.

Once upon a culture long ago or far away, mourning was a state both ritually displayed and visibly endured over protracted time. Widows might literally or effectively sacrifice their lives, though this was manifestation of something other than grief. Black or some other mourning color might be worn for life, maybe for a few years, certainly for one. People’s lives were changed; at least they were noticeably marked. The grieving were meant to accept that; others were intended to know it. Death became us.

What gloom this is for we who live in the secular culture of unfettered fulfillment and celebrated overcoming. In our culture, life’s possibilities are as great as our imaginations, our setbacks are temporary, and a loss only a plot point on the way to inspiring comeback. Life – life! – is looking forward.  Death is looking back. Death is a downer.

Suffer a death, and most others, even good friends, will fairly quickly cease to speak of it. Reverse the roles and you will too. It is awful, so awful – what, beyond the first sincere expressions of sympathy, the early empathetic consolations, is there, finally, to say? We go on. We cannot linger. We cannot dwell. We cannot lose ourselves in self-pity and despair. It comes to us all, both the mourning and the death, but life is not life – life! – that is daily diagnosed with death. We must endure – only now, in our modern cultures, we must do it invisibly, without a ritual call for attention. To wear even a black armband for a year would be a curious and questionable display.

Suffer the death, however, of someone deeply loved, and what you soon enough learn, and long experience, is that a year is a moment, a headshake, really, only, as after a blow, in the effort to clear it. There may be going on, but there is no overcoming. There is no processing, no coming to terms, no “closure,” except as for scar tissue over a wound. Let life pick at you in misfortune for a while and discover then that a scar is not a healing, but a protection, not a recovery, but a covering. The wound remains, invisibly, as the world, and even we, will have it – to go on, in order to go on – but just like death, our wounds, the wound of death too, become us.

Yesterday was the anniversary of my brother’s death. One year ago, suddenly, within minutes, of a heart attack. I eulogized Jeff a few days afterwards. I memorialized him on his birthday a few weeks ago. He would have been 65. These have been the public expressions, the normalized utterances of grief, and continued mourning in a world without black to display them while the mourner keeps his peace. This has been my year with death, of grieving who was lost to it, bearing the transfiguration of it, living palpably in the immanence of it.

If one is lucky, and I was, the first profoundly affecting death will be of a parent, in its proper time. The first for me was my mother, almost nine year ago. It feels – may I be pardoned this cliché? – yesterday. That is the truth of it. And surely I began to feel the transformation then, the unveiling of a truth like a monument, one you knew was there all along behind the curtained parapet, bound to take dominion everywhere, and yet which, the curtain dropped, stuns nonetheless with its very monumentality. My father died a year and a half later, and soon the metamorphosis was complete. One is not the same person anymore.

My father died at 94. But he nearly died – the doctor’s said so – of a heart attack thirty years earlier, at 64, the age at which my brother did die. My mother’s only sibling, her brother, Al, died of a heart attack too, at 59. Two months ago, I turned 60.  I feel much younger – only now, maybe, properly middle-aged, say 40. I’m pretty fit for my age too. And until the grey came in, I was always taken for much younger than I happened to be, occasionally still am. But I am not 40, and just a few weeks before Jeff died, he said to me over our drinks – a smoky, burnished single malt scotch washed over glittering rocks in a fine hotel bar – that you never know what is going on inside your body. Then, soon, he woke in the morning planning to love his wife, Anne, another day, hoping to enjoy their life together another thirty years, as our father got to do, and by that evening his heart had exploded in his chest on a tennis court and he was gone. He was up in the set five games to one when he got the chills – “Something’s not right,” he said – then began to perspire, his throat feeling tight, so he went to the bench to sit down, where his head jerked back and he fell to the floor.

There could be more.

My father was raised until the age of 12 or so by his grandparents, after his parents had abandoned him and sister to come to America. His grandmother died first, then his grandfather – my great grandfather Zakiah. That’s him below in his Sabbath best. Heckuva beard. I had one like it at 20. He’d have been proud.

By the time I began to press my father, late in his life, for all I could learn of the pre-Revolutionary Russian shtetl in which he was born – actually in Ukraine – he could not tell me how his grandparents had died. As I learned on my own, though the now well known Ukrainian Holodomor – the Soviet’s manmade famine of 1932-33 – claimed anywhere from 2.4 to 10 million lives in the Ukraine, the lesser known famine of 1921-23, in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Civil War, was responsible for perhaps 1.5 to 2 million deaths. This was the period during which my father and his sister left Ukraine on their own as children, after Zakiah died. How likely is it that Zakiah, too, died of hunger?

What is the possibility he collapsed in the dirt of his stable – an old Jew dead on the ground, who knows from what –  from a heart attack?

For a year, then, I have wondered, worried. Me, too? When? I have grieved my brother and grieved myself (“It is Margaret you mourn for”). For there is so much unfinished, so much more to do. Just let me accomplish what I was meant to do – what I meant to do.

Would I ever welcome it? Who knows, but not too soon, not cut short, not before I’m done.

I walk the dogs, late at night. The dark is electric, translucent, it vibrates. I vibrate with it. The tree limbs are painted against the sky. I feel my body, its vulnerable physical being as never before, the connection of bone to cartilage, tissue to organ, the great organ of my heart suspended in its cage, pressed against my chest. I feel – imagine I feel – its every skipped beat, its spike, its thump, its moment before. What is always theoretical, which is not to say not real, is now real and not theoretical. At any moment. From out of the sky, the new, the blue, the cars speeding by, the faces rising up, the now, the not, forever, anymore. Like that. Just like that.

We live as if made to be here. What illusion. Now, I feel the contingency of the physical world, and, so, me, like a house not of cards, but of numbers, Pythagorean metaphysics with one digit wrong: the numbers tumble from their scaffolding and all the universe disappears. Mine anyway. Or when I freaked out on acid at 17 and the worst of the many nightmares: the big bang reversed, the universe contracting on itself, wrapping back around and condensing until it is shrinking to nothingness again, folding in upon my regressing fetus, in dark, starless space, and the end of me.

I gaze dreadfully at the now unnatural reality that surrounds and threatens to swallow me, at any instant end me. I am Roquentin, and I am sick with the world. The world is changed, and I am changed.

We imagine – from whence do we imagine, what personal self-delusion, cultural sedative, civilizational lie – that if we are lucky enough not to die young, by accident or illness, not to lose our hearing, our sight, our legs or arms, that the course of our pleasure in being alive, however great or small, will proceed on a continuum of breadth and intensity, no matter what impediments may temporarily rise up.

How many decades of People Magazine covers are there?

“His Despair Behind Him, He’s Back in the Fast Lane.”

“Her Sorrows Over, She’s – Back, and Better Than Ever.”

Life interrupted (life!), but never off its course in the pleasure of it, never altered in its path to fulfillment. Not to live forever altered. Unalterably altered.

We love, great loves, we lose, great loves. What is the boy now, who has lost his ball? We think we shall never love again, have cause to love life again. An ultimate shaking grief.

But in death, the worst, the starkest, most despairing, most ungiving of words, you may cry forever, pound your fists and kick your feet – the epistemology of loss:

Irretrievable.

Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark
Floor of the harbour. .

***

Two months after my father’s death, I completed what had been an aborted journey before it, to that Ukrainian shtetl from which he came – Orinin. At the end of my visit, on a gentle slope that was the best I could figure from what he had told me of where his home had stood, I read aloud a simple story of Mac’s life, his flight, and the return of his youngest child nearly eighty-five years later. I buried in the soil on that spot a time capsule of his life, a copy of the story and images of the family life he got to have, long into the future and far removed from the early pain and the ultimate effort to deny it to him.

I sat down on the slope of the small hill, just above where I had buried the capsule. With the shovel in my hands, I faced the tree on which I had posted the story of Dad. I could see ahead of me, to the right, the high hill on which were buried, their headstones looted, somewhere, Zakiah, my great-grandmother, and who knew however many other long gone and distant ancestors. Straight ahead, passing behind the cemetery hill, was the second of the two roads Mac had remembered to me, the one that led to a lake and a waterfall.

Peripherally, I could see that Julia, down now by the car with our interpreter and our driver, was taking photos of me. They were waiting for me, waiting for me to be complete with what I was doing. I was trying to imagine. As I have all my life, I was trying to imagine what was gone and had come before me, in order to make it present and no longer gone. When would I be done? When would my conjuring be enough? When would I be satisfied?

– when my father, as an eight year old boy, perhaps, leading a pair of horses to drink after their long ride to Kamenets-Podolsk and back, was actually walking down the road below me?

How long could I make the others wait while I tried to perform this magic? They would wait. They would not begrudge me. I had come a third of the way around the world for this moment. They would wait. But how long could I sit there, staring out at the rear of Orinin in 2005 – looking not that different from Orinin in 1910 – but living in my head? When would be enough? Could there ever be enough?

What was it, in fact, now, that I wanted?

I stared out at the scene before me. What did I want, sitting on that hill? How long could I remain before the call of life, the next moment, the need to pick up and go on – because we need to pick up and go on – led me to rise and walk away, probably forever?

I wanted us all to be together again. I wanted to return to some original state, whatever, whenever that was. It would be Queens Village, the garden apartment, I suppose, for me, maybe for all of us, our father coming home each night to that outer borough oasis with the daily paper and tales of the city, our mother still mothering us but moving on, finally, to a career of her own, and the three children for the last time all living together, before my sister was married. Strange, in a way, that I might choose that time, when I was so unformed and unhappy, when I would not discover anything that might be called happiness, or the self I had always been, for decades. But how do we know it is happiness and our own selves we really long for? I wanted to go home to when we had all been together, no matter what each of us had been alone. I wanted to go home all the way to Orinin and my father’s childhood, to the great-grandparents I had never known and who had led lives that could barely have been more different from my own.

Yet… who knew what surprises there might be? Did Zakiah – after my father watered the horses and they were stabled, after dinner was done, and Aikah, my father’s aunt, and Golda, his sister, and he were asleep – did Zakiah sit down by the fire for some last, quiet waking minutes and… write? Did he argue with some Jews on the streets of Kamenets-Podolsk, after dropping off a fare, that there would be no Messiah because there was no God, because even if there had been a God, he had been murdered in the shtetls of the Pale a thousand times – a hundred thousand times – the Bal Shem Tov be damned, and maybe that’s why our father never went to school, because there were only the Jewish schools and to hell with them, they taught two thousand years of nonsense, put a horse’s reins in your hands and you’ll live. Maybe I wanted to go home before Orinin, to Germany, from where those Adlers must have come, or to the town of that Tatar who probably raped some ancestor of mine during a pogrom I have the eyes I do. Or I wanted to go back to that first gene that was my own – no, that first gene – and look it in the face and see the mirror of the world.

What did I want?

I wanted that my father had not died.

I wanted that all my powers of imagination and all my talents – all those years of thinking and dreaming and inward turning, to see into the essence of things – would bring him back and make him undead (I didn’t care about “longevity” or the natural course of anything) so that the journey, as I had put it after our mother died, would go on forever.

I wanted that the first and last, the only natural barrier between me and my own coming end had not been removed.

I wanted that I would not die.

I wanted that our family would all be together again, in those essential moments of who we were to each other, early and late, trying and failing, learning, always becoming and never ending.

How long could I sit there and make it so?

***

Our dinner just ended, my phone had rung now five times, an unknown caller leaving no messages. How it annoyed me. And then the sound of a message this time. I listened. It was Anne, my brother’s wife. Could I call her on Jeff’s cell phone, she asked in an even voice.

I had barely ended the call and begun to form the thought something must be wrong before my sister’s number showed up on the screen, and I knew something was.

A heart attack?

“Sharyn?”

“Have you spoken to Anne?”

“I just listened to a voice mail asking me to call.”

I had stood from the sofa, was making my way for some reason to my desk.

“Are you sitting down?” Sharyn asked.

I had sat down.

“What?” I said urgently. “What?”

“Jeffrey’s dead.”

My head sunk toward the desk as the howl of protest rose up in me along with my fist, the fear that I had kept buried, sometimes withdrew to hold and worry like a bead, then quickly stuffed away again, all the fears, the worries, the anxieties that rise up in a mind, in a life, that never come to pass, surely this was meant to be one too –

No! No! No! My fist pounded the desk with every growling, aching howl of agony.

Fist pounding, right first, up, down with every scream, No! No! No!

Julia ran to me, through her arms around me in tears.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

We sobbed, we shook, we lamented. Jeffrey, dear Jeffrey.

We gathered ourselves. I told Sharyn we would go the emergency room, where Anne awaited us. I stood near the door before we left, as Julia collected some last items we might need, my body wracked inside the way it had been the night in Paris I nearly choked to death and Julia saved my life with the Heimlich, the way I had felt in the emergency room at UCLA, after my car was totaled by the woman who ran the light, before Jeff came to get me, when I thought I was about to go into shock, though I did not.

I thought I would have a heart attack myself.

I asked Julia to drive. I called my department chair from the car and asked her to cancel my classes for me. I turned to the window.

From Marina del Rey to West Hills in the San Fernando Valley, thirty to forty minutes at that time of night, to think, to sit stunned in the well of the passenger seat and watch the black, bleak profiles of the Santa Monica Mountains pass on either side, eternal witnesses to the long procession of the dead and grieving.

We turned into a parking lot we had visited many times. All the illnesses of my parents’ declining years, taking my mother home to die in her bed, standing around his hospital bed with Sharyn, Jeff, and Anne to watch my father die, his eyes staring up at us in his final silent glowing moments, shining with unaccountable beauty.

Now Jeff.

As we walked from the car to the emergency room entrance, Julia held my arm to brace me. These were the last moments of its being only hypothetical, a tale told of the end that comes to all of us, even those we love, even us, the myth of creation and destruction we worship and deny. But now, once we walked through that door and down the corridor…

I pulled aside the curtain. Jeff lay on his right side, a tube still in his throat. So still. Behind him, to his right, sat his oldest friend and his wife. In a chair by his head, Anne sat. I stared. Just as with my mother and my father, one feels in an instant – faster than an instant, it is in the tissue of life – the difference between sleep and death, the cold absence. The life is of the body, but the person is not the body, however we may adore and worship it.

Anne called me to her chair. You sit with him, she said.

I took her place. I reached out with my right hand and caressed my brother’s cheek and hair as I would never have done in life. I leaned in close, repeating my love in whispers to his vacant gaze. For what I had observed from above, I could now see clearly and directly. Jeff’s left eye had remained half open, and it was staring now right at me.

AJA

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The poet Stewart Kestenbaum, who lives in Maine, lost his brother Howard in the World Trade Center towers on 9/11.

A Prayer for the Dead

The light snow started late last night and continued
all night long while I slept and could hear it occasionally
enter my sleep, where I dreamed my brother
was alive again and possessing the beauty of youth, aware
that he would be leaving again shortly and that is the lesson
of the snow falling and of the seeds of death that are in everything
that is born: we are here for a moment
of a story that is longer than all of us and few of us
remember, the wind is blowing out of someplace
we don’t know, and each moment contains rhythms
within rhythms, and if you discover some old piece
of your own writing, or an old photograph,
you may not remember that it was you and even if it was once you,
it’s not you now, not this moment that the synapses fire
and your hands move to cover your face in a gesture
of grief and remembrance.

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It isn’t that you boycott.  It’s what you boycott. And why. As the ends don’t justify the means (most people would agree), ends don’t illegitimize the means either. Reasons matter. Aims matter. We can pursue good ends through bad means, and for bad reasons. We can likewise use a good – or at least neutral – means toward a bad end. In that case, it is the end that is bad, not the means.

Categorical confusions – where would public debate be without them?

I don’t argue the efficacy of boycotts here, one way or the other. That is another discussion, and lots of people have opinions on that. I don’t argue that boycotts should be like ballots, in the daily toolbox of democracy. That would be the end of community, like everyone not speaking to everyone else.

That make silence a bad thing?

My point is that boycotts, at their best – meaning, pursued for good and compelling reasons, to achieve just goals – are actually, though performed in extremis, an expression of community.

Community: commonality, leading at times to joint action.

That can be bad, like shunning the different: small towns at their worst – or, let us say, states legislating inequality. But community, obviously, can be a good thing, too. Why the whole history of civilization is an expression of faith in the value of community. And communities acting together in expression of their values, to praise and, when they feel a significant boundary has been unacceptably crossed, to censure – community is conservative. It conserves and promotes the values and vision that bind us together, even in the toleration of, the invigoration from, difference. It also unites, when pushed too far, in spurning what would tear it apart.

What, then, of the effort, as it has been called, of a “secondary boycott” against Rush Limbaugh – a boycott not against a business directly, Limbaugh himself, by encouraging listeners to abandon him, but against the sponsors, the businesses, who advertise on his show? According to Bradley A. Smith in the Wall Street Journal,

secondary boycotts have long been recognized as harmful to civil society. They rend the social fabric by making it difficult for people to simply live their lives.

This is remarkably selective – though hardly any longer surprising – conservative social analysis. Produce an American social and economic system over the past three plus decades that enriches the very rich and corporations beyond any previous measure and destroys the American working class dream, in job security, economic advancement and security, health and education, and when the shat upon rise up from the stink, accuse them and their public advocates of waging “class warfare.” “Rend the social [and governing] fabric” for more than thirty years, beginning with Newt Gingrich’s Conservative Opportunity Society, despoil the public conversation for over twenty years with Rush Limbaugh’s vile and divisively ugly discourse, and when a tactic is chosen to fight back against this cancer on community, charge it with being harmful to civil society.

This form of offhand faux innocence riddles Smith’s article. ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) is described as

a nonpartisan nonprofit that provides a meeting ground for conservative state legislators to share ideas.

“Nonpartisan,” no doubt, because it also serves the agenda of all those conservatives in the Democratic Party. And, of course, ALEC is not “a meeting ground for conservative state legislators to share ideas”:  it has, instead, a professional staff that writes model legislation for dissemination to GOP state legislatures in order to promote a uniformly reactionary agenda. State and local governance, indeed. This is rather a new form of federalism – outsourced market-financed stealth reactionary federalism.

Achieving contradictory dissimulation just between the start and midpoint, and completely misinforming over the length of a single appositive phrase should earn the writer some kind of award.

Target, Smith further informs us, was itself targeted for boycott, for contributing to the campaign of

Tom Emmer, a pro-business candidate for governor of Minnesota who also happened to oppose same-sex marriage. [Emphasis added]

“Also happened.” Like how he just happened to be bald or five feet ten. Marriage equality and all the rest of gay equal protections are the civil rights issue of our time, and the kind of movement that conservatives – always swimming against the rising tide of human dignity – invariably oppose. So it delivers only what has become the usual conservative hypocritical con for Smith to invoke the boycotts of the Black Civil Rights movement in the desperate argument against the Limbaugh boycott.

All these examples are what are called “secondary boycotts”—attempts to influence the actions of the target by exerting pressure on a third party. Secondary boycotts should not be confused with primary boycotts. A decision not to patronize a business that discriminates on the basis of race is an example of a primary boycott. Primary boycotts—used to great effect during the Civil Rights Movement—have a long and often laudatory history.

The laudatory history of civil rights boycotts and the Black Civil Rights movement is one, during its contemporaneous actuality, of course, that conservatives of the time uniformly opposed, often violently. The patron saint of modern conservatism, William Buckley as soon as a year after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, would nonetheless editorialize “Why The South Must Prevail.” Four years later, he could still assert,

Should we resort to convulsive measures that do violence to the traditions of our system in order to remove the forms of segregation in the South? …I say no.

The attempt to distinguish, in ethical and civil legitimacy, between primary and secondary boycotts is a categorical casuistry, the now usual ruse by which conservatives draw on the historic moral achievements of liberalism and attempt to co-opt them, use them as a buttress for whatever is their current resistance to an expansion of equal rights and protections. So it is with Smith’s distinction.

Would we now, in the moral afterglow of the Black Civil Rights achievements, claim that a corporate supporter of a segregationist enterprise – a restaurant, a bus company – would have been undeserving of the same censure as its beneficiary, should have been spared the same opprobrium? How else best to express that communal censure but though the same economic sanction, of consumer business both withheld and discouraged? That is what worked in those glory days Smith invokes. It was not some sudden conversion to the integrationist cause that led the Montgomery bus company ultimately to reverse itself.

In 1955, in the midst of the bus boycott, all three members of the Montgomery, Alabama city commission announced on television that they had joined the [White] Citizens’ Council.

It was the economic pain.

Opponents of the StopRush Project argued first that the campaign was an effort in censorship. Smith makes a passing attempt at this argument.

Boycotts are particularly unattractive when intended to squelch speech. In each of the previous examples, boycotts were organized to harm the target economically so that the target would pressure the original speaker to, well, shut up. The power of ideas is abandoned for the power of economic coercion.

I responded to this misconception of censorship here and here.

Rather than censorship, by a “government, media outlet, or other controlling body,” it is economic pressure: politics attempting to work in the marketplace…. Limbaugh, who, like you and I, has a right to cry “slut” and “feminazi” and “magic negro” on almost any street corner, has no right to be on the radio. He is there because the economics support him in being there: he has enough supportive listeners to earn him his commercial sponsorship.

Rather than censorship, the issue of Rush Limbaugh – of Rush Limbaugh not simply speaking his mind or what passes for it, but of Rush Limbaugh on commercially sponsored public airwaves – is precisely one of economics and of American community standards.

In one sense, this is, indeed, the marketplace, and a marketplace of ideas and speech too, and conservatives should have no difficulty with it in principle.

This is precisely what the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision affirmed, that the expenditure of money is expression, which may not be constrained – and by corporations, too. I wrote,

In the Citizens United decision, in the opposition to public funding of campaigns for government office, conservatives have upheld the claim that the expenditure of money is speech and may not be restricted. Liberals reject this claim, but must live, for now, in that land. In the full rhetoric of political contention, money – who has it and who wants it, what they will do for it and what they spend it on – is part of our language of inducing cooperation. It is what purchases Limbaugh his megaphone when other, better, smarter, more constructive voices are without it. It purchases his megaphone, not because he is making better arguments, but because he popularly plays, like all demagogues, to fear and anger, and the customers a sponsor has, with their purchases, speak louder than those the sponsor doesn’t know it is losing in the quiet withdrawal of their business.

As I argued in that second post, while some liberals, and certainly his supporters, may see a campaign against Limbaugh as an opportunity to vanquish a political opponent, many liberals – and others too, no doubt – are genuinely offended by him, and deplore the effect he has had on the national political culture. His conservative fans, like any partisans, may love the way he sticks it to what they perceive as liberal shibboleths, pieties, and hypocrisies. How many of them, though, not seduced by anger and alienation, can look at themselves in a midnight mirror and think with honesty – without the rationalization of who else does it too – that the divisive contempt he has injected into the national culture for over two decades has been good for the nation?

What else can community values mean, but to affirm that Limbaugh has every right in the Constitution and in greater principle to say the things he does, but that much of what he says is hateful and deplorable, and the community will not sponsor him in saying it and in disseminating his ugly message? The community will not sponsor him, and if you, commercial advertiser, will sponsor him yourself, supporting and advancing what the community finds objectionable, then we will withhold our support from you too.

Expression is not only the spoken word, but the unspoken word. Silence is speech too: the assent not given, the promise not made, the agreement not offered. If the expenditure of money is speech, then the refusal to expend money is speech too. If cash may be donated to PACs and Super PACs for the purposes of advertisement persuasion – not simply the expression of one’s own views, but the effort, secondarily, to influence the views of others – then it may, conversely, be withheld, and one may just as rightfully and reasonably seek to influence others to similarly withhold the expenditure of their money. If corporations – only through the craven pursuit of consumers where they converge, or through the expression of their executives’ political views by sponsoring a political voice like Limbaugh’s – will enter the public forum, then they can expect to receive reply. They seek to leverage their influence and their profit among the many customer-listeners of a single show; their critics may seek to leverage their influence by persuading others, beyond only themselves, to speak their silence too, by choosing to pocket their own cash in rejection not only of Limbaugh, but all those who support him.

“People have a right not to do business with companies or individuals,” Smith nearly concludes. They do, indeed. And they have a right to influence others – or try to – through words or with money. Or the withholding of either. It’s all expression, it’s all speech, it’s all good. So Smith and I reach some agreement in the end, and we got there without either calling the other a slut or a magic Negro or some such. Because talk like that could rend the social fabric, and neither of us wants that.

AJA

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My parents were fortunate enough to live long lives, my mother, Helen, until 88, my father even longer. For the last eleven years of my mother’s life, after some decades of their wandering and separation, the three children had come together again in the same city. The birds had flocked together once more. Mother and father took wing to join them, and all flew home together – a second family life less complicated than the first, unburdened by grievances, by then let go, lifted aloft by love and joy in relationship. It was the gift of all our lives.

One element in this experience, different from that of friends who lost parents much earlier in life, was the that of persisting in relationship with parents many long years after the original basis of that relationship had passed, even, in many respects by the end, been reversed. This is a poem I wrote about that experience, while my parents were still alive. It was, then, “for my parents, grown old.”  It’s for my mother today.

A Geology of Birds

Water has worn us, like more time’s mountain
flow we could ever have seen coming
left us on this present bank like stones
found in near relation on the ground.
The inexorable flood rounds us
apart, our mineral origin
matter only for geologist’s eyes.

Who would have thought
the birth cries, stone’s cries
water forgot, we’d forget?
A mother’s songs of deliverance drift
homeless in the burbling stream
a father’s tillering hand lies idle
and ritual kisses
try to shape from lips
an early, pressing need
like the air we’d gasp for lack of.

But need
like the nested sparrow’s
gaping mouth, wild with hunger
for the seed of all that follows
need departs, a winter’s calling
and we fly, stones into birds
into another hemisphere
so far from any beginning
nearer even the youngest’s end
riding currents we cannot name
feeling, as we seek what calls us
we see a wing we knew.

AJA

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Music: Tim Story, “The Daughers,” from Shadowplay.
Art: Elizabeth Colomba 

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Giving Los Angeles (or West Coast) cool jazz a whole new meaning. These guys simply take wing.

The Dave Brubeck Quartet on ”The Lively Ones” television show, first broadcast July 25, 1962.

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The question is who we are to each other. It’s at the beginning and end of every political argument, regardless of whether anyone raises it. Are we lone figures passing on a cold tundra, or do we pause to stand, and even stay, in fellowship? And what will break it? Every other consideration is secondary.

Derek Thompson at the Atlantic, who often delivers brief economic insights with surprising graphs, the other day offered this one by way of Michael Cembalest of JP Morgan. Cembalest is not an optimist regarding the European Union, and this graphs presents just another reason for it.

What Thompson says is this:

The euro zone has Greece. The United States has Mississippi. Or Missouri.

The difference between the U.S. and Europe is that when the Greek economy “pulls a Mississippi” (or perhaps I should say, when Mississippi “pulls a Greece”), the EU and the U.S. have 180-degree opposite reactions. Over here, we calmly write checks to Mississippi in the form of Medicaid and unemployment insurance, no questions asked. Europe has no comparable “Peripheraid” for its weak peripheral states. Instead, it has chaos.

….

When you hear commentators say, “the euro zone must begin to transition toward a fiscal union,” what they are saying, in human-speak, is that the Europe needs to be more like the United States, with balanced budget laws for its individual members and seamless fiscal transfers from the rich countries to the poor, to protect the indigent, old, and sick, no matter where they reside.

The Germans call this sort of thing “a permanent bailout.” We just call it “Missouri.”

There is much to be considered another time about the whole historically accidental nature of states, as in “The United –,”, but for now I will make a different observation. What Thompson neologizes above as Peripheraid – fiscal transfers from more prosperous states to the less, as more is paid to the federal government in taxes than is received in federal aid – would fit comfortably under the rubric of from each according to its ability, to each according to its need.

Just in case Ma and Pa Tea Party didn’t have enough to keep them up at night. Jethro is reaching for the shotgun.

How curious is it, too, that the U.S. “donor” states in the graphic example above – California, Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York – are states in which political support for the nature of this kind of economic, and other, relationship is likely to be highest, whereas the recipient states – Missouri, Tennessee, Kansas – are among those more likely to reject the philosophy upon which they happen to be benefiting, without, so far, a march on the local federal building and the burning of Obama in effigy.

The European Union, in contrast, envisioned itself, fundamentally, as a union in prosperity. How far its multi-state economic alliance imagined itself, beyond a business joint venture of nations, to be a fellowship of peoples is being tested. If the understanding is the former – and there is little reason to think most Europeans feel a greater commitment to each other than that – then it is easy, regardless of economic theory and sense, to understand the Germans, or any other nation, taking the position with Greece that it has.

“You overspent. Your were profligate. We’ll bail you out. But you’ll do it on our terms, and on terms that don’t put us at risk too.”

On what basis do the Finns and Germans feel any differently than that towards the Greeks and the Irish?

On what basis do Americans toward each other?

AJA

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Losing yourself in the moment. Living in the moment. Living by losing yourself in the moment. Being in time.

Some good writing from Tim Kreider.

When I’m balanced on two thin wheels at 30 miles an hour, gauging distance, adjusting course, making hundreds of unconscious calculations every second, that idiot chatterbox in my head is kept too busy to get a word in. I’ve heard people say the same thing about rock-climbing: how it shrinks your universe to the half-inch of rock surface immediately in front of you, this crevice, that toehold. Biking is split-second fast and rock-climbing painstakingly slow, but both practices silence the noise of the mind and render self-consciousness blissfully impossible. You become the anonymous hero of that old story, Man versus the Universe. Your brain’s glad to finally have a real job to do, instead of all that trivial busywork. You are all action, no deliberation. You are forced, under pain of death, to quit all that silly ideation and pay attention. It’s meditation at gunpoint.

I’m convinced these are the conditions in which we evolved to thrive: under moderate threat of death at all times, brain and body fully integrated, senses on high alert, completely engaged with our environment. It is, if not how we’re happiest — we’re probably happiest in a hot tub with a martini and a very good naked friend — how we are most fully and electrically alive. Of course we can’t sustain this state of mind for too long. People who go through their whole lives operating on impulse tend to end up in jail. We are no longer purely animals, living only in the moment; we are the creatures who live in time, as salamanders live in fire, prisoners of memory and imagination, tortured with dread and regret. That other, extra-temporal perspective is not the whole reality of our condition. It’s more like the view from the top of the Empire State Building, of people as infinitesimal dots circulating ceaselessly through a grid. Eventually we have to descend back to street level, rejoin the milling mass and take up our lives; you lock up your bike and become hostage to the hours again. But it’s at those moments that I become briefly conscious of what I actually am — a fleeting entity stripped of ego and history in an evanescent present, like a man running in frames of celluloid, his consciousness flickering from one instant to the next.

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Alan Johnson has a bracing roundup in the May-June issue of World Affairs of the latest in communist theorizing. Entitled The New Communism: Resurrecting the Utopian Delusion, it begins so:

A specter is haunting the academy—the specter of “new communism.” A worldview recently the source of immense suffering and misery, and responsible for more deaths than fascism and Nazism, is mounting a comeback; a new form of left-wing totalitarianism that enjoys intellectual celebrity but aspires to political power.

Johnson argues that the latest “ flirtation with the notion of left-fascism” needs to be taken seriously. He focuses on leading proponents “ Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek and the French philosopher and ex-Maoist Alain Badiou,” but includes as well the work of

the authors of the influential trilogyEmpire, Multitude, Commonwealth, the American Michael Hardt of Duke University and the Italian Marxist Toni Negri; the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo (who recently declared that he has positively “reevaluated” The Protocols of the Elders of Zion); Bologna University professor and ex-Maoist Alessandro Russo; and the professor of poetry at the European Graduate School (and another ex-Maoist) Judith Balso. Other leading voices include Alberto Toscano, translator of Alain Badiou, a sociology lecturer at Goldsmiths in London, and a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism; the literary critic and essayist Terry Eagleton; and Bruno Bosteels from Cornell University.

Extracting from the writing of many, Johnson successfully captures a characteristic vatic logorrhoea that is heightened by the convergence of Marxist rhetoric and contemporary theorizing.  In our current state, people are

“excluded from their own substance” – Zizek.

But a new communism will be

“an egalitarian discipline of anti-property, anti-hierarchy and anti-authority principles” - Bosteels.

It will lead to

“a world that has been freed from the law of profit and private interest” – Badiou.

The philosophical vacuity rises far above even these formulations, however, to mystical heights of baggy rhetoric.

Gianni Vattimo sees a communist future in “an undisciplined social practice which shares with anarchism the refusal to formulate a system, a constitution, [or] a positive ‘realistic’ model according to traditional political methods.” Instead, Vattimo thinks that “communism must have the courage to be a ‘ghost.’”

Jean-Luc Nancy ups Vattimo.

The common means space, spacing, distance and proximity, separation and encounter. But this ‘meaning’ is not a meaning. It opens precisely beyond any meaning. To that extent, it is allowed to say that ‘communism’ has no meaning, goes beyond meaning: here, where we are.

Beyond this hall of verbal mirrors, says Johnson, or maybe as its ground, (or as Zizek might like to formulate it, where the idea is excluded from the substance of the word, the word from the substance of the world),

the refusal to face up to the criminal record of actually existing communism as a social system, let alone stare into that abyss until one’s politics and theory are utterly reshaped by it, tells us that the new communism remains within the orbit of leftist totalitarianism.

For so it is for Badiou that

failure is nothing more than the history of the proof of the hypothesis.

One needn’t read into all this, however; the new communists are frank about their allegiances and intent. Johnson quotes Zizek from Living in the End Times:

The only “realistic” prospect is to ground a new political universality by opting for the impossible, fully assuming the place of the exception, with no taboos, no a priori norms (“human rights,” “democracy”), respect for which would prevent us from “resignifying” terror, the ruthless exercise of power, the spirit of sacrifice . . . if this radical choice is decried by some bleeding-heart liberals as Linksfaschismus [left-wing fascism], so be it!

According to Johnson,

Zizek argues that the mistake of the left was to accept “the basic coordinates of liberal democracy (‘democracy’ versus ‘totalitarianism’)” and suggests that we “fearlessly . . . violate these liberal taboos,” adding, “So what if one is accused of being ‘anti-democratic,’ ‘totalitarian’ . . . ?”

Johnson is quoting here from the in-your-face entitled Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? in which Zizek, I’ve written,

attempts to render empty and harmless the concept of totalitarianism, [calling it] a mental “stopgap” inhibiting thought. It is a device used by “conformist liberal scoundrels”… for the purpose of “blackmailing us into renouncing all serious radical engagement.”

I have another favored citation to offer, from Zizek’s preface to The Zizek Reader, one that reveals Zizek’s intellectual attractions as well the now long-noted guiding spirit of communism in practice.

[W]hat I find theoretically and politically engaging in the religious legacy is not the abstract messianic promise of some redemptive Otherness, but, on the contrary, religion in its properly dogmatic and institutional aspect.

The Soviet edifice, and within, Zizek as court jester theorist.

Before he’s shot.

And a ruthless clerk takes power.

AJA

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Outside of war, no modern state has ever been subject to such an attack on its legitimacy and existence as has the state of Israel. Indeed, the concerted transnational political challenge to Israeli legitimacy – given the longstanding open-ended conditions of military and other violent conflict against Israel – may be truly conceived, to invert Clausewitz, to represent politics as a continuation of war by other means.

It is a truth of conflict between peoples manifested in history that groups in conflict will hold to genuinely differing – which is not to say equally true – perceptions of the grounds of their conflict and that most members of warring groups will demand, up until some point of human and political exhaustion has been reached, that the conflict be maintained until the ascendancy of their claims has been achieved. Outside parties will commonly remain uninvested. Non-state actors, such as expatriated descendents embedded in other cultures, may feel, and even at times act on, sympathies with one group (Irish-Catholic supporters of the IRA in the U.S., for instance), and allied states may materially support their sides in unexhausted conflicts that promote an interest of the ally, but overwhelmingly it is the case, and enunciated position of almost any outsider, that whatever terms of settlement to the local conditions of conflict are acceptable to the warring groups themselves – the invested parties – are certainly acceptable to the outside world.

All the rest of us just want peace – so glad you two could find a way to get along.

One of the conditions that muddies consideration of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, and now raises profound obstacles to its settlement, is the purposeful, strategic masking of hostile intent among outside parties – in attitudes unsympathetic to Israel’s founding and to its historical conditions of conflict, and that are actually directed at the state’s dissolution – under the guise of peace and justice politics. Of contemporary political charlatanry there is no greater representation.

This simple bad faith, then, stands as a first condition in analyzing arguments over the nature and possible resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – that while some disagreements are inherent in the conflicting perceptions and demands of the parties to the conflict, some are actually developed and maintained by outside interests that, while pretending to seek resolution, actually seek to advance the conflict to a point of victory by the Palestinian side. In this manner, in fact, many ideologically-driven outside agents and their supporters, while draping themselves in the moral finery of peace and justice and elaborately and insistently articulating its vocabulary, actually serve as proponents of the conditions – the disputes – of continued conflict. Then, when that conflict periodically becomes heightened and armed, these fake advocates of peace will blame Israel and, in extraordinary gestures of more heightened bad faith, fail to perceive, certainly acknowledge, their own responsibility. The Palestinians and Israelis are, in a sense, supposed to be, in the very nature of their uprising in conflict, angry and unyielding with each other – until the point of some hoped for compromise. Empathetic nannas from the U.S. and U.K. and human rights champions all over the world, on the other hand, are supposed to be calling for compassion compromise and an end to the belligerence, not spraying one fighter’s face in the corner and whispering in his ear, “You can win this thing.”

One of the first signs, a blaring announcement, of a third party’s promotion of continued conflict is in its perpetuation of the historical argument. We know the path to resolution of international conflicts is not by reaching agreement, or winning the argument, on the historical origins of a dispute. That resolution is known as argumentum ad baculum ( the appeal to force) and is generally reached through war. Such is the only promise of continuing disputes about original claims and offenses in history. Nonetheless, as the basis for mischaracterizations of contemporary conditions, ongoing historical dispute forms the foundation of left anti-Israel campaigning, and postcolonial ideology draws it all together.

The postcolonial prism perversely distorts the creation of Israel – the return of political and national autonomy to the oldest continually oppressed and persecuted minority in the world – as a Western colonial enterprise. In order to make this claim, however, it is necessary to deny the Jewish historical connection to the land that became Israel. But while the consequent fraudulent claims about Jews, so common to Jewish history – such as that Ashkenazi Jews are really the descendents of the Khazars and not the Jews of ancient Israel at all – are many, the contrasting historical evidence of Jewish origins, such as multiple genetic studies, is overwhelming. Still the denial of Jewish origins is common, though as a direct lie, more commonly by Palestinians and other Arabs. The Western left representation is more rhetorical, more of a piece with a broader ideological scheme, and more devious. Increasingly, left anti-Israel activists – against the recent historical phenomenon of Ashkenazi Jews retuning to Israel from Europe, and thus superficially characterizable as outsiders and colonizers – label the Palestinian population, in contrast, as indigenous.

In international policy, the definition of an indigenous people is so controversial that the U.N. will not label as an actual definition those identifying characteristics that its Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues has established as explanatory of the concept of indigenous people – even though the establishment of a class and the identification of distinguishing characteristics for a subset of that class is the functional practice of developing a definition. The third and fourth characteristics, then, note the following:

Indigenous peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of societies now prevailing in those territories, or parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal systems.

Manjusha S. Nair has observed that

territoriality is premised on originality, since original inhabitants have more claims on a territorial space… Hence, indigeneity becomes a field of contestation. Some are born with it; others imagine it as an ethnic belonging. Empirically, the claim of indigeneity is always contested since few human groups inhabit a space from the beginning. The groups that claim indigeneity associate themselves with the original inhabitants in quite imaginative ways though they exist many generations later. [Emphasis added]

Obviously, by these parameters, both Jews and Palestinian Arabs have indigenous claims to make. European, Ottoman, and other empires traded colonial rule of the Middle East for two millennia while Jews and Arabs throughout, like all subjects of imperial conquest, suffered under the rule of others. Surely there is no active contestation of indigeneity that reaches farther back in time than the one in which these two groups engage. Surely, too, however one may reasonably characterize an ongoing effort to deny the claim of either, it cannot be as one directed at conflict resolution and peace. Yet beyond the unsurprising, belligerent claims of some Jews and more Palestinians that the claim of the other is false, the like claim by some on the far left, dressed in the postcolonial vocabulary of corrective justice, is as ideologically-driven an intellectual fraud as has been foisted on the field of human rights since the collapse of the communist world. Further, it is a political abuse of the conquered and dominated peoples postcolonial theorizing purports to champion.

It is an unfortunate truth that many indigenous peoples around the world were fooled for that second time or saw history offer its second repetition as long ago, let’s say, as when the Spanish ordered in 1599 that every surviving male of the Acoma Pueblo who was over twenty-five be punished for his resistance by the loss of his right foot. The iterations of deception over the centuries since represent nothing less than the nightmare of history. There is no degree of distrust, no contempt for Western acculturation that might be begrudged any indigenous people conquered in, but still surviving the colonial onslaught. This is the fundamental historical precondition from which to draw a postcolonial theory. It takes little imagination to appreciate how such theorizing would attract politicized indigenous men and women to the full range of far left and postcolonial political perceptions, including – professed and politicized as it now manipulatively is in the rhetoric of colonial dispossession and difference – that of Israel-Palestine. The crueler truth is that the whole maneuver stands one more time for the same exploitation, the colonizing by Western ideologues, for their own entirely different propaganda purposes against Israel, of the true politics of indigeneity, pursued on behalf of peoples who do not already have 21 states of their own.

So manipulative, confused, and incoherent is the appropriation of the language of postcolonialism and indigeneity to the propaganda war against Israel that its perpetrators fail to recognize the inner contradictions of it. They focus almost exclusively in their manufactured colonial construct on the Ashkenazi returnees to Israel from Europe, ignoring the land’s persistent Jewish population and that from surrounding Arab territories and nations. The long Diaspora is used, practically and conceptually, to alienate Jews from their own territorial origin, their own indigeneity. See, for instance, the ignorant example, easily repeatable, of Helen

Thomas calling for Jews to “return” to Poland. In the historical imagination of the anti-Israeli and the frequently anti-Jewish, the long sojourn from home for the Jews has entailed the loss of their claim to that home. Note, then, below, the exceptional identification by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, of who exactly constitutes a Palestinian refugee.

The operational definition of a Palestine refugee is any person whose “normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948 and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.”

Palestine refugees are persons who fulfil the above definition and descendants of fathers fulfilling the definition. [Emphasis added]

Recall from the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues above the identifying focus on “ancestral territories” and the preservation of “ethnic identity.” Consider how Nair referred to the common practice for peoples claiming indigeneity to claim it even though “they exist many generations later.”

The Palestinians claim a right of return even for descendents who never lived on the land. Why should it be different for Jews? How many generations would need to pass before Palestinian Arabs would relinquish their identification with the land, their claim of an ancestral home, and a right of return? If the condition of conflict exiled Palestinians from the land and their autonomy for a thousand years, for two thousand, as history so long exiled Jews from theirs, would they accept their claims as forfeited?

Why should it be any different for Jews?

One may call those falsifiers of Jewish historical identity and claims many things – those propagandists of postcolonial rhetoric and exploiters of the true history of indigenous colonization – but one may not call them honest. And they are not proponents of peace and justice.

AJA

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“When I was young, I dreamed of a boy searching for God. Now I am old, and I dream of God searching for a boy.”

The focus of yesterday’s Jazz Is, the vocal standard “Nature Boy,” was written by eden ahbez. This is not like saying written by Johnny Mercer or  Jimmy Van Heusen. ahbez is not of the that world or tradition and remains an unlikely source of a jazz standard. I am not going to provide much in the way of biographical material because you will read some essentials from sources below, but when the complete unknown showed up at a Hollywood nightclub in 1948 to press his original song – music (a story for another day) and lyrics – on Nat King Cole, he looked like this.

As a teen hippie in the late 1960s, with hair, beard, and dress very similar to what you see of ahbez here, I recall vividly what even then was the outraged and repulsed response of so many around me, even in New York City – one reason our own name for ourselves was not hippie, but “freak.” It challenges the imagination to think of what the daily reaction was to ahbez circa 1948. This is a superficial consideration other than to point out how out, and historically ahead, of time ahbez was, though this fascinating blog about ahbez (who characteristically preferred his assumed name in lower case) offers access to information about both beat and hippie roots in “the emergence of primitivism, naturopathic medicine and eco consciousness as it traveled from 19^th Century Germany to the West Coast of the United States between WWI and WWII.”

My real interest today is in what we make of life like ahbez’, both in its radical unconventionality and in the way it flirted for so long around the line between an insistent and unfathomable private self and minor celebrity, with the machine that manufactures the latter seeming to bestow on a life the light of significance – of a “star.”  There are many photos of ahbez on the web and even videos. One of the latter is of an eccentric appearance he made on early television. Another, controversially, is of an encounter with him on the street when he was already quite old, in the 1990s. The disturbing essence of the latter is the no doubt innocent and admiring desire of the interviewer to capture the extraordinary in ahbez and how it conflicts – even in the presence of the video on YouTube – with ahbez’ gentle and perceptive, if spacey, disinclination to be reduced to a curiosity unreflective of his complexity as a single human being.

The first biographical excerpts below were written by someone who did not know ahbez, who appears to hold no animus toward him, but for whom ahbez’s exceptional life and personality are obviously, and maybe appropriately, skeptically, superficially oddball.

Eden Ahbez was one of the authentic fringe figures in space age pop, a one-shot wonder so dramatically different from anyone else that he became, perhaps, a greater legend than his accomplishments justify. Born a good Jewish boy in Brooklyn, he ended up cultivating a Christ-like appearance and reputation among the fruits and nuts of sunny southern California.

Just what brought him from Brooklyn in 1908 to Los Angeles in the mid-1940s awaits a better biographer’s investigation. He claimed to have been raised in an orphanage, and have crossed the U.S. on foot eight times by the age of 35. He settled in L.A., married a woman named Anna Jacobsen, slept with her in a sleeping bag in Griffith Park, claimed to survive as a vegetarian on three dollars a week, and stood on street corners in Hollywood lecturing on various Oriental forms of mysticism.

He emerged to public attention around 1948, when Nat King Cole recorded his song, “Nature Boy,” that told a fantasy of a “strange enchanted boy” “who wandered very far” only to learn that “the greatest gift” “was just to love and be loved in return.” Having no job and no fixed residence, he had plenty of time to hang around places like the Lincoln Theater, where he accosted Cole’s manager, Mort Ruby, insisting that Cole look at the soiled, rolled-up manuscript of “Nature Boy.”

….

Cole and Capitol didn’t know what to make of the song, so they sat on the record for months. Meanwhile, word-of-mouth about the tune began to grow from Cole’s live performances, and eventually Cole realized the record should be released. Unfortunately, no one had bothered to secure the rights to the song, and Ruby went off on a hunt to locate Ahbez. Legend has it that he found Ahbez and his wife camped out below the first “L” in the “HOLLYWOOD” sign. It turned out that Ahbez had given a half dozen people different shares of the publishing rights, and he ended up with virtually nothing. (After Cole died, his wife eventually gave the rights in toto back to Ahbez.)

Capitol released the tune as a “B” side, but when it first played on WNEW in New York, the station was bombarded by calls, and “Nature Boy” quickly became Capitol’s #1 single. Frank Sinatra, Dick Haymes, Sarah Vaughan, and others rushed out cover versions, with the Petrillo recording ban looming just days away.

Ahbez was a legend in Hollywood for his unusual life style. Even after he and Jacobsen had a son, they kept on living out under the stars, with not much more than a bicycle, their sleeping bags, and a juicer to their name. The story may be apochryphal, but it’s said that once, when Ahbez was being hassled by a cop who assumed from his wild appearance that he deserved to be hauled off to a mental institution, he remarked calmly, “I look crazy, but I’m not. And the funny thing is, that other people don’t look crazy, but they are.” The cop thought it over and responded, “You know bud, you’re right. If anybody gives you any trouble, let me know.”

Although Ahbez (or “ahbez,” as he insisted in being called, holding that capital letters should be reserved for the divine) later had another tune, “Land of Love,” recorded by Cole, he faded back onto the street corners until 1960, when Del-Fi Records boss Bob Keane brought him into the studio to record Eden’s Island. For this album, Ahbez recited his poetry/songs in front of a pseudo-Martin Denny jungle exoticaarrangement. Mickey McGowan has described this album as sounding like “Martin Denny had gotten together with Jack Kerouac” (if Kerouac had become a hermit instead of a beat, that is).

Ahbez popped up in a few different places during the 1960s, most prominently with Brian Wilson somewhere in the days before the legendary Pet Sounds and Smile albums were recorded. He cut another album,Echoes from Nature Boy, similar to Eden’s Island, putting his poems in musical settings, which was released posthumously. Ironically, he died in 1995 after being hit by a car.

Now here is a an already old account of ahbez, but already long after his notoriety, from the Los Angeles Times Calendar section in 1977, by a writer who was his sister-in-law.

(Here is a link to another blog, rich with material, by someone else who knew and revered ahbez.)

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For a marvelous contrast, sample both of the versions below of eden ahbez‘s famous jazz ballad, “Nature Boy.” The first is a classic, serenely tasteful rendition by Nat King Cole, who first performed and recorded the song. The second, longer performance is the stunningly inventive rendition arranged by Ross Burford and Connaitre Miller for Howard University’s Jazz Vocal Ensemble, Afro Blue.

And again…

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Development Ideology – Fraud or Nuisance? (II)

by Dercum Over

(Dercum Over recently completed a two-year service with the Peace Corps as a volunteer Healthy Schools coordinator. The Peace Corps officially discourages independent journalistic expression by serving volunteers, so he waited until his two years were concluded before writing this essay. Parts of it were published in the annual in-house Peace Corps Guatemala journal The Id in 2010. Publication of The Id was suspended without explanation in 2011. This is the second of two parts. You can read the first part here.)

“Cultural exchange starts with misunderstanding. We are not afraid to misunderstand.”
– Isamu Ohsuga of Byakko Sha, a Japanese Butoh dance troupe.

I bothered with yesterday’s reprise of development history because it has provided us with a contested inheritance. The prevailing ideological dogma in Postmodern development theory is now “sustainability,” and we intern fieldworkers in the Peace Corps daily endure the tyranny of the devolution of this concept. At least, I did.

My problem is not so much with the idea of a “sustainable” planning for the provision of those tractor parts, or in the case of Healthy Schools Guatemala the provision of replacement handles and washers for the faucets we install in our hand-washing stations. That seems like a good idea, probably should be part of any sensible plan for the future – oh wait, it already is!! What bonehead makes an intellectual law out of common sense? An ideologue does, that’s who. My problem here is with the tyranny of ideologies in general, and sustainability is simply the flavor of this era.

Because it is deemed more sustainable, we are instructed to include “host-country-nationals” (postmodern PC terminology for “people”) in a variety of unlikely behaviors. For instance, my job description as coordinator in the Healthy Schools program theoretically included supervisory status of water infrastructure maintenance in the school district’s several dozen schools. There is no district budget for maintenance; instead parents’ groups are responsible for basic repairs. Instead of simply fixing a broken PVC water pipe on a school campus, I was instructed to require sustainable behavior of the school and parents. In other words, I was to hold a two-hour meeting with the parents’ group and discuss it, write a budget, develop a consensus, and incidentally explain the concept of consensus to people who have been operating on consensus since before Columbus caught the clap.

It must have looked good on paper – train the trainers etc. But these are ordinary mortals, and when recently have you noticed your child’s grade school teacher, 30 students to her classroom and two kids of her own, wrestling with plumbing issues in the boy’s locker room?

A ten-minute job, the cost of repairing that broken tube was ½ Q – about six cents US.  The tube had been broken for 8 months, and this particular small community of parents prefers arguing to taking initiative, (not an uncommon community priority in Baltimore, Boston or Barstow, either.) I am an impatient ideologue, so I didn’t call the meeting; I fixed the damn tube so that the kids could start washing their hands again.

Incidentally, when I did that small repair job, it accidentally had the unintended but useful result of embarrassing the community parents – that an outsider would barge in and handle their problem.  So, the next repair I threatened to attempt in a nearby community got taken care of the very same day. My direct participation in this case worked better than any ideological pontification I could have mustered, and I believe it usually will.

Ideological constructs are perhaps appropriate in the offices and lecture halls of Washington, Princeton, or Geneva, where the conscientious and principled people who control the money must debate its equitable and efficacious delivery to us witless neanderthals in the field. (USAID, anyone?) However, the excellent inhabitants of those smoke-free rooms are divorced from the practice of – shall we say – Applied Sustainability? There’s a lugubrious example of this kind of disconnect in my neighborhood here in Santa Apolonia. Peace Corps, USAID and others have been promoting a recent development fad  – constructing composting latrines for human waste with two alternating storage bins, so the user can isolate one bin after it is full, where it reverts biologically to a rich topsoil/fertilizer that can then be used safely on crops for human consumption. Great confirmation of the politically correct ideology of re-cycling a biohazard usefully, and in parts of Africa where fertile topsoil is scarce, this concept probably provides a useful result.

The problem is that the theoretically attractive, ideologically pure concept has metastasized into the real world, where concrete problems require practical solutions. These latrines are now being promoted willy-nilly by enthusiastic acolytes of the Postmodern cult of Sustainability, (not to mention by the mediocre bureaucrats, who must be seen to promote projects in order to cite their accomplishments at the next meeting.)  Recently, two different agencies went all out in my vicinity of Guatemala and put up a bunch of them. They totally put on the dog, complete with all the consensus development and concomitant training classes. The village farmers were recruited, proselytized, and certified orthodox before construction began. (The labor was accomplished using village workers and agency construction materials, a partnering arrangement dictated by what I deem to be a successful element of Postmodern methodology, although it has also been argued that the work has always been done by the lowest-status members of any group, consensus or any other.)

After about five years (average age of the latrines from two different projects,) these 40 compost-creating latrines now stand idle in the fertile garden of Guatemala. There’s plenty of fabulous topsoil here; its abundance creates a different development problem when it falls down the mountains in landslides in the sub-tropical rainy season, smothering the life out of entire farming families, who know all about the virtues, hazards and availability of Guatemalan topsoil.

The upshot is that these 40 village farming families with the new composting latrines – thoroughly informed about soil but not yet up to speed on intrepid First-World ideologues – don’t actually want to perform the unpleasant-if-sustainable labor required once or twice a year to turn eight cubic feet of human excrement into a modest heap of topsoil. Ironically to the point, one of these unused and therefore useless latrines has been “usage-adapted” to store bags of commercial fertilizer. The bags pile up snugly in this otherwise useless outdoor closet space, and there’s a roof too. Perfect. What a waste of resources, of initiative, of an initial instance of attempted good faith between this rural community and a bunch of inept ideologues, all sacrificed on the altar of Rampant Sustainability.

So, re-ordering human behavior proves an elusive pursuit. Participating in it seems more to the point. After two years of participating in the fieldwork of international development, my view is that this kind of work hinges less on theory and more on personal contact. What we like to call development usually involves behavior change. Successfully induced behavior change doesn’t happen because someone says how. It happens when a new idea works better. Multiple repetitions are generally required in order to demonstrate this improvement. After all, this exchange of information is a communication, not a mail-order purchase. The human elements of unfamiliarity, impatience, commitment to other priorities, cynicism, immediate-need-balanced-against-future-profit, all combine to require that people develop enough trust in one another to agree to engage in the experiment together.

The theorists and managers in First World countries develop this trust with other theorists and managers in the various host countries that receive development aid, because those are the people with whom they actually spend time. For them, the location of the cultural interface where idea transfer takes place is in the upper echelons of the host-country status quo. To us in the field, this exchange projects the appearance of one chapter of the status quo patting another on the back, and examples abound – abound – of misappropriation. After Hurricane Agatha in 2010, a USAID functionary in Guatemala City quoted me a price of $250,000 US for a three-room school-rebuilding project here. Interesting number. The municipality where I live recently completed a two-room school (with all the same extras) for Q178,000 or about $24,000 US. – a tenth!! In an election year our mayor was proud to have arranged that size of investment in public infrastructure, and he said so while campaigning, so it’s unlikely that he was adjusting downward. I have to wonder – and after my completed Peace Corps service I can wonder out loud – where the rest of the money goes here when USAID is paying.

A more benign instance of inadvertent misappropriation: those agency theorists might have looked to a field worker for some advice about actual problem solving before they signed off on the glossy ideology of topsoil production in Guatemala. Those farming villagers mightn’t have bothered with those silly, out-of-context latrines if a development fieldworker had set up a real-world messy demonstration: “Here’s what you do; here’s what you get.” There was no problem with the previous latrine design, there was no problem with scarcity of topsoil, but sadly, neither was there a shortage of ideological blather.

Catchphrases also evolve. The United Nations (among others) has begun using a different buzzword than “sustainable” to describe some of its various initiatives – one that I like better, at least until the ideologues force-bloom it to include whatever else they need it for. Recent literature introduces the terminology “current best practice” when describing poverty intervention options.

At my site in Guatemala (I’m still here, I’m still absorbed by this stuff, in spite of my skeptical tone,) we are starting a project to build a school using plastic bottles filled with the ubiquitous plastic packaging trash that blights the terrain and is reportedly contaminating our food chain at a molecular level as UV sunlight reduces it to polymer dust, or as people burn it with the other trash. Creating construction materials from our trash doesn’t strike me as particularly sustainable behavior in any desirable way. It certainly isn’t a final answer about what to do with plastic; I can’t comfortably envisage construction-grade candy wrappers in our hopeful collective future. Rather, this practice seems to me right now to be a temporary, practical way to gather and stash the trash economically without burning it. (The filled bottles replace cement block as filler in stuccoed walls, which are structurally reinforced with poured-concrete-and-rebar beams.) In the near future, the empty bottles themselves will begin to have cash value as incipient recycling practices of P.E.T. plastic become more prevalent, and then this interim technique will need to adapt or die out. As such, it now provides a great example of “current best practice,” a useful theoretical generalization for a pragmatic problem-solving technique – one that took place in a specific, real-world context before it was ever idealized by an abstracted theoretician.

This essay is dedicated to the cherished memory of Dr. Sergio Mack, the creator and project director of Healthy Schools Guatemala, who died suddenly in March. He was a thoughtful leader, an innovative social-program designer, a persistent contributor, a patient boss, and a great guy.

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Development Ideology – Fraud or Nuisance?

by Dercum Over

(Dercum Over recently completed a two-year service with the Peace Corps as a volunteer Healthy Schools coordinator. The Peace Corps officially discourages independent journalistic expression by serving volunteers, so he waited until his two years were concluded before writing this essay. Parts of it were published in the annual in-house Peace Corps Guatemala journal The Id in 2010. Publication of The Id was suspended without explanation in 2011. This is the first of two parts.)

“Cultural exchange starts with misunderstanding. We are not afraid to misunderstand.”
– Isamu Ohsuga of Byakko Sha, a Japanese Butoh dance troupe.

The first time I recall seeing the term “sustainable” in the context of development was in a rather smug popular news-magazine article in Time or Newsweek published some time in the 1970s. As I recall, the piece accused the Soviets of bumptious behavior for trying to provide agricultural development aid in Africa. They had sent 20 tractors to a cooperative farming effort in a Socialist-aligned emerging nation. (I think it was in Tanzania, but I can’t find any reference on the web. Since this detail exists in pre-digital limbo, it probably isn’t even fair game any more. History seems to have rebooted 20 years ago.) Anyway, these hapless Soviets had created a Big Noise with their tractors in the early days of their project, chuckled the author, but they had also failed to provide support in the way of a supply of parts. After a year or two of the trademark ignorance, fraud, and lunacy inherent in the Communist ideal, the author comforted us, the Africans had remaining in their new Socialist Eden a single working tractor and 19 others disassembled for parts. He then triumphantly condemned the tractor project as hopeless folly because it had been “unsustainable.”

His conclusion is perhaps slightly ironic, because that time frame also included another example of hopeless folly in foreign aid known as the Vietnam War, which also finally proved to be unsustainable. But never mind; the concept of sustainability, of designing aid programs with the future in mind, was considered – surprising to me now – a new approach back then.

In keeping with the Modernist ideology of that era, foreign aid projects were typically big-ticket infrastructure items such as the Aswan dam, a product of Soviet foreign aid, or the Thai national power grid, a project financed by the Western-aligned World Bank. In brief, Modernist ideology purported to address international social problems by throwing money at them – by inundating them with electric dams, roads, tractors and refrigerators. Critics cited spiraling Third World debt and the exportation of Consumerism as tools of Western hegemonic neocolonialism.

Ideologies evolve, if slowly in terms of utility for the average Peace Corps volunteer. Some social scientists mark the year 1972 as the end of Modernism, punctuated by the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis. Back story: in 1954, at the height of the American Modernist era, city planners condemned an urban community of low-income black homeowners in order to erect a monument to the modernist ideology that advancing technology – in this case a high-rise apartment project – will ameliorate human misery. The completed “projects” quickly became a poster child for all the social ills of high-rise slum tenements everywhere, and the ensuing social disaster was untenable. Scant 16 years later, these enormous, blighted buildings were dynamited, and the Postmodern era was born.

The disillusionment resulting from the collapse of all those Modernist social fantasies when taken to their inevitable extremes led to a new series of ideological generalizations: appropriate technology, “teach a man to fish,” downsizing, human capital, bottom-up design, “train the trainers”, and – lording over all – sustainability. These are the catchphrases of Postmodern ideology in social development. In catchphrase terminology, we no longer “throw money at it;” we now “develop a consensus.”

To those of us dealing with the international development field right now, in the heart of the Postmodern era, (or is it possibly the ass-end?) this whole global development folderol seems to be taking its sweet time to get rolling and accrue some demonstrable success, let alone respect. One specific example, in 1995 the World Health Organization sponsored a gala global garden party to initiate the “global school health initiative”, an idea that had already been in vogue in Central America for a decade, to more than 100 eager member countries, representatives of which got to visit Geneva for a week that summer. Sixteen years later, there are lots of Healthy Schools government office desks that have printed lots of brochures at the national level of these countries, (Guatemala has such an office desk too,) but fewer than 10 actively funded and staffed programs. Of these, most work with fewer than a dozen schools.

This seems to me to be a fair indication of top-down development-project dysfunction, sort of like those Soviet tractors. I hope it’s not too cynical to observe that, for most of those W.H.O. jet-setters in 1995, it’s taken 16 years to print some brochures, and not too trivial to wonder how many people got paid how much to arrange for these wonderful publications. Possibly, the authors of these top-down international development schemes ought to figure out a sustainability parameter for their own grand global initiatives. (Full disclosure: I am gratified to observe that Healthy Schools Guatemala, a bottom-up development design, is by far the most advanced of the lot. After 16 years of continuous hands-on trial and error and persistent evolution, the program has grown and matured. It now encompasses several hundred schools in a disciplined program design that includes realistic goals and progress monitoring into the future. It could provide a model for other countries, should they wish to model on success. This is the program I was lucky to work with during my volunteer service.)

Lamentable global progress, to be sure, but actually, the applied science of altruistic social intervention as an organized human endeavor isn’t that old. The International Bank of Reconstruction and Development – today a branch of the World Bank – was initiated in 1944 at the Bretton-Woods Conference to deal with the cost of rebuilding the planet after the war, and it became the leading institution for fostering global development, albeit with the unacknowledged caveat that American businesses get the lion’s share of the carcass. Before that, international development aid was either faith-based – a vote for our deity is a vote for your next meal – or else a matter of direct private investment in local infrastructure in order to more efficiently extract a colony’s wealth. The Nairobi-Mombassa railroad is an excellent example of this second example of early development.

It doesn’t do to get too hyperventilated about our post-Bretton Woods national altruism. No one forgot to include tax exemption in the mix. My favorite example of the American approach to development run amok is the corporate American charity that once arranged a federal tax write-off for the donation of natural-disaster support in the form of 12,000 Maidenform bras to earthquake victims in Asia, an exercise in ironic irrelevance that exemplifies the American “free market” priority in foreign affairs – completely divorced from supposed altruistic first principles of international development.

Altruistic first principles – that glossy term might seem to express an optimistic or naïve assumption. The topic might merit a separate examination (by someone else,) but briefly, I assume that international development aims to accelerate the access by the world’s poor to better health, education and economic opportunity. By “accelerate” I mean that development initiatives are playing catch-up, that poor people are trapped by a gap in opportunity, and that we in international development are partnering with those affected to try to close that gap.

It is also possible to presume a malign intent for international development initiatives. If the First World status quo were only interested in promoting its own hegemonic control of other economies, what better misdirection than an elaborate charade of altruism with which to stumble along in meaningless endeavor, promoting extraneous ideologies and rewarding mediocrity (USAID, anyone?) To misappropriate the catchphrase, “Sure, teach a man to fish, but only if you have a monopoly on fishing poles.”

You don’t have to consider yourself a hard-line Marxist to understand this cynical worldview, but you probably do have to consider yourself a hard-line Capitalist to condone it. From my two-year internship in development work in the Peace Corps I have seen clear examples of both these approaches to international aid. While reality probably falls somewhere in between, it is no longer clear to me that people with a vested personal interest in maintaining the existing status quo should be making decisions that determine a change in the status quo of others. (Another full disclosure: I don’t have either kids or a mortgage, so my personal identification with the North American chapter of the global status quo is decidedly tentative. I am committed to the understanding that coercing the destinies of people in other nations simply to profit on the price of bananas is both repugnant and bad for future business relations, let alone future crime control. For further reading on this position, google Guatemala, John Foster Dulles, Col. Oliver North, and cocaine.)

So – 67 years after the idea of institutionalizing international altruism in order to promote the United States’ version of the status quo, we have realized that big dams and big roads create unmanageable debt, and that big dreams have unintended consequences, but what else have we learned?

Next: What else we’ve learned.

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We turn from yesterday’s Semitic to today’s sublime. (Yes, a redundancy, but some things require emphatic repetition.) Some of you may recall that your proprietor traveled to Ecuador in late January. (And why would you not remember? We are friendly people here on the sad red earth, deserving of some remembrance, no? Yes? Please?) We visited dear friend Ashley who last year expatriated herself to Cuenca, second capital of the Quechua (Inca) empire, old colonial city, yet increasingly fashionable modern center of the arts and good living 8000 feet up in the Andes. So in love did we fall, that Julia will be leading a travel photo workshop there in January 2013. I will tag along to make a pest of myself. The photographers among you can stay posted on those developments at The Julia Dean Photo Workshops.

Meanwhile, Ashley (Rogers) and her business partner, the divine Michel Blanchard, have achieved quick success heading up a wide-ranging Ecuadorean travel concierge service called Ecuador At Your Service. From short to long term travel, individually and in groups, research and reservations to real estate services for prospective expats, they are your people. You can hear them, too, on their weekly radio show on the Overseas Radio Network. Now, their latest offering is a design service, Ecuador Interiors. Pictured below is the loft space designed and decorated by the two for a colonial conversion in the heart of downtown Cuenca.

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One of the salient features of the evolving massively networked media environment is the readier production than ever before of manufactured realities. Enough people simply assert something to be true, enough people virally lift the assertion across the MNM and write about it as true, and the idea takes almost unshakeable hold in the minds of a sufficient number of people so that the manufactured reality is now a feature of reality itself – a contention, a belief that clings to circumstance and becomes a part of it. No situation in the world produces more of this than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Last week, as an example, Paul Krugman, in an almost classic apophasis extended over three very brief paragraphs, managed, while pretending not to address the conflict – “But I have other battles to fight, and to say anything to that effect…” – to invoke as many as three of these manufactured realities. The first, announced in the title of his column, is that there is a crisis in Zionism. It has been said by some that if there is a crisis in Zionism, it is, in fact, a crisis in liberal Zionism, not Zionism per se. It might also be characterized that if there is any kind of crisis in Zionism, it is a crisis produced by those declaring that there is a crisis in Zionism. Said the man with the gun in his hand, “Don’t you understand – this is a life or death situation!” Well, if you say so.

But such perceptions, or their contrary, may merely be a matter of temperament. Okay, you deal with the crisis. I’m going fishing. Or, okay, you deal with the crisis – I’ll go deal with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.

Next, while Krugman was feigning apophasistically (oh, I like that) not to address the crisis of Zionism in a column he titled “The Crisis of Zionism,” he also claimed of Israel that

the narrow-minded policies of the current government are basically a gradual, long-run form of national suicide

and that

to say anything to that effect is to bring yourself under intense attack from organized groups…..

This is a pretty common – hell, this is a constant complaint of critics of Israeli policy: that they criticize Israel, quite dramatically and severely in many instances, and that – oh, my God – they get criticized quite dramatically and severely back. What the hell is going on around here?

This sentiment was echoed in an “open-letter” of encouragement to Krugman from that very sensitive dear, Jeremy Ben-Ami, who declared,

As the President of J Street, the pro-Israel, pro-peace lobby, I am followed closely by my own personal buzzsaw.

The last time Ben-Ami supped with Barack Obama and George W. Bush he was heard to cry out, “You guys just have no idea.”

In the face of this brutal rhetorical assault, the likes of which has not been seen since way back during the pre-modern days of the last Rick Santorum anti-Obama ad, Krugman felt compelled – even though he really didn’t want to talk about all this stuff – to proclaim Peter Beinart “brave,” and Beinart’s book, titled, wouldn’t you know, The Crisis of Zionism, a “brave book.”

It is near impossible to measure the magnitude of the courage it takes to stake out a position on Israel basically that of the editorial board of the New York Times and of nearly every one of the regular international columnists of that paper. From Mearsheimer and Walt to Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, Charles Freeman, Norman Finkelstein, Gunter Grass, Haaretz, the Guardian, many of England’s major unions, many scores or more of left campus organizations, the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, the World Council of Churches – may I stop now? It’s a lonely world out there. It’s a no man’s land, brother. The courage, the courage.

And what they suffer once they speak out – what they suffer.

What do they suffer?

Other people disagree with them. Vehemently. Why?

Says Beinart of Israel, it is

an entity of dubious democratic legitimacy

that is

sweeping the two-state solution into history’s dustbin.

More,

we should call the West Bank “nondemocratic Israel

for it is guilty of

systematic oppression.

Beinart had previously written,

Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral

while

 in Israel today, this humane, universalistic Zionism does not wield power. To the contrary, it is gasping for air.

And get this:

Hebrew University Professor Ze’ev Sternhell is an expert on fascism and a winner of the prestigious Israel Prize. Commenting on Lieberman and the leaders of Shas in a recent Op-Ed in Haaretz, he wrote, “The last time politicians holding views similar to theirs were in power in post–World War II Western Europe was in Franco’s Spain.”

I think I’ll stop there. My aim here is not to argue any of these claims. My aim is to call attention to their nature. Their severity is hard to surpass without criminal accusation – hardly unusual against Israel in these confused times – and some of them even imply it. Yet these critics, such as Beinart and almost all like him, and now from behind a rhetorical device, Paul Krugman, take umbrage, cry foul, that people who feel and think just as deeply as they, but against their positions, argue back at them with just as great severity. Followed the contention between American Democrats and Republicans lately – from the Affordable Health Care Act to gun rights to contraception to who’s a card-carrying communist to who’s a war criminal? Strong views, strong language.

Maybe it should be different, but it’s all around us. For me to be called “shoeshine boy for Hitchens” is a penny found on the street. “Jew hack” is stronger stuff. And though readers who even recall might think that after this, this prime specimen had burrowed back into a wall post, I’ve spared him the attention of letting readers know that he occasionally likes to write and try to post comments calling me Judenrat. Worth knowing about him, more – for there’s a point in it – is that his was the voice that narrated The Goldstone Report video along with Ken Loach and Arundhati Roy. That is how it mixes together in the cauldron of Jewish modernity.

What contemporary critics of Israel are doing in their constant whining that the defenders of what they criticize are playing too rough – poor babies – calling them names, and it shouldn’t be allowed, is engaging in a form of special pleading. They want an exception made for critics of Israel. They get to say that Israel is losing its democracy and an acts as an oppressor, that Zionism is in a downward moral spiral, that Israel’s government bears comparisons to Franco’s Spain, but that their opponents, who believe all of these charges to be utter, slanderous crap, don’t get to slam these critics back just as hard. Why would these various voices think themselves so special – that they should be spared the equities of rhetorical combat?

For the actual anti-Semites amongst them – for the John Mearsheimers blurbing for the Gilad Atzmons – the meme of fierce, crushing retribution from the Zionists is just a continuation of the classic conspiratorial slander: speak out against the powerful Jew and his forces will rise up foully in repressive reaction. The well-intentioned critic of Israeli policy speaking nonsense – Krugman writing of “the narrow-minded policies of the current government” as if this protracted history of Arab enmity and rejectionism began only with the facilely-conjured bogeyman of Benjamin Netanyahu in 2009 – repeats the same meme (“to say anything to that effect is to bring yourself under intense attack”), and the blind alliance between the vile and the vain further poisons the atmosphere. Wherein lies their vanity? They are so convinced of the moral valor of their stand that they are astounded that the universe does not deliver to them a dispensation from the return volley. How brave they are to say shitty things about Israel; how simply awful and unfair that Israel’s defenders will say shitty things back.

The culminating appeal, the bathetic cri de Coeur is against a charge of anti-Semitism. Krugman, in his not writing about the crisis of Zionism, finds words to repeat this manufactured reality too, complaining of

organized groups that try to make any criticism of Israeli policies tantamount to anti-Semitism.

You will, of course, find people making stupid, reflexive charges of anti-Semitism and self-hating Jew. There are enough bloggers and comments sections out there to allow any little teapot to pop its lid. The woodwork delivers up critters who squeal “self-hating Jew” in letters and emails just as it does those who squeak “Jew hack.” It is not, all that often, a very attractive world. What you will not find, however, is any record of his legitimate critics calling Peter Beinart anti-Semitic. I had the idea, but of course I was not the first, so when I Googled “Beinart” and “anti-Semite” together, among the hits I made on the first page was this from Jewlicious:

Search on any internet search engine for “Peter Beinart antisemite” or “Peter Beinart antisemitic” or “peter beinart antisemitism” as I just have and at least in the first pages of the search (I didn’t have the patience to go deeper, sorry) there were no articles or blogs, certainly not from any reputable sources, where Beinart is called anti-Semitic. In fact, you find supporters of his position and reasoned articles, pro and con, about his book.

What you may, indeed, find more of than anyone actually calling Peter Beinart or other mainstream liberal critics of Israel anti-Semitic is people, rather, objecting to critics of Israel being called anti-Semitic. At least in the public internet records of this debate, discussions of the prospect of the charge, and expressions of objection to the charge, are far more likely to be found than any actual leveling of the charge.

Jews have a long history of coping with manufactured realities. It isn’t over yet.

AJA

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There are few poems that move me as much.  In its avid desire to reclaim from the fire all of particularity, “the smallest color of the smallest day,” it simply burns.

BY DELMORE SCHWARTZ

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Hyperbole is a commonly used word that is actually a classical rhetorical device. We recognize it is as exaggeration for effect, which is distinct from by temperament, which no doubt leads to the tall tale, then the outright lie, then corruptions of the spirit, the flesh, and  the soul, and finally the fall of civilization as we were once proud and foolish enough to dream it.

I’m sorry. I got carried away.

Philosopher Gary Gutting wrote a piece for The New York Times’s The Stone series on issues in philosophy. It was a standard examination of the common disagreements about language between traditionalists and revisionists, those who conceive of language as a static system of structures, rules, and usages, and those who view it as a dynamic construct evolving over time. In admirable moderation, Gutting offered that it is both. As in many features of the world, it depends on the time frame and the context.

A few days ago, fellow philosopher Peter Ludlow offered as he thought that even Gutting’s description of what is dynamic counts as static for Ludlow.

Recent work in philosophy, psychology and artificial intelligence has suggested an alternative picture that rejects the idea that languages are stable abstract objects that we learn and then use.  According to the alternative “dynamic” picture, human languages are one-off things that we build “on the fly” on a conversation-by-conversation basis; we can call these one-off fleeting languages microlanguages.  Importantly, this picture rejects the idea that words are relatively stable things with fixed meanings that we come to learn. Rather, word meanings themselves are dynamic — they shift from microlanguage to microlanguage.

Now, you see, this is where I think the hyperbole comes in to play. And I’d like to convey that thought to you, but language being a “one-off thing,” at all times a “microlanguage” that does not consist of “stable abstract objects that we learn and then use,” you don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?

It is true that every use of a word, just like every event in the universe, is a one-off thing, a single instance of what is classifiable in abstraction. Every cow is an instance of cowness, even if cowness exists not as a Platonic form, but as a construct, in conception and verbal definition, from all the individual instances of actual cows we encounter in the world and continue to encounter. Just as Heraclitus observed that we cannot step into the same river twice, S.I. Hayakawa offered that “”no word ever has exactly the same meaning twice.” Still, ambling down the road, when you ask me to point you in the direction of the Mississippi, I know what river you mean, and when I ask you to hand me a pen, I end up with the instrument I need.

Says Ludlow,

Shifts of meaning do not merely occur between conversations; they also occur within conversations — in fact conversations are often designed to help this shifting take place.  That is, when we engage in conversation, much of what we say does not involve making claims about the world but involves instructing our communicative partners how to adjust word meanings for the purposes of our conversation.

For example, the linguist Chris Barker has observed that many of the utterances we make play the role of shifting the meaning of a term.  To illustrate, suppose I am thinking of applying for academic jobs and I tell my friend that I don’t care where I teach so long as the school is in a city.  My friend suggests that I apply to the University of Michigan and I reply “Ann Arbor is not a city.”  In doing this, I am not making a claim about the world so much as instructing my friend (for the purposes of our conversation) to adjust the meaning of “city” from official definitions to one in which places like Ann Arbor do not count as a cities.

None of this is all that remarkable, or new. Turning to classical rhetoric again, what Ludlow describes in the first paragraph above – “how to adjust word meanings for the purposes of our conversation” – is called distinctio. In a distinctio, the writer or speaker specifically denotes the meaning of a special term being used in the discussion as it is intended to be understood, very specifically, in that discussion. A common distinctio might begin, “For the purposes of this discussion, hyperbole should be understood to mean….”

In the second paragraph of Ludlow’s above, the clarification that for the speaker, in this context, “Ann Arbor is not a city,” is a casual, conversational form of metanoia. The process of definition, like the process of classification, like conceptualization itself, is as much a negative practice as it is a positive one. In order to denote all of the characteristics of what a thing or idea is, we also have to find ways to distinguish and mark off in distinction, the wide world of things that it is not. That is the way it works. We understand what a chair is, in part, by understanding that, and why, it is not a sofa. A metanoia is one manner of defining a term through a process of negation.

We have recognized these immediate, contextual, one-off needs for clarification and definition in language for a very long time. We have also recognized something else, and we practice it, with a relatively high level of success every day. In order to perform a distinctio, in order for the speaker in the example above to enact his metanoia clarifying, for his purposes, what constitutes a city and what does not – in order to do these things,  the other words he was using to explain himself, that both he and his interlocutor were using to conduct the exchange, had to be stable enough in meaning for the two to have a communication successful enough to perform the clarification about what a “city” should be understood to mean.

Know what I’m sayin’?

AJA

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Just take this as an add shot to your morning espresso.

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ESTRAGON:(having tried in vain to work it out). I’m tired! (Pause.) Let’s go.

VLADIMIR:We can’t.

ESTRAGON:Why not?

VLADIMIR:We’re waiting for Godot.

We caught the penultimate performance on Sunday of the Michael Arabian directed Waiting for Godot at the Mark Taper Forum. It was a truly superb production of which the Los Angeles Times’s Charles McNulty wrote,

Under the incisive direction of Michael Arabian, the play is treated not as a symbolist pageant or a philosophical gag machine but as an encounter with two tattered souls whose plot is the master plot of our lives: filling up the time that has been bafflingly granted to us during our stints on planet Earth.

L.A.’s 84-year-old Alan Mandell, as Estragon, and Ireland’s Barry McGovern, as Vladimir, were a master class in physical and vocal performance, each forlorn stare and song of a syllable, every vaudevillian charade, another note in what is mostly a concerto for two. I was reminded, watching them, of a Broadway highlight forty years ago in seeing John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson together in David Storey’s Home.  You know that acting cannot be done at a higher level.

You could quote the highlights from Samuel Beckett’s play and end up rendering the whole thing all over again, but I thought I would offer the less commonly repeated – Lucky’s virtuoso first-act monologue of entropic dissolution, so reminiscent, in its absurdist poetry and scholastic parody, of the other writing giant for whom Becket remarkably served as secretary in his youth, James Joyce.

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