before him. He is the president who said that there were “very fine people” among the neo-Nazis who chanted “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville (and reportedly declared that being pressured into “cleaning up” his remarks were “the biggest fucking mistake I’ve made.”)……


Trump surrounded himself with aides equally dedicated to the marketing of hate for political gain, like former top strategists Steve Bannon, and mastermind of the president’s draconian border policies, Stephen Miller. He refused to repudiate the support of white supremacists. He made the politics of over-the-top personal attacks on television and via Twitter his political signature.


Trump did not put the bombs in the mail or pull the trigger in Pittsburgh or Louisville, but he has contributed to a mood in which anti-Semitism has soared in America under his leadership, with anti-Semitic incidents 
rising 57 percent in 2017 alone, according to the Anti-Defamation League. That is the largest year-on-year increase in over four decades.  


He has made institutionalizing discrimination against people of color, whether at the border, or by making it harder for them to vote, a centerpiece of his administration’s policies. 


Even if, as appears the case, the Pittsburgh shooter suspected Trump, too, was 
under the thrall of the Jews, it is the behavior of Trump and those around them that has given permission for the haters to step out from the shadows, and into a more visible role in American public discourse. 

So I agree with David Rothkopf. Trump may not have pulled the trigger himself, but he has played a definitive role in making the United States a place where lunatics are free to roam. This will not be the last such incident as Trump, in a desperate bid to tilt the mid-term elections to his fevered base, has been lashing out even more to stoke fear and hatred. Many of us told you two years ago this is what would happen.

Bradley Burston, one of my favorite Israeli writers, has sadly, but correctly labeled it a Pogrom.  You should read his entire post here. Its an awesome ode to good people gone senselessly. 


El Malei Rachamim, God who is made of mercy. El Malei Chemlah, God who is made of compassion. El Malei Or, God who is made of Light. God whose house has been defiled by a cruel and monstrous and godless darkness – bless us, the survivors.

Good will come of this. The memories of the fallen are, even now, a blessing.

The future that was stolen from us.

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Sorry for the long delay in posting. Was on the road last week to the land of milk and honey and also had a fair amount of work to do. I have been taking a lot of time to do some thinking both forward and back, when a decision is approaching that you have dreaded, don’t want to make, but know you will have to. It put  a crimp on the idea of writing, especially from my laptop.

Tomorrow will be the 100th anniversary of the 11th hour of the 11th month of the 18th year and the end of a long and terrible war that killed millions and upset the world order for the next century and probably the century to come. It created the pre-conditions of the next terrible war, which killed even more millions, and created the most terrible weapons known to man.

Tomorrow is Veterans Day in the United States, the day we are supposed to honor living Veterans for their service. In Great Britain and the Commonwealth it will be Remembrance Sunday where they will honor all those who died in Britain’s many struggles, partially derived from its own empire and partially derived from the struggle to keep madmen from taking over and creating an evil empire.

Finally, it was Homecoming at my beloved Alma Mater, and people were heading of their respective reunions. Thinking back to when I was in my Senior Year- and so full of idealism and hope for the future – well, that was just the icing on a cake of a sea of frustration I am feeling right now. 

I too, like many people will put up a picture of me in uniform. Unlike some, however, this year the posting of such a picture will not be the totally joyous act of pride that it appears to be for some. Because, and especially in view of the events of the last two years, I can’t help but keep asking myself: “What was it all for? What if anything, did we really accomplish? Where is better and safer world we were supposed to striving for?

Sure, for many of us, myself included, the military was a fair trade. We got skills, excitement, friends, and adventures in exchange for a paycheck and the distinct possibility of dying in the line of duty. But it was supposed to be for a purpose, for the hope of a better and saner world where our children would not have to waste the resources on conflict and could use them instead for achievement. The events of the last 25 years have shown us just how screwed up that line of thinking was – especially the last 10 years. 

Technology-wise many great inventions have been created. We carry now in our pockets a marvelous communication device, through which we have an axis of the world’s knowledge,  and by which we have really heated and pointless arguments with strangers over our twisted American politics. And too, we have lot of great breakthroughs that expanded the length and quality of life. We just, as a country, have yet to figure out a way to economically pay for them or provide them to all of our citizens irrespective of yearly income or employment status.  And too, somehow after a 100 years, we still have massive pockets of misery and poverty around the world and the supposedly “great powers” have still not figured out a way to put an end to it. In the world of Star Trek, Earth finds a way to banish poverty, war, disease from the planet in a century.  In the real universe, it seems to me that we will never find a way to do it. Now mind you, in both visions of the world, the resources are present to accomplish improvements, but in the real world – especially in America –  the will to do so is most assuredly absent.

That was NOT the future that was supposed to be ahead of us when we raised our hands, oh so many years ago. We were children in the age of the 60’s,  where it still seemed America could accomplish anything. We knew that because America had gone to the moon. The technology was going to save us, and the dream of eliminating, or at least dramatically reducing poverty in America was not laughed at as it is today. Sure there were some pretty scary things too -especially in the early 70’s as Vietnam spiraled down to its tragic end. But most of us felt we were going to be part of something great, that were were in fact “exceptional” and were part of a movement defending freedom.

As it turned out we weren’t doing that. The country we had sworn to serve allied itself with dictators and it made unsavory deals that were perceived to be in our best national interests and basically acted just like any of those once great European powers that we all looked down our noses at.  Interestingly enough, unburdened by the cost of the many wars the US had to fight between 1979 and today, they were able to make some small progress on some issues, until the seeds of that terrible conflict in 1918 finally had sprung forth their terrible fruit and they had to deal with new problems, as did we.

And in the end, what of the world of 2018 and the first 20% of the 21st Century? We can’t really say the world is any better or safer now – in fact it actually feels much more dangerous. What happened to the that bright future with healthier lives, more leisure time, greater stability and a gradual progress towards peace, worldwide?

Charles Pierce, one of my favorite current writers asked a similar question when penned an essay entitled, “How Can We Believe in this America?”. A long time believer in the idea of political commonwealth he asked the same questions I am asking today:

We owe each other a debt and we owe each other an obligation, and because of these fundamental American imperatives, there are things that we own in common with each other, and that we are obliged to protect for our posterity. The water. The trees. The wild places in the land. We lose sight of these truths sometimes. Acceleration is the great danger. We lost sight of these truths during the Industrial Age, when the accelerated pace of new manufacturing caught the country by surprise. It was only the long, slow rise of progressive politics that brought these basic truths back to the national mind, and we got the national parks out of it. We have lost sight of these truths again, in the Information Age, when even more accelerated technologies caught us by surprise. It is an open question still whether we will be able to recover that which we have forgotten.

I can’t help but feel in the years since he wrote those words, the acceleration has gotten worse.  Certainly, in the last few years, the rise of demagogues has led the re-creation of the same destructive nationalism that gave rise to the First World War in the beginning.

Our service, my service, was – while indeed a trade-off I was willing to make –  was also supposed to be about accomplishing something in the service of a greater cause and building a better tomorrow for myself and my children. The sad history of our current time is that we have done anything but. And now I am at the fall, turning into winter of my life, having to accept the knowledge that we gave our lives to a service that accomplished little if anything that we hoped to see achieved.

Again, I will ask the question, “What was it all for? And who stole that better  world and future from us?” The answer to the first question I certainly do not know – but I do know it was not for what the United States of America has become in the last two years, if not more accurately,  the last 10 years. No, it was not for that. And if it was, then I have wasted the better part of my life on a fool’s errand.

As for the second question, well we know the who those villains are. They are the deadly sins listed in the bible – summed up for Americans by one word: selfishness. Somewhere along the way, we stopped caring about making the country as a whole better and bringing the rest of the world along with us.  We were getting ours and as for the “other people” – well screw them. They are just lazy moochers anyway. That makes me extremely sad and despairing. It was never supposed to be like this.

Yes, its a different world with new technology. Interestingly, however, much of the technology now is not that big a change from the world of the 60’s. Sure we can communicate worldwide now in an instant, but that is just a linear progression from the technological breakthroughs of the post World War II era. And as we were again grimly reminded this week and last, it has a dark side too. But in a lot of ways we never made the mighty breakthroughs we thought were just around the corner.  It’s still 12 hours to fly to Japan and supersonic passenger travel is just a distant memory. The beautiful space planes and planetary travel of the movie 2001 do not yet exist. And probably worst of all, while a child born today may live to be over a 100 with ease, the truth is, where he was born and who he was born to will make that determination.  Far more than any doctor or scientist will. And if he is born in the wrong place, he may very well struggle – at great risk-for almost all of those years. 

By blindly accepting that reality or worse yet, cheer-leading the bad forces that enable it, we dishonor the service of those men who fought and died in the so called Great War and all the Wars that came after. That’s wrong. We owe them and their descendants something much, much, better.

I’ll close with my favorite line from one of my favorite books:

Either War is Finished or We Are.  

As I wrote a few years ago on Memorial Day 2014 :

Yes, it is a piece from an American novel, with a British slant. However,  I think if you try, you can substitute American battles, American names, and American cities and see the analogies to our present day. It is true that not all of the comparisons are apt-the Soviet Union is no more and it is pretty clear socialism has been discredited-however substitute “Globalization and rampant unregulated profit taking” and Tudsbury’s prediction holds true. And I would also point out – as much as so many people try to deny it, whatever we Americans have in the way of honor and virtue, we learned it from the British.

If we seek to honor the sacrifices of the brave Soldiers, Sailors, Airman and Marines who have fallen today-we must also ask ourself what are we doing to make this country a better place to live for their children and their families. For in the end, that was what they were fighting to defend, a free society that improves itself, not simply falls back into the evils they fought so hard to protect us from.

Andrew Bacevich wrote recently:

Americans once believed war to be a great evil. Whenever possible, war was to be avoided. When circumstances made war unavoidable, Americans wanted peace swiftly restored.

Present-day Americans, few of them directly affected by events in Iraq or Afghanistan, find war tolerable. They accept it. Since 9/11, war has become normalcy. Peace has become an entirely theoretical construct. A report of G.I.s getting shot at, maimed, or killed is no longer something the average American gets exercised about. Rest assured that no such reports will interfere with plans for the long weekend that Memorial Day makes possible.

You should find that trend very scary-I know I do.

The last great President

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I made a point of getting home early today so I could watch the state funeral for George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st President of the United States and probably the last President ever that will be able to be spoken of with the words, “great President”. It was with sadness I watched the service, for it seemed to me, I was also watching a funeral for my own country. 

Which is sad, because George H.W. Bush represented that dream of many, that the United States can actually be a much better nation than it turned out to be in the opening years of the 21st century. While the man had many flaws and many of his policy prescriptions were also flawed, unlike his predecessor, and definitely, unlike his successors, the 41st President of the United States tried to put the country first, and do what was needed in terms of good policy. Even if it cost him at the ballot box in 1992 – as it did when his own party behaved like the selfish, spoiled children they were to become, by decrying his very necessary move to raise taxes and cut the deficit. He should have been hailed as a hero by the Republican party for that one act alone. 

But he wasn’t and so he lost in 1992 and the present era began. 

In Alternative History books, they use a concept called Point of Departure. Meaning an event that occurs that alters the timeline and leads to a string of events happening. I will be forever convinced that if George H.W. Bush had won re-election in 1992, the country would not have descended into the political morass that it is in today. There would have been no Clinton impeachment, I am quite sure his son would never have been President – thus preventing a wasteful and disastrous invasion of Iraq, the GOP might not have gone headlong over a cliff to embrace the current vile, cruel and selfish policy prescriptions, and for sure Donald J. Trump would have just been a worthless real estate mogul instead of a corrupt and worthless President.

Those who supported H. Ross Perot in 1992 deserve to be held in utter scorn for being the prototype of the selfish pigs that devolved into the deplorable MAGA hat wearing idiots we see today. They bear a fearful burden for the damage they inflicted on this country. We could have been a much better country.

But none of that happened and events proceeded to the low point of American history, when the current useless occupant of the White House thought himself to be equal to the challenge of the highest office in the land. Donald Trump is not fit to tie George Herbert Walker Bush’s shoes. Bush was as qualified a President as we have ever had. Trump is the other end of the bookend, absolutely the worst and most unfit President we have ever had.

And don’t think that was not lost on the other Presidents in attendance today. Look at these before and after shots when the man baby showed up.

Then the Trumps showed up:

A graceless fool to be sure. Even moreso during the service where all the praises for Bush showed to highlight how utterly worthless Trump is. 
Any recitation of virtue seems like an implicit criticism since Trump is so utterly devoid of that quality. 

41 represents the last of the line, the moderate Republican and Eastern Republican. As Charles Pierce noted:

He was the scion of Yankee wealth, that great chilly monolith that provided an opponent with whom the rising political power of the immigrant waves, especially the Irish, was obliged to contend. He was one half of the oldest tribal political rivalry of the time and place of my growing up. That’s why I got such a kick out of watching him handle that baby as though someone had handed him a live grenade. Honey Fitz, Jim Curley, or any of the Kennedys would have known what to do. Hell, Curley might have sung it a lullaby.

Because of that, I was best able to see him as the last of them—the old-line eastern and northern Republicans. (He never could pull off the whole Texas business. His son was much better at it, and he wasn’t that great.) I knew the political tradition from which he’d arisen as well as I knew my own. Certainly, those Republicans became the protectors of inherited wealth and privilege, but they also were the descendants of some stubborn bastards who’d scratched colonies out of some of the most unforgiving landscapes on which anyone ever landed, and a helluva lot of them had been abolitionists as well, while the arriving Irish were busy hanging black folks from lampposts.

Bush really did not change from his youth to his time in the White House. Unfortunately his overrated predecessor had set the stage for the foundation of the party he gave his life to, to fall apart.

However, as Bush rose in the Republican Party, its power base swung south and west. It slowly embraced empowered radical religious fundamentalism. And, most significantly, in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, it made a conscious decision to energize itself through the splintered, but still powerful, remnants of American apartheid.

Bush never appeared comfortable with these developments, but he never could quite bring himself to denounce them, and he had very little compunction about using them when he needed to do so. Because of this, and because of the starchy aloofness of his basic mien, he struggled mightily against the impression that he was inauthentic. He did not often win that battle.

And thanks to Newt Gingrich the worthless souls of the Tea Party started to rise and the rest of us have suffered for it ever since.

Read my lips. No new taxes!

He was not a stupid man. He knew that the Reagan economic poison was going to lead to a sugar-rush high and then a massive structural deficit and then a recession. But he couldn’t bring himself to say that to a hall full of people already thick with the prion disease. Then, in a kind of mad irony, economics circumstances forced him to raise taxes just a little because he had been right about the voodoo all along. All the rising forces in the Republican Party he’d tried to appease by being something he was not, or by outsourcing the work to reptiles like Ailes and Atwater, roared to life against him.

Even if America shakes off the shackles of the terminal illness that is Trumpism and elects a decent man or woman ( which contrary to what my red hat wearing friends say, Barack Obama was), that person will never be recognized as such. Today’s polarized country cannot think that way – and as we are seeing in Wisconsin and Michigan, today’s Republican party is committed to ensuring a one party, minority state rule- like their dream of South Africa comes to pass.

I was a Republican when 41 was President. He visited my ship. I flew in Desert Storm, where he was able to stay focused on the task at hand, and unlike his son, did not get suckered into a foreign policy disaster. Too many people fail to realize it, but we probably still have a world to live in because he did not do a break dance on the Berlin Wall, but masterfully helped the Soviet Union to die with some dignity.  That may be his greatest achievement, but its also the one he seems to never get credit for.

After all:

It wasn’t a given, however, that the Cold War would end peacefully. In fact, we worried inside the U.S. government about all sorts of crises that might unfold as the Soviet Union neared its eventual collapse on Christmas Day 1991. A cabal of KGB and Red Army leaders actually overthrew Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for two suspenseful days in August of that year.

We worried there might be another challenge to Gorbachev and Russian Republic President Boris Yeltsin again that autumn which could provoke conflict inside the country or seek to obstruct the freedom of the USSR’s former satellites in Eastern Europe. We were also acutely concerned that the USSR’s vast collection of nuclear weapons and nuclear material might fall into the hands of a breakaway warlord across that vast country or into the hands of a criminal network.

Bush’s singular achievement was in creating a relationship of trust with both Gorbachev and Yeltsin. That reassured them the U.S. would not seek to take advantage in the Cold War’s last months.

It was also not a given that West and East Germany would unify peacefully as communism collapsed after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President Francois Mitterrand, both with clear memories of the Second World War, were initially skeptical as they pondered the reappearance of a powerful German state in the center of Europe. Some German leaders advocated a reunited neutral Germany between Russia and the West.

Bush knew both of those scenarios would be destabilizing. He was looking to the future and so he swung his support behind German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s aim for a united German nation — but one embedded in the NATO alliance.

Experience counts and in a life of public service, George Herbert Walker Bush had acquired a lot of it. It served the entire US well when it needed it. This is something the current crop of MAGA hat wearing morons seem to fail to understand.

Again, he was not without his flaws and there was plenty he could have done much, much, better. But to me, anyway, 41 represented the hope of making  America a better place to be. I wish he had stood up to the thugs that later took over his party, but that was not his style. 

So now, here I am at the fall of my life wondering if we will ever have a good President again. I hope so. I am worried we will not. But in George H.W. Bush we had one. We were just too stupid to recognize it at the time.

I’ll take a 1000 points of light over selfishness and cruelty any day. 

When is a crime just a crime?

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Its been a month since I have posted. I have been busy. No excuse to be sure-but its the truth.

During that time a lot has happened, much of it comment worthy-and if you are big reader like I am, you have probably read a lot of the commentary on it already. So I will try not to repeat it.

What I do want to take a couple of moments to comment on is the Chattanooga shooting yesterday. As soon as I heard that the shooter had a Muslim name, I said to myself, “Oh boy, here we go.”

And true to form, the Town Hall Harlot proved me right.

Of course, the fact that the shooter was a naturalized American citizen is immaterial to this conclusion.  Now mind you this is just a month after a mass shooting in Charleston S.C. occurred. That we are told is not “terrorism”, but this is. Can’t they both be equally despicable?

Apparently,  in the eyes of some, not.

I think its important in this time of national tragedy to not be a Malkin or a paranoid American, but to step back and look at some actual facts.

Because, whether you want to admit it or not-the events of Charleston and the events of Chattanooga are more alike than they are different. When boiled down to it’s base facts, as we know them so far: An American had a grudge. So he obtained a firearm and attempted to rectify his grudge by using that firearm on his fellow citizens. The grudge may have been fueled by irrational ideas from abroad-but it does not erase the fact that the killer was an American citizen who decided that killing fellow American citizens was the way to go.

Americans are killing each other again. That is the fundamental—if politically less useful—lesson of what happened in Tennessee yesterday. An American citizen got his gun and he went to a strip mall and he killed four of his fellow citizens, killed them as dead as Michael Brown or Eric Garner, as dead as the people who were killed by Dylann Roof, who’s awaiting trial, or as dead as the people who were killed by James Holmes, who was convicted of killing them just yesterday. By all the criteria of which we boast of our exceptionalism to the world, Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez was as much of an American as the four people he allegedly murdered. His motivation doesn’t matter. He was a citizen. His victims were citizens. Americans killing other Americans. It’s an old story being rehearsed again with unfortunate frequency.

It troubles me that so many people are trying to tie in unrelated issues to this tragedy. Do we need to enforce our borders? Of course we do. Do we need to restrict immigration quotas from Islamic nations? Much as it pains me to say it, perhaps we might-but before we do so, we need to have a bigger conversation about American ideals and the laws of unintended consequences. Because the same people who are advocating this course of action, are descended from possible nations where their ancestors were considered terrorists just the same as Mr. Abdulazeez was. Is America a beacon of liberty or not?

That said, Islam has some real problems right now, problems that collectively it refuses to deal with. I’m not blind to that. Nonetheless, I am having a hard time making the distinction between how denying immigration rights now to qualified immigrants, would have stopped an immigrant family from spawning a criminal some 20 years ago. Someone is going to have to explain to me how that works.

I’m willing to bet you a quart of your favorite Scotch that :

1) The weapon(s) used yesterday were obtained legally, at anyone of America’s 129,817 gun dealers.

2) Mr Abdulazeez may or may not be linked to some overseas terrorist group. I, at this point do not know. But I also would like someone to tell me how that would have stopped him from legally obtaining a gun to commit his heinous deeds. Evidently his family had already been investigated and cleared.

Eventually we’ll learn more about Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, but one thing is certain: The Marines who were killed yesterday were equally as much as victims of the American culture of violence as the victims in Charleston.

Lets not forget too that:

  So far in 2015 , 27000 times an American chose that same course of action. They all had problems they had decided they could not solve. They all had grudges. They all had something that made them angry enough. And, as a result, almost 7,000 of our fellow citizens are as dead as the people in Tennessee. This is not an explanation that satisfies any particular agenda but, unquestionably, we are a very fearful nation with an unacknowledged history of violence that also has armed itself very heavily. Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, an American citizen, chose a very American course of action.  He had a problem he couldn’t solve so he reached for the most American of solutions. He reached for a gun and he killed some of his fellow citizens.?

We will be told over and over again, “this is different, we are at war.”  I beg to disagree. Whatever wars we are fighting beyond our borders, here at home-this was a crime. Every bit as much a crime as a contract hit ordered by a mob family in Ukraine, China or Sicily.  You have to fight it the same as any other crime. Its tragic that the nation lots four of its finest, but its losing fine citizens everyday. We need to remember that.  When you boil it down to brass tacks, this yet another case of an American with a grudge, who obtained a weapon inside the US and took out his rage with it. If this is terrorism, than most gun violence is terrorism.

And I call it a crime, not an act of war. Terrorism is a violent tool used for political reasons to bring pressure on governments by creating fear in the populace. In the same way, I have never thought it helpful to refer to a “war” on terror, any more than to a war on drugs. For one thing that legitimizes the terrorists as warriors; for another thing terrorism is a technique, not a state. Moreover terrorism will continue in some form whatever the outcome, if there is one, of such a “war”. For me what happened was a crime and needs to be thought of as such. What made it different from earlier attacks was its scale and audacity, not its nature.

The legends leaving us.

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The month of January has been a sad one for folks like me, who treasure the music of the ’60s and ’70s and had some of my best times in life with the great artist’s creations in the background as a soundtrack.

David Bowie, Glenn Fry. Dale Griffin, and now Paul Kantner.

Bowie and Kantner leaving are real sad notes. I have great memories of both my teen years and my first years of real freedom in Japan listening to those guys.

I was a Jefferson Airplane fan because my sisters were Jefferson Airplane fans. And as they morphed into Jefferson Starship, I remained an active fan. The band in the ’70s was awesome. I even loved them when they went on divergent paths in the ’80s and ’90s. “In June 1984, Paul Kantner, the last remaining founding member of Jefferson Airplane, left Jefferson Starship, and then took legal action over the Jefferson Starship name against his former bandmates. Kantner settled out of court and signed an agreement that neither party would use the names “Jefferson” or “Airplane” unless all members of Jefferson Airplane, Inc. (Bill Thompson, Paul Kantner, Grace SlickJorma KaukonenJack Casady) agreed. ” Thus Mickey Thomas formed “Starship” and later went on to do “the worst song ever made. ( Which I love by the way).

Fortunately, Kantner reestablished Jefferson Starship in 1992, and so allowed me to enjoy them immensely my first wonderful year in Japan.

I played the CD for Deep Space / Virgin Sky till it was worn out. My favorite song on the album is this one:


As if things were not screwed up enough.

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God decided to play a cruel joke on American politics by holding a recall election of His own. The winner was Justice Antonin Scalia.

The loser will be the rest of the United States, that is left behind to watch the Constitutional farce that will be the nomination of his successor. More on that in a bit.

If you search the archives of this blog, you will find that there was a time when I actually defended Antonin Scalia. It was in this post here. For the record, I have not changed my mind, The Citadel should still be all male and Justice Scalia performed a service by eloquently pointing out why the arguments of the plaintiffs were flawed from both a legal and educational standpoint.

But the larger picture, as I have recognized some 8 years later, is that , by and large, the majority of the American people no longer care about the validity of mine and Justice Scalia’s viewpoint. The court made that obvious in VMI, when only one justice voted no. Sadly, it did not recognize that in cases that were far more important to the national polity.

Consider his key role in Heller, Citizens United, and Bush vs Gore. Not to mention voting to gut the Voting Rights act. 

And then there is this:


This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is “actually” innocent. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any claim based on alleged “actual innocence” is constitutionally cognizable.

That, is among many of his dissents-a head slapper. How can anyone argue that way-even from a strictly legal standpoint?

Antonin Scalia was a brilliant legal mind and definitely worthy enough to be a Supreme Court Justice. Unfortunately, his brilliance was so often squandered on ideas that were just flat out bad. Charles Pierce sums it up well:


I believe the United States would be a better country if none of these remarks ever were made.

So now we will have the national mourning, and the lying-in-state, and the state funeral, all of which Antonin Scalia deserves. Giving 30 years of your life to public service at the highest level is something worthy of respect, even if it was largely in service of a political philosophy that derides public service at almost every other level of government. And his death on Saturday certainly is a seismic event in our politics. It raises the stakes in the upcoming election to almost unimaginable levels. How do we know this? Because Mitch McConnell, the majority leader of the United States Senate, already has thrown the Constitution out the window for purely political purposes.

That a sitting Senator, much less the Majority Leader of the Senate, could make such a bold statement, in direct opposition to the requirements of the Constitution is really astounding. It is really a sad commentary of  the damage our tea sniffing fellow citizens, aided by the lazy 50% who can’t even be bothered to exercise their civic rights to vote; the damage that having really lousy legislators causes.

McConnell and by extension the two children, Cruz and Rubio who echoed it, don’t have a leg to stand on.


Of course, this is all my bollocks. In 2012, the “American people” decided that Barack Obama should appoint justices to the Supreme Court to fill any vacancies that occurred between January of 2013 and January of 2017. Period. Just because Mitch McConnell is a complete chickenshit in the face of his caucus doesn’t obviate that fact. The 36 percent of eligible voters who showed up for the 2014 midterms, the lowest percentage in 72 years, don’t get to cancel out the expressed wishes of the majority of the 57.5 percent of eligible voters who turned out to re-elect the president in 2012. And before this meme really picks up steam, 17 justices have been confirmed during election years, including Roger Taney, which sucks, in 1836, Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist, who were appointed in 1972, and Anthony Kennedy, who was appointed in 1988.
(And it should not be necessary to point out that any argument made by this Congress on the basis of political tradition or legislative politesse inevitably will cause Irony to shoot itself in the head.)

If you weren’t thinking about voting before, you have a really good reason to now. I know I will vote the hell out of this election and I will be supporting someone who does not endorse the legacy of cruelty and selfishness that the current GOP has wrapped its loving arms around.

Herman Wouk.

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Herman Wouk has passed away at the age of 103, just ten days short of his 104th birthday. According to the Times of Israel, he was “working on a book until the end.” To say this makes me sad is a gross understatement. While obviously, I knew this day was approaching, imagining a world where he is not writing about it is indeed a depressing prospect.

Fortunately for us all, his written words and now, thanks to the wonders of YouTube, his spoken words, will live on till long after all of us in the current generation have passed on.  He was, in my opinion, a great American writer of the 20th century, who deserves recognition with the other great American writers: Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner and the rest. Then again, when it comes to Herman Wouk,  I am more than a little biased. If you have been a long time reader here, you know that I have quoted him on these pages again and again.

Herman Wouk was a writer that had a significant influence on my life. I’ve read nearly all of his books, some several times. His vivid descriptions of the Holocaust were forefront in my mind whenever I went to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem or traveled to and from the city. Same is true of his novels The Hope and The Glory as I traversed the roads of Israel from Kiryat Shmona down to Beersheeva and points south.

Back in 2015, David Frum wrote an article for The Atlantic, pointing out that Wouk’s gifts had been under-appreciated by the American literary world.  The whole thing is worth your time to read.  Most people only know of Wouk as the author of the Caine Mutiny, or as the writer behind the memorable performance by Humphrey Bogart. However, as Frum reminds us, there is much more to his body of work than that.

His first great success, The Caine Mutiny(1951), occupied bestseller lists for two consecutive years, sold millions of copies and inspired a film adaptation that became the second highest-grossing movie of 1954. Wouk’s grand pair of novels, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, likewise found a global audience, both in print and then as two television miniseries in the 1980s.


Wouk won a Pulitzer for The Caine Mutiny. From then on, however, critical accolades eluded him. Reviews of the two “War” novels proved mostly dismissive—sometimes even savage. Critics assigned the proudly Jewish Wouk to the category that included Leon Uris and Chaim Potok rather than Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.


Negative critical judgment matters. After the first fizz of publicity, it is critics who in almost all cases determine what will continue to be read.  The novelist known as Stendhal described books as tickets in a lottery, of which the prize is to be read in a hundred years. If enduring readership is the ultimate prize for a writer, then Wouk is at present failing. Readers under 40 know Wouk, if they know him at all, as a name on the spine of a paperback shoved into a cottage bookshelf at the end of someone else’s summer vacation—or perhaps as the supplier of the raw material for Humphrey Bogart’s 
epic performance as Captain Queeg of the USS Caine. What they don’t know is that Herman Wouk has a fair claim to stand among the greatest American war novelists of them all.

When I returned to Israel after a 16-year lapse, it was Herman Wouk I first turned to, to understand the history of Israel ( which I already knew a lot about from having read his books, and a lot of other accounts). I also turned to Wouk as a starting point to better understand Judaism, which I feel is essential if you want to understand Israel truly as it is.  Too many Americans don’t bother to learn either history or the religious basis that underpins the Jewish state, and because they don’t, they fall into the trap of not understanding Israel as it really is.

In 2012 I undertook to re-read both The Glory and The Hope, as well as his book This is My God. That led me to accept an offer to learn Hebrew from a class in 2013.  While I can read Hebrew quite easily now, the spoken language has proven more of a challenge, but I nonetheless persist in trying to master it. As I immersed myself more and more into all things Israel, Wouk’s writings were always in the back of my mind.

Especially when I visited here:

Yad Vashem Hall of Names

The Holocaust is front and center in much of his work, even when the war was not the subject. Frum explains:

The Nazi Holocaust pervades the War novels and lurks in the corners of Caine too. Some of Wouk’s characters stumble into the Holocaust’s maw; others glimpse inside and are transformed forever. Adolf Eichmann makes a large and memorable appearance in War and Remembrance. Let it be noted that the supposedly middlebrow Wouk more shrewdly penetrated the Nazi murderer’s self-serving lies than the echt highbrow Hannah Arendt. Wouk’s Eichmann is no banal bureaucrat, but a fanatical plunderer and murderer—just as the historical documents that have become available since the writing of Wouk’s novels have confirmed.


It’s really a striking thing how unexpressed a place the Jewish Holocaust occupied in the writing of American Jewish novelists in the decades after the war: Heller, Bellow, Malamud, Doctorow. (Mordecai Richler too, to include a Canadian.) With Wouk, the Holocaust is always front of mind. In 2012, at 97, when he was asked by Vanity Fair which living person he most despised, he answered, “The Jewish writer who traduces his Jewishness.” (The runner-up, it would seem, is the U.S. military veteran who traduces the U.S. military.)
 

That is not to say that Wouk’s characters did not have their flaws, and in his historical novels as Frum notes, “ the contrivances necessary to move Wouk’s characters from event to event sometimes creak”. He is right about that, and it’s noticeable in War and Remembrance especially. But Frum also notes,

The characters themselves, however, never feel contrived—not the fictitious characters and (even more difficult) not the historical ones. Their stories and their personalities endure in the memory. Wouk may not be a stylistic innovator or a polisher of the perfect phrase. What he does achieve however is to create characters one finds oneself talking about years afterward as if they were people one knew, with problems as urgent as one’s own.

And from my perspective, to borrow a phrase from one of his characters, I did not care for about the blind eye he turned to his country’s excesses, and I am in agreement with Frum that Wouk was very unfair to his female characters, especially Rhoda – who contrary to the assessment in Frum’s article – was a confused soul who had been done dirt by the circumstances thrust upon her.

But these are minor flaws that can be easily forgiven. Herman Wouk was a product of his generation and his beliefs on religion and other things informed his work. It’s very acceptable for me to take issue with him on certain things, yet still adore his work.

Herman Wouk in 1989

The thing I love about his books is that his writing and storytelling just flows and he knows how to create a grand cavalcade of events without becoming bogged down and losing his audience. For a history buff like me, he also knows how to get the history right.

Perhaps his best epitaph and the proper way to close a post is to do so in Wouk’s own words:

“In the glare, the great and terrible light of this happening, God seems to signal that the story of the rest of us need not end, and that the new light can prove a troubled dawn.

For the rest of us, perhaps. Not for the dead, not for the more than fifty million real dead in the world’s worst catastrophe: victors and vanquished, combatants and civilians, people of so many nations, men, women, and children, all cut down. For them, there can be no new earthly dawn. Yet thought their bones like in the darkness of the grave, they will not have died in vain, if their remembrance can lead us from the long, long time of war to the time for peace.” 
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

יְהֵא שְׁמֵהּ רַבָּא מְבָרַךְ לְעָלַם וּלְעָלְמֵי עָלְמַיָּא

“May His great name be blessed forever, and to all eternity” -from the Kaddish.

Memorial Day.

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I don’t have much to add to the discourse on this Memorial Day. In the past 14 Years I have written a good number of posts honoring the event. You can read some of the better ones here, here, here, and here.

I can also point you to a list of Citadel Graduates who have fallen in the line of duty here.

I’ve read and heard all the instructions not to “thank a veteran for his service” which I agree with.

I have also been starkly reminded of those brave pilots, NFO’s and enlisted Aircrew who perished in E-2 Aircraft mishaps.

There are several omissions that need to be added:

VAW-123, USS Forrestal, E-2A, Mediterranean Sea, October 16, 1969, Lost at Sea in a bolter…. LCDR Paul Martin Wright, LCDR James Leo Delaney, LTjg Howard Booth Rutledge.

LT John Gore (VAW 126, VR-48) Crash at Dothan, Alabama 15 Nov 85 

There is a good website with a list of C-2 mishaps and lost souls here.

An E-2A crashed in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1970. 5 people perished. I cannot find the names.

VAW-120- 1973  Crashed in the water just off Ocean View (Norfolk). Lt. Walter J. MacLeod Jr., Lt. Cmdr. Randall M. Moore, Lt. Edward W. Cassel, Lt. Arthur T. Dunn, Ens. Howard E. Wagoner.

VAW-125, early 1978. Elevator disconnect accident over Supply, NC. LCDR’s Ken llgenfritz, Tom Davis and LT Jim Beamer. Two “guest” CVW-1 aircrew also perished.

VAW-115, NF603… Aug, 1985… LT(jg) Kevin Kuhnig and Ens Chris Mims, Lost at sea

LT Tom Waterbury, VAW-117. Killed in a T-2C mishap.

LT John Brown Dec 5th, 1994. T-34C. Former C-2 driver.

It is still not a complete list- but its the best I can research tonight.

Which brings me back to what is on my mind this Memorial Day. It is the prevailing thought for me this year and is one I wrote several years ago.

If we seek to honor the sacrifices of the brave Soldiers, Sailors, Airman and Marines who have fallen today-we must also ask ourselves what are we doing to make this country a better place to live for their children and their families. For in the end, that was what they were fighting to defend, a free society that improves itself, not simply falls back into the evils they fought so hard to protect us from.

It is line with the question I keep asking myself again and again, “What was it all for?” I still don’t have a good answer, but it certainly was not to see the American Democracy come under threat from within.

Remember the Fallen!

Throwback Thursday And we are back.

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Watching the ceremonies for the 75th anniversary of D-Day gave me poignant reminders of my own visit to the area some 5 years ago. The area is astounding, especially the area around Point du Hoc where fierce fighting occurred, with US Rangers fighting literally straight up. This was the post I quickly drafted after we got back. I’ve added a gallery of pictures, something I meant to do – but did not get to.

Spent the last five days in France. It was outstanding-especially as we went to visit the Normandy Beaches. Pix to follow over the next few days.

So here is where I spent my 4th-no fireworks, but a lot of sincere feeling for the folks who can never leave this place:

“Not for the dead, not for the more than fifty million real dead in the world’s worst catastrophe: victors and vanquished, combatants and civilians, people of so many nations, men, women and children, all cut down. For them, there can be no new earthly dawn. Yet though their bones lie in the darkness of the grave, they will not have died in vain, if their remembrance can lead us from the long, long time of war to the time of peace. ” -Herman Wouk

L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim

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Is the Hebrew phrase for, “Next year in Jerusalem”. ( לשנה הבאה בירושלים). A couple of things have been making me think of that phrase this past week.

Today, for example, is Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Remembrance Day. It happens right before the week of Israel’s Memorial Day and Independence Day. I’ve been in Israel twice for it. It’s a stirring thing to see all traffic come to a stop on the roads, people get out of their cars, and stand in stillness for two minutes while the siren goes off. This year that is not happening and Israel is not having an in-person ceremony. For the first time ever it was a virtual ceremony.

Despite Yad Vashem’s Warsaw Ghetto Square being eerily deserted, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day ceremony nevertheless went ahead in perhaps the strangest circumstances of the country’s history.  In the shadow of the coronavirus epidemic, the host of the ceremony addressed an empty square and vocalists performed without an audience – but the speeches from the country’s leaders, the stories of survivors and the prayers for those murdered all went ahead regardless. 

The video in the link is worth watching, although it is an hour and 15 minutes long. The Kaddish Prayer ( Hebrew prayer for the dead) is said and at the end of the ceremony HaTikvah, the Israeli national anthem is sung. I’ve included that part of the broadcast in the clip below:

I much enjoyed my work in Israel and miss my trips there a lot. I am going to return there for a while probably after the first of next year, God and this damn disease willing.

The other reason I have thought a lot about the phrase is the fact that I have been watching the HBO mini-series “The Plot Against America.” It is based on the 2004 Philip Roth novel of the same name. I started reading it when it came out as I am a big Philip Roth fan, but for some reason, I never finished it. In subsequent moves, the book got given away, and I no longer have it. The book is an alternate history of America where Charles Lindbergh becomes President – and makes accommodations with the Nazis.

I have been watching the series with great interest, however, and I find it to be at the same time, compelling TV and also a disturbing analogy to where the United States of America is headed with Donald Trump as President. Roth never wrote the book to be a prophecy, but events have turned his novel into one. See the trailer here:

While I am not Jewish, I find much to identify with in the Jewish faith, especially in the last few years. And one does not have to be Jewish to understand the effect of fear – and a nation whose people turn their backs on decency – going entirely to the dark side.

This commentary from the Jerusalem Post, by Gabe Friedman, which is explicitly discussing the anti-Semitic back story – nonetheless struck a chord with me. He calls it “the scariest story he has ever watched.” I can fully agree with him, the alternate past it portrays, and the potentially deadly future that he and I and many others may yet face is indeed frightening.

In many senses, the Levins feel like the 1940s version of my family. They’re not very religious but have strong Jewish cultural ties. They go to their local Jewish bakery more than their synagogue. They can recite memorized lines of Hebrew, but don’t know what the words mean. 

Other recent shows that have depicted Jews have leaned toward stereotype, not archetype. “Hunters,” the recent Amazon series about Nazi hunters in New York City, offers an example: Its efforts toward Jewish authenticity rely on matzah ball soup, gefilte fish jokes, prayers and ridiculous Yiddish accents. So when one “Hunters” character calls another a “kike,” it didn’t feel like an attack on me or anyone like me.

By comparison, every slur in “Plot” packs a strong punch. When the Levins are told to leave their hotel for no reason other than their Jewishness, and the police ignore their claims of discrimination, I got queasy. When an intimidatingly large antisemite comes over to their café table to tell them to be quiet, I cowered into my couch pillows. But Simon also captures a feeling that’s even more crucial, from an affect point of view, than the characters’ Jewishness: the feeling of being watched over, manipulated and on one’s own. Their government claims to support them, but it’s only a nominal protection, a state of being that could easily slip into a much darker place

The tension of being on that dividing line, between safety and a lack of it, filled me with dread as I watched. For me at least, that made the show more powerful than a gut-wrenching Holocaust film that shows Jews being violently abused and murdered. It shows what I could be dealing with in the future, should the gears of history tilt slightly the wrong way.

The fear he describes is real. As I watched the first two episodes, I could substitute the name Trump” for Lindbergh and understand precisely how stressful 1940, with a Lindbergh candidacy, could be for the Levin family. Substitute “2016” for “1940,” and you can capture the stomach-wrenching dread that I experienced as the months went by. The Republican party abandoned any shred of decent behavior to kowtow to this foul-mouthed talking yam of a President.

And as for the events of the later episodes in 1941 and 1942? Well, to me, they are real, and it’s easy to see similar type events occurring if the nation is foolish enough not to destroy this orange monster at the ballot box. The ease with which Americans in Roth’s world abandoned any pretense of decency and turned on their fellow Americans is very believable. After all, we see it play out in a smaller form just this week. As I have stated again and again on these pages, the Trump GOP wants a dedicated type of political apartheid with a minority (a minority in the sense that it never represents the will of the majority of the people, just like now) government driving home a twisted vision of what they think America should be. It won’t just be ethnic minorities that will be chased in that America, and it will be all of us who had the nerve to point out how truly absurd all of this is.

So, while Roth did not intend to write a social commentary, social commentary is what we got from his novel. If and when the worst happens, and America commits national suicide, folks like me will have to seek out a new home. Eighty years ago, that is what the idea of Zionism was about. Realizing the home you had was about to turn totally against you in a vicious way, so it became time to find a new home.

Overreacting, you say? I think not. Let me remind you what we saw on the streets of Columbus, Ohio, just this week:

Seen at the anti-lockdown protest in Columbus, Ohio.

It’s a stark reminder,  “the people who believe conspiracies about science are likely to harbor and join forces with those who have conspiracies about race and religion. Bigots, in other words. There is no larger group of extremist believers in conspiracies than on the right. And as this COVID issue worsens, with the aid of a conspiracy-mongering president, bigotry will also rise.

In Roth’s novel, 1940 was a pivotal year. 2020 is turning out to be one also. The Plot Against America shows us where the bad road leads.

L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim

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