New Heights - a soap opera review

New Heights - or Neumatt, as I believe it's called in the original Swiss German - is a 2021 Netflix production about a Swiss family trying to keep a traditional dairy farm going in the face of the modern world of factory farms and other big city types out to make a buck, tradition be damned. The story begins when the Wyss family has to confront the fact that, believing his failure to manage finances has bankrupted the farm, their husband and father has hanged himself in the barn, leaving them all to scramble.

It's also, almost in passing, an LGBT drama - which is how I found my way to it - because I am a sucker for gay romances, and because I wanted to see how modern-day Switzerland would deal with the topic of gay people in a rural setting.

It has the usual flaws of TV serials; it is too drawn out in places and you have perhaps too many subplots you have to keep track of. But all in all, I found it a cut above most soap opera/telenovela Netflix/Amazon Prime TV drama standards, for the writing, the acting, the dramatic turns of plot and the settings. It moves between a high powered downtown Zurich consulting firm and a dairy farm in Neumatt, an actual place a half hour north of Bern and an hour west of Zurich. It's a highly professional production, with actors who have some serious acting chops. And a great story of a family with skeletons in the closet and an inclination to rush to each other's aid one minute and throw each other under the bus, the next. It's great soap-opera material, in other words.

Before he takes his own life, the father writes a letter to the golden boy of the family, Michi, asking him to keep the farm going and look after his younger brother, Lolo (Lorenz). Lorenz combines a love of animals and the virtues of a hard-working farmer with near saintliness of character. He knows what's right, sees and calls out the evil all around him, and serves as the conscience of and motivator for his mother and his siblings. Michi never saw eye-to-eye with his father and left a long time ago to go off to the city to make his fortune. His mother and siblings are both proud of his talents and accomplishments but also find him hard to relate to, so thoroughly has Michi turned his back on them all. At one point, as a relationship is developing with his colleague and soon-to-be lover, Joel, Michi lies to him about his background as a farm boy.

What makes this a slice above soap opera quality story-telling is the skillful way the contrasts are worked in between rural and urban consciousness, between "the bright kid" and "the slow kid" members of the family, the way Michi is torn between the farmers of the world he grew up in and the opportunity to excel at what he can do as a consultant for the money-grubbing dairy farmer technocrats who pay him such a good salary. His father wants him to come help fix the roof. "Don't you know I can pay five workers to do that in the same amount of time it would take me to do it myself?" he responds. Other moments lift it, as well. When younger brother Lolo catches Michi in flagrante with his gay lover Joel, Michi is humiliated at being outed this way. "I know you're gay," Lorenz responds. "I was just wondering if this is a serious relationship." The low IQ son with the big heart, it turns out, has a really big heart - and is not so dumb, after all.

One of the reasons I watch so many LGBT dramas is I'm dealing with a lifelong need to find evidence that things have gotten better. I don't know whether this story is indicative of Swiss attitudes in general, or of just a segment of the Swiss population, or whether this is a form of socialist realism, but the treatment of Michi's homosexuality and the couple's relationship is refreshing. The local veterinarian, Döme, who complicates the story when a childhood fling is momentarily rekindled. Döme is now happily married and has no doubt his wife a child come first, but the fling serves to remind Michi of years gone by when he was caught by his father with Döme, also in flagrante (can't people do the jolly behind locked doors?). And this puts some meat on the bones of his need to run to the city and leave farm and family behind. The pre-gay-lib and post-gay-lib contrast is striking.

Another progressive element to the story is the fact that Michi's lover, Joel, has dark skin. Joel is played by the established German actor, Benito Bause, whose father is German/Italian and whose mother is Tanzanian. He is never identified as "the black guy" but only as "the guy from Hamburg." Progress worth noting. 

Or is it? That's the trouble with social progressive elements in film or in literature; you never know whether they reflect attitudes in the larger society or simply the views of the filmmaker.

I can't predict how others will find this photoplay, let's call it. Those who want characters they can relate to may have a hard time relating to these sometimes loathsome members of the Wyss family. I don't know if their redeeming features are sufficient to overcome the backstabbing. I won't comment on the ending except to say they've left open the possibility of coming up with another season.

I'll be first in line to watch it, if they do.

In Schwyzerdütsch, Swiss Standard German and German Standard German, with English subtitles; also available dubbed in English

photo credit

Putin's War - a lefty's perspective

I've been listening closely to the debate going on in Germany over Putin's war and I am struck by the number of public voices in Germany urging their government to press Zelenskyy to the negotiating table. I'm taken aback by how many Putin apologists there are and how broadly they are supported, if the commentaries to their public appearances on social media are any indication.

There's an irony in this. I became a diehard lefty many years ago. I once said my arm would fall off if I ever voted for a Republican and these days, now that the remnants of the Republican party that retain dignity and integrity have been swallowed up by the thoroughly repugnant MAGA wing of their party, I don't waste a minute apologizing for my lefty stance. I watch Amy Goodman for news and my bookshelves are filled with books by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. I'm a big Michael Moore fan.

What put me on this path was my experience in the army in the 1960s, where I discovered unbelievable mindlessness and justification for blind obedience. That came with the understanding that the Vietnam War showed the United States to be effectively indistinguishable, in my view, from earlier European imperial powers. The good guys, the noble American idealists striving for an expansion of democracy, were still there, bumbling their way with occasional successes. But much of the time I saw America as a bully willing to go to war to aid American commercial interests. Over the years, that hasn't changed. I still see America as a seriously flawed democracy, struggling to contend with its greedy vulture capitalism segment, and I still see war as the failure of human beings to give peace their best efforts. I remain fiercely anti-war, and despite the arguments I've rehearsed over and over again in my mind for this thing called a just war, I prefer to take the view that living to fight another day is the better course of action in most cases.

But if opposition to war is, or should be, the default position, that does not shut down the case for fighting a just war. I've struggled over the contradictions involved. So why, I've been asking myself, do I find myself so strongly wanting the Ukrainians to push the Russians out of their country if it means not only endless killing not only of the Ukrainian population, but of innocent Russian young men? Putin, we know, won't hesitate to use the youth of his country as cannon fodder, or mine sweepers, as we remember how Stalin used to clear the mine fields by running young recruits across them to give his more seasoned troops easier access to the Nazi forces. Prolonging this war only makes us party to Putin's inhumanity. This switch is more than ironic. It reflects a moral dilemma of the first order.

Why do I want to make Volodymyr Zelenskyy into a hero? Why do I feel so good that Biden has just promised the Ukrainians, by a vote of 68 to 29 in the Senate, another $44 billion in assistance? And why am I feeling a sense of resentment for Germany for not getting behind the war efforts?  For so many years I was proud of Germany that it had picked itself up from World War II and become arguably the chief voice for war-avoidance. They knew what they were talking about. If you've seen the images of German cities in 1945, with scarcely one block of stone on top of another in some places, you'll see why the cry became "Nie wieder Krieg" - no more war. In Europe, at least. This was tested in Kosovo, but by and large Germany became the peacemaker, and I was proud of Germany for that.

So many Germans I once admired - Sahra Wagenknecht, Serdar Somuncu, Richard David Precht - all notable public intellectuals, as well as other leftist politicians like Gregor Gysy and the head of the Lutheran Church in Germany, Margot Kaessmann - have come out, usually citing the responsibility Germans carry, given their tragic history, for never shooting at Eastern European people in a war situation. And they are not outliers, but are joined by large numbers of others in both the German radical right and radical left. All united by the eminently responsible sounding argument that Germany must never again engage in war.

I don't want to make the political arguments here. Or go into the historical events, such as Putin's earlier invasion of Ukraine in 2014 when he got away with murder and the Europeans sat on their hands as he ran off with the Crimea and the Eastern Ukrainian provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk as well. There were rumbles among the members of NATO, in the UN General Assembly and elsewhere, but nobody made any effort to resist the blatant disregard for the agreements signed by every nation involved to respect established borders. Those are arguments for another day.

I just want to say out loud that the images of bombed Ukrainian cities have had an effect on me. No amount of justification for Putin's dream of a Russian-controlled Ukraine matters any more. It's the images of the bombing of civilians, the brutality of attacking gas and water generating plants as the winter is upon us. It removes the last shred of truth to the claim that Putin wants to see his fellow Slavs as brothers and sisters. Makes him a bloody, war-mongering hypocrite. 

I will still listen to anti-war arguments. But if you want me see any solution to this war other than Putin's defeat you're going to have to come up with some mighty convincing new ones. As long as the Ukrainians continue to show such determination to defend their borders, I'm going to continue, I imagine, to see Zelenskyy as a heroic figure and Ukrainians as a people with a cause worth defending. Count me in as one tax-paying American cheering the trillion-dollar package the Senate came up with today. Keeping the government funded. Good idea. Increasing maternity leave benefits. Good idea. And supporting Ukraine with big bucks. Very good idea indeed.

Reichsbürger Milieu

 Unless you were out looking for it, you may have missed the news from Germany that they are dealing with a bunch of clowns who want to overthrow the government and bring back the German Reich. A German analogue to the white supremacist element of MAGA, with supreme authority in the hands of the Kaisers, a Germany of heroic Siegfrieds and Brunnhildes, free of Jews and foreigners. Reich is a distinctly German word which embraces all monarchical rule from kingdom to empire. It is the antithesis of a republic governed by democratic institutions. I can justify calling them clowns only because, so far, they are both impotent and downright silly, and present no real threat to anybody. Unfortunately, there are two reasons for concern: they are widespread and involve a broad range of followers, including police, military, and members of the justice system, and they are inclined to violence.

Chief among the disparate conspiracy groups are the so-called Reichsbürger, "citizens of the Reich," who have set up a 71-year-old member of the minor nobility, one Heinrich XIII, Prince Reuss, to be their leader. Reuss is a wealthy entrepreneur living in Frankfurt who has partially funded the Reichsbürger efforts. Another ringleader is 69-year-old retired military officer Rüdiger von Pescatore, expelled from the army for selling illegally-obtained weapons from the defunct East German army. A third notable would-be member of the new restored government is Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, a former judge in the Berlin regional court and former right-wing Alternative-for-Germany Party member of the Bundestag (German Parliament).

Looking at this phenomenon through American eyes, three things come immediately to mind. One is the tragic fact that anti-semitism lives on in Germany. A thorough study of German antisemitism will show, I am convinced, that it remains very much a fringe movement, and that Germans as a whole have done much to make their country both proud of its Jewish history and a welcome place for Jews who make Germany their home. But given the impact the horror of the Holocaust has had on Western Civilization, there is no escaping the fact that even the smallest trace of anti-semitism in Germany is disheartening. We hear constantly of the necessity of "eternal vigilance" in keeping democracy alive; the same applies to the effort to head off any possibility of a repeat of the Holocaust.

The second thing that strikes me as worth noting is the way in which the Reichsbürger and other members of what the media are calling the "Reichsbürger Milieu" - a curious choice of words for a grouping of people unhappy with the way many modern-day democracies are run - see the U.S. as the bad guy. Much of their dissatisfaction is understandable and many Americans, including myself, will readily admit that when America sneezes much of the rest of the world catches a cold. But I also see the UK and the EU as more than capable of working out their own destinies with America less and less a big brother as time goes by. Blaming America for Europe's woes is one way to go; finding common ground with your neighbors is a better one. Europe has the numbers, the talent, and the energy, if they can just figure out how to harness these resources.

A third observation I'd like to make how often the U.S. and European democracies find themselves fighting similar struggles. Trump got a foothold in the U.S. because he was able to manipulate the legitimate dissatisfaction among his countrymen that too many of them were falling through the cracks. The gap between the well-to-do and the have-nots has grown to a staggering degree in recent decades, and Americans observe, correctly, that all is not well with the American way of life and government. The problem is they hired a fox to tend to the henhouse. Germans too, are uncomfortable with the cracks in their system. They too, some of them, are looking for a king, a big-daddy to ride in and solve all their problems. So far, fortunately, at least they are not seeking a new Führer. The bottom line, unfortunately, is there is a surprising number of folk in both places who have lost faith in democracy as the best - or, at least, the least bad - way to govern themselves.

None of this is new information, I realize. I repeat it here only to emphasize that the only way out of this mess is a steady persistence, a commitment to do the right thing, to keep going, keep speaking out, keep getting informed and staying informed. You don't need to stick your hand in the fire to know that pain will follow. You don't need to let the clowns and the wackos - and the self-serving Enablers who believe they can ride the tiger - to dismantle democracy in order to see the consequences. 

I love it that we have strong democracies and the luxury of allowing blithering idiots like Marjorie Taylor Green and Heinrich XIII to come forward and reveal their limitations as public figures. Keep laughing. And keep watching carefully.

Shawn, rhymes with get off my lawn

One of the ways I believe our quality of life has improved since the onset of the internet age is that we now have easy access to all sorts of bloggers and vloggers now sharing their views on what matters to them. Like with fire, or any other powerful entity, how you spend your time in front of a computer screen has to be properly managed. Fire can burn you; it can also heat your soup. Dumb blogs can bore the bejeezuz out of you or lull you into closing down your brain; good ones can further your lifelong quest for new information and greater understanding.  And you don't need to go to a library, a lecture hall, or a public debate to take these new things in. All you need is an internet connection and a monitor to watch things on. 

Covid has been a perfect nightmare for a lot of active people, but for me it was a turning point. I realized immediately, now that Netflix and Amazon Prime can provide you with more movies than you can realistically take in, that I could easily become an even bigger couch potato than I already was.  I could also bewail the fact that I (and everybody else) had become housebound. But I could just as easily do something about becoming more selective about what I take in.  Faced with the opportunity to select from among an almost infinite amount of new information, I soon found myself shutting down movies I once might have watched to the end, searching for ever more reliable sources of news, and renewing my faith in the human race by watching world-class classical musical performance after another. I could also sit and allow to parade through my living space an astonishing array of young people with magnificent minds and keep myself from falling into despair over America's dumbed down embrace of fascism and the destruction of the planet, and focus regularly on a plethora of pick-me-up bits of evidence that all was not lost, that there are young people out there who might just keep us from going under. I began to take serious note of possibilities I had not seen before. Or seen but not paid much attention to. I don't believe in any gods, but if I did, their name would be YouTube.

Let me mention just two examples of whiz kids who have provided me with endless hours of education and entertainment.  There are so many more.  And I know my interests are parochial and that what turns me on may not turn you on. But let me show you mine, and invite you to show me yours.

Here's just a few:

1. One is a gay couple in Nova Scotia who have decided they want to live off the grid. They travelled for a time in a camper, but then settled down in the woods north of Halifax and built a geodesic dome to live in, cleared the land, brought in solar panels, built a garden and generally went about making a life for themselves while waiting (two years now) to be able to build a permanent home out of shipping containers. They have a huge following and post a fascinating update on their accomplishments every Sunday. I always look forward to Sunday for two reasons: The Sunday New York Times and Tyler and Todd.

2. Another is a recent Oxford university graduate in philosophy and theology named Alex J. O'Connor. He runs a blog he calls Cosmic Skeptic in which he advocates for a greater understanding of atheism (as opposed to being an evangelist for atheism itself), for animal welfare and for vegetarianism, and is, in my view, a powerful argument for going to university to not merely get a degree in philosophy, but to become a philosopher in practice. His videos have been viewed 50 million times and he has 450,000 subscribers, including yours truly.

Alex has a steel-trap mind and I couldn't do him justice. If you have time and the inclination, you can jump in anywhere and hear what he has to say.

There are so many more, cooking shows, political discussion groups, debating clubs. But I'd like to focus for the rest of this space on one guy in particular. He is perhaps not as impressive in the same way as Alex O'Connor, but he's somebody who nonetheless blew me out of the water as I began to see the extent of things of which he was capable. I'm talking about somebody named Shawn.

Shawn is a mystery. Whether by design or simply because I haven't done all my homework, I can't be sure. I have not been able to find out his full name, nor where he comes from. His blog name reveals the fact that he has a good sense of humor - and I always associate humor with intelligence; call it a prejudice, but I think you have to be smart to be funny. He goes by "imshawngetoffmylawn." The name has nothing to do (that I can see) with what he does. He is just about the most amazing polyglot I've ever come across. And he's so damned young! God knows what he's going to be capable of as the years go by.

I started out with his trashing of the Hebrew alphabet. He tells us he's been speaking the language most of his life, which led me to assume, once I saw his Russian and English were also native, or near-native, that he must be among the many Russian Jews who emigrated to Israel, and then moved on to life in an English-speaking country.  He can't write Hebrew, he says, and that would fit with his having left as a child. Click here for a taste of that video (or, of course, the whole thing.)

Shawn has a magnificent obsession.  He wants to support the efforts to bring dead languages back to life, as in the case of Cornish, and keep endangered languages from disappearing. The reasoning is the same as the effort to maintain plant and animal species. (I just heard that one in 8 species on earth is at risk of distinction.) The argument runs like this: It's not just human beings that should be treasured but especially the diversity that exists among human beings and all life species as well.  We never know, for example, when a plant species goes extinct, whether we've lost a chance to develop a cure for all kinds of diseases by medicines yet to be discovered. And when it comes to human language, anybody familiar with how differently the world is constructed in the mindsets of speakers of diverse languages will understand what a loss of a human language means to the richness of human civilization. And if you're familiar with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis you know the theory that the world you are able to take in is to some degree directly affected by the language you speak, because that language determines what it is

you focus on.

So let's hear it for ranters, I say.

Shawn is a polyglot and he may be a good linguist as well - many polyglots get seriously into linguistics sooner or later. I'm not sure about the extent of his linguistic knowledge. But there's no doubt he's an exceptional whiz kid when it comes to mastering languages. He's got this great thing going with his followers where he gets them to pick a language for him to learn and he then goes at it intensely for a couple weeks and shows off his knowledge and his proficiency. Mind-boggling what he accomplishes this way.

But let me finish my speculation on his mystery identity.

But here's what I've been able to surmise from watching the videos I can find under his name.

I discovered that he speaks near native English, Russian, and Hebrew early on, so my first guess was that he must be a Russian Jew who found his way to Israel and then to North America. I then noted that his Russian, like his English, is near-native, but not-native, and that led me to think he may have been raised in one of the non-Russian countries of the former Soviet Union, maybe the Balkans. I then discovered a vlog he did in Latvian in which he says he grew up there but is not Latvian. He obviously speaks Latvian either natively or near-natively, to add to the pile.

Here is a video of his about the Latgalian language, the language spoken by many in Eastern Latvia, aka Livonia

He's got a great sense of humor, evidenced by his videos where he speaks English, Russian, Hebrew and Latvian in various foreign accents.

Here he is speaking Hebrew, which he claims as one of his native languages.

And here he is speaking Hebrew with various foreign accents. He needs to get together with Trevor Noah.

 

And here he is showing off his ability to read the UN Declaration of Human Rights preamble in all identifiable Slavic languages:  . Not too many people could pull that off.

And here he is showing off his ability in another fashion - counting to 100 with each number in a different language from all previous ones. Here he's just show-boating, but when you got it, flaunt it, I say.

My ears really perked up when I saw him take on a bit of Nova Scotia history, as well, because I have Nova Scotia roots, and am familiar with the Mi'kmaq Indians, the aboriginals of the Maritime Provinces.  Mi'kmaq is an Eastern Algonquin language and Shawn talks about the Mi'kmaq interaction with the speakers of Algonquin and the Pidgin language that ensued. 

If you want a more thorough linguistic take on that example of languages in contact, as well as a bit of history of the French expulsion from Nova Scotia, check out this blogger, "History with Hilbert"

And if you want to hear the sound of Mi'kmaq, here is a young lady singing the Beatles song, Blackbird, in Mi'kmaq.

And while we're on the topic of Nova Scotia, my memory of the Gaelic-speaking priests from St. Francis Xavier University who came to visit me when I was stranded at the age of 16 in a hospital in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, was jogged. Here Shawn takes up the topic of "Canadian Gaelic," and he is, of course, talking about these wonderful men I knew as a kid: 

Here he is discussing the Keres language. A linguistic isolate (like Basque), that is a language with no connection to any other language on the planet.

And Breton. 

And Cornish. 

 

I mentioned his sense of humor. Here it is again as he points out, with barely hidden glee, that "I speak English" in Chinook is "Naika wawa Kinchotsh wawa." naika = "I"; wawa = both "speak" and "language"; and Kinchotsh (King George) = English.  And - how's this for an ironic tidbit of interest only to advocates of keeping endangered languages alive - the Chinook jargon (it doesn't even have the standing of a language, but is referred to only as a jargon) was once a widely spoken lingua franca in the Pacific Northwest (Oregon, Washington and British Columbia), used in trading, in court proceedings and elsewhere, but at its peak, in 1870, according to Shawn, it was spoken by no more than an estimated 100,000 to 250,000 people. And here's Shawn being gleeful again when he points out that there was a textbook published in 2018 for Chinook Jargon, titled  La Chinuka Interlingvo Per Esperanto, which, if your Esperanto is up to snuff, is The Chinook Jargon, in Esperanto.

When they took away our language, they took away our ability to think in our own way.      

Clare Swan, a Dena'ina elder in 1985 (and I doubt she had any idea who Whorf was.) 

Kind of sums it up.

And speaking of polyglots interested in language maintenance, here's an interesting tale about a French guy who decided to make the preservation of Eyak his life's work.

And the Dena'ina language of Alaska.   It's worth noting in passing that the Dena'ina language of Alaska has been shown to have a linguistic connection with Navajo and Apache. So there, those of you looking to prove Uncle Henry came over from Russia millions of years ago by walking across the Bering Strait.

Did you know? - bet you didn't, but now you do - that if there is a field of study on the Latgalian (Livonian) language called - wait for it - Latgalistics. And if you decided to pursue it, that would make you a Latgalistician.

Moving on...

Here's his report on Estonian.

I won't go on. There is much more, if languages are your shtick. And if you're tired of this messed-up world and find it encouraging, as I did, to come across young people with the kind of skills we all wish we had, a way of seeing a bit of hope for the future, Shawn-of-unkown-origins will be a treat.

If you ever do discover his roots, do let me know, will you?

America: A Land of Prophets

Warning. The world is ending. Don't believe me? Just look up in the sky!

I think it's important to maintain a healthy distance between human beings and their ideas. People are much more than their thoughts. I'm an ardent follower of the Enlightenment Project and its ideological stance expressed in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, all thirty articles of it, and particularly the first one, which reads:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

But the fact that I make such a declaration publicly doesn't prove that I put what I say into practice. For that you really need to observe my behavior over time. The important thing isn't me or others who make the same claim; it's the idea which is broadly shared by people of good will.

It is important, I think, that we make such declarations, that people defend democracy even when their voting habits suggest they don't practice what they preach. Sometimes, I think, people listen to themselves and talk themselves into things.

The other side of the coin is that all sorts of stupid things come out of people's mouths, and given some time for reflection, they retract those moments of carelessness. They deserve a chance to retract the occasional slip. And also they should be given the liberty to change their minds.

Consider the evangelical preacher John Hagee, for example, the guy who founded Christians United for Israel. He's a literal fundamentalist. If the Bible tells us Noah put animals in his ark two by two, it bothers John Hagee not a whit that there probably wasn't enough room for lions and tigers and giraffes and deer each to get a separate room or how it was that the pairs were 100% fertile and once the ark let everybody off on Mount Ararat, they were all able to keep their species going.

I think John Hagee's lack of familiarity with even the stuff of elementary school science classes makes him look like an idiot. I'd still shake his hand and offer him coffee or tea should he pass my way. But I'd also want to check out whether his ideas are simple b.s. or whether they actually cause harm. Does he hurt Catholics when he calls their church the "whore of Babylon"? I'd let that one go, but then again, I'm not a Roman Catholic. What about Palestinians, or Israelis who believe the answer to the standoff in the Middle East must be solved by getting Israelis and Palestinians to work together?

Of course, maybe koala bears and polar bears and grizzly bears really did all fit together somehow. Hagee's claim that the Noah's Ark tale was not some kind of exercise of early biblical imagination but a literal historical event doesn't bother me anywhere near as much as his claim that God used Hitler to punish the Jews for not following his commandments. And check out his 1990 sermon where he tells you God had another purpose, as well: he wanted the Jews to have the motivation to found the State of Israel. Which they had to do to before they could all convert and become Christians, and fulfill biblical prophecy. I've decided that was Hagee simply having a dumber-than-shit moment. Let it pass. Maybe.

Whether you take this claim as evidence that Hagee is just another half-witted televangelist making a personal fortune from leading the vulnerable and the clueless to part with their shekels, or whether he's totally sincere, he illustrates this bizarre everyday phenomenon that is American religiosity. The problem is when we gave "faith" a seat at the table along with "reason," we opened the floodgates to the tragedy we live with today, where anybody can come up with the most cockamamie proposition imaginable and defend it with the political argument, "I've got a right to my beliefs!" Yes, of course you do, but that don't make it right!

Because Hagee is a religious leader, nobody can touch him, legally. And that's OK with me. I think the best response to nonsense speech is non-nonsense corrective speech, not censorship. As long as a critical mass of people use their heads, check their facts, and commit to civil and reasonable discourse, we'll make it through such diatribes as John Hagee puts forth from his pulpit. But recently evangelicals - and not just evangelicals but some mainstream Christians as well, the kind who believe Mary was a virgin, her son walked on water and Methuselah married a woman named Edna and lived to the age of 969 - have been working hand-in-glove with politicians to make national policy. Best pay attention here, as women, people of color, Jews, gays and transsexuals can tell you.

Hagee became a strong McCain supporter until McCain got wind of his Holocaust stance and dropped him like a hot potato. But, as Daniel Benjamin of the Brookings Institute reminds us, this is just Hagee getting started. Hagee also explains Hurricane Sandy as God's punishment for Louisiana's bad behavior. A kind of replay of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell's suggestion that 9/11 was God's punishment for abortion, homosexuality, feminism and secular public schools.

What gets me about such claims - besides their sheer hilarious nonsense, I mean - is what it says about their concept of their Christian god - that he is ready, willing and able to starve and torture children for their parents' sins. Never could get my mind around that line of thinking.

But back to Hagee. These days, Hagee has gone full speed ahead in his support for Israel. No such thing as the Palestinian people, he says. No concern for how Israel formulates its foreign policy; all that matters is that they fulfill biblical prophecy.

I just came across his 2013 book on another thing that mystifies me about how God apparently works in mysterious ways - through riddles. He sends us signs that require prophets to interpret. Hagee is happy to answer the call. He's been obsessing for years now over another message from heaven, another "Watch out, folks, I'm a-comin' for ye!" 

A little background on the sign. From time to time, the earth lines up perfectly between the sun and the moon, creating a huge shadow on the moon. Eclipses can be partial.  Or total, when a full moon becomes totally dark.  However, some of the sunlight leaks, and when it passes through the earth's atmosphere, the light gets filtered and scattered. Some wavelengths are shorter than others, and the shorter the wavelength, the more likely they are to appear reddish or orange in color. On rare occasions the moon can take on the color of blood; hence the term "blood moon." Also known as the sanguine moon, the travel moon, or the harvest moon. It's the same phenomenon as occurs during sunrise or sunset, when the light is the kind of red that sends poets into a tizzy. 

Where the plot thickens, though, is when these blood moons come in groups of four. Tetrads. If you want to know more, there's a quite useful Norwegian site called timeanddate.com, which has information on the topic. The simplified version is this: every six months or so there is an eclipse season, during which time a lunar eclipse at full moon and a solar eclipse at new moon occur. And, according to timeanddate.com, every so often there are four such eclipses in a row - hence the name tetrad, which may be defined as four blood moons in a row, about six months apart.  For a complete list of up-and-coming eclipses, click here. 

Hagee is apparently done with seeing Hitler as the messenger of God and into a new shtick, interpreting the blood moon phenomenon and citing the Book of Revelation 6:12: 

And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood.

Hagee wasn't the first clever devil to take advantage of the gullible. Christopher Columbus, whose knowledge of the heavens puts Hagee's to shame, told the Arawak Indians shortly before a blood moon was due that God was angry that they weren't feeding his men properly and would turn the moon red. It worked. The Indians couldn't get provisions to the ships fast enough after that.

Hagee obsesses over this tetrad phenomenon in his 2013 book, Four Blood Moons: Something is about to change. He is unconcerned, apparently, about the fact that you don't see the eclipses of the sun and moon everywhere on the planet, and what you experience depends on where you are located. In order to experience the two to five eclipses that occur every year, you'd have to be constantly on the move. The total eclipse of the sun coming up in April 2023, for example, will not be seen by anyone in North America. But when God commanded the sun to "stand still" in the sky so that Joshua could fight the battle of Jericho and make the walls come tumblin' down, he wasn't talking about the sun as viewed in Peoria, Illinois or Bariloche, Argentina.

There once was a time when most people in America simply brushed off the wacko flame-throwing bible thumpers. Considering the evidence that we have all but lost our government to people manipulating the populace by fear and loathing of the "other," I suggest we might oughta give these clowns more serious consideration. Just because you want to defend to the death their right to spew stuff and nonsense doesn't release you from the responsibility of calling out bullshit when you see it.

Cheerful poepzakjes for love dogs

If you are a doggie owner, you are familiar with what we call "poop bags" in English. That's not the polite term. The polite term is "waste bags," waste being the polite word for shit.

Something in the vicinity of 50% of the houses in my neighborhood are inhabited by dog owners, and on any given day there will be dozens of poodles, chihuahuas, Jack Russell terriers, labradors, German shepherds, samoyeds, Lhasa Apsos and mixed breed animals walking their owners up and down the street, stopping to sniff every blade of grass, squatting to whiz, or depositing their waste on the ground for a human to pick up and dispose of. We are a responsible bunch. You occasionally come across a fugitive dog turd, but mostly people are good about keeping the sidewalks and lawns tidy.

In the mail today a package came from China, via Mexico City (importado por importadora Amazon México, S. de R. L. de C. V. Juan Salvador Agraz No. 73, Piso 5, Colonia Santa Fe Cuajimalpa, Delegación Cuajimalpa de Morelos, Ciudad de México, Distrito Federal C. P. 05348) (See screenshot of building at left - it's between the Volvo and the Renault dealerships.)

Taku ordered the poop bags in December 2021. I don't know whether the delay was in China, in Mexico, or here in the USofA. No matter. They are here now, all 900 of them.

What caught my eye was how poop bags is rendered in the various languages Amazon chooses to provide for the international set, and the varying degrees (or complete lack thereof) of euphemism involved.

Besides English, where we speak of "waste", there is the Japanese:

愛犬用処理袋　- aiken yō shoribukuro - literally "love dog use disposal bags"

(And don't miss reason lost-count-how-many for loving the Japanese language - the fact that "pet dog" is rendered "love dog.")

Then there is the hyper-avoidance euphemism, Italian, which renders this object 

sacchetti igienici (hygenic sacks/bags). 

You could get more euphemistic, I suppose, if you called them "butterfly wing bags" or maybe "cherry pie bags" but "hygenic" is going some.

And at the other extreme are the zero-euphemism languages, French and Spanish:

sacs à excréments and bolsas para excrementos.

German uses the word 

Kotbeutel,

 Kot being the standard translation for feces, i.e., not vulgar, like shit, but not a word to toss into a conversation while sipping tea and eating cucumber sandwiches. Beutel is German for sack/bag.

Back in the day when I was teaching a seminar at Keio University called "International responses to the AIDS crisis" we marveled at how differently people put out the word that the best approach to take toward the disease was not to mistreat the victims, but to practice safe sex. For Brazilians, this meant showing pictures of loving couples, adding some salsa music to the background, and then the words, "protect those you love by using a condom." In Japan, it was comic book cartoon characters, (i.e., at two levels of euphemistic remove) one male, one female (it wouldn't do to suggest, back in those early days, that AIDS was affecting same-sex people having sex), with the message "Please remember to use a condom." The French were handing out free condoms at railroad ticket offices to people buying long-distance vacation tickets. And the Dutch? The Dutch message was, "When you fuck, use a condom!"

That came back to mind when running down the list of Amazon languages on the poop bag box. I was all ready for strontzakken - which would be the zero-euphemism Dutch term for "shit bags." Instead, I found the (at least to me) utterly delightful 

poepzakjes  "poop sacks."

Amazon didn't stop there. You know that sealing tape around the box that normally tells you, if the contents are "Fragile," that you should "Handle with Care"?  This time the tape read:

Handle with cheer.

I kid you not.

The box contained 900 bags/Beutel/sacs/bolsas/zakjes/sacchetti/fukuro. Our two girls don't poop with each walk, but sometimes go early in the morning or late at night in the backyard. We pick those dropped treasures up when we see them, of course, but we occasionally miss one here and there and leave it to the sunshine to dry them up and roll them away. But mostly we make very high use of this wonderful modern invention, the poop bag. When the girls were young, I suggested (obviously before giving it sufficient thought) that we should not be using plastic, but picking the turdies up with paper towels and carrying them to the toilet. Taku quickly disabused me of this false attempt to be environmentally conscious, reminding me that this is California, and flushing toilets was bad enough when all you did was pee, but adding four flushes a day for dog turds was seriously irresponsible. So poop bags (which are sealed tight and tossed into the trash bin) it is.

Given the eleven month delay in shipping, we're figuring it's time right about now to place another order.

The question is, should we be boycotting China and Amazon and buying our poop bags elsewhere?

That would be my inclination at the present time. But I love getting packages delivered with cheer.

Young Royals - a film review

Sweden has a king. He is known as Carl XVI Gustav, with the number in the middle indicating he's the sixteenth Carl but not the sixteenth Carl Gustav.  A bit of trivia I picked up while digging around to find out if there is a Swedish crown prince who might take offense at the portrayal of the royal family in Young Royals, an extremely popular and beautifully done series on Netflix. I'm tempted to call it a "beautifully done series on a gay crown prince on Netflix" but that would tilt all the marbles toward the gay aspect of the fictional story and completely miss the political stuff, which is a fierce condemnation of Sweden's upper class.

Let me pick these things apart, and talk about the gay crown prince, Wilhelm, first, and then the political stuff. Both the (fictional) gay love story and the critique of the (fictional) monarchy and non-democratic hierarchy make this series very compelling indeed. I've watched it twice. And I appreciated it even more the second time around.

To get this out of the way, yes there is a Swedish prince and he was at one time heir to the throne. But on January 1, 1980, the Swedish parliament passed, for the first time in European history, the feminist new law establishing absolute primogeniture.  What that meant is that Crown Princess Victoria, the daughter of Carl Gustav and his wife Sylvia, became heir to the throne, and not her younger brother Prince Carl Philip (note: not Crown Prince; just prince), who had been heir up to that point, because he's the first-born male heir. Carl Philip was only seven and a half months old at the time, so I doubt he took the move as an insult. Instead he has had forty-three years to get used to his sister prepping to become future Queen of Sweden.

But first, let me get to the gay love story. Two Netflix streaming shows have made waves this year, both thrilling the loving bejeezuz out of the LGBT crowd, if I have assessed the scene correctly. As well they should. Both are superbly well-done: well-acted, well-written, unabashedly unapologetically pro-gay, and sweet as honey on sugar cubes. I'll stick to Young Royals for now, and leave Heartstopper for another time.

Wilhelm, usually called Wille (played by Edvin Ryding), heir to the Swedish throne is enrolled at the country's leading private boarding school. His mother, the queen, and practically everybody who's anybody in Sweden's Who's Who of noble families, went there. It is a hotbed of upper class twits who bully the non-upper class kids in their midst. These include the kid from the other side of the tracks, Simon (played by Omar Rudberg, a Venezuelan-Swede in real life). The casting director obviously worked at getting people to play the roles who fit expectations.

It's a coming out story. Both boys are sixteen. Simon has been out as gay for years, and has a wonderfully (divorced but) supportive mother and father, and he's very close to his sister, Sara (Frida Argento), who has Asperger's, a fact which enables her to stir up a lot of dust, furthering the plot in a school where everybody keeps secrets. Wille, on the other hand, is just discovering he has a strong attraction for this outspoken and self-aware classmate, Simon, and in no time they are making out to beat the band. Then there is August, a melodramatic bad guy (Malte Gårdinger), leader of a pack of bullies who follow him because he is a member of one of Sweden's oldest families, a first-class bully - and you can almost see him tying Wille and Simon to the railroad tracks. He is a member of the royal family and when things go sideways, Wille's mother, the queen, calls on August to "help out," thus making things even rougher for her son than he already has it.

The story revolves around the conflict Wille faces in having a life to share with his lover and having to live up to the hetero expectations put on him as crown prince. At sixteen, he's at the absolute edge of endurance and often collapses under the stress. Simon, loving and kindly as he is otherwise, is also unable to manage expectations that he will play second-fiddle to the kingdom and keep his love life secret. Young Royals is all about stress, frustration and hypocrisy. Great material for a powerful drama. The episodes are written with cliff-hangers, and I dare you to try not to binge.

As I implied, it's the political as much as the gay love story, that I find so compelling about this series. It portrays Sweden as a complex mix of what the world thinks it is - the world's most socially progressive country - on the one hand, and an inherently conservative place where people worry about what the world thinks of you and tradition matters. The kids are only in their mid-teens, but their parties are filled with alcohol and drugs and they are open to the world about their sexual interests and proclivities. Even the queen admits to her son that she is not bothered about his homosexuality; it's just that, as crown prince, he has a duty to be hypocritical and keep his sex life secret.

It's a fictional portrayal of the Swedish royals and Swedish nobility, in the same vein as The Crown is about British royals. And it almost dares reporters to knock on the real Queen Sylvia's door and ply her with questions about similarities to Wille's mother, the fictional queen. And ditto for the real Prince Carl Philip. I can just see somebody sticking a microphone in his face and asking, "I know you're married with children, but are you really hiding your homosexuality?" You may want to tell me I'm making too much of this inclination by fans to confuse actors for the characters they play. But I don't think I am. Look, for example, at what this poor kid, Kit Connor, who plays a bisexual lover in Heartstopper, is going through now that he's dating a woman. A whole bunch of gay folk are showing that while they like the L and the G in LGBT, they're not sincere about their support for their B brothers and sisters. (I'll wager these folk are even less sanguine about the T element, as well.) It's homophobes and entirely too many gay monosexuals joining up to be little shits these days. Further proof, for those who still need telling, that LGBT people are just folks trying to make a living and pay their taxes. Some are saints, some are sinners or in-between.

And, in the end, this is the actual focal point of the political side of this drama: in real life, the character of Simon is played by a young man who is openly bisexual. But Edvin, who plays Wille, refuses to talk about his sexuality. He could say, "I'm still trying to figure that out." That might well be the case. But he could also say, "I'm leaving it ambiguous, because if I come down on one side or another I'll just lose the fans from the side I don't come down on. And this is a business. And it's all about keeping everybody happy." So don't blame the fictional queen. There's much to be said for ambiguity and keeping the world guessing.

But while there's no way we can or should avoid the political aspects of coming out to the world, there's no reason we can't celebrate and fully enjoy an absolutely lovely gay love story. Which is what Young Royals is.

photo credit

Magrippa did it

I love Rome. If I could manipulate time, I'd go back and build a separate and parallel existence for myself where I'd live my life in Rome and become a historian. I wouldn't want to give up my actual history, so it would have to be that I could live two lives or more simultaneously.

I've been to Italy six times. Each time I've said to myself, "Why didn't I come to live my life here instead of Japan?"  Japan and Italy both have an esthetic that appeals to me, but it's almost as if they were at opposite ends of the spectrum. What is beautiful in Japan tends to be contained, restricted, individualized. What is beautiful in Italy is expansive and extroverted. Japan is the kinkakuji, the Golden Temple, in Kyoto. Italy is the Colisseum. Japan is the sound of the shakuhachi in the foggy distance, Italy is the chorus from Nabucco. In the end, I love them both.  It's not either/or with Japan; it's both/and.

The Latin language never quite took with me. When I went into languages seriously, I wanted them as a way to communicate with living people. I entered the field of linguistics first with an interest in grammar, and used to shop the second-hand stores for grammars of languages which I would then pore over the same way my mother would read True Confessions or follow the lives of movie stars. Once into linguistics seriously, that interest expanded into the other subfields of phonology and morphology - sound systems and how words are formed. If given the gift of building several parallel lives, I would today be a fluent speaker of Russian, French, Spanish and Japanese and my German would be the level of my English instead of the never quite ready for prime time level I am stuck with. Oh, yes, and Italian. By all means Italian, which I consider the linguistic equivalent to watching a kaleidoscope of butterflies at play.

When I was about fourteen, we took a family vacation to Lake Massawippi, in Quebec. Vacation, for my father, meant a chance to go hunting and fishing. In order to have his way he had to promise he'd take us to town to see a movie, and that movie turned out to be Magnificent Obsession, with Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman. Since that time I've internalized the phrase and made it synonymous with happiness. In order to be happy - or maybe "fulfilled" is a more accurate word for what I'm getting at - one should have an obsession of some kind. A life project. Jane Fonda has political activism, concert pianists have the piano, and I once heard somebody (it may have been Itzhak Perlman?) giving a master class tell a budding musician, "Unless you are certain you would die if you could not do music, you should not become a professional musician."

Ever since Covid put us all into lockdown, I've been obsessed (not necessarily in a magnificent way) by YouTube. Music, politics, language and culture lectures. I love Tyler and Todd, the gay couple who have made an off-the-grid life for themselves in rural Nova Scotia, all sorts of bloggers. I love listening to Davide Gemello giving Italian lessons online and the magnificently obsessed Luke Ranieri, the guy trying to convince the world that it's been going downhill ever since we stopped speaking Classical Latin. Don't share their obsessions, most of the time, but love that they have them.

I can get obsessive over wanting to get answers to trivial questions. Like what does the inscription МАGRIPPA-L-F-COSTERTIUM FECIT mean on the facade of the Pantheon? I know that 'fecit' means 'made' but I suddenly realized after all these years I didn't know who Magrippa was and I didn't know what the rest of the label said that was carved into stone about 120 years after the birth of Christ, give or take. Just now, a half century or more since I first took note of this magnificent building, which I've gone back to visit with each visit, I have the answer. It means "M(arcus) Agrippa - i.e., not Mr. Magrippa - filius (son) of Lucius, consul for the third time, made (this)." And for an extra bit of trivia, the inscription is a lie. That building was actually built by Hadrian, the same guy who built the wall to keep the blue-faced Scots from overrunning Yorkshire a few years later. He just kept the facade of the old pantheon, which had burned down.

The Pantheon, incidentally, still functions today as a catholic church, and you can get married here, if you have the right connections, although you will need to reimburse the state for the loss of revenue, I'm guessing, from the six million tourists who shuffle through the world's largest unsupported dome with a hole in the ceiling to let the rain in and splash all over the floor. Just kidding. It has a slanting floor and holes to drain off the rain and it rarely rains in anyway.

For Italy lovers, let me recommend you watch Luke Ranieri's vlog on how Latin became Italian. If the phonology and the morphology make your eyes glaze over, you can always turn the volume off and just enjoy the gorgeous views of Italy.

I'm currently between obsessions. I was obsessive about the Trump phenomenon there for a time, but am now so burned out by this champion of the rebirth of fascism in the United States, that I can't stand the sight of him. I think he's a distraction anyway and the real problem is the lack of demand that liars be exposed and civility be restored, although if he gets reelected in 2024 I will kick myself down several flights of stairs for not working harder to get our clumsy justice system to throw his ass in jail.

But I digress. I was obsessing over the beauty of Italy there for a while. How is it that I constantly get pulled back into obsessing over America's national shame?

Must work on that.

source: photo of the Pantheon: credit goes to John Harper and Getty images

Treasures among discarded books - a reflection more than a review

I just finished a book I picked up in one of the book exchange boxes we now find in many residential neighborhoods these days, a wonderful addition to modern life. They reflect the fact that used books now have little value. I once imagined that I could unload the 1500+ books I brought back with me from Japan, but soon learned I can't even give them away. Libraries won't take them. School libraries might, but you will have to look around. In any case, these book boxes can hold some nice surprises. Can't tell you how many books I've found in one of about six of these book box stands within a few blocks of my house. And, of course, I regularly drop off books there myself.

The most recent book I brought home with me is one that had been sitting there for some time. Apparently nobody wanted it. It's titled, On Hitler's Mountain: Overcoming the legacy of a Nazi Childhood. No surprise there. With all the misery in the daily news, who needs to dredge up the Nazis? In fact, I suspect unless you're a history buff with a special interest in mid-20th Century history, you'll probably want to avoid this topic like the plague. If I were to make a "been there, done that," list of topics I've dealt with in my life, Germany from 1933 to 1945 would be at the top of my list. I grew up in a German-speaking home and had to ride the question how it was that the Germans I had around me as a kid were the people who taught me the meaning of love and security and the difference between right and wrong, while at the same time "the Germans" was a concept that often led a lot of people to freeze up and look like they wanted to spit.

By the time I started school in 1946 I had learned from my German grandmother that "there are good people and bad people everywhere you go," and that was all anybody thought I needed to know at that age. It then took many years to work through - to phrase the issue in the theatrical terms I've heard all my life: "how it was that the people who created Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms were also able to generate Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels?"

As a professional academic I devoted myself to the study of culture, defined as the "values, attitudes and beliefs of a people with a common identity and the practices and products derived from them." There, too, I moved from the initial oversimplifications - French make good lovers, Germans like to march, when Americans form groups the first thing they do is pick a president, vice-president and a secretary-treasurer - to an ever more nuanced understanding of diversity. We still operate with a lot of those simplifications. Like all generalizations, they make it easier to talk about the world without having to hedge all the time. "Of course, I don't mean all Japanese drink green tea, but most clearly do and not all Italians eat pasta, but most clearly do." Today one of the big questions that hang in the air is how it is that Putin is able to pull the wool over so many Russian eyes and get them to believe he is "liberating" the Ukrainians from Nazism. Often the answer you hear is "Well, Russians have no history of democracy; they are used to accepting the word of whoever is in charge. There is a powerful consistency between following the czars, following Stalin, and following Putin. It's in the Russian blood." The reason we fall for such generalizations is that there is a lot of obvious truth in them. You have to reduce a large complex of people to a single representative, but that comes naturally. Babies are cute, teenage girls giggle, Scandinavians are blonde. And Democrats are disorganized and Republicans have lost their soul.

On Hitler's Mountain is the story of a little girl - her name is Irmgard Paul - who grows up in Berchtesgaden in the shadow of Hitler's Eagle's Nest, his retreat in the far south of Germany. It's actually about half an hour south of Salzburg, Austria, by car - where Hitler met with fellow Nazis to work out some of the Third Reich's most important policies. As one of the kids from the neighboring village, she even gets to have her picture taken on Hitler's lap. 

The memoir has four parts, tracing her childhood in the shadow of Adolf Hitler from her birth in 1934 until Germany's defeat in 1945 in the first three. Barely eleven at war's end, the tone changes with her life circumstances. She writes of challenges during the war, such as the moment where she has to choose between outing her anti-Hitler grandfather, whom she is not particularly fond of, to her Hitler-loving teacher, who is responsible for brainwashing the children in her charge and getting them to put the state and their Führer above all else. And of an awareness that while her family has to scrounge for food, she's luckier than the kids flooding in from the cities to her mountain village to avoid the British and American bombs now raining down on their homes. I read the book in bits and pieces, reflecting on such things as her having to live at times on potato peels while I regularly sat down to delicious curries and salmon and pasta with bottarga, the roe of the mullet - the fish, not the haircut - that Taku and I discovered in a restaurant some years ago in Florence, and which has remained one of my favorite things in the world. There but for the grace of God, go I, the saying goes. The absolute randomness of God's grace has always puzzled me. How do some of us get to feast on bottarga or salmon or T-bone steaks while others of us have to make do with potato peels?

My inbox fills with e-mails and my cell phone would ring every fifteen or twenty minutes, if I left the ringer on: Adam Schiff, Martin Sheen, Stacey Abrams, and a dozen others, all asking me for money and threatening the end of democracy if I don't come up with $55 immediately to split between them and the DCCC. It will be matched, doubled, tripled, I'm told, and as we get closer to election day I won't be surprised if that increases to quadrupled or quintupled. The only way we get to save democracy from the Trumpists, the tails wagging the Republican dogs, we are given to understand, is to spend billions of dollars on ads to scare the shit out of independents and habitual non-voters, scare them to the polls to keep the election deniers out of office. The majority of Republicans running for office deny that Biden won the 2018 election. In Arizona, all but one of the candidates are deniers. And nearly one third of Republican voters now tell us they're fine with using violence to keep themselves in power.  Among election deniers, that figure is 39%.

I have sent money to John Fetterman and to a few others, feeling like my widow's mite contribution is money down the drain when Republicans have so many superrich in their donor base. But what is one to do? The game is money and that's how it is played. The cost is expected to soar to $9.3 billion before it's over.

This little memoir of a girl from Bavaria who once sat on Hitler's knee brings home the question of what happens when too many people share my concern that I'm just tossing money down the drain or believe the whole game is a losing business and tune out. I don't listen to Trump any more. I'm way past disgust at this lying narcissist, disgusted at the people who believe they can ride the tiger and come out on top financially, disgusted at how easy it is to blame the guy, blame his enablers, blame the media for keeping him front and center and his name fresh in the minds of so many who boast they are apolitical and will go with the crowd. I will vote, but even if I gave hundreds of my retirement savings dollars to the people I think can save democracy, that 9.3 billion dollar figure feels like a kick in the gut.

Irmgard Paul eventually met an American, married him and came to live in New York where she wrote her memoir under her married name, Irmgard A. Hunt. When asked one time whether she thought a Hitler could happen here in America, her response was:

(Y)es, an American Hitler is possible. But it would arrive largely unnoticed and insidiously, with the pretense of a free democracy intact. The first prerequisite is having the executive, legislative, and judicial functions in the hands of one very strong party with media either largely controlled by that party or under sympathetic ownership.

For the longest time now, ever since we began using the word fascism openly to describe the Trumpist phenomenon - the unabashed lying, the cult of the leader, the lowered resistance to the idea of public violence - we have been warned that any comparison to Hitler is a surefire way to weaken your argument. You become accused of being the boy who cried wolf, of overstating your case.

The caution is appropriate. We are not living in a fascist state. Our press is still largely uncontrolled; our problem is less about media control than it is about gullibility. I have blamed it on the American propensity for giving faith equal billing with reason. Once you open yourself up to the notion that what you believe to be true is as valid as what can be demonstrated to be true, you're an easy mark for anybody in the indoctrination or propaganda business - preachers of organized religion I'm talking about you - to grab you where you are vulnerable - your fears, your doubts, your prejudices against "others," particularly others you can be convinced are unseating you from a position of privilege. Our problem is multifaceted. It's part fear - of violence, of change - part ignorance of the big picture. And part simple inability to see ourselves as living in a national community and the ever-present inclination to revert to tribalist impulses.

Unless you're particularly interested in Nazi history or unless you're in the mood to read a wonderfully told memoir of a woman looking back over her life lived through the greatest changes in modern times, On Hitler's Mountain is not going to jump at you as a "must-read." But I'll drop a spoiler on you. Irmgard Hunt becomes an international environmental consultant for such clients as the World Bank and USAID.  Her daughter volunteers as a doctor in Nepal. Her son teaches classics at the University of Colorado. 

Unfortunately, she contracts Alzheimer's, so the end of her life was not easy. It was, however, from all appearances, a life lived well. For anybody in search of happy endings, or looking for light in the darkness, if you come across the book at one of your local book exchanges, take it home and give yourself a good read. One that grows on you, as it sinks in that it is good history, and not simply a gripping memoir.

The box on the left is similar to the ones in my neighborhood. I understand, incidentally, that in Britain, rather than remove those wonderful red phone boxes, they are being converted into free book exchange libraries.

photo credit

book box

Vatican Girl - a film review

It used to be fun to beat up on the Catholic Church.  You know, those folks who tell you all about how important it is to follow Jesus?

Quo audito, Iesus ait ei: Adhuc unum tibi deest: omnia quæcumque habes vende, et da pauperibus, et habebis thesaurum in cælo: et veni, sequere me.

That's from the Vulgate version of the Bible, Luke 18, Verse 22.

In God's native language, English, the Vulgate version translates to:

And when Jesus heard this, he said to him: “One thing is still lacking for you. Sell all the things that you have, and give to the poor. And then you will have treasure in heaven. And come, follow me.”

Of course, elsewhere in the Bible, God demonstrated that he's not merely mighty; he can also be witty. His church-builder, Saint Peter, whose name in Latin, Petrus, actually means Rock, provided God with a play on words he evidently couldn't pass up:

Et ego dico tibi, quia tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam...

and I say to you, who art Rock, and upon this rock I shall build my church.

Clever, don't you think? Tie it together with Matthew 18:18

Amen dico vobis, quæcumque alligaveritis super terram, erunt ligata et in cælo: et quæcumque solveritis super terram, erunt soluta et in cælo. 

Amen I say to you, whatever you will have bound on earth, shall be bound also in heaven, and whatever you will have released on earth, shall be released also in heaven.

It took a while - until 1870, to be precise, when the First Vatican Council, under Pope Pius IX, declared that when popes speak ex cathedra, i.e., "from the papal throne," they are infallible. Hypocrisy, meet arrogance.

It's like shooting fish in a barrel to beat up on the Catholic Church these days. The proclaiming of itself as infallible in matters of truth and morality is echoed in the prayer asking God to deliver Jews "from their darkness." In fact, the pope is the director of an institution that is not merely fallible, but chock full of corruption.  You don't have to go back to the Crusades or the impetus to the Protestant Reformation that was the sale of indulgences in order to pay for the construction of St. Peter's. In just the past couple of decades we've seen the scandals of the Vatican Bank.  Which looks, in retrospect, like just a warm-up to the priest abuse scandals. And which have pretty much shredded the integrity of the church, in the way it put on full display its willingness to put the appearance of propriety ahead of the welfare of catholic children for all the world to see - over and over again in country after country.  

But just as I don't want to give up on America because so many of us are willing to give up on democracy, I don't want to reduce the church to its bad apples. I'll grant you that believing that there is a God who built a very fallible human institution called the church on a rock doesn't work for me. There's too much evidence it's built on shifting sand. But at the same time, even though its doctrines leave me cold, I know it provides a whole lot of people a place to put their best intentions. It's a big tent.

Netflix came out this week with a film which many will see as yet more proof of the church's fallibility, in the way it ignores the two most basic pillars of morality, the avoidance of violence and deceit, pillars which non-Christians and Christians alike tend to agree on.

Vatican Girl: the Disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi is a four-part series based on the disappearance of a fifteen-year-old girl who lived with her family inside the Vatican and who was lured away by still unidentified kidnappers on June 22, 1983. Her whereabouts and her fate are unknown to this day. 

Vatican Girl is a story very much worth telling. A heartbreaking tale of a girl torn from her family which starts out as a simple kidnapping and ends up a multi-faceted story of international intrigue involving Mehmet Ali Ağca, the guy who got a life sentence for shooting Pope John Paul II, but got out early and now feeds stray dogs and cats in Istanbul, shady mucky-mucks within the Vatican hierarchy, all the popes since JP II, the Vatican Bank, Russia and the KGB, and the Italian Mafia.

Somehow Mark Lewis, who wrote and directed the docuseries, and Chiara Messineo, its producer, managed to get access to Emanuela's brother, Pietro Orlandi, and the journalist Andrea Purgatori, both of whom have devoted much of their lives these past nearly forty years keeping the search going and the story alive. It's a powerful combination of agonizing frustration, as one conspiracy theory after another takes center stage, and fury-making disbelief at how badly such a great story can be butchered. Long before you reach the end of the fourth episode, you're ready to throw a shoe at the TV screen or computer monitor you're watching this slipshod misadventure on. How many times are the shots of people getting into a green car or putting a coin in a payphone recycled?  Fifteen? Twenty? Help!

Even if you don't mind being jerked around by one conspiracy theory after another, each one poo-pooed in turn, you will still smart at the fact that the best they can do after all this time is tell you the church is full of secrets.

What do the popes know that they are not telling?

I'm sorry.  If you think the church is covering up yet another scandal, you should say so outright.  Bash away, if you must. But don't turn this whole thing into a thriller that goes nowhere in the end.  And don't suggest that every pope, even Francis, plays the mafia game of omertà (silence) like a pro without more to go on. You make me want to turn in my church-bashing credentials and come to its defense. OK, so you did line up virtually all of the witnesses in the various conspiracy tangents and have them all, one after another, lay the blame on the church. But, as at least one critic has pointed out, this series bears more resemblance to Dan Brown's DaVinci Code than it serves the cause of investigative journalism.

Emanuela's mother appears only at the very end, possibly because the filmmakers didn't want the audience to miss the thrill of the roller-coaster ride by being reminded this is a story about a family's never-ending tragedy.

Vatican Girl is mostly in Italian, with English here and there.

It's not a flop despite its annoying repetitiveness - the series is worth watching for its depiction of life in Rome, аnd for the reminder that the Vatican hierarchy can give master classes in how to play your cards close to your chest.

I give it a C-minus.  OK, a C.

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Firebird - a film review

The gay liberation movement, like other social and political efforts to secure freedom from discrimination, is a long and painfully slow process. You don't change people's convictions overnight, and breakthroughs like giving women the same rights as men and blacks the same rights as whites and LGBT people the same rights as straights are not single events. People like to place them in a historical context. It's common to speak of the Stonewall Riots as the starting point of the world-wide gay liberation movement, even though it actually began with countless smaller events many years earlier. Consider the efforts of Magnus Hirschfeld in Weimar Germany, for one. Liberation is a not a single event, but a long laborious process.

In a number of places around the world they still throw gay people off of roofs. Torture and jail them. Expose them to ridicule. The degree of hostility varies with the degree to which the need arises in sexually insecure people to demonize other people's ways of expressing sexual and emotional feelings.  The gay liberation movement has met with tremendous success around the world. Some thirty countries already grant the right to same-sex couples to marry, and more are added to this list every year. At the same time, at the other end of the spectrum, there are countries - remember Iran's former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's hilarious statement: "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who has told you we have that."

I bring this up not because it's new information - it's anything but - but because I want to talk about Firebird, a film I came across yesterday which I think deserves recognition as one of these many markers of the progress of the international gay liberation movement. It has been around for a year and made the rounds of 60 LGBT film festivals, and has appeared in some 500 theaters already, but has only now been released on Amazon Prime. Despite its boosters' claims that it's up there with Moonlight and Brokeback Mountain, it's not. It lacks the wallop and the brilliance. But I hope that won't deter you from giving it a chance.

For starters, it's an Estonian movie, and that alone should catch your attention. Actually, it's a British/Estonian co-production which came into being thanks in large part to British actor, Tom Prior, and the Estonian producer and director, Peeter Rebane. Somebody brought to Rebane's attention the story of Sergey Fetisov, an Estonian soldier in the Soviet Army in the late 70s who falls in love with a pilot he is assigned to show around the base. Rebane, gay himself, was carried away by the story and eventually teamed up with Tom Prior to write the screenplay. Rebane would produce and direct; Prior would co-author as well as act the role of Sergey.

It takes time, but they eventually find Ukrainian actor, Oleg Zagorodnii, to play the role of the pilot, and Russian actress, Diana Pozharskaya, to play the role of Luisa, close friend and fellow soldier to Sergey, whom everybody expects he will marry one day. He doesn't, and to say any more is to spoil the plotline.

How well you relate to this movie will depend on how important it is to you that movies be free of "message," a political or other didactic agenda pushing some cause. If you're like most who believe art only suffers when weighed down by some school ma'arm's finger wagging at you, trying to teach you something, this film will be nothing more than a few moments spent with beautiful people and a full-on romantic gay love story - a little flesh - not too much - all pretty run-of-the-mill these days. IndieWire gives it a B-.

If you're like me, though, you will likely appreciate the stunning progress of the Baltic States (I understand that what is happening in Estonia is happening in Latvia and Lithuania as well, if not quite as fast), now free from the chokehold of the Soviet Union and its successor state, Russia, and becoming more like its European neighbors with each passing day. Where once Sergey's dreams included going to Moscow to study acting, these days Estonians are a whole lot closer to their Finnish cousins and neighbors, and other westerners cheering on Ukraine's attempt to break free of Russian clutches. For the record, I have no personal knowledge of whether LGBT people in Estonia still experience greater hostility than in the west because of holdovers from Soviet times, but stepchild adoption became legal in 2016, gender change is recognized by law, and gays, lesbians and bisexuals are allowed to serve openly in the military. Actually, same-sex activity (between consenting males, at least) was decriminalized in Estonia as early as 1929, almost a century ago.

And a gay Estonian can get wind of a memoir about a love story between two Russians stationed in Estonia and make it into a movie non-gay Estonians can incorporate into their cultural heritage.

But I don't want to leave you with the impression that the film is lacking in value except as a polemic for gay liberation. There are moments of genuine passion, times when the tears are real and the fears of being found out are palpable. And the side story - of a sophisticated slightly older cultured man fostering and bringing a kid from the farm into the life of theater and ballet - is a real treat. They actually brought in a ballet troop and choreographed a scene from Stravinsky's Firebird Suite to show the powerful impact of the older (in his 30s - not that old!) gay man on his younger lover. Also fascinating were the Estonian landscapes and the dull Soviet architecture of the time. One scene is even filmed in Moscow.

In the end, the story has the power of all love stories which make us go to extraordinary levels to keep that love alive. In the end, the location is a distraction to what makes the world go around. Besides money, I mean.

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Royal Bodies

In for a penny, in for a pound. I've gotten lots of responses from friends about my pitch to lighten up on the goodly number of Brits, and others, as well, who were making such a big deal out of the death of a grandmother, as I chose to frame the event of Elizabeth II's passing.  It's interesting how a once very minor concern - the use of a monarchy to represent a nation - has become a topic people are responding to. It's not a new topic, but an old one being revisited in some new intriguing ways.

I felt it was unworthy to buy into the fiction that a human being is indistinguishable from the nation for which she is a stand-in. I saw her first as a person and secondly as somebody assigned a burden most of us would find too heavy to carry.  A burden (I'm projecting here, of course) in no way compensated for by the castles and the jewels, the perks and the women curtseying right and left. I felt a discussion of the value of the monarchy should be left to another day.

Well, the queen is buried and the period of official mourning is over with. Bring on the discussion.

At first sight, there are far more consequential issues to concern ourselves with. There are hurricanes in Nova Scotia and Florida, both affecting family members of mine, for starters.  There's Mussolini's granddaughter carrying on his fascist tradition in Italy, other fascists carrying on in Hungary and Poland, and the U.S., where the Republican Party's doing its damnedest to scuttle democracy. The Covid pandemic. Immigration. The energy crisis. Global warming.

Friend Barbara just gave me a reason to keep the focus on this peculiar habit of using human beings as instruments of state a bit longer. She linked me to a marvelous piece from the London Review of Books from nine years ago by the British writer, Dame Hilary Mantel.

When Mantel was young, she suffered from endometriosis, which left her, at age twenty-seven, with the devastating reality that she would never have the choice to have children. Coming face to face with her own vulnerability as a woman gave her a new perspective on, among other things, women whose lives are lived within the confines of a monarchy. She concluded that the creation of a monarchy was, in fact, just one more example of the instrumentalization of women's bodies. The primary task of a monarch is not to tap you on the shoulder and make you a knight; it's to produce children.

The article in the London Review from nine years ago I'm referring to is entitled "Royal Bodies." It has a new relevance with the death of Elizabeth II.  You can read it, but I recommend you sit back and listen to Hilary Mantel's reading of it in her own voice. Either way, it's brilliant writing. Let me give you a sample. Mantel was at Buckingham Palace once and watched the queen walk by:

And then the queen passed close to me and I stared at her. I am ashamed now to say it but I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones. I felt that such was the force of my devouring curiosity that the party had dematerialised and the walls melted and there were only two of us in the vast room, and such was the hard power of my stare that Her Majesty turned and looked back at me, as if she had been jabbed in the shoulder; and for a split second her face expressed not anger but hurt bewilderment. She looked young: for a moment she had turned back from a figurehead into the young woman she was, before monarchy froze her and made her a thing, a thing which only had meaning when it was exposed, a thing that existed only to be looked at.

Mantel has gone deep into British royal history, has written extensively of the Tudors. Of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII. But also of Diana and Kate Middleton and how the former didn't fill the bill but the second seems to be doing splendidly. But mostly how the institution really ought to go the way of all institutions destructive of human rights, especially the right to choose one's own path in life.

As I've stated before, I cannot go along with all those who view the luxuries royals have as compensation for their necessary surrender of their personhood to the uses of the state. My view is that material wealth may bring great satisfaction for a time. But if one has a soul, sooner or later one has to realize what has been taken from them. Hilary Mantel says it much better than I could:

   Is monarchy a suitable institution for a grown-up nation? I don’t know. I have described how my own sympathies were activated and my simple ideas altered. The debate is not high on our agenda. We are happy to allow monarchy to be an entertainment, in the same way that we license strip joints and lap-dancing clubs... 

... Harry doesn’t know which he is, a person or a prince. Diana was spared, at least, the prospect of growing old under the flashbulbs, a crime for which the media would have made her suffer.

... We don’t cut off the heads of royal ladies these days, but we do sacrifice them, and we did memorably drive one to destruction a scant generation ago.

Living in Japan I had the opportunity over the years to hear from a number of women and men who had no say in choosing a spouse. In village culture, where everybody knows everybody, so the argument goes, it makes sense for parents to match their children with the children of peers, choosing practical criteria in making the decision, and not love or passion, as young people are wont to do. Love is something, they say, that comes with time, as people sacrifice for their mates, their children, and the good of the community. People accommodate this demand, and take on the communal value.

But how many of us who do not live in this cultural milieu would accede to this practice? The royals of Britain are fully western in their value system. True, if you are raised to think and act like a prince, you might well find yourself going with the flow, as a majority of royals clearly do. But is there a justification for it, other than to keep a pre-democratic tradition alive?

On the other hand, Americans have learned by bitter experience what can happen when you put the roles of head of state and head of government into the same person. The head then can begin to take on too much importance. Maybe the monarchy system isn't such a bad escape valve, after all. That's the issue, ultimately. At what price can we justify using others like ourselves for political ends? At what cost do we turn away from that system, which has, after all, worked out pretty well in other nations:

Andorra	Co-Prince	Prince Emmanuel Macron and Archbishop Joan Enric Vives Sicília
Antigua and Barbuda	King or Queen	Queen Elizabeth II
Australia	King or Queen	Queen Elizabeth II
Bahamas	King or Queen	Queen Elizabeth II
Bahrain	King or Queen	King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa
Belgium	King or Queen	King Philippe
Belize	King or Queen	Queen Elizabeth II
Bhutan	King or Queen	King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck
Cambodia	King or Queen	King Norodom Sihamoni
Canada	King or Queen	Queen Elizabeth II
Denmark	King or Queen	Queen Margrethe II
Eswatini	King or Queen	King Mswati III
Grenada	King or Queen	Queen Elizabeth II
Jamaica	King or Queen	Queen Elizabeth II
Japan	Emperor	Emperor Naruhito
Jordan	King or Queen	King Abdullah II
Kuwait	Emir	Emir Nawaf Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah
Lesotho	King or Queen	King Letsie III
Liechtenstein	Sovereign Prince	Sovereign Prince Hans-Adam II
Luxembourg	Grand Duke	Grand Duke Henri
Malaysia	Yang di-Pertuan Agong	Yang di-Pertuan Agong Abdullah
Monaco	Sovereign Prince	Sovereign Prince Albert II
Morocco	King or Queen	King Mohammed VI
Netherlands	King or Queen	King Willem-Alexander
New Zealand	King or Queen	Queen Elizabeth II
Norway	King or Queen	King Herald V
Oman	Sultan	Sultan Haitham bin Tarik
Papua New Guinea	King or Queen	Queen Elizabeth II
Qatar	Emir	Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani
Saint Kitts and Nevis	King or Queen	Queen Elizabeth II
Saint Lucia	King or Queen	Queen Elizabeth II
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines	King or Queen	Queen Elizabeth II
Saudi Arabia	King or Queen	King Salman
Solomon Islands	King or Queen	Queen Elizabeth II
Spain	King or Queen	King Felipe VI
Sweden	King or Queen	King Carl XVI Gustaf
Thailand	King or Queen	King Rama X
Tonga	King or Queen	King Tupou VI
Tuvalu	King or Queen	Queen Elizabeth II
United Arab Emirates	President	President Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan
United Kingdom	King or Queen	Queen Elizabeth II
Vatican City	Pope	Pope Francis

Is it that the idea isn't so bad that with a little tinkering it can be made less onerous?

Watching the spectacle has been a journey. I began by finding it unbecoming to fault a single individual for the evils of the British Empire, especially at a time when thousands were inclined to mourn that individual's passing - including family loved ones. 

And have ended up feeling that we've got this backwards: we should not fault the queen at all. Instead, we should be asking ourselves what sort of non-democratic impulses we harbor in ourselves that give us a reason to use human beings as instruments, rather than an end in themselves.

Give a listen to what Hilary Mantel has to say. She makes my case in a far more entertaining way than I ever could.

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