tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70179256996904465202024-03-17T20:03:52.269-07:00HepzibahAlan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15532896902247434009noreply@blogger.comBlogger1139125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-27086098855953265272024-03-07T09:49:00.000-08:002024-03-07T09:53:26.752-08:00Bumpy Night<p>The consensus of people in the know at the moment is that Trump is likely to win in November.</p><div>Too many people who would otherwise vote democratic will not because they don't want what they see as a doddering old man running the country.</div><div><br /></div><div>Your vote <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/c605260b-8e35-455d-873d-d71717db922e">doesn't matter</a>, actually, unless you live in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia and possibly Nevada: </div><div><br /></div><div>The reason is our political system is structured not on the basis of majority rule, but so that the winner will be determined by the Electoral College.</div><div><br /></div><div>Nothing you can do about that now. Not if you are going to insist we are governed by the rule of law.</div><div><br /></div><div>I fit comfortably into the demographic of leftist Americans who fear a Trump victory is equivalent to the rejection of democracy, a victory for right-to-life Christian nationalists, corporate enablers of the "I've got mine" wealthy class who have succeeded in convincing a critical mass of Americans to believe it's the Democrats who are now the party of the rich. They do represent the more sophisticated better educated Americans, in fact, but this element of the population has now been successfully tagged with the label "elitist" and vast numbers of Trumpists take pleasure in blaming them for anything and everything they see as wrong with their everyday lives - high prices at the supermarket, high gas prices, rejection of traditional sex and gender roles, insistence this is not a Christian country, billions given away to fight wars in Palestine and Ukraine, to name only a few.</div><div><br /></div><div>I've been arguing that we need to keep our eye on the ball, that we need to fear a Trump victory and vote for Biden despite all reservations about his suitability - whatever he lacks is not as bad a problem for the country as a Trump victory would be. And, by the way, if you have the capacity to look at his record objectively, he's done an amazing lot of good in the past four years.</div><div><br /></div><div>But what ails us at the national level at the moment is that we have been led to believe that truth is elusive, that government is inherently not to be trusted, and that Trump - or somebody like him interested in tearing it down and starting over - is the solution to the current malaise.</div><div><br /></div><div>Our media is not reliable. If you tune into Fox News, you get what amounts to the Republican propaganda ministry. If you tune into MSNBC, you get a bunch of political geeks talking not about policy matters but the horserace, who is in the lead here and there around the land.</div><div><br /></div><div>From my perspective, the American justice system is properly functional and the charges against Trump are legitimate. He should be put on trial on 91 counts and if found guilty prevented from being relected president. From the perspective of a critical mass of Americans, truth is as he claims it to be and this is all a witch hunt. And given our lack of faith that there is such a thing as objective truth, you are free to embrace or reject either perspective.</div><div><br /></div><div>What ought to be a healthy debate on important issues - how we spend tax money internationally and domestically, what things should be determined by government and what things should be left to the private sector, to what degree should we be the world's policeman, how important is personal privacy, to what degree do we try to control the internet and artificial intelligence - these issues are not front and center. What is are our suspicions, fears and special interests without regard to the general welfare of the country. To a great degree this was ever so and is nothing new. But I have the impression that we are living in unusually chaotic times, that things have gotten wild and out of control.</div><div><br /></div><div>I think of Bette Davis - "Fasten your seat belts; it's going to be a bumpy night!" (People think she said "ride"; she said "night" - Margo Channing, <i>All About Eve</i>, 1950.)</div><div><br /></div><div>I know I can't get people to come around to my perspective; it's not in the zeitgeist at the moment to take others' perspectives if they don't have prior tribal approval. But we can at least broaden the range of discourse we listen to. That's my Plan B. If you're not going to listen to me, at least listen to more stuff.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here are two bits of non-Fox, non-MSNBC stuff: The first is from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cz-crxWS6s&t=133s">UnHerd</a>. Look them up if you don't know them. They claim to be a neutral source of information. I see them as right-of-center - but you already know I tend to take a left-of-center perspective, so figure that in...</div><div><br /></div><div>The second is an all-out anti-Trump <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cthNNNrDaBk">piece</a> that gives me no end of pleasure.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Google Sans", Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><div class="ii gt" id=":1rf" jslog="20277; u014N:xr6bB; 1:WyIjdGhyZWFkLWY6MTc5Mjg3NTU0NTMwOTI0MDkyOCJd; 4:WyIjbXNnLWY6MTc5Mjg3NTU0NTMwOTI0MDkyOCJd" style="direction: ltr; font-size: 0.875rem; margin: 8px 0px 0px; overflow-x: hidden; padding: 0px; position: relative;"></div></div></div>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-52256395894503020432024-03-01T18:26:00.000-08:002024-03-01T18:26:48.098-08:00Creating a safe place for Jewish kids in Berkeley<p>The bad news keeps on coming.</p><div dir="ltr" gmail_original="1"><div>There's a real possibility that Trump may get re-elected president in November, for starters. There's the loss of the comforting illusion that the U.S. Supreme Court is an independent branch of government. Russia's got the upper hand in Ukraine, and Macron and Scholz are squabbling publicly over how to form a common European response to Putin. American media now accept as normal and routine the brazen lies that the Republicans in Congress openly spout publicly, night time comedians are openly grateful to them for providing them with a clown to satirize,* and there is evidence that lying openly is now acceptable American behavior. Then there is the feebleness of the will to stop pollution and support rapid development of renewable energy, there's homelessness, there's the dumbing down of American youth, aided by the Covid Shutdown and leading to the open embrace of ignorance as a positive virtue. </div><div><br /></div><div>And if that were not sufficient to drive you to despair, there is the capture of the Christian faith community by a political subset of the Evangelical Community committed to an authoritarian populist who speaks of his opponents as "vermin" and claims the flood of people seeking asylum in the United States are "polluting the blood" of Americans, in ignorance or denial of the fact that these notions are derived from the language of Hitler and the Nazis. And, not least of all, there is the failure of people all around to distinguish between Hamas and ordinary Palestinians of good will and between Benjamin Netanyahu's "take it all for Israel" right-wing jingoist policy and Israelis of good will. It leaves you breathless and profoundly discouraged.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's all too much to deal with in a single response. Let me take up the last one only for now, the battle over how to frame the current Israeli war on Hamas in response to their surprise attack on Israel last October 7 and the capture of some 130 Israeli hostages. Hamas states they will be released when the 5200 Palestinians now in captivity in Israel are released. (Allow me some space here - I make no claim to accurate numbers, since they can change at any time.)</div><div><br /></div><div>To bring this home, I have just read a forty-one page <a href="https://brandeiscenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Brandeis-Center-ADL-Complaint.pdf">letter</a> written by the Brandeis Center for Human Rights to the Department of Education complaining about the way the Berkeley Unified School District has failed to protect Jewish and Israeli students from sometimes violent and commonly intimidating anti-Semitism in Berkeley schools. As a life-long educator, even though I have no children in school, I feel this calls for Berkeley citizens to inform themselves and speak out.</div><div><br /></div><div>And that, in turn, leads to the stone wall that is the discourse on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. You can't even ask the question, "Where do we start?" because by now it's clear the narrative you will become part of by taking a stance is so long and convoluted that you will be considered an enemy by the other side the moment you pick a starting place. And every outrage and injustice you point out on one side will be met by a "What about...?" question from the other side, citing a similar outrage or injustice perpetrated by them.</div><div><br /></div><div>I have tossed in my two cents a number of times. In brief I have argued that the only reasonable approach to take is one based on today's realities, not on history filtered through the lens of religion or other ideological starting points. Israel exists as a powerful modern country. That has to be a given. People who call themselves Palestinians also exist. Efforts to make them Jordanians or Syrians or Egyptians or push them out of their homes or bomb them out of existence only hardens their resolve and makes them cry out even louder for justice. If there is to be a solution, it will not be found in the extremist positions both sides take. There are Israelis and Palestinians willing to work together toward a mutually satisfying outcome; these are the people we should be identifying and then working with.</div><div><br /></div><div>I know there are many arguing that reason doesn't work in America anymore, that you have to appeal to people's emotions, not their intellect. Maybe so. But I maintain it's not one <i>or</i> the other, but one <i>and</i> the other. Whenever anybody asks me to take an either/or approach, I automatically always find a <i>reason</i> to take a <i>both/and</i> instead. Better to cover all the bases.</div><div><br /></div><div>If I had Aladdin's lamp I'd ask the genie to get the Berkeley High School faculty to remember their first priority is to create a safe place for those in their charge to learn and create knowledge. And their second is to remember the distinction between education and indoctrination, and to value argument as a means of persuasion over assertion. I'd also ask the genie to remind them and anyone else dealing with the Israel/Palestine question that there is space enough between the Jordan and the Mediterranean for both peoples. Neither has to be expelled. </div><div><br /></div><div>Education is a never-ending task. No sooner does one generation learn the importance of distinguishing between fact and fiction and between a person's ideas and their personhood than it falls upon them, in turn, to teach it to the next generation.</div><div><br /></div><div>We yearn for reliable authority, for a leader to take us out of this mess we're in, (remember the German word for <i>leader </i>is Führer). But we're on our own.</div><div><br /></div><div>That's bad news if we continue to fail to make the proper distinctions between truth and lies and follow the liars. Not such bad news if we seek out and join with others of good will.</div><div><br /></div><div>There's so much we can still do.</div><div><br /></div><div>Start by writing Joe Biden and telling him to disassociate himself from Netanyahu and his policy of killing Gazans and encouraging West Bank settlement by Jews. Tell him to do it now.</div><div><br /></div><div>It may swing the election in November, so it's not just the right moral step to take but a practical step as well.</div><div><br /></div><div>If you're frustrated at all the things going wrong, do that. It's a small thing, but it's an important one.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*I appreciate that some of them - I'm thinking of Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, in particular, have taken the gloves off and their satire has gotten very sharp indeed - and I also appreciate the fact that Jon Stewart is back at it.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="auto"><div><blockquote style="border-left-style: none; color: inherit; margin: inherit; padding: inherit;" type="cite"><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;" /></blockquote></div></div></div></div></blockquote></div>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-22133151720820816462024-02-12T19:52:00.000-08:002024-02-12T19:52:53.906-08:00Focus on the Enablers<p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">My friend Barbara, in Berlin, just sent me a <a href="https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Kriegsthese-aus-Kaliningrad-Kant-ist-schuld-article24730943.html">clipping</a> from N-TV, a German news channel similar to CNN (and, if I am not mistaken, CNN owns half of it.) It is a report of the claim by the Russian governor of the oblast (province) of Kaliningrad that its most prominent historical figure, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, is responsible for the war in Ukraine.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">Kaliningrad was once the capital of East Prussia when it was part of Germany and was known as Königsberg. In 1945, it was ceded to Russia, its German citizens driven out, and russified. Kant's grave remains a major tourist site, in recognition of his contribution to the history of philosophy. One of the first thing students of modern philosophy learn, (in contrast, I mean, with those who focus on the works of the ancients like Plato and Aristotle) is that one can be either a Kantian or a Utilitarian. A Utilitarian argues that the right thing to do, morally, is whatever leads to the greatest good for the greatest number or people. In contrast, a follower of Kant shares his view that the majority can often be mistaken, and believes that the greatest good is what is established to be good <i>in principle, </i>which is something we can come to understand by the use of reason. He argues that you should want to have happen to others only that which you would want to have happen to yourself, and that you should always see other human beings as ends, and never as a means to an end. Majority rule derives from utilitarian ethics; rule of law limited to agreed upon basic rights - constitutional rights, for example, regardless of the will of the majority - has a Kantian ethical orientation.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">So much for the Philosophy 101 lesson. Here's what the N-TV article is about:</span></p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">Anton Alichanow, the governor of Kaliningrad Oblast (province), made the pronouncement three days ago (last Friday, as the <i>Moscow Times </i><a href="https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/02/12/kaliningrad-governor-blames-immanuel-kant-for-ukraine-war-a84046">confirms</a>,) that Kant was a moral relativist whose works have enabled the West to take a relativist ethical stance which allows it to violate all the agreements it has made with Russia, a culture which Alichanow insists is "based in values (sic!)." Russia is therefore provided with a justification to step in and correct the situation (Go get'em, Putin. Go get those corrupt Nazis).</span><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">Like any wild theory, you can find a grain of truth in what he is saying. The Americans, after the war, stopped (more accurately: slowed down) the active pursuit of Nazis and turned its focus onto making friends with the Germans, allowing Nazis to get away scot free in many cases, in order to form a strong anti-communist front, while Russia could claim the mantle of being ongoing fighters of fascism. That anti-fascist claim was then extended to the Soviet-run East Germany, which claimed that all the ex-Nazis had fled to the West, a grossly oversimplified view of things, and quite inaccurate. Today this view of the former Soviet world of good guys fighting the nazi bad guys of the west has come alive in Putin's justification for his "military incursion" - and call it a war and you go to jail.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">Alichanow is enabling the Putin justification for invading his neighbor in precisely the same way Trump's enablers support his claim that January 6th was not a coup attempt but a simple case of angry citizens expressing their displeasure about the 2020 election. I repeat. In Russia you can go to jail for <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/03/05/1084729579/russian-law-bans-journalists-from-calling-ukraine-conflict-a-war-or-an-invasion">calling</a> an invasion an invasion. Give that a moment of thought next time somebody asks about the power of words.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">You don't need to take an advanced course in philosophy to recognize that Alichanow's claim is not only false; it is the exact opposite of the truth. Alichanow is a vivid example of the Big Brother mentality in George Orwell's <i>1984</i>, whose main character, Winston Smith, works for the Ministry of Truth. The dystopian world has been taken over by authoritarians intent on complete mind-control. They have <a href="https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/this-quote-means-war-is-peace-orwell-1984-8658392/">persuaded</a> the world that "war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength."</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">After hearing Trump call for Russia to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7HE6bCe24g">attack</a> any NATO country that is behind in paying its NATO dues, and after watching Tucker Carlson sit and be <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOCWBhuDdDo">instructed</a> by a half-hour lecture on a butchered version of history by Vladimir Putin, I wrote Barbara that I was ready to leave the planet as soon as I could locate my keys. She wrote back that she wanted to come along.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">I remember so vividly the first lessons I got in political theory as a teenager. I was working part-time after school in a shoe store owned by a man who had ideas that challenged the ones I was coming up with. My ideas reflected the Republican views of my father; Mr. Campbell's were the views of a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. According to my father, Republicans were people who worked hard and lived an honest life, while Democrats were corrupt inner-city politicos who made crooked deals that enabled them to hold onto power. According to Mr. Campbell, Republicans believed the only people you could trust were those who put their self interest first. Do-gooders inevitably got corrupted. The best form of government was minimal government and we should take our lead from the marketplace. Democrats were concerned with things like social equity and community welfare and preventing the poor from falling through the cracks. Those conversations in the back of the store when there were no customers and all the shoe boxes had been reshelved gave me a democratic political orientation I hold to this day, some seven decades later, give or take. Sorry, Dad. I'm going my own way.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">I respected my father and it hurt a little to find myself pulling away from him. The alienation only increased over time for reasons other than political ones and many years passed before we could find our way back to relating to each other. We did, fortunately. He lived to 84, and there was time for us to mend fences. The advantage of a long life is that one can do that with a bit of effort. I have done the same with others I have had serious differences with, especially over religion and politics. I still have a positive orientation to life, still believe one can find common ground when working with others of good will.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">My problem these days, however, is that this condition seems to be getting more elusive by the day, harder and harder to find. How are Israelis and Palestinians who are willing to share their corner of the Middle East to deal with Jews who believe God intended for them to have the whole thing and with Palestinians who believe killing every Jew in sight is God's will? How are we to "negotiate" with Putin who insists he is not an aggressor in Ukraine but a savior of ancient Russian territory from Nazis led by a Jewish man named Zelenskyy? </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">Finding common ground will always remain the most noble of political goals, I think. Anybody interested in making the world a better place must necessarily work to find compromise, if not complete agreement. But there are times, such as when perpetrators of violence try to run you down, when you have to fight. Even Gandhi recognized that Hitler was not a man to be reasoned with.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">I can of course be wrong about this, but I am persuaded that we are making a terrible mistake in loading Donald Trump down with all the wrongs of American political life at the moment. I think of him, despite his crimes and lies and conspiracy theories, as more of a clown than an American fascist. The latest one, in which the Trump enablers are <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boXvrW3TSz0">attributing</a> Taylor Swift's influence to a conspiracy by the NFL rather than her simple desire to show her support for Democrats, is only the latest of many times when you don't know whether to laugh or cry. Another is the evidence that when the Democrats finally put together a plan for dealing with the immigration problem even better than the one Republicans might come up with, Trump puts the breaks on, because a success this big would be seen as a Biden success and Trump would rather sabotage it than let Biden get that credit in an election year. Is it possible to get clearer evidence that Trump is willing to keep the agony of the immigration problem alive if it leads to his personal advantage? Is it possible to get clearer evidence that his motives are self-serving than when his lawyers claim that he has the right to kill his political enemies and get away with it unless he is first impeached - especially when we know that the cards for impeachment are stacked in his favor? The evidence piles up - and still the Enablers enable. Still the right-wing politicians stand idly by. Still the supporters ignore the evidence.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">It's easy at times to draw parallels with Hitler and Mussolini, and Orban and Duterte and Erdogan and Kim Jong Un and Putin and Xi Jinping and all his other authoritarian models of strength and power - he draws them for you, in fact!. But I think the focus should be on the people who make the wheels go round, the "Enablers." The apologists, the Republican Congresspeople who value their jobs more than their party and their party more than American democracy. Just as the child abuse scandal in the Catholic Church showed, it wasn't that handful of sexually frustrated priests who were the problem, but the Bishops who shuffled their troubled souls around, enabling them to go on abusing kids in a new location rather than exposing their crimes because it could damage the image of the church to do so. It was the Enablers. Capital E. Wrong-headed thinkers.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">The outrages perpetrated by Donald Trump have increased, seemingly at a geometric rate, from the merely unkind - the way he <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX9reO3QnUA">mocked</a> a <i>New York Times</i> reporter with a disability - to cuddling up to Putin in his call for him to attack NATO allies in arrears, a potentially catastrophic international move, if he gets to carry it out. But still, despite it all, we are faced with polls which suggest that Americans could actually put this guy back in charge of the executive branch of government. Few things blow the mind as effectively.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">Debates over the proper size and heft of government is one thing. Talking with people who are likely to vote for Trump and use the excuse that Biden is too old, is another. Not the same level of discourse. Not the politics I first encountered as a teenager.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">And there is an additional wrinkle in the fabric. Yesterday's <i>New York Times</i> carried two opinion pieces, one by Maureen Dowd, the other by Ross Douthat, that pushed the view that Biden really is too old to hold the office. Which prompts me to ask, are they too Enablers? Or are they doing their job in a principled way, asking tough questions which are deeply unwelcome at the moment? I honestly don't know and would like some more honest debate by people making arguments on the basis of evidence, and not on gotcha ideology.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">How did we get here? How did we get this close to discarding this wonderful two-and-a-half-centuries long attempt to establish a "more perfect democracy"? We could well do that in November, toss out a system of checks and balances and replace it with a one-man show run by a craven narcissist. Reject constitutional (Kantian) principles - not for the will of a misguided majority, but for a minority of self-serving politicians - and their Enablers.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">What happened to that excellent world of civil debate and passionate argumentation where we could hope to find common ground? Where people of good will could agree to disagree and trust that we could live with our differences? How did we enable liars and conspiracy theorists to take control of our lives and reduce us to these least worthy versions of ourselves?</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">God, we've got to fix this.</span></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: Merriweather;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Merriweather;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Merriweather;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Merriweather;"><br /></span></div>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-25744316930968739552023-12-28T14:30:00.000-08:002023-12-28T14:46:58.718-08:00Gaza and the horns of a dilemma<p>A couple months ago, I <a href="https://hepzibahpyncheon.blogspot.com/2023/10/dont-kill-people-of-gaza.html">posted</a> a blog titled "Don't kill the people of Gaza," in which I tried to make the case that there are both moral and practical reasons for Israel not to retaliate militarily for the October 7th Hamas attack, that the killing of civilians in Gaza is wrong. I felt this conviction pretty strongly, and considered taking the posting down the next day, because it was too obvious to be arguing about.</p><p>A few days ago, I tuned in to a <i>Spiegel </i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1yA3uulv5g">interview</a> with two prominent German thinkers, on German television, and got another perspective. That perspective has not exactly turned me around, but it gave me some heavy stuff to consider which I want to share with you. I now feel less certainty when I argue the Israelis are only making things worse by continuing the violence. It's still true that two wrongs don't make a right, but what if the second "wrong" isn't really wrong?</p><p>One of the interviewees is Düzen Tekkal, a TV journalist of Kurdish and Yazidi background. She makes a strong appeal for keeping both sides of the conflict in focus. The other is Michael Wolffsohn, a German historian born in Israel but raised in Berlin. His German-Jewish parents fled Hitler in 1939, but returned after the war. Wolffsohn went back to serve in the Israeli army, and clearly feels at home in both Germany and Israel. It's Wolffsohn's argument that is troubling me.</p><p>I've spoken about this elsewhere, but at the risk of being repetitive, there is a line in the movie <i>Munich,</i> which I come back to again and again. The line is "It isn't Jewish."</p><p>The screenplay for <i>Munich </i>was written by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth. I've admired Tony Kushner's work since the first time I saw <i>Angels in America, </i>which I think of as the great morality play of the LGBT liberation movement. The clarity of his moral values comes out again in <i>Munich, </i>which deals with the Israeli retaliation against the Palestinian group <i>Black September</i>, responsible for the killing of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972. In the film, Golda Meir sets up a clandestine team of Mossad agents to take down the eleven Palestinian killers. Each killer is assigned an agent to take him out, and they all succeed, save one. The one who can't go through with his task hears his grandmother's voice in a dream. "It's not Jewish," she says to him.</p><p>Israel is a democracy, and that means it lives with multiple conflicting values. Some Israelis have no trouble resorting to assassination to dispose of their enemies. Others hear their grandmother's voice and remember one of Judaism's gifts to the world is its sense of justice. And that's what's going on here, in the debate over whether and how to retaliate for the October 7th attack. The majority of its Jewish population found the attack so barbaric that they are willing to go along with their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, despite blaming him in large part for working with Hamas and for choosing to send troops to the West Bank to protect settlers harassing the Palestinian locals instead of keeping an eye on Gaza. They are willing to let loose on Hamas, despite the fact it entails the killing of thousands of supposedly innocent Gazans, half of whom are children.</p><p>And that brings me back to the German historian, Michael Wolffsohn. He sides with the Israelis calling for swift and certain retaliation. Hamas must go, they say. But listen to Wolffsohn's reasoning:</p><p>If you think back to 1945, when Germany gave in to the demand for unconditional surrender, there was no serious argument that Germany should not have been bombed into submission. Hitler had been elected chancellor and become an authoritarian who, once in office, could not be dislodged from power. Bombing his country was the right thing to do, and even today, coming up on a century later, most people see the way the war played out in that light, the killing of innocent Germans as a necessary evil. And ditto for Japan, by the way, although there is no shortage of debate over whether use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was overkill.</p><p>Wolffsohn puts Hamas in the same category as Hitler, a political entity originally elected but now so thoroughly entrenched that few dare (or want to?) speak out against this power dedicated to the total destruction of Israel and the killing of every Jew on the planet. Not somebody you can make deals with. And the proof of that is their willingness to use their own people as shields or as cannon fodder, to store their munitions in schools and hospitals and effectively dare the Israelis to bomb them, counting on the Kushner-type Jews with their grandmother's voice in their heads, to restrain the Israeli army on the grounds that "it isn't Jewish" to kill. Grandma knew her Ten Commandments.</p><p>It isn't Jewish to kill children. Nobody will argue that. But what are we to do with the fact that Palestinians are used as shields? Just go on saying "it isn't Jewish" as Hamas sends rockets to bomb Israel day after day? Surrender? Turn Tel Aviv back into olive groves?</p><p>Wolffsohn maintains that just as Germany needed to be brought to its knees in 1945 at the cost of countless thousands of lives for modern-day Germany to come alive as a modern democracy Gaza has to be brought down in like fashion. In years to come, the Gazans of today will be recognized as innocent bystanders, and their deaths will be understood as a tragedy, but future historians will recognize what is an unavoidable necessity. Germans died from Allied bombs, but if Hitler had not invaded Poland in September 1939 and much of the rest of Europe in time, if he and his fascist thugs had not set the Holocaust in motion, there would have been no Allied bombs. It was in Germany's long-term interest that Hitler be brought down. If those opposed to fighting Hitler had had their way, their "peace now" arguments would only have extended the misery. You've got to know who you're fighting and be able to separate those who will negotiate from those who won't.</p><p>Note that Mahatma Gandhi, when faced with this dilemma, first urged that the Jews should have "<a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/gandhi-on-the-holocaust">offered</a> themselves to the butcher's knife." But in time he also urged India to support the British in their war effort. Practical reasons trumped moral ones; he wanted the British to offer India independence in return. But that doesn't change the fact he supported the military takedown of Adolf Hitler.</p><p>We are talking about maybe the greatest dilemma of our lifetime. One part of me wants to take the pacifist position: killing is wrong, no matter who does it; two wrongs don't make a right; there's got to be another way, a diplomatic way and we just have to keep searching till we find it. And another part of me finds Wolffsohn's argument persuasive. There is evil in the world. Hitler killed for <i>Lebensraum</i> and to eliminate people he saw as <i>Untermenschen.</i> Hamas kills people for being Jewish and has promised to keep fighting till the State of Israel is wiped off the map. Hitler continued sending 16- and 17-year-old boys to the front even when it was clear the war was lost. Hamas openly boasts of rape, beheading and torture as tools of war. Negotiations are the way to go only if you can get your opponent to the table, and trust that they will honor peace agreements.</p><p>Ultimately, I come down on the side of the peaceniks. I can't handle the killing of children, and Realpolitik and I have never been the best of friends. I keep thinking there has got to be a way short of bullets and bombs to stop the killing. I realize my plan to kick the settlers out of the West Bank and throw Netanyahu in jail for life won't fly, and I don't have any better suggestions. I know the arguments against both a two-state and a one-state solution are currently both overpowering. And I can't imagine having to bear the political responsibility of choosing between delaying the war and dreaming of a magic solution on the one hand, and continuing to bomb Gaza to dust, on the other.</p><p>So I post these feeble "think-pieces" on my blog, hoping they might inspire somebody reading them to point out things everybody has been missing so far.</p><p>I don't believe in divine intercession or in knights in shining armor coming to the rescue.</p><p>My only comfort is that dilemmas sometimes do - magically - get resolved.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-28715500414871847162023-12-14T18:13:00.000-08:002023-12-28T14:32:30.871-08:00Free Speech, Genocide, and Ill-Chosen Legalese<p><span style="font-family: inherit;">I've been following the story this week of the three university presidents in the dock over their failure to crack down on anti-semitic protests on their campus. In case you've been avoiding the news because you're tired of all the downer news of Trump leading in the polls or his loyalists' success in shutting down government, you may have missed what's going on. If that's the case, let me urge you to tune back in. This story has implications far beyond the charges of wokism and political correctness that it appears to be about at first glance.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">To start in the middle (because to start at the beginning of all the issues converging would require a review of the arguments in favor of First Amendment rights to free speech and the entire history of Palestine and of anti-semitism), three university presidents,</span><span style="color: #222222;"> Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, Sally Kornbluth of MIT and Claudine Gay of Harvard, were called on the carpet this past week by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oklC-xpSOWc&t=356s">grilled</a> in connection with protests of Israel's response to the attacks by Hamas on October 7th. In a nutshell, they were charged with failure to provide Jews on their campuses with safe haven from calls for genocide by the protesters.</span></p><p><span style="color: #222222;">What troubles me about this event is how any attempt at a nuanced analysis of what happened - and is still happening - seems to be beyond our grasp. It's a chaotic free-for-all, with right-wingers asking the questions and progressives not being able to provide their own acceptable framing of the problem. To jump to the bottom line, the questioners asked, in unabashed sophomoric gutsiness, "Are you in favor of genocide?" and the responders responded, in embarrassing evasive-sounding language, "It depends on the situation." Not cool. Not cool at all. If the two sides were your teenage kids, you'd want to lock them in a closet until they turned twenty. I squirmed - as I imagine most Americans did - at both the hostility of the questioners and the naiveté of the responders, who gave a legalistic response when a moral one was in order. The unsatisfying answer gave Elise Stefanik, the question, a chance to show justified outrage and lash out at what half the country now considers unduly privileged leaders of elitist institutions. Take that Harvard, Penn and MIT, you arrogant bastards. Magill has now resigned and Stefanik's <a href="https://www.wcax.com/video/2023/12/11/one-down-two-go-stefanik-resignation-university-pennsylvania-president/">response</a> is "One down. Two to go." In case you missed the complexity of this congressional attempt to address the very real problem of anti-semitism on U.S. campuses, keep in mind that Sally Kornbluth of MIT is Jewish. Also keep in mind that Stefanik was not being honest here. Language is an important part of the problem. It should be common knowledge by now - it isn't, but it should be - that <i>jihad</i> has a broad range of meaning. In the mouth of Islamic radicals it means "all out war" against non-Muslims, but to speakers of Arabic generally, it means "struggle" and is mainly understood to mean "engage in the battle to do the morally right thing." <i>Intifada</i>, similarly, means <i>uprising, </i>and when used in the struggle against Israeli attempts to limit Palestinian rights (as Palestinians see them), the word means resistance. And the word <i>genocide </i>itself tends to be <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/12/genocide-meaning-definition-jews-israel-gaza-harvard-stefanik.html">used</a> as a shock term more frequently than an accurate description of behavior.</span></p><p>But that is a moot point in this case. Associated Press has pointed out that there was in fact no call for genocide, that the word appeared only in complaints that the revenge attacks on Hamas amounted to a genocide perpetrated by Israel, considering the number of deaths in Gaza number over 18,000 since the retaliation began. So Stefanik's insisting on a yes/no answer to the question of genocide should be considered a badgering of the witness. Stefanik, in fact, gives herself away. When questioning Kornbluth on the question of genocide, Kornbluth replied, "I have not heard calling for the genocide of Jews on our campus." To this, Stefanik responded, "But you've heard chants for intifada." </p><p>And next thing you know, the way the story gets told is that the presidents were so insensitive as to let protesters off the hook when calling for genocide, as if they were working in a Nazi framework. Some individuals may have gone that far, but I have yet to see evidence for it. I trust you will agree with me, however, that this automatic bait-and-switch of the word genocide for intifada, is manipulation on the part of Elise Stefanik.</p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">These confrontations with the three presidents encapsulates the dilemma we're facing, in the U.S. and in the world, with the arrival of the internet and instant exposure to complex ideas which everyone, wise and foolish alike, feels they have the right - and often the duty - to chime in on. Nuance gets lost in the shuffle. And with it goes the argument postmodernists try to make that objective truth is elusive and we are better off accepting the notion that there are multiple truths, that everybody should just tell their story and we should let all the conflicting narratives just sit there side by side. You can hear this argument at work every time somebody speaks of "speaking your own truth."</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">But the hearings aggravate an already open wound in America, the inability to proceed with civility through agonizingly painful differences of opinion. We live in permanent "gotcha" mode, egged on by the media and its habit of reporting conflict, often with what seems like glee: "If it bleeds, it leads." It doesn't require a close look at the hearings to see that the Committee went at the three academics with righteous gusto. Jewish Americans, three-quarters of whom generally vote democratic, are finding a sympathetic ally in the Republican Party these days.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">I am in no position to oppose hard grilling of the world's movers and shakers by Congress. I see it as their job to expose wrongdoing, and have enjoyed watching them go at people in the hot seat and make them squirm - automobile manufacturers, bankers, oil and gas executives, for example. One of my heroes is Katie Porter, with her whiteboard. An even bigger hero has been Liz Cheney and others on the Congressional January 6th committee. I watch what Congress does more closely these days than usual, frankly, out of a fear t</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">hat the reelection of the 45th president of the United States and the Republicans riding his coattails would mean the end of democracy in America. Just so you know what my biases are and</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit;"> where I'm coming from. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">I said at the start that the presidents-in-the-dock event needs to be understood in the larger history of the Israel/Palestine conflict. I cannot do that history justice, but let me give a quick summary in three or four paragraphs of how I understand it, also in order to expose my limitations and let you know where I'm coming from.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><u>A little background</u></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">The larger battle between Israel and the Palestinians is one of the Western world's most frustrating battles of conflicting narratives, to use the postmodern term. M</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">any have declared the problem insoluble, and indeed it has persisted since before the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, over seventy-five years ago now, still with no end in sight.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">To risk oversimplification, the main Israeli narrative is that Palestine is the traditional Jewish homeland and Jews have a right to it. Religious Jews - and many biblical-literalist Christians as well - maintain that right was God-given, but even non-religious supporters of Israel claim that right is historical. When Palestinians tell the story, they usually insist that the Jewish right to emigrate to Palestine does not include the right to push the Palestinians out, and that that is the start and the heart of the problem. From there the conflict goes quickly to arguments over whether the Jews have a right to form a Jewish state, which includes preferential treatment for Jews, whether the Palestinians were pushed or chose to sell their land voluntarily and leave, whether, in the absence of a historical Palestinian state for Palestinians, there should be one now, and whether the Palestinian National Authority speaks for the Palestinians, or maybe Hamas of Hezbollah. The Palestinian National Authority has to face charges of widespread corruption; Hamas is the terrorist organization responsible for the aforementioned barbaric invasion, and Hezbollah is supported by Iran, a country that refers to Israel as "Little Satan" and has declared it to be an "enemy of Islam."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: small;">Also part of the context is the fact that Palestinians, regardless of whether they are responsible for their own fate and, if so, to what degree, have lived lives not of their own choosing as refugees for seventy-five years. Technically they are not refugees in the normal sense, i.e., people driven from their countries, but are "internally displaced," i.e., still living in Israel or under the Palestinian authority, and these children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those displaced in the late 1940s are considered refugees by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). Many have made decent lives outside Israel/Palestine throughout the Middle East, in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and elsewhere (including as far away as Chile) but resent not being able to return to the homes they fled or were otherwise forced to surrender subsequent to the foundation of Israel in 1948, which they refer to as "al-Nakba," or "The Catastrophe." <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel#:~:text=As%20of%20March%202023%2C%20Israel's,%25%20(around%202.048%20million).">Half</a>, approximately one million, of these internally displaced Palestinians live in Gaza; 750,000 live in the West Bank and another 250,000 live in Israel proper and comprise 21% of the Israeli State. For the sake of comparison, 73.5% of the Israeli population, or 7.145 million, are Jews.</span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">The Israeli-Occupied West Bank is governed by Fatah, a political party led by Mahmood Abbas. Jewish settlers, now numbering 750,000, supported by Israeli's President Benjamin Netanyahu and </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">soldiers of the Israeli Defence Forces</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"> are now actively pushing them out of the Occupied West Bank. And, in this case, at least, the "pushing out" has more of a claim to objective truth than other parts of the conflicting narratives.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"> Gazans, long before this current moment where they are dying under Israeli bombardment in large numbers as shields for their Hamas rulers, were described by supporters of Palestinian rights as living "the largest open-air prison in the world."</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Hamas was elected to run Gaza in 2006 and there have been no elections since. For a brief period they ruled in accord with Fatah, but by 1997 were at odds with them and have been ever since. Since there is no way of identifying how much support Hamas gets from the citizens of Gaza, it is difficult to assess how much responsibility they should bear for the recent Hamas attack and how strong a case might be made justifying Israel's recent ruthless attacks on Gazan civilians as unavoidable "collateral damage," and what the Israelis can do, if anything, to go after Hamas without such killing of civilians. Clearly there is no shortage of debates all deriving from the main event, the attack.</span></p><p><u style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Back to the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT</span></u></p><p><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">It appears to be virtually impossible to draw a clear line of separation between the attack by Hamas and the right of Palestinians to seek relief from their current political disadvantage in this conflict of narratives between them and Jewish Israelis. The blurring of the line is evident not just at Harvard, UPenn and MIT, where students sympathetic to the lot of the Palestinians have been protesting and where the presidents of these institutions are now on the carpet for failing to label their protests as anti-semitic hate speech. The Anti-Defamation League reports a 388% increase in anti-semitic incidents over last year. And anti-semitism seems to be on the rise elsewhere, including in Germany, despite strong efforts to draw a line between itself and its anti-semitic past.</span></p><p><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;"><u>Free Speech and Anti-Semitism</u></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">Suddenly, we're back at the task of defining just where the line is between free speech and hate speech. Supporters of the work of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce are quick to point out that the "woke" ideology of many, maybe most, of American campuses has been hard on free speech. Despite calls for DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), anybody insisting there are only two genders, or that the recent focus on trans rights is coming to the detriment of gays and lesbians, or that there should be consequences to those failing to use the right gender pronouns are having a hard time of it. Now, say the rightists, they suddenly want free speech?</span></p><p><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">You can see how these issues bleed into one another. What are we actually debating here, one might ask, Palestinian rights, hate speech, or the fragility of American democracy? For that matter, how are we defining anti-semitism and is anti-zionism the same thing as anti-semitism? In my view we need to hold fast to the freedom to criticize Israeli government policies without being labeled either of those things, but I understand that this involves a judgment call at times and clarity can be elusive.</span></p><p><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">While I'd like to keep these issues apart and deal with each of them separately, I don't know how to do that. I cannot pretend not to see right-wing American politics overshadowing the hate speech question. Watching the coverage of the protests, and of the grilling of the presidents, I find myself feeling a sense of despair. Presidents Magill, Kornbluth and Gay were not being allowed to give nuanced responses to people demanding a yes/no answer. The assumption behind the questions is that the pro-Palestinian protestors are calling for genocide. Do you approve of genocide, and are you failing to protect your Jewish students from hate speech by not shutting them down? Yes or no, please. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="color: #222222;">The three women try repeatedly to resist what they clearly believe to be a reductionist question, one requiring nuance. They tried to defend free speech by drawing a line between speech that stops there and speech that leads to action, the old "crying fire in a crowded theater" argument. And in doing so, they came across as duplicitous. A quick run-down of the commentary shows that probably a critical mass of the American public found their responses reprehensible.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="color: #222222;">I have to ask. Are the "bad answers" - I assume you'll agree with me that giving a legalistic response when a moral one is expected isn't smart - the fault of the presidents? Or were they simply "overly lawyered," as some have claimed. Were they so concerned about not getting into legal hot water that they saw no choice but to evade the pressure to give a yes/no answer?</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">On the one hand, anybody taking the Israeli, or Jewish, side in this polarized debate is likely to rejoice at this turn of events. When testifying before the Senate Committee, when she was asked by Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) if students "calling for the genocide of Jews" ran counter to her university's rules, she might have said, "You're asking a crudely insulting question, Congresswoman. And shame on you for even suggesting I would approve of genocide. No, of course I don't approve of genocide. But as President of the University of Pennsylvania, I have a duty to uphold free speech, however obnoxious it may get at times." Instead, she responded legalistically, trying to get at that line between "just speech" and "speech leading to action." What the students were saying must be allowed, she implied, unless it turns into conduct. Then it can be considered harassment and dealt with accordingly. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="color: #222222;">Stefanik apparently saw an opportunity to go for the throat and it</span><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="color: #222222; font-size: small;"> was <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/university-of-pennsylvania-president-liz-magill-steps-down-over-antisemitism-testimony-scandal">downhill</a> from there for the university president. Stefanik repeatedly insisted the student protesters were calling for genocide and Magill continued to draw a line between speech and action - and allow for free speech. This testimony will no doubt serve future </span></span><span style="color: #222222;">students of communication</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;"> as a clear example of the importance of social context: it's not enough to speak truth; you've got to know how the audience is going to interpret that truth. Magill behaved as if she were in an ivory-tower environment where philosophical discussions require precision and nuanced distinctions are valued. She failed to account for the fact that Stefanik knew how to play to an audience of people now prone to dismiss ivory-tower intellectuals as duplicitous and elitist. Just answer yes or no, dammit! What we saw played out was a battle between "just us real folks" and "the despised elite" that characterizes polarized America these days.</span></p><p><span style="color: #222222;">There are other views on the topic and I want to mention one in particular because it is part of the full range of the intellectual scene. There is no shortage of hurt and outrage by defenders of Jews and others who believe the level of severity of anti-semitism is underrated, on American campuses and elsewhere, and argue that the main point ought to be not free speech but the lack of consistency in what speech is actually protected. That is the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax4BDqoJeso">perspective</a> of the Ayn Rand Institute, for example, whose spokespersons, Onkar Ghate and Israeli libertarian, Elan Journo, would put the central focus not on free speech issue at all but on the hypocrisy of a class of leftist elites. One can see in this attitude the Ayn Rand argument that what the left is after is taking from the best and the brightest and giving to the rest of us, not letting the successful have what they have earned but spreading the wealth to all the "losers" among us. Jews, says Ghate, are now "winners" and thus the left is going after them. They have lost their claim to being a protected class. This take on things brings home the frustration successful people often feel when they sigh and say, "I just can't win for losing." I don't give much credence to this view, but this is no place to take on the Ayn Rand philosophy.</span></p><p><u style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">Some background on the Committee</u></p><p><span style="color: #222222;">It's worth looking beneath the surface into who was running the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. For starters, was headed by Republican Virginia Foxx, representative of North Carolina's 5th Congressional District. I recognized Ms. Foxx as the person <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Foxx#:~:text=In%20October%202023%20while%20amongst,the%202020%20U.S.%20Presidential%20election.">telling</a> that ABC reporter to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd11rSn3K5A">shut up</a> and go away when the reporter asked House Speaker Mike Johnson the other day about his 2020 election denial efforts. I know her as an ardent homophobe, someone who once called efforts to remember Matthew Shepard, the gay kid left to die on a fence in Wyoming in 1998, a hoax to foster the spread of hate crimes bills, which she has also opposed. She later retracted the hoax charge. She <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Foxx">opposes</a> abortion, even when performed to save the life of the mother. She is also a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Foxx">signer</a> of an amicus brief supporting an attempt before the Supreme Court to contest the 2020 election. A Trumpist through and through, right down to election denying.</span></p><p><span style="color: #222222;">But Foxx was not the main voice on the committee. That dubious honor goes to Elise Stefanik, who tried, with considerable success, to tie the word "intifada" with "genocide." But as the <i>Guardian</i> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/12/university-president-antisemitism-israel-palestine-explained-harvard-penn">points out</a>, </span>this is political dishonesty: </p><p><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #121212; font-family: GuardianTextEgyptian, "Guardian Text Egyptian Web", Georgia, serif; font-size: 17px; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures;"></span></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="color: #222222; font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #121212; font-family: GuardianTextEgyptian, "Guardian Text Egyptian Web", Georgia, serif; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures;">The first Palestinian intifada in the late 1980s consisted largely of non-violent forms of civil disobedience. The second intifada of the 1990s and early 2000s saw a wave of suicide bombings that killed more than 1,000 Israelis and maimed many others. While segments of Israeli society were left traumatised, it appeared to fall short of the legal definition of genocide.</span></span></p></blockquote><p>And genocide expert Omer Bartov, and Israeli-American professor at Brown, makes the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xtP7CVSJGY">case</a> that <i>intifada</i> simply means civil protest, and there is no reason to think and act as if the entire Palestinian protest movement is populated by extremists with genocidal intent. That's why I put into Magill's mouth the words I wish she had spoken instead of assuming her audience would follow her distinction between free speech and bad action, and accuse her of being evasive.</p><p>One has to wonder if this isn't a clear example of the political right's efforts to hit back at what they see as the center of "wokism"? Elise Stefanik demands a simple yes/no answer to her "genocide" question, and mocks the presidents' legalistic answers. While most people are agreeing Gay should have found a way to avoid answering a moral question with a legalistic response, anybody who knows Stefanik's background story of expulsion by the university for supporting Trump's claim that the 2020 election was stolen, can be expected to wonder how much of this attack on her alma mater through its president might be very personal indeed. I know, I know. I sound like I'm condemning with speculative innuendo, but <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7M3anc4PZv4">listen</a> to the distain in Stefanik's voice as she follows up her original question and tells Gay what her answer should have been.</p><p>I said earlier that the attack on Israel by Hamas has now blown up and sucked Americans polarized into right-wingers and lefties into the mix. To see that played out, listen first to the testimonies of Jewish students sponsored by the Republican right wing, then to the testimonies of two prominent Jewish scholars. The <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-YEXMYsCNQ">former</a> are almost guaranteed to make you believe Jews are not safe on American campuses; the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xtP7CVSJGY">latter</a> are almost guaranteed to make you believe to cast out the three presidents is tantamount to surrendering the free speech debate to those who would shut it down for good. If nothing else is true, the fact that truth is not likely to survive in a shouting match is. Somehow we need to get back to calmer discussions of differences.</p><p>This brings us to the question of whether Magill and her two president-colleagues should be punished for failure to understand when to use nuanced reasoning and when to cater to the need for plain speech - and to what degree. Do they really need to resign their jobs? I think not. God help us if we are all judged by our weakest moments. Ten years before being pushed out of UPenn, she was dean of the Stanford Law School. And I am happy to note I am hardly alone in this. Both the <i><a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/12/editorial-gay-harvard-partisan-attacks/">Harvard Crimson</a></i> and the <i><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/12/business/claudine-gay-harvard/index.html">Harvard Corporation Board</a></i> have come out in support of Claudine Gay. <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/12/07/metro/mit-board-supports-president-kornbluth/#:~:text=By%20Tonya%20Alanez%20Globe%20Staff,%2C%202023%2C%209%3A53%20p.m.&text=In%20a%20statement%20issued%20Thursday,and%20other%20forms%20of%20hate.%E2%80%9D">Ditto</a> for MIT's support for Sally Kornbluth.</p><p>Ironically, there is a plus side to this kerfluffle. A quick glance down the commentary to the reports of this event will reveal all manner of anti-woman and homophobic attitudes alive and well in America to this day, but they cannot hide the fact that women are now breaking glass ceilings. Just as with Liz Cheney losing her seat in Congress as the representative for Wyoming because she went out on a limb to take down Trump, these women are paying a high price for not "doing the right thing" as many people see it. </p><p>Dig deeper into the story and you see the three presidents being attacked on a more personal level, particularly Gay, who is <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/12/12/1218514457/harvard-president-claudine-gay-antisemitism">charged</a> with plagiarism in her dissertation, a charge I won't go into here, but you can follow up by clicking on the highlighted word "charged" in this sentence. Questions were also raised about the degree to which their universities were pro-Palestinian because much of their research funding comes allegedly from places like Qatar, a country clearly on the side of the Palestinian claims. I won't go into that, either, but you can read about it <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4312167/">here</a> and consider whether Qatar is being given a bad rap by people failing to distinguish between its support of Palestine and its legitimate interest in fostering scientific research. </p><p>Alan Dershowitz, not a person whose opinions I value much any more, but he has pretty much <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reibkTRZ4oI">trashed</a> her and I think his charges need at least a proper airing. But this is not the proper time to go after her. This is a time for sticking to the free speech issue at hand and not piling on with old grievances. If Gay was the wrong person, as Dershowitz claims, for the job of Harvard president, that issue can be dealt with in another venue where she can get a full hearing and others get to come to her defence.</p><p>I understand, by taking this position sympathetic to the presidents, I am going to disappoint some of my Jewish friends, particularly those for whom the recent wave of anti-semitism in the U.S. and abroad is especially galling. And as I said, even in Germany, where they have worked so hard to stand by Israel in recent years and insist on ridding any suggestion they could ever again harbor anti-semitism, it makes one weak in the knees to see that resolve begin to crumble. </p><p>I understand why some might want to insist it's time to stop what they see as hair-splitting. And, as I pointed out, there is real anti-semitism on these and other campuses in the country, and so far it has not being adequately dealt with. But I also see in the attacks on these three presidents an overreaction, a pendulum swing from too little to too much. And I see the potential loss of democracy as a real possibility and I believe the need to support free speech is critical in shoring it up against those now willing to dismiss it as too much trouble to maintain. </p><p>It's time, I think, to stop bashing elite universities and remind ourselves of the scientific and intellectual gifts they routinely give not only to the United States, but to the whole world. And it's time to give the three presidents some space. It's not for me to determine the fate of the three presidents. The level of support MIT and Harvard are giving their presidents indicates their horrible gaffe (giving a legalistic-sounding response when a stronger show of sympathy for Jewish fears was called for) firing them would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, especially since they have all three recognized their error and apologized for it. Listen to the House <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gVzVSjhXSM">debate</a> over Resolution 927 today on whether Congress should to call for the presidents' resignations today (seriously? Congress wants to dictate their will to private educational institutions???), particularly to the strong case <i>against</i> the resolution by Jamie Raskin, which begins at about minute 28:48. Jamie Raskin says it better than I can.</p><p>Their fate is not in my hands. It will probably be decided by big donors threatening to withhold donations if the presidents get out of line. If it were in my hands, I'd say, "You blew it, ladies.... And now can we all get back to work fighting anti-semitism more effectively, having learned from this experience? And to the business of being civil to each other?"</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="color: #222222;"><br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="color: #222222;"><br /></span></p><p><br /></p>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-23075431500078011702023-12-10T10:33:00.000-08:002023-12-11T10:21:47.105-08:00Things my grandmother taught me<p>In 1962, the year I graduated from college, I had to go into the army. The U.S. had a draft in place and I was at the age where the Cuban Crisis and the impending war in Vietnam meant I could be forced to carry a gun and kill people in the name of "defending freedom." I didn't want to do that, but I also didn't want to take advantage of the usual methods of escape. I knew I could declare myself a homosexual, but that was the equivalent of hanging myself from a tree. I could take a hammer to my instep, but I've never been very good with pain. I could run to Canada. That was an attractive prospect, actually. I have an emotional home in Nova Scotia, where my maternal grandmother was from and where we used to spend all our summers growing up. But that too was unappealing, in the end. I had too many ties to the United States.</p><p>I got wind of another alternative. I could take the bull by the horns, volunteer to join the army before they could draft me, and apply for the Army Language School in Monterey. As a volunteer I had a decent chance of avoiding the infantry and determining my own placement.</p><p>Let me continue for a while in Russian. I'll provide a translation in the next paragraph, so you can skip right over it if you don't read Russian.</p><p>Примерно в полутора часах езды к югу отсюда находится город Монтерей. В Монтерее есть школа под названием <i>Армейская школа языков</i>. Пока я был там, его название изменилось на <i>Институт Иностранных Языков Министерства Обороны</i>, но я присоединился к нему, когда это был ALS. Этот опыт стал поворотным моментом в моей жизни. По трем причинам. Во-первых, потому что меня потом отправили на командировку в Германию; во-вторых, потому что у меня сложились многие из самых важных дружеских отношений в моей жизни с людьми, которых я впервые встретил там. И, наконец, из-за близости к Сан-Франциско, где я проводил много выходных, меня познакомили с местом, которое, как я сразу понял, станет моим домом в ближайшие годы.</p><p>About an hour and a half drive south of here is the town of Monterey. In Monterey there is a school called the <i>Army Language School</i>. Its name changed to the <i>Defence Language Institute</i> while I was there, but I joined it when it was the ALS. That experience was a major turning point in my life. For three reasons. First, because I was sent to Germany on assignment afterwards; secondly, because I formed some of my most important lifetime friendships with people I first met there. And finally, because of its proximity to San Francisco, where I would come to spend many weekends, I was introduced to a place I instantly recognized would be my home in the years to come.</p><p>The Cold War was at its height. In order to get the assignment to study at the Army Language School I had to enroll in the Army Security Agency. I had to become a spy. Not a cloak-and-dagger spy, but a much more mundane kind: somebody who sat in a room listening to Russian soldiers in East Germany talk to each other, hoping that if they were going to start World War III they would talk about it in advance.</p><p>I did this in Berlin. I lived in a barracks where Hitler's former elite guards were once housed, and every day climbed into a bus to be transported out to the pile of rubble that had become a mountain of the ruins of the buildings of Berlin. The place had an ironic name: Teufelsberg - Devil's Mountain. It was in the American Zone, and restricted to Army Security Agency people only, who built a site on top where they could raise antennas and scoop up all sorts of radio waves, including those of the entire Russian Army stationed in the German Democratic Republic, which Berlin was, conveniently, located right plunk in the middle of.</p><p>My year at Monterey had been richly fulfilling. By the end of it I was able to follow lectures provided by some of the 150 Russian faculty members now living as exiles in the U.S. and unable to follow their original professional paths as doctors, lawyers, and intellectuals of all sorts. They were lucky to get jobs as teachers of Russian for the American military and largely hid their lights under a bushel. Fortunately for us, some of them couldn't keep that light contained and it would leak out. Such was the case with one member of the Romanov family who lived and died for Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. In the last few months at Monterey, while I missed many of the fine points I was nonetheless able to listen to Prince Romanov (whom we cruelly called "Shaky Jake" - I think he had Parkinson's and we were young and stupid) lecture on and on in Russian about what a great man this guy Tchaikovsky was and what he had contributed to Russian culture.</p><p>We were not supposed to be exposed to this kind of positive view of things Russian, I am sure, but fortunately the Americans making the decisions about things like this had next to no knowledge about what they were doing. They even stamped our bilingual dictionaries "Confidential" because they contained Russian words. And while we're on the topic, despite the fact that they threatened to jail us if we said word one about our work, they issued insignia for our uniforms that carried the image of a cloak and dagger. No shit.</p><p>When I got to Berlin, that knowledge of Russian I had spent a solid year acquiring, six hours a day in class plus homework, five days a week, was put to use. I'd go into the windowless quonset hut, put on my earphones, and listen to Russian soldiers count to ten and back down to one. They had to talk because they had to keep the lines open - just in case the American invaded - and when they had nothing else to say - which was most of the time - the simply counted to ten.</p><p>After a month of this I was convinced I was losing my mind. In retrospect, that is probably less of an exaggeration than it now sounds. I ended up being transferred to the German section because I was raised in a sometimes German-speaking household and could handle the Saxon dialect my colleagues who had studied German at the ALS found overly taxing. But that's a story for another day. How I had almost not gotten my security clearance when they found out I had a German-born mother and had relatives living in Germany. How the army had not wanted to allow native speakers of German to work as German translators but believed it was safer to train people with no German backgrounds instead. The point is, after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to teach me Russian, the army was now faced with a choice: throw this loser in jail for a while and give him a dishonorable discharge, or take the deal he was offering and get some use out of him. I am happy to relate the army made what was the best choice for both of us.</p><p>I once swore I'd live a life of no regrets. It was a childish goal, totally unrealizable, but I was sincere when I made the vow. I couldn't know then how much I would regret not continuing to study music and develop my skills at the piano, not learning Japanese early on, before spending 24 years in that country with very imperfect Japanese, not spending more time in France, not studying Chinese. And allowing my Russian to dry up and blow away. I'm a linguist, and know a bit <i>about </i>language, but I live with gigantic gaps in my knowledge of actual languages themselves.</p><p>But along with the regrets come the consolations. I can't play the piano anymore, but the years of practice gave me an appreciation for music that I credit with getting me through the hours of isolation during the Covid crisis - with full credit going to YouTube, of course. And, it turns out, my Russian may be on life support but it's not dead. And with a familiarity with the language came the even more important familiarity with the culture and love of all things Russian. Well, most things Russian. I learned from my German grandmother in the first ten years of life to distinguish between good Germans and bad Germans. And in later years to extend that to the point where I now agonize over Putin's invasion of Ukraine not just for the death and destruction of Ukrainians, but for the cannon fodder Putin is making of young Russian lives.</p><p>We recently had major reconstruction done on our house. The company we hired is owned by Moldovans and the workers who came to the house were two Moldovans, three Ukrainians, an Uzbek and a Kazakh. They were fantastic siding replacers, painters, plasterers and all-around fixer-uppers. Their working language was Russian, and you can imagine the pleasure it gave me to realize I could follow much of their conversation.</p><p>They caught me listening to them.</p><p>Ой, вы говорите по-русски? </p><p>Ah, do you speak Russian?</p><p>Я изучал русский язык, когда служил в армии, 60 лет назад.</p><p>I studied Russian when I was in the army, sixty years ago.</p><p>To counter the awkwardness I felt being so out-of-date, I thought I'd make some nice idle conversation.</p><p>"So you all speak Russian because you grew up in Soviet Union days?"</p><p>A brief moment of silence.</p><p>Then, "Oh, no. We were all born after 1991."</p><p>Not friends of Russia. But fully accepting of the Russian language as their own. The Kazakh told me he never learned Kazakh properly, that Russian was his home and school language from the beginning. These are people who had their own version of a grandmother to teach them how to tell the good guys from the bad guys and not jump to conclusions.</p><p>You can see why my heart aches when gay people on American university campuses form groups carrying pro-Hamas signs "because they support the Palestinian people."</p><p>Where were their grandmothers when they needed them?</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-61038595642695924022023-12-07T11:32:00.000-08:002023-12-07T12:36:27.930-08:00Dresden<p>I've just finished watching a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc9PScONCSo">video</a> about the reconstruction of Dresden and am flooded with memories of a time gone by.</p><p>Sometime in the early 90s my friend Jerry called me and said, "It's time." We were in the army together in the 60s and had made a trip to Italy to visit relatives of his in Torino. Our strongest memory of that trip was the time we spent in Florence, where I remember looking up at the splendid villas and thinking wouldn't it be great to see this glorious city from up there in the hills. Jerry and I were travelling on the cheap, but we promised each other that some day we would come back and get closer to the full splendor. Now, thirty years later, we had the money and it was time.</p><p>When I mentioned the upcoming trip to my friends Bob and Hiro (I was living in Japan at the time), they asked if they could join us. Two friends of Jerry's had also asked to join in and this nostalgic "full splendor" journey had suddenly grown to six people. This meant it would be cheaper for us to rent apartments in Siena, Florence and Rome than to stay in hotels. The excitement built as we collected recipes from Italian cookbooks and envisioned sitting around at long Italian tables filled with pasta and Chianti and squeezing all the Italy out of the experience we possibly could.</p><p>Because I couldn't go to Europe without visiting Berlin - the place Jerry and I had spent most of our Cold War Army days - I added ten days at the beginning of the trip. Bob, who had heard all my tales of my years in Berlin, decided he wanted to join me for that part of the trip as well and not just the Italian part. I was, of course, delighted to be able to share Berlin and Potsdam with him and with Hiro.</p><p>What I didn't realize was that Bob and Hiro were on their last legs as a couple, that Hiro was a fistful of resentment and Bob had an equal amount of guilt about having cheated on him, enabling Hiro to lead him around by the nose. The trouble started in Potsdam, when I took them to <i>Sans Souci</i>, one of my all-time favorite places, where one could walk the paths that Frederick the Great walked with Voltaire and imagine all sorts of lofty conversations about the meaning of life. Hiro's pronouncement on the Berlin trip? "I don't like Protestant cities. It's the Catholic cities in the South where all the beauty is."</p><p>I was determined not to be drawn in to their personal squabbles and not let this dream trip get off on the wrong foot, so I kept silent. Hiro would miss the point that this time in Berlin was to share my German identity with Bob and revel in the personal and the political history. It was not a time for gazing at cathedrals or Michelangelo's Pietà (although we would get to them too, eventually).</p><p>From Potsdam we moved on to Dresden, where I was taken by surprise at how completely I would get swept up by the stark and unfamiliar atmosphere. When the Berlin Wall came down and Germany reunified and it became possible to travel in the former East Germany, I had had my first close encounter with the effects of socialist priorities in Potsdam. The East Germans had little money and prioritized housing and social welfare over restoration of the buildings of empire. As a result, <i>Sans Souci, </i>Freddie's getaway for himself and his dogs,<i> </i>and the larger New Palace, Kaiser Wilhelm II's last residence, were still in drab disrepair. The gardens were splendid; it didn't take a fortune to develop them, but putting back the structures of the elite of days gone by was not a priority. Now, here in Dresden, there was another dimension: decades after the war they still had not rebuilt the inner city. One could walk around spaces in the downtown area as large as football fields and find only emptiness. A profound sense of depression sank over me and I began looking forward to getting out of Dresden and on to Prague and Vienna and our "let's do it right" trip to Italy with Jerry and two of his friends.</p><p>Sitting in a MacDonald's café right in the center of Dresden's downtown, directly across from where the Frauenkirche once stood, I looked out over this evidence of human cruelty. The world will forever debate the decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but for me, at least, the fire bombing of Dresden is not up for debate. I had spent a lot of time on World War II history and was familiar with the arguments over whether it was necessary to bomb Dresden into the ground. The war was clearly won by the time, in February 1945, the British RAF with American help saturated the city with enough bombs to cause a firestorm that melted human flesh. Overkill, it would seem, now with the benefit of hindsight.</p><p>There was no need for that degree of savagery. It was clearly done as a humiliation exercise. Dresden was Germany's cultural center, Hitler's pride and joy. Its military significance is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden">contested</a>, and I don't want to make a case for it here. Either way, the misery and death brings home the fact that we are at the mercy of decisions made by those in high places who can and do make Realpolitik decisions in which human beings can be redefined as unfortunate-but-necessary "collateral damage." I grew up in America where people bewailed the loss of American lives in World War II. But I grew up in a German family and bewailed the loss of German lives, as well, and struggled to make sense of how easily the Germans could have been led by the nose to follow a Pied Piper who promised to solve all their problems for them. Since the Russians invaded Ukraine, I have been repeating this experience. While most people mourn the loss of life among Ukrainians, I am acutely aware of the cannon fodder among Russian youth. I mourn Russian deaths these days and wonder why Russians can't or won't rise up in protest. And I am reliving the aching question of how Americans can be following a modern-day fascistically-inclined leader who promises ("Only I can do it!") to bring back America's better days.</p><p>Henry Kissinger died this week. In a more just world, I believe this man should have been tried as a war criminal. He is directly <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/12/2/kissinger-a-war-criminal-with-a-nobel-peace-prize">responsible</a> for the death of between three and four million people, many of them Cambodians in a country we had never declared war on. That decision then cascaded into the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge regime which brought about the "killing fields" where another million and a half people lost their lives. If you want, you can also call this a "contested" decision: Henry Kissinger got a Nobel Prize for fighting communism and got to live to the age of 101 and be embraced by America's ruling class right up to the end. Kissinger also helped in the assassination of a legitimately elected socialist in Chile, Salvador Allende, who was replaced by Augusto Pinochet, known for dropping young people objecting to his regime from planes into the sea.</p><p>In modern times, we have Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. Just as Kissinger can justify his actions by declaring he was fighting communism, Netanyahu determined it was in his interest to support the Hamas regime in Gaza to counterbalance the Palestinian Authority, which, if it could gather sufficient steam, would work on a two-state solution in the Middle East. Hamas launched a barbaric attack on Israel on October 7th and the Israelis are retaliating by killing countless thousands of Gazans caught in the fire - "collateral damage" - as they try to root out this same Hamas regime. How it is the Israelis have not ridden Netanyahu out of town on a rail, or at least locked him up as a Hamas supporter, remains a mystery.</p><p>There are two schools of thought in Israel. One, the one I relate to, starts from the premise that Israelis and Palestinians have no choice but to learn to live together. Neither of them is going away. The decades of pushing the Palestinians out and the adamant resistance of Palestinians to the establishment of a Jewish state in their midst have only prolonged death and destruction. Israeli progressives want to find their way out of this dilemma through cooperation. The other school of thought, the one embraced by Netanyahu and those who believe God gave the Jews the entire land of Palestine, is that there is no reason to believe in cooperation, that trust is naive and all one can do is fight tooth and nail to keep Palestinians from gaining the upper hand. In his mind, he's doing what's best for Israel, just at Kissinger was convinced his way of fighting communism was worth the collateral damage. If you wiggle just right, you can see things from these men's perspectives and even make their case for them. But then you eventually reach the kind of justification that gives Hitler a pass as well. He too was a moral man, provided you are willing to argue that morality is best understood as what's good for the German people, all others be damned. It's taboo to suggest that Putin's "What's good for Russia, Ukraine be damned," Netanyahu's "What's good for Israel, Palestinians be damned" and Trump's "What's good for America, the rest of the world be damned" are parallel thoughts, ultimately. But that's what it comes down to - we think in terms of human universals or we split into warring factions led by lesser beings.</p><p>In the U.S., we have the MAGA folks propping up a man responsible for thousands of deaths by spreading misinformation about vaccines, a man who suggested we use bleach to cure Covid, that a contest between blacks and white supremacists has "good people on both sides," a man who refers to his political enemies as "vermin" - in a direct throw-back to Nazi name-calling. So much for American exceptionalism.</p><p>There is no reason to automatically link these thoughts, the bombing of Dresden, the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the Kissinger deaths in Cambodia and Chile, the brutal invasion of Ukraine, the Netanyahu/Hamas deaths in Israel/Palestine. That's just me allowing the thoughts in my head to run free.</p><p>Sometimes I go to YouTube to bring me rich wonderful classical music by a half dozen or more of my favorite pianists and just sit back and groove.</p><p>Today I just happened on this video of the reconstruction of Dresden.</p><p>Random selections.</p><p>Random thoughts.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-48176674261292969312023-12-01T15:30:00.000-08:002023-12-01T15:30:38.167-08:00Whatever<p> I live by the parable of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant">blind men and the elephant.</a> I am convinced that we tell stories of truths seen through a lens that lets certain light - facts or information - through while blocking things that others might see. In doing so, we seldom - and maybe don't ever - get the whole big picture. You know the story. The earliest versions of it go back to the Tittha Sutta, a text from 500 B.C. when the Buddha was alive. But most of us know the version penned by the poet John Godfrey Saxe - about six blind men who come upon an elephant. One of them, puts his hands on the tusk and declares that an elephant is "round and very hard." A second, touching the tail, sees it as "thin like a rope." A third puts his hand on the side of the elephant and describes it as a wall. None see the whole elephant.</p><p>Not all reality is about missing the whole for the parts. Sometimes it's about truth and falsehood, and not about partial perception. But most people, I think, lack the ability to stand back and question their own convictions and wonder if their life experience is sufficient to perceive nuances. Pessimists are inclined to see the glass half-empty, optimists as half-full, and even when they get things right, they might not do so for the right reasons. My father used to annoy the hell out of my by declaring, "Even a clock that is stopped is right twice a day." I was pissed that he didn't seem to want to distinguish between being right because one get to truth for the right reasons, and not by accident.</p><p>This is a difficult time to be alive if you focus on the apparently real possibility that Donald Trump could become president again in 2024, and use the willingness of so many Americans to let go of democracy and repeat the colossal error of the Weimar Republic and give power to a strongman simply because he knows how to tap into fears of chaos and the possibility that things are changing too fast, and in the wrong direction. I'm feeling quite glass-half-empty these days when I look at floods and forest fires and other indications that we may not have halted climate change in time, when Putin appears to be winning the war in Ukraine, when Covid continues to kill and incapacitate people right and left, when Israel's solution to the barbaric attack on its people by Hamas is to kill thousands of children in Gaza and unabashedly claim their deaths are unavoidable. The only thing, practically, that keeps me from despair is the parable of the blind men and the elephant. I'm hoping I'm simply failing to see the whole picture.</p><p>Nuanced thinking is underrated. Particularly in dumbed-down America where we have convinced ourselves that the right to hold an opinion is the same thing as the right to declare what is factual and what is not. I just listened to a German talk-show in which the participants were arguing over whether Israel was an <i>apartheid</i> state. Their conclusion? Many Israeli policies are the policies of an apartheid state, yes, particularly in the West Bank, where settlers are getting away with brazenly illegal government-support of pushing Palestinians out of their homes. But we should not use the word <i>apartheid</i> because Israel's greatest fear is being wiped out themselves, and everybody knows that in South Africa, where the notion of <i>apartheid</i> originates, the victims of it eventually took over. And that means admitting they have an <i>apartheid</i> government means that they will eventually be overcome by their Arab minority living among them and subject to their wishes. The talk-show participants were saying, in effect, "yes Israel is an <i>apartheid</i> state, but we will not win friends and influence people in Israel by saying so." Same with calling Israel a colonizer state. The focus needs to go back onto the striving for a two-state solution.</p><p>Normally I would argue for simple plain truth expressed in simple plain language and call this approach an obfuscation, a manipulation of language for political ends, a form of insincerity. But in this particular case, I prefer a <i>Realpolitik</i>. Just as I believe the starting place for any discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma should be that the Israeli state is a given reality, and don't need or want to haul out the entire history of the Zionist project, I think there are times when life counts more than death and peace counts more than violence, and those ends are unattainable without nuanced thinking.</p><p>And now let me do something I know is going to feel like switching horses mid-stream. Let me move to different and unrelated topic and think out loud for a minute about the line between fact and opinion, which line we seem to have lost of late in America. Opinion, and its companion, taste, are not the same thing at all as truth and a preference for facts. I've been thinking a lot about this distinction and the consequences of our having so badly blurred the line. </p><p>Thanks to the internet, and YouTube in particular, we now have access to things people in previous generations never even dreamed of. We can bring to our immediate attention almost anything ever written or said. In my case, I've been listening to best-in-the-world performances by classical pianists, for example, for some time now. I have my favorites - Alexander Malofeev, the Jussen Brothers, Yuja Wang, Vyacheslav Gryaznov, Martha Argerich, to name a few that come first to mind, in no particular order, and without any attempt to rank them. I have my favorite pieces that I listen to over and over again. There is Alexander Malofeev playing Tchaikovsky's <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZtqjelW_nA">Pas de Deux</a></i> from <i>The Nutcracker Suite. </i>There is Vyacheslav Gryaznov playing Rachmaninoff's <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMuBludr5Tg">Italian Polka</a>. </i>There is the Jussen Brothers playing Strauss' <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYfsRfssIjw">Fledermaus</a></i> encore, all of which I've heard dozens of times. These pieces ground me. Not as "best" in any real sense in terms of technique or style or all-around beautiful pieces, but go-to music that makes me feel good, and bring balance back into my life. It has taken me a lifetime to recognize, however, that when it comes to esthetic experiences, I need to stop seeking out experts to tell me how to evaluate them. While careful study of music and paintings and dance and you-name-it forms of art definitely do enhance the pleasure of it, it doesn't determine whether or to what degree it is going to give me pleasure.</p><p>I've come to really dislike the ranking of great artists. I know I can't prevent others from doing it, from praising or criticizing Van Cliburn and Vladimir Horowitz and Arcadi Volodos and Arthur Rubenstein and setting them up against each other. I just listened to a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvKQKnIVy1I">performance</a> by Yunchan Lim of Rachmaninoff's <i>Third Piano Concerto</i> at the Van Cliburn competition in Fort Worth, Texas last year and got to my feet at the end, with tears in my eyes, in the privacy of my own bedroom with nobody else around. That happens sometimes. It was, to me, a perfect performance. Everything went right. The Steinway, the hall, Marin Alsop, that wonderful woman breaking into the all-male world of conducting - she too was in tears at the end of Yunchan's performance. In cowboy town Fort Worth, Texas, no less. For those who don't understand how beauty can sneak up on you. And don't miss the fact that this was not a recital or a concert. He was being evaluated against others in a competition!</p><p>Most of those who went to the trouble of submitting a comment agreed with me this was a world-class performance, a magical talent being displayed. But there were those who complained the Steinway wasn't quite perfectly tuned or that Yunchan's touch wasn't quite up to the standard set by Arcadi Volodos. </p><p>Some people are never satisfied, I said to myself. But, I couldn't help it, it sent me to YouTube, which, sure enough, had a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imdb5qxdVaU">recording</a> of Arcadi Volodos doing what's now called "Rach3" with the Oslo Philharmonic by those who assume the right to get familiar with these greats, unfortunately sound-only. And I have to admit that Volodos' version was also good-as-it-gets. And OK, maybe better. Fingers-that-fly (on other videos, trust me). It's like watching Olympic athletes perform at a superhuman level. But what am I supposed to do with those tears from Yunchan's performance, put them back in my head? Who's got it right? I ask myself - the version of me that appreciates exceptional talent, cold-hearted ranking of merit, knock-your-socks-off exceptional performances, or a sit-back-and-let-it-flow-over-you performance? An interesting, but ultimately trivial debate. You can go one way on one occasion, the other way on another.</p><p>There are times, it turns out, when you need to apply nuanced thinking to decide when to use nuanced thinking. I'm just stumbling around with the obvious here: there are fundamental differences in evaluating the three basic philosophical notions of truth, beauty and justice. With beauty and the evaluation of objects of art or perfomance or skill, seeking nuanced distinctions is little more than a game to play, and is all too often played by snobs and other one-uppers. And with justice, it's more a question of cultural notions of right and wrong. But it's when it comes to questions of truth that there is so much more at stake. Esthetic phenomena invite snobs whose opinions are more about proving one is a superior being or an "insider" than about anything resembling truth. Do I really need others, with greater knowledge of distinctions between "very good" and "very very good" to tell me how to approach an artist and a performance? It should be obvious that I do not. But life-and-death matters, including government policies about war and peace and national security, or health and education and who gets to appoint Supreme Court justices, require of all of us that we shed this virus we picked up in the 1960s, the idea that the appropriate response to everything was "Cool!" Or "Whatever!"</p><p>I went along with my husband who wanted to paint our house orange and shock the bejeezus out of our neighbors and stand out like a sore thumb. That's not <i>why</i> we did it; that's just the result. The point is that when it came to choosing between elegance and fun, we decided on the latter.</p><p>But when somebody tells me there is no difference between the democratically-oriented Joe Biden and the other guy who refers to his political opponents as <i>vermin</i>, well...</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-49748069433454462842023-11-10T13:19:00.003-08:002023-11-10T14:38:23.913-08:00Following Rachel Maddow's lead<p>I've been a big fan of Rachel Maddow for years now. There is so much there that I am drawn to. I like her faith in the American democratic project. I like the fact that her cool-headed recognition that we are mightily flawed as a nation doesn't shake her belief that humankind is nonetheless perfectable - provided we work hard enough at it. I like her dedication to investigative journalism, now looking for all the world like a lost art. I like her curiosity. I like her commitment to reason and objectivity. I like that she cares about world events and acts accordingly by keeping herself informed and remaining ready to express an opinion unabashedly, asserting her right to participate in the governance of the world around her. She inspires me to try to imitate that effort, however imperfectly.</p><p>I listened to her report the other day on the research she did for her latest book, <i>Prequel, </i>on Henry Ford, the pro-fascist American who helped Adolf Hitler form his policy on eliminating the Jews among us. I knew the story, and I'm familiar with the long history of anti-semitism in America as I am with the chronic social illnesses of racism and sexism that keeps the U.S. from being the model for morality it likes to see itself as. These things baffle you when you get deep into them. I'm currently reading a biography of Thomas Jefferson and trying to get into the mindset of a man who lived with the contradiction of working his whole life long to eliminate slavery while keeping two hundred slaves of his own. Wondering how I'd deal with the man if I could take a time machine back to Virginia in the late 1700s, and how hard I'd try to push him to work harder.</p><p>You don't have to look far to find imperfections in the society you live in. What's difficult is keeping your cool when talking with those who defend them. I'll never forget watching a program on television (I believe it was Donohue) as a kid where they lined up a number of concentration camp survivors and confronted them with holocaust deniers - in the interest of creating a fair debate. And another time when gays were confronted by homophobes, and each side got to "lay out their perspectives." As somebody who grew up with the belief that freedom of expression entailed having to listen to all sorts of slander and lies, it was a challenge. And it still is. I understand that there are people you'd rather shoot than talk to.</p><p>Sometimes the best we can do is agree to disagree. Debates on the existence of a God are like that. A complete waste of time, most of the time, because each side is simply reflecting a different set of experiences,</p><p>What about the two wars going on at the present, one in Ukraine, the other in Israel/Palestine? Are they simply two sides at loggerheads reflecting two different sets of experiences? Or is one side simply deluded? Does Putin have a case when he says Ukraine should be seen as part of Russia? Which narrative, the Zionist one or the Palestinian one, has the greater ring of truth? Are these legitimate issues one can and should debate? Can one side persuade the other, ultimately, or is the best than can happen that they agree to disagree? And if so, what can that disagreement look like other than endless war?</p><p>We reach out for examples of fight-to-the-death times that have given way to solutions. France and Germany, Britain and Germany, are today the best of friends. They were not when I was a kid. "The troubles" in Northern Ireland seem to have found their way to a solution, as well. If it can happen in these cases, why not in the Middle East?</p><p>Let me focus just on the Israel/Palestine conflict, for a moment, since that is the one I find not just sad, but heartbreaking. I've taken sides on Ukraine. I think the Russians need to recognize that there are too many Ukrainians willing to fight to the death for Russians to pursue this dream of folding them back into the arms of Mother Russia. For me, that's an easy one. The Palestinian case is more troubling because I find myself genuinely torn. I can feel the weight of the Jewish yearning for a homeland. And I can feel the injustice of what the Palestinians call an invasion of European Jews onto land they are being pushed out of. And the insult <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_was_no_such_thing_as_Palestinians#:~:text=%22There%20was%20no%20such%20thing,of%20the%20Six%2DDay%20War.">uttered</a> by that kindly old grandma, Golda Meir: "There is no such thing as Palestinians."</p><p>Like anybody else who has been dealing with this issue since my eighth birthday (pardon me for making it about me here, but the fact that we share a birthday is not insignificant to me) the day the modern Israeli nation was formed - I've listened to countless hours of justification from both sides. I know pretty well how the two narratives go. I've heard both presented numerous times by convincing spokespersons. A good Palestinian argument makes me pro-Palestinian; a good Jewish argument makes me pro-Israel. Because I am neither Jew nor Arab I have the luxury of washing my hands of the conflict. Fight it out amongst yourselves, guys, I've said out loud more than once.</p><p>I don't think anybody with any sense of responsibility can take that approach. Israel is a nuclear power; if they feel existentially threatened, one has to assume they are likely not to give up without a fight with those weapons. Then also Americans, like myself, have to assume responsiblity for the fact that our government goes to almost incredible lengths to support Israel, down to the last bullet and howitzer. We are morally obligated to watch where our money goes. Never mind that much of that support comes from American Christian <a href="https://apnews.com/article/christian-zionists-israel-republican-presidential-candidates-97a5bd9359a9af724fb55cfb154007ef">nationalists</a> who believe that the conversion of Jews to Christianity is a necessary precursor to the Battle of Armageddon.</p><p>So here's my take. I try to watch and read a wide range of analysis of the problem, but I admit I'm like everybody else, a product of the information that happens to come to my attention. Let me lay out what opinions I have formed and stress that they are the result of those somewhat arbitrary sources, and therefore not carved in stone.</p><p>1. Hamas found an opportunity to attack Israel because Bibi Netanyahu took his eye off the ball. His base includes the right wing "Israel for Jews only," settlers in the West Bank, committed to expanding Israeli territory by pushing Palestinians out. Because Palestinians were causing a fuss over being pushed out, Bibi pulled the IDF, the Israeli Defence Forces, away from the Gaza border where they would have been able to prevent all or most of the incursion and subsequent massacre on October 7th. Pretty bad call by a political leader. How he keeps from getting tarred and feathered remains a mystery.</p><p>2. The Palestinians, for all the injustice done to them over the last three quarters of a century, have had some pretty bad luck in getting decent leadership according to the sources I read. Whether it's that, or unavoidable human folly, simple greed and corruption, or something in the polluted water that makes them unable to get their shit together to present a solid front against Israeli incursion on their homeland, I can't tell. I hear all these explanations all the time, but don't know how to evaluate their validity because I have trouble finding truly neutral sources of information. I find believable sources - in the British and German press, but Britain started this whole mess during Mandate times, so I pause before taking British information in, and Germany, while justifiably doing all it can to show national contrition for the evil it perpetrated against the Jews, is also not a neutral party to the scene. Germany is among the most notable world <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/german-military-exports-israel-up-nearly-10-fold-berlin-fast-tracks-permits-2023-11-08/#:~:text=As%20of%20Nov.,approved%20in%20all%20of%202022.">suppliers</a> of the Israeli war machine, thirty-two million dollars worth in 2022, and ten times that so far in 2023. I know Israel has to defend itself, but in the long run I see the choice of seeking a military solution as the primary cause of Middle East problems, ahead even of incompetence in governing on both sides. An understandable outcome of the seething hatred among the two populations, but hardly a productive one.</p><p>It's not that I don't trust sources like the <i>Guardian</i> and <i>Haaretz; </i>it's that I'm just cautious in principle, given how radical the opposing narratives are.</p><p>3. If it were up to me (it's not, obviously and I realize that nothing I say here is original) I'd suggest we skip the historical narratives and begin with present reality: Both sides are willing to fight to the death to get their way. Israelis need to convince their right wing that it doesn't matter that they think God promised the land to them: if they want their children to live, they will have to find a compromise. And Palestinians need to get past the fact that the Israelis bullied their way in; they are here now, they have built a mighty nation and it will never be disassembled. Both sides have no alternative to compromise. </p><p>4. Israel's Arab neighbors have often taken advantage of the Palestinians as a victim rather than come to their aid. Egypt, not without justification, is fearful of what would happen if there were a sudden influx of refugees. The Jordanians have similar fears. And the world is not persuaded by those who insist the Palestinians, as Arabs, already have a homeland in Jordan. It's a cowardly inaccurate cop-out.</p><p>5. Probably the most intractable problem is the presence of now about 700,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They have to leave. Don't ask me how, but either they leave or they accept living under Palestinian authority. I see no way out of this. This is a backs-to-the-wall issue, I realize, but if you want a solution, it has to include this step.</p><p>6. Both sides need to bring back a serious commitment to a two-state solution. Because Israelis fear the Palestinians might someday outnumber them in a single state, the one-state solution is a no-go, precisely because as a democracy it would have to stop being a Jewish state. </p><p>7. The reason the world, and not just reasonable Palestinians and Israelis bearing the brunt of Middle Eastern folly, throw up their hands in despair is that it gets to watch in real time how the expression of anger leads to more anger and hatred to more hatred. Apparently Hamas had no idea Netanyahu's blunder in leaving Southern Israel unprotected would enable them to run in and butcher innocents - ironically, largely folk most interested in working toward a just solution with Palestinians. They let loose sickos among them who raped, killed kids and gouged eyes out. And then made videos of their horrors they had to know would inflame Israeli rage. Which it did, and now many otherwise decent Israelis are perfectly willing to turn Gaza into a parking lot and kill not hundreds, but thousands of Gazan children. The world cries out for people who can back people down from this level of rage. Who can find nuances in the most trying of circumstances.</p><p>8. I don't expect to be alive by the time Israelis and Palestinians come to live peacefully and cooperatively side by side, but I look at the large number of French people taking vacations in Germany and vice versa. And at the very real possibility that the Northern Irish can now drive across into Ireland and no longer remember where the border was. Well, they could until Brexit. I'm not up-to-date on that. But Brexit notwithstanding, things can get better.</p><p>9. Because this Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been labeled intractable and has gone on for so very very long, and baffled so many people with good intentions, it's tempting to view it as one does a chronic illness and find ways to take our minds off it. But that's like putting a band-aid over an infection. What's needed are people who can fight, get knocked down, and get back up to fight some more, no matter how long this problem lingers. I know how hard it is to reason with some people. But some day it will sink in that there is a way to prevent their children from dying by bombs, tanks and guns.</p><p>I started this reflection off with Rachel Maddow's history of fascism in America. She goes to great lengths to not make comparisons with the rise of the National Socialists in the 1930s, insisting she wants to place the focus on the "good guys, those who resisted fascist and anti-semitic forces on government. But you can't escape the fact that at times they held sway, and the government did cave to their wishes at times. And if you don't see a cautionary tale in there, you're not paying attention.</p><p>Something in me tells me I should put down my reading on the troubles in the Middle East and pay more attention to the fact that an alarming number of Americans seem to be willing to allow Trump back in office, knowing (but not caring?) that he will immediately dismantle the legal structures we have in place to keep elections free and the judiciary independent of a <i>Führer. </i></p><p>Once again, it's all about getting your priorities straight and your shit together.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-20602685567791779692023-11-06T10:44:00.002-08:002023-11-06T12:36:49.094-08:00Still fumbling for the right words<p>Sometime in the early 1970s - I think it was 1972 - I got word from Berlin that my Tante Frieda seemed to be on her last legs. So my friend Ben and I hopped an Aeroflot flight to Moscow, intending to spend a couple days there before taking the train to Berlin. Everything had to be arranged through <i>Intourist</i> in those days, right down to meal vouchers in the hotel we were assigned to. Much as I wanted to get to Tante Frieda, I was counting on her surviving long enough for us to have a look at the Kremlin. She lived another dozen years.</p><p>Aeroflot felt no need to accommodate passengers. The eleven or twelve hours, whatever it was, were boring as hell, "in-flight entertainment" evidently being a decadent Western conceit. And when we reached the air space over Moscow, the plane simply dived straight down without any warning. No way to know whether they were doing this to save on fuel or whether we were facing certain death. I assumed the latter but managed to calm down when I noticed the Russian passengers were taking this move in stride.</p><p>It had been a decade since my Army Language School days and my Russian was pretty rusty. Ben and I were given rooms miles apart, for some reason. No cell phones, of course, in those days. I wanted to shower and sleep, but there was no soap in my bathroom, so I wandered into the hall to find the overseer, a woman sitting in a raised booth in the middle of the corridor. "Soap?" I asked, rubbing my hands together. I had forgotten the Russian word. "Ah, мыло (mylo)," says the lady in charge, and produces a tiny bar from under her desk. Without trying I had hit upon the secret to getting soap.</p><p>Somehow Ben and I found each other and before going out into the freezing cold - it was December - we went back to the soap lady to ask where we could eat. She didn't bother to look up from what she was reading, but simply indicated with her head that we should follow our noses to the end of the corridor. Which we did. When we got to the cafeteria, there were two women in waitress uniforms watching us approach. I summoned up my Russian, with all its limitations. Instead of saying, "Can we use these coupons here?" I said "Is it possible to use these coupons here?" (Возможно использовать эти купоны здесь? - Vozmozhno ispolzovat' eti kuponi zdyes?) The answer came back with what I swear was a sneer. "Все возможно! (Vsyo vozmozhno! - "Everything is possible!"</p><p>We were in the Hotel Rossiya, right next to Red Square, so we didn't have to go far to see the main sights. Ben freaked out at the total absence of cars. Only one car passed us on our walk and a policeman stopped it. We never understood why. I can't remember where we were going but I knew it was on Gorky Street, so I stopped a kindly-looking elder gentleman and hauled out my Russian once more: "Can you tell me where Gorky Street is?" He stares at me for a minute. Then says, "Gorkovo? Gorkovo?" and reaches down and touches the pavement with the back of his hand. "Vot Gorkovo" "Here is Gorky Street."</p><p>I had never had so many humiliations one after the other in my life. What is it about these people? They're going to win the Cold War on intimidation alone.</p><p>Other than a quickie walk around the Kremlin - at least we managed to do that - we missed the chance to do much else and made our way to the train for Berlin. Once again, Intourist showed a complete lack of consideration for what its "customers" might want, and put Ben in the forward set of coaches and me in the rear - with no way of crossing from one to the other. I was totally on my own for the entire distance, in a car filled with sullen Poles who were teachers of Russian on an excursion to Moscow.</p><p>Sullen, that is, until we reach the Polish border when all hell broke loose. Out came the bottles of vodka, the sandwiches and salami, and suddenly everybody wanted to know who this strange American was travelling alone through their country. For the first time, I began to relax and let my Russian do what it could. But the time we reached Warsaw, where they all got off, I was snockered and quite fluent.</p><p>Well, fluent may be going too far. Because I had been living in Japan for a couple years, my mind did that trick that often happens to second-language learners. The brain divides the language storage space into two compartments - English and "Other." Try as I may, I couldn't keep myself from sticking Japanese words into my Russian sentences.</p><p>That memory was brought alive this morning when one of the guys working on my house stuck his head through the door to the patio. The electrical socket on the outside of the house doesn't work, so we told the guys to use the one just inside the door to keep their batteries charged. The guys, as I explained elsewhere before, are from Moldova, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan and their common working language is Russian.</p><p>"Mozhno?" says Yuri. "May I?"</p><p>"Mochiron," I respond.</p><p>"Er... "Konyechno."</p><p>Amazing how the mind can turn an awkward, slightly unpleasant memory into a fond melancholic one over time. "Of course," is "konyechno" in Russian. Or "mochiron" in Japanese.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-1826091105065944562023-11-04T19:47:00.005-07:002023-11-04T19:56:57.535-07:00Tore - a film review<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgOC5eVn2kGlHEdi1p_fif7dq_ud4ipLhPfG-FZQU3SpShBneNke8oUb0B-buZmk5bS-OdCBn9X9jFY3-hml78Z8SNEMUIqtD2fKff0GcDbb4mqnvYjV_e626Qz0fkc4lzrkwUncR5WXeTsXrNdxeyAUoXOYiKn9TKrDy4ETpW6BQZrXc5tz3I6ULWOdKI" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="580" data-original-width="680" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgOC5eVn2kGlHEdi1p_fif7dq_ud4ipLhPfG-FZQU3SpShBneNke8oUb0B-buZmk5bS-OdCBn9X9jFY3-hml78Z8SNEMUIqtD2fKff0GcDbb4mqnvYjV_e626Qz0fkc4lzrkwUncR5WXeTsXrNdxeyAUoXOYiKn9TKrDy4ETpW6BQZrXc5tz3I6ULWOdKI" width="281" /></a></div>I want to talk about another of those movies that seem to be piling up these days, the kind you watch and can't quite explain why because they are not all that good.<p></p><div>This one fits that category. It intrigued me no end. First off, I found I had an intense attraction to the writer, William Spetz, who also plays the lead role in the TV series. It's titled <i>Tore.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>It's Swedish and takes place in Stockholm.</div><div><br /></div><div>Tore, the main character is, like Spetz who plays him, 27 years old. He's not a loser, exactly, but he has done nothing of note in his life, has lived at home with his father since his mother's death, has no ambition, has never had sex, never gotten drunk, can't drive a car. His father, and his best friend, a girl named Linn, believe he needs to be pushed out of the nest so he can get his life started.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's painful to watch. His naiveté is cloying, and I no doubt would have turned the film off in the first twenty minutes if it were not for his eyebrows. </div><div><br /></div><div>His father gets hit by a garbage truck and dies, suddenly, and the entire plot line consists in watching this immature kid fail to grow up, fail to grieve, fail to do anything useful. If I'm correct about American tastes when I say Americans like people to be "good deep down inside" I'm probably also correct when I say Swedes don't have any need for their fictional characters to be good guys. They are willing to watch somebody bob on the waves and find themselves - or not - by the end of the 90 minutes it takes to tell their story.</div><div><br /></div><div>While Tore has never had sex, his desires are same-sex desires, and he stumbles into sex, drugs and alcohol with equal clumsiness. We're supposed to believe the story is about a guy who can't process grief. It is that, but it's just as much about a guy who can't process much of anything that matters in life. He even sells his dog, at one point, the third creature in his life, along with Linn and his father, who love him unconditionally. Spetz, the writer, risks creating a character so devoid of character and interest, that you wonder at some point, as I said, why you're still watching. It can't be just the eyes and the eyebrows.</div><div><br /></div><div>There are some very graphic sex scenes, and they are well played. The drag queens are talented and the child actors are well chosen.</div><div><br /></div><div>A mixed bag of a movie. My guess is the reason I got to the end is that I couldn't believe this guy could mess up his life so badly; I had to wait to see the happy ending that I hoped would be there.</div><div><br /></div><div>I also want to give credit to movies that feature gay characters who play roles that have nothing to do with their being gay. I can't put the label "The Long Hard Slog to Gay Liberation" on this one because it depicts a world in which gay characters are not fighting for liberation; they are living with it and in it.</div><div><br /></div><div>Won't spoil the ending for you.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Netflix streaming - six episodes</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><p></p><div></div><p></p><div><br /></div>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-84686864353323622582023-10-28T17:20:00.002-07:002023-10-28T17:27:29.112-07:00Prince Turki speaks for me<p>Stick around long enough and the world may actually come to your front door.</p><div>Or, at least, blow your mind.<br /><div><br /></div><div>In my politically active days I was ardently opposed to the war in Vietnam. Most of the world has come around to the view that that war was the turning point to any claim the United States may have had to a moral high ground in international relations. I believe I called that one right.</div><div><br /></div><div>When war criminals George W. Bush and his boss, Vice-President Cheney, decided to use 9/11 as an opportunity to invade Iraq, they were roundly supported by people on both the left and the right. I proudly put a bumper sticker on my car announcing "Barbara Lee speaks for me." She was and is my representative in Congress (she's now running for the Senate.) It was Barbara Lee who was the sole representative to vote against that invasion of Iraq. That too, has turned out to be the right call. It was a shameful moment, when America proved it knows how to make the same mistake twice. It handed Iran a prize on a silver platter, and opened the flood gates to the Taliban, ISIS, Hamas and other islamist zealots. It contributed in a significant way to the hatred many in the Muslim world feel toward Western ways. Instead of modeling democracy, America (and its allies) chose to seek change by means of killing machines. When bombs drop on your heads it's hard to believe the guys dropping the bombs have a nuanced understanding of the difference between ordinary Muslims and radical islamists.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now, once again, we are standing behind Bibi Nethanyahu in his campaign to root out Hamas, no matter how many children of Gaza have to die in the process. Even Biden, whom I have come to admire since he picked up the reins from the anti-democracy party led by a cheap fraud of a hustler, even Biden, is giving money and arms to this misguided attempt to prove that two wrongs can make a right, this time on the part of Israel.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm very pro-Jewish. Very pro-Israel. I understand the desire of Jews to have a homeland after the Holocaust Experience. I want them to succeed as a country. But I believe this use of bombs is not the way to go and is in the long run counter-productive. I believe that they are only generating more hatred. Another generation - as if three generations were not already enough - is learning to hate Israel with such passion that some will even be willing to become suicide bombers. I want them to stop bombing Gaza not because I am anti-Israel, but because I am pro-Israel.</div><div><br /></div><div>Argue with me. Go ahead. I have no claim to certainty here. But I do believe that's what is going on.</div><div><br /></div><div>And after living in Saudi Arabia, where women, until recently, could not drive or go to the movies without permission from a father or a husband, where every day I watched religious police bash people with clubs for not closing their stores fast enough at prayer time, I never thought I'd say this: not only does Barbara Lee speak for me. But so does Saudi Arabia's former intelligence chief, Turki Al-Faisal.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>At least on this issue. I'm sure if I knew more of his views, I might well find things to disagree on.</div><div><br /></div><div>But on this issue, he speaks for me.</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCTla5lupzc">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCTla5lupzc</a></div><div><br /></div><div>Start at the beginning of his speech at minute 1:35 if you want to skip the introduction.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-41298339393839281042023-10-15T13:11:00.001-07:002023-10-30T11:28:06.925-07:00Don't kill the people of Gaza<p>Two days ago, I wrote a blog <a href="http://hepzibahpyncheon.blogspot.com/2023/10/a-moment-for-taking-sides.html">entry</a>, <i>A Moment for Taking Sides, </i>in which I expressed my sympathy for Israel as the victim of vicious attacks by Hamas, and urged anybody with influence over current affairs to side with them in taking Hamas down. "First things first," I said. First get rid of Hamas, <i>then</i> get on with the business of putting right the injustices perpetrated on the Palestinians by what I am convinced are misguided and self-defeating Israeli policies. But I'm afraid I left unsaid why I think Nethanyahu's policies are self-defeating, ultimately. And, Nethanyahu is hardly the only Israeli leader responsible for bad policies; he's merely the latest and, I happen to think, the worst of the lot.</p><p>Every time - every single time - the topic of Israel/Palestine comes up in discussion with friends, we get bogged down with competing historical narratives. My first exposure to the history of Israel/Palestine was probably the Ashkenazi Zionist perspective I swallowed whole from the 1960 movie <i>Exodus</i>, based on Leon Uris's book and starring Paul Newman, a fictional account of heroic efforts by European Jews to get around the British efforts to limit emigration to Israel. That film went a long way to establishing American sympathy with the Zionist project. Only much later, after developing leftist political sympathies, did I begin to get the view from the other side.</p><p>This leads me to underline the importance of understanding something about the sociology of knowledge, how much of what we know is accidental and arbitrary. How we can err in thinking we have a grasp on reality when in fact what we know, true and factual though it may be, is only part of a bigger picture. That's why the metaphorical tale of <i>The Blind Men and the Elephant</i> has become one the guiding lights of my understanding of the world.</p><p>Another aspect of this thing called the sociology of knowledge is the fact that you can't say everything at once. One of the dangers of the modern day is our willingness to take bumper-sticker wisdom too seriously. Another is our impatience: we like our summaries to be limited to one page. Sometimes we have to check and make sure we have the whole story. For whatever reason, I didn't get it all out the other day. When I said that I wanted to stand with Israel, I failed to add my hope that they don't make the horror of this attack worse.</p><p>I fear that is what they are about to do. They have the attention - and the sympathy - of decent people around the world at the moment. Few will be surprised to see them strike back, hit Gaza as the launching place of the attack, for all it's worth. OK, so there will be collateral damage, they will say. What do you expect us to do? We can't sit on our hands and let the hostages be abused; we've got to get them back. And we can't let the leaders of Hamas get away with murder; we've got to take them out.</p><p>It is at highly emotional moments like this one when we are most likely to go off half-cocked, when politicians worry more about how they are being perceived than about doing the right thing. America did it when George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condaleeza Rice and company took us into Iraq after 9/11. They made a mistake the whole world will be paying for for a hundred years, destabilizing the Middle East in a whole new way. I can't tell you how often I have wanted to lose my lunch as I watched Michelle Obama speak of W as a personal friend; I see him as a war criminal. And how I squirmed over the fact that Dick (ditto war criminal) is the father of Liz Cheney, one of my heroes. </p><p>But let's leave this discussion of cognitive dissonance for another day. My point here is that I believe Israel is about to commit an error equivalent to the Iraq War misadventure. By killing thousands of innocent Palestinian residents of Gaza, as we killed thousands of innocent Iraqis, I believe the Israelis will only generate further sympathy for the terrorist attackers. Increase hatred. Add fuel to the flames.</p><p>Politicians are not all evil. Nor are all of them stupid. The reconciliation approach taken by Mandela, Desmond Tutu and other South Africans who resisted the temptation to take revenge on and slaughter the leaders of the <i>apartheid</i> regime illustrate this point.</p><p>One of the main reasons, possibly the primary reason, for the timing of the attack was the prospect of Saudi Arabia and Israel forming a pact with the United States. If they manage to do this, its is likely other Arab states will follow. And part of the deal would very likely be that Israel would have to grant meaningful concessions on their hardheaded anti-Palestinian policies. Saudi Arabia would gain enormous prestige, but so would Israel. And the Palestinians would not be thrown under the bus, as many are claiming; they would be in a much stronger position, with Arab/Israeli tensions lessening. The only losers would be Hamas, which derives its strength from hatred and division, which, in turn is derived from their all-or-nothing approach to the land of Palestine. Hamas, remember, wants nothing to do with anybody who is moving toward a two-state solution, or any other suggestion that the land of Israel/Palestine might be shared.</p><p>Instead, I am afraid, because Nethanyahu remains in control, the use of military force, and all the killing of innocents in the line of fire, will continue.</p><p>It's why people of good will are currently in despair.</p><p>I don't believe in miracles. But I do believe that a sense of human decency can prevail if and when people bring it to the fore. I know it looks like the naive Christian notion of turning the other cheek and many will oppose it for that reason. But sometimes the moral approach and the practical approach coincide. I believe if Palestinians see the Israelis turn from violence to a rational long-term peace-keeping strategy, they will find the strength they need to muster to rid themselves of Hamas and whoever might succeed them once they are wiped out. Remember, it does no one any good if Hamas is removed and somebody just as bad takes their place.</p><p>In the long run, wouldn't a new peace-oriented approach have a much better chance of succeeding?</p><p>Wouldn't it at least be worth a try?</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-84488428627433563722023-10-13T10:45:00.000-07:002023-10-13T10:45:27.540-07:00A Moment for Taking Sides<p>Like everybody else I come in contact with, I am saddened and depressed by the images of the attacks on Israel by Hamas this week. I have resisted the urge to comment on the war for all the usual reasons. First, I have nothing original to add to the dark picture. Secondly, I know from bitter experience that all but a tiny handful of people who try to offer helpful suggestions about the Middle East end up looking foolish. There is such a complex history, so many choices of starting places, that you don't have to go very far to find somebody insisting you are starting with the wrong one.</p><p>My earliest childhood lesson in how messed up the world can get comes from growing up with German people during and just after World War II. "Germans" were "bad" people, according to most of the adult world I lived in in America. But they weren't. My grandmother was love personified. So were all her friends from the Germania Singing Society, from the German Lutheran Church, from the German-American community of which she was a part. "There are good people and bad people everywhere," was her explanation. It should have satisfied my six-year-old self, but it didn't. When I read the newspaper, the references were always to the misery "the Germans" caused. Nobody used the expression "the bad Germans." It was simply "the Germans."</p><p>This human habit of generalizing is a necessary but ultimately harmful social convention. Today "the Russians" are invading Ukraine and "the Israelis" are about to bomb, starve and crush Gaza in retaliation for the barbarism inflicted on them by Hamas. And just as I knew there was something wrong about faulting "the Germans" for what the Nazis did, I know there is something wrong with not seeing that countless thousands of young Russian boys are being led to the slaughter by the Russian military, no less victims of Putin's imperial ambitions than Ukrainians. And Palestinians living in Gaza, who have not had a say in who controls their lives since Hamas was elected in 2006, are about to die in even greater numbers now than even before. Hamas savages, Gazans die, along with Israelis.</p><p>What makes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so bitter is the widespread conviction that the two sides lack the will, and many believe the capacity to come together. On the Palestinian side is Hamas, a terrorist organization committed to killing every last Jew with a ferocious hatred not seen since the Holocaust. On the Israeli side are the Orthodox ultra-nationalists, who continue - with the aid of that god damned son of a bitch Benjamin Nethanyahu and his sinister Deputy Prime Minister, Yariv Levin - to squeeze the life out of both Palestinians and democracy in Israel. People for whom the current apartheid policy is only a stepping stone to the total disenfranchisement of non-Jews within Israel.</p><p>I've been sitting here, trying to tell myself to take that "god damned son of a bitch" bit I just wrote out, and go back to my comfortable claim to neutrality. I'd like to do that. Would like to sing out, "I'm neither Arab nor Jew and just want everybody to get along."</p><p>But I can't do that at the moment. At the moment, all the other bits of history need to get pushed aside in my head as I try to get it around the fact that Hamas attacked a group of people singing and dancing. Killed a couple hundred of them. Then raped and dragged a hundred more into Gaza to be used as shields as they continued their efforts to wipe out every Jewish man, woman and child.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjidD6ymx-VxaZ0rEd7XtKi7PuAgID22ANko7Mydx78e7ChEw9DWN9TRnZJmozcFWjyp_9L3hZUCLNPbXEWSW2DqSykyIs69ejdn355pgt1xDKzGJ3QoVsp_CdC0AnVHjjZJe7F6_EANoPQsdWz2aLU4JpAufUMey-hG49HKIGc0ecTq6s7_bxfZPKzozs/s900/384193607_3977273525830876_1341126949223622043_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="900" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjidD6ymx-VxaZ0rEd7XtKi7PuAgID22ANko7Mydx78e7ChEw9DWN9TRnZJmozcFWjyp_9L3hZUCLNPbXEWSW2DqSykyIs69ejdn355pgt1xDKzGJ3QoVsp_CdC0AnVHjjZJe7F6_EANoPQsdWz2aLU4JpAufUMey-hG49HKIGc0ecTq6s7_bxfZPKzozs/s320/384193607_3977273525830876_1341126949223622043_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>I can't stay neutral. I'll find my way back to balance soon, I hope. But for now, here's my response to the<br /> three friends who wrote me "but what about the Palestinians?" when I posted that beautiful picture of the Israeli flag superimposed on the Brandenburg Gate.<p></p><p>My response is "First things first." First recognize this is not a fair fight. The framing, at least at the moment, is not Palestinian vs. Israeli; it's between barbarians and families murdered in their beds. Between barbarians and singers and dancers.</p><p>As an American, I support President Biden's declaration: "Let there be no doubt: The United States has Israel's back."</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-85240518517755367832023-10-04T15:01:00.000-07:002023-10-04T15:01:06.066-07:00Bad News, Good News<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1U-IJvX4exN1-dXKY7JzhT_D2H9pzyUd8WsVQxZNhX5zreYDDpg_KJTrKjYx961bO-QJnJ4JMKmPGGg0_7R7AQRN6jxftlTpzSkg3hK9xczt7_9tAbkv67bB-rDSJUXfyE2jMWVFz2X3E54aRlTmGX5YpNswbOvPpbDX8v0cRo3SlObiCmRy32aHxdAc/s1200/gettyimages-1704945492-scaled.webp" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="805" data-original-width="1200" height="215" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1U-IJvX4exN1-dXKY7JzhT_D2H9pzyUd8WsVQxZNhX5zreYDDpg_KJTrKjYx961bO-QJnJ4JMKmPGGg0_7R7AQRN6jxftlTpzSkg3hK9xczt7_9tAbkv67bB-rDSJUXfyE2jMWVFz2X3E54aRlTmGX5YpNswbOvPpbDX8v0cRo3SlObiCmRy32aHxdAc/s320/gettyimages-1704945492-scaled.webp" width="320" /></a></div>So much bad news has come down the pike of late, you've got to allow me to let out a whoop and a hollar at some really good news. Rotate in your graves, Strom Thurmond, Anita Bryant, Jerry Falwell and all you other sexists, white supremacists and homophobes of yore, as the world gets a look at the Vice-President of the United States swearing in a Senator pro-tem from California yesterday. The new senator's name is Laphonza Butler. She is black. She is married to the third woman in the photo, with whom she is raising a daughter (just in case you missed the fact that LGBT people have family values, too). In fact, all three women in the photo are black women. We've come a long way since the 13th and 14th time the U.S. Constitution was amended: the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, and the moment women were granted the right to vote in the U.S. on August 18, 1920.<p></p><p>"Piano, piano si va lontano" they say in Italian. Literally, "Take it easy if you're going a long way." Meaning you can't rush things if you want them done right.</p><p>Sometimes the pace of progress is agonizingly slow. We live in a country where the political right gets away with slapping the label "socialist" on health care for all Americans, knowing that most Americans can't distinguish the word from "communist" and they know a bad thing when they hear one. The Equal Rights Amendment has yet to pass, and it appears to be at the end of a long line of things progressives would like to see happen. We can't stop a self-serving minority from dictating to the majority via the Electoral College and the way voting districts are gerrymandered. Hungary, Estonia and Portugal each have one billionaire each living within their borders. The United States <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_billionaires">has</a> 735. Not a problem per se, but something to think about when you realize that if you went out and spent $100 on dinner every night of the week, it would take over 2.7 million years (that's 2,700,000) before your check would bounce for insufficient funds. And that's if you have only <i>one</i> billion dollars in the bank. Most of the 735 have more than that. Elon Musk is <a href="https://www.lancastereaglegazette.com/story/money/2023/10/03/elon-musk-forbes-400-list-2023/71045684007/">alleged</a> to have $251 billion, so multiply those 2.7 million years by 251. You get my point.</p><p>And put that fact (if I've done my math right - no guarantee there - if not, please set me right) up against the fact that the Republicans were on the verge just now of shutting down the government because they don't believe it should involve itself in helping the 14.5 million American children living in poverty. They prefer to leave that to the market. Oh, and of those 14.5 million, more than 13.1 million are food <a href="https://moveforhunger.org/just-hunger-lasting-impact-food-insecurity-children?gclid=Cj0KCQjwmvSoBhDOARIsAK6aV7hba_4pi2e4geX4pgtUUxcOqJAH-oTnD0s2A5L24_E3QBTPpQWlu3caAgqJEALw_wcB">insecure</a>.</p><p>I could go on forever listing all the good news items I've come across lately and line them up against the bad news items. It's part of the art of living how much of each you let into your awareness of the world to spur you to responsible action and how much you keep out to save your sanity. I zeroed in the other day on the fact that parking meters in Berkeley now want $2.75 to allow you to park your car on a commercial street per hour. Highway robbery, if ever there was such a thing. Greedy bastards run the City of Berkeley. Then today I had Darling Daughter Boobie (aka Bounce) get her once-every-three-years rabies shot, a necessary step in getting her dog licence renewed. The cost of that is $40 for those three years. But because I'm over 65 years old, the City of Berkeley lets me register my dog for free. So today I love the City of Berkeley and want to find the person or persons who put that regulation in place and give them a hug and a smooch.</p><p>Other good news on the gay liberation front comes from <a href="https://76crimes.com/2023/10/04/african-island-nation-mauritius-overturns-anti-sodomy-law/#more-49198">Mauritius</a>, where they just rescinded the law punishing gay people for having sex. Piano piano.</p><p>And from the Vatican, where the pope is trying to <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pope-francis-suggests-blessings-same-sex-unions-may-be-possible/">convince</a> the hardliners in his church to lighten up and allow priests to bless same-sex unions. The hardliners are holding out, reasoning that it's just not right to bless sinners. One might argue that the line they fling around is "love the sinner and hate the sin." But I guess they're not idiots. They know that a good many of the men and women who go to the trouble of standing up in front of God and all the world to declare their love for each other are probably going to do things in the bed at night besides snore. No matter. Let's hear it for Papa Francesco. Piano piano.</p><p>Kevin McCarthy got bounced, good news, and replaced by another one of us Mc people, neither good nor bad news, except that this one is an out-and-out <a href="https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2023/10/temporary-house-speaker-rep-patrick-mchenry-has-long-anti-lgbtq-record/">homophobe</a>, bad news, and a guy known for being rude as hell. Check out his <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_McHenry">run-in</a> with Elizabeth Warren, for example. He also just kicked Nancy Pelosi out of her office, but I don't want to fault him for that, necessarily. Good news is he's speaker only pro tempore, and therefore not third in line for the presidency.</p><p>What all is next? Will the Maldives sink below the ocean due to global warming? Will the Ukrainians hold out against the Russian invasion? Will we ever get mom-and-pop stores back instead of putting immigrants into jobs where they get abused by cost-cutting big corporations? We're onto the real <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz0uQmLJqi4">possibility</a> that there may be a cure in the offing, and not just a stop-gap medication, for HIV/AIDS. My eye doctor tells me my eyes are good for another year without cataract surgery and Boobie is back sleeping in my bed again, at least when I get to bed before midnight.</p><p>Let me end on a positive note. Tangerine Turd, of the political party that touts itself as the family-values party, is now on display as the Big Daddy who taught his two older sons to be bare-faced liars. They may lose the right to do business in New York, and TT père has been legally declared a fraud. Ditto Jr. and Eric. Dyed-in-the-wool Maga folk will still follow him anywhere, I know, but there is reason to believe their numbers are diminishing. </p><p>Slowly, but surely. Piano piano.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2023/10/laphonza-butler-sworn-in-as-senator-becomes-the-first-out-lgbtq-senator-of-color/?utm_id=sidebar3&utm_term=headline&utm_content=politics&utm_source=LGBTQ+Nation+Subscribers&utm_campaign=1a559682e9-20231004_LGBTQ_Nation_Daily_Brief&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c4eab596bd-1a559682e9-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D">photo</a> by Getty images: </p>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-4815385917095399762023-10-02T19:38:00.000-07:002023-10-02T19:38:21.003-07:00Venturing Out<p>HWMBO (He who must be obeyed), aka "the spousal unit," aka the family member who still works full time, buys all the groceries and does all the cleaning, has been nagging the bejeezuz out of me since Covid came to town to get up from in front of the computer and out to exercise. I know he's just looking out for my well-being, so I try not to snap back. But one of the reasons I don't exercise is I have vertigo and need a cane to minimize the wobble. Another is I have promised myself I'd get me some orthotics and some new shoes, and just haven't gotten around to it.</p><div class="Ar Au Ao" id=":rt"><div aria-controls=":ud" aria-label="Message Body" aria-multiline="true" aria-owns=":ud" class="Am Al editable LW-avf tS-tW tS-tY" g_editable="true" hidefocus="true" id=":rp" itacorner="6,7:1,1,0,0" role="textbox" spellcheck="true" style="direction: ltr; min-height: 178px;" tabindex="1"><div>So today, I decided, was going to be the day. I got up, put on one of the few pairs of trousers I have without threads dangling from worn-out pantlegs, my least wrinkled shirt, and off I went. Found a place across from <i>La Foot, </i>stuck my credit card in the parking meter and promptly recoiled at the $2.75 hour parking fee. Christ, was it that long I've been hiding in my room? How did we get from a quarter an hour to $2 friggin 75?</div><div><br /></div><div>I grumbled to the front door of La Foot:</div><div><br /></div><div><img alt="/" id="gmail-merch_logo" src="https://shoptheelmwood.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ls.jpg" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; height: auto; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 20px; max-width: 100%; outline: none; padding: 0px;" /><span class="gmail-hours" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;"><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 20px; outline: none; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">Monday – Saturday:</span> 10:00 am – 6:30 pm</p></span><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">(510) 644-3668</p><p id="email" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;"><a href="mailto:info@lafoot.com" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #169bb4; cursor: pointer; font: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;">info@lafoot.com</a></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">2917 College Ave</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px;">Berkeley, CA 94705</p><p id="gmail-website" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 20px; outline: none; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><a href="http://lafoot.com/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #169bb4; font: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;">http://lafoot.com</a></p>You don't have to look that closely to see that their website informs you they're open on Mondays. Well, they lied. The sign on the door says they're closed on Mondays. No apologies or anything. Just closed Mondays.<div class="gmail-socials" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 20px; outline: none; padding: 0px;"><br class="gmail-Apple-interchange-newline" /></div></div><div>Suddenly that $2.75 began to feel more like five bucks. Go ahead. Rob me blind and then stab me in the back for good measure. I won't add a kvetch about how not that long ago I could have walked to <i>La Foot</i> from my house in twenty minutes, but that's now a distant memory.</div><div><br /></div><div>Then I got a brilliant idea. I'd drive to the place where you get parking permits and spend $66 to get a J-sticker so I can park on the street when the construction workers come and put a dumpster in my driveway when they start work replacing the siding on my house. I still have more than 45 minutes on my parking receipt and it says "City of Berkeley Parking Permit" without further specification, so I assume it will be good across town.</div><div><br /></div><div>Except for the time I spent idling first behind a giant book mobile then behind an Amazon delivery truck parked in a way that didn't permit anybody to drive around, I made it in good time, parked, and wobbled my way up the stairs only to find a sign reading "Hours of Operation: 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. It was now 4 p.m. and I was once again out of luck. So much for getting up from the computer and venturing out into the world. What kind of city service closes up at 2 friggin p.m.?</div><div><br /></div><div>I have trouble reading these days. My eyes have gotten noticeably worse since the last time I got new glasses. I have an appointment at Kaiser for an eye exam tomorrow morning. I decided to come home and look forward to that.</div><div><br /></div><div>Back in front of the computer I see there's an e-mail from Kaiser. It tells me there is a strike pending and I need to be prepared to find all appointments cancelled.</div><div><br /></div><div>The justice system has put the Orange Fraudster on the docket and they might actually take away his toys and put his ass in jail.</div><div> </div><div>What's a little frustration compared to that good news? <br /><br /></div><div>I should get out and about more often.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div></div>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-90853613545552098332023-09-30T17:11:00.009-07:002023-09-30T20:37:31.928-07:00Remembering Dianne Feinstein<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhImYXhLElCEIJ1cvhrNwkQ43olSUmZW_MtfMH6rmx95ceyzxAHlA-kliExCCrVV_86D0mguDMpYwGU8m8I5GDmIXht7U0jTyJK-EW5IZ-Vhpxyd03JLSDyT4yr4cAYYScS1OwBg6qw2YPz4KhCMksXGLNZE6XRBFYMRWJ9hg1KYB9qEsLKP74sJUFIt4/s1140/Screenshot%202023-09-30%20at%2016.34.49.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="622" data-original-width="1140" height="175" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhImYXhLElCEIJ1cvhrNwkQ43olSUmZW_MtfMH6rmx95ceyzxAHlA-kliExCCrVV_86D0mguDMpYwGU8m8I5GDmIXht7U0jTyJK-EW5IZ-Vhpxyd03JLSDyT4yr4cAYYScS1OwBg6qw2YPz4KhCMksXGLNZE6XRBFYMRWJ9hg1KYB9qEsLKP74sJUFIt4/s320/Screenshot%202023-09-30%20at%2016.34.49.png" width="320" /></a></div>In recent years, I had stopped paying much attention to what Dianne Feinstein was about. With all the focus on the wretched state of the American pursuit of democracy and on evidence that an alarming number of my fellow Americans were actually throwing their support behind a charlatan and dictator wannabe, I had surrendered to the temptation to follow what a good many of my fellow citizens on the other side were doing and simply tune out. The passing of Dianne Feinstein woke me up. I was not practicing what I preached, I realized suddenly: that citizens can and should perform at least their minimum civic duty and keep their eye on what their political representatives were doing. <p></p><p>I came to live in San Francisco when I got out of the army in the summer of 1965. I had spent a year studying Russian at the Army Language School in Monterey [it changed its name to the Defense Language Institute the year I was there], had spent many weekends in San Francisco, and knew that I wanted to make it my home. It was in San Francisco that I rented my first apartment, got my first job as an adult, supported myself for the first time, and came out as a gay man.</p><p>After running through my savings from my army days, I got a job at the French Railroads providing European train tickets to travel agencies from an office which overlooked Union Square. I rode the last stretch of my commute on the cable car up from Powell and Market, which you could do in those days as an automatic transfer, and could often be heard to exclaim that I had died and gone to heaven, which happened to be known locally as San Francisco. I began memorizing all the city's street names and decided at some point that the only job I could imagine better than the one I had would be to drive a cab. I was absolutely in love with the city.</p><p>San Francisco had not yet been Manhattanized. It was still a city without a lot of skyscrapers and even the locals still rushed from one hill to another in constant pursuit of a better view. And my self-loathing as a gay man was fast diminishing as I was able to bounce around the periphery of one or another organization devoted to gay civil rights like <a href="https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Society_for_Individual_Rights_(SIR)">SIR</a>, the Society for Individual Rights, march in the annual Pride Parades and eventually, in the 70s and 80s, even join two Marches on Washington. Harvey Milk would not arrive and become the unofficial "mayor of Castro Street" for several more years. Support for gay liberation was already building but it still lacked the kind of leadership Harvey - and Dianne Feinstein - would come to provide.</p><p>I left for Japan for a few years and by the time I returned, in 1973, Harvey had established himself and I would see him handing out flyers from time to time. I left again for Saudi Arabia in 1976 and by the time I returned a year later, Harvey had finally succeeded in becoming part of the establishment, although it was still an uphill battle against the likes of Anita Bryant and the Briggs Initiative, with the majority of citizens still inclined to believe that <i>gay</i> was just another word for <i>child molester</i>. Briggs wanted to fire all gay teachers, and overnight I became politically active not just as a gay man, but as a teacher who might lose his number one choice of a way to make a living. </p><p>When Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk were shot, on November 27, 1978, I was living in Santa Cruz and teaching at UCSC. I came up to the city in a state of shock and despair, mitigated and channeled into sadness by the candlelight march from City Hall to the Castro. I made my way to Harvey's memorial service at Temple Emanu-El on Arguello Street, I think it was the next day or sometime not long afterwards. I am left with two powerful memories from that day. One was the beauty of the Mourner's Kaddish, which brought me to tears and made me wonder if I could convert to Judaism on the spot. The other was of Dianne Feinstein coming down the aisle and taking her seat in the pew directly behind where I was sitting. I couldn't get out of my mind her having stuck her finger in the wound where the bullet had gone through Harvey's flesh. It was all too real, all too cruel.</p><p>I was not much of a fan of Dianne Feinstein after she took on the job of mayor. My politics were far to the left of her. I didn't like the fact that she vetoed domestic partner legislation in 1982, and her support for big corporations and for building high rises really rubbed me the wrong way. But that same year she began her life-long campaign to do something about guns killing so many Americans, and in time I came to see her role as a moderate democrat as defensible, if not all I would wish for.</p><p>Politicians are not my favorite people in the world. It's easy to come down hard on them when they don't represent your interests, and I've badmouthed Dianne quite a bit over the years. Even recently, as she held on to her job even when she was too ill to do it well. But as I go over the list of her accomplishments and recognize how widely respected she was for her work against guns, for abortion rights, her shift to opposing capital punishment in 2018, her efforts to protect the California coastline and forests from developers, especially her creation of the Death Valley and other National Parks and for dozens of smaller contributions - like opposing Trump's support of moving Israel's capital to Jerusalem, I'm comfortable calling myself a Feinstein fan. One of the decent politicians. One who doesn't always represent your interests - but who does? - but one who does the job she is elected to do.</p><p>Damning by faint praise, I realize, is not the best endorsement. But I'm not being fair when I stop at saying she's not one of the worst politicians. Considering what bozos and clowns, ne'er-do-wells and downright blaggards we've had go to Washington on the taxpayer dime, Dianne stands out as way better than "pretty good."</p><p>Just as I learned at Stanford that some of the best minds I've ever encountered can be found in female heads, the fact that I live in a place represented by Barbara Lee (representative for Oakland and Berkeley), Senator Barbara Boxer and, until yesterday, Senator Dianne Feinstein, means I've still got reason to believe the American democratic experiment might make it yet.</p><p>It's been a great run, these last six decades and more sharing a California identity with the likes of Dianne Feinstein. I wish now I'd sent her a thank-you note while I still had the chance.</p><p><br /></p><p>photo: screenshot of Dianne Feinstein announcing the assassination of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, November 27, 1978, an image as vivid in my mind today as it was that night when I first took it in.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-59373513540289086122023-09-29T23:09:00.001-07:002023-09-29T23:09:25.222-07:00El Houb - a film review<p><span style="background-color: white; color: #202124; font-family: Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 28px; text-align: center;">الحب </span>(El Houb) is the Arabic word for "love." It's also the title of a Moroccan-Dutch film that came out a few months ago about a young man, Karim Zahwani, caught in bed with another man by his father. The discovery breaks the resistance Karim has long struggled with to come out to his mother and father, partly to free himself of the prison of silence he has been living in, partly to get them to stop nagging him to get married. To say it doesn't go well would be an Olympic-sized understatement. By the time the Zahwani family even begins to come to terms with their son's homosexuality, Karim has holed up in a closet, turned off the water and the electricity and even trashed their apartment. "Knock down drag out" doesn't begin to tell the story.</p><p>El Houb is not an easy watch. To start with, if one has lived in Europe or America or in most places in the modern world where homosexuality is now old hat as a topic, one has to go back to a time when LGBT people lived closeted lives of hypocrisy or deception. The obvious question that comes to mind is why should we waste our time with yet another coming-out story? "Been there, done that, didn't like it, moved on."</p><p>The answer is that along with the fact that, come January 1, 2024, Estonia will be the 34th nation to recognize same-sex marriage is the equally salient fact that it is still illegal in 35 countries, including every one of the Islamic states. That includes Morocco, the country of origin of the immigrant Zahwani family now living in the Netherlands. Karim's mother has two major concerns: what will the neighbors think? And how can her son possibly want to do such a haram thing?</p><p>I have to admit I was tempted to shut the film down several times. The Sturm und Drang gets seriously heavy and you want to throw things at the screen each time you see a face twisted in agony over the struggle both sides are going through. If Karim were clear-headed on the subject and it were just a question of getting his mother and father over the hump, it would be a lot easier. But a great deal of the agony is watching Karim struggle with his own doubts.</p><p>What made me stick with the histrionics - and that's an appropriate term here - was my lifelong interest in what happens when cultures clash. And the knowledge that the actor, Fahd Larhzaoui, who plays Karim, is himself a gay man of Moroccan origin born in the Netherlands. The story will no doubt frustrate you with its surfeit of homophobia, much of it self-imposed. But only if you fail to recognize that it is also, ultimately, a tale of homophobic Moroccans coming to embrace the modern values of their adopted country, and their gay son in the process.</p><p>Seen in that light, it's a nice little contribution to the long slow slog toward gay liberation. Belgian-born Lubna Azabal, of Moroccan origin, plays the mother. Slimane Dazi, a French actor of Algerian origin plays the father (and he apparently had to work hard to learn Moroccan Arabic to get the role). They are both superb, as is the kid who plays Karim as a boy in the flashbacks.</p><p>I watched it on Amazon Prime, but I believe it's also available online at:</p><p><a href="https://tubitv.com/movies/100003839/el-houb-the-love?start=true&tracking=google-feed&utm_source=google-feed">https://tubitv.com/movies/100003839/el-houb-the-love?start=true&tracking=google-feed&utm_source=google-feed</a> .</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-79396660435247185312023-09-16T16:52:00.000-07:002023-09-16T16:52:44.831-07:00The transgender issue - Part VI - "I'm pretty sure I'm right."<p>"I'm pretty sure I'm right."</p><p>I love it when I get that feeling, as I do when I open up solicitations from the Southern Poverty Law Center where they tell me my contributions will go to fighting gerrymandering in Alabama or Missouri.</p><p>Why can't I get that feeling when I declare the best thing to do is withhold puberty blockers from kids under sixteen because it would lead to faulty bone development and because most kids then go on to do serious damage with hormone treatments and eventually surgery.</p><p>I just watched one of my favorite German satirists, Jan Böhmermann, take up the topic. He sneers at the question by the unenlightend segment of the population who worry about men in women's changing rooms. No doubts. Why should they be allowed in? "Because transwomen are women!" </p><p>There you go. Truth by declaration. He goes on to celebrate the rejection of the 1980-something law requiring trans people to jump through all sorts of hoops before being allowed to change their gender and congratulates Germany for catching up with fifteen other nations that allow the change on the basis of a simple declaration. Böhmermann has enough confidence that he's on the right side of history not only to declare what's true, but to sneer at those who disagree with him.</p><p>Why does this question continue to plague me? Why do I continue to want to hear from the other side, from the religious folk who tell me you need to stay in the gender you were born into because it's God's will. (And I hate it that I have to use "gender" here because "sex" is an outmoded concept) And from others of the political right wing. Why can't I just do what I always do and go with the leftist flow? Not merely the leftist flow, but apparently with the majority of LGB people who are in solidarity with the transactivists?</p><p>A couple days ago, I <a href="http://hepzibahpyncheon.blogspot.com/2023/09/detransitioning-part-v-on-transgender.html">blogged</a> about how I was persuaded that professional theologians of the Christian persuasion had some of the most clear-headed arguments against transgendering and for detransgendering. I deliberately chose them because I knew they'd be on "the other side" and I needed to push the strength of my own convictions. Sean McDowell, the interviewer, makes clear he knows he's right because his convictions are biblically based. In another <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yr8zIEbKXo">interview</a>, with a more gay-friendly evangelical who sees no conflict between his faith and being gay, McDowell insists he's got it right and isn't going to be persuaded by any modernist attempt to restructure traditional theology. I sit here, in my lived gay experience, listening to a man who believes my soul depends on giving up my marriage to a man and my entire circle of friends and family who whole-heartedly believe, as I do, that God, if he exists, doesn't care what I do with my naughty parts. And I'm supposed to believe this man when he pronounces on the trans question? Because I am pre-disposed to believe him anyway? So much for listening to "people in the know" when you haven't got the time or the energy to dig for truth and understanding on your own.</p><p>This is the thorniest issue I've come across in a very long time. Reason doesn't help me out here. Arguments on one side are offset by equally convincing arguments on the other.</p><p>Have a listen to this <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPNSWjjAzDk">Swedish documentary</a>, for example, on efforts to get folks at the Karolinska Institute who enabled transgender kids access to hormones and surgery as part of "gender-affirming" care, and the disastrous results which followed.</p><p>Then listen to this <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIuS-48tSpE">Frontline Program</a> which makes an equally powerful argument for listening to your kids when they describe the need to change sex (sorry - I know I'm supposed to say gender, but I just can't) as a life-and-death issue.</p><p>And then tell me you don't have the same doubts about declaring "I'm pretty sure I'm right."</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-61115629381414234332023-09-14T20:03:00.001-07:002023-09-16T16:53:24.360-07:00Detransitioning - Part V on the Transgender Issue<p>About six weeks ago, I started a four-part think-aloud here on Hepzibah about the transgender issue, knowing I was risking being a fool by rushing in (on Aug. 7, 9, 11 and 15) and pretending I could both view it from a neutral position and take a stand at the same time. I still hold those dual views - that transgender people need our support on a personal level and the question of medical intervention on the human body should not be left to people who go through life saying "whatever!"</p><p>After four attempts to shed light on the topic I decided I'd had my say (my "think-aloud") and it was time to face my limitations and shut up and listen a while before saying any more. So I put it on the back burner, along with my concern over whether American democracy is in real danger or merely facing another bump in the road, whether I should take my love of animals more seriously and become a vegetarian, whether the U.S. should continue to support Ukraine (I'm not really on the fence on that one; I say yes.), and all the other "eat your peas and think of the starving children in Africa" issues that cross my path.</p><p>The response to my discussion of the transgender issue was disappointing. One friend asked me, "Why do you care? It's such a trivial issue in the greater scheme of things. And it affects so few people!" I didn't argue with him, but my mind went to the several videos I had watched by people who had come to regret their choices to undergo breast and penis removal. I have no trouble imagining myself in other people's shoes, normally. I like to think I can imagine being Jewish, being black, emigrating to another country. But for the life of me I can't get my head around the idea of having my penis lopped off. And back in the early 70s one of my closest friends took his own life, and for years afterward, I had dreams of shouting at him, "Why didn't you wait! Just a few years. Life for gay people will get better. Much better!" I have become obsessed with the idea of preventing young people from making decisions they come to regret - or would if they were still alive. So in some indirect way this issue has become personal for me. </p><p>And then there's the fact that the place where I normally sit - on the left of the political spectrum, with democrats and LGBT people, doesn't quite feel at home anymore. Just as the Republicans have usurped American democracy, I have the sinking feeling that the trans activists are taking more of the LGBT space than is justified, and perhaps the people who like to label the extreme left "woke" are not just the Marjorie Taylor Greene idiots the left like to think they are. Maybe we ought to think more about lock-step support of some of our inclinations to do the right thing and come down on the right side of history. Hate speech, for example. I can't get a handle on that issue, either. In Germany, you can't say anything good about Hitler and the Nazis. They've shut down free speech on that issue and everything in me wants to shout, "Hallelujah, good on ya, Deutschland! Way to go!" But then where do I go with that other voice in my head that insists, "the only way to counter bad speech is with more speech, not with censorship." My head goes with that one. I understand, in principle, how the attempt at a cure can sometimes be worse than the disease.</p><p>So here's Part V of my thoughts on the transgender issue. What are we to make of the folk now claiming in ever-increasing numbers that they made a mistake by medically intervening their way out of gender dysphoria? I know the numbers are still small, but not so small they can be ignored. On the one hand, anecdotal evidence is quite often misleading and potentially worthless. On the other hand, if you listen to the collective testimony of individuals now filling the internet with their claims they made a mistake, if you've got a conscience, you have to let that testimony in. At least give the issue a serious hearing.</p><p>Of all the articles and videos I've come across on the issue of detransitioning, one in particular stands out. I am drawn to it because it comes from a place I normally run from. Two Christian doctors talking about the issue and insisting it has not only a social, a legal and a medical dimension, but a spiritual one. "Aaaargh" as they say in the comics. Gag me with a spoon. But my life experience has demonstrated that all sorts of b.s.ers and bloviators (if there's a difference) can sometimes come out with gems of wisdom. Nobody should be rejected out of hand until they've had their say. And the more I listened, the more I concluded they had a great deal of information I needed to consider. Here I am, in bed with anti-gay homophobes, I said to myself. Just what I need to check the strength of my convictions.</p><p>I'm talking about <a href="https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001JS9Z94/about">Sean McDowell</a> talking to<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9HU8kW2zNk"> Paul Rhodes Eddy</a>, in an hour-long piece from three months ago. Sean McDowell is a professor of theology at Biola University, a Christian college near Anaheim in the greater Los Angeles area. He is the author/editor of around fifteen books on Christian apologetics. He has a PhD in Christian apologetics from a Southern Baptist theological seminary. I'm familiar with him as an opponent of same-sex marriage of the "hate the sin and love the sinner" school of thought. Nice guy, from what I can see.</p><p>And here is the blurb on Dr. Paul Rhodes Eddy from the Center for Faith, Sexuality and Gender, with which he is associated: </p><p><span style="background-color: #8393a1; box-sizing: border-box; color: white; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 17.5px;"></span></p><blockquote>Paul Rhodes Eddy (PhD, Marquette University) is Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Bethel University in St. Paul, MN. He has authored, co-authored, or co-edited a dozen books, including <i>Understanding Transgender Identities: Four Views</i> (Baker Academic, 2019). He is also a Teaching Pastor at Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, MN. He lives in White Bear Township, MN with his wife Kelly and their two sons. </blockquote><p>As I listened to their discussion, I saw my task as trying to distinguish the parts of what they had to say that I might assume to stem from their bias as anti-LGBT Christian apologists from what they had to say as objective scientists. And when I say "they" I mean chiefly Dr. Eddy, the sex researcher being interviewed by Dr. McDowell. My starting place comes from lived experience as a gay man; Dr. Eddy's starting place is almost certainly colored by the world he lives in of men and women who believe my embrace of homosexuality as a positive thing is misplaced, and transgendered people - perhaps - I can't be sure - are even more in need of corrective thought. That raises the obvious question: can either of us be objective here? </p><p>The longer I listened, the more I thought I saw their Christian orientation (not to say bias) leaking through their conclusions, the more I was persuaded that Dr. Eddy is no less sincere in his desire to understand the transgender dilemma than I am. And the more I found a meeting of the minds. We both reach pretty much the same conclusions on transitioning and detransitioning. Tempting as it is to ascribe his conclusions to a Christian ideological bias, how can I explain away the fact that I reach pretty much those same conclusions? I felt that obligated me to give him the same benefit of the doubt that I am inclined to give myself.</p><p>I recommend you give them a listen, if you have the time. It's only an hour. But if you want a condensed version, here's my take on what they had to say:</p><p>McDowell and Eddy begin their discussion with a Christian liberal admission that the church has not always done the right thing in dealing with sexuality. I am reminded of the times I have observed how readily people can become conciliatory once their ability to bully has been checked. And their claim that they see their goal as "missiological" - wonderful word, that - gives me the creeps. But we're just getting started.</p><p>First off, "detransitioning" is defined, simply, and I'd say obviously, as "reversing the transitioning process." Transitioning is divided into three parts: social (taking on attitudes and behavior of the opposite sex), medical (from puberty blockers to hormone therapy to surgery), and legal (taking steps, such as official name change, to reorient the world to one's transgender change). [Please note that I am following the transgender activist practice of using "transgender" to include what was once commonly distinguished as medical-biological (transsexual) as well as social (transgender). I don't like blurring the distinction, but I'm going with the flow here because I don't want to get hung up on the linguistic dilemma.]</p><p>Alarm bells went off for me when Eddy observed that Darwinian evolutionary theory opened up the perspective of seeing sex and non-binary and on a spectrum, since embryonic development takes us through the female-to-male journey in the womb. My thought was, "What's he getting at? Is he trying to shade evolution at the same time as the choice to transgender?" They move on before I can get an answer to that question.</p><p>Eddy credits the internet with the growth of interest in transgendering. Specifically with the idea that it was something one might consider doing. At the end of the last century there was relatively little interest, but between 2004 and 2007 there was a sudden spike in the number of adolescents reporting gender dysphoria. And, of course, as dysphoria became more prevalent, so did transitioning - and ultimately detransitioning, as well. Eddy cites two studies of adolescents in schools, one in Minnesota in 2016 showing 2.7% of 80,000 students surveyed in grades 9 and 11 reporting "some sort of transgender or gender-diverse identity." A second study, in Pennsylvania in 2021, showed 9.2% of students reporting "gender-diverse identity." If these studies are reliable (a big "if") they suggest a strong increase in dysphoria-consciousness. (And that, of course, opens up the question of whether transgender-consciousness is the same thing as dysphoria. I believe it is not, but that's a question for another time.) </p><p>Another question that cannot be ignored is why the sex ratio has changed so remarkably. Where once it was boys/men wanting to be girls/women, these days it is primarily girls/women wanting to be boys/men.</p><p>And a third question is what is the explanation for the high correlation between people with gender dysphoria and people with autism.</p><p>When they reach the question of why it is that transgendering has become such an issue at this time, I begin to appreciate Eddy's ability to be neutral. He acknowledges the culture war which polarizes us all: him on the Christian "God wants us to marry the opposite sex only and remain in the bodies we were born into" side, and me on the side of those who come up with things like"you don't tell me who I can love and who I can marry - I have the right as a citizen living in a democracy to make that decision on my own" and "seems to me the 'born into' question is up for grabs at the moment." But to his credit (in my view) he suggests we look at these questions from a multivariate perspective, and not assume simple single causes. He advocates a "bio-psycho-social" model to follow. I grit my teeth when he adds that, as a Christian, he'd like to add a spiritual component to that mix and make it a "numa-bio-psycho-social" model, and I immediately want to know how the spiritual differs from the psychological. But that's clearly another rabbit hole we probably need to walk past.</p><p>What kinds of issues does the bio-psycho-social model direct us to? The "bio" part leads us to ask whether there are chemicals in the environment, for example, that ought to get us to focus on such things as the intersex question. Sounds to me like asking us whether there's something in the water. But who knows? Maybe there's something there. The "social" aspect is the biggie, as far as I'm concerned. When somebody identifies as transgender, are we doing the right thing by insisting on a gender-affirming approach? Are we seriously doing right by kids by going with their assertion that they are "in the wrong body"? I've come down on that side, so far, and I'm still there. But I recognize it as a legitimate question, mostly because my life has been one discovery after another that I have held firm convictions that I later come to understand as erroneous, and the only proper approach to scientific questions is to assume truth to be "the sum total of all knowledge to date <b>subject to change at any moment with the introduction of new reliable information.</b>"</p><p>Then comes the troubling possibility that some people have come upon gender dysphoria through interaction with their peers. Adolescents are notoriously susceptible to peer group influence and it's an open secret that a lot of bad ideas get into the heads of kids from television and social media. There's even as word for it: <i>social contagion</i>. Add to that the increasing social acceptance of transgender folk and the fact that insurance companies, some of them, are now willing to pay for medical transitioning, and you've got a whole new ball game, a whole new reason to make the leap. And, of course, from the perspective of somebody who later wants to detransition, a whole new risk one should avoid. Either way, a whole new complexity. Not as dramatic as the possibility that, perhaps not in the immediate future, but eventually, we may see uteruses transplanted into male bodies. But complex for sure.</p><p>I'd like to make a brief discursion here to take up two issues McDowell and Eddy do not address. I'm old enough to remember when people went to extremes to hide the fact that they were gay. Old enough to be astonished at how radically the world has changed. Today I can be openly gay and the world I live in, at least, is totally supportive. Positive images are everywhere. The most popular movie on Netflix recently has been <i>Red, White and Royal Blue</i>, a wonderful fantasy in which two drop-dead gorgeous men, one the second in line to the British throne and one the son of America's first female president fall in love and even get portrayed having anal sex in one scene. How's that for a switch? And the world roars its approval. Given this reality, it will surprise no one that all sorts of young men and women who probably would have been too inhibited to explore same-sex sex only recently are now giving it a go. I celebrate this. I think it's good for young people to get drunk a few times. It's the only way one can learn what drink does to you. Do you become a silly drunk? An obnoxious drunk? A morose drunk? You need to know yourself and know what the risks are. Similarly, I think you should know yourself sexually. Young people experiment with sex and if they discover they are essentially heterosexual after a couple gay trysts, all the better. Self-knowledge is essential to a good life.</p><p>But what about experimenting with switching sex and gender? Socially, I'd say the situation is the same as experimenting with same-sex behavior. No harm done, except possibly to your dignity and loss of standing in your old social circles. Do it, if you feel like it, I say. If nothing else, it will put you in the shoes of more serious-minded gender dysphoric people. You will experience the difficulties they go through. But again, I draw the line at medical intervention. Cut off your breasts or your penis and you don't get to go back again. Not something to mess with. Not a parallel with experimenting with being gay.</p><p>The other issues is a big one, in my mind. There is a glaring inconsistency, as I see it, in the transgender claim, from guru Judith Butler on down, that gender (and sex!) are fluid, that there are any number of ways of being a man or a woman, that being non-binary is the way to go. But at the same time people who believe they were born into the wrong body and want to change their gender seem to go for the stereotypes of the opposite sex. Male to female candidates want to be Marilyn Monroe, not Angela Merkel. Female to male often go for the lumberjack or tough guy image, not the self-effacing polite gentleman who gives his seat to a lady. What's that all about, other than calling the "multiple gender" notion into doubt? </p><p>But maybe I'm making too much of that idea. Let me get back to the discussion between McDowell and Eddy. They don't use the word <i>zeitgeist</i> but theyacknowledge that transgendering is so much with us that there are now children as young as three or four being socially transgendered. And it's now clear that once the three-step process starts (from social to blockers and hormones [estrogen or testosterone] to surgery) it's quite likely to continue. And that means that detransitioning will as well. I note, though, that that does not speak to the real issue, which is whether the percentage of those transitioning warrants the calls to stop the process entirely. That, it seems to me, remains very much an open question which McDowell and Eddy, now thirty minutes into their discussion, have not resolved.</p><p>Eddy takes up the distinction between <i>regret over transitioning</i> and <i>detransitioning. </i>The three main reasons for the former, regret, are: 1) some medical complications; 2) a less-than-satisfactory functional outcome; and 3) a less-than-satisfactory esthetic/appearance. However, while the statistics on the regret rate run between 1% and 2.2%, the rates for actual detransitioning run between .5% and 1%. But, I suspect, there is an issue of numbers, here. Eddy himself describes the statistics as "dicey."</p><p>Once Eddy gets into the think of the discussion on detransitioning, he focuses on the complexity behind the figures. Many of the early studies on transitioning, he points out, were undertaken at a time when transitioning came only after extensive counseling, and an attitude which favored moving slowly and carefully. Thus one should expect lower levels of detransitioning from that early era because more thought went into the decision to transition in the first place. Nowadays, when people launch into medical measures after sometimes as little as thirty minutes of counseling, one supposes the risks of an unwise choice have shot way up. This highlights the dilemma one faces over whether to listen to those who threaten suicide or self-harm if they don't get permission to transition or to those who insist on taking it slow, and call their bluff. No enviable spot to be in, for sure.</p><p>But don't miss the point here. The overwhelming majority of those who transition find their lives are better after doing so. Figures go as high as 98%. That too is not an insignificant fact, fuzzy statistics notwithstanding. And both Christian apologists reach that conclusion from the data available. And yet, they also warn that in years to come we may have to reevaluate these conclusions as the almost inevitable increase in testimonies from detransitioners eventually comes in. By the end of their session, I find myself better informed, but no less convinced I should be put off by an overriding approach that favors caution.</p><p>At the end of their discussion, Eddy gets into the question of the reliability of psychological research in general, the search for data on the transgender issue being only one subset of that research. The problem, he stresses, is what he calls <b>replication bias</b>, the fact (he asserts) that 1) much psychological research never gets replicated, and 2) some research gets taken early on as authoritative and research that counters its findings gets ignored. Add to that the fact that there is yet to be established a standardization of linguistic terms and of measuring tools and the fact that much of what we claim to know is based on retrospective studies, and there is good reason to push the pause button. Just as self-report data is notoriously unreliable, so is data that comes from recall. </p><p>When it comes to detransition studies, there is another huge problem, according to Eddy. Many of the studies deal with people who decide to - or decide not to - transition after a few months or a couple years. But other studies show that most of those who detransition do so only after eight or ten years. So these people's experience is not being captured in most of the current studies on detransitioning. Also, detransitioners are less likely to seek the advice of those medical advisors they transitioned with. I wish I could question Eddy about this, though. What difference does it make where the statistics come from on detransitioning? Wouldn't an individual detransitioner be counted as such no matter whether they went through their original transitioning doctor or another doctor? I'm now beginning to worry that maybe my original suspicion that and understanding of the transgender issue is riddled with bias. But is it, in this case, a pro-Christian bias? Or my inclination to see an ideological pro-Christian bias where there isn't one? I am none the wiser after two careful engagements with this video.</p><p>We are left with the impression that we are only at the beginning of a useful understanding of how to proceed rationally with people suffering from gender dysphoria, despite the number of years the problem has been around. </p><p>Eddy and McDowell end on the question of where to go from here and how to advise parents faced with children with gender dysphoria. Eddy advocates use of not a gender-affirming model but what he calls a gender-exploratory model. In plain English: more "let's think about this" than "whatever you say, dear." Once again we are confronted with a choice of going with the head or the heart, the head being the exploratory approach where we question and reason, the heart being affirmation as a way to show love to our children by giving them assurance we trust them to know what they need from life.</p><p>And - again, no surprise - which way you go will depend on the kind of relationship you have with your kids, how much trust you have established with them, how much freedom you've granted them to try new things and fail, and how much you believe they have acquired the maturity to make wise decisions.</p><p>Not something you can get help with from outside. Not something a counselor or therapist can assess with certainty. Something that has to be taken on a case-by-case basis. Welcome to reality, where you have to call the shots with the knowledge you are limited to and accept the consequences they leave you with.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-63560318425333988212023-09-12T11:55:00.001-07:002023-09-12T21:54:37.911-07:00Identities<p>I've got a whole bunch of identities I've worn like skin over the years. I am a New Englander, a Californian, a gay American, a brother, son and grandson, a man married to another man, a German-American, a member of the extended Johnston clan of Nova Scotia, a dog lover, a professor emeritus.</p><div>I wear these identities with pride. They ground me and provide me with a sense of security. I know who I am and where I come from.</div><div><br /></div><div>I have had other identities in the past, some of which mattered for a brief time such as member of the Class of 1958 (the Gilbert School in Winsted, Connecticut) and the Class of 1962 (Middlebury College). Others, like my religious identities - Baptist, Congregationalist, Lutheran, I grew out of and away from. My friend Frank likes to refer to me as "flaquito" (skinny), an affectionate reminder that I spent my early years with less weight on my bones. In Japan I was identified as a "gaijin," an "outside person," a term that got under my skin the first few years I lived there.</div><div><br /></div><div>I love it when I see others wearing their identities with pride. I grew up in a small town full of Italian immigrants, and watching them live life loud and filled with affection used to make me wish I was Italian.</div><div><br /></div><div>And in more recent years, I've observed the same kind of relationships among Mexican families and Jewish families. Not as loud, maybe, but as affectionate.</div><div><br /></div><div>One could do worse than grow up in a family that revels in its roots.</div><div><br /></div><div>I don't want to shed any of my long-lasting identities. I want forever to remain a dog-lover. But I wouldn't mind - at least for a time - living life as an Ashkenazi American Jew, particularly if I had a father who was a cantor:</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiafwfZaweE">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiafwfZaweE</a><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div></div>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-24206940138138604632023-09-06T12:06:00.003-07:002023-09-06T12:20:10.503-07:00Democracy is slipping away "For the first time in my life, I have wished somebody dead," a friend of mine wrote recently. She was referring to the former president of the United States. "Time for him to have a stroke."<div><br /></div><div>I didn't pick up on her comment. I might have. I agree the guy is loathesome and dangerous in his habit of saying things that are patently untrue, counting on his cultlike following to march, lemming-like, off the cliff and take the rest of us with them. But I don't wish him dead because I've come to understand that the hatred such a wish would require takes too much out of me. I'm pretty good at getting my spirits back up when they go down - good music, good food, good conversation all do that - but why use the energy, I tell myself, when I could put it elsewhere.</div><div><br /></div><div>For one thing, I think blaming the orange road kill, to use one of his ninety-nine names in current use, is not the problem. The real problem is a combination of two things. One is an uninformed populace willing to follow-the-leader because we live in what some call a "post-epistemic age" - an age when we no longer believe in the idea of objective truth, but think truth is simply whatever you want it to be. If I want to follow an American Führer, I can. I know my rights.</div><div><br /></div><div>The other problem is our failure - is it laziness? simple apathy? ignorance? - to do the work necessary to keep democracy alive. We have allowed it to slip through our fingers, to wither away, because (and this connects it to the first problem) we have lost the will to educate our children in the art of critical thinking. Where once we valued being smart and working hard, we now put our effort into equity and diversity. </div><div><br /></div><div>Now don't get me wrong. I'm not against including the whole population in the American experiment in democracy and, God knows, as a gay man I committed to diversity and inclusion decades ago. But I also value nuanced thinking, and avoiding pendulum swings like overcompensating for leaving kids out of competitive games by giving them all participation trophies. I have weak muscles and flabby skin because I built an aversion to physical education early on, when my elementary school physical education program consisted of baseball or football instead of calisthenics or soccer, and I was almost always the last to be selected when my colleagues chose their team members. I know the feeling of being left out; I know where the impetus to award participation trophies rather than reward athletic performance came from. But the push for inclusion came with a loss of excellence. And the notion that "learning should be fun," much as I agree with it, also brought with it the feeling that there was something off about a dedication to hard work and struggling against the odds.</div><div><br /></div><div>I have no way of measuring this claim, if indeed it is true, but I'm not alone in my concern that we are throwing American democracy out because we aren't willing to do the work to keep it alive and well. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two professors of government at Harvard have put their heads together and written a book titled <i>Tyranny of the Minority</i>. I haven't read it; it's due to come out next week, but you can read about it in a splendid history and summary of the slide of American democracy in an <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/american-constitution-norway/675199/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20230905&utm_term=The+Atlantic+Daily">article</a> in the latest edition of <i>The Atlantic. </i>[You may need to have a subscription to gain access.]</div><div><br /></div><div>It starts out by making the point that the United States, which once led the world as a model for the pursuit of democracy, has fallen behind. What jumped off the page at me was the claim that even Argentina, my idea of a country that knows how to shoot itself in the foot, now outranks the U.S. in Freedom House's Global Freedom Index. Not economically, I assume, but in other measures. Freedom House, I should mention in passing, is roundly criticized by conservative voices for being too "progressive" (don't you love that notion - "too progressive"!), but at the same time it receives most of its funding from the U.S. State Department and other government grants.</div><div><br /></div><div>Levitsky and Ziblatt's main point, if the <i>Atlantic</i> article is anything to go by, seems to be that the U.S. has painted itself into a corner and no longer has the mechanisms needed to gain rule of the majority. We read on a daily basis how the tail wags the dog in America, how the Senate blocks such things as voting rights and those wearing the mantle of retrograde Southern racists like George Wallace and Orval Faubus, who today would clearly be in the Republican Party, and Strom Thurmond, have infiltrated the Republican Party's power brokers. Evangelicals, themselves infiltrated by "God loves you more if you're rich" prosperity-gospel leaders, now exercise power way beyond their numbers, although one might prefer to describe what's going on as political manipulation by right wing politicos of clueless religionists. </div><div><br /></div><div>I'm on so many democratic party politicians' mailing lists that I spend hours every week clearing out my inbox of "please send five dollars...three dollars... anything you can?" solicitations from worthy candidates. I understand that the only way around deep pocket Republican donors is for small donors on the left to pitch in, but I can't escape the worry that anything I send barely covers the cost of mailing me and asking for more donations. It seems so much like a losing proposition.</div><div><br /></div><div>I don't know what else to do, other than stay awake (something that has gotten harder and harder to do as the brain-fog descends), pay attention, and share the information that comes my way when my bullshit detector goes off.</div><div><br /></div><div>I don't believe in intercessory prayer. I don't think that getting Saint Francis to use his clout with the Big Boss to save the squirrels from my favorite animals - dogs - is the way to go. But if you do, please, will you, get somebody upstairs to shake my fellow-Americans into awareness that we are losing our democracy as we speak. And guide the hands of Jack Smith and Fani Willis and all the other heroes fighting the good fight to throw aforementioned road kill's ass in jail.</div><div><br /></div><div>And to think clearly, to question, to speak out, to vote, and not to surrender to cynicism.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-84581203863852653872023-09-01T19:06:00.002-07:002023-09-01T19:08:24.690-07:00Yokohama AIDS Conference 1994<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKdN13iBNxZ_txLdFYOZzOVfJVoo7Z1LAAMgkra8KxrcoTPPLtNNCMUMTfgpsYDLGQ6DrJEV_akjW2FCahBZGEDFErbIS6WU5Gdr7o-xkTElfI3Fa8YRKGrEvrUiZBnO30h5ojrTVbgIaTOE3waCL30HgNYF23uoeIsFKKjYTL7QVG1liqBBDu4-bTzqY/s2016/IMG_1333.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2016" data-original-width="1512" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKdN13iBNxZ_txLdFYOZzOVfJVoo7Z1LAAMgkra8KxrcoTPPLtNNCMUMTfgpsYDLGQ6DrJEV_akjW2FCahBZGEDFErbIS6WU5Gdr7o-xkTElfI3Fa8YRKGrEvrUiZBnO30h5ojrTVbgIaTOE3waCL30HgNYF23uoeIsFKKjYTL7QVG1liqBBDu4-bTzqY/s320/IMG_1333.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>Still trying to throw away tons of paper in files in my closets. Still failing because there's so much there that brings back memories. I blogged earlier today about planning a sabbatical in San Francisco to coincide with Taku's new venture as a foreign graduate student at San Francisco State. I then went back to work for all of twenty minutes before I came across some notes I kept from my attendance at the AIDS Conference in Yokohama in 1994.<p></p><p>When I took the job at Keio in 1989 we were still up to our ears in death in San Francisco. AIDS was raging out of control, and I didn't hide the the fact that I felt, upon arriving in Japan where AIDS was largely unknown, a sense of blessed relief.</p><p>For the first few months, at least. Then, gradually, it began to get under my skin how clueless everybody was. How can you not see what's going on in the world, I heard myself thinking all the time.</p><p>Because I had a tenured professorship, I had free rein to teach almost anything I chose to focus on. I decided to massage my "cross-cultural" credentials a little bit and proposed a seminar with the title, "Cross-Cultural Responses to the AIDS Crisis." It wasn't exactly a roaring success. Only four students signed up. Keio, I want to acknowledge with gratitude, let me go ahead with it and we dug into responses around the globe to the AIDS crisis to see what they might tell us about the attitudes, values and beliefs of the people of the various countries involved. We dug up lots of interesting stuff. The French were offering condoms with long-distance train tickets. The Brazilians assumed that advice would only be taken seriously if they never lost sight of the fact that having sex was fun, and thus couched messages in samba music and sexy poses. The Japanese avoided possible embarrassment by using real people in their public messages and used stick figures instead. The Dutch posted messages like, "When you fuck, use a condom!"</p><p>By the end of the semester, our little group had become quite close and their interest in AIDS had intensified to the degree that we all decided to attend the Tenth International Conference on AIDS that year which, conveniently, was going to be held in Yokohama. I can't remember how I did it, but I managed to wrangle some money out of the university to enable us all to go. The normal registration fee was outrageous - about $1000, if I remember right. But that made sense when you realized that they set the fee this high so they could give lots of radically reduced tickets to people from poor countries, countries suffering the most from AIDS.</p><p>No sooner did I get involved than I learned the conference directors were embarrassed by the fact that Japanese people were not signing up. The apathy I first encountered when first arriving in Japan was still there. In the end, the government decided to provide free, or next-to-nothing, tickets to Japanese doctors and their families. Not academics, for the most part, not people accustomed to attending academic conferences.</p><p>The result was we got to see a large number of cultures in contact which otherwise would not likely have been in contact. Typical of many of the presenters, for example, were sex workers from Rio de Janeiro and typical of many of the Japanese audience members were high-society ladies in high fashion clothes and shoes costing a Rio slum dweller's annual income. You can imagine the look on the faces of these ladies when the speaker's Portuguese presentation was translated into Japanese and they heard, "Some of our biggest problems come from doctors who prescribe medicine before they've even had a look at your dick!"</p><p>An unforgettable moment of that conference that remains with me came during the plenary given by the head of the World Bank. Somebody asked him, "What is the single most important thing we can do in confronting this crisis?" I expected, given his role in dealing with the world economy, he might say something like, "write letters to your congress people and urge them to fund better health care," or something to that effect. His actual answer was: "Educate women."</p><p>Another unforgettable moment, moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, was listening to the Japanese Minister of Health predict that AIDS would not become a problem in Japan because "there are few homosexuals and Japanese are very educated." At the same time, his ministry was publishing the information that 50% of 20-24-year-old males and 20% of females were having sex outside of a partnership and only a third of those were using condoms.</p><p>During one presentation a (Mr.?) R. Msiska, head of the National AIDS Control Program in Zambia, put it out there in black and white: "We are undone by this disease. Our economy is in shambles. Our productive workers are dying. Not a single Zambian individual is untouched by this disease." At the same time, in another part of the conference, Norio Hattori, who I believe was press secretary at the Japanese foreign ministry at the time, urged "all the people of the world to work together." I shouldn't be too hard on him, strong as my inclination to disparage the work of Japanese bureaucrats is. I understand his ministry was pledging billions of dollars by the year 2000. I just checked and I see they actually <a href="https://www.theglobalfund.org/en/news/2022/2022-08-27-global-fund-applauds-japans-major-commitment-to-help-end-aids-tuberculosis-and-malaria-and-strengthen-systems-for-health/">followed up</a>, so maybe it's time I stopped biting at the heels of Japanese bureaucrats.</p><p>The fact that the seminar had only four students attending had the upside that the university was willing to pay their entry fee. I doubt they saw anything at Keio to match that level of educational experience. On the last day, to quote from my own notes from 29 years ago:</p><p></p><blockquote>I walked out of a meeting at 7 p.m. in a state of near total mental exhaustion, because I simpy couldn't take any more. I went out onto the plaza where, despite the heat, people were mesmerized by a razzle dazzle high tech multimedia presentation on PWAs (people with AIDS) in all stages of life and in death, poetry written by and about them, scenes of protest juxtaposed with official responses, etc. When you can't stand it anymore, out come the dancers and the rock music. Even at age 54, I understand the need to be loud.</blockquote><p>That was 1994. Just over twenty-nine years ago. Today we struggle over how to deal with the transgender issue, we worry whether there will be fighting in the streets if our gangster-president gets sent to jail, Covid lingers on, the German economy is in full stagnation, people are throwing democracy into the trash can in several places simultaneously around the world, and global warming is making fools of us all.</p><p>But we are no longer terrorized by AIDS.</p><p>I remember vividly when we were.</p><p>Sometimes things actually do get better.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-44970326510686344382023-09-01T14:28:00.001-07:002023-09-01T15:49:32.925-07:00Using memories to avoid house repairs<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv9PIgKSs3xFqqOmoldFXW5GCqqK_Tw3VU77C06Ecr8ilBnvdUKAoTisRxnDNyNAKGM3A3_pXCRsUVQQENOeq11OORXcaauuodljpS_E3PPbilQiLr3aWxfWe7uvH1Kp0c35Gewp78qHkYvvxKQqcmDNvGMFf_Tlct00hH_jn4sNJc7f8krJjt7urVE6U/s616/Emperor_Akihito_199011_1.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="616" data-original-width="440" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv9PIgKSs3xFqqOmoldFXW5GCqqK_Tw3VU77C06Ecr8ilBnvdUKAoTisRxnDNyNAKGM3A3_pXCRsUVQQENOeq11OORXcaauuodljpS_E3PPbilQiLr3aWxfWe7uvH1Kp0c35Gewp78qHkYvvxKQqcmDNvGMFf_Tlct00hH_jn4sNJc7f8krJjt7urVE6U/s320/Emperor_Akihito_199011_1.jpg" width="229" /></a></div> That guy in the photo on the left with shoes to die for and a very transparent desire to look a lot taller is the previous Japanese Emperor Heisei, known while he was alive as Akihito. Japan uses two calendars, the Gregorian one we and most of the world use for modern-day international business exchanges and the official Japanese calendar, which changes with each emperor. I was born in Showa 15 [Showa = Hirohito], first went to live in Japan in Showa 45. And while teaching at Keio University, I applied for a sabbatical to run from September of Heisei 9 to March of Heisei 10. I know that because I've been avoiding the task of getting people to come fix the walls of my house by cleaning out my closets and trying to throw away the tons of stuff there gathering dust.<p></p><p>I never get very far in these moments. Something always grabs my attention and I get carried away with memories. This morning it was coming across that sabbatical application in Heisei 9 (1997) and the fateful decision to fulfil Taku's lifetime wish to come to the States. We were just starting out as a couple and didn't want to be separated, so we calculated I'd take a sabbatical for a semester while he came to live in my house in Berkeley. It worked. He got into San Francisco State in women's studies, I got my sabbatical and Taku got his first taste of living in what would become his adopted country. Good times.</p><p>Lots of water under the bridge since those days. Taku decided one day he had gone into women's studies not so much out of a desire to study women, but because he wasn't up to telling the world his real academic interest was in gay studies - and the opportunities in that area were far fewer. He switched to graphic design and got a job with a Japanese company in San Francisco. When we first met, we spent a lot of time talking about Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir and the state of feminism in Japan, and I rode him about wanting to give that fascinating stuff up just to become "another fairy who wants to make things pretty." But he was undeterred.</p><p>To read my sabbatical application is to roll your eyes and wait for your bullshit detector to go off in your head. But it wasn't all bullshit. I really was interested in postmodernism, still a new idea to me in those days, and I had no doubt I would be picking things up I could use in my seminars in culture theory. And that came to pass, even though I never pursued anything to publication.</p><p>I am still plagued by postmodernism and how to walk the line between holding to the conviction<br /> there is such a thing as objective truth, on the one hand, and, on the other, recognizing the words of anthropologist Clifford Geertz,</p><blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdIfYFc0OIOsg1l52MhYuOkR5VbCsyhBkM_SJZIPNfpGGHbt5voXDNX74yfRiniFsLFw3iWjav72aXv7An0atU4Fw5L_8xpXXlI6qbIQrDyYPMHT-eevtBWEg_tPM2OCgIKiBoa3oKD4qXYN4jbq3a3Nih6Fj-pXEoA6Bp6KIKi3wDAViXtMWHdrGz7K0/s1086/0-4.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1086" data-original-width="814" height="425" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdIfYFc0OIOsg1l52MhYuOkR5VbCsyhBkM_SJZIPNfpGGHbt5voXDNX74yfRiniFsLFw3iWjav72aXv7An0atU4Fw5L_8xpXXlI6qbIQrDyYPMHT-eevtBWEg_tPM2OCgIKiBoa3oKD4qXYN4jbq3a3Nih6Fj-pXEoA6Bp6KIKi3wDAViXtMWHdrGz7K0/w319-h425/0-4.jpg" width="319" /></a></div>that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun…I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning.</blockquote><p>These days the struggle is less over political correctness per se than the best way to approach the T in LGBT.</p><p>I went into retirement seventeen years ago already, and no longer have seminar students to toss ideas around with. Taku is now an American citizen and wonders aloud after dinner sometimes whether he made the right decision to leave his home country for one that sometimes seems to be eating itself alive. </p><p>Life goes on.</p><p>And I still need to get those damned crumbling walls fixed. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p></p>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7017925699690446520.post-15589029561864164032023-08-30T12:58:00.001-07:002023-08-30T13:03:17.099-07:00Tante Frieda<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilFsPIP1Sol2VGjOQx5PYjWLyV9Tany4_VEsBZ3bahqngz0-6_rT-R3pKOpiQg9V_22bmCytlBB_wLn5w7uMWxcc9T9yVKTjfr4P_t2-XhXvBrtAVuLnJdEhnvlJdFyJWhNrdGrzX_MW3zj3L8vOzMqWk5odDlXmOIHKMnj6cKh1MVyc2ZyKMo6ivri6g/s1086/0-2.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1086" data-original-width="814" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilFsPIP1Sol2VGjOQx5PYjWLyV9Tany4_VEsBZ3bahqngz0-6_rT-R3pKOpiQg9V_22bmCytlBB_wLn5w7uMWxcc9T9yVKTjfr4P_t2-XhXvBrtAVuLnJdEhnvlJdFyJWhNrdGrzX_MW3zj3L8vOzMqWk5odDlXmOIHKMnj6cKh1MVyc2ZyKMo6ivri6g/s320/0-2.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>I love the German word <i>Lebensgefährtin. Leben</i> is <i>life, </i>and the second half of the word contains the word <i>Fahr(en),</i> the word for travel. It's the German equivalent of <i>life partner</i>, a person you travel through life with. It's the word my Uncle Otto used to introduce me to Frieda Müller<i>, </i>whom I would come to know as <i>Tante Frieda</i> (Aunt Frieda) over the years. I had close ties to Germany, one intellectual, my friend Achim, and one emotional, my Tante Frieda, back in the sixties, when I began to consider for the first time becoming something other than an American. I had begun to feel the pull of my German roots when I went to school in Munich, in 1960, and the feeling only intensified when I found my way to Berlin as a "cold warrior" a few years later. My fellow American soldiers called the Germans "doobies" (supposedly after the sound of the police, fire and ambulance sirens, which they said <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1Ce1z5fN90">sounded</a> like doo-bee-doo-bee). I, on the other hand, had a wonderful personal connection to the city of Berlin in Frieda and Achim and their friends and families.<p></p><p>Frieda and I were not related by blood. She and her husband were close family friends of Otto and his wife. Frieda's husband managed to survive the war only to die when a railroad trellis collapsed on him two weeks into the cleanup. He worked for Berlin's transportation service. Otto, too, had lost his spouse and in time the two of them took up what in German is called an <i>Onkelehe</i> (uncle marriage), a system of hitching up with somebody without marrying them, usually because you get more financial benefit by not doing so. Frieda and Otto had to wait over a decade to be allotted an apartment, and when they finally got one, they were reluctant to give up the luxury, including the pension rights which came along with it. So every morning Otto got up, took the bus across the city where Frieda made him lunch - the main meal of the day - and the two of them just hung out, went to concerts and plays, and visited with other friends, many of whom were also in <i>Onkelehe</i> arrangements.</p><p>Otto wasn't a relative by blood, either. While I was the grandson of my mother's mother's first husband, Otto was the brother of her second. In those days I wasn't all that keen on some of my blood connections, so I saw this relationship in a more positive light than some might, an early instance of "chosen family," a concept which has come to take on powerful significance in my life over the years.<br /></p><p>Tante Frieda had an actual honest-to-God twinkle in her eye. She was one of the most cheerful people</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgexrCQmX5Yp4diuTVuZtZ1ezRgMOctN97lZMzj0veWAs-oQfHv_A3hcvf0AahpzwXPGNkbSt5No6qDgyfoouRRRm1SqUCtvgn7ZEJSS1Oy59EUeKjYo19waIHPgOguJsAWOiENsA96FsdDRuxdYWPUW3OAXeKj55yO5iH14squMUGehcnHrcQvf34tIxU/s1086/0-3.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="814" data-original-width="1086" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgexrCQmX5Yp4diuTVuZtZ1ezRgMOctN97lZMzj0veWAs-oQfHv_A3hcvf0AahpzwXPGNkbSt5No6qDgyfoouRRRm1SqUCtvgn7ZEJSS1Oy59EUeKjYo19waIHPgOguJsAWOiENsA96FsdDRuxdYWPUW3OAXeKj55yO5iH14squMUGehcnHrcQvf34tIxU/s320/0-3.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>I've ever known. She loved to laugh, loved to find pleasure in the most mundane things - when you drip filter your coffee, be sure to stir it in the pot once before serving it to mix the flavors - and provided me with a place to bring my army buddies for Kaffee und Kuchen; they also called her Tante Frieda.<p></p><p>Over the years, through Otto's death and my years in Japan and Saudi Arabia and California, I took every opportunity to return to Berlin, usually at Christmas time. Nobody does Christmas as well as the Germans do, in my experience, with their Christmas markets, their choral music in the churches, their Christmas trees with real lighted candles. Frieda lived into her 90s and outlived everybody who once mattered in her life. I felt a strong obligation to come and hang out with her at least for a week or two at Christmas, despite the dreaded <i>Bohnenkönig </i>torture she put us through. Achim and his wife would invite us over for Christmas dinner and Tante Frieda would arrive with a stack of sweet rolls. We had to amuse her by eating them all until we found the one containing a coffee bean, whereupon the finder would be crowned "bean king." Too much dessert, usually following too much food and drink. More fun in retrospect than it was in the moment, I assure you.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_IPcPE0ZfOgcA1o61AKQicCQoT78aitKcY3ktTRYFwBJ6zb0YvTpeftidD1rmAg4WW1ZpJfQ-RvuGiJ0fAKn89VOJFm3K1A4fLgxR3YU_8mWXqXcag5HSgZE8F-M9oTb3rkdPXYHMNp-QpGyuij0gAsYYeEECyUfn51lcl_bTuPfyAaKwPXl8yl7DtUM/s1086/0-1.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1086" data-original-width="814" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_IPcPE0ZfOgcA1o61AKQicCQoT78aitKcY3ktTRYFwBJ6zb0YvTpeftidD1rmAg4WW1ZpJfQ-RvuGiJ0fAKn89VOJFm3K1A4fLgxR3YU_8mWXqXcag5HSgZE8F-M9oTb3rkdPXYHMNp-QpGyuij0gAsYYeEECyUfn51lcl_bTuPfyAaKwPXl8yl7DtUM/s320/0-1.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><p></p><p>Not long before I left Berlin and the army, in April of 1965, the Germans infuriated the Russians by inviting the German parliament, the Bundestag, to hold a session in West Berlin. The Russians retaliated by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1965/04/08/archives/soviet-jets-harass-berlin-as-bundestag-meets-there-berlin-harassed.html">flying planes</a> low over the city, virtually at eye level past tall buildings. Tante Frieda and I had gone to a concert and were having coffee in the rooftop cafe of the KaDeWe department store in downtown West Berlin and at one point a plane flew so close I could clearly see the pilot. The racket was ear-splitting and Tante Frieda insisted we leave then and there.</p><p>That was the first and only time I found her willing to talk about her war experiences. She had been a chemist and was pressured to join the Nazi party. She refused, and was punished by being given double duty as watch during air raids. During one of those raids, crawling from one damaged air raid shelter to another in the neighboring building, she fell and damaged her spine in a way that affected her hearing. She was now nearly deaf, and if she didn't have her hearing aids in couldn't even hear the door bell. Since she didn't have a telephone, the only way we could get her to answer the door if I ever arrived (I'm talking about later years now) unannounced, was to stick a broom handle through the mail slot and hope she would see it.</p><p>All these events, the Russian pilots staring me in the face, the broom handles, the bloated feeling from eating too many sweet rolls, the "einmal rühren" (stir once), the twinkle in the eye - all this comes flooding over me today. I don't recall, if I ever knew, what year she was born - it must have been around 1895, or 130 years ago, give or take. I do remember the date, though. It was August 30th.</p><p>Happy Birthday, Tante Frieda!</p><p><br /></p><p>photos are:<br /><br /></p><p>1. Tante Frieda in her late teens</p><p>2. friends Ed and Bonnie, me, Tante Frieda, and Onkel Otto, 1964-5</p><p>3. Tante Frieda, my guess in her 30s or 40s</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Alan McCornickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05211376863316639727noreply@blogger.com0