Letter to Dad #6

I literally went to shul today Dad to say Kaddish, but I told my brother that I didn't know if I'd be able to get through it without a scene if they mention the war. He said 'please don't make a scene', so I said 'Of course I won't long as the war doesn't get mentioned.' To which he said 'they probably will mention it.' 

I'm sure he thought I'd be mature enough to handle myself in there so it wasn't a problem. I'm not, I never was. I've dealt with that building's bullshit my whole life, and now I never have to again. I'll come to shul to say Kaddish for you on days I know what the sermon will be about and I can leave the room when it's time to hear more of their Ein-sof horseshit, but on the days when I don't know it's coming, how does anybody go into that room? It's been seven months. Your soul is probably in Olam Ha'Ba by now, and I could be wrong but isn't the Kaddish supposed to be for the living? Not once does it mention the dead. 

I know that the whole point is that it's supposed to be said in a community, and the community is supposed to bind us together. But this is a community that cares all about unity and not a vine or fig for communing. So long as everyone agrees, there's a place. But for those who need a place, for those who feel alienated, for those who don't know what it is to bond with people just one degree different from them, they're utterly lost to community. So many shuls are not real shuls, they're country clubs. They claim to learn, but how much learning goes on in these places that isn't agitprop? 

It's not just agitprop about Israel. It's agitprop about the shul itself. A shul is a product just like a soft drink, and the big shuls are constantly advertising themselves to justify their ginormous operating expenses. I'm sure megachurches are exactly the same way, but we Jews have this problem that we kinda advertise to the world that we're better than this.... We're really not. For all the times you privately crapped on the entire Jewish world, including and especially your town of residence, you bought into this as much as anybody. 

As a high school student at BT I used to say that the difference between KSDS (where our other synagogue was) and BT was the difference between anarchy and a totalitarian state. KSDS was a very high pressure school in many ways, but low enthusiasm was steeped into us from the moment we set foot in the door till the moment the learning disabled among us finished homework at 11:30 at night. By the time we were teens, as many of us skipped morning minyan (services) as could get away with it. Studies were, of their type, taken very very seriously in this school that never went past eighth grade: they called themselves 'The Jewish Gilman' (Gilman being Baltimore's most elite private school). They certainly were too important to make anyone go cheer at sporting events, which would languish in the gym with no cheers as quiet as a cathedral except for the sounds of a bouncing basketball and a deafening buzzer. Teachers were constantly yelling at the children but none of them could actually keep any classroom in order. We were encouraged to sing in order to learn our prayers multiple times a day until the day we graduated at 14, and everybody basically just droned the words as they fell asleep. The middle school head kept telling us that we should revere our teachers as ultimate founts of wisdom, founts that often wore a piece of jewelry each day on every finger, wore a seven hundred dollar pantsuit every day to class and their hair in beehives so tight they could serve as helmets, yelling at us in nasal Baltimore accents thick enough that you expected crabs to come out their mouths at any moment. Hebrew teachers would sneak belts of whiskey when they thought nobody was looking, and Israeli adults would talk crap in Hebrew about their students and other teachers right in front of them and assumed we didn't notice. In a lot of ways, I found KSDS an absolutely miserable experience, where teachers deposited a daily diet of aggression onto their students who then deposited it on each other. In others, it was an absolutely hilarious place. Like so many Jewish youth experiences in every generation, the real weirdos ended up teaching at Jewish schools, most of whom didn't even realize they were weird. Nothing about the place was serious, and nothing about the place was taken seriously by the students. The only people who took the school seriously were the administration, who put a kind of Potemkin front on the school to make parents think that it was an incredibly elite academic institution while most of the teachers were barely ahead of their students. 

BT was, of course, the opposite. Certainly not the opposite in learning, though it did have a few very serious scholars in the high school, but the precise opposite in ethos. In many ways, it was as much a Potemkin front as KSDS, but the difference was just how desperate BT was to keep up the ruse. So far as I could tell from two years there vs. my nine at KSDS, there wasn't nearly as much yelling or contempt, though there was as much as any other school, but BT was a kind of parochial North Korea where the entire school from nursery school to 12th grade was constantly being brought into the main sanctuary as a way to praise donors who just bought the shul yet another Torah. Even the smallest happening at the lower school was advertised in the Baltimore Jewish Times as though it were an event at the 92nd Street Y. Every teacher seemed to have multiple fake honorifics, and every high school student got some kind of bullshit award every year: not to boost their self-esteem, but because the award would boost their transcript for college applications. Every teacher, every student, every janitor was under the eagle eye of Mrs. S____, an administrative autocrat so brilliantly exacting and intimidating that had she not been born frum she probably could have become Hillary Clinton. Kids at BT were divided very exactingly into the great hopes of Zion, and the execrations and astonishments. The high classes were afforded every educational amenity, privilege, and praise. The kids would be touted in the shul newsletter, in the Jewish Times, and by the time they got to college they had enough clippings that their futures were practically bought and paid for. The rest of us, they just kinda shrugged: "We know you don't have a future, you know you don't have a future, just leave us alone and you can do whatever you want and don't screw your life up before you leave."   

Dad you spent your lifetime implying what morons the other people in Pikesville were. Sadly, in many cases you were right. We spent our lives being told just how amazingly smarter Jews were than other people: then we spent our childhood going around Pikesville where people were certainly more successful than elsewhere, but who was the average Pikesville success story? People who just were kinda mediocre, dull, second-tier, nothing of interest to say, and if they had something interesting to say, they were too success oriented to let anyone hear it. In many ways, it speaks incredibly well of this weird Jerusalem suburb in Maryland: the average person deserves success too, and if they can make it as an accountant, a lawyer, a doctor of an unvital organ, why not?   

The only problem is the hypocrisy of it. It's fruitless to pretend that Jews don't tout ourselves as being smarter than everybody else, cleverer, more interesting, and yet somehow we often even think ourselves more moral. Something is wrong with that, and you could see it in how... well... mediocre Pikesville is: how few interesting things people there had to say or do, how materialistic were the possessions of your generation, how 'basic' are the interests of my generation (and you commented on both at least as often as I did...). 

The fact remains, being Jewish is a drek sandwich in the best generations. We're hardly known as the easiest people to get along with, yet getting along with other Jews is a lot easier for Jews than getting along with the goyim who so often want to kill us. From generation to generation, the best and brightest of the Jewish world generally realize the grass is goyer, and they get out. They assimilate, and so they hope, they blend in until their progeny are indistinguishable from their peers. Our gene pool somehow absorbs the loss, and the genotypes of Jewish intelligence are embedded deeply enough that they keep showing up even in those people who carry it recessively. Many frum people are brilliant, god knows they've produced millions of Torah scholars, but are we really that much smarter than everybody else? And if, on the small off chance we are, does it matter at all? 

In your generation, a disproportionate number of the best and brightest were the children of Holocaust survivors. In my generation, a disproportionate number of the best and brightest were the children of Soviet emigres. Like you, those kids existed in a diaspora within the diaspora. We knew about them, we went to school with them, and we marginalized them. Most (not all) of the Russian kids were social pariahs. They were scared to talk, and the kids among them who did open their mouths usually regretted it. I was pretty damn low on the social totem pole growing up. They were lower: the Jews within the Jewish community. For ten years I went to school with, of all people, Julia Ioffe, one of the towering journalists of our time, and in ten years, I'm not even sure I said two words to her. I'm not sure anybody else did either. 

Like you and the other 'greenies' (children of survivors), they were the ones with the overwhelming hunger for achievement, they were the ones with the overwhelming drive for success, desire for recognition, and fear of failure. And like you, their fear of failure was probably more terror than fear. Their parents knew exactly what it meant for it all to come crumbling down, and they wanted fortresses of security so absolute that no establishment man could ever take them away. 

And that's the problem. It's not just the Soviet emigres and the Greenies, it's not just the Jews going back before the War, or going back long before masses of Jews came to America. Like Hoffer said, we can never have enough of what we don't really want. Security is a myth, and so is success. There is nothing you can gain that cannot be taken away from you, and often the very conspicuousness of your security and success is what makes people so single-minded to remove it. You sort of realized all this in the end, but I don't think you quite got there. 

What there is, all there is, is community, all there is is survival, all there is is settling, compromise, and a fleeting, temporary sense of belonging, all of which can evaporate from day to day, all there is behind that is a modicum of self-esteem we can reserve for ourselves to absorb the blows when prosperity fades, and all there is beneath that is humility before a world on which we are just dots. We, Jews, Americans, immigrants and Pikesvillians, believed in success and security, and the payment for both may be demanded from us very soon. We chased money for ourselves when we should have chased common well-being, we chased individual prestige when we should have chased belonging, we chased security when we should have chased compromise.

You realized a lot of this, certainly better than many, certainly better than me at times. But if the failure to recognize this was your flaw, our falw, it was the flaw of everyone else we knew, everyone else we lived around, everyone else who breathed that same air of smoke fish and chreyn (horseradish).

More later...

Letter to Dad #5 (related to 4)

Oh my what you would have made of this Iran invasion. Oh my god it defies belief that you would have lived in times so absurd. You spent your life in a troubled preparation for an unstable moment that never came, and it seems to be imminent the very moment you leave this earth.

You'd be aghast at the incompetence, and I would be arguing to you, as ever, that the incompetence is deliberate. The whole point is to pursue it incompetently. The whole point is to make the war go on as long as possible, because the longer it goes, the worse it gets, and the worse it gets, the more indispensible Trump and Netanyahu seem to their followers. As a dog returns to his vomit, the fool persists in his folly (Mishlei 26:11), so the more incompetently both Trump and Netanyahu pursue this war, the more they create an argument for their own indispensability, both countries have grown so gullible because to cease in their folly would be to acknowledge it. It's precisely the 'sunk cost' fallacy you talked about ad nauseum.

Ultimately, I'm not sure it matters whether it's deliberate incompetence to plunge us into a state of desperation for a leader, or whether it's the blunders of two malignant narcissists living reality as a fantasy. What matters is us, not Trump. What matters is that the most mendacious, venal, and stupid man in America sailed over the machinations of 10,000 cleverer candidates to put his stamp on this country that will alter the world's axis forever, and the 80 million idiots who support him. Why did they support him?

No liberal wants to hold Obama responsible for it all, because to hold Obama responsible would be to acknowledge that the vision Obama conjured in us of what life can be is false. Well, you can't, not without an equal threat of force. Republicans were always right about that. You can't negotiate with your opponents be they Vladimir Putin or be they the Republican Party. Only the threat of something worse brings them to the table, and Obama, optimist that he was, thought he could lower the temperature by bringing us all to the table tax free in an exchange of ideas that would eventually make everyone realize that his ideas were the best. What Obama did not realize is that the lowered temperature was the temperature we were already sitting in. Temperatures don't get lower than they were during my childhood, and even in the 2000's, all the old legislative barterers and exchangers of ideas were still in the Senate and House and judiciary, the temperature only raised because of the determination of a new generation of leaders to raise it.

I find conservatives and socialists so overwhelmingly un-self aware in their constant accusations that we liberals are 'condescending.' OK, so the best of us are condescending to them, but conservatives and socialists are nothing short of hateful to us, and the worst of us can't help responding hate for hate. We all are what we were formed to be. I grew up in the era of FOX News and talk radio. Both on mass media and in person, I spent decades of my life hearing conservatives inveigh every day against everything I believe, everything I value, every choice I make, everything I am. I have watched the dozen and change close republicans in my life spend their lives accusing everyone who is not part of their movement of irredeemable corruption; and then watched them be shocked whenever I got mad, shocked whenever I called them out on their spreading obvious propaganda, shocked whenever I implied or said that their behavior was not worthy of dialogue when they take opportunities every day to either imply or say outright that they look at people exactly like me and you as moral inferiors.

You didn't really care about that. For you, it was just another excuse to be condescending to them. You viewed us all a bit like pets, and when people got mad at you, when people insulted you, you thought it was cute, and you'd keep baiting and encouraging us to keep insulting you. As weird as it might sound to those who didn't know you, you loved it. Getting made fun of was another way of being the center of the room, and you were secure enough to know that if you wanted to, you could say the perfect three words to squish any of us like a cockroach. At least you could until we mined a real insecurity of yours, at which point you inevitably became extremely hurt and sometimes incensed.

But now that I'm middle aged, it's not just the right, it's a left too of online hornets and committed friends (who sometimes become ex-friends) who similarly can't be bothered to see how their behavior embraces everything they supposedly hate. At least I'm self-aware enough to see the ugly contradictions between my aims and my results, but I doubt any of them are.

Nevertheless, in spite of this and millions more variables, Obama thought people were rational, and when presented with the best possible options, reason would compel them. Like all progressives in all eras, more than 50% of Obama's ideas were great, but the ones that weren't were inevitably disasters (we won't get into which right now, you know them as well as I do...), and just like Woodrow Wilson the progressive of 100 years ago, this Presidency of optimism ultimately ended in national nihilism and worldwide despair. There are so much worse things in the world than being condescended to, but people HATE being condescended to far more than they hate things which are infinitely greater dangers to them. If people think they are being taken seriously, they can be convinced to die and kill for those whom they think esteem them. If people think they are being looked down on, they would rather die and kill than improve their lives.

Why did so many millions find Obama condescending? Well, why did people find you the same? Well, partially because you clearly thought your solutions were better than theirs, and it's because you clearly thought yourself smarter than them. The problem was, like Obama, you WERE smarter than us all, but the best solution is almost never the solution that works best. The best solution is usually not the preventative one that eliminates the problem for decades, it's usually the duct tape solution that comes apart next month and lands us right back to where we started. At least with the duct tape, we know how to fix it. What Obama wanted was change, but he wanted change to happen from the bottom up, and as Eric Hoffer would say: 'change is the biggest ordeal on the planet.'

The double standard held against Obama was so outrageous and must be partially explained by a mixture of propaganda and racism. In the entirety of ten years, Obama basically had two comments held against him: one ("cling to gods and guns...") in the pressure of a campaign, one ("at the end of the day, I won.'... not even a bad comment...) in the pressure of negotiations with Eric Cantor. But it does not change the fact that propaganda exists, and Obama-era progressives were completely ill-equipped to combat it. He was absolutely right:, modern Republican policy was and is entirely ideology driven, but so often was Obama's, and no one is quicker to point the finger of blame than someone of bad conscience who have to repress to themselves that they may very well be wrong. The modern Right desperate to prove us wrong precisely because they were more wrong than us.

A large part of the hostility against Obama was ideology and racism, but the other part was anxiety: not just anxiety, pure terror of the future. The idea of persuading the entire country to see themselves in a way that might improve their lives was nothing short of a trauma for this country. It forced us all to come face to face with the idea that we might not be as great as we think we are, that other countries have surpassed us in quality of life, that the world no longer looks at us as the beacon of freedom and hope. So much of the country resented that look. Some simply thought Obama was wrong about America, and many of them thought Obama a simple America-hater (a sentiment beneath contempt), but a large part of Trump's appeal was precisely that millions of the forgotten America realized that in some way, Obama was right. Trump was in many ways elected to restore everything that Obama showed us we lost.

Every day of your life you got some new solution in your head that would maximize people's efficiency. You wanted to impose changes on people's behaviors, their routines, their entire mentalities and work ethics, but you were completely unprepared for the idea that other people might ultimately be better off with the way things were. In going about things how you did, you taught the lesson that we were (meaning I was) unsatisfactory to life's demands, and you certainly taught that we were (I was) unsatisfactory to your demands. This is what happens from liberal condescension. There are so much worse things in life than condescension, but no one can make us feel more fearful than we can within our own mind, and nothing in the world spurs the mind to the worst possible self-opinion more effectively than does other people's condescension. I unfortunately spent decades of my life making sure you didn't get away with your personal insults. I wish I could have figured out how to ignore them, but if the whole country can't figure out how to deal with condescension from a smart President with good ideas who barely ever insulted them and would be gone in eight years, how can one man figure out how to deal with withering condescension from the only father he would ever have?

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But if there was one thing you never were, it was full of shit. You spoke your mind every minute of every day, sometimes down to the second, and seemed utterly heedless of the consequences. Amazingly..., whether due to environment or heredity, I picked up this behavior, and when I did it, you would act as though the world had ended.

People say we're now living in a post-truth age. That's a load of shit in itself. We've been living in a post-truth age at least since my adolescence. Bill Clinton based a whole career on composting truth into law-evading bullshit, and Republicans of the 90s with their accusations about 'liberal media' declared an outright war on truth.

I'm sure we could date the post-truth age even further back, but the truth is that the entirety of human history is based on having an extraordinarily fungible relationship to the truth. Truth is something so easily abused, so easily manipulated, so easily coopted for propaganda that what does it mean to tell it?

...I need to read more before we go on. Sorry Dad.

Letter to Dad #4

Part I.

I know I know, I haven't gone to say Kaddish in over a month. I know you were adamant you wanted me to say Kaddish but... look at it from my point of view.

It's not that I hate shul, I hate shul today. I don't doubt part of it is that I'm just lazy, but I loathe what shul's become in this age of war. I don't just loathe the usual trivial daf yomi they extend the service every day to do (we'll call it daily Talmud study for the Goyim), but I hate that on any day, you don't know when daf yomi will be interrupted for a political argument that they use to act like assholes. I can't fucking stand Chabad at least as much as they can't, but the day after the Chabad shooting, the teacher couldn't even be bothered to disguise his contempt for them. The day of the prisoner exchange, they were just nattering on about WHAT A DISASTER IT IS THAT THE HOSTAGES CAME HOME. What did they expect? That we'd be able to saturate bomb Gaza without eventually getting every single hostage killed? You deserve my attendance, of course you do, but whether or not my lack of attendance is out of laziness, these people are not deserving of my attendance. I know, I know, I can find another shul with daily minyans. But look at the other shul we belonged to, would the shammesh there be any less beligerent? You know who I'm talking about.... If I hear one more statement like this in a place that's supposed to keep the separation between synagogue and state I can't be held responsible for the potential scene I make, and that would be no great tribute to you.

On the days I remember to, I say Kaddish on my own, usually in the car and I never daven the rest of the service, but I chant the Kaddish whenever I remember to where no one can see me talking to myself. I also finally cried today, on the toilet. I felt relieved, not from the results of the toilet but from finally reacting with proper emotion to your passing. Seven months later, I'm still in Kubler-Ross phase 1: shock, utter shock, shock that this giant presence in the lives of everyone who knew you is no longer here. We probably should have seen it coming: you of course did, but how does a presence like yours not live forever? As the shock is still there and I haven't even moved into denial, I don't doubt I'll be chanting the Kaddish for you long after the proscribed eleven months.

I have so many memories of that shul, particularly of being with you, sitting with you as you taught me all the prayers and recounted all your memories of what it used to be like at BT before I was born, and what it was like at Beth Jacob before that. Everything with you was an anecdote, a story as vivid as reality, so real that I felt there, living a life in Jewish Baltimore long before I was born: but by the time I was a kid, it was a mausoleum, a museum to mid-century Baltimore with hardly any other kids, deliberately taking a center tack with no political commitment except an extreme one to AIPAC and an almost equally extreme stance against Palestinians. I was practically the only kid in the main service, and every family we knew went to a different shul. Now BT is very much a shul of 2026: full of modern frum (modern orthodox for the goyim: also known I suppose as 'diet orthodox'), full of young families, full of commitment to the Israeli Right and the ultra-nationalist strain of Zionism, full of opposition to the two-state solution, and full of it. Whether or not I'm too lazy to go, I can't go in good conscience, and after a few more years of enduring this, I have to imagine you'd be tempted to feel the same way.

I don't feel particularly comfortable in any shul right now. I don't feel comfortable at the shul I defected to either, where apparently there's a giant war there about whether to support Israel at all now. When I got a column in the Jewish Times, you referred to my views on our religion as 'extreme left.' Of course you did... It was yet another attempt to undercut the achievements of anyone in your family other than you, but if I'm extreme left, then can you be surprised then that I have hesitations about going to say Kaddish at any shul religious enough to have a daily minyan? And if I'm extreme left, what then are people to my left? My support for Israel is unshaken, I just wish someone could, as I've said many times before, save these people from themselves before they turn us all into two thousand years more of pariahs. And in case you thought there might be a place for me at BT, I read that quote, which I once used in an email to Rabbi W-------, admittedly not my nicest email, appear as the subject of a sermon of his, claiming that it was said by a 'Reform Rabbi' and claiming that people who talk like this rabbi are no different notice than 2000 years of Christian antisemites. He didn't name the rabbi... I know you'd say he wasn't referring to me... bullshit. He hates when anybody contradicts him as much as you did.

I miss you so much, I really do, but you're a bit lucky you died when you did. I very much wonder if you were hoping to, because the world you loved, the world you showed me, is dead. I was trying to show you that it was dying for thirty years, and you refused to believe me. As dangerous as it is for anybody to think they're right overmuch, I knew I was right. I was right because all that lives must die, and you taught me that history always resumes after every break even as you refused to apply that lesson to your own time. Once you realized it, you couldn't live with those results, you'd rather have died than concede you were wrong. You thought a world that did not embrace your ways was doomed, and I'm now the one who has to live in this world you assured me on your way out has little good future. You were obsessed with planning for the future, but you never planned how to live with a future that might embrace different values from your own. That unenviable task falls to me and my brothers. You gave us all the education and security to take time to figure it out, but you didn't give us any clues, and for that, I'm deeply sorry but I can't be particularly grateful.

Part II.

You told the truth as you saw it every day of your life, however brutal, but we now live in a world awash in horse leavings. 'Post-truth' it's called. If the truth exists, there are millions of forces all throughout the world trying their damndest to obscure it. You knew exactly how to deal with lies, you had no idea how to deal with bullshit. Nobody knows the truth, and like all people who repress their doubt, they cling to their bullshit all the more and spend every day convincing themselves that they know the truth and all those who contradict them are impediments to it.

And like any era where everyone's convinced they know the truth, we are now a world without truth: politically, geopolitically, morally, communally, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. We Americans wanted a world where the truth is however we define it: we got that world, and now we're all somehow amazed that seemingly rational people are willing to go to war to impose their version of the truth on others. The human craving for certainty is so enormous that people will kill in order to make falsehoods true.

Grad students and their professors constantly espouse that there is no truth and that the truth is imposed on us by those in power, and they pretend that their insight is somehow new when it goes back to before the enlightenment itself. The only truth in the universe is for omnipotent beings like God. For us, there is only what humans perceive to be true: we've known this at least since Giambattista Vico. And yet, in their case, they believe in their vision of the truth so greatly that many of them will support everyone from Hamas to Putin in an attempt to dislodge the version of imposed truth they hate so vitriolically. And in consequence, they provoke the establishment to fight back with every means they have. The establishment, whatever their ideological orientation, is a much more powerful force whose every move causes tectonic shifts. The establishment has now been overthrown by authoritarian forces from within so establishmentarian that they are almost countercultural.

The only result shown to work is value pluralism: the ability to leave people alone in their false beliefs and not rock the boat overmuch: the restraint and good judgement used to not impose a different vision on peoples unwilling to embrace them: pluralist Presidents like Eisenhower, Kennedy, HW Bush and Clinton understood that while there is truth, the truth is fundamentally unknowable, so you cannot impose that vision on others because if you impose a wrong truth on them, the results can be catastrophic. They rejected monism, and precisely by pursuing policies in direct contradiction to each other, they let America live on for decades after them. Eisenhower understood that overmuch national security would probably destroy the liberty it was meant to protect; he understood that the New Deal was necessary and impossible to overthrow, and yet within its strictures one could also operate under a philosophy of fiscal conservatism. Kennedy rejected the false choice of strident anticommunism or embrasure of communism, and even if he took too many risks, his resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis laid the groundwork for negotiation with the Soviet Union. HW Bush refused to declare total victory in the Cold War that would have humiliated the Soviet sphere still more, and broke his 'no new taxes' pledge at the expense of a second term because the stability of the country is so much more important than voodoo economics. Clinton showed we needn't choose between big government and no government, he reformed welfare and free trade precisely because Republicans left to their own devices would have destroyed them.

And more than any of them was Harry Truman. So many liberals hate him for dropping the bomb. Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed 210,000 people, most in an instant and the survivors in an agonizing death of years. The alternative? A ground invasion. If a ground invasion of Gaza resulted in 70,000 deaths (a disputable claim, I know Dad...), what might a ground invasion of Japan cost? 2 million lives?

Truman wanted to expand the New Deal. Practically everybody in America wanted to expand the New Deal except your father-in-law. But the Cold War demanded attention: there's no point in a better social safety net after we all die. We needed the Marshall Plan, we needed NATO, so rather than complete the New Deal here, we gave Europe a New Deal.

Nobody in America wanted to lose China to Communism. Even at the time we all knew the end price: Mao and the death of tens of millions. The eventual price tag? Anywhere between 40 million deaths and 120 million. But Douglas MacArthur's solution? Drop 30 to 50 atomic bombs, resulting in god knows how many more dropped by and against the Soviets, which may well have resulted in a MacArthur dictatorship that would have made Hitler's look like the Roosevelt Administration. Truman did the unthinkable: he fired the most popular man in America, who was also a power drunk madman, before MacArthur killed us all.

But Obama, for all his strengths, ultimately pursued the policies of an idealistic doctrinaire. He believed the arc of the universe bent toward justice, that one should always negotiate with one's opponents, that with enough data and expertise, one can arrive at an indisputable best solution. But however unjustly, the end result of Obama's policies was a tornado of resentment that lead to the election of Donald Trump. Obama thought people are as fundamentally generous as Kissinger thought they were fundamentally selfish: people are not generous or selfish or good or evil, people are people: unknowable as a group, inscrutable as a specimen, varied from person to person and moment to moment. Obama was a good guy, a smart guy with many accomplishments, I was a lot happier to call him my President than you were, but he thought he'd cracked the code, and we are all paying for his hubris.

And Biden? Well, he was just inconsistent... We didn't know whether he was a pluralist or a monist: he may have no longer had the presence of mind to know himself. As for Johnson and Reagan? Well, they may have understood that segregation and the Soviet Union were absolute moral evils, but no one can be surprised with the tradeoffs. Civil Rights caused the polarization we now deal with every day: it was obviously worth it, but the fallout means that every gain in rights thereafter would be delayed for generations. The fall of the Soviet Union (not that Reagan meant to cause it...) lead to Putinism and the rise of China: it may yet lead to World War III. Is that worth the tradeoff? Not if it costs a billion lives, but it still hasn't, so for the moment: yes, probably, but Reagan still may have doomed us all. And Carter? Well, he's not consequential enough to deal with in detail (SALT II, vs. human rights, telling America they couldn't have cheap energy and everything else they wanted, and Camp David may have saved Israel from five more Yom Kippur wars even as it doomed Israel to Likud). I would have said no about him until recently, but in light of how he's now maligned by the Right and hagiographed by the Left, he is clearly misunderstood and better than either you or I gave him credit for. As for W? Well... fuck him.

You taught me most of this Dad, even if you disagreed on particulars (you particularly hated Kennedy), but you didn't teach me how to do it in my personal life, you just lectured me about something you never did for me yourself. What you understood with your brain but never with your heart was the compromise itself is the goal. Nobody gets what they want, but everybody lives on. Maybe unsatisfactorily, maybe fearfully, but unsatisfied and fearful is better than war and death. Life is a series of impossible choices we must make to save the most amount we can. Personally, professionally or historically, you never go to war unless your security is definitively attacked: not maybe, not 'I think its been attacked', you only go to war when the truth of the attack to your security is indisputable and obvious. When you do, you respond with overwhelming force, but even then, war is just a series of compromises until such time as you can reach a resolution that lets people survive in a state only a little better than war. You would have rather died than compromise in your personal life, and as a result, your personal life was not quite as satisfied as it probably would have been if you had been a little less stubborn about what you wanted. You always told me 'life is about settling', but in your own household, you never made peace with settling for anything.

Perhaps you passed that lesson onto me, but I'm trying to unlearn it.

------------------------------------------

Maybe I can figure out a Part III later.

Contemplating Resurrection

 Mahler's Resurrection is one of those pieces that hooks you to classical music forever, and once you've heard it a hundred times, you dread hearing it another hundred. When i listen to earlier Mahler, when i listen to late Mahler, when i listen to works as diverse as the third, the fourth and the seventh, there is never a moment when I feel as though I'll get tired of it, because there is no getting to the bottom of emotional meanings that ambiguous. When you hear the funeral march from the Titan Symphony, when you hear the end of the 9th and Das Lied, the finale of 7, the opening of 3, there is no saying what music like this means. It's as though every emotion hurtles toward you all at once and you can't possibly feel them all every time you listen.

This piece practically got me through three years of high school, but at some point, Mahler's Resurrection gets retired from lots of music nuts' daily listening. There is no second guessing the meaning of poetry like this:

"O Sorrow, all-penetrating!

I have been wrested away from you!

O Death, all-conquering!

Now you are conquered!

With wings that I won

In the passionate strivings of love

I shall mount

To the light to which no sight has penetrated.

I shall die, so as to live!

Arise, yes, you will arise from the dead,

My heart, in an instant!

What you have conquered

Will bear you to God."

It's not quite as embarrassing in German, but even in English, it's no worse than Wagner, and next to Tippett or Ellington this is downright eloquent, but as poetry, it ain't great art. There's no need to ponder this to figure out what it means, and even if you pondered it, it's not like you'd come up with any brilliant new interpretation.

As with all great music, what makes it work is the music.... Mahler makes the listener earn that trip to E-flat Major heaven. Heaven for Mahler was in the key of E-flat just as E-flat was the key of heroism for Beethoven and the key of the deepest sublimity for Mozart. The Symphony of a Thousand begins where the Resurrection leaves off, and the moments of the sixth symphony's deepest happiness are in E-flat Major, the key most distant from that horrific work's home.

Indeed, Mahler sets up the whole musical argument of the symphony at the beginning by pre-figuring the final resurrection chorale, only for it to trip up into a moment of diminished chord fortissimo abyss that sounds to me like nothing so much as Satan falling from heaven through the Kingdom of Chaos (I never understood those small luftpausen there, it sounds so much better to me as one uninterrupted jumble). Just think of that quote from Paradise Lost: "Where eldest Night / And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold / Eternal anarchy amidst the noise / Of endless wars, and by confusion stand;" And then listen to this failed first attempt at Resurrection:

[https://youtu.be/y5FXxb4M_x4?si=wkFbYErFNSlMnWVm&t=858](https://youtu.be/y5FXxb4M_x4?si=wkFbYErFNSlMnWVm&t=858)

It's hard to believe that Mahler read Milton. He certainly wouldn't have read Milton in the original: he struggled with English even after living four years in America. But Milton was a formative influence on both Goethe, the Shakespeare of every German, and Klopstock, who, of course, wrote the Resurrection Ode intoned whisperingly by the choir upon their entrance.

The musical goal of resurrection, the very germ of the symphony's finale, was already in his head from the time he wrote Todtenfeier. It's entirely common in Mahler for material from one symphony to show up in the next, and he carries them forward from work to work like leitmotifs. People have often referred to Mahler as the most 'novelistic' composer, and you'd have to be deaf not to hear why. Like in Wagner's Ring, every theme so clearly represents an idea. We may not know what that idea is, but the theme itself is so emotionally resonant in such a specific way that there is often no mistaking the meaning of Mahler's themes, even if it is impossible to describe the contexts and permutations through which Mahler puts them. Think of how the major-minor modal shift at the end of the Resurrection's first movement shows up all through the sixth symphony. The Resurrection has a very brief quiet moment in the celli and basses, right at the moment before the choral entrance, that is present in the 'paradiso' section of the first symphony's finale. There are all kinds of moments like this all through it. Hell, if you squint your ears really hard, you could see the 'summer marches in' of Mahler 3's opening as the happy version of the horrifying 'march of the dead' in the finale of Mahler 2.

And that's just the intertextuality within Mahler's own work. If you look at the DNA of Mahler's resurrection and see it in the context of other music, the similarities are so striking that you have to at least wonder if Mahler intended a coded language of allusion that gives away the program. I doubt Mahler meant something so conscious, but I also doubt such associations were absent from his head.

Just think of the opening of the Resurrection Symphony and compare it to the evocation of a storm in the Prelude of Wagner's Die Walkure. The tremelos in the upper strings seem to sound like rain coming in sheets. In Wagner, the lower strings seem to be pulsing at running speed, as though to indicate Siegmund running through the woods. In Mahler, it's at a slow walking pace, like the 'notes inegales' at the beginning of a French Baroque Overture, figures so beloved of Handel. It seems to indicate some sort of state grandeur, and Mahler even writes in his program note that he's burying the hero of the first symphony.

It was when I heard Semyon Bychkov conduct it at Carnegie Hall in 2018 that I realized that the first movement sounds uncannily like a state funeral. Not a low class funeral like in the fifth symphony, but a dignified, solemn, ornate funeral of an absurdly pompous monarchy: precisely such a kingdom as the Austro-Hungarian Empire of Franz Josef which birthed Mahler and so much other classical music. If it's a state funeral, you can hear 21 gun salutes [https://youtu.be/tb1KISFyx7c?si=4OYBpif13TRF9zei&t=244](https://youtu.be/tb1KISFyx7c?si=4OYBpif13TRF9zei&t=244), you can hear the marching of troops and changing of guards (assuming they do it up to speed: [https://youtu.be/RkLIKptIqGo?si=U3L94iEDVz4h7q6C&t=618](https://youtu.be/RkLIKptIqGo?si=U3L94iEDVz4h7q6C&t=618), you can even hear the hearse driving by a public of onlookers https://youtu.be/Oi6ZjkXFlcU?si=F2E8KQVHSPC4_Doe&t=1260. And let's not forget: the whole thing is in C-minor: the key with which Beethoven buried the hero of the Eroica. To me, the whole movement has become about the burial of hope. I'm too young to know what it's like to lose the Kennedys and MLK, but I am old enough and Jewish enough to remember what it was like to lose Rabin. The whole thing had that feeling of knowing that all your hopes for what your life would be like were shot to shit. In that moment, most of us knew that suddenly, our lives were cast into a much bitterer lot than they would have been just a few days earlier. I doubt Mahler could experience all the political assassinations of his own day and not intuit something similar about his own generation. And let's go back to that 'kingdom of chaos' moment: as Richard Taruskin points out, the diminished chord on which it lands, however well concealed, is basically the exact chord as what Wagner termed the 'horror chord' at the beginning of the finale of Beethoven's Ninth.

Is the Resurrection a political work? No, of course not, but it isn't entirely removed from politics either. Think of the St. Anthony scherzo. Objectively it's the most elegantly composed movement of the work in an extremely inelegant work. No one ever wrote better scherzo's than Mahler: every scherzo of his is a masterpiece, but along with 9 and 5, this may be the masterpiece among them all. The story tells of how St. Anthony finds the church empty, so he goes and preaches to the fish in the stream. The fish are pleased by his sermon, and then they go on living exactly the same lives as before. Everything about this movement seems to be about the inability of Christians to live a virtuous life. And yet... Mahler sets it in what we Jews call the 'freygish' scale, the Jewish mode ('freygish', I guess, means Phrygian? I guess the two scales sound alike?). It is so clearly supposed to sound like Klezmer music. [https://youtu.be/s2_8oFNwZU0?si=OlmHlGk6Vn3UsOND&t=2228](https://youtu.be/s2_8oFNwZU0?si=OlmHlGk6Vn3UsOND&t=2228) Is Mahler trying to tell his audience something? Well, I don't know, but what I do know is that suddenly, amid all these gefilte fish, the music suddenly turns into a Christian hymn. [https://youtu.be/oUBx_Q-xw2M?si=UjmU-yuimiuNiuWo&t=2305](https://youtu.be/oUBx_Q-xw2M?si=UjmU-yuimiuNiuWo&t=2305) And then comes the inevitable moment when the Christian music turns violent and the cry of despair that accompanies it.... [https://youtu.be/tb1KISFyx7c?si=qGdOPCQ7tU8kI0Ua&t=2409](https://youtu.be/tb1KISFyx7c?si=qGdOPCQ7tU8kI0Ua&t=2409)

Once you hear the Jewish/Christian divide in this music, I don't think it's possible to get the image of a pogrom out of your head.

And then consider some of the words of the next movement, Urlicht:

Man lies in direst need,

Man lies in direst pain,

Is Mahler intuiting the future of Jews and Europe and war and oppression? Probably not, and yet somewhere it's there, in his head, in his nervous system, something is intuiting a world gone well off a path it was never firmly on to begin with. Somewhere it's also there in the heads of the listeners that rejected his music. And somewhere it's in our heads whose ancestors lived and died through all that soon came. And just in case we're unclear that there is something Jewish about this message comes these three lines of text:

I then came upon a broad path,

An angel came and sought to turn me back,

Ah no! I refused to be turned away.

I am from God and to God I will return,

This is so obviously referencing Jacob wrestling with the angel and renamed Israel. Those the angels would turn away, we too demand salvation. We too demand acceptance. We too demand all rights which you Christians take for granted.

And then comes the 'cry of despair' again, even more despairing, followed by... C-Major? It's as though the earthly cares of C-minor are dispelled.

....

I'd like to finish this but the last movement has enough material to cover that it needs to be its own post. If I don't get to it, remind me to tell you all about how Mahler might have been inspired by looking at Renaissance art:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Zc-YlzHe8Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Zc-YlzHe8Q)