Gaza and the horns of a dilemma

A couple months ago, I posted a blog titled "Don't kill the people of Gaza," in which I tried to make the case that there are both moral and practical reasons for Israel not to retaliate militarily for the October 7th Hamas attack, that the killing of civilians in Gaza is wrong. I felt this conviction pretty strongly, and considered taking the posting down the next day, because it was too obvious to be arguing about.

A few days ago, I tuned in to a Spiegel interview with two prominent German thinkers, on German television, and got another perspective. That perspective has not exactly turned me around, but it gave me some heavy stuff to consider which I want to share with you. I now feel less certainty when I argue the Israelis are only making things worse by continuing the violence. It's still true that two wrongs don't make a right, but what if the second "wrong" isn't really wrong?

One of the interviewees is Düzen Tekkal, a TV journalist of Kurdish and Yazidi background. She makes a strong appeal for keeping both sides of the conflict in focus. The other is Michael Wolffsohn, a German historian born in Israel but raised in Berlin. His German-Jewish parents fled Hitler in 1939, but returned after the war. Wolffsohn went back to serve in the Israeli army, and clearly feels at home in both Germany and Israel. It's Wolffsohn's argument that is troubling me.

I've spoken about this elsewhere, but at the risk of being repetitive, there is a line in the movie Munich, which I come back to again and again. The line is "It isn't Jewish."

The screenplay for Munich was written by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth.  I've admired Tony Kushner's work since the first time I saw Angels in America, which I think of as the great morality play of the LGBT liberation movement. The clarity of his moral values comes out again in Munich, which deals with the Israeli retaliation against the Palestinian group Black September, responsible for the killing of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972. In the film, Golda Meir sets up a clandestine team of Mossad agents to take down the eleven Palestinian killers. Each killer is assigned an agent to take him out, and they all succeed, save one. The one who can't go through with his task hears his grandmother's voice in a dream. "It's not Jewish," she says to him.

Israel is a democracy, and that means it lives with multiple conflicting values. Some Israelis have no trouble resorting to assassination to dispose of their enemies. Others hear their grandmother's voice and remember one of Judaism's gifts to the world is its sense of justice. And that's what's going on here, in the debate over whether and how to retaliate for the October 7th attack. The majority of its Jewish population found the attack so barbaric that they are willing to go along with their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, despite blaming him in large part for working with Hamas and for choosing to send troops to the West Bank to protect settlers harassing the Palestinian locals instead of keeping an eye on Gaza. They are willing to let loose on Hamas, despite the fact it entails the killing of thousands of supposedly innocent Gazans, half of whom are children.

And that brings me back to the German historian, Michael Wolffsohn. He sides with the Israelis calling for swift and certain retaliation. Hamas must go, they say. But listen to Wolffsohn's reasoning:

If you think back to 1945, when Germany gave in to the demand for unconditional surrender, there was no serious argument that Germany should not have been bombed into submission. Hitler had been elected chancellor and become an authoritarian who, once in office, could not be dislodged from power. Bombing his country was the right thing to do, and even today, coming up on a century later, most people see the way the war played out in that light, the killing of innocent Germans as a necessary evil. And ditto for Japan, by the way, although there is no shortage of debate over whether use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was overkill.

Wolffsohn puts Hamas in the same category as Hitler, a political entity originally elected but now so thoroughly entrenched that few dare (or want to?) speak out against this power dedicated to the total destruction of Israel and the killing of every Jew on the planet. Not somebody you can make deals with. And the proof of that is their willingness to use their own people as shields or as cannon fodder, to store their munitions in schools and hospitals and effectively dare the Israelis to bomb them, counting on the Kushner-type Jews with their grandmother's voice in their heads, to restrain the Israeli army on the grounds that "it isn't Jewish" to kill. Grandma knew her Ten Commandments.

It isn't Jewish to kill children. Nobody will argue that.  But what are we to do with the fact that  Palestinians are used as shields? Just go on saying "it isn't Jewish" as Hamas sends rockets to bomb Israel day after day? Surrender? Turn Tel Aviv back into olive groves?

Wolffsohn maintains that just as Germany needed to be brought to its knees in 1945 at the cost of countless thousands of lives for modern-day Germany to come alive as a modern democracy Gaza has to be brought down in like fashion. In years to come, the Gazans of today will be recognized as innocent bystanders, and their deaths will be understood as a tragedy, but future historians will recognize what is an unavoidable necessity. Germans died from Allied bombs, but if Hitler had not invaded Poland in September 1939 and much of the rest of Europe in time, if he and his fascist thugs had not set the Holocaust in motion, there would have been no Allied bombs. It was in Germany's long-term interest that Hitler be brought down. If those opposed to fighting Hitler had had their way, their "peace now" arguments would only have extended the misery. You've got to know who you're fighting and be able to separate those who will negotiate from those who won't.

Note that Mahatma Gandhi, when faced with this dilemma, first urged that the Jews should have "offered themselves to the butcher's knife." But in time he also urged India to support the British in their war effort.  Practical reasons trumped moral ones; he wanted the British to offer India independence in return. But that doesn't change the fact he supported the military takedown of Adolf Hitler.

We are talking about maybe the greatest dilemma of our lifetime. One part of me wants to take the pacifist position: killing is wrong, no matter who does it; two wrongs don't make a right; there's got to be another way, a diplomatic way and we just have to keep searching till we find it. And another part of me finds Wolffsohn's argument persuasive. There is evil in the world. Hitler killed for Lebensraum and to eliminate people he saw as Untermenschen.  Hamas kills people for being Jewish and has promised to keep fighting till the State of Israel is wiped off the map.  Hitler continued sending 16- and 17-year-old boys to the front even when it was clear the war was lost. Hamas openly boasts of rape, beheading and torture as tools of war. Negotiations are the way to go only if you can get your opponent to the table, and trust that they will honor peace agreements.

Ultimately, I come down on the side of the peaceniks. I can't handle the killing of children, and Realpolitik and I have never been the best of friends. I keep thinking there has got to be a way short of bullets and bombs to stop the killing. I realize my plan to kick the settlers out of the West Bank and throw Netanyahu in jail for life won't fly, and I don't have any better suggestions. I know the arguments against both a two-state and a one-state solution are currently both overpowering. And I can't imagine having to bear the political responsibility of choosing between delaying the war and dreaming of a magic solution on the one hand, and continuing to bomb Gaza to dust, on the other.

So I post these feeble "think-pieces" on my blog, hoping they might inspire somebody reading them to point out things everybody has been missing so far.

I don't believe in divine intercession or in knights in shining armor coming to the rescue.

My only comfort is that dilemmas sometimes do - magically - get resolved.

Free Speech, Genocide, and Ill-Chosen Legalese

I've been following the story this week of the three university presidents in the dock over their failure to crack down on anti-semitic protests on their campus.  In case you've been avoiding the news because you're tired of all the downer news of Trump leading in the polls or his loyalists' success in shutting down government, you may have missed what's going on. If that's the case, let me urge you to tune back in. This story has implications far beyond the charges of wokism and political correctness that it appears to be about at first glance.

To start in the middle (because to start at the beginning of all the issues converging would require a review of the arguments in favor of First Amendment rights to free speech and the entire history of Palestine and of anti-semitism), three university presidents, Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, Sally Kornbluth of MIT and Claudine Gay of Harvard, were called on the carpet this past week by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce and grilled in connection with protests of Israel's response to the attacks by Hamas on October 7th. In a nutshell, they were charged with failure to provide Jews on their campuses with safe haven from calls for genocide by the protesters.

What troubles me about this event is how any attempt at a nuanced analysis of what happened - and is still happening - seems to be beyond our grasp. It's a chaotic free-for-all, with right-wingers asking the questions and progressives not being able to provide their own acceptable framing of the problem. To jump to the bottom line, the questioners asked, in unabashed sophomoric gutsiness, "Are you in favor of genocide?" and the responders responded, in embarrassing evasive-sounding language, "It depends on the situation." Not cool.  Not cool at all. If the two sides were your teenage kids, you'd want to lock them in a closet until they turned twenty. I squirmed - as I imagine most Americans did - at both the hostility of the questioners and the naiveté of the responders, who gave a legalistic response when a moral one was in order.  The unsatisfying answer gave Elise Stefanik, the question, a chance to show justified outrage and lash out at what half the country now considers unduly privileged leaders of elitist institutions. Take that Harvard, Penn and MIT, you arrogant bastards. Magill has now resigned and Stefanik's response is "One down. Two to go." In case you missed the complexity of this congressional attempt to address the very real problem of anti-semitism on U.S. campuses, keep in mind that Sally Kornbluth of MIT is Jewish. Also keep in mind that Stefanik was not being honest here. Language is an important part of the problem.  It should be common knowledge by now - it isn't, but it should be - that jihad has a broad range of meaning. In the mouth of Islamic radicals it means "all out war" against non-Muslims, but to speakers of Arabic generally, it means "struggle" and is mainly understood to mean "engage in the battle to do the morally right thing." Intifada, similarly, means uprising, and when used in the struggle against Israeli attempts to limit Palestinian rights (as Palestinians see them), the word means resistance. And the word genocide itself tends to be used as a shock term more frequently than an accurate description of behavior.

But that is a moot point in this case. Associated Press has pointed out that there was in fact no call for genocide, that the word appeared only in complaints that the revenge attacks on Hamas amounted to a genocide perpetrated by Israel, considering the number of deaths in Gaza number over 18,000 since the retaliation began. So Stefanik's insisting on a yes/no answer to the question of genocide should be considered a badgering of the witness. Stefanik, in fact, gives herself away. When questioning Kornbluth on the question of genocide, Kornbluth replied, "I have not heard calling for the genocide of Jews on our campus." To this, Stefanik responded, "But you've heard chants for intifada."  

And next thing you know, the way the story gets told is that the presidents were so insensitive as to let protesters off the hook when calling for genocide, as if they were working in a Nazi framework.  Some individuals may have gone that far, but I have yet to see evidence for it.  I trust you will agree with me, however, that this automatic bait-and-switch of the word genocide for intifada, is manipulation on the part of Elise Stefanik.

These confrontations with the three presidents encapsulates the dilemma we're facing, in the U.S. and in the world, with the arrival of the internet and instant exposure to complex ideas which everyone, wise and foolish alike, feels they have the right - and often the duty - to chime in on. Nuance gets lost in the shuffle. And with it goes the argument postmodernists try to make that objective truth is elusive and we are better off accepting the notion that there are multiple truths, that everybody should just tell their story and we should let all the conflicting narratives just sit there side by side. You can hear this argument at work every time somebody speaks of "speaking your own truth."

But the hearings aggravate an already open wound in America, the inability to proceed with civility through agonizingly painful differences of opinion. We live in permanent "gotcha" mode, egged on by the media and its habit of reporting conflict, often with what seems like glee: "If it bleeds, it leads." It doesn't require a close look at the hearings to see that the Committee went at the three academics with righteous gusto.  Jewish Americans, three-quarters of whom generally vote democratic, are finding a sympathetic ally in the Republican Party these days.

I am in no position to oppose hard grilling of the world's movers and shakers by Congress. I see it as their job to expose wrongdoing, and have enjoyed watching them go at people in the hot seat and make them squirm - automobile manufacturers, bankers, oil and gas executives, for example. One of my heroes is Katie Porter, with her whiteboard. An even bigger hero has been Liz Cheney and others on the Congressional January 6th committee.  I watch what Congress does more closely these days than usual, frankly, out of a fear that the reelection of the 45th president of the United States and the Republicans riding his coattails would mean the end of democracy in America. Just so you know what my biases are and where I'm coming from. 

I said at the start that the presidents-in-the-dock event needs to be understood in the larger history of the Israel/Palestine conflict. I cannot do that history justice, but let me give a quick summary in three or four paragraphs of how I understand it, also in order to expose my limitations and let you know where I'm coming from.

A little background

The larger battle between Israel and the Palestinians is one of the Western world's most frustrating battles of conflicting narratives, to use the postmodern term.  Many have declared the problem insoluble, and indeed it has persisted since before the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, over seventy-five years ago now, still with no end in sight.

To risk oversimplification, the main Israeli narrative is that Palestine is the traditional Jewish homeland and Jews have a right to it. Religious Jews - and many biblical-literalist Christians as well - maintain that right was God-given, but even non-religious supporters of Israel claim that right is historical. When Palestinians tell the story, they usually insist that the Jewish right to emigrate to Palestine does not include the right to push the Palestinians out, and that that is the start and the heart of the problem.  From there the conflict goes quickly to arguments over whether the Jews have a right to form a Jewish state, which includes preferential treatment for Jews, whether the Palestinians were pushed or chose to sell their land voluntarily and leave, whether, in the absence of a historical Palestinian state for Palestinians, there should be one now, and whether the Palestinian National Authority speaks for the Palestinians, or maybe Hamas of Hezbollah. The Palestinian National Authority has to face charges of widespread corruption; Hamas is the terrorist organization responsible for the aforementioned barbaric invasion, and Hezbollah is supported by Iran, a country that refers to Israel as "Little Satan" and has declared it to be an "enemy of Islam."

Also part of the context is the fact that Palestinians, regardless of whether they are responsible for their own fate and, if so, to what degree, have lived lives not of their own choosing as refugees for seventy-five years. Technically they are not refugees in the normal sense, i.e.,  people driven from their countries, but are "internally displaced," i.e., still living in Israel or under the Palestinian authority, and these children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those displaced in the late 1940s are considered refugees by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). Many have made decent lives outside Israel/Palestine throughout the Middle East, in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and elsewhere (including as far away as Chile) but resent not being able to return to the homes they fled or were otherwise forced to surrender subsequent to the foundation of Israel in 1948, which they refer to as "al-Nakba," or "The Catastrophe." Half, approximately one million, of these internally displaced Palestinians live in Gaza; 750,000 live in the West Bank and another 250,000 live in Israel proper and comprise 21% of the Israeli State. For the sake of comparison, 73.5% of the Israeli population, or 7.145 million, are Jews.

The Israeli-Occupied West Bank is governed by Fatah, a political party led by Mahmood Abbas. Jewish settlers, now numbering 750,000, supported by Israeli's President Benjamin Netanyahu and soldiers of the Israeli Defence Forces are now actively pushing them out of the Occupied West Bank.  And, in this case, at least, the "pushing out" has more of a claim to objective truth than other parts of the conflicting narratives. Gazans, long before this current moment where they are dying under Israeli bombardment in large numbers as shields for their Hamas rulers, were described by supporters of Palestinian rights as living "the largest open-air prison in the world."

Hamas was elected to run Gaza in 2006 and there have been no elections since. For a brief period they ruled in accord with Fatah, but by 1997 were at odds with them and have been ever since. Since there is no way of identifying how much support Hamas gets from the citizens of Gaza, it is difficult to assess how much responsibility they should bear for the recent Hamas attack and how strong a case might be made justifying Israel's recent ruthless attacks on Gazan civilians as unavoidable "collateral damage," and what the Israelis can do, if anything, to go after Hamas without such killing of civilians. Clearly there is no shortage of debates all deriving from the main event, the attack.

Back to the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT

It appears to be virtually impossible to draw a clear line of separation between the attack by Hamas and the right of Palestinians to seek relief from their current political disadvantage in this conflict of narratives between them and Jewish Israelis. The blurring of the line is evident not just at Harvard, UPenn and MIT, where students sympathetic to the lot of the Palestinians have been protesting and where the presidents of these institutions are now on the carpet for failing to label their protests as anti-semitic hate speech. The Anti-Defamation League reports a 388% increase in anti-semitic incidents over last year. And anti-semitism seems to be on the rise elsewhere, including in Germany, despite strong efforts to draw a line between itself and its anti-semitic past.

Free Speech and Anti-Semitism

Suddenly, we're back at the task of defining just where the line is between free speech and hate speech.  Supporters of the work of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce are quick to point out that the "woke" ideology of many, maybe most, of American campuses has been hard on free speech. Despite calls for DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), anybody insisting there are only two genders, or that the recent focus on trans rights is coming to the detriment of gays and lesbians, or that there should be consequences to those failing to use the right gender pronouns are having a hard time of it. Now, say the rightists, they suddenly want free speech?

You can see how these issues bleed into one another. What are we actually debating here, one might ask, Palestinian rights, hate speech, or the fragility of American democracy? For that matter, how are we defining anti-semitism and is anti-zionism the same thing as anti-semitism? In my view we need to hold fast to the freedom to criticize Israeli government policies without being labeled either of those things, but I understand that this involves a judgment call at times and clarity can be elusive.

While I'd like to keep these issues apart and deal with each of them separately, I don't know how to do that. I cannot pretend not to see right-wing American politics overshadowing the hate speech question.  Watching the coverage of the protests, and of the grilling of the presidents, I find myself feeling a sense of despair.  Presidents Magill, Kornbluth and Gay were not being allowed to give nuanced responses to people demanding a yes/no answer. The assumption behind the questions is that the pro-Palestinian protestors are calling for genocide. Do you approve of genocide, and are you failing to protect your Jewish students from hate speech by not shutting them down? Yes or no, please. 

The three women try repeatedly to resist what they clearly believe to be a reductionist question, one requiring nuance.  They tried to defend free speech by drawing a line between speech that stops there and speech that leads to action, the old "crying fire in a crowded theater" argument. And in doing so, they came across as duplicitous. A quick run-down of the commentary shows that probably a critical mass of the American public found their responses reprehensible.

I have to ask. Are the "bad answers" - I assume you'll agree with me that giving a legalistic response when a moral one is expected isn't smart - the fault of the presidents? Or were they simply "overly lawyered," as some have claimed. Were they so concerned about not getting into legal hot water that they saw no choice but to evade the pressure to give a yes/no answer?

On the one hand, anybody taking the Israeli, or Jewish, side in this polarized debate is likely to rejoice at this turn of events.  When testifying before the Senate Committee, when she was asked by Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) if students "calling for the genocide of Jews" ran counter to her university's rules, she might have said, "You're asking a crudely insulting question, Congresswoman. And shame on you for even suggesting I would approve of genocide. No, of course I don't approve of genocide. But as President of the University of Pennsylvania, I have a duty to uphold free speech, however obnoxious it may get at times." Instead, she responded legalistically, trying to get at that line between "just speech" and "speech leading to action." What the students were saying must be allowed, she implied, unless it turns into conduct. Then it can be considered harassment and dealt with accordingly.  

Stefanik apparently saw an opportunity to go for the throat and it was downhill from there for the university president. Stefanik repeatedly insisted the student protesters were calling for genocide and Magill continued to draw a line between speech and action - and allow for free speech. This testimony will no doubt serve future students of communication as a clear example of the importance of social context: it's not enough to speak truth; you've got to know how the audience is going to interpret that truth.  Magill behaved as if she were in an ivory-tower environment where philosophical discussions require precision and nuanced distinctions are valued. She failed to account for the fact that Stefanik knew how to play to an audience of people now prone to dismiss ivory-tower intellectuals as duplicitous and elitist. Just answer yes or no, dammit! What we saw played out was a battle between "just us real folks" and "the despised elite" that characterizes polarized America these days.

There are other views on the topic and I want to mention one in particular because it is part of the full range of the intellectual scene. There is no shortage of hurt and outrage by defenders of Jews and others who believe the level of severity of anti-semitism is underrated, on American campuses and elsewhere, and argue that the main point ought to be not free speech but the lack of consistency in what speech is actually protected. That is the perspective of the Ayn Rand Institute, for example, whose spokespersons, Onkar Ghate and Israeli libertarian, Elan Journo, would put the central focus not on free speech issue at all but on the hypocrisy of a class of leftist elites. One can see in this attitude the Ayn Rand argument that what the left is after is taking from the best and the brightest and giving to the rest of us, not letting the successful have what they have earned but spreading the wealth to all the "losers" among us. Jews, says Ghate, are now "winners" and thus the left is going after them. They have lost their claim to being a protected class.  This take on things brings home the frustration successful people often feel when they sigh and say, "I just can't win for losing." I don't give much credence to this view, but this is no place to take on the Ayn Rand philosophy.

Some background on the Committee

It's worth looking beneath the surface into who was running the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. For starters, was headed by Republican Virginia Foxx, representative of North Carolina's 5th Congressional District.  I recognized Ms. Foxx as the person telling that ABC reporter to shut up and go away when the reporter asked House Speaker Mike Johnson the other day about his 2020 election denial efforts. I know her as an ardent homophobe, someone who once called efforts to remember Matthew Shepard, the gay kid left to die on a fence in Wyoming in 1998, a hoax to foster the spread of hate crimes bills, which she has also opposed. She later retracted the hoax charge.  She opposes abortion, even when performed to save the life of the mother. She is also a signer of an amicus brief supporting an attempt before the Supreme Court to contest the 2020 election. A Trumpist through and through, right down to election denying.

But Foxx was not the main voice on the committee. That dubious honor goes to Elise Stefanik, who tried, with considerable success, to tie the word "intifada" with "genocide." But as the Guardian points out, this is political dishonesty: 

The first Palestinian intifada in the late 1980s consisted largely of non-violent forms of civil disobedience. The second intifada of the 1990s and early 2000s saw a wave of suicide bombings that killed more than 1,000 Israelis and maimed many others. While segments of Israeli society were left traumatised, it appeared to fall short of the legal definition of genocide.

And genocide expert Omer Bartov, and Israeli-American professor at Brown, makes the case that intifada simply means civil protest, and there is no reason to think and act as if the entire Palestinian protest movement is populated by extremists with genocidal intent. That's why I put into Magill's mouth the words I wish she had spoken instead of assuming her audience would follow her distinction between free speech and bad action, and accuse her of being evasive.

One has to wonder if this isn't a clear example of the political right's efforts to hit back at what they see as the center of "wokism"? Elise Stefanik demands a simple yes/no answer to her "genocide" question, and mocks the presidents' legalistic answers. While most people are agreeing Gay should have found a way to avoid answering a moral question with a legalistic response, anybody who knows Stefanik's background story of expulsion by the university for supporting Trump's claim that the 2020 election was stolen, can be expected to wonder how much of this attack on her alma mater through its president might be very personal indeed. I know, I know. I sound like I'm condemning with speculative innuendo, but listen to the distain in Stefanik's voice as she follows up her original question and tells Gay what her answer should have been.

I said earlier that the attack on Israel by Hamas has now blown up and sucked Americans polarized into right-wingers and lefties into the mix. To see that played out, listen first to the testimonies of Jewish students sponsored by the Republican right wing, then to the testimonies of two prominent Jewish scholars. The former are almost guaranteed to make you believe Jews are not safe on American campuses; the latter are almost guaranteed to make you believe to cast out the three presidents is tantamount to surrendering the free speech debate to those who would shut it down for good. If nothing else is true, the fact that truth is not likely to survive in a shouting match is. Somehow we need to get back to calmer discussions of differences.

This brings us to the question of whether Magill and her two president-colleagues should be punished for failure to understand when to use nuanced reasoning and when to cater to the need for plain speech - and to what degree. Do they really need to resign their jobs? I think not. God help us if we are all judged by our weakest moments. Ten years before being pushed out of UPenn, she was dean of the Stanford Law School. And I am happy to note I am hardly alone in this. Both the Harvard Crimson and the Harvard Corporation Board have come out in support of Claudine Gay. Ditto for MIT's support for Sally Kornbluth.

Ironically, there is a plus side to this kerfluffle. A quick glance down the commentary to the reports of this event will reveal all manner of anti-woman and homophobic attitudes alive and well in America to this day, but they cannot hide the fact that women are now breaking glass ceilings. Just as with Liz Cheney losing her seat in Congress as the representative for Wyoming because she went out on a limb to take down Trump, these women are paying a high price for not "doing the right thing" as many people see it. 

Dig deeper into the story and you see the three presidents being attacked on a more personal level, particularly Gay, who is charged with plagiarism in her dissertation, a charge I won't go into here, but you can follow up by clicking on the highlighted word "charged" in this sentence.  Questions were also raised about the degree to which their universities were pro-Palestinian because much of their research funding comes allegedly from places like Qatar, a country clearly on the side of the Palestinian claims. I won't go into that, either, but you can read about it here and consider whether Qatar is being given a bad rap by people failing to distinguish between its support of Palestine and its legitimate interest in fostering scientific research. 

Alan Dershowitz, not a person whose opinions I value much any more, but he has pretty much trashed her and I think his charges need at least a proper airing. But this is not the proper time to go after her. This is a time for sticking to the free speech issue at hand and not piling on with old grievances. If Gay was the wrong person, as Dershowitz claims, for the job of Harvard president, that issue can be dealt with in another venue where she can get a full hearing and others get to come to her defence.

I understand, by taking this position sympathetic to the presidents, I am going to disappoint some of my Jewish friends, particularly those for whom the recent wave of anti-semitism in the U.S. and abroad is especially galling. And as I said, even in Germany, where they have worked so hard to stand by Israel in recent years and insist on ridding any suggestion they could ever again harbor anti-semitism, it makes one weak in the knees to see that resolve begin to crumble.  

I understand why some might want to insist it's time to stop what they see as hair-splitting. And, as I pointed out,  there is real anti-semitism on these and other campuses in the country, and so far it has not being adequately dealt with. But I also see in the attacks on these three presidents an overreaction, a pendulum swing from too little to too much.  And I see the potential loss of democracy as a real possibility and I believe the need to support free speech is critical in shoring it up against those now willing to dismiss it as too much trouble to maintain. 

It's time, I think, to stop bashing elite universities and remind ourselves of the scientific and intellectual gifts they routinely give not only to the United States, but to the whole world. And it's time to give the three presidents some space. It's not for me to determine the fate of the three presidents. The level of support MIT and Harvard are giving their presidents indicates their horrible gaffe (giving a legalistic-sounding response when a stronger show of sympathy for Jewish fears was called for) firing them would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, especially since they have all three recognized their error and apologized for it.  Listen to the House debate over Resolution 927 today on whether Congress should to call for the presidents' resignations today (seriously? Congress wants to dictate their will to private educational institutions???), particularly to the strong case against the resolution by Jamie Raskin, which begins at about minute 28:48. Jamie Raskin says it better than I can.

Their fate is not in my hands.  It will probably be decided by big donors threatening to withhold donations if the presidents get out of line. If it were in my hands, I'd say, "You blew it, ladies.... And now can we all get back to work fighting anti-semitism more effectively, having learned from this experience?  And to the business of being civil to each other?"

Things my grandmother taught me

In 1962, the year I graduated from college, I had to go into the army. The U.S. had a draft in place and I was at the age where the Cuban Crisis and the impending war in Vietnam meant I could be forced to carry a gun and kill people in the name of "defending freedom." I didn't want to do that, but I also didn't want to take advantage of the usual methods of escape. I knew I could declare myself a homosexual, but that was the equivalent of hanging myself from a tree. I could take a hammer to my instep, but I've never been very good with pain. I could run to Canada. That was an attractive prospect, actually. I have an emotional home in Nova Scotia, where my maternal grandmother was from and where we used to spend all our summers growing up. But that too was unappealing, in the end. I had too many ties to the United States.

I got wind of another alternative. I could take the bull by the horns, volunteer to join the army before they could draft me, and apply for the Army Language School in Monterey. As a volunteer I had a decent chance of avoiding the infantry and determining my own placement.

Let me continue for a while in Russian. I'll provide a translation in the next paragraph, so you can skip right over it if you don't read Russian.

Примерно в полутора часах езды к югу отсюда находится город Монтерей. В Монтерее есть школа под названием Армейская школа языков. Пока я был там, его название изменилось на Институт Иностранных Языков Министерства Обороны, но я присоединился к нему, когда это был ALS. Этот опыт стал поворотным моментом в моей жизни. По трем причинам. Во-первых, потому что меня потом отправили на командировку в Германию; во-вторых, потому что у меня сложились многие из самых важных дружеских отношений в моей жизни с людьми, которых я впервые встретил там. И, наконец, из-за близости к Сан-Франциско, где я проводил много выходных, меня познакомили с местом, которое, как я сразу понял, станет моим домом в ближайшие годы.

About an hour and a half drive south of here is the town of Monterey. In Monterey there is a school called the Army Language School. Its name changed to the Defence Language Institute while I was there, but I joined it when it was the ALS. That experience was a major turning point in my life. For three reasons. First, because I was sent to Germany on assignment afterwards; secondly, because I formed some of my most important lifetime friendships with people I first met there. And finally, because of its proximity to San Francisco, where I would come to spend many weekends, I was introduced to a place I instantly recognized would be my home in the years to come.

The Cold War was at its height.  In order to get the assignment to study at the Army Language School I had to enroll in the Army Security Agency. I had to become a spy. Not a cloak-and-dagger spy, but a much more mundane kind: somebody who sat in a room listening to Russian soldiers in East Germany talk to each other, hoping that if they were going to start World War III they would talk about it in advance.

I did this in Berlin. I lived in a barracks where Hitler's former elite guards were once housed, and every day climbed into a bus to be transported out to the pile of rubble that had become a mountain of the ruins of the buildings of Berlin. The place had an ironic name: Teufelsberg - Devil's Mountain. It was in the American Zone, and restricted to Army Security Agency people only, who built a site on top where they could raise antennas and scoop up all sorts of radio waves, including those of the entire Russian Army stationed in the German Democratic Republic, which Berlin was, conveniently, located right plunk in the middle of.

My year at Monterey had been richly fulfilling. By the end of it I was able to follow lectures provided by some of the 150 Russian faculty members now living as exiles in the U.S. and unable to follow their original professional paths as doctors, lawyers, and intellectuals of all sorts. They were lucky to get jobs as teachers of Russian for the American military and largely hid their lights under a bushel. Fortunately for us, some of them couldn't keep that light contained and it would leak out. Such was the case with one member of the Romanov family who lived and died for Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. In the last few months at Monterey, while I missed many of the fine points I was nonetheless able to listen to Prince Romanov (whom we cruelly called "Shaky Jake" - I think he had Parkinson's and we were young and stupid) lecture on and on in Russian about what a great man this guy Tchaikovsky was and what he had contributed to Russian culture.

We were not supposed to be exposed to this kind of positive view of things Russian, I am sure, but fortunately the Americans making the decisions about things like this had next to no knowledge about what they were doing. They even stamped our bilingual dictionaries "Confidential" because they contained Russian words. And while we're on the topic, despite the fact that they threatened to jail us if we said word one about our work, they issued insignia for our uniforms that carried the image of a cloak and dagger. No shit.

When I got to Berlin, that knowledge of Russian I had spent a solid year acquiring, six hours a day in class plus homework, five days a week, was put to use. I'd go into the windowless quonset hut, put on my earphones, and listen to Russian soldiers count to ten and back down to one. They had to talk because they had to keep the lines open - just in case the American invaded - and when they had nothing else to say - which was most of the time - the simply counted to ten.

After a month of this I was convinced I was losing my mind. In retrospect, that is probably less of an exaggeration than it now sounds. I ended up being transferred to the German section because I was raised in a sometimes German-speaking household and could handle the Saxon dialect my colleagues who had studied German at the ALS found overly taxing. But that's a story for another day. How I had almost not gotten my security clearance when they found out I had a German-born mother and had relatives living in Germany. How the army had not wanted to allow native speakers of German to work as German translators but believed it was safer to train people with no German backgrounds instead. The point is, after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to teach me Russian, the army was now faced with a choice: throw this loser in jail for a while and give him a dishonorable discharge, or take the deal he was offering and get some use out of him. I am happy to relate the army made what was the best choice for both of us.

I once swore I'd live a life of no regrets. It was a childish goal, totally unrealizable, but I was sincere when I made the vow. I couldn't know then how much I would regret not continuing to study music and develop my skills at the piano, not learning Japanese early on, before spending 24 years in that country with very imperfect Japanese, not spending more time in France, not studying Chinese. And allowing my Russian to dry up and blow away. I'm a linguist, and know a bit about language, but I live with gigantic gaps in my knowledge of actual languages themselves.

But along with the regrets come the consolations. I can't play the piano anymore, but the years of practice gave me an appreciation for music that I credit with getting me through the hours of isolation during the Covid crisis - with full credit going to YouTube, of course. And, it turns out, my Russian may be on life support but it's not dead.  And with a familiarity with the language came the even more important familiarity with the culture and love of all things Russian. Well, most things Russian. I learned from my German grandmother in the first ten years of life to distinguish between good Germans and bad Germans. And in later years to extend that to the point where I now agonize over Putin's invasion of Ukraine not just for the death and destruction of Ukrainians, but for the cannon fodder Putin is making of young Russian lives.

We recently had major reconstruction done on our house. The company we hired is owned by Moldovans and the workers who came to the house were two Moldovans, three Ukrainians, an Uzbek and a Kazakh. They were fantastic siding replacers, painters, plasterers and all-around fixer-uppers. Their working language was Russian, and you can imagine the pleasure it gave me to realize I could follow much of their conversation.

They caught me listening to them.

Ой, вы говорите по-русски? 

Ah, do you speak Russian?

Я изучал русский язык, когда служил в армии, 60 лет назад.

I studied Russian when I was in the army, sixty years ago.

To counter the awkwardness I felt being so out-of-date, I thought I'd make some nice idle conversation.

"So you all speak Russian because you grew up in Soviet Union days?"

A brief moment of silence.

Then,  "Oh, no. We were all born after 1991."

Not friends of Russia. But fully accepting of the Russian language as their own. The Kazakh told me he never learned Kazakh properly, that Russian was his home and school language from the beginning. These are people who had their own version of a grandmother to teach them how to tell the good guys from the bad guys and not jump to conclusions.

You can see why my heart aches when gay people on American university campuses form groups  carrying pro-Hamas signs "because they support the Palestinian people."

Where were their grandmothers when they needed them?

Dresden

I've just finished watching a video about the reconstruction of Dresden and am flooded with memories of a time gone by.

Sometime in the early 90s my friend Jerry called me and said, "It's time." We were in the army together in the 60s and had made a trip to Italy to visit relatives of his in Torino. Our strongest memory of that trip was the time we spent in Florence, where I remember looking up at the splendid villas and thinking wouldn't it be great to see this glorious city from up there in the hills. Jerry and I were travelling on the cheap, but we promised each other that some day we would come back and get closer to the full splendor. Now, thirty years later, we had the money and it was time.

When I mentioned the upcoming trip to my friends Bob and Hiro (I was living in Japan at the time), they asked if they could join us.  Two friends of Jerry's had also asked to join in and this nostalgic "full splendor" journey had suddenly grown to six people. This meant it would be cheaper for us to rent apartments in Siena, Florence and Rome than to stay in hotels. The excitement built as we collected recipes from Italian cookbooks and envisioned sitting around at long Italian tables filled with pasta and Chianti and squeezing all the Italy out of the experience we possibly could.

Because I couldn't go to Europe without visiting Berlin - the place Jerry and I had spent most of our Cold War Army days - I added ten days at the beginning of the trip. Bob, who had heard all my tales of my years in Berlin, decided he wanted to join me for that part of the trip as well and not just the Italian part.  I was, of course, delighted to be able to share Berlin and Potsdam with him and with Hiro.

What I didn't realize was that Bob and Hiro were on their last legs as a couple, that Hiro was a fistful of resentment and Bob had an equal amount of guilt about having cheated on him, enabling Hiro to lead him around by the nose. The trouble started in Potsdam, when I took them to Sans Souci, one of my all-time favorite places, where one could walk the paths that Frederick the Great walked with Voltaire and imagine all sorts of lofty conversations about the meaning of life. Hiro's pronouncement on the Berlin trip? "I don't like Protestant cities. It's the Catholic cities in the South where all the beauty is."

I was determined not to be drawn in to their personal squabbles and not let this dream trip get off on the wrong foot, so I kept silent. Hiro would miss the point that this time in Berlin was to share my German identity with Bob and revel in the personal and the political history. It was not a time for gazing at cathedrals or Michelangelo's Pietà (although we would get to them too, eventually).

From Potsdam we moved on to Dresden, where I was taken by surprise at how completely I would get swept up by the stark and unfamiliar atmosphere.  When the Berlin Wall came down and Germany reunified and it became possible to travel in the former East Germany, I had had my first close encounter with the effects of socialist priorities in Potsdam. The East Germans had little money and prioritized housing and social welfare over restoration of the buildings of empire. As a result, Sans Souci, Freddie's getaway for himself and his dogs, and the larger New Palace, Kaiser Wilhelm II's last residence, were still in drab disrepair. The gardens were splendid; it didn't take a fortune to develop them, but putting back the structures of the elite of days gone by was not a priority. Now, here in Dresden, there was another dimension: decades after the war they still had not rebuilt the inner city. One could walk around spaces in the downtown area as large as football fields and find only emptiness. A profound sense of depression sank over me and I began looking forward to getting out of Dresden and on to Prague and Vienna and our "let's do it right" trip to Italy with Jerry and two of his friends.

Sitting in a MacDonald's café right in the center of Dresden's downtown, directly across from where the Frauenkirche once stood, I looked out over this evidence of human cruelty. The world will forever debate the decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but for me, at least, the fire bombing of Dresden is not up for debate. I had spent a lot of time on World War II history and was familiar with the arguments over whether it was necessary to bomb Dresden into the ground.  The war was clearly won by the time, in February 1945, the British RAF with American help saturated the city with enough bombs to cause a firestorm that melted human flesh. Overkill, it would seem, now with the benefit of hindsight.

There was no need for that degree of savagery. It was clearly done as a humiliation exercise. Dresden was Germany's cultural center, Hitler's pride and joy. Its military significance is contested, and I don't want to make a case for it here. Either way, the misery and death brings home the fact that we are at the mercy of decisions made by those in high places who can and do make Realpolitik decisions in which human beings can be redefined as unfortunate-but-necessary "collateral damage."  I grew up in America where people bewailed the loss of American lives in World War II. But I grew up in a German family and bewailed the loss of German lives, as well, and struggled to make sense of how easily the Germans could have been led by the nose to follow a Pied Piper who promised to solve all their problems for them. Since the Russians invaded Ukraine, I have been repeating this experience. While most people mourn the loss of life among Ukrainians, I am acutely aware of the cannon fodder among Russian youth. I mourn Russian deaths these days and wonder why Russians can't or won't rise up in protest. And I am reliving the aching question of how Americans can be following a modern-day fascistically-inclined leader who promises ("Only I can do it!") to bring back America's better days.

Henry Kissinger died this week. In a more just world, I believe this man should have been tried as a war criminal. He is directly responsible for the death of between three and four million people, many of them Cambodians in a country we had never declared war on. That decision then cascaded into the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge regime which brought about the "killing fields" where another million and a half people lost their lives.  If you want, you can also call this a "contested" decision: Henry Kissinger got a Nobel Prize for fighting communism and got to live to the age of 101 and be embraced by America's ruling class right up to the end. Kissinger also helped in the assassination of a legitimately elected socialist in Chile, Salvador Allende, who was replaced by Augusto Pinochet, known for dropping young people objecting to his regime from planes into the sea.

In modern times, we have Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. Just as Kissinger can justify his actions by declaring he was fighting communism, Netanyahu determined it was in his interest to support the Hamas regime in Gaza to counterbalance the Palestinian Authority, which, if it could gather sufficient steam, would work on a two-state solution in the Middle East. Hamas launched a barbaric attack on Israel on October 7th and the Israelis are retaliating by killing countless thousands of Gazans caught in the fire - "collateral damage" - as they try to root out this same Hamas regime. How it is the Israelis have not ridden Netanyahu out of town on a rail, or at least locked him up as a Hamas supporter, remains a mystery.

There are two schools of thought in Israel. One, the one I relate to, starts from the premise that Israelis and Palestinians have no choice but to learn to live together. Neither of them is going away. The decades of pushing the Palestinians out and the adamant resistance of Palestinians to the establishment of a Jewish state in their midst have only prolonged death and destruction. Israeli progressives want to find their way out of this dilemma through cooperation. The other school of thought, the one embraced by Netanyahu and those who believe God gave the Jews the entire land of Palestine, is that there is no reason to believe in cooperation, that trust is naive and all one can do is fight tooth and nail to keep Palestinians from gaining the upper hand. In his mind, he's doing what's best for Israel, just at Kissinger was convinced his way of fighting communism was worth the collateral damage. If you wiggle just right, you can see things from these men's perspectives and even make their case for them.  But then you eventually reach the kind of justification that gives Hitler a pass as well. He too was a moral man, provided you are willing to argue that morality is best understood as what's good for the German people, all others be damned.  It's taboo to suggest that Putin's "What's good for Russia, Ukraine be damned," Netanyahu's "What's good for Israel, Palestinians be damned" and Trump's "What's good for America, the rest of the world be damned" are parallel thoughts, ultimately. But that's what it comes down to - we think in terms of human universals or we split into warring factions led by lesser beings.

In the U.S., we have the MAGA folks propping up a man responsible for thousands of deaths by spreading misinformation about vaccines, a man who suggested we use bleach to cure Covid, that a contest between blacks and white supremacists has "good people on both sides,"  a man who refers to his political enemies as "vermin" - in a direct throw-back to Nazi name-calling. So much for American exceptionalism.

There is no reason to automatically link these thoughts, the bombing of Dresden, the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the Kissinger deaths in Cambodia and Chile, the brutal invasion of Ukraine, the Netanyahu/Hamas deaths in Israel/Palestine. That's just me allowing the thoughts in my head to run free.

Sometimes I go to YouTube to bring me rich wonderful classical music by a half dozen or more of my favorite pianists and just sit back and groove.

Today I just happened on this video of the reconstruction of Dresden.

Random selections.

Random thoughts.

Whatever

 I live by the parable of the blind men and the elephant. I am convinced that we tell stories of truths seen through a lens that lets certain light - facts or information - through while blocking things that others might see. In doing so, we seldom - and maybe don't ever - get the whole big picture. You know the story. The earliest versions of it go back to the Tittha Sutta, a text from 500 B.C. when the Buddha was alive. But most of us know the version penned by the poet John Godfrey Saxe - about six blind men who come upon an elephant.  One of them, puts his hands on the tusk and declares that an elephant is "round and very hard." A second, touching the tail, sees it as "thin like a rope." A third puts his hand on the side of the elephant and describes it as a wall. None see the whole elephant.

Not all reality is about missing the whole for the parts. Sometimes it's about truth and falsehood, and not about partial perception. But most people, I think, lack the ability to stand back and question their own convictions and wonder if their life experience is sufficient to perceive nuances. Pessimists are inclined to see the glass half-empty, optimists as half-full, and even when they get things right, they might not do so for the right reasons. My father used to annoy the hell out of my by declaring, "Even a clock that is stopped is right twice a day." I was pissed that he didn't seem to want to distinguish between being right because one get to truth for the right reasons, and not by accident.

This is a difficult time to be alive if you focus on the apparently real possibility that Donald Trump could become president again in 2024, and use the willingness of so many Americans to let go of democracy and repeat the colossal error of the Weimar Republic and give power to a strongman simply because he knows how to tap into fears of chaos and the possibility that things are changing too fast, and in the wrong direction. I'm feeling quite glass-half-empty these days when I look at floods and forest fires and other indications that we may not have halted climate change in time, when Putin appears to be winning the war in Ukraine, when Covid continues to kill and incapacitate people right and left, when Israel's solution to the barbaric attack on its people by Hamas is to kill thousands of children in Gaza and unabashedly claim their deaths are unavoidable. The only thing, practically, that keeps me from despair is the parable of the blind men and the elephant. I'm hoping I'm simply failing to see the whole picture.

Nuanced thinking is underrated. Particularly in dumbed-down America where we have convinced ourselves that the right to hold an opinion is the same thing as the right to declare what is factual and what is not. I just listened to a German talk-show in which the participants were arguing over whether Israel was an apartheid state. Their conclusion? Many Israeli policies are the policies of an apartheid state, yes, particularly in the West Bank, where settlers are getting away with brazenly illegal government-support of pushing Palestinians out of their homes. But we should not use the word apartheid because Israel's greatest fear is being wiped out themselves, and everybody knows that in South Africa, where the notion of apartheid originates, the victims of it eventually took over. And that means admitting they have an apartheid government means that they will eventually be overcome by their Arab minority living among them and subject to their wishes. The talk-show participants were saying, in effect, "yes Israel is an apartheid state, but we will not win friends and influence people in Israel by saying so." Same with calling Israel a colonizer state. The focus needs to go back onto the striving for a two-state solution.

Normally I would argue for simple plain truth expressed in simple plain language and call this approach an obfuscation, a manipulation of language for political ends, a form of insincerity. But in this particular case, I prefer a Realpolitik. Just as I believe the starting place for any discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma should be that the Israeli state is a given reality, and don't need or want to haul out the entire history of the Zionist project, I think there are times when life counts more than death and peace counts more than violence, and those ends are unattainable without nuanced thinking.

And now let me do something I know is going to feel like switching horses mid-stream. Let me move to different and unrelated topic and think out loud for a minute about the line between fact and opinion, which line we seem to have lost of late in America.  Opinion, and its companion, taste, are not the same thing at all as truth and a preference for facts. I've been thinking a lot about this distinction and the consequences of our having so badly blurred the line. 

Thanks to the internet, and YouTube in particular, we now have access to things people in previous generations never even dreamed of. We can bring to our immediate attention almost anything ever written or said. In my case, I've been listening to best-in-the-world performances by classical pianists, for example, for some time now. I have my favorites - Alexander Malofeev, the Jussen Brothers, Yuja Wang, Vyacheslav Gryaznov, Martha Argerich, to name a few that come first to mind, in no particular order, and without any attempt to rank them.  I have my favorite pieces that I listen to over and over again. There is Alexander Malofeev playing Tchaikovsky's Pas de Deux from The Nutcracker Suite. There is Vyacheslav Gryaznov playing Rachmaninoff's Italian Polka. There is the Jussen Brothers playing Strauss' Fledermaus encore, all of which I've heard dozens of times. These pieces ground me. Not as "best" in any real sense in terms of technique or style or all-around beautiful pieces, but go-to music that makes me feel good, and bring balance back into my life. It has taken me a lifetime to recognize, however, that when it comes to esthetic experiences, I need to stop seeking out experts to tell me how to evaluate them. While careful study of music and paintings and dance and you-name-it forms of art definitely do enhance the pleasure of it, it doesn't determine whether or to what degree it is going to give me pleasure.

I've come to really dislike the ranking of great artists.  I know I can't prevent others from doing it, from praising or criticizing Van Cliburn and Vladimir Horowitz and Arcadi Volodos and Arthur Rubenstein and setting them up against each other. I just listened to a performance by Yunchan Lim of Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto at the Van Cliburn competition in Fort Worth, Texas last year and got to my feet at the end, with tears in my eyes, in the privacy of my own bedroom with nobody else around. That happens sometimes. It was, to me, a perfect performance. Everything went right. The Steinway, the hall, Marin Alsop, that wonderful woman breaking into the all-male world of conducting - she too was in tears at the end of Yunchan's performance. In cowboy town Fort Worth, Texas, no less. For those who don't understand how beauty can sneak up on you. And don't miss the fact that this was not a recital or a concert.  He was being evaluated against others in a competition!

Most of those who went to the trouble of submitting a comment agreed with me this was a world-class performance, a magical talent being displayed. But there were those who complained the Steinway wasn't quite perfectly tuned or that Yunchan's touch wasn't quite up to the standard set by Arcadi Volodos. 

Some people are never satisfied, I said to myself. But, I couldn't help it, it sent me to YouTube, which, sure enough, had a recording of Arcadi Volodos doing what's now called "Rach3" with the Oslo Philharmonic by those who assume the right to get familiar with these greats, unfortunately sound-only. And I have to admit that Volodos' version was also good-as-it-gets. And OK, maybe better. Fingers-that-fly (on other videos, trust me). It's like watching Olympic athletes perform at a superhuman level. But what am I supposed to do with those tears from Yunchan's performance, put them back in my head? Who's got it right? I ask myself - the version of me that appreciates exceptional talent, cold-hearted ranking of merit, knock-your-socks-off exceptional performances, or a sit-back-and-let-it-flow-over-you performance?  An interesting, but ultimately trivial debate. You can go one way on one occasion, the other way on another.

There are times, it turns out, when you need to apply nuanced thinking to decide when to use nuanced thinking.  I'm just stumbling around with the obvious here: there are fundamental differences in evaluating the three basic philosophical notions of truth, beauty and justice. With beauty and the evaluation of objects of art or perfomance or skill, seeking nuanced distinctions is little more than a game to play, and is all too often played by snobs and other one-uppers. And with justice, it's more a question of cultural notions of right and wrong. But it's when it comes to questions of truth that there is so much more at stake. Esthetic phenomena invite snobs whose opinions are more about proving one is a superior being or an "insider" than about anything resembling truth. Do I really need others, with greater knowledge of distinctions between "very good" and "very very good" to tell me how to approach an artist and a performance?  It should be obvious that I do not.  But life-and-death matters, including government policies about war and peace and national security, or health and education and who gets to appoint Supreme Court justices, require of all of us that we shed this virus we picked up in the 1960s, the idea that the appropriate response to everything was "Cool!"  Or "Whatever!"

I went along with my husband who wanted to paint our house orange and shock the bejeezus out of our neighbors and stand out like a sore thumb. That's not why we did it; that's just the result. The point is that when it came to choosing between elegance and fun, we decided on the latter.

But when somebody tells me there is no difference between the democratically-oriented Joe Biden and the other guy who refers to his political opponents as vermin, well...