A crazy week

What a week!

First there was the Rapture. Unless you have been living under the proverbial rock of ages you know that according to indisputable biblical prophesy, on May 21 all true Christians will have been wafted up to Heaven for all eternity whilst the rest of us would be subject to agonizing torments of biblical proportions until October 21 when the world itself would come to an end. I’m not sure if at that point we go to Hell or simply cease to exist, but in any case we give up our chance to sing psalms and strum harps and praising Jesus for the next 20 quadrillion years. If you are reading this without suffering the torments of Hell on earth the prophesy proved false. But millions were taken in by it and some of those millions, desirous of having their pets looked after, after they are in the hereafter paid enterprising atheists to look after their dogs and cats while they were gone. I don’t know how much cash changed hands but the whole story is proof to me that the sprit of Elmer Gantry is alive and well and living in the mouth of a false prophet somewhere beyond the New England/New York region.

Then there was the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair. Maybe “affair” is the wrong word in this context. After all, when people have affairs there’s presumably a degree of mutual consent involved. But M. Strauss-Kahn, the Socialist head of the International Monetary Fund (and how that happened is beyond me if the word “socialist” still has any meaning. The IMF, that pillar of support of the capitalist system is the last place you’d expect to find a socialist in charge. Or maybe that would be in a $3000.00 a night hotel room.) In any case Mr. Strauss-Kahn allegedly raped a cleaning lady, this with the impunity and insouciance you might expect from one of his international standing, and was on a plane waiting to fly home to France when New York City policemen came aboard, cuffed him and escorted him via a perp-walk to Rikers Island where as of this writing he is ensconced wondering, no doubt, how he of all people could end up in such a predicament. American journalists have been congratulating the United States for not turning a blind-eye, as Europeans, especially French or Italian Europeans might. Of course American (and European) members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy have been turning a blind eye to the activities of pedophile priests for decades and as part of the weird week I might mention that after an exhaustive investigation a commission has concluded that priests trained before the 1960s were not properly prepared for the social upheaval of the ’60s and ’70s, so they made passes at little boys who wore glasses (and those who didn’t as well). Makes sense.

Then Mahmoud Abbas published in the New York Times a statement justifying the Palestinian Authority’s decision to approach the UN to ask for recognition of Palestine as a sovereign state. According to his view of history “the last time the question of Palestinian statehood took center stage at the General Assembly, the question posed to the international community was whether our homeland should be partitioned into two states.” By “our homeland” he means all Palestine west of the Jordan River. (If he still thinks of all Palestine as west of the river than Israel has troubles. So does J Street.) Then, according to his distorted perspective, “Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened.” I guess it was a lucky coincidence that fully mobilized Arab brigades were at the border ready to invade.

The week continued with a counter blast from Danny Danon, deputy speaker of the Knesset. In his op ed piece he says if the West Bank/Gaza Palestinians declare themselves an independent nation, Israel will (or should) declare all Jewish settlements in the West Bank part of Greater Israel, and deny Arabs living in those zones Israeli citizenship. While Danon concedes that there would be international uproar over this he feels it will soon pass. I am not a believer in the two-state solution for reasons enunciated from time to time. But this is crazy. Danon and Abbas deserve each other, the one with no sense of the past, the other with no sense of the future. But if they deserve each other, why should we suffer?

As I’ve said, it was a crazy week.

More foolishness on the founders scene

Does anyone read the Constitution anymore? I mean, yes it has embarrassing elements (Article 4, Section 2, clause 3 allowing vigilantes from the South to come up North to retrieve run-away slaves comes to mind immediately. But we got rid of that one. It cost us a Civil War with 620,000 deaths, but we got rid of it.) But there are some gems. I particularly like the phrase in Article 6 that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” Many of the framers then went on to sit in the first Congress which passed and sent around to the states a dozen amendments for ratification including one that contains this little piece: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Which brings me to David Barton. He belongs to that school of unprofessional historians known as Christian polemicists. At a recent conference on church-state relations held at Roger Williams University (full disclosure – I organized the conference) Professor Matt McCook of Oklahoma Christian University (which I do not believe is a hotbed of radical leftists) defines Christian polemicists as suspicious of professional historians whom they believe make too much of the Enlightenment and deny the fundamental Christian beliefs of the Founding Fathers. Instead this group argues that the founders were devout Christians who wanted to create the United States as a Christian nation. Other conferees took it as a given that the founders, even if some were religious, did not want to make America a Christian nation and one pointed out that the Constitution is godless (in that God is not mentioned at all).

Barton, according to a recent story in The New York Times (May 5), has been consulted by several potential Republican presidential candidates, including Mike Huckabee who extols Barton as “maybe the greatest living historian on the spiritual nature of America’s early days,” Newt Gingrich, who believes that “American freedoms are divinely granted,” and Tea Party favorite Michele Bachmann. All praise his work dedicated to the argument that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and is on the road to ruin because we have forgotten this and abolished prayer in school.
As do all of his kind, Barton has a problem with Thomas Jefferson’s argument in his famous 1802 letter to the Danbury (Conn.) Baptist Association which called for a wall of separation between church and state, the basis (along with actual words of the Constitution) of the principle that there should be a wall of separation between church and state. According to Barton, Jefferson’s “wall” was meant only to protect religion from the state, not the other way around. It was intended to keep “Christian principles in government,” not prevent religion in the public sphere. Sadly, there’s nothing in Jefferson’s letter or in his life to substantiate this. Jefferson was an atheist, convinced that within a generation all Americans would be Unitarians (another way of denying Jesus’ divinity).

At the Roger Williams conference mention was several times made of different tiers of founders. There were those who participated in the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and those who didn’t. Patrick Henry is an example of the latter. He was a devout Christian who advocated taxation to support religion, and limiting public office to Trinitarian Protestants. But the people who actually wrote the documents that define America rejected Henry’s ideas.

Even ignoring the fact that Barton twice spoke before neo-Nazi groups (he claimed not to know they were neo-Nazis) his distortions ought to offend Christians and Jews (and Muslims and atheists). America’s radical departure into modernity was acting upon what it learned from Europe – to separate church and state. When the state creates a preferred religion, the state will be engulfed in civil war, learning will be stifled, dissenters will be jailed (or worse) and society will stagnate.

God gave the United States a nonsectarian Constitution – I know because Newt Gingrich tells me so. But if we allow the David Bartons of this world, based on cherry-picked quotations and a misreading of the past, to convince us that America was intended to be a Christian nation, America will not be strengthened; it will be destroyed.

Spiked Pieces

Neither the piece immediately below nor the revised version following were published in the April 29 edition of the Voice & Herald. The editor said there were factual mistakes and wouldn’t run either version. I wonder, though, if I’d been commenting on identical events in, say, Topeka if she would not have published it. Ironically the optimist in me says she wouldn’t, but the realist who occasionally emerges thinks she would have.

When on the Morning of the Long Knives the suits descended from their aerie the eleven victims were doing their jobs, as far as I know with dedication and competence. It was not to help them; they were marked for elimination. We are told that budgetary considerations were paramount, that staff had to be cut as funds were down. I’m sure that’s true, as I’m sure that the salaried suits all agreed to take a pay cut in this time of economic distress.

The word on the street is that as the layoffs were announced the victims were immediately escorted out of their building in front of patrons, allowed only to take their personal belongings. No lingering good-byes, no opportunity to ask “why me?” just a security enforced exit. A person with experience in these matters reports that this is how business works and the Alliance is a business. Things have to be done this way to avoid badmouthing, bad morale and general malaise if the fired are not taken away immediately.

At the preschool the children were playing outside when their teacher was told to go upstairs to talk to the manager and hear about the layoff. When she went down to collect her things, with an escort, the kids were inside and saw her leave. There’s a lasting memory for you. “My pre-school teacher got busted. I don’t know what she did but it must have been really, really bad.”

The chief suit, the chairman of the board, responded to public outrage by throwing other people under the proverbial bus. They chose who to terminate, not me, he suggested. He then asked that we feel sorry for the poor souls—for those who chose who would be let go, not the laid off themselves. “Let us all respect the process and the unimaginable burden they had to bear. They acted with compassion, dignity, and respect,” he writes. I wonder who has the greater burden to bear—those fired or those who selected those to be fired. In his explanation of events could not the chairman of the board, a distinguished attorney and political figure in the state have chosen a phrase less offensive to Jewish eyes and ears than “The genesis of that final action…”? Was I the only reader who saw the coincidence of “final action” and “final solution”? And the word “action” of course is the very word used in the 1940s winnowing process. Is there no sensitivity? At all? Maybe not. Here’s what he also says: “Let’s remember who and what we are and focus on our future. We are social justice, lifelong Jewish learning, and loving kindness.” Loving kindness? Escorting dedicated long-term employees out the door as though they were potential criminals? He then concludes with wishes for a happy Passover. I assume that the people who were terminated so suddenly on the Monday before Passover and two weeks before Easter were either Jewish or Christian. Is it a demonstration of loving kindness to let people go before, not after, they celebrate normally joyous holy days with their families? I’m guessing that the Passover Seders in the afflicted homes were glummer than they traditionally are; I’m guessing that Easter Sunday was marred in those homes where Jews showing loving kindness fired Christian workers just before the holiday. Could it not have waited? I guess not. Loving kindness apparently has its limits.

This newspaper is published by the Alliance but is not a house organ. If you are reading this column, you know the truth of that. But I think we failed the public with our headline and sub-headline in the last issue. While in print the story of the firings occupied prime space, right corner above the fold, the on-line version was buried below “Relearning and Rethinking the Passover Saga” and “Israeli Knesset Members Try Listening”. The headline in both was deliberately sanguine despite this metaphorically sanguinary event: “Restructuring at Alliance leads to streamlined efficiencies: Even with staff reductions, no interruption of services is expected.” Our readers deserve better; so do the eleven who were terminated. The remaining staff ought to look into joining a union. It may not save jobs in a period of economic difficulties, but it might at least give the suits pause before they swoop down in such a cavalier fashion with their security guards.

After this was rejected I tried to tone it down and made some “factual” changes, but not enough, she said. No security guards, for instance. Had the opening two sentences of the paragraph above really been true these minor issues would have been resolved in the usual editorial fashion, not by spiking the piece.

This is not the column I wanted you to read. That one was spiked by the editor. She said that my criticism of the Chairman of the Alliance board of directors for his explanation of why and how eleven employees were let go was an ad hominem attack on him. She also said that some of my language was over the top and that that there were factual errors in the piece. She also objected to my contention that the layoffs just before Passover and Easter were poorly timed, pointing out that there is no good time.

As to the first complaint, I can see where she was coming from but I never attacked the man; in fact I respect him. I did think though that his justification for the way employees were treated was disingenuous. As to the second, that some of my criticism was over the top, she was dead on; it was and shouldn’t have been. My facts? Well, I referred to people being fired and she pointed out that firing is for cause; letting go or laying off is for economic reasons and that there were justifiable if unfortunate economic reasons to reduce staff (a point I never contested). That language could have been easily fixed if there were not the other problems. As to the timing of the lay offs, the editor is correct, but so am I. A draw.

I still hold with my closing paragraph which as she did not criticize it I imagine she’ll let stand. I said: “This newspaper is published by the Alliance but is not a house organ. If you are reading this column, you know the truth of that. But I think we failed the public with our headline and sub-headline in the last issue. While in print the story of the [layoffs] occupied prime space, right corner above the fold, the on-line version was buried below ‘Relearning and Rethinking the Passover Saga’ and ‘Israeli Knesset Members Try Listening’. The headline in both was deliberately sanguine despite this metaphorically sanguinary event: ‘Restructuring at Alliance leads to streamlined efficiencies: Even with staff reductions, no interruption of services is expected.’ Our readers deserve better; so do the eleven who were terminated. The remaining staff ought to look into joining a union. It may not save jobs in a period of economic difficulties, but it might at least give the suits pause before they swoop down in such a cavalier fashion with their security guards.”

In 1997 Robert D. Kaplan wrote what has become a famous essay in the Atlantic Monthly. He called it “Was Democracy Just a Moment?” He wrote about how and why democracy always fails in emerging nations with no middle class and no tradition of nationhood, but in advanced industrial societies the principal villain is corporations, those faceless though familiar entities that govern our every moment. They establish their own communities, their own rules, their own police. They have power in the halls of congress and with the presidency and work to maximize profits by becoming global, leaving the workers of their home constituency with scraps. They are the oligarchs of the modern world, the few governing for the benefit of the few. “Neither the Founders nor any of the early modern philosophers ever envisioned that the free market would lead to the concentration of power and resources that many corporate executives already embody,” he writes.

What does this have to do with the way the lay offs at the Alliance were handled? A friend of mine who defended the actions argues that this is how businesses must do things and the Alliance is a business. That may be, but some of us at any rate were working under the assumption that the Alliance was a different kind of business. Yes, the bottom line could not show a deficit, just as no business can. But the idealist in me thinks of Jews as a people apart, a light unto the nations, not a business copying the ruthlessness of corporate others but a people with an ethos allowing them to find ways to do things that must be done more humanely, and then not being disingenuous about it.

Reflections on "Paul"

The only recognizably Roman Catholic member of the clergy I could identify was a nun sitting in the front row. We (and a capacity audience) were watching the North American Premier of Howard Brenton’s “Paul” at the Gamm Theatre. When the play was over, she was the first person to stand and applaud. I turned to my wife, tapped her on the shoulder, pointed to the nun with my chin and asked “Did she see the same play we did?” It’s hard to imagine.

Some background: According to “The Acts of the Apostles” the fifth book of the New Testament, those who knew and followed Jesus were still Jews, but Jews who thought the Messiah had come in the person of Yeshua (Aramaic for Joshua). They still obeyed the old laws but because they shunned rabbinic authority and were baptized, they were shunned and persecuted. The principal persecutor was Saul of Tarsus who, hearing that there were Jewish followers of Yeshua in Damascus determined to go there to stamp out the community. On the way, he was blinded by a light and heard a voice saying “Why do you persecute me?” and realizing that only the voice of Yeshua would say such a thing—though he was dead—he converted to the new faith. And to him it was a new faith. Unlike Jesus’ old colleagues who thought of themselves as Jews, Paul (the name he adopted upon having his miraculous experience on the road to Damascus) creates a new religion, one where circumcision is not required, nor eating of kosher meat etc., the better to attract gentiles (Greeks) to the new faith.

Now, all of that is a given. The play, though, assumes facts not generally found in the Christian texts—that Jesus and Mary Magdelna, a prostitute, were married, that Jesus did not die on the cross, so was not resurrected but kept in hiding by Peter and James (Jesus’ brother—another thing not generally accepted by Christians) that Joseph and Mary were wealthy purveyors of religious objects in Nazareth, that Peter and James sent Paul out to convert the gentiles assuming that he’d be ignored—or stoned, that they brought Yeshua with them to Saul’s encampment and had him talk to Saul, a well meaning hoax that Saul believed in its entirety. The depiction of Nero is so off the wall that I won’t even mention it other than to say that if you missed Kelby T. Akin as the despotic emperor you missed something rare.

So, we are there the night before Paul’s execution is scheduled. He’s chained, chanting almost as if in a self-induced trance “Christ is risen” over and over and over again. He is a man of faith. But then Peter (played by Gamm veteran Jim O'Brien) is brought into the prison and as the play unfolds he reveals to Paul all the deceptions. Jesus was not God, but an inspiring man. This Paul the believer refuses to believe, that he has been deceived, that his life’s work is based on someone else’s artifice. Peter, who knows the truth ultimately joins in with him intoning, imploring, Jesus the risen God, to help them. If he’s going to die, he may as well die for a cause—whether he believes it or not.

So, why was that nun applauding? I don’t know, but I suppose she does.

A good piece of theater ought to leave us with questions—all the best literature does. Here the question is not so much was Jesus God (the answer is “No”) but the epistemological question, how do we know that the things we know (and are the things we know truly true)?

And we Jews? We enter the Passover season in a couple of days. Our tables will groan under the weight of food, we’ll be a little drunk after four cups of wine, we’ll open the door to allow Elijah the prophet to come join us (he hasn’t yet, but maybe this year) we sing songs and prayers, we ask questions to which we already know the answers, but do we? Were our ancestors slaves in Egypt, rescued by God through his servant Moses? Were there all those plagues? Or miracles? It hardly matters. If one wants to believe, there’s no harm; if one sees the story simply as a metaphor for the potential of the oppressed to rise and liberate themselves, so be it. To my uncertain knowledge there is no historical evidence that the story of the Exodus is true, but it’s a wonderful story nevertheless. If nothing else it gives us the opportunity to clean behind those corners we never normally get to, to be with friends and family to sing and rejoice. Dayenu.

What's a Jewish Subject?

A recent letter complains that the Voice & Herald is becoming a platform for the Democratic Party with a leftist agenda that alienates conservatives and uses me and my last column as his prime example. I admit to being an economic liberal. In fact, I’m proud of it. I think that taxing the wealthy to support public programs such as bridge repair, heath insurance, medical research etc. is all to the good. I think that President George W. Bush was right on target when the announced that his form of conservatism was “Compassionate Conservatism” suggesting that the other kind, the usual kind, the Reagan kind, is not. It’s too bad that his words were lip service only. In his 1988 acceptance speech when nominated by the Republicans to run for President George H. W. Bush talked of making America a kinder gentler nation which upset Reagan acolytes, but he too was on to something. Do liberals have all the answers? No. Do I disagree with some liberal positions? Yes. As to being called a liberal or a conservative, I think the terms have lost their meanings. Given the choice I’ll define myself as a “Humanist” by which I mean someone in the tradition of Cicero, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, someone who believes that if an action liberates humanity it is positive; if it retards it, if it enslaves, it is to be opposed. If humanist is too vague, just call me Jewish.

So, in my last column I started out by discussing union-busting in Wisconsin and elsewhere and then segued to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Where’s the Jewish content? My critic wants “to hear about Jewish news and interests in the paper.” In the Forward (a Jewish newspaper) Leonard Fein (a Jew) writes in his March 2 column about “Sam Gompers, David Dubinsky, …Albert Shanker, to say nothing of … Andy Stern, Randi Weingarten and a host of others who have played — and still play — central roles in America’s labor history…[Labor] is… a Jewish issue because justice is everywhere and always a Jewish issue.” Who can disagree? You don’t have to be a Marxist to know that the ruthless exploitation of the worker is not only immoral but economically counter-productive—just read Adam Smith’s “On the Wealth of Nations,” that primer of capitalism and you’ll find the same thing. Is Smith not Jewish enough? “Justice, Justice thou shall pursue,” is or ought to be a familiar quotation. It’s from an old book my critic might once have read. Each Yom Kippur we chant from Isaiah on treating our workers fairly and find nothing with which Governor Walker and his ilk would agree. Jeremiah’s explanation for the coming destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple was that masters were enslaving their workers. Micah (another Jew) asks “what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” Does this include depriving people of their rights so that the wealthy can become wealthier? Is Moses Jewish enough? Read what he has to say about Egyptian labor practices and about how Jews in their own land should treat gleaners.

Too old fashioned? There’s Abraham Joshua Heschel who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman who along with James Cheney were lynched, two Jews and a black man murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi because they tried to register Negroes to vote. Not by liberals. When Ronald Regan, that demigod of the modern conservative movement began his quest for the presidency as the Republican candidate in 1980 he went first to Philadelphia, Mississippi of all places, and proclaimed that he believed in states’ rights, a code word in those days (and maybe in ours) for segregation. He was a conservative; I’m not, I’m a Jewish humanist, and if being a humanist offends those who are not, such is life.

If there are conservative Jews who in the modern context place the greed of the land owner above the rights of the gleaner, who do not walk humbly with their God, who do not place Justice before all other considerations, are they living up to the standards set before them by generations of greatness? Or have they succumbed to Mammon like the Jewish owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, Max Blanck an Isaac Harris, union-busters who locked poor immigrant girls into their factory and escaped while 146 of them died within a few minutes, jumping out of the building, crushed against the bolted doors, of burns and smoke inhalation. Blanck and Harris were found not guilty of manslaughter by a jury of their peers, other people who as Abraham Cahan (another Jew) reminds uswere businessmen, salesmen, rent-collectors, not poor Jewish women denied the rights of collective bargaining.

Modern Day Pharoahs

If turn around is fair play, if the majority cannot simply clobber the minority into submission in the land of the free and the home of the brave, let’s pass a law that calls for annual election of governors of Wisconsin and not have their salaries automatically deposited. Let’s pass a law that for every dollar a billionaire donates to one party he has to donate 50¢ to the other. Free speech isn’t free, after all. Soon enough it will be Passover and we will be reminded again about Pharaoh’s unfair labor practices. At our table I think we’ll contrapuntally read excerpts of the conversations between Governor Walker and the man he thought was David Koch. (If that fundraiser from NPR resigned after he was caught in a sting; if the woman who was NPR’s CEO resigned after her subordinate was caught in a sting, doesn’t fair play suggest that Walker resign too? When kosher pigs fly. Maybe.)

I’ve been thinking about union busting a lot lately. You can’t avoid it; it’s everywhere: Wisconsin, Ohio, Providence. The old manufacturing unions are pretty well pre-busted. Not because American workers abandoned them but because capitalists decided to close shop up north and move south only later to discover that they could make even more money off the backs of cheaper labor in Asia so they hightailed it across the Pacific. Conservatives and “Right to Work” advocates (= right not to have any say in working conditions or salary) now are after the public unions recruiting the jealous, the ones who used to have a good job but whose livelihood has been snatched away by the recession brought about by the economic activities of the very people now giving themselves huge bonuses and buying politicians, having managed to defeat campaign finance reform. These unfortunates are willing to say, “If I can’t have a pension, why should they?” as if the public employees’ pensions are taking food out of their mouths, as if the suffering should be shared only by all poor people while the wealthiest get tax breaks. But the public workers of Wisconsin were willing to take lower salaries and contribute more to their benefit packages. Their line in the sand was collective bargaining.

Next week we mark the hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory disaster. Many of us remember the Station Nightclub fire that cost this community 100 lives. If there was anything good to come of that tragedy it was a series of laws to tighten fire codes (I suppose we are still paying fire marshals even though they are public employees). Back on March 25, 1911 600 workers, the vast majority immigrant girls, mostly Jewish, were working on the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of the ironically named Asch Building. A match carelessly dropped onto some fabric cuttings set the conflagration going. The fire hose was rotted and fell apart as men tried to extinguish the fire which quickly spread among the materials and cleaning chemicals. Some of the women managed to get to the roof and from there escape to other buildings; a brave passerby manned the elevators until the shaft was engulfed in flame. To prevent pilfering the owners of the business had the doors barred shut. In only 18 minutes a hundred and forty six women were killed, either from burns, from suffocation or from smashing into the pavement as they jumped in their desperate attempt to survive. The owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, managed to escape the conflagration, thank goodness, and later they managed to escape prosecution. Let us all praise devious lawyers. (The owners subsequently lost a civil suit and were required to pay $75 per victim which they could well afford as their insurance company paid them $60,000 more than the reported losses, or about $400 per casualty. In 1913, Blanck was once again arrested for locking the door in his factory during working hours and fined $20.)

Did any good come of the fire? Well, there were new safety regulations, and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, formed in 1900 was greatly enhanced and served for decades to protect workers against the Max Blancks and Isaac Harrises of the world, men who put the bottom line before the lives of the people who made their profit possible. But I forget; we are all anti-union nowadays; we see the unions as self-serving and out of touch with the real working people of America—the ones without jobs.

A Modern Purim Story

Paul Krugman stole my Nobel Prize. I don’t hold it against him, but I think the guy should at least publicly acknowledge the debt. As many of you know we were roommates in college (Yale ’74) who’ve maintained our friendship over the decades meeting each year on Boxing Day to exchange gifts and get hammered (he’s a Jameson’s man, I go for Glenlivet French Oak 15 year old). It was my idea that resulted in the paper that he was cited for in his Nobel ceremony; he just did the statistical analysis. He doesn’t exactly deny this, but he claims that anything written down on a sleazy bar’s coaster dated December 26 any year, doesn’t count as co-authorship. “Nonsense,” I counter, but he rejoins with “Ha!” and shows me his medallion.

But now his guilt feelings have paid big dividends as he’s shared with me in strictest confidence an explosive WikiLeaks revelation that he’s planning to release in his column on March 20, “Just in time for Purim,” he tells me. He thinks I’m going to sit on this, that I’m not going to scoop him, not beat him to the publication punch, that the promise I made last December 26 to keep his confidences holds the same weight as if spoken when sober? He thinks the Nobel is his exclusively? Ha! Read on.

Not content to embarrass American diplomats, the WikiLeaks people have tapped into the (formally) private correspondence of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. Walker is nervous that a Cairo-like rebellion is in the making, that public employees, who are rallying at the State House in Madison demanding that he reverse course on his attempt to abolish their collective bargaining rights might soon demand his recall. He’s even sought advice secretly from Hosni Mubark who faced a similar crisis last month. That correspondence is part of the WikiLeaks revelations as are Walker’s concerns that the Book of Esther he’s been reading on the advice of a local rabbi describes a situation uncomfortably like his own, for just as Haman wanted to kill Jews because Mordechai refused to bow to him, Walker is trying to kill public employee unions which did not support him in his election bid. Just as Hosni called in his thugs to beat up the Tahrir Square protestors, Walker has called in the Tea Party to out-shout the Public Employees. Walker knows it didn’t work for his pal Hosni, but is trying it anyway; he also knows what happened to Haman, and he looks with fright at all those three-corned hats the cheeseheads wear to Packers games. The internal memos reveal that he thinks they are mockingly reminding him of Haman’s fate.

In another WikiLeaks revelation there is correspondence between Walker and his former top aid who has the euphonious name of Ima Goodheart. Goodheart, in E-mail correspondence with Walker, points out that “public workers essentially make a deal to get paid less now and collect pensions upon retirement. So we can’t renege on good-faith contractual agreements.” Thus Goodheart is described as a “former aid.”

In public Walker claims there is no other solution to Wisconsin’s debt crises. In private he thinks the solution is two-fold. “First,” as he puts in the WikiLeaks’ revelations, “we kill the unions and then we give big tax cuts to the wealthy.” When Walker sent an E-mail to George H.W. Bush asking what he thought about this, the former president tweeted: “LOL, Voodoo economics in the land of pasteurization. Will you never learn?”

Walker has also been corresponding with other Republican governors. WikiLeaks revealed that he congratulated Governor Rick Scott of Florida for rejecting $2.4 billion in federal money to build a high speed rail connecting Tampa and Orlando which would have created 24,000 new jobs at a cost to Floridians of only $1.25 million. As Scott wrote to Scott “Well, done Scott! Together we can deny public services to all!”

Can the Scotts be stopped, or do we all have to start drinking Scotch to forget some Scotts Welsh on obligations. After all, on Purim, which rapidly approaches, we are enjoined to get so drunk that we can’t tell an Aleph from a Beth. On Purim we tell stories that are not necessarily true in all details, like this one you’ve been reading—actually none of them are—but we tell the essential truth that arrogance in high places has its comeuppance if, like the protesters in Madison and in Cairo, like Mordechai and Esther, we stand up to manipulative oppressors. It’s happened before, Scotts; it can happen again.

Happy Purim.