Both/And

Just want to do some thinking aloud here, for a minute...

One of the rules I live by is that when people try to force me into an either/or situation, my first response is to ask why I can't have both/and.

I've been listening practically non-stop to the news on the war on Ukraine. I've never had a strong interest in Ukraine before, so I've got lots to learn here. On the other hand, I've felt for years a strong connection with things Russian - music, culture, literature and language. And when I see people, Ukrainian people and American media people both, speak of Russians as "the Enemy" I cringe. I can never see Russians as the enemy and I've said explicitly in a number of places that nothing makes my heart bleed like the thought of beautiful young men and women killing each other when their leaders put a gun in their hands and tell them to shoot. I struggle with a strong inclination toward pacifism and want very much to just insist that everybody must put down their guns now and refuse any and all calls to war. And at the same time, I don't know what else one can do when somebody marches into your country with guns and tries to kill you, other than fight back. One of life's most agonizing dilemmas.

For years I thought life consisted of being either gay or straight. I felt a strong affinity for other LGBT people, sought out gay companions, gay films, gay novels, and laughed at jokes directed at straight people as dumb "hets" (heteros...breeders...pick your epithet). But in time I realized I had more straight friends than gay ones, more chosen family among straights than among gays, and that line wasn't serving any profitable purpose.

The impetus for this commentary is a reflection on how Volodymyr Zelenskyy has risen so quickly to hero status. Here's a country being led by a comedian who once played being president and then made use of that role to become actual president. And now he has taken on the appearance of a man born for this time and place. Everybody, but everybody, seems to be singing his praises and I too find myself using the word hero when thinking and speaking of him.

He's a Jew. And a hero. And a Ukrainian. Not just one of these. All of these. For the anti-semites of the world, people who think like Hitler, who managed to persuade millions of his countrymen that one could not be both Jewish and German, Zelenskyy is the proof in the pudding that one can be both/and.

His grandfather was the only one of his generation of Zelenskyy men to survive the attack on the Soviet Union by the Nazis. Watching Putin try to brand his administration as neo-Nazi is a jaw-dropping absurdity of Trumpian proportions. Evidence for those who want us to believe the world is simply mad.

I became a Jew the moment I heard the cantor at Harvey Milk's funeral launch into the kaddish. (For an example of how it's done, listen to Ari Schwarz do it at a 9/11 memorial service which the pope attended). Doesn't mean the tears don't well up at the opening bars of Brahms' German Requiem.  Both/And. Not either/or. And it doesn't mean that I stop identifying as a cultural Christian (as opposed to a religious one) and hang tight to my view that we need to see organized religion as a potential for blocking efforts at achieving progress in the here-and-now. It does mean that we need to make room for each other. Both religious Christians, Christians in culture only, and people for whom those categories don't apply.

That's all I want to say for now, that I love the fact that Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy is a Jew whose first language was Russian and who had to learn Ukrainian as a second language. And a hero to the Ukrainian people now.

Sounds like there's a contradiction in there somewhere. There's not. It's both/and.

How fast they grow

Keeping spirits up is a real challenge these days. I'm glued to the news, history and analysis of what's going on as Trump's idea of a smart man whom he "understands very well" savages Ukraine and we can do little but watch it happen.

But there was a ray of sunshine this morning as thousands of runners ran the Berkeley Half Marathon, and came down Fulton Street, a block from our house. We still remember the time when we couldn't hold the marathon because of the bad air from the smoke in Napa County. This morning, though, the air was fresh and clean. Moreover, we had a special stake in the run this year.

Takashi, one of my dearest friends, who was one of my students at Keio, decided to make his home in Oakland a few years ago, to my absolute delight.  I got to witness his marriage at San Francisco City Hall to an absolutely lovely woman, and, since then have been watching their family grow up close. First came Koh, now fast approaching his teenage years. Then Kei, his little sister. Together they make up my idea of the cutest kids in the world. 

Icing on the cake is Iggy, their chihuahua, the doggie who turned me from somebody who didn't care all that much for little dogs to one of the proud daddies of Miki and Bounce. If not for Iggy, those little girls, who have completely turned our lives around, might not have become part of our family, and I am eternally grateful for that.

We haven't seen each other much in recent months because of the Covid lockdown, and before that because Takashi took the family back to Japan so he could work for the Special Olympics. In that time, Koh and Kei have grown like bamboo shoots, almost too fast to keep track of.

Our spirits got a huge lift this morning as we got Miki and Bounce out for an early morning walk at 7:15, to watch the runners in the Berkeley Half Marathon to cheer Takashi and Koh on. They both did the run.

I know it's a cliché for old folks to talk about how fast time flies and how fast kids grow. But because I found this such a source of pride and uplift, I just have to share it.

The photo on the left is of Takashi and Koh taken in 2015. The one on the right is of Koh taken an hour or so ago. I missed Takashi but my eagle-eyed husband helped me pick Koh out of
the crowd.

The photo at the top is of some of the runners lining up at the start line. Threw that in just for the fun of it.

Update: 12:51 p.m.

Adding two videos plus a photo of Takashi, Koh and Kei, which Takashi just provided with the notation:

"Thank you so much for cheering this morning! Both Koh and I finished strong! It was so much fun!!!"

Sorry mama didn't get in the picture. But somebody had to operate the camera.

Used without Takashi's permission. Hope he doesn't mind😘.

Racism not going down without a fight

 I blogged a few weeks ago (January 8) about the efforts going on in Berkeley to rid ourselves of names on buildings that honor historic figures traditionally viewed as heroic, but who were also slave holders.

It's not just Berkeley. It's the whole Bay Area, and I suspect, if I checked into it seriously, I'd find it's going on way beyond just my local lefty region.  The understated German expression, "Das ist gut so!" comes to mind - "I think that's a damn good thing!"

Sometimes, though, they go too far, in my view, like when they want to shed the names of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Fortunately, a decision to chuck Washington, Jefferson, Paul Revere and others onto the trash heap of history in San Francisco got reversed, in the end. 

 Somewhere, between the efforts of right-wing white supremacists like Tucker Carlson, who want to disparage any effort to raise the consciousness of future generations about our slave-holding past, and those who would rename the State of Washington, a compromise will be found, I suspect.

Meanwhile, for any of you who know San Francisco, to "Bye Bye Berkeley" (hypothetical, very tentative) we can now add "Bye Bye Sir Francis Drake" (actually happening).

I love it that I'm still alive to watch the world (my little part of it, at least) come awake. I'm a big fan of that famous Santayana quote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it!"

And while we're at it, I highly recommend listening to John Oliver's rant on the right's effort to mask their white supremacy by manufacturing fake facts in connection with Critical Race Theory.

We are living the Chinese curse. These are indeed interesting times.

To Russia With Love

I volunteered for the U.S. Army in the fall of 1962,  because I had inside information that I was going to be drafted in September or October. Much as I was a sissy with no love of guns and bayonets, I took the chance of getting into the Army Language School as a way of avoiding dying in Cuba or Vietnam. It worked. I've never been to either Cuba or Vietnam.

When I got to Monterey, I ended up in the Russian Department and spent a year struggling over the difference between perfective and imperfective verbs and singing in the Russian Choir.  Both were music to my ears, actually. I loved Russian immediately the minute I learned that tooth was pronounced zoop and paper was pronounced bumaga.

There was a wonderful bunch of Russians and Ukrainians on the faculty - a woman we called Minnie Mouse because of her shoes, the wife of the Monterey Peninsula Orthodox Church priest, for example. She used to carry on with sentimental reminiscences about life under the Czar. There was also a prince of the Romanoff family with the tremors. We called him Shaky Jake. Then there was General Markov, who regaled us with tales of war and maneuvers into places so remote that the locals smashed out the headlights of his jeep, thinking they were blinding it, and an ex-bolshevik no-nonsense lady named Mrs. Nessin, who became my model as a teacher. She knew how to get down to business and stay there. The memory of her kept me professional more than once when I might otherwise have been tempted to lose my cool in front of a classroom.

And Sergei Sinkievich, who could do handstands on the balcony railing. He had left Russia when the Bolsheviks took over and went to Yugoslavia, and then left Yugoslavia for Germany when things got rough and we used to say we need to watch him carefully: if he ever left California we would know it would be wise to follow him.

It was the height of the Cold War and the message from on high was clear and explicit. We were to treat them Rooskies with suspicion and keep our distance. The plan didn't work. We developed considerable affection for most of our teachers. It was my first lesson in never confusing people with the politics of the nation from which they came. (Actually, it was my second. I grew up among German-Americans, post Second World War.)

As the years went by, I wandered off the path I had been set upon, one that would make me fluent in the Russian language and a lover of all things Russian.  Much of the vocabulary I once owned has slipped away, but I still have a strong feel for the language, still have an appreciation of the literature, and a huge love of its music. Nobody moves me like Rachmaninoff. Tchaikovsky is close behind. And for years I would have done anything for tickets to a Dmitry Hvorostovsky concert. I return again and again to YouTube for performances by the Igor Moiseev Folk Dance Ensemble.

Distinguishing a nation from the government that controls it now comes naturally to me, as I think it does anybody who goes out into the world and benefits from Goethe's insight when he said, "He who knows no foreign language knows nothing about his own" - and recognizes Goethe meant much more by that than language. I reconfirmed that when I went to live in Japan, eventually even marrying a Japanese, and putting that fact up against the memory of being taught as a kid that "those people (the Japanese) don't love their children the way we do ours." Today it's remembering that while Putin is a thug and Russians are hacking into our national secrets right and left (as we are theirs), there's no reason to hide the fact that I'm a huge fan of almost all things Russian. Today I find myself hoping the world will not mistake all Americans as Trumpists, clueless Evangelicals or white supremacists. And that Americans will stop equating Germany with Nazism. And Russians with Putin's dream of restoring a Russian-centered Soviet Empire.

I understand how a Russian can be a patriot. Listen to Hvorostovsky sing about soldiers far from home crying for mama, if you don't believe me, and remember that 20 million of them lost their lives in the Second World War. Or listen to this rendition of what may be the most beautiful national anthem ever written - at least up there with New Zealand's and Israel's.

Or listen to Vladimir Pozner, an apologist for things Russian, a Russian journalist who grew up in the U.S. and speaks perfect American English. I used to watch him on Ted Koppel's Nightline and on the Donohue show, back in the day when, for a brief time, it became cool to bring an actual apologist for the Soviet way on to tell his side of the story to American television audiences. Pozner is still around, still saying things many Americans find thought-provoking and more than a little uncomfortable. He asserts, for example, that America missed the boat when the Soviet Union fell apart. It might have implemented a kind of Marshall Plan for Russia, drawn it into the fold of Western democracies. Instead it insisted on treating Russia as the same pariah the Soviet Union was, and embracing the Wolfowitz Doctrine, an unabashedly imperialistic political stance which encouraged American triumphalism and helped pave the road to the kleptocracy Russia is today. 

It pains me to watch Russia and the West at loggerheads and closer to war than they have perhaps ever been, even during Cold War times. The issue is Ukraine and the fact that Russia has its back against the wall. "How would you feel," Pozner asks, "if Mexico decided one day it had enough bullying by the United States and asked China to send it defensive weapons? And if America and its allies suddenly lined up to help Mexico move out from under American influence and enter China's sphere instead?

I don't want to suggest that I'm totally behind this line of reasoning. I think Ukraine's desire to follow Poland, Hungary, Czechia and Slovakia and other former Soviet Republics, like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into the EU and conceivably even into NATO, cannot be reduced to a black-and-white analysis.  "Poor Mexico," Mexicans are fond of saying, "So far from God, and so close to the United States." I'm sure not a few Ukrainians have smiled at that, given their own problems with their giant neighbor to the north and east. Ukrainians have good reason to run toward democracy and not simply away from Russian imperialism. And that doesn't change the fact that, as with Kosovo, which the Serbians - with or without justification - saw as their point of origin, Kievan Russ is every Russian's idea of their original home. This is a situation that calls for the world to learn a lot more about Russian geography and history, and not go to war.

Germany is having a terrible time. Its new chancellor is taking tons of flak for his insistence that Germany will not go to war, even if Russia invades, and that is giving even some of the smartest people in the know - Anne Applebaum, for example, pause and the desire to take a hard line against Putin. And few believe the U.S. and the rest of Europe will either. But Putin may feel he has to draw a line in the sand, and this is it. We can't predict whether or how we might all back down from this crisis. Many Germans, and others, are worried Chancellor Scholz is being perceived as weak and indecisive. I'm happy to see him recognize that the temptation to jump in the squabble can be resisted.

If you listen to Pozner - and, I repeat, he is very thought-provoking - you should also follow Anne Applebaum. Both of them are anti-Putin, both feel he is less powerful, actually, than most of the world thinks, and both agree, more or less, that he is nonetheless dangerous. Donald Trump is a known fool, but we are learning, as the January 6 commission continues to reveal more and more once hidden documents, that he was, and possibly still is, just as dangerous in his bungling incompetence as a more competent leader might be. Ditto for Putin, who might well misjudge both his power and the need to prove himself a decisive leader and proponent of the equivalent of Russia's Monroe Doctrine, i.e., stay the hell out of our back yard!

War over Ukraine is not at the top of the list of things I worry about. Global warming, America's propensity for conspiracy theories, what comes after the Omicron variant of Covid-19 and a whole bunch of other things bother me more. But I do also agonize over the possibility that Russian and Ukrainian young people are in line to be sacrificed to the gods of war.

I once believed my elders when they told me Japanese didn't love their children. Now I marvel at how readily people can be led by fear, hatred and assertive ignorance to believe pure unadulterated bullshit. These days I listen to Vladimir Pozner, share his views on Wolfowitz and am put off by his disparaging of Navalny, Putin's nemesis whom somebody poisoned, either with Putin's knowledge or by somebody hoping to get into Putin's good graces. We should listen to smart people, especially those with insider knowledge. But we should also triangulate information.

The thought that somebody might take a gun, shoot and kill a beautiful young man in a Russian military uniform is the stuff of my nightmares. And the same goes for a beautiful young Ukrainian. (And, to their mothers, they're all beautiful.)

I put on an American army uniform in 1962 and joined in the effort to keep America safe from those damn Rooskies of the evil Soviet Empire. It's now sixty years later. Lots and lots of water under the bridge. These days I just wish I knew how to keep these boys safe from the guns their elders expect them to shoot each other with.

image of Russian soldier above

The right to be stupid

I've been watching Whoopi Goldberg get raked over the coals for her attempt to sound clever. Man, did she bomb! She's been hung out to dry for two things she said which I think should be taken separately. One strikes me as a question of perspective, that the Holocaust was not about race but about man's inhumanity to man. The other was a comment probably meant to be clever, and one that she must have thought was a kind of mark of solidarity with black folk; that the Holocaust was about white people fighting amongst themselves. Now that's stupid. Seriously stupid. And insensitive as all get-out.

The Holocaust was absolutely not about white man against white man. It was one of the cruelest examples of a hateful ideology put into practice by a nation of folk many of them living in poverty and hoping for a savior, somebody who would "Make Germany great again."  People filled with fear of falling through the cracks, apathetic or clueless about the degree to which the Weimar democracy depended on their active participation, working hand-in-hand with a critical mass of enablers of fascism. One of the lowest points in Western civilization. Seen from this aspect of the issue, and through an American lens, Whoopi was right: race had nothing to do with it.

Where she needed to be corrected was in her oversimplified notion of what racism is. Nobody can blame an American, and particularly an African-American, for seeing anti-racism as a struggle between black and white Americans. We all define things on the basis of our own experience, and our racism is all about the white supremacist belief, prevalent through most of our history, and to some degree still very much alive today, that white people had the right to own black people and use them in any way they chose. They could rape them, work them to death, tear them from their loved ones with impunity, be assured that the police would help them capture them when they ran away. American racism is about as evil as evil gets. It's not surprising that when Whoopi looked through that lens, she found the connection between racism and the Holocaust almost irrelevant. And given her work in the area of human rights, it's not surprising she should foreground it.

But that was Whoopi with blinders on, not Whoopi worthy of punishment. She evidenced absolutely no intention to cause harm. She merely missed the very important fact that the Holocaust was indeed about race; it was about people who used the word explicitly, people who thought of themselves as the "master race" and the Jews as a race that they had every right to extinguish. Right down to the last man, woman and child.

When she expressed on The View that what the Nazis did should be interpreted as a crime against humanity rather than an example of racism, she was being reasonable, whether you agree with her or not. She had a perspective. You don't have to agree with it. And a couple of her fellow panel members did protest. That's what a talk show called The View is supposed to be about - a sharing of different perspectives. 

Where Whoopi went off the rails was the second part of her statement, that this was whites fighting amongst themselves. I'm still reeling at the stupidity of that statement. But I don't feel any need to beat her with a stick. I'm happy she found it a good idea to apologize.  Not before she found herself in a hole and kept digging, unfortunately. "Race is something I can see," she said on the Colbert Report.

We're living in a time when being stupid can cost you more than if you're crooked. While the conspiracy theorists run relatively free, we are quick to punish, quick to portray ourselves as people who would not be stupid, given the chance. We worry less about being hypocritical than about being politically correct. The media bring on a holocaust survivor who wants to school Whoopi in the evils of the holocaust, and the network plays this up big: "What would you like to say to her?" the newscaster asks, even after reporting that Whoopi has seen the error of her ways and apologized for what she said.  And it was a real apology, not just a perfunctory one:

I should have said it is about both. As Jonathan Greenblatt from the Anti-Defamation League shared, ‘The Holocaust was about the [Nazis’] systematic annihilation of the Jewish people — who they deemed to be an inferior race.’ I stand corrected.

It occurs to me that what's going on is not about the re-education of Whoopi Goldberg, but about the view we have that the media's role should be a didactic one. Here's how you're supposed to think, it tells its audience. Take notes. Do it right. Don't make the mistake Whoopi Goldberg did. Whoopi has no recourse. She doesn't get to explain. She has to sit there and put out her hand to be slapped with the ruler. No protests. Just take your punishment.

It's bad enough that we have to watch Americans fall all over themselves these days to spread one bit of misinformation after another. The fawning members of the Republican Party give me an ulcer. But it pains me almost as much to have to watch us turn our backs on something I thought was sacred. I'll never forget the first time I heard somebody say, "The freedom of speech, the freedom to worship in any way you choose, the freedom to organize labor unions - all those are important freedoms; but the greatest freedom we have is the freedom to be stupid." It's another way of saying that the freedom of speech has no meaning if there are going to be censors or arbiters of correct thinking.

I'm really glad Whoopi apologized for that insensitive statement. I wish she had not been suspended just so ABC, the network that The View is on, gets to look clean and pure. When I read the reason Kim Godwin, the head of ABC, gave for the move, "I've asked her to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments," my stomach turned. How arrogant. How condescending. How dare you think you're in a position to give lessons on morality? But on second thought, it occurred to me that it probably wasn't Whoopi she was addressing, but the American people. When you're put in charge of media, you assume a moral position. Otherwise you're just a tool of monied interests. Or a simple propaganda machine, like Fox News. I don't know Godwin, but my guess is she's no more a hypocrite than the rest of us. She's just doing her job as she understands it.

I'm not going to shed a tear for Whoopi. She took on the risk by going on a talk show where people of different opinions get together to slug it out. Getting slapped down goes with the public job.  Anti-semitism is up in America - and around the world - it's good that it's getting the attention this goof brings to it. Good that people are learning that not all Jews are white, that being Jewish is not parallel to being Catholic, because Jewishness and Judaism are two different things; that not all Jews are religious and Jewishness is not an ethnicity. It's a lot like it in some ways, but it's not the same thing. Just ask an American whose father was a Persian Jew and whose mother was a German Jew and who was raised in a secular household in America. It's good that we get to learn from this kerfuffle.

But, as always, it's what happens next that matters more than what has happened to date. If this experience makes Whoopi less willing to speak her mind for fear of showing her ignorance, that will be a big loss. She's been in hot water a number of times before. It's part of her personality to say things off the cuff. Like the time she pointed to her pubic area and said, referring to George W. Bush, "We should keep Bush where he belongs, and not in the White House." She needs to be free to be stupid (and vulgar) again, and we need to be free to call her stupid (and vulgar) again, if that's how she strikes us.

And that goes for all of us, of course.