The Gaza Blockade disaster

For June 11, 2010
From the Old Olivetti
By Josh Stein

The world’s attention is on the catastrophic oil spill off the Gulf Coast and the president’s enfeebled response, a disappointment to his advocates (I include myself), confirmation to his foes. But while the oil continued to spew from the earth beneath the sea, on the high seas, Israel’s navy attempted to commandeer a flotilla bent on breaking its blockade of Gaza. The consummation, deaths aboard the lead ship, was devoutly to be wished by the organizers of the expedition. For them it was a no lose situation. If Israel allowed the boats to land it would be a small triumph. If the materials were seized without deaths, and, as the Israelis promised, checked then sent to Gaza, it would be a lesser victory, but not nearly as good theater as what actually happened. That was a bonanza—or was it a calculation? We’ll never know. Israel will transfer the food, medicine and building materials to Gaza and Hamas will have martyrs, the world will be able to blame Israel for the loss of life. The world will little note, nor long remember concurrent Muslim murders by Muslims. As Tom Friedman reminds in the Times, within the week, Muslim suicide bombers murdered nearly 100 Muslims in mosques in Pakistan and pro-Hamas gunmen destroyed a U.N.-sponsored summer camp in Gaza because it wouldn’t force Islamic fundamentalism down the throats of children. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/opinion/02friedman.html?hp)

On May 31, when I first heard the news of the deaths aboard ship I had a feeling akin to dispair. “Where,” I asked myself “are the people who planned and executed the raid on Entebbe airport to free hostages 2500 miles away?” Israel was the world’s hero back then on July 4, 1976, almost upstaging all the hoopla of the 200 year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Lightning fast the Israelis freed 100 people. According to the mission’s overall commander, Brigadier General Dan Shomron, the plan succeeded because since “no one expected the Israelis to take such risks … they took them.” One Israeli was killed, the leader of the strike force, Yonatan Netanyahu, elder brother of the current Prime Minister. But that was then. Now we have been snookered by people whose public relations skills are exceeded only by Israel’s ability to fall into an obvious trap.

Ehud Toledano, University Chair for Ottoman Studies, Department of Middle East and African History at Tel Aviv University (and a cousin of mine) writes in an E-mail that the commandos were sent into a mission that was ill-planned and ill-conceived by the high command of the navy.” There was “no, or totally insufficient intelligence, both in terms of info gathering and analysis... And, hence, a bad plan for what was wrongly supposed to be a group of peaceniks, but in fact were terror-trained Islamic radicals, ready to use violence in order to kill our soldiers, not just stop the takeover, which they knew they could not do.” He points out that information is “coming out now …to the effect that they were well organized, armed, and had thousands of dollars in their pockets. Families in Istanbul told the press a few hours ago that their relatives had a strong desire to die as martyrs.” This confirms a statement in last Wednesday’s Times that “The Gaza Freedom March made its motives clear in a statement before Monday’s deadly confrontation: ‘A violent response from Israel will breathe new life into the Palestine solidarity movement, drawing attention to the blockade.’” Ehud continues: Those seeking martyrdom “were on the upper deck, about 40 of them, with the [foreign sympathizers] staying on the lower decks, [who] therefore had no knowledge of what was being planned and executed upstairs. It is due to their high skilled professionalism that the commandos avoided being killed and ended up killing so few of the terrorists.”

Amos Oz, published in the same issue of the Times the Friedman column appears bemoans two simultaneous sieges—Israel of Gaza; Israel by Arabs. He wants Israel to sign a peace with the Fatah government in the West Bank, returning to the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as the Palestinians’ capital. Once this is done, Hamas in Gaza will either continue to be isolated or will join with Fatah. More pie in the sky? I think so. Even an isolated Hamas still has the capacity to do irreparable harm, much as that tiny hole in the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. Neither is going away; Israel can sign peace treaties with willing Arab partners, but the unwilling will still be there and president Obama will probably be as incapable of dealing with the one as he is with the other. I wish it weren’t so, but my wishes count for little.

From the pages of Al Jazeera

For May 28, 2010
From the Old Olivetti
By Josh Stein

There are those Jews, of which I am not one, who see in President Obama a crypto-Muslim or at least a crypto-enemy of Israel driving it to make suicidal concessions, and who feel those Jews who support him are dupes (or maybe dopes). There are other Jews of which I am not one, who are urging the president to force Israel, for its own good, to conciliate its policies towards the Palestinians so that a two-state solution can happen in our time.

Then there’s As’ad AbuKhalil.

He’s an articulate Lebanese-American professor of Political Science at California State University, Stanislaus who describes himself in his blog as an “Angry Arab” (http://angryarab.blogspot.com/). I first ran across him in an Al Jazeera posting (http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/05/201051664435120219.html).

The central thesis of AbuKhalil’s piece is that President Obama is a tool of the Zionists and that Arabs have betrayed Palestinians by urging compromise, not war. (This seems to fly in the face of those Jews who see Obama as a tool of the Arabs as well as those who see Palestinians as desirous of peace.) How typical is he? It’s hard to tell but his blog is filled with complimentary posts.

He begins with:

“Every year, Arabs around the world commemorate al-Nakba ... But poems and speeches are now too embarrassing to recite and Arab governments barely seem interested in remembering - so busy are they trying to win Israel's approval for direct or indirect negotiations. While in the past, Arab governments spent money combating Zionist propaganda, last year, the Arab League - with Saudi funding - purchased advertisements in Western newspapers with the aim of convincing Israel that Arab governments are, in fact, eager to make peace and normalize relations.”

I remember those ads and wonder why AbuKhalil thinks they reflect reality, not subterfuge, but it’s his piece. I don’t write for Al Jazeera. As to the Palestinians themselves, AbuKhalil sees evidence of betrayal.

“As far as the Palestinian Authority (PA) is concerned, revolutionaries belong in museums and [traditional Palestinian foods] are celebrated as the only elements of the rich tapestry of Palestinian national identity.”

Palestinian politicians are excoriated as though they were Zionists:
“Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, has become the new darling of the West. The Western press has, accordingly, produced an unending supply of laudatory and fawning pieces about the leadership of the man who …did not receive more than two per cent of the support of the Palestinian people in the last legislative elections.”
He sums up with, “The reality is that Arab regimes washed their hands of the Palestinian struggle long ago.”

The alternative to this cowardly behavior? Armed struggle.

“Armed struggle was responsible for bringing the Palestinian cause to the attention of the world….It delivered the Palestinian people from a time when their very status and identity was denied to a time when the UN had to recognize the fruits of Palestinian self-determination. Armed struggle also unified the Palestinian people under one umbrella and generated Arab support; PLO military operations inside Israel often featured Arabs from across the region. It also instilled a sense of pride among Palestinians and put an end to the sense of despair that prevailed in the wake of al-Nakba.”

I believe he’s right. Nobody was paying attention to Palestinians until they started hijacking airplanes in the 1960s, but oddly enough, Yasser Arafat, the man who authorized the hijacking of planes, the leader of the Intifada, was as bad as the rest. He is responsible for the weak Palestinian government in Ramallah “which operates at the discretion of Israel and its Western allies, protecting Israel from legitimate Palestinian armed struggle.” (I’m reminded when I read this of attacks made by some J Streeters who excoriate Elie Wiesel, Abe Foxman and Alan Dershowitz. Nobody, it turns out is a prophet in his own homeland.)

In a televised debate which aired on Al-Jazeera TV on February 23, 2010 AbuKhalil stated that President Obama “has given free rein to the Zionist lobby to do whatever it likes, both in terms of foreign policy and domestic policy.” Domestic policy, too? I’m a Zionist but I wait in vain to see Republicans proven right—that Obama will bring about a European-style Social Democracy.

As I asked, earlier, is AbuKhalil typical? He’s certainly articulate, if somewhat inconsistent. He cannot be ignored by the proponents of a two state solution.

Filming the aftermath of the Rwanda Genocide

In a previous column I wrote of my friend Mark Grashow who has dedicated his retirement years to furnishing school children in Zimbabwe and Tanzania with books and school supplies and teachers. Now let me tell you about my step-nephew-in-law, Taylor Krauss.

A Yale graduate, Taylor began his professional life working for documentary film maker Ken Burns. On assignment in post-genocide Rwanda, he saw something that struck a chord. As a student at Yale he’d visited the Fortunoff Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies. But in Rwanda, where during 90 days of hell, at least half a million minority Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu were killed by fellow Rwandans, no one was recording testimonies, or even providing social services for survivors. He worried that the mistake of not listening to survivors of the European holocaust was being repeated, with potentially devastating results. After all, if the story was forgotten, it could happen again, there or elsewhere. So he founded “Voices of Rwanda,” to record on film survivors’ testimonies about the destruction of their families during the genocide, and of the lives they’d lived before.

This is psychological and historical aid he brings. It’s not food or school books, such as Mark is providing, but on another plane it’s just as vital. It’s an opportunity to make sure that no one forgets, that unlike our holocaust, which is denied by Nazis and their sympathizers. Now, while stories are still fresh they can be recorded, and by recording, perhaps the victims will achieve some sense that what they went through was something the world will care about. It’s therapy for us too; we can’t just ignore Rwanda, tucked away there in the middle of nowhere, as we tend to view central Africa, but it’s a land where savage murder occurred on a massive scale, one “master race” of blacks perpetuating it on another, as one “master race” of Europeans perpetuated it on us.

The parallel isn’t lost on Taylor. Unlike the Holocaust, after which survivors mostly fled to Israel or the United States, in Rwanda, he says, “you’re living next to the killer who killed your family. There’s no space to tell stories,” which must be told. Here’s where he, the outsider, the Jew, comes in. “The reason I can be doing this work is because I am a Jew.” Krauss graduated from a Catholic high school in Phoenix, in 1998. He says that being in such an environment forced him to confront his own Jewishness because he had to represent a whole religion. When he would explain to Rwandans that he was a Jew, they would respond, “Oh, OK, you understand.” His being Jewish made it easy to relate to the survivors, and easier for them to tell him their stories. He said that in some regard, they feel that there is a shared history. And obviously so does he.

Taylor and his colleagues sit for as long as each story takes, sometimes more than 12 hours, and they have collected hundreds of hours of testimonies. But numbers don’t matter, he says. “Even one testimony is priceless. The more people share their testimonies the more I realize the importance of being there. The act of listening is the most important thing.”

I don’t know if it’s fair to say that Taylor has a credo, but if it does it might be this: “If you care about these issues [man’s inhumanity to man], then you have to make changes in your life.” He believes that it is a Jewish obligation to be listening to survivors in Rwanda. “We will be committing the same mistakes if we are not listening. The retelling of the [Rwandan] Holocaust is exactly the reason I am here.”

I was reminded of all this while reading president Obama’s recent speech—the one at Buchenwald.

“To this day,” the president reminded, “there are those who insist that the Holocaust never happened... This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts; a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history. This place teaches us that we must be ever vigilant about the spread of evil in our own time, that we must reject the false comfort that others’ suffering is not our problem and commit ourselves to resisting those who would subjugate others to serve their own interests.”

It is exactly in this spirit that my nephew Taylor is working in Rwanda, because he is a Jew.

You can read more about Taylor and his activities on his website: voicesofrwanda.org

President Obama’s comments can be found in their entirety at http://blogs.jta.org/politics/article/2009/06/05/1005677/obama-at-buchenwald

A History Lesson: One we hope won't be repeated

Last Shabbat I was reminded of how American and how Jewish I am. In schul we read of the death of Sarah, first of the matriarchs. We also commemorated the 45th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Ask any person of a certain age (my age) if they remember where they were and you will get a stream of reminiscence. I was just coming out of an art history exam, thinking about going home for Thanksgiving; I overheard a couple of other students talking about presidents elected in years ending in zero dying in office and wondered why they were bandying about that old chestnut. Moments later I knew.

In my lifetime’s memory, I can’t think of a better, certainly not a more inspiring president than JFK whose words were eloquent, whose public actions were on the mark, whose wife added grace and charm to the stodginess of Washington. If things work out as we hope they will, now my children will have the experience of a Kennedy-like president in the White House—a man whose words are eloquent, whose public actions are on the mark, whose wife will add grace and charm to the stodginess of Washington.

At our house we commemorate the mournful event in Dallas as we always do, with song and quotation. We began with a toast made over Jameson Irish whisky, and sang,

“Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen, and down the mountain side
The summer's gone, and all the flowers are dying
'Tis you, 'tis you must go and I must abide.

One guest rose to recite a line from Edward Everett, the other speaker at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery and now inscribed on the Rhode Island World War II monument. “No lapse of time, no distance of space, shall cause you to be forgotten.” Then, unbidden lines from a poem I’d memorized in 7th grade came to mind. It’s from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Decoration Day” a stanza of which seemed appropriate. From Jameson affected mind to quivering lips it passed, including this stanza:

Rest, comrade, rest and sleep!
The thoughts of men shall be,
As sentinels to keep
Your rest, from danger, free.

I don’t know if this will resonate with many, but two historical events, I hope not precedents, intrude into my mind with nightmare vividness. Briefly in 1618 there was a king and queen of Bohemia, Frederick and his English wife Elizabeth who were of the same lofty plane as the Kennedys and the Obamas. So gracious were they, so open to the arts and sciences that this so-called Winter King—for so brief was his reign—was a foretaste of last century’s Prague Spring. But as in 1968, so in 1619 the forces of repressive reaction drove them from Prague and restored unimaginative conformity, while simultaneously ushering in the Thirty Years’ War. Another historical model: The Gracchi, two brothers in second century BCE Rome, children of wealth and privilege who objected to the outsourcing of jobs (importation of slaves) and importing of cheap products (grain which came virtually free into Rome from conquered provinces) and the displacement of the small farmers who could not compete, their lands snatched up by wealthy aristocrats for a song to grow not wheat but olives and grapes—and then when there was no Italian grain the price of the imported stuff went sky high. The Gracchi sought to curb these abuses by, yes, by spreading the wealth, by limiting the size of the great estates and restoring to the displaced farmers new lands confiscated from those who had taken advantage of their poverty in the first place. Naturally the forces of law and order (yes, Virginia, I am being sarcastic) took matters into their own hands and both brothers in their turn were brutally assassinated. John and Bobby were their modern day counterparts. Those who know me know that I don’t actually pray. Usually. But this I do pray—that the Secret Service does its job. The brothers Gracchi and Kennedy were sacrifices enough.

As you read this, Thanksgiving will have been and gone. I hope it, the quintessential New England holiday, the holiday that doesn’t exclude Jews was a joyous one. Already we are being bombarded with Christmas music and decorations, but with the economy so bad and getting worse, who can blame retailers for rushing the season. So, in that spirit, though to me as I write this it’s not even Thanksgiving yet, Happy Hannukah to all, and to all a good 2009.

The Party

On Tuesday we woke early hoping to beat the crowd at the Francis J. Varieur Elementary School where we vote. By the time I arrived it was necessary to stand beyond the outer door—on a beautiful autumn morning, chatting companionably with neighbors and strangers. Promptly at 7:00 we were allowed into the gym; I stood on the R-Z line, took my ballot, walked to an open booth and completed broken arrows with a felt-tipped pen. I voted for the Irish guy—O’Bama, (I was number 37 that morning to cast my vote) and left the building at 7:15. Feeling patriotically uplifted I drove to school where the pro-McCain people were dourly looking at the latest polls, wondering if they could hold the states W. took in ’04 while the pro-Barack throng nervously asked of each other, “How will they steal it from us this time?”

The rest of the day dragged on and on and on and on. Finally it was time to go home to the hopefully celebratory party we’d arranged for some friends, fifteen of us, armed with polling statistics and as each state was reported we checked to see if it was expected for this candidate or that. We ate and swigged and ate some more, occasionally engorging something recognizable as part of a legitimate food group other than chazerie. Swing states were coming in remarkably slowly. Finally Pennsylvania was awarded to Barack, greeted by whoops and a hollers and shouts of “That’s it, that’s it,” to which others said, nervously, “No, not yet, let’s not put a kenyna hura on this.” But then Ohio was reported solidly in Barack’s camp! By the time the networks proclaimed the winner, shortly after 11:00, we had just heard that Virginia, where my son Sam had been working on the campaign since the summer, had come in for Obama.

We cheered, popped the corks off bottles of champagne, and spontaneously burst into song—first “God Bless America/Land that I love/Stand beside her, and guide her/Thru the night with a light from above./From the mountains, to the prairies/To the oceans, white with foam…../God bless America/My home sweet home” and then a modified version of a song that had been going through my head all day—“We have overcome/We have overcome/We have overcome, today/Oh, deep in my heart/I did believe/We would overcome, someday.” We drank to our healths, and to Obama’s, and to the health of the United States. We felt as though America had done something good and noble that day. Tears flowed as freely as the bubbly. I called Sam and shouted into his voicemail, “You did it, you did it, you did it!” My wife and three others in the room took credit for New Hampshire, the swing state they drove up to last weekend to knock on doors and speak to undecideds. It was a wonderful night. Those of us who proudly call ourselves liberals know that we’ll face our comeupance in some future election, but tonight was ours and we savored the feeling of triumph.

McCain made a graciouis and conciliatory concession speech, but I was bothered by two things—while the Democrats had planned their victory party out in the park and open to all, the Republicans met in an exclusive hotel (I’ve seen it; it’s gorgeous) by invitation only. (Someone at my house commented that this was a microcosm of the difference between the parties.) The other grouse was in his reflection that “This is an historic election, and I recognize the special significance it has for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight.” But as I heard these words I immediately thought, “and white people too.” Without an overwhelming number of people of European descent voting for Obama, this political miracle could not have taken place. It was a multi-racial victory, a victory for America, not a victory for black people only. We did this thing also. My pro-McCain students are proud to have been alive when America broke the color barrier—they just wish the black man had different policies. I’m glad he doesn’t.

And so, we enter a new era. Both McCain and Obama made the same point. It’s time to put the bitterness behind and to work together instead to solve the myriad problems that confront the nation. In a way, winning the election was the easy part; now comes the tough work of reconstructing a viable economy and finding Osama bin Laden, hidden in his cave, so long ignored.

Election is not a choice between good and evil

In a few days we will have a choice between young and old; Keynesian trickle up, and supply side/trickle down; between a Harvard Law Magna Cum Laude and a Naval Academy legacy who graduated 894th out of a class of 899. One wants to discontinue the war in Iraq, the other wants to fight on (and on and on) until victory. Both men are honorable at their cores; this is not a Zoroastrian contest between good and evil; each has erred and is willing to admit it.

We have the opportunity, 45 years after Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech to put a black man in the White House. Just think of that. In August 1963 Dr. King referred to Negroes as victims of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality, their bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, not being able to gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. Their basic mobility could be only from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. Their children were stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “For Whites Only”. “We will not be satisfied,” he thundered magisterially, “until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

That time is almost here. America now treats its African American citizens with the dignity they deserve. Hillary Clinton’s supporters were convinced that it was a woman’s turn to be president, and they were almost right. The representative of the other oppressed group won the day this time. There will be a woman president elected; it is a consummation devoutly to be wished—but apparently it’s the black man’s turn first. I can’t explain it; I don’t justify it, but it is. We cannot turn away from the opportunity to elevate America, to make King’s dream and ours, a reality.

Anticipating losing, McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin or their surrogates have begun to hurl charges at Obama. “He’s a Socialist!” In fact, he’s not, nor is it illegal. I’ve just checked the Constitution. “He’s a Muslim!” In fact, he’s not, and it’s not illegal. I’ve just checked the Constitution, again. “He attended Jeremiah Wright’s church for 20+ years!” Yes, that’s true, but it’s neither illegal nor relevant. McCain deserted his wife for his paramour 20 years ago. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the approach to the economy; what matters is inspiring hope in a forlorn nation. John McCain, for all his service to the nation, is of the past; he would have made a terrific candidate in 2000 but of the four candidates running, surely it will be he to whom America first tearfully bids heartfelt thanks for his life and career. And then we’d get Sarah Palin. She wasn’t McCane’s first choice; Lieberman was, but the party bosses reined in their maverick and so he picked Palin, a woman with whom he’d had a total of three hours of conversation. When he was forced to give in and accept the inevitable “he was furious,” according to one of his advisors as quoted in the October 27th New Yorker. “He was pissed. It wasn’t what he wanted.” It’s not what any reasonable person wants—just ask conservative columnists David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer and George Will, all of whom have rejected her as presidential. And yet if the old man wins and dies, she’s who we get.

McCain suffers from Stockholm Syndrome. In 1973 hostages taken in an aborted bank robbery, held captive for six days, actually tried to help the robbers when the police finally broke in and afterwards refused to testify against them. Back in 2000 McCain was running for the Republican Party’s nomination against Governor George Bush. After losing badly in Iowa he beat him in New Hampshire and Carl Rove’s gloves came off. The people of South Carolina were bombarded with innuendo and out-right lies that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black baby. Illogically enough he was simultaneously branded a “fag” in flyers sent to churches. In South Carolina, remember! He went down to defeat then, and what is he doing now? Adopting the techniques of his captors. Lies and innuendos, the same sort of thing that cost him 2000. A McCain rally in North Carolina began with this introduction—not by the candidate himself—“Liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God.” People in Ohio were told that Obama didn’t go to Hawaii to be with his ailing grandmother but to destroy evidence that he’s not really an American citizen. It’s a pity; McCain’s not a bad man; he’s just a man behaving badly. Desperation will do that to some people.

The Bard and Barack

It’s summer time and the livin’, as Ira Gershwin wrote, is easy. The world has no fewer problems but the tendency is to put the serious stuff on the back burner until after the World Series. But people can go too far.

I have in mind Edward Achorn in Tuesday’s August 5 Providence Journal: “Was the Bard a secret Catholic?” is the question asked, and it will come as no surprise that the answer is a definitive “could be.” Achorn relies on Joseph Pearce’s The Quest for Shakespeare: The Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome. You may remember Pearce. He was a member of the British National Front, a neo-fascist society dedicated to race purity. Twice he served time for militant racism, but then he found the Catholic Church and reformed. Currently he is a professor of literature at the right-wing Catholic Ave Maria University.

The evidence Achorn selects from Pearce’s tome is interesting, but it’s the kind that people present when they want to make the case that Columbus was Jewish—as circumstantial as it is irrelevant. Achorn concludes his article with a graphic you-really-don’t-want-to-have-to-read-this-stuff-while-sipping-your-morning-coffee description of being drawn and quartered, a punishment meted out to Catholics in Elizabeth’s persecutions of them. This is followed by, “His works remain universal. But that Shakespeare might have been a hidden Catholic lends undeniable piquancy to the themes of power, honor and strained loyalty running so strongly through his work.”

If Catholics want to claim Shakespeare, it’s fine with me. But what is objectionable is that while Achorn uses as his source a (pseudo) academic and quotes a legitimate one—Anthony Esolen who contends that Pearce’s case is “meticulous, reasonable and convincing” he without cause or justification maligns academics in general. Hey! What’d I do?

“All this of course, [that Shakespeare was devout crypto-Catholic] must seem anathema to academics who wish to embrace Shakespeare as the spokesman of secular modernity. The popular creed of our day is that godless Man is all, and that elites, using Machiavellian means to advance themselves, should have as much power as possible to work their superior will over less enlightened human beings. In the view of some, Shakespeare had nothing specific to say about morality or religion, other than to question the legitimacy of both.”

Let’s parse this. To begin with there is no such thing as “academics”. We are, if anything, anarchists. No one of us speaks for another, and often enough, not even for ourselves. We are ready to admit that we favored something until we opposed it. We are a punching bag for conservatives who see our malign presence in the classroom as undermining everything they believe in, but the punching bag is never the aggressor; it’s the innocent bystander.

Is there really a stampede of academics embracing Shakespeare as the spokesman of secular modernity? Is secular modernity so immoral as Achorn assumes? I know conservatives who are atheists, liberals who believe in God and neither camp advocates immorality.

Now we get to the core. We secular modernist academics are elitists! And we don’t trust the common man to make decisions for themselves! And we are inappropriately co-opting Shakespeare, that moral Roman Catholic. I know you know, this, dear reader, but when conservatives use the word “elite” they are not talking about Noble Prize winners, nor even of Congressional Medal of Honor recipients. They are talking about liberals, especially liberal Democrats, and, now-a-days more particularly Barack Obama. It’s the cry of the right-wing haves who want to wrest the poor and the lower middle class away from the Democrats who have been their champions at least since the days of FDR.

Oh, and lest it goes unsaid. Poor Shakespeare was a crypto-Catholic because he feared torture and death at the hands of rabid Protestants? This is why he “revered justice, detested bullies, and fully understood the sinfulness and frailty of his fellow men and women”? Elizabeth’s predecessor, her half-sister Mary, burned Protestants at the stake and Guy Fawkes, a Catholic, tried to blow up Parliament. In Spain the Inquisition’s auto de fes were consuming Protestants, Moors and, need I remind you, Jews. Galileo was threatened with the same punishment for the same crime as Giordano Bruno who had been burned at the stake for teaching the Copernican theory. Let’s face it, Catholics at that time held no monopoly on being persecuted. Belief in God does not equate with moral behavior; secularists can be just as moral—or immoral—as religious folk.

Obama's flip-flops are growing worrisome

I’m worried about Obama. It’s not the usual right-wing bombast (he’s an anti-Israeli-crypto-Muslim). In fact, my problems are the opposite of theirs. Now that the nomination is surely his, he’s taken some “centrist” positions in a vain hope to win over moderate Republican support.

First it was agreeing with the Supreme Court’s gun decision. That strict constructionalists failed to notice the words referring to the maintaince of a well regulated militia as the raison d’être of the Second Amendment’s very limited acquiescence to individuals bearing arms amazes. In 1973 the Court said, “Let the slaughter intensify, legally” and it did. Now the Justices are saying it again, and it will. And Obama supports them. Narrowly the case was about whether people in Washington, DC had the right to a loaded gun in their house for self defense and a rifle for hunting, but the chuckleheads who constitute the NRA are going to take this as the opening shot to bring home an alleged right for anyone not yet convicted of a crime to pack a rod.

Then it was his advocacy of federal funds going to faith-based groups. That sound you hear is Thomas Jefferson rolling over in his grave, or maybe it’s the wall of separation between church and state cracking. Or both. Have we learned nothing from the Jim Jones fiasco? You remember Jim. He established Jonesville in the jungles of Guyana after first conning such luminaries as Vice President Walter Mondale and First Lady Rosalynn Carter, and then when his frauds were becoming public he had an investigating congressman and his entourage murdered and then ordered the mass suicide of his 900 Kool-Aid-drinking-faith-based-community. And now in his swing to the right Obama wants to give money to people who on the one hand say “We will use it wisely” and on the other object to government scrutiny of how they spend money—based on their constitutional right of separation of church from state.

Not that Obama isn’t getting pilloried from those with whom he is trying to make friends on the right. He is. When he spoke of giving federal funds to religious groups he hedged. “First, if you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help, and you can’t discriminate against them—or against the people you hire—on the basis of their religion.” Bill Donohue (I wrote about him in the December 8, 2006 edition of the Voice & Herald, you may recall) shouted “Fraud!” Donohue, who fronts the “Catholic League,” fulminated: “What Obama wants is to secularize the religious workplace.” He argues that Obama’s position is “a body blow to religious groups that apply for federal funds.”

And in this Donohue may be right (I hate to write that). Obama, who billed himself in this specious speech as “someone who used to teach constitutional law” ought to know better. Part of the reason for the separation of church and state is actually to protect religion from the state. If government can impose a requirement that religious institutions can not insist that people hired share their religious convictions and sensibilities than government would, in effect, be delivering the body blow of which Donohue protests. Oh what a tangled web Obama weaves when first he practices to, to what? To deceive? Maybe.

And has he changed his position on bringing the troops back from Iraq within 16 months of his taking the oath of office? I don’t know. He says “yes” and explains “no.” He challenges those such as me who hold him to our standards. I’ve been saying these things all along, he says; we weren’t listening. Ah, the fault dear reader is not in the man but in ourselves, for we were so desperate for change that we failed to pay attention. Is that what Obama is saying?

Not that John McCain has won my support. He is a Republican. George W. Bush is a Republican. Under Bush, though warned, we were attacked, we’ve fought the wrong enemy, spending trillions of dollars and thousands of lives while the price of fuel has skyrocketed, tens of thousands of jobs have been lost, the stock market is in free fall and the Taliban is on the rise. McCain is trying to put as much distance between himself and Bush as he can, but he’s still a Republican and while someday that emblem may not be a stigma, it is today. Just ask former Senator Lincoln Chaffee.

Boomers in the White House (Or: How I guessed wrong)

Caveat Lector. Reader, beware! In 1980 I confidently predicted that President Carter would narrow defeat Ronald Reagan. In 1992 I was sure that President George H.W. Bush would defeat little known Bill Clinton. In 2000 it was obvious that Al Gore would win over George W. Bush. (On that one I was right, except that…well, you know…) So I’ve given up on predicting presidential contests, even primaries. By the time you read this Obama will probably be the prohibitive favorite, or even the nominal nominee of the Democratic Party (whoops, poor Obama, I’ve just made a prediction!). The rules of the game are that I can’t endorse, and I wouldn’t, but I can comment in the comment section of this paper, and so I will.

Those who voted in the Democratic Primary earlier this month were purportedly given a choice between style (Obama) and substance (Clinton). But as Barbara Fields alluded last week, there might be more than that; we were given a choice between my generation and the next, and for those of us in my age-range we can compare to those in our parents’ generation.

My parents’ generation was represented by Kennedy and Nixon, the one the golden boy of change, the other an exemplar of suspicion and trickery; Ford and Carter are of their generation too, both men of honor, neither up to the job; Reagan was a throwback, the front man for those who wanted ever since its inception to undo the New Deal. Then after H.W. Bush it was my generation’s turn to produce presidents. We gave you Clinton and Bush, both draft evaders, the former a womanizer whose indiscretions cost his party its hold of congress and later the presidency. The latter is a failed example of a puppet king who succeeded in doing his masters’ task, lowering their taxes, and then thought he could assume the mantle of leadership by creating an unnecessary war, and in so doing has alienated 70% of the country.

My generation was the product of the sexual revolution (thanks to Hugh Heffner, et al.) and rock and roll—that most mindless of music which has now further degenerated into the non-music of racial slur, misogamy and gangstas. We were babied by our doting parents who had survived the Great Depression and the Second World War, determined that we should have what they had not, and we appreciated it. But if Clinton and Bush are our representative presidents, we have failed to live up to our enormous potential.

Now another Clinton is running for president. At first she seemed to be the prohibitive favorite, the all but anointed champion of her party, the heir presumptive to her husband’s popularity. She was thought of as inevitable. And she was. Until the voters had their say. First in Iowa, then in South Carolina, then not able to eliminate her rival on Super Tuesday she suffered a string of defeats until the March 4th contests which are before me, but by the time you read these words you will know whether she was able to survive as a viable candidate, or not. Yes, she’s strong on policy, but she’s of my generation, and therefore I think that she’ll lose; I think the American public has had enough of us baby-boomers whose time in office was brief (16 years) but perhaps too long.

Obama on the other hand seems to have surmounted the twin trials of being inexperienced and half African. He is reputed to be a Manchurian Candidate, a crypto Muslim who will betray America and Israel. It’s nonsense, of course, but such are the tactics of conservatives who fear that he will defeat whomsoever the Republicans put up—whether it be the aged war hero or the amusing creationist.

As a people we seem at this writing to be at the tipping point. Should we give one more chance to the old discredited generation, or take a blind leap of faith towards the new? Not to belabor the cliché, but it’s the same question voters were asked to resolve in 1960. Nixon the man of experience, who while the same age as Kennedy, seemed a throwback to the old, or take a chance on the less experienced visionary. Then, narrowly, we looked forward. Today? I think we will again. My generation has failed America in its offerings as president. I think America is looking for new hope in a new generation of mixed blood. I may be wrong. It’s happened before.


A correction: Last week quotation marks were inadvertently omitted, making it appear that I had said that I would like to ban the writings of David Duke, etc. but that we don’t do those things in America. While I agree with the sentiment, the words were not mine; I was quoting a colleague, J. S. Friedman of the College of Wooster in Ohio.