Happy Birthday, Tante Frieda

Tomorrow is my Tante Frieda's birthday. Try as I may, I cannot locate her actual birth year, so I can only guess it must be somewhere in the vicinity of my grandmother's birth year, which was 1895.  That would put her at 129 today. Nice old age for someone who is still very much alive in your memory.

I've blogged before - probably several times; I tend to repeat myself a lot these days - about my time in Berlin and my connection with one of my favorite people of all time, my Aunt Frieda - so I won't go into detail here, except to repeat that some of my favorite family members are chosen, not birth family. My "great aunt" Frieda Müller, was the Lebensgefährte (life companion) of my mother's mother's second husband (i.e., not my mother's father)'s brother. Guess you can't get more non-biological than that.

For friends and family who want to read more, check out my blog entry from November 13, 1999, entitled "We Don't Care About the Berlin Wall Very Much." It's a reaction to the lack of interest my Japanese students were showing in the Second World War and the Cold War that followed it that made me kind of grouchy. I understand that it's a universal human truth that adults are going to wail over their kids' lack of shared interest in the things they think are important, but I also feel that some parts of history should be kept alive if, for no other reason, so that we can learn from mistakes and not repeat them.

There was an article in this week's Sunday New York Times about Cambodian efforts to teach their kids about the Pol Pot regime. I'm also acutely aware that the last of the Holocaust Survivors are now almost all gone and despite heroic efforts to keep those memories alive, they will eventually go too.

Each of us fights this battle on a personal level as we age. I'm now 84 and am aware that I'm the last German-speaking member of my mother's side of the family. Many of them never knew the grandparents I grew up with and practically none of them feel any connection with Germany. That saddens me, because that is still a living breathing part of my identity.

So for the next few days I'm going to be toasting my beloved Tante Frieda and talking my husband's ear off, ignoring his rolling eyes as I repeat something I've bored him with half a dozen times before. As long as I'm alive, she will be alive.

The photo above is one of several I managed to pull from her collection. It now hangs on the wall on a staircase and I see it every day (when I take time to notice it). I believe it was taken in about 1910 when she was about 15, give or take - I could be off by several years. In a world in which Germans are famous for their precision (think cameras, cars and trains running on time - in the old days, I mean, that's gone now too) I'm a lousy representative of the tribe.

In any case, Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag - Happy Birthday, Tante Frieda. Du bleibst unvergessen - you are not forgotten.

Soaking up the DNC Infomercial

Count me among those who would vote for a box of rocks before supporting Donald Trump's attempt to get back into the White House. I gave up listing the reasons why I loathe this guy years ago when it dawned on me that nobody would get as far as he has gotten without a good number of enablers. Since then I've tired of the many well-intentioned folk who work full-time generating outrage over his latest show of ignorance, cruelty or insensitivity. Stop beating a dead horse, I want to say. Put your energy where it can do some good. Forget the meanness, get out of the dark side, focus on the decency and integrity that still exists all around us.

I had not been much of a Kamala Harris fan before it became clear that Biden was likely to lose to Trump in the November election and it was time for drastic measures. I was all set to send my widow's mite to whoever the Democratic Party would pick to replace him. Kamala has managed to bring in half a billion dollars in what, one month? since she took over, so I'm feeling like a tightwad, but my inbox fills with a hundred requests for cash every day, so I want some indication that my contribution will be more than a good luck token, divided fifty ways. I'm real cynical about the American way of running elections, and the fact that in the U.S. it's the rich who call all the shots. I am also tempted to simply jump on the bandwagon to eliminate the Electoral College but have to admit I don't have a tight grasp on the difference between FPTP (first past the post) arguments, which support it, and the PR (proportional representation) arguments, which are agin it. At least I'm less ambivalent about the fight to get big money out of politics. I lost all respect for the Supreme Court way before they threw out Roe v. Wade, back when they gave us Citizen United, giving legal weight to the notion that rich people are more important in America than poor people.

All of this as a way of saying that until a week ago I was pretty cynical about national politics and followed it only casually. I am not particularly knowledgeable, and have been more anti-Trump than pro-anybody in particular.

But then came the Democratic Convention. At the risk of exposing my belly to the wolves, I am going to admit that I have become an enthusiastic supporter of the Harris/Walz ticket. More than a little. I'm ready to beat the drum. I am too old to travel to Nevada or Arizona to knock on doors, and remain grouchy about the belief that my ability to contribute to political campaigns can make a dent, but I am now ready at least to bore the socks off of anybody in a crowd who might want to hear what I think about American politics. I'm happy to share my views about the choice between somebody way more than decent and somebody way less so. Between somebody who will support the Ukrainian effort to push the Russian invaders out of their country and somebody who thinks the Russians should be able to "do whatever the hell they want." Between somebody who believes a person's right to determine what they do with their body and somebody who believes the government has a duty to punish doctors who aid women in distress who have been raped by a parent or sibling or who have learned they are carrying a nonviable fetus.

Richard Reich has a clear explanation for what a party convention is these days. Originally it was a conference to bring attention to the many candidates vying for the job and make a case for each. It was  an actual contest, not unlike a beauty or talent contest. In recent times, and especially this year, it has evolved into a giant "infomercial," an occasion for "selling" the candidate chosen by insiders to the public. When leading democrats were able to convince Biden that the signs were clear that he couldn't win in November, he was persuaded to step aside. The fact that he did so is evidence that he has the strength of character to put country ahead of party and self. Gainsayers are trying to cast shade on this, claiming he was "pushed." But Biden himself has never even hinted that that was the case. On the contrary, he still holds the leadership of the Democratic Party. I think he is rightly celebrated by the party as a hero, and not a victim here.

The party then had to face a second important decision: who to replace him with. Biden's choice was Kamala Harris. This made sense because technically that would have her do what she was elected to do: step in if Biden could no longer do the job. It also made sense pragmatically; given how close the polls show the election is likely to be, for Democrats to scrabble over a successor would surely have not been in their best interest.

Republicans have lost the decency and integrity they once had, exchanged their souls for power and wealth to a proto-fascist Pied Piper with little to no regard for truth or traditional American values. He appeals to the unfortunately large number of Americans who are convinced we need to tear down government and start over.  Democrats, in contrast, tend to  believe it is in the nature of democracy to tinker endlessly at the machine, replacing worn parts and discarding dysfunctional ones. Traditional Republicans are still to be found, but they occupy back seats and no longer have a voice in what goes on. The mainstream of the party are not remotely conservative any more, but rather ideological enablers of a self-serving power structure which has put their political organization on a path dangerously close to the path taken by the Germans in the last days of the Weimar Republic. My father was a proud Republican. For him Republican stood for standing on your own two feet, accepting personal responsibility, for honesty, integrity and for putting in a good day's work. I can only imagine what he'd say if he saw his party now in the hands of Christian nationalists and oligarchs whose hold on power depends on misinformation, swallows outright brazen lies by their leader, voter suppression, gerrymandering and minority control in all three branches of a government maintained and manipulated by fear and anger.

The contrast between the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention couldn't have been more stark and the split today between the mindsets of the two parties couldn't be more extreme. The RNC coasted along on fear and anger, the DNC on a sense of possibility. The purpose of the infomercial was to convince Americans they not only could but should allow themselves to shake off the long period of dread and bring out of the closet the concept of joy. Trump was upset by Harris's laugh. I doubt he was aware of what he was accomplishing by this attempt to detract; his remarks only served to underline the sense of relief - to the point of euphoria - that extended right to the top of the ticket. Democrats love her contagious laugh.

I don't know who deserves the credit for putting on this fantastic show. They pulled out all the stops. Partied from start to finish. Music, dance, hand-clapping and joyous speechifying. I remember how I used to cringe at the hokiness of a political convention. This time I looked at the candidates from Wisconsin wearing hats shaped like cheddar cheese and saw it not as dumb but as playful. The drawn-out roll calls where each state got to give a shout-out to its best-known native sons and daughters didn't come across as chauvinistic but as a well-deserved display of pride. And the accompaniment by a DJ and by rapper Lil Jon to help it along didn't hurt. The cumulative effect, when it was over, was to feel a sense of national unity and comfort in diversity.

Several highlights still remain in my mind: Adam Kinzinger telling Republicans that they needed to vote with Democrats until their party could be regained; Michelle Obama getting back at Trump for his insensitivity in calling the jobs illegal aliens are commonly limited to "black jobs" with one of the best come-back slap-downs of all time. "Who's going to tell him," she asked, "that the job he's currently seeking might just be one of those 'black' jobs?"

Then there was the rapturous welcome the crowd gave to President Biden; Barack Obama showed he could keep up with his wife in slapping the Donald down. "There's the childish nicknames, the crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes," he said, mimicking Trump's habit of moving his hands in an out as if playing an accordion to show size. By now the audience is familiar with all the talk about Trump's small hands and the allegation that it signals a small penis. At least that's what late-night comedians have made of the habit, and nobody missed the reference. Remember, we're talking not about a "may the best man win" contest but a Hollywood style entertainment program where foul language and sex references are now very much part of the scene.

Elizabeth Warren said of Trump and Vance, "I wouldn't trust those guys to move my couch." Melania Trump's aide, Stephanie Grisham, came out for Harris because, she said, Trump has "no empathy, no morals, and no fidelity to the truth." Vice President Pence's one-time aide, Olivia Troye, told her fellow Republicans, "You're not voting for a Democrat. You're voting for democracy....You're not betraying our party. You're standing up for our country."

The primary purpose of the infomercial was to stress the character of the new and unfamiliar party leaders, and here's where the script writers more than earned their pay. Kamala's speech was a textbook model for public speaking, perfectly constructed, and perfectly delivered. In contrast to her black-suit-no-pearls self-presentation, her husband, Doug Emhoff came across as warm and fuzzy, a husband and father to make anyone proud. I resonated personally with his description of their family as a blend of cultures and traditions. He goes with her to church; she makes a mean brisket dinner on Passover, he tells us.

But the pièce de résistance, the four-handkerchief moment of the final session was when Tim Walz got up to speak and began by telling the audience that his wife and daughter and son were his whole life. Gus, his seventeen-year-old son rose to his feet, tears streaming down his cheeks, and he could be heard to shout out, "That's my Dad!"

The moment turned out to be a Rorschach Test. Anybody who loves love could spot it as a spontaneous expression of affection for a father by a boy with learning limitations. A handful of loveless creatures like the stone-faced, stone-hearted and unloveable Ann Coulter made fun of the kid. When condemnation came down on them like the wrath of God, they withdrew their statements. It was too late; their character has been revealed and will be part of their legacy. One guy - I don't want to take the time to look up his name - made some remark about the kid not being manly. "Remember, Republicans," he was saying, "real men don't cry."

Sorry, jerk. People who are overcome with emotion and affection sometimes do. How many of us, if presented with a father telling the world he loves you in front of a combined television and live audience of 30 million people, plus those who watched it on YouTube and cable, that you are his whole world, would not cry, I ask you. I think it would take an Ann Coulter heart not to.

The show's over. I can now get back to Netflix and Amazon Prime binge-watching. Maybe do some postcard writing for Kamala and Tim Walz.

And you'll have to forgive me if my chauvinism shows through now and again. If you are not familiar with San Francisco Bay Area geography you may not know that Berkeley and Oakland are, in effect, a single East Bay entity, so when she tells the world she was born in Oakland, I get to grin from ear to ear. I live in Berkeley, six blocks from the Oakland line and spend more time in Oakland than I do in Berkeley, to shop, to see a doctor, to go out to eat, to visit friends. Kamala was born in Oakland and lived in the flats in Berkeley and started school at Thousand Oaks, just north of Solano Avenue in Berkeley. I was there not too long ago to attend a performance by the son of the woman who used to clean my house. Very local. Very familiar. Very much home folk.

The kind of thing that makes me smile.

Some perspective on military valor

I grew up during the Cold War and graduated from college in 1962, just in time to be drafted into the army to fight the commies who we believed were about to start a Third World War, this time with nuclear weapons. Everybody knew everybody in my small town in Connecticut and I was able to wrangle the information out of the local draft board (there was a draft in effect) that my number was coming up sometime in the fall, possibly as early as late September.

I was too pain-averse to smash my instep and running off to Canada required more pluck than I had at the time, so my ears perked up when I learned that if I enlisted I had a decent chance of getting into the Army Language School in Monterey, California. It would mean an extra year - three, instead of two - of military service and I would still have to carry a gun, and go through basic training.  

I dodged the Cuban Missile Crisis only to be faced with the new war in Vietnam. I no longer saw a choice, so it was sign on the dotted line, take the bus to New Haven, learn that my heart murmur was benign and start my days at Fort Dix, New Jersey where I crawled under barbed wire on the ground.  When my superior would scream in my face, "What's the spirit of the bayonet? I would scream back: "Kill, kill, kill!"

But at least I didn't have to go to war.

Over my college years, which included a junior year in Munich, I had developed a facility for and fascination with language learning and the field of linguistics. Getting to go to the Army Language School seemed too good to be true. I ended up studying Russian and was sent to Berlin, initially to listen in on Russian soldiers in the field in East Germany. Eventually, though, my knowledge of German got me transferred to the political section to listen in on the cadre that was paired with East German officials who really ran the show. Not a bad way, all told, to spend the extra year it cost me to avoid the draft.

I've written much elsewhere about the importance to my life of that year - which became closer to two years in the end - in Berlin. I formed not only a passionate love for the city, established a close bond with a favorite aunt - my Tante Frieda - and formed friendships with guys I came to define as "chosen family."  Watching the wheels go round up close in the American military, I also developed a political consciousness that I would carry with me for decades. It included a seething loathing for what I saw as American bullying. When I left the army and came to live in Berkeley, California, I was a walking stereotype of a leftie pinko banging on about American imperialism and the cruel folly of America's role as world policeman. I saw so much stupidity and corruption in the army that I could barely see straight. At one point my mother wrote me that she was proud that all three of the McCornick boys - me and my two cousins - were wearing a uniform and serving their country, Billy in the Marines, Brian in the Air Force, and me in the Army. I wrote back to my mother that if she mentioned that fact again I would tear up the letter and never read anything she wrote again.

That wasn't me at my worst. That came later, when I was at a Chinese New Year's parade in San Francisco, where I settled after I got out of the army. A military band came by and I found myself shouting "PAID KILLERS!  PAID KILLERS!" at the top of my lungs.   A woman standing next to me began shaking with rage.  "My son's in the army. And he is not a paid killer!" she said.

I've spent the last fifty plus years wishing I could find that woman and apologize to her. I was 26 at the time and convinced that America was not just on the wrong track, but an actual force for evil in the world. And I made no distinction between national policy as established by people at the top and the people in the trenches whose only option was carrying out the orders from above. I've had a lifetime to modify the convictions I held so fiercely in the 1960s.

And I have modified them. I came in time to distinguish between people with the power to call their own shots and those who appear to have been born to be cannon fodder.  No great feat, actually, especially because I grew up in a half-German household during and just following the Second World War. In time I came to see Germans not just as perpetrators but as victims of the war, in part because of Tante Frieda, who had lost her hearing crawling from one bomb shelter to another. I took that same perspective toward the Russian soldiers invading Ukraine when I read that Putin was drafting both prisoners and people from non-Slavic minority areas. 50,000 of them have died so far and counting, in addition to the 30,000 Ukrainians who have lost their lives trying to keep their country whole. I have a profound respect for military valor, and really do regret being so naive in my twenties.

So here I sit, now an old fogey in front of a computer screen hoping my country can escape the folly of putting back into the White House a man with so little character that he refuses to have his picture taken with soldiers with missing limbs. He sneered at war hero John McCain for spending much of his time as prisoner in a cage in North Vietnam  ("I like people who don't get caught") and just today joked that the rich Republican donor he's giving a Medal of Freedom to is much better off than recipients of the military Medal of Honor, because the latter are riddled with bullets.  I assume the guy was trying to make a joke. Either way, the insensitivity is stunning.

I know many worry about handing him the code to nuclear weapons.  I worry more about giving this lowlife the power to send young people to war.

Embracing both politics and religion

When I first went into teaching the "common wisdom" I would get from all my teacher-trainers was to avoid at all costs the topics of politics and religion. I followed that advice for a while, but I soon realized it wasn't wisdom at all, but a way to cut the heart out of any real person-to-person interaction between learners. 

Note that I didn't say "teacher" and "learner." Except when filling out income tax or other forms where I am asked to list my occupation, I gave up making that distinction years ago.  And I should say I'm talking about teaching mature students, not young kids,  I think a teacher's best occupational strategy is to "teach" something they want to "learn" so they can jump into the fray as a co-learner.

This way of going about sharing yourself with the world has its risks.  I lost a friend a few years ago when suddenly, and without explanation, he started ghosting me. I made several attempts to get him to respond to my pleas for an explanation, but I kept drawing a blank. It saddens me no end, because I liked and admired the guy.

It's possible I said or did something stupid or harmful. I don't know what that might be, but the possibility remains open. Until I get an explanation - and hopefully a chance to repair, if repair is possible - I am left to speculate.

This erstwhile friend - I'll call him Wolfgang - has an intense dislike for politicians. For him there's no good politician but a dead politician. In contrast, I have a whole bunch of politicians I admire. I could go way back, but let me start, arbitrarily, with Harvey Milk. I think what he accomplished for LGBT people has been generally recognized, and when my husband and I got married at San Francisco City Hall the happy occasion became a thrilling occasion when I learned that the woman who was marrying us was the daughter of the woman who swore Harvey Milk in when he became San Francisco Supervisor. And - there's more! - we got married right next to a bust of Harvey Milk in the space at the top of the stairs overlooking the Rotunda.

A second gay politician who had my highest admiration was Barney Frank, chiefly but by no means only because of his work on demolishing the closet that LGBT people lived in.  Today, these two gay men I tend to view in heroic terms are slipping into history, but we have an up-and-comer in Pete Buttigieg, who matches his gay predecessors in smarts and articulateness. Frank slipped up and got tangled in a couple of scandals, but he more than made up for it, in my view, by the work he accomplished over the years since.

I got into a discussion the other day about the surprising number of democratic politicians I find it easy to say good things about, starting, of course, with Pete Buttigieg: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Beto O'Rourke, Joaquin Castro and his one-minute older brother Julian,  Katie Porter,  Amy Klobuchar, my own California representatives Barbara Lee and Barbara Boxer, and the representative from the neighboring (14th) congressional district, Eric Swalwell, and many many more, right up to Tim Walz and Kamala Harris.  The Harris/Walz ticket has brought me, like so many others, out of the political doldrums and given me reason to shed the fear that Americans were almost certain to cast into the toilet this marvelous project we've got going to build a democracy.

Today I found another one - a democratic politician to admire - and another Texan to boot. This guy's name is James Talarico.  My friend Bill just phoned to put me on to him. If you know Bill and me and our atheist history, this may come as a surprise.

Talarico grew up just north of Austin in a religious (Presbyterian) home. For years I was so anti-organized religion that I wouldn't have given him a moment's thought. But I've traveled the long path to reconciliation with people whose faith strikes me as sincere and indicative of a search for meaning - not to say truth and justice - rather than political power and tribal identity. Talarico decided at some point that it was better, to use his words, to devote his energies to eliminating the need for charity rather than to Christian charity itself. He became a Texas state representative in one district, until the Republicans gerrymandered him out and he then went to another. Obviously a smart guy, he's the youngest member of the Texas State Legislature. He seems to be getting his stride in both politics and religion by exposing the true nature of America's Christian Nationalism movement, which he equates with the older term: christo-fascism.

Give him a listen. You won't be sorry. Here he is giving a sermon on his views in a Baptist Church. And here he is talking about his path to both religion and politics in a TV interview.

Zs and Apostrophes

I doubt anybody gave much thought to the fact that when Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race that linguists and English teachers were about to be called on to explain a couple mysteries of the English language as she is written. Let me try to get ahead of the game.

Vice-presidential candidate-to-be is Tim Walz, from Minnesota.  By some counts, nearly a third of Minnesotans have German ancestry, so it's not surprising the state's current governor should have a German family name.  It is apparently the most common ancestry in the state and according to the World Population Review website, more than ten percent of Minnesotans over the age of five actually speak German at home, which I find really hard to believe in this day and age. But moving on...

Everybody knows what a waltz is - it's a dance where you go one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two three and people immediately think of Johann Strauss and the (beautiful) Blue Danube. So even though Tim Walz leaves the t out of his name, most people will want to pronounce it like the dance. But don't. His name got Americanized at some point and it is now pronounced walls, as in a room has a ceiling, a floor and four walls.

It's not that we can't say waltz. We may not have a letter for the sound of t and s (or t and z) put together like Hebrew does with the 18th letter of its alphabet צ, which the website "Hebrew for Christians" is happy to inform you is pronounced "like ts in nuts." Or the 21st letter of the Cyrillic alphabet ц, which does likewise.  Japanese also has っ, but enough of this tangent.   My point is Walz uses the English spelling pronunciation of z as in zebra and not the ts sound of the tse-tse fly.

And, for my fellow Germanophiles (für meine deutschbegeisterten Kollegen), let me acknowledge in passing that the German word for Waltz is not Waltz, but Walzer.  The Beautiful Blue Danube Waltz is simply Der Donauwalzer. And note that the addition of a t wouldn't change the pronunciation. It's not there in German probably because it would be redundant. I have no idea why one got added in the English word waltz (assuming, perhaps mistakenly, that the German word came first), but because it was, we can now draw a distinction between waltz and Tim Walz that can't be made in German.

OK.  Now for the second issue, where to put the apostrophe.

Historically, the apostrophe in English was used either to show a place in a word where a letter has been omitted, as in contractions such as don't for do not and couldn't for could not, or to mark the so-called "Saxon genitive," more commonly known as the possessive case of nouns as in Mary's lamb as opposed to the phrase the lamb of Mary, which is suggestive of a higher register such as biblical language. (Ever wonder why we say the Lamb of God and not God's Lamb?)  There are two more usages of the single apostrophe, to mark a quotation within a quotation, or as an alternate to double quotation marks around a single word, but that's not relevant to the discussion here.

Where the plot thickens is where spoken English and written English part ways. The apostrophe-s flows freely in both written and spoken English in the sentence: "Mary had a little lamb, and oh look there's Mary's lamb right there!"

But what happens when the possessive comes on a word ending in an s or z or sh or ch (a "sibilant") sound? Mary has a little lamb and so does James. I see Mary's lamb but I don't see James's.

In this case, there is no problem. We have a name for this. It's called the epenthic schwa. A schwa is the sound we make when we're looking for a word and can't quite come up with it, a sound commonly written as "uh".  "I'd like to, uh, maybe, uh, kind of, uh, get your permission to spend the night with your daughter." James's lamb is pronounced "James-zus lamb," 

Lost in the sands of time is the explanation for why we have an alternative in which we are all left to wonder how the wee little apostrophe got to not only play its stand-in role as an epenthic schwa but actually create another s-sound on the word as well: We can write this without the second s: James' lamb.

Here's where people go running to dictionaries and books on style, hoping to find an authority to tell them how to do this properly.

I'm not going to do that because my linguistics training has made me a descriptive linguist, and not a prescriptivist. I consider telling people what to do is not science; describing what people do is.

Problem is I'm also trained as an English teacher (i.e., as a "prescriptivist") and am a bit of a fussy queen to boot. I cringe whenever I see people confuse it's with its. All my linguistic training is for naught when I see a student composition with a sentence like, "The cherry tree in my front yard is so beautiful in the spring before it starts to lose it's blossoms." Or when I see an apostrophe used with plurals, as in, "This parking lot has room for fifty car's."

But back to James's lamb.

Consider the sentences "Henry James and his brother William live next door.  I've known the James brothers all their lives." They pose no problem. But what about if the two brothers own a car in common?  Is it the James car? The James' car? The James's car?  Many will want to write this as the James' car and cite the grammatical rule that an  apostrophe is used to mark plural possession. 

I can't tell you what's right. I can't even tell you what most people do, although I'm sure somebody can, since we now have the ability to count no end of trivia to the last jot and tittle.

There. How nice to get back to fussing over language and language usage.

I'm looking forward to the Democratic Convention in Chicago when the Harrises come out (one of whom kept his bachelor name, Emhoff) with the Walzes (Walz'?) (Walz's) to the roar of the crowds.

It feels so good not to have to fight the depression that trumpism has spread across the land and to feel a bit of hope again. And freedom to turn my attention to things like punctuation instead of a possible loss of democracy.

P.S. (added Aug. 13) - I apologize for leaving the impression that the English word for waltz and the surname Walz both come from the same German origin. That is not the case.  The surname is apparently a derivative from the name Walter, and the verb to waltz comes from the proto-germanic word walt- meaning to turn, revolve and only in the 18th century became applied to "that riotous and indecent German dance."

The Boyfriend - a review

A gay reality show?  From Japan?  You've got to be kidding.  Could Japan's essentially conservative nature really have undergone this dramatic - not to say unbelievable - transformation in recent years?  I thought Japanese society was an inherently homophobic society.  Not of the thuggish Islamicist sort where gays are thrown off of tall buildings, or even of the gay-basher sort common to many parts of Europe and America, but of a kinder gentler sort, where gays are simply shunned for being just a bit too far over the line from "normal" behavior.

That's one possible reaction many will likely have after watching the Netflix production just out called The Boyfriend. And it was my first reaction, as someone who has spent twenty-four years of his life in Japan in two segments, one from 1970 to 1974 and a second one, after a hiatus of fifteen years, from 1989 to 2006, plus several shorter stays in between. I was an out gay man from San Francisco, but I determined it was in my best interest when I took a job as a professor at a Japanese university to go back in the closet. True, that may have been an unduly fearful decision on my part - and I did come out again in time - but I had plenty of confirmation from other LGBT men and women that I was doing the smart thing.

But - to return to the topic of the Netflix ten-episode series The Boyfriend, there are at least a couple of much simpler, more straightforward explanations for why a reality show with gay characters should suddenly appear on Japanese television. One is that gay liberation is finally catching up with Japan. It's not ready yet to allow same-sex marriages, but five months ago, in March of this year, both a Tokyo district court and a Sapporo high court challenged the ban on same-sex marriage, and it would appear it's only a matter of time. Netflix is probably seizing the moment.  Whether for cynical reasons (gays are still an entertaining curiosity) or profit-motive reasons (romance sells and the general population is now ready for LGBT love stories) I leave for others to figure out.

Another explanation is that it's not a particularly remarkable event in the first place. Japan has traditionally allowed parallel worlds to exist between people in the everyday world and people in the arts. Japan is the land of the geisha, after all, and men in drag appear regularly on modern-day television, especially in talk shows dominated by people known as "talents" - people who dress in unusual costumes selected to push the envelope into shock, outrage or simply silliness. These folk assume the role of soothsayers, supposedly insightful social commentators, although their contributions sometimes get so sophomoric and inane that you find yourself thankful people don't wear shoes inside the house or you'd be flinging them at your TV screen. 

The presence of such a group in this show - call them the Japanese version of a Greek chorus - begs the question of what exactly a so-called reality show is anyway.  And invites the observation that it is anything but real, but rather nothing more than a form of performance art designed to stimulate and titillate a bored audience looking for ever new and original entertainment. The group includes Otake Masaki, who goes by the stage name Durian ("the king of the fruits") Lollobrigida, who comes out in normal male dress at the start but gets more and more into his drag personalities as the show goes on.

The set-up is a simple one: nine unattached gay men, raging in age from 22 to 34, gather together at a resort by the sea for a month, allegedly to find friendship and love - with a camera following their every remark and facial expression.  Believe that's "reality" and I've got a bridge to sell you.  To build a closer bond between them, they are assigned the job of driving off to the beach each morning to sell coffee and cookies to the general public, although "general" isn't the right word, since the number of customers is small enough for the focus to remain on the personalities of the two gay characters in the coffee truck as they interact with customers one at a time, even bringing cups of coffee to their table. Camera running, of course.

An obvious question is why anybody would think you can simply throw people together and expect them to fall in love with each other, or, at minimum, form lasting meaningful relationships. That question is addressed directly by a member of the Greek chorus who makes the observation, "Anybody can fall in love with anybody."

In addition to the nine love-seekers and the "talents" (Greek chorus) there is another important but unseen character: from time to time a laptop dings and somebody opens it and reads a message from on high. This godlike character determines their daily activities, chiefly who will take the coffee truck out on any given day. He (it is a masculine voice) also has them do such things as write anonymous notes as a secret admirer and drop them in the mailbox each one has on their door. On several occasions, the boss-man decides they will have an overnight with a person of their choice who agrees to the arrangement.

As simplistic as the notion is expressed by the authority in the machine (the laptop) that "We hope you will find an irreplaceable partner," the reality performers play along. Rather than understanding that friendships take years to form and depend on observing the other in all kinds of character-revealing situations, they seem willing to believe the observation of a simple act of kindness, or generosity, or even politeness, is sufficient to make one fall in love. It marks them as astonishingly superficial.

At the same time, because the filmed interactions are so sanitized, we only get to see these guys on their best behavior. There is no cruelty, no harshness, no violence, no meanness. If anything, they display the stereotypical Japanese feature of being other-oriented to such an extreme that you need a Greek chorus to speculate over what's going on behind the masks of politeness they are all wearing.

At the same time, they do reveal markedly different character differences over time, giving some credibility to the producer who claims he selected the characters for their diversity of type. Two of the more extreme differences show up in the connection established by the two youngest participants, Dai and Shun, who do (spoiler alert) actually become a couple by the end of the series. Dai is outgoing and assertive (he sends Shun a dick-pic at one point); Shun is pathologically shy and suffers from an obvious inferiority complex. Shun is the kind of guy you'd expect to say, "I couldn't possibly fall in love with somebody stupid enough to fall in love with me."

Kazuto is everybody's first choice of a best-friend type. He comes in on Day One with food and continues to prepare meals for his colleagues - he is a cook and restaurant owner in real life. Another stand-out is Usak, a nationally well-known go-go boy who enters in Episode 2 and leaves early in Episode 5. He has a handsome face and is built like a brick shithouse. He lacks articulateness initially, but manages to bring everybody to tears when he leaves, and clearly has what it takes to break down the cool of Chef Kazuto, who otherwise plays his cards close to his chest.

And I trust my remarks in the previous paragraph reveal what I think the show has going for it, despite the charge of superficiality and banality: the characters may be not all you'd like them to be, but they are by and large sympathetic characters you come to root for. If this program is in fact staged, which Durian Lolobrigida claims it is not but I nonetheless suspect it is, it is well-staged with a well-composed plot line.  And that makes it worth watching. I've heard many non-Japanese comment over the years that they find Japanese too anodyne to actively like or dislike, and that was my first take on Japanese too until I made Japan my home and came to understand that its rich and complex culture makes it a world-class civilization, which contains the full range of human personality differences, unlike the manicured personalities in The Boyfriend.

Watching "gay boys" as they go about looking for love will not be everybody's cup of tea, even if this so-called reality show does turn out to be real. But in notable contrast to all the violence, blood, gore and duplicity in the shows Netflix brings to market, this one is refreshing, uplifting, and in the end, immensely sympathetic. I am not sure I share the Rotten Tomatoes rating of 100%. It moves slowly and youthful indecisiveness isn't at the top of my list of fun things to spend your time on. But if you have the patience, I think you will find it is worth the watch.

The characters are, in order of introduction:

1. Dai, age 22, a college student

2. Taeheon, age 34, a designer originally from South Korea, notably not out to his parents as a gay man

3. Ryota, 28, a model, a barista - considers himself a bisexual

4. Gensei, 34, a hair and make-up artist

5. Shun Nakanishi, 23, musician

6. Kаzuto, 27, cook and manager of an izakaya-type restaurant, everybody's favorite among the group 

7. Usak, 36, a nationally known go-go dancer

8. Alan, 28, a mixed-race (Brazilian/Japanese) guy who grew up in Japan, works for an IT company

9. Ikuo, 22, the late-comer, works in the food industry

Giving up on the Two-State Solution

Good news: With Biden agreeing to sacrifice his personal goals for the good of the country and his party, we can stop with the dread and allow ourselves to hope once again that the United States of America might regain the place it once held, rightly or wrongly, as a beacon of democracy for the world.

Bad news: Kamala has to choose a vice-presidential candidate to run with and soon. Well, that's not really bad news so much as it is discomfort-making news, because although she has a pretty good selection of democratic politicians to choose from, the fact that she can choose only one of them is going to piss a bunch of people off.

My favorite human being among the candidates is Pete Buttigieg. How could I not love this guy?  A fellow gay, he has done more to further a positive image of LGBT people than anybody else I can think of. I just love the guy to pieces. Love his husband, Chastain, love his cute kids, swell with pride when I observe how articulate he can be in talking back to the trumpist me-me-me crowd.

I hope Pete isn't selected, though, because I'm among those who worry the country isn't ready for a gay man a heart-beat away from the Oval Office. There are others with more experience; Pete can wait four or eight more years and continue to build his resume. He appears to be doing a bang-up job building bridges and making trains run on time.

My favorite among the candidates who I think would make a great companion party leader is Tim Walz of Minnesota. He comes across as warm and caring, and when you dig into his record, he's clearly been walking the walk and not just saying nice things as governor of a very civilized state.

If I were putting money on her choice, I'd go with Josh Shapiro. Also articulate.  And I understand that people like him for his potential for carrying Pennsylvania and its large number of electoral votes.

And, by the way, back to Pete Buttigieg for a minute, can't we more of us get on the bandwagon he's driving to rid the country of this undemocratic idiocy of allowing a minority of rural voters more say in the direction of the country than the rest of us?

But let me get back to my intended point of this morning's ramble: choosing Josh Shapiro as VP candidate. While he's got so much going for him, looks, smarts, political creds, he's also got his Jewishness going against him. Just as I fear the country might not be ready for a gay man, I fear Shapiro's pro-Israel remarks might lead too many Americans pissed off at our lockstep support of Israel, right or wrong, to pull the lever for the other party - or maybe for the current political buzz-kill, Robert Kennedy's child wandering in the no-vaccinations wilderness.

Talk about being between a rock and a hard place... Hamas gets it all wrong. They start with a legitimate cause: the fight against Israeli injustice vis-a-vis its Palestinian minority and fuck it up with its policy of kidnapping, rape and murder on October 7th.  And what does Israel do?  Come back with a policy Israelis can be proud of?  Not on your life. They fall into the trap Hamas sets for them by using its own people as shields, and mows them down. The nation formed to provide a refuge for a people victimized by thuggish fascists now drops bombs on Gazan civilians and has already killed more children there than the number of Ukrainian victims of the Russian invasion of their country - just to get some perspective here.

Kamala Harris has to tread the thin line between showing support for Israel as a nation of Jewish people like her husband without losing the support of not just Arab-American voters who worry about what they see as an unjustifiable "Israel right or wrong" approach to American diplomacy. With or without Josh Shapiro next to her in the front seat.

Since this is a blog, and not an academic article where expository writing rules ought to apply, allow me to spin off on an update in my views on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, which I just sent off to a friend of mine:

Two comments come to mind each time the conflict grabs my attention. One is the Abba Eban observation, "the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity" and the other is Golda Meir's insight: "Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us." 

My focus on these two remarks reveals the fact that I am drawn emotionally to the culture of Ashkenazi Jewishness but feel neutral, at best, toward Sephardic Jews and Palestinians. Back in the day when Leon Uris published Exodus, I had total sympathy with the Zionist project of building a Jewish homeland after the Holocaust. And ever since then I've felt that unbalanced enthusiasm for one side over the other slip away as I watched the Israelis use their material (and intellectual) superiority and organizational skills over the Palestinians to grind them into the dust - all with the dubious justification that Jewish survival as a people depended on it.

It doesn't. Jews live well in the United States and Canada and many other countries as well, whether being Jewish means lighting candles on shabbat or simply preferring lox and bagels to fried rice; they are no longer in danger of extinction. And if the project of trying to out-birth their Palestinian neighbors (on the part of the ultra-orthodox among them) flops as a means of achieving their ends, you won't see a tear in this eye.

The nationalist goals of the 19th century are no longer valid, in my view.  I have serious doubts they ever were, although I won't take a stand on that.  In any case, they seem to have screwed the pooch by (apparently) ruining any chance of a two-state solution and must now deal with a one-state solution or endless war. So be it.

Long live Israel, I say.

Home of Jews and Palestinians and anybody else who is ready to do what it takes to make it their home.

I would prefer to say "not my farm; not my animals" except for the fact that my country insists on spending billions of U.S. tax dollars to maintain an only-Jews-as-first-class-citizens state and to prop up sleazeballs like Bibi Netanyahu simply because he has managed to get control of the reins of power.  (And because using a metaphor which will no doubt lead people to call me an anti-semite for allegedly referring to Jews and Palestinians as animals is something one ought not do in such a humorless day and age.)

A.