Bounce's Yahrzeit

Bounce and Miki

 Sometime in the early 1950s I found myself in Temple Beth Israel, the synagogue in my home town of Winsted, Connecticut.  I can't remember how or why I got there; possibly it was the time our youth group at the First Church, which was directly across the street from the synagogue, got invited to services in a move to bridge the space between our religious faiths - my home town was good that way.

What I do remember is that at some point in the service a man got up to speak of his father.  It was his father's "yahrzeit" I learned, the anniversary of his death. It was the moment, if I were to pick one, when my lifelong respect, not just for things Jewish but for the Jewish religion in particular, began.  A profoundly human community thing to do, to stop for a moment and give an individual a chance to speak publicly of the grief they felt over the loss of a loved one.

I know there are people who see my assertion that one can love an animal as fiercely as one can a fellow human being as disrespectful, somehow.  Even folly.  But I have lived these last 365 days in sadness since we took the life of my beloved canine daughter, Bounce, because she had a growth in her belly and, at age fourteen, the pain and confusion of an operation, I decided, would take her too far below the quality of life line to justify keeping her alive. 

It's one thing to define dilemma as a philosophical concept. It's quite another to feel it in your bones. I had long since recognized that the capacity to love and care for another was actually more important to the soul than the gift of being loved, so it didn't surprise me that I was facing some serious grief.  In no small part because Miki had died just a short year and a half earlier. But I wasn't ready for what it would do to me to be the one to pull the plug, to give the order for the vet to put Bounce to sleep and then administer a second medication to stop her heart.  As I watched this beautiful little creature close her eyes and relax into a face at peace, I had what it takes to convince myself I was doing the right thing.  I wanted selfishly to keep her alive at all costs, but chose to put her comfort and freedom from pain ahead of my own desires. Why then, was I feeling like I had failed at one of life's greatest challenges, to love and care for another, to be the guardian and protector of another life.  

It has been a year today. The ache is not as acute, but it won't go away. I can speak of it, and I spend a great deal of time dealing with death and dying now that I've lived beyond the normal lifespan of an American male.  I trust I will process this grief eventually. 

Just not yet.

Boots - a review of the TV series

It's easy these days to succumb to dismay or even depression over the efforts of the oafish Pied Piper in the White House to dismantle democracy in the U.S.A.  Two hundred and fifty years we've been at this project, trying to include more and more of the American populace into our sometimes hit sometimes miss effort to make the Enlightenment ideals in our founding documents a reality.  We are in an era where our steps forward seem to be wiped out by steps backwards.  But... but... I'm writing this on October 18 and the images are coming in of millions in the streets of all fifty states on No Kings Day, so the fat lady ain't sung yet.

It's always useful to be reminded of how far we've come.  It's for that reason I just sat through the eight Netflix episodes of Boots, a series inspired by The Pink Marine, a book by Greg Cope White, about his experiences as a gay man in the Marines in the days before "Don't Ask Don't Tell."  Normally I don't take a lot of pleasure in beating my head against the wall, but I read somewhere that the fact that it was spread over eight episodes meant it was able to track the progress of gay liberation in the military that paralleled the progress in society at large, and who doesn't like happy endings?

There were times when I thought I'd wandered into enemy territory.  Boots is gay history and ultimately a coming out story with a happy ending.  But it is also a full-throated endorsement of the world of macho men and the U.S. Marines.  The story takes place at a basic training camp where "boys are made into men" - i.e., where they learn to shout "kill" at every opportunity and grit their teeth against pain.  I wanted to turn it off at times.  The reason I didn't was that the acting was superb and the gay characters were complex personalities.  There are multiple sub-plots, all shedding light on contemporary American minority groups.  The lead character, Cameron, and his best friend, Ray, join the Marines to get away from home. Cameron is running from his mother's neglect, Ray from his father's pitiless machismo.  They wonder at times if they haven't moved from the frying pan into the fire when Cam gets bullied for being gay and Ray for being a mixed-race kid.  There's a lot of bullying, in fact.  The recruits are not the most enlightened of folk.

I discovered, once I got far enough into it, that one of Boots' producers was Norman Lear. The company is headed by a female captain, there are twin brothers working out family dynamics, a suicide, masochistic leadership, and plenty of examples of selfish kids learning to care for their fellow recruits.The characters grow and mature over time, and that is probably the reason why I couldn't put it down.  It's a superb sociological study of America's difficulty in handling its diversity.  

And lots of jingoism and chauvinism.  You have to take the less appealing with the more appealing.

Semper fi!

Coughing in Warsaw

Part I: All about me.

Polish audiences seem to have a wonderful capacity for holding in a cough.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

It's 2025 and I am once again in thrall to the performances of some of the world's best pianists at the 2025 Warsaw Chopin Competition.  It's also October and there's lots of flu and colds in the air, apparently.

The contestants come up the stairs, down onto the stage, bow, sit at the keyboard, adjust their chair, get out their handkerchief, wipe their hands and sometimes the keyboard, and stare nervously at it, lift their arms, and begin.

Out comes some of the most beautiful music ever written and the world is effectively shut outside my door.

They play a number of pieces, sometimes, as with preludes, moving from one to the next without delay.  When they do delay, as if to gather strength to move on in another direction, we are suddenly presented with a barrage of coughing. It's clear people need to cough, but have been holding it in until it is socially acceptable to let it out.  After a number of these displays of respectful silences followed by loud hacking, the whole thing becomes quite funny.  And distracting.  I'd almost prefer it if the audience would just let loose when they need to.

Maybe I'm overly focused on coughing.  I have a lung disease and that means I also have a chronic cough and I'm more than a bit pissed that I can't go to public performances anymore for that reason.  Except that actually I can as long as I get seated early enough to calm my breathing.  I don't cough if I don't exert myself.

Part II: All about Western Civilization and racism - and me again

When asked about my race, I check the Caucasian box. Both my parents go all the way back to fade-out as Europeans in origin. And I am profoundly disgusted when I encounter MAGA folk who are white supremacists. I have loyalty to my LGBT brothers and sisters, to my fellow German-Americans, to both Germany and Japan, countries whose cultures I have had the luxury of playing around in and who have offered me great benefits: Germany gave me a year of university education and an introduction to the joys of urban living.  Japan gave me a good living for 24 years and enough money to buy a house in the San Francisco Bay Area.  It also gave me a husband I'm terribly fond of.  But I have no loyalty whatsoever - zero - to the Caucasian race.  If two men could make a baby, I'd be more than happy to have a mixed-race Asian-Caucasian baby to love and to raise as much as I love my dogs and cheerfully pick up their poop off the sidewalk when we go on walks. I don't understand why one would give credit to accidents of birth.

At the same time, maybe because I lived those 24 years in Japan and because my first lover was a black American, and my last one, my husband, and the one before were Asians, I am race-conscious and totally committed politically to the notion that racism needs to be eradicated all over the world.

When I first went to Japan, back in the 1970s, I remember watching a TV program where they were teaching Japanese how to applaud. How much was too much, how much was not enough. It was hilarious.  So very Japanese, I thought, in focusing on doing the right thing rather than allowing for spontaneity.  All they succeeded in doing, I thought at the time, was stressing that western music was alien.

That's the thing.  "Western" music - Bach, Beethoven and Brahms - do not belong to Germany, or to Europe, or to "Western civilization." They are world composers and belong to us all.  When I still had legs that could go all night long, I used to dance in a kolo folk dance group. I'm not a Yugoslav.

And that takes me to make the observation that now, when the contestants at the Chopinowski competition (to give this a Polish slant) have more Asian names and faces than you can shake a stick at (if you're a white supremacist and into shaking sticks) I feel obliged to mention that not only does the list of contestants contain several Lees from Korea and four Lis from China, but there is also Kevin Chen and Ryan Wang from Canada, Eric Lu and another Wang, William, from the United States. And if that doesn't make my point, you've got to include the Polish speaking Viêt Trung Nguyên from Poland and Yuanfan Yang from Edinburgh.

Part III: Sweet mysteries of life...

How the judges make their decisions continues to baffle me.  I know I'm just showing my limitations here, but when I began listening to the first round all I could hear was perfection. Then I listened to the second round and had to admit I thought the performances as a whole were actually somehow better than they were in the first round.  Obviously the judges were onto something.  But what?  How could I be so out of it?  I had good musical training as a youth, was a church organist for a while and accompanied choruses and ballet lessons.  I wasn't good enough to go on to a career in piano or in music, but I thought I had a well-trained ear. But the judges are miles ahead of me.  This is one serious bunch of musicians, and that probably explains why I'm inclined to use words like "thrill" and "joy" when reacting to the competition.

Part IV: Favorite composers

Following up on my musical limitations, I often say, when asked to identify my favorite composer that I don't like ranking world-class quality talent.  If forced to, I'd put Mozart and Chopin out beyond all the others, but I'd still list Liszt and Rachmaninoff and Bach and Tchaikovsky as gifts from the gods.  As with the Olympics, much of this probably stems from the tendency of countries to claim their heroes as national heroes.  Austria gets Mozart, Germany gets Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Mendelssohn and a whole bunch more, Russia gets Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev and many others, and Poland says it will be damned before it lets France take Chopin away from them.  Hence this every-five-year spectacular thing in Warsaw.

Part V: Chopin, in particular    

Sitting for hours in front of the tube (or the computer) listening to 28 contestants display ways to do things with their fingers that are not humanly possible (like watching divers or pole-vaulters in the Olympics), I realize how much, even after all these years, I still have to learn about just what Chopin managed to do in writing over 250 known and numbered pieces of music, in addition to many which got lost or never got numbered. He wrote more than twenty waltzes, more than fifty mazurkas.  Of all his music, it's the nocturnes (all 22 of them) that go most directly to the soul, the etudes that blow my mind, the polonaises that make me want to get up off my chair and pretend to be the King of France, the rondos and scherzos that make me happy to be alive.  And where does that leave the four ballades - utterly beautiful pieces of music - and the impromptus and the two concertos.  And the bolero and the berceuse and the barcarole (music for boats??? - yes, I understand he got the inspiration from Venetian gondoliers).

The excitement isn't over.  They are, as I write, just beginning the third round and the winner won't be announced till the end of the month.  I've chattered on about spin-off thoughts rather than pretend I'm in the running to judge the performances.  You can find those easily; they're on YouTube.

Again, words that I reserve for things like the Warsaw Chopin Competition, if you haven't watched fingers fly in a while, go to YouTube for the thrill of it all.  Joy.  Pure joy.

What's in a word?

The war of words between those who would surrender the quest for an ever more perfect union in favor of autocratic rule in the United States and those committed to the democratic project has reached a fever pitch.  Anger and invective fly back and forth and more and more friends of the Enlightenment worry that the battle may already be lost.  I have largely held off commenting on the fracas out of a suspicion that anybody chiming in at this stage merely adds to the din.

If you're a regular reader of Hepzibah,  you probably know that my academic background is in linguistics, and I identify as a sociolinguist, sociolinguistics being the study of the way language is used as a tool for communication in society. This interest has led me to question in recent times whether or not Donald Trump deserves the label "fascist." 

The left seems quite at home calling Trump a fascist; the right fumes the left's use of the term is dirty pool, little more than an attempt to provoke them into anger.

I'd like to make an argument that this bone of contention should be seen as two separate issues: first off, is he in fact a fascist?  And secondly, even if he is, is the term so loaded that there is nothing to be gained by calling him one?

Because the terms fascist and fascism cover a broad range of notions, whether you can make a solid case that Donald Trump is a fascist depends on how you define the word, so let's start there.

The notion of fascism originates in Italy.  It was first closely associated historically with Mussolini's ruthlessly authoritarian style of governing, but was soon extended to Hitler's national socialism. Its use can be traced back to as early as the 1870s, and was extended in the 20th century to the rule of Franco in Spain.  Since World War II, the term has been expanded over the years and today often functions virtually as a synonym for any absolute dictatorship.  But, I want to focus here not on its history but on how closely trumpism reflects the five features which define it.  Those features are: 

        1. the prioritizing of might over right, and an appreciation of power and violence for their own sake;

        2. the exaltation of race, nation or other collective entity over the rights and desires of an individual;

        3. The appeal to populist illusions rather than to reason and evidence-based objectivity;

        4. economic and social control by physical suppression;

        5. the cult-like blind obedience to a leader, probably the clearest example of which was the Führer-Prinzip - the "leader principle" - in Germany under Adolf Hitler.

These five aspects of fascism apply to virtually all dictatorships to at least some degree. At one extreme, the Japanese Emperor was literally a god, even though his position was essentially symbolic and he was actually dictated to by what most people saw as lesser beings who ran the government. Stalin in Russia was arguably as ruthless as Hitler, and ruthless brutality did not end in 1945.  Ferdinand Marcos was a kleptocratic piker by comparison, but many would nonetheless include him in the lot.  Pol Pot killed more than a million of his own countrymen, as did Mao in China, although Maoists insist with considerable justification that his policies brought about improvement in the lives of the Chinese people overall after centuries of poverty and backwardness. We are left to debate whether that advance was worth the cost of millions of lives and must constantly remind ourselves that the application of these five descriptors of fascism varies in severity and in extent.

When laid out like this, Trump is small potatoes compared to his more bloody predecessors with an authoritarian bent. The reason the left wants to include him in their number probably has less to do with his resemblance to them, and more with the astonishment that any leader could capture the hearts and minds of so many of his countrymen with such fierce devotion. Although I may be placing more stress on the Führer-prinzip than on the other features, even his supporters tend to concede that his pronouncements have less truth value than self-serving utility, and the parallels to Hitler's rise to power during the waning days of the Weimar Republic are impossible to miss.  Those who choose to slap the fascist label on Donald Trump, as I am inclined to do, have to admit they may be doing so because they are shocked at evidence that fascism could, in fact, be happening here, rather than that they have an open-and-shut case for using the label.  

I'm listening to those who argue that the charge is over-the-top because the guardrails have - so far, at least - held and his moves against the DOJ and the late-night satirists Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert have all fallen flat.  And because he's not so much interested in Lebensraum (Greenland and Panama notwithstanding).  I'm aware that he's way more hung up on his own ego and that"Make America Great" is not the same thing as "Amerika über alles."  He's not interested in ruling the world; he just wants love and affection - and lots more money.  But I have to ask you, is he a fascist only if he succeeds?  I think he gets points for trying, however clumsily, to replace constitutional democracy with self-serving autocracy.

Whether history will know him as a no-doubt-about-it fascist or as a tried-but-failed fascist is, in the long run, not what matters here. What does matter is the fact that the advent of trumpism has left an indelible mark on America's history.  Future students of American history will now have to add this new "-ism" to its list of other bumps in the road toward "a more perfect union:" racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, religious bigotry, anti-semitism and homophobia. (And I beg the indulgence of those who think my use of the metaphor of "bumps in the road" is unduly wishy-washy.)

I have not held back in attaching the fascist label to Trump, first of all because his rallies instantly bring to mind the Nuremberg rallies, with masses of people displaying sometimes insane levels of devotion. But news coverage as well shows his minions going out of their way to sing his praises, way beyond what once were normal levels of social interaction.  What is in the nature of his followers, one has to ask, that makes them behave in such a cult-like fashion?  And what is behind their failure to impose consequences after fact-checking his lies?  His moves against democratic institutions are right out in the open - against the media, against universities, against the justice system.  As are his recent efforts to shut down late-night television comedians who satirize him in ways that get under his skin.

I am aware that if we're ever going to close the gap between left and right, we're going to have to consider more seriously not whether what those of us holding fast to democracy say is true, but whether what we say communicates what we want to communicate.  Communication is measured not by what comes out of one's mouth but by what the listener takes in through their ears. It's a contest between being right and being effective. So having made the case for identifying Trump as a fascist, whether a real one or just a paltry wannabe, the question is still open whether or not highlighting the fascism in trumpism helps us put the country back on the road to democracy.  When most people hear the word fascism, they think of Hitler, not the whole range of tinpot autocrats, so I have to admit it probably doesn't.

But there is another battle going on, and that is how one fights the lies being fed to the public by Trumpist Enablers, including Trump himself and the Fox propaganda network that functions as a propaganda ministry for the Republicans. A liar has an inherent advantage over a truth-teller, because truth tellers are more limited by what they can say, so long as the intended audience is willing to be persuaded by untruth.

That's not the whole story, not the main event when discussing the state of American democracy. Willingness to be duped is not what I consider America's weakest link.  I would reserve that term for America's lack of equity, a problem exacerbated  by the Supreme Court's decision in "Citizens United": too much money and power in the hands of too few. Until we fix that problem we on the left are going to be held responsible for putting Trump in power in the first place. How many democratic administrations have made even a feeble attempt to address the inequity problem?  Democrats, as much as their Republican counterparts, have been wary of Bernie Sanders and his urging that we pay closer attention to unions and the working class. And afraid of being labeled as socialists.  Those who blame the Democratic Party elites for the rise of Trump have a case. The fact that they're having trouble getting back on their feet is not a mystery to most Americans anymore.

Republicans have long been the power brokers for the wealthy and for corporate control of wealth - the "I got mine!" crowd. They have been quick to dismiss opponents as socialists or communists, words carrying the weight of House on Un-American Activity days and the efforts of J, Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn to root out enemies of the people, another term that Trump has brought back to life. Since those days there has been no way to even begin proposing a better way to distribute the national wealth without getting tarred with one of those labels, socialist or communist.  Republicans have tied their fate to a 21st century pied-piper and become an unabashed trumpist party of single-issue voters, whether that issue is the price of lettuce, the goals of Christian nationalism, or turning the clock back on the rights of women and gay people.

Self-interest is not the worst thing in the world unless it comes at the expense of others, as it does with Trump's Enablers, many of whom have no interest in ethical government and have climbed aboard the Trump bandwagon not because they believe it is just but because it happens to be in the lead.

In the end, I throw in my lot with those favoring democracy, which I understand the way Winston Churchill did when he made that memorable statement in a speech to the British House of Commons in 1947: "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."   Its weakness lies in the fact that it doesn't care whether people are their best selves or their worst selves; the people have to be careful what they ask for because in a working democracy they get what they ask for.  Hitler, Trump, Orbán, Marcos, Erdoğan and many other anti-democratic leaders were, at least initially, democratically elected.

For reasons I've never adequately explained, even to myself, while I'm very light in the faith department, I do have faith in the human race.  I believe, in the long run, given enough time to think things through, people will come to their senses.  And if they put bums in office, they can and will ultimately throw them out again.

I have a sign on my wall which reads "My kids have paws."  I've lived longer than both my mother and my father did and I don't have kids whom I want to watch get their diplomas.  I just hope I live long enough to see my country throw this fascist bum out.

Remembering German grandmothers

A friend of mine, now approaching his 80s, just lost a friend of fifty years who was 88. I sent him that standard but woefully inadequate ¨Sorry for your loss¨ message. When death comes lofty language is easily mistaken for insincerity, so experience teaches us to settle for silence, and hope that those suffering loss will understand that this is a time when less equals more.

This friend of mine responded with a wonderful history of his fifty years of relationship with the deceased, essentially turning the death into an opportunity to count his blessings.  Now that I have reached an age where death is routine, I have a keen respect for such skill.  It becomes evident that there is more than ¨sorry for your loss¨that one can say.  

One can of course retreat to the reminder that grief is invariably a reflection of love and affection.  At least that has been my experience - that the greater the love the greater the grief. But that doesn't guarantee that grief will be any easier to process.

I was raised in a German family, largely by a German grandmother named Bertha who mistook me for a prince.  Everybody should be so lucky.  Her affection gave me the confidence all children should be granted to go out into the world unafraid and prepared for the slings and arrows and the hostility we all have to face.  I have been the beneficiary of not just a mother's love, but the love of aunts and grandmothers - plural - as well.  I got more than a fair allotment; in addition to my grandmother - meine Großmutter,  I got to establish a close relationship with Großmutter's sister-in-law, my great aunt Frieda, when I established a second home in Berlin. Frieda and her life-partner went through life as the German equivalent of John Smith and Mary Jones.  He was Otto Schmidt and she was Frieda Müller.  Special people despite their "ordinary" names.

I'm going on about Tante Frieda because today is her birthday.  She died back in the early 1980s at the age of 94, so you can't say she didn't live a full life.  How happy it was is another question.  She lived through the Second World War in Berlin, forced to work through the night and the bombing because her work as a pharmacist made her too valuable to be given time off.  Because she refused to join the Nazi party she had to work nights, as well, as a guard in a bomb shelter, and crawling from one bombed-out shelter to the next in the pitch black one night she fell and suffered from a loss of hearing as a result. 

She looked back on those days with remarkable equanimity. The one and only time I saw her vulnerable was when we were having coffee at a cafe on the top floor of the KaDeWe Department store in downtown West Berlin and had to endure the roar of Russian planes flying by close enough that you could see the pilots.  Soviet/Western Power hostility had been ongoing since the Soviet Blockade of West Berlin had resulted in the Berlin Airlift in 1948-9 and the Russians were protesting the latest quarrel - if I remember right, it was the decision of the Bundestag to hold a session in Berlin. 

"Take me out of here," she said, and as we finished our Kaffee und Kuchen at home I got her to talk about her war experiences for the first time ever. My admiration for her powers of endurance, already high, went through the roof.

I googled "Frieda Müller" Sachsenwaldstraße - her address - just now on the wildly improbable chance something about her might show up.  What did come up was another "Mary Jones," Gertrud this time instead of Frieda, living in the same Steglitz district of Berlin, a woman born around the same time as Tante Frieda, who was deported to the concentration camp in Theresienstadt in 1943 before being transferred to Auschwitz and murdered a year later. An unknown grandmother worth remembering for a far more earnest reason.

Gertrud's name appears on a "stumbling block" (Stolperstein) - one of those more than 100,000 brass plates now memorializing the victims of the Nazis that have been placed around the country to mark the residences of the victims carried away in the Holocaust. 

I'm reminded of Jesus and the thieves on a cross in Monty Python's Life of Brian singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," that wonderful satire of the the pollyanna "Today shalt Thou be with me in Paradise" insistence on avoiding the harsh realities of life - death, for example. But I have to admit there are multiple ways of processing grief and remembering the good parts while downplaying the not-so-good parts. That's the mood I'm in today, thinking back on my grandmother's practice of sneaking a shot of Liebfraumilch - we kept it a secret from my mother - when I would come home from school and celebrate a good test result.  And on the insistence that the grandmothers of the Holocaust, like Gertrud, not be forgotten. And on the good fortune Tante Frieda, one of the cheeriest people I have ever known, experienced of making it through the war more-or-less in one piece.

I don't want to "sum things up" by pretending we can will ourselves to focus on the bright side of things. And I don't want to downplay the difference between the two grandmothers who loomed large in in my personal life and the unknown victim of the Holocaust who died in the most grotesque of circumstances when I was only four years old.

But I also don't want to miss a chance to celebrate the richness of lives lived to the fullest while remembering our commitment to never letting the authoritarians ever ready to take advantage of our limitations to keep us from that goal.

Happy Birthday, Tante Frieda.

The Penguin Lessons - a film review

 I went to live in Argentina for several months in 2007 when friends of mine decided to accompany their daughter there for a gap year before she started college. I had been there before to visit them in Bariloche, a town in Patagonia known for harboring both Nazis fleeing arrest after World War II and Argentines being chased by the military dictatorship which held the country in its grip from 1976 to 1983. That incongruity - the town is famous for its chocolates and its Swiss chalets - led me to dig into the history of the "dirty war,"  in which opponents were snatched off the street and stuffed into Ford Falcons and dropped into the ocean from helicopters, and where children were stolen from their families and given to military families to raise as their own.  I had grown up in a German-heritage family and knew a lot about evil in theory, but here now in Argentina I got to see it and feel it up close.

An old friend recommended a 2024 movie just out on Netflix called The Penguin Lessons.  It's based on a memoir of an English teacher in Buenos Aires who encounters a penguin covered in oil slick while on a vacation trip to Uruguay, cleans the penguin up and smuggles it back to Buenos Aires. The lead actor is English comedian Steve Coogan.  I began this review with the political background - the story takes place in the early days of the dictadura - because it's the elephant in the room.  A better metaphor would be to call it the weak link. The story is sweet and almost impossibly endearing - what's not to love about a penguin paddling around the house - but the fascists get let off lightly, and that keeps the film from succeeding, in my opinion.  It's still a lovely experience when you're in need of a feel-good evening in front of the screen, but it does require you to leave your conscience in check a bit.  Perhaps more than just a bit.

I wanted to find a way to tell you I'd come across a delightful film I'd like to recommend to you, but I find the encounter with fascism that we find ourselves in at present contextualizes much of how I see the world these days, and certainly makes it impossible to avoid mentioning the fascism of Argentina half a century ago that has left a permanent mark on my conscience. Like the protagonist Steve Coogan character, who fails to come to the aid of a friend as she is being arrested, I stumble around looking for a place to start, and find myself stumped over what action I can take, other than to call out what I see happening right in front of us, as a bare minimum.

Watch the film.  Enjoy the warm embrace of the characters.  Let yourself be delighted by an animal who mates for life and let your mind run free over reflections on loyalty, living with evil and deciding when to lie low and when to speak up.

Netflix.

The Responsibility of Surviving

I remember well a conversation I had with one of my heroes - my aunt Frieda in Berlin - about thirty years ago when she revealed to me that she had already outlived all of her family and most of her friends. I couldn't get the thought out of my mind that "surviving" was perhaps not the greatest thing in the world one could aspire to.  Intellectually, I understood the term "survivor's guilt" and was profoundly moved by the 1980 movie, Ordinary People, about a family of two sons in which one son dies in a boating accident and the other son goes mad with guilt about not being able to save him. But simply outliving everybody is a different story: there should be no guilt, in the normal course of things, about being lucky.

Trouble is, when you outlive everybody - or even most people - who mean anything you, it's not the guilt that plagues you; it's simple loneliness. You think of something, encounter something, that makes you want to share it with somebody - only to re-remember that they're not there anymore.

Bounce (left); Miki (right)

I have a dozen images of old friends on my computer desktop, following my conviction that the best way to approach bad news is to stare it down, and not run and hide from it.  I hear something new about Switzerland and want to contact Doris to confirm it.  She's there, a big broad smile on her face, among the dozen. And the same goes for all the others. I spend most of my time alone in my room at the computer, and chatting with these friends-gone-by happens a whole lot.  Twelve of these images are of people; one is of the all-time loves of my life, our dogs Miki and Bounce.  They lived to fourteen - not a bad age for chihuahuas, but their deaths are up there with the worst things I have ever experienced.

I learned many years ago that when people reported the death of a loved one that the very worst thing you could do is try to cheer them up, or try to make sense of the death.  Instead, the clichéd "Sorry for your loss," insincere as it sounds, was probably the best thing to say.  And then shut up and say no more.  But it has always been hard for me to keep my mouth shut. I live by and for words. I use language to explain, to work out dilemmas, to comfort, to provoke, to uplift.  I want terribly to say something like, "You know that pain that you are feeling tends to come in direct proportion to the love you feel for that person."  It sounds true, and most probably is.

I am now 85 and people are dropping all around me. I now get to experience what Tante Frieda went through on a daily basis. And it's not just that I miss those who have died; I worry about being a drag with others in my life still here because talking about death and dying is, if not an outright taboo, at least a terrible downer.  

I remember hearing the Dalai Lama, when asked what he intended to do now that he was retiring, answer, calmly and with his usual warm charm, "I intend to spend the rest of my time preparing for my death."

Bravo, DL, I said.  Not afraid to demonstrate how one brings death into one's life and takes it in stride.  I joined a group called Death Café that meets every couple of months to talk about death and dying to break down this hypersensitivity around the topic.  It's not for everybody, and I fully sympathize with young people who want to avoid thoughts of end times before it would appear to be a useful thing to do, but I find it enriching to share with total strangers something this intimate.

Speaking of the Dalai Lama...  He's another hero of mine, right up there with Tante Frieda.  You know the couplet saying, "There are only two rules you need to follow in life.  One is 'Don't sweat the small stuff" and the other is 'Remember, it's all small stuff.'"  Well, the Dalai Lama has one I think is as wise: "Be kind whenever possible." and "It's always possible."

So why am I talking about death and dying suddenly? Well, one reason is it's on my mind a lot. Another is it disciplines and focuses the mind, helps you get your priorities straight.  Shows you how temporary the reward is for being able to score a good put-down and how much value there is in being kind.

A third reason is a video I just came across which I found quite moving.  Of someone reading a love letter a man writes to his dead wife. I want to share it with you here.

May you live long and prosper.  And may you live among kind folk.

James Talarico

Earlier today I posted a blog on George Takei, who has taken up the fight against homophobia and racism very late in life.  I took interest because I'm always looking for a way to get engaged in the struggle against injustice now that the U.S. seems to have taken a giant step backwards. I no longer have the mobility to get out into the street and bang pots and pans which, all things being equal, I would probably find the most satisfying. And I worry about losing friends when I go at them for their very understandable decision to prioritize their own mental health by tuning out on the news.  I don't have a lot of money to send to political candidates, and every time I do I feel like a heel for not sending it instead to Doctors Without Borders, the Southern Poverty Law Center or Planned Parenthood - to name but three really worthy causes.

The very least I can do, I think, is to stay focused on people I hope have at least half a chance of taking down the billionaire oligarchs we are now at the mercy of, and encourage others to throw their support behind them.  That's what I'm trying to do here, by calling attention to, of all things - and can you believe it? - a Christian pastor.  His name is James Talarico, and he's from Texas.

I'm a huge Pete Buttigieg fan.  What's not to love?  A gay man who, when he talks, tends to say all the things I'd like to say, only he says them better. I love it that he's not only smart as they come, but appears to be a great husband and father, as well as an effective politician. I wish him success in running the race to the top political offices in the land, including, let's hope, even the presidency.  "Slow and steady," I want to urge him; "Don't burn out too fast."

Now I've found another guy - not a gay man this time, but, of all mind-blowing things, a Christian pastor - who I am inclined to want to put out there as a second Pete Buttigieg, somebody very smart and very articulate who inspires trust and models humility, dignity and decency.  The complete antithesis of what comes to mind with the word politician.

James Talarico is still young.  He was born just a year and three days before I turned fifty.  I know; at 85 everybody looks young, but although I don't apologize for being what the world sees as a geezer, I also don't want to make the mistake of being an ageist. I trust my body into the hands of doctors and dentists in their thirties; I can do the same for politicians, if I try.

Because I came to know that homophobia, especially in America, tends to find its primary support in organized religion, especially in clerical hierarchy-centered Roman Catholicism and fundamentalist Protestantism, I have spent many years of my life bashing religion.  It has taken me a lot of time to listen to my own advice and see Christians in a more nuanced way. But just as I have been able to reduce the complexity of ethical systems to a simple commitment to avoid violence and deceit, I'm with James Talarico in being able to see true and good Christianity as a commitment to the commandments to love one's God and one's neighbors. I remain a non-theist, but I admire nobody more than I do Christians who dedicate their lives to putting these two principles into practice.

I became a fan of Gavin Newsom the day I heard him speak in a church in the Noe Valley neighborhood of San Francisco when he was still mayor. He earned my everlasting gratitude for the work he did in making same-sex marriage a reality, a move which launched what would eventually become national policy.  I also connect with Kamala Harris on a personal level because of a shared local identity - I know the schools she went to as a child.  And when Bernie Sanders speaks, I am happy that the last time somebody asked me where my political affiliations lay, I responded "with the Democratic Socialists." I also feel good (usually with some reservations here and there) about Kentucky's Governor Andy Beshear, New Jersey's Cory Booker, Minnesota's Amy Klobuchar, Connecticut's Chris Murphy and Georgia's Jon Ossoff. I think if the Democratic Party ever finds a way to circle the wagons on an agreed-upon agenda, we may rescue the country yet. And there are more. There's Tim Walz and Josh Shapiro and JB Pritzker and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others standing in the wings just off stage.

But as these guys jostle for positions in the executive or legislative branches of government on the Democratic ticket in the next presidential election, let's not lose sight of others with leadership qualities who may take some time yet to make themselves better known and gain the right kind of experience to be the kind of leaders we've been missing.

Like Pete Buttigieg and James Talarico.  I know you know Pete Buttigieg.  But if you are not familiar with James Talarico, have a look at this:

Coming out Takei

Some years ago now, maybe thirty, pressures from my job at Keio University in Japan had reached a boiling point and I decided what I needed to clear my head and free my spirit was to drive across the U.S. I had done it twice before and it had worked wonders.  So one summer day in the early 90s I headed out from my U.S. home in Berkeley, California to visit my family and the place I grew up in Connecticut.  Two of my students from my work home in Japan asked if they could come with me. I decided the trek would be better with their company than heading out by my lonesome, so I said yes. 

Not long after starting out, still in California, we found ourselves driving through Manzanar, one of the ten forced relocation camps set up to house Americans of Japanese ancestry between March 1942 and November 1945 when Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, acting on a phantom fear that Japanese immigrants somehow posed more of a wartime threat than other immigrants from around the world, including my German-born mother and the many Italian-American friends I grew up with in the post-war 1940s and 50s.  Both boys were familiar with the name and insisted we stop.

Since our visit, Manzanar has become a monument and a museum to injustice.  But when the three of us got out of the car, the first thing that struck us was that the place had been swept clean of all traces of its historical significance.  There was nothing to see but sand and dust and a bit of desert vegetation.  Nothing to indicate it had once housed ten thousand men, women and children whose only justification for their interment was their race.  Most spoke only English and had never known any home but their Sacramento, Los Angeles or other West-Coast cities and towns.

The boys were outraged at the conspicuous effort to sanitize this ugly chapter in American history, and I felt a deep sense of shame over this obvious backslide in the American effort to form an ever more perfect democracy.

I am married to a Japanese.  He is also an American citizen, which makes him, at least technically, an issei (first generation Japanese immigrant), and we live in large part in a Japanese-American cultural space. So when George Takei's second graphic novel, It Rhymes with Takei, came out this year, Taku ordered a copy and I devoured it in two sittings in two days.  That led me to turn to his first graphic novel, They Called Us Enemy, published in 2020, which I had not gotten around to reading - and finished it off in another day.

George Takei is best known as the actor who played Helmsman Hikaru Sulu in the original version of Star Trek.  He lived as a closeted gay man till the age of 68, fearing that revealing that he was gay would lead to the end of his acting career.  In It Rhymes with Takei, he makes up for lost time by narrating his personal coming out story.  In time, he marries his lifelong partner, Brad Altman, who then takes the Takei family name.  George and Brad Takei have since dedicated their lives to the two causes of gay liberation and raising the awareness of the injustice of Executive Order 9066.

I live in constant awareness of the debt I owe to the lesbians and gay men who paved the way for me to live my life as an openly gay man. When Taku and I got married at San Francisco City Hall in 2013 we not only got to use the rotunda but were thrilled to learn that the ceremony would take place right by the bust of Harvey Milk.  And we saw as icing on the cake the fact that the mother of the woman marrying us had sworn Harvey Milk in when he became San Francisco Supervisor. 

I still use the word "husband" self-consciously when I identify my life partner.  But I use it freely, aware that I get to do so by standing on the shoulders of heroes to the gay liberation movement such as Harvey Milk and Bayard Rustin, the organizer of Martin Luther King's March on Washington.  Since San Francisco is known world-wide as a center - some even call it the capital - of the gay liberation movement, it has been hard not to get jaded with the coming out stories I've listened to and nodded in sympathy with. I've heard many voices suggesting it's time to stop reducing gay liberation to the moment of coming out and simply enjoy the freedom to be openly gay without repercussion.  So were it not for the fact that George Takei also portrays his life as a struggle to process the indignity of Executive Order 9066, I might have put his coming out on the back burner. Instead, reading his two books back to back has caused me to focus on the dark side of American history, now, right at the time when I've been trying to avoid the relentless 24/7 news of the ways American democracy is being systematically dismantled.

My political orientation is on the progressive side of the spectrum, so I share the view that patriotism is both a worthy sentiment and that it involves recognition of the fact that the democracy project involves occasional steps backwards. I get impatient with the folks on the right whose familiarity with the global refugee problem is out of date. But even back in the times when we were among the more sought after destinations for asylum seekers, America's inclination to pat itself on the back was unworthy. And leftists today angry at the Trump administration for scooping innocents off the street and sending them to concentration camps in El Salvador, sabotaging its relations with it neighbors Canada and Mexico and with its friends in Europe and around the world, need to remember the genocide of the American Indians and the long years of slavery and segregation. But also the shameful fact that the uprooting of loyal Japanese-American immigrants on the West Coast was due to a racist inability to see them the same way as we saw German or Italian immigrants on the East Coast, as people who had left their homelands behind and taken on an American identity. There are ways to determine whether an immigrant is loyal. Race is not one of them.

Fully comfortable in my skin as a "good-as-the-next-guy" American despite my gay (and can I add German-American Japan-resident) identities, I feel a yawn coming on when faced with coming-out stories.  So very "been-there-done-that." But as I was reading George Takei's books I found my mind wandering.  A good book can take you up and away from preoccupation with the here-and-now.  It can set you down in a place where you wouldn't otherwise choose to go to.  I found myself seeing the familiar in a new way and focusing on the many whose lives go unnoticed.  

It's easy to become despondent over the efforts of the JD Vances and Stephen Millers of the world to dismantle American democracy.  And easy to overlook somebody like Alan Turing, whose work in breaking the Nazi codes contributed directly to the defeat of Hitler.  Or Oliver Sipple, who grabbed the arm of President Ford's would-be assassin in 1975 and saved his life.  Sipple was then outed as a gay man and his career went into the toilet.  Turing's fate was even more harsh.  He was driven to suicide after exposure of his secret.  Reading It Rhymes with Takei brought me not only back in time to my own coming-out youth; it brought me back to the life of Alan Turing.  George Takei has had the benefit of the years of positive social change that his predecessors lacked, but it still took him sixty-eight years to come out nonetheless.  It Rhymes with Takei and They Called Us Enemy are valuable pieces of the historical record of what men and women, heroic and non-heroic, go through to shake off social prejudice. 

One final comment - about Takei's decision to tell his stories in manga (graphic novel) form.* My years in Japan were crucial to my way of making sense of the world and my years as a teacher put me in a learning environment where education is regularly defined as "leading one out of" ignorance and stale assumptions. As I picked up Takei's graphic novels, I remembered a conversation with one of my students who heard me sneer at the ubiquitous manga in the hands of fellow train companions during my long commutes in Japan.  "Nobody reads anymore!" I complained.  

"You need to broaden your perspective," my student suggested.  "You place too much stress on the written word; you're missing the many ways people today take in information." He was right.  A picture is still worth a thousand words, and a graphic depiction of an event, if done right, can be a powerful means of conveying a story.

I believe that Japanese-American George Takei knew what he was doing when he chose to share his life in manga form.

*"Manga" is the way the first two syllables of the word "magazine" are pronounced in the Tokyo (and standard) dialect of Japanese.  Japanese tends to adopt only the first two syllables of multi-syllabic English loan words.

If you can't stand it, you gotta fix it

I have lots of reasons for feeling good about my decision many years go to make San Francisco my home.  Not the least of these is the fact that when my husband and I got married, back in 2013, we were able to do so in the rotunda of City Hall, right by the bust of and memorial to Harvey Milk. Milk and the mayor at the time, George Moscone, were assassinated in 1978 by a homophobic "all-American boy" and ex-policeman, and became martyrs to the gay cause. In time, the ugly side of the killing receded enough for the contributions of "The Mayor of Castro Street," as Harvey Milk came to be referred to, became a major source of pride for LGBT people.  I no longer get to events like today's march - it's too taxing on these old bones - but I have no doubt that many in the crowd of today's 55th annual pride parade at least uttered his name in passing.

There is icing on the cake that was being able to marry at San Francisco City Hall.  The woman who married us was the daughter of the woman who swore Harvey Milk in way back when he first entered San Francisco politics.  And I have a poster of the film, Milk, starring Sean Penn, posted on my bedroom door, a film I managed to get into as an extra, by the way.

There is an excellent article in today's Sunday New York Times by Andrew Sullivan, in the Opinion section, making the argument that we have gone too far in the LGBT movement by bending over backwards to support the trans folk among us by agreeing to cast off the distinction between male and female as biological categories. If you're "with it" these days, and you're out there marching in the streets and protesting the notion that "gender assigned at birth" needs to give way to gender as a choice, he claims, you're actually providing ammunition to the right-wingers who would "Make America Great Again" and take us back to the 1950s, where a woman's place was in the kitchen, blacks knew not to "get uppity" and gay people lived in closets.

I'm probably exaggerating Sullivan's point, but not by much.  And right on cue, there's a news item out today about how Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, one of Trump's most conspicuous ass-kissers, removed the name of the navy's oil replenishment ship Harvey Milk, allegedly because it should not have been named for woke reasons in the first place. OK.  But then why did he leave intact the names of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Harriet Tubman, Thurgood Marshall, Earl Warren and Robert F. Kennedy, among others in the class of ships named after John Lewis?  Maybe he just hasn't gotten around to it.  Maybe I'm being paranoid that he started with Harvey Milk.

This year also marks the twentieth anniversary of a film that lives within me as possibly the most powerful movie ever made, Brokeback Mountain.  Movie critic Matt Baume has just seen it again and compares the sadness he felt watching it for the first time with the anger he felt this time around.  Have a look at his take on this important piece of cinematic history.  Baume makes the point I wish more people would make.  Following the line the Heath Ledger character, Ennis, utters, "if you can't fix it...you gotta stand it," Baume argues Ennis has that exactly backwards; it should be: "If you can't stand it, you gotta fix it."

Fifty-five years of Gay Pride parades. Things are far better than I every imagined, twenty years ago and before. I'm married to a man and I live in a world comfortable with, even highly supportive of that fact.

But I also live in a country where, as I pointed out in my last blog entry, the president can still insult Germany's chancellor by implying he was a Nazi supporter, and his Secretary of Defense can still remove Harvey Milk's name from a naval vessel because homophobia lives on in the hearts of a critical mass of Americans and we lack the will or the skill to fix it.

Otto, hast Du Worte?

 The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, not long after I had settled into my job at Keio University in Japan. I had lived through the Cold War in Germany and had many friends and family members for whom this event was a dream come true they were never convinced could happen in their lifetimes. It was a clear indication that the Cold War was over and Germany could now hope to look forward to becoming a normal European democracy. I sat in my living room watching the crowds pour out of East Berlin, tears streaming down my face.  If only Achim were still alive.  If only Tante Frieda were still alive.  The gods are cruel, I thought, for not allowing them and countless others of their fellow Germans to live long enough to experience this longed for event and renewal of faith in the human race's chances of building a better collectivity on the European continent.

I remember an article in Der Spiegel about a survey in which Germans were asked whether the defeat of Hitler and the Nazis was a defeat or a victory for Germany.  The overwhelming response showed a majority of Germans, even those who had at one point in their lives shown support for Adolf Hitler, were now convinced that the Holocaust and the tragic killing of millions upon millions of soldiers and civilians was a national shame it would take decades to recover from, but that Hitler's defeat was an essential step toward what would now be Germany's pursuit of democracy.

Anybody who has followed the German political scene since the defeat of Hitler is aware of how well Germany, often referred to as a Wirtschaftswunder - Economic Miracle has served as a model modern egalitarian state.

But let me get back to the time when I watched the news of Berliners tearing down the Wall and fighting back tears. The next day I met colleagues from the foreign language department where I worked and ran into a brick wall.  When I shared my enthusiasm for the "Mauerfall" - the "fall of the wall," one of my French teacher colleagues took the wind out of my sails with the comment, "Not everybody is as excited as you to see Germany united, considering their history up to 1945." 

I didn't know where to begin. This was a "Treppenwitz" situation - you know, where you think of what you should have said only after you've gone down the stairs after losing an argument (Treppenwitz = "l'esprit de l'escalier" = "staircase wit").  I didn't know whether I should feel anger or surprise.  Does this guy really believe that after all these years (it was now 1989) of recognition of the evils of the Nazi years that there were still Germans yearning to go back to them?  And to make things worse, this guy was Japanese.  He had picked up the anti-German prejudice from retrograde French friends and colleagues, no doubt.  Did he have no knowledge of the wider world and of historical developments?  He wasn't a stupid man.  How could he be so ignorant?

That was over thirty years ago.  Then, just the other day, to America's profound humiliation we saw a repeat of that ignorance of history as President Trump insulted both the morality and the intelligence of the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, in the Oval Office.  Merz was trying to get Trump to realize how important America was in ending World War II and urging him to come once again to Europe's aid by stopping the war in Ukraine.  When Merz brought up June 6 as a great day to be celebrated, Trump's response was to wonder out loud: "not a great day for you?"

It's at times like this that I hear the voice of my Tante Frieda, who at moments of astonishment and outrage used to turn to her life partner, Otto, and say, "Otto, hast Du Worte?" - (Otto, do you have words?")

Revival - a review

A friend, whose opinions I tend to share, put me on to the 2017 movie Revival, available on Roku. It is the story of a Southern Baptist preacher in rural Arkansas who is torn between his conviction that homosexuality is an unforgivable sin and his attraction for a drifter who comes to his church one day looking for food and shelter.

Read no further until you've seen the film.  I can't do a decent review without revealing the ending.

Because the topic matter concerns the intersection of religion and homosexuality, it was a given that I would be strongly drawn in by the story.

And right up to the ending, I assumed, as the plot unfolded, that this would be just another tale of the imbecility of homophobic evangelical bigotry and I would be writing a critical review of the film, listing predictability as its main weakness.

When the ending turned out to be anything but predictable, I was blown away. I then had to take a bit of time to consider why it left such a bad taste in my mouth.

At first I concluded that what I expected was that the gay preacher would see the light and choose love and affection over the rigidity of evangelical homophobia. And the fact that the bad guys won this one pissed me off.

But that thought gave way to the conviction that the story simply went off the track.  The preacher had displayed nothing but decency and sincerity up to this point.  Why would he act so out of character?

And that thought then gave way to the argument in my head that his self-loathing, clearly the motivation for his actions at the end, was sufficiently intense to explain the ending after all.

Add to this act of murder the actions of the minor characters, the blood lust of Trevor, the incestuous thoughts of Jimmy, the greed and duplicity of the rival pastor in the town, and you've got, if not an actual horror film, a depiction of Christian folk filled with sin and depravity.

The weakness of Roman Catholicism, Protestants are wont to say, is that the clergy have too much power: they can forgive the worst of sins in the confessional. The weakness of Judaism, by contrast, is that there is little emphasis on doctrine or belief; what counts is going through the motions. When evangelical Protestants turn the focus on themselves, their failure to live up to the impossible demands of Sermon-on-the-Mount morality means that the overwhelming majority of them are caught in an endless cycle of sin and imperfection. And a moral code in which sexual acts are right up there with murder and deceit, if not out ahead in importance.  Add to that the fact that the church is made up of a large number of emotion-junkies, people who "feel the spirit" and confuse the thrill with religious sincerity.

Watching a community of evangelicals display these sins to an almost exaggerated degree makes you question why anyone should be attracted to religion. Was this the real goal of the filmmaker?

If so, maybe I need to give the film a much higher grade than a B-minus.  And the acting is first rate.

And if in the end I still have a bone I have to pick, it is with the book, not the movie version of the story.

High on a hill it calls to me

From time to time yet another article or video calls for attention to the city of San Francisco.  A video just showed up yesterday, and I recommend it to all lovers of what Bay Area locals know simply as "the city,"  twenty minutes of historical trivia almost guaranteed to fascinate and entertain.

The city is full of flaws which reflect the woes of the country at large.  It's got a nimby problem and it's full of homeless people who shit wherever they can because we have an aversion to providing public toilets out of concern they will be used by the many drug addicts. It has been colonized by the wealthy from Silicon Valley who decided it was more fun to live where the action is rather than stay in Palo Alto/Mountain View/Menlo Park and, just like those towns, it has become too expensive for most of the kids who grow up there to inherit their parents' homes and live happily ever after.

But that doesn't mean it doesn't continue to inspire passionate love and affection for the place. We may not sing San Francisco with quite the same enthusiasm as Jeanette MacDonald once did, but if you've been to a performance at the Castro Theater and felt the thrill of hearing it on the Wurlitzer Hope-Jones organ as it is being raised and lowered from center-stage through the floor at the start and at the end of performances, you can still find it in there somewhere.

I started my independent adult life in San Francisco back when you wore a flower in your hair in the Haight/Ashbury days, and despite my twenty-four years in Japan and my embrace of the San Francisco diaspora with my purchase of a house in Berkeley, across the bridge, when people in Germany or Japan or other places around the U.S. identify me as a San Franciscan, I wouldn't dream of correcting them.

Have a look and a listen to Daniel Steiner's history of the growth of The City.  You can make a game of picking out the several factual errors and bloopers - the commenters will fill you in.  It is a great way to get a booster shot for the virus that is disillusionment with one of the world's greatest places to visit.

Or call home.

Remembering my mother on her 110th birthday

My mother was born 110 years ago today (March 25) at a Midwifery Institute in Celle, Germany. It was the middle of the First World War and her father was out of the picture. I grew up with rumors of what happened to him - we knew he was still alive and raising a.second family - but details were sparse. All we knew is that Bertha Rühmann, whom I knew as Grossmutter, was effectively a single parent of twenty who had no viable means of raising a child. 

One of Bertha's sisters, Johanne, was married to a man named Paul Gundelach and living in his home town of Braunschweig. Johanne had just had a child as well, Paul Jr., about a month before my mother was born, and took my mother in.  Living in a country which has just lost a World War was a challenge, but the Gundelachs lived on a farm and had food to eat.  Her daughter now cared for, Bertha got a job as a stewardess on the Hamburg-Amerika Steamship Line and traveled the world.

Sometime in the next eight years Paul and Johanne were able to make a deal with an uncle named Henry Aust who had emigrated to America some years before to sponsor them as indentured servants and in 1923 Paul finally fulfilled a vow he had made to himself watching soldiers being blown to bits in Russia. He and his wife, Johanne, their son Paul Jr. and their niece/adopted daughter, climbed aboard the good ship Bayern in Hamburg and sailed away to a new life in America, landing in New York on October 26, 1923 and making their way to Torrington, Connecticut, where Henry Aust called home.

Paul and Johanne Gundelach legally adopted my mother - she had come across the ocean as Klara Schultheis, her original birth name - and had two more children, Carl (written American-style, with a C) and Rose (a name which worked equally well in both German and English). That adoption notwithstanding, four years later, Grossmutter's ship docked in New York and she made her way to Torrington, where she decided she had no choice but to stay, take my mother back, and live happily ever after in America.

Carl and his wife had two children, eventually, and Rose and her husband had three, giving me a bunch of cousins to grow up with on my mother's side of the family, to match the four I had on my father's side. The families remained close and it wasn't long before Johanne and Paul Gundelach became known by everybody in the family and far beyond as Mutti and Vati - the German equivalent of mommy and daddy.

Gundelach family gathering circa 1955
back row first four heads: Uncle Paul, My father, Uncle Carl, me
next row in, from left: Aunt Rose, Vati, Mutti, Klärchen (my mother), Aunt Connie, Grossmutter, Uncle Pete (Grossmutter's third husband)
front row: three kids: cousin Nancy (Uncle Carl/Aunt Connie's daughter); my sister Karen,  cousin Jimmy, Nancy's brother

Mutti and Vati continued to refer to my mother as their daughter.  They called her Klärchen, as they had when she was a little girl.  I often reflected on the fact that I had not the normal two, but three, sets of grandparents - and with them all the extra aunts, uncles and cousins. We have not kept in close contact, but the connection among the few survivors are still there.  My sister, the tallest of the three kids in front of my mother, turns 80 this year and is a great-grandmother.

My mother died of a heart attack at the young age of 60. Today she would be 110, and I am acutely aware she has been gone for a full half century.

As the years go by, my fantasy of finding a time machine only grows stronger.  If I could go back in time, I would want to get my mother out of bed and to a doctor rather than take a pill and see how she felt in the morning - a decision which was to be her last.  I'd also enjoy getting to know her as a woman twenty-five years younger than me.

All the questions I would bug her with.

So many questions.

Happy Birthday, Mom.

 

Remember Executive Order 9066 and Nuanced Thinking

Living in a Japanese-American household (we even have a dog named Sachiko), I couldn't fail to mark the anniversary last week of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066.  Compared with the battle between truth and accuracy and manipulation of and by the media, Executive Order 9066 may feel like a  back burner item.  But it shouldn't. It's part of the same story.

On February 19, 1942, following the failure to distinguish Japanese immigrants to the United States from Japanese loyal to the Japanese Emperor and in support of the bombing of Pearl Harbor two months earlier, Roosevelt determined that Japanese ethnicity was sufficient reason to rip ordinary Japanese-Americans from their homes and ship them - 120,000 of them - to ten internment camps away from the West Coast: Heart Mountain in Wyoming, Tule Lake and Manzanar in California, Topaz in Utah, Poston and Gila River in Arizona, Granada in Colorado, Minidoka in Idaho, and Jerome and Rowher in Arkansas.

Nearly 72,000 of these were American citizens and we now know that all but a tiny slice of that population were indistinguishable from other immigrants to the U.S., saw it as their only home, and had no reason to work against its best interests. It was a crude political action, based on the racist belief that ethnicity and culture are indistinguishable from political loyalty. Throwing them out of their homes and seizing their property cost the Japanese-American community a net income loss of $2.7 billion dollars, calculated in 1983 dollars.

The Oakland Asian Cultural Center has produced a superb memorial on this, the 83rd anniversary of this black mark on American democracy, which you can view here.

I say this insult to the civil rights of American citizens is tied to modern-day events because it's obvious the same lack of nuanced thinking and behavior is currently front-and-center. One of the participants in the Oakland Asian Cultural Center presentation argues Executive Order 9066 was not an exception to the American Way but part of its legacy. Genocide of the American native population, slavery and segregation, police brutality based on race, and Islamophobia, she argues, are merely earlier examples. Today we have a president who creates conspiracy theories such as spreading the cruel and hateful untruth that Haitian immigrants are eating the pets in Springfield, Ohio, and that Ukraine, and not Putin, started the war there, that Zelensky is a dictator with only 4% of his population behind him, when the actual number is something like 57%.

Rather than make the common distinction between right and left wing (or red states and blue states) I think it makes sense to see an important distinction between closed and open-minded thinking and coming down in favor of open-mindedness because it matches the scientific method which defines truth as what we know as of the present moment and always subject to change as new information becomes available.

It's a small world, and we are not alone in our folly.  If you watched the German election last Sunday, you saw that the battle between progressives and authoritarians in Germany is quite similar. The two centrist parties, the center right Union Parties under Friedrich Merz and the center left Democratic Socialists under Olaf Scholz, will form a coalition, probably with the Green Party (the only other more-or-less centrist party left) because all of the German parties are united, despite vast differences, in refusing to work with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party despite the latter's rapid growth into the second largest political party in the country. The reason is their nationalistic anti-immigrant policy and desire to downplay the Hitler legacy.  Meanwhile, by the way, our Vice President goes to Germany, ignores the Chancellor and meets with and throws his support behind the head of the AfD Party.  The new American ethic of might makes right has blurred American eyes. It apparently takes too much work, too much thinking, to separate the person from their ideas and the person's rational thoughts from their irrational ones. Where will this all lead?

It's no easy job spot and reject jingoism and insist on a nuanced acceptance of a national legacy with all its scars and warts. The immature parts of us want to root for the home team, "my country right or wrong." My main concern these days is the fact that we in the U.S. have surrendered to the oligarchs. We have allowed the likes of of Rupert Murdoch, the Koch Brothers, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, JD Vance, Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and their ilk to "flood the zone" with mis- and disinformation, and have decided to follow a leader who openly and unabashedly shows total disregard for objectivity in reporting facts. Or, to put it in plain language, to distinguish between good guys and bad guys.  In the 1940s it was Japanese = traitor; today it's Muslim = terrorist; black man = thug; authoritarian (non-, even anti-democratic) leader = admirable strongman.

Where is the ability to draw a line between decency and integrity on the one hand and self-serving tribalism on the other? Where did that distinction go? How do we get it back?