Who Is Baltimore?

 

I've lived the vast majority of my life in Baltimore, and yet I never viewed myself as being from here.

People from Baltimore are not like me. They're either blue collar working class, elite doctors, suburban professionals, non-profit radicals, basic b's, or from demographics I still know very little about. I have never transcended the feeling that I don't belong here, yet I'm tied down for all sorts of health reasons from leaving.

I'm a begrudging native born citizen of Pikesville, a Baltimore suburb so Jewish it has its own yarmulke. Every writer needs an address - not an address at which they live, but an address from which their worldview is oriented, and my true address has never been in the city. More than fifty years ago, my family left the city in panic, and I suppose I inherited some small measure of fear and contempt.

For me, the city of Baltimore is a forbidding pinball machine where the obstacles can land you anywhere but a safe place - not safe physically, but spiritually. My college friendships proved far more durable than the vast majority of my friendships in Baltimore, and, speaking frankly, life here was always a series of disappointments - albeit with quite a few exceptions.

But there were always these many inlets of hope, and beauty and personality. The city as a whole's not been great to me, but there've surely been great times whose memories I would not give up for anything. Certain facets of the city, certain types of people, are absolutely unique to Baltimore. John Waters once said that he preferred Baltimore to New York because "people in New York think they're weird, but they're actually normal. People in Baltimore think they're normal, but are actually weird."

The Key Bridge was rarely part of my world. I remember sailing and biking around it and never stopped being awed by its size, but I can't ever remember driving on it. I grew up on the opposite side of the metro area, live in the opposite side of the city. Yet I knew like everybody that it was one of Charm City's most beautiful sights. The Key Bridge is what blue collar factory workers cross to get to work. It was opened in 1977, ten years already into Baltimore's decline, but it was a symbol of industrial boom: the productive town Baltimore used to be and we hope can be again.

Until 1970, Baltimore was our sixth-largest city by population. It used to be the port of the nation and one of its steel capitals. During World War II, it was where the ships were built that carried the planes of Detroit and Pittsburgh into war. Before and after, it was where the goods of the world were imported and our country's goods were exported. After World War II the US was more than fifty percent of the world's GDP, and Baltimore was a city to be reckoned with almost as much as DC. Appalachian miners came here to work in factories, immigrants came here to prosper. All that is over and has been my whole life.

It was impossible to grow up in modern Baltimore and not see the loomings of American decline. Drive three miles from my parents' house and you find urban blight, drug trades, hopelessness and constant violence. The city of Baltimore is basically divided into nine squares. Three of them comprise "The White L", where prosperity basically lives, while squalor affects so much of the other six. In all the other six are neighborhoods and parks still so beautiful that you marvel there can be crime and poverty within them, yet you look closer and its everywhere: a boarded up house on every block, thousands of unemployed men on the streetcorners drinking in full view, homeless drifters walking every sidewalk, police cars patrolling every road. I remember telling a friend's parents that live in rural Pennsylvania that they could get to Route 70 much more quickly if they drive through West Baltimore, but I couldn't remember the name of the road that got them there (US 40). I went up to a cop, an African-American cop, to ask him how to get to 70 and told him I was trying to give them directions through W. Baltimore to get there. His response: "Are you out of your mind?"

Drive around Baltimore and you realize there is so much promise here. It was a great American city, and but for a curse's worth of bad luck could so easily be again. There is so much that is beautiful: parks, churches, bars, factories adapted into artisan shops, housing stock and apartment buildings; with so many thousands of hardworking, nice and friendly people. Go to DC and try to start up a conversation with a stranger on the street, they'll be annoyed. Do it in Baltimore and you get a full conversation. Whether or not I feel part of that community, Baltimore is a community where people are banded to hope together. Despair is so easy here, yet people never give up through Baltimore's millions of hardships.

That is the most beautiful thing about Baltimore. Whether I find it easy to hope in Baltimore, there are thousands of people who hope in Baltimore because it's NOT easy, yet what choice do we have? Whether or not we feel at home, this is home, it is the place we make our lives, and we live here, another generation that amid its tragedies do the best we can to believe in something better, make it better, celebrate and hope.

Amen.

That's History

The only way I'm going to get through this incarnation of what Israelis call the 'Matzav' (the 'situation') is by disconnecting from it. Not stop reading, but stop connecting emotionally. At the very beginning of this, I wrote here that the only way we were going to get through this is by steeling ourselves. Not steel in the sense of eliminating compassion, but steel in the sense of facing cold hard fact: history is the eternity of subverted expectations. We're supposed to be heartbroken, and it's only when we're too heartbroken to expect triumph that triumphs are made. It's the experience of defeat following victory following defeat following victory. It's the eternal wheel of fate. Everything that rises falls, everything that falls rises. Jews are no exception, if anything we are the ultimate proof.

If Israel doesn't complete the decimation of Hamas, if Israel does not rescue the hostages, if Israel exchanges hostages for Palestinian prisoners, there will be more attacks on Israel, and Hanas will do everything they can to make them deadlier. Steel yourself.

If Israel wins, Netanyahu can take the credit and may win back a narrow voting majority of the Israeli public, thereby staying as Prime Minister, possibly for life, no matter how hated by the rest of Israelis. Steel yourself.

The longer this goes on, the more millions of innocent Jews will be held responsible in unpredictable ways for the mere crime of supporting Israel, even a peaceful Israel. Steel yourself.

The longer this goes on, the more Gazans are likely to die of famine and disease in far greater numbers than have died so far. The longer this goes on, the more likely Hezbollah is likely to bomb saturate the Israeli north to the point that Israel will have to launch another ground invasion in Southern Lebanon. Steel yourself.

If a Palestinian state is recognized worldwide without Hamas stripped from power, if Hamas gets a full measure of foreign aide, Israel/Palestine could experience warfare on a scale only seen in the modern Middle East by Syria and 80s Iraq/Iran. Steel yourself.

The longer this goes on, the more tempted goyisher friends will be to dissociate from Jews for the crime of supporting Israel. Steel yourself.

The longer this goes on, the more tempted American left wingers will be not to vote for Biden, British left wingers not to vote for Starmer, German left wingers not to vote for Schultz, and French left wingers not to vote for Macron should he be in a runoff with Le Pen. Many leftists in all four countries reason that since their supposed liberal leaders advocate for what they construe as genocide, things can't get any worse. They would thereby cause the fall of any liberal bulwark against right wing authoritarianism, and perhaps the fall of democracy in all these major world powers. Thereby endangering the very Muslim communities they think they're protecting. Steel yourself.

The longer this goes on, the more Israel will necessarily become the ally of any Western power that opts for reactionary anti-democracy leadership. Steel yourself.

The longer this goes on, the more willfully the world will overlook the crimes of Hamas and twenty other Middle Eastern dictatorships. Steel yourself.

The longer this goes on, the more Israel becomes a wedge issue between friendships, with potential for explosive fights that turn friends into enemies. Steel yourself.

The longer this goes on, the more tempted other Shia powers are to create other theaters of war: not just Hezbollah in Lebanon but Iran, Yemen, Syria, spurring a war that could inflame the entire region, and perhaps spread elsewhere. Steel yourself.

This is history. History is not just one fucking thing after another, it's the dispelling of each era's illusions. Every solution is temporary. Civilizations have life cycles just like people do, so do policy solutions. Everything eventually lives out its use until its physiognomy comes undone. This is what we read about. You just face the unpleasant truths and realize that you are part of processes so much bigger than you are. Eventually we all are just nodes of data compiled in a book, where our life stories are distilled to historical trends, waves, forces, beliefs, where the reader views our way of life with ironic distance.

Nearly all of us feel the ground under our feet shifting right now, the expectations of our era are coming undone just like the expectations of previous eras. These tectonic shifts are more lethal than any earthquake ever recorded, but just like earthquakes, they always happen, and then they stop, we pick up the pieces, we rebuild, we latch onto new beliefs, and we take care as best we can to provide for a future that doesn't experience our turbulence.

But eventually, the turbulence comes back, and eventually, that turbulence will stop again just as ours will.

Sometimes, you just have to accept that you're on a ride bigger than anything you do, and all you can do is your best to make yourself into metal that doesn't melt in even the hottest climates.

Why Are Jews So Sensitive About Israel?

So why are we so hypersensitive about all things Israel? Is it birth-to-death conditioning as so many progressives would have it? Is it as so many antizionists have it, a fascist connection to the Mogen David that represses any thought that contravenes our tribal mentality? Is it, as so many Jews would have it, the extreme frustration at gentile hypocrisy? Or is it as so many Jewish fundamentalists have it, that the world is crawling with antisemites?

It's none of the above.

It's far more basic than any of those, simultaneously more primal and more real.

There is a baseline fear, often an unconscious one, but I maintain it exists in every Jew you've ever met, even somewhere in Jewish antizionists. The fear is this:

If you get rid of our state, you get rid of us.

There is that nameless dread in every Jewish soul, repressed until we hear you talk about Israel, that all this security and prosperity is as paper thin as the citizenship documents which were always taken away from us. Other groups worry about prosperity and denied opportunities, Jews worry that it all will be taken away. 

Here's something I wrote a while back: 

"So many gentile lives are constrained from too few choices, most Jews are stuck by too many. So many gentiles worry that they'll never get what they need, Jews worry that everything they need will disappear tomorrow. So many gentiles feel the chip of humiliation, and dream that with more things: titles, privileges, pride, their humiliations will cease. Jews are history's ultimate proof that everything you think is helpful is worthless: from materials to titles to privileges to pride to ESPECIALLY MONEY. There is no such thing as a life protected from humiliation - the whole point of how to live a good life is that we endured our humiliations with faith, honor, responsibility, righteousness, kindness and community; that we show seven good faces to a world that's wanted Jews dead for 2000 years, will want us dead many times yet again; and many people who seem friendly to us now may stand by as we get annihilated.

No Jew seems oppressed until every Jew you know disappears overnight. No amount of money protects us, no amount of prestige stops us from being blamed, no amount of power cannot be stripped at a moment's notice. It is the eternal Jewish lot to rise as high as any outsider can possibly rise in a foreign society, only to fall the very moment when things go wrong and the true insiders need meat to throw to the populace."  

Look at every immigrant in the world whose state threw them out, then look at us. Other modern peoples get displaced for generations, or a hundred years, but our whole lifespan as a people is one long displacement and this is the one period since Christ himself that has been the exception. If we don't have Israel, we have no country at all, just memories of countries that threw us out whenever we became marginally inconvenient. We exist lifelong with stories of ancestors exiled from every corner of the world. That fate was what 2000 years of Jews worked so hard to avoid with no avail. It's the fate in which our guts tell us we will partake again. Even if the Palestinian refugee status lasts for the rest of my lifetime, it's still temporary compared to the Jewish stories I and fifteen million other Jews have heard our whole lives. If we get displaced again, it's not just us or even our grandchildren who might be refugees, it might be all our descendants for all coming time until we get another brief blip of security 2000 years from now.

And that's only if we live. When we didn't have a state of our own, we were subject to all the same persecution as any other minority, only to then encounter complete, systemic, total extermination. Not the extermination of a substantial portion of us, not our extermination over the course of 400 years, but near complete extermination over two or three years, spanning our population over an entire continent. And not once, but repeatedly. In the Crusades and the mass expulsions of the Middle Ages, in the conquest of Judea by Rome, in the aftermath of the Black Plague, in the Chmielnicki massacre in Ukraine - that state which now means so much to liberal Jews, in exterminations thousands of years ago that seem ever so distant until the moment their stories reappear in our consciousness as horrifyingly present, and of course... that thing that happened to my grandparents.

So many leftists and intersectionalists and anticolonialists find all things Israel distasteful, but they would read the above and see a complete affirmation of their worldview. "That's exactly why we fight for the dispossessed!", they would answer. "That's why we fight against nationalism! That's why we fight against genocide! That's why we fight for the rights of victims!"

Why should we believe you? What makes your movement so special when every other revolution to save the world has backfired?

No one reaps the whirlwind ideological movements create the way Jews do. 

Let me repeat that. 

No one reaps the whirlwind ideological movements create the way Jews do. 

The proof will be for another day. 

Why I'm Feeling Black Dog

 Leaving aside any personal concerns, of which like everybody I have my share, probably a lot more, I feel like a man without company.

I'm trying to be a dispartial arbiter of what's going on so people could get context, but I've slowed down because I almost can't do it. What's going on with my former friends on the left is so infamously disgusting. What's gone on on the right is obviously disgusting and has been for decades, but on the left I saw it coming and warned them for two decades. I thought because some were my friends a plurality of them might be exceptions, but it made no difference to well over 50% of the people I know. I knew it at the time, yet I hoped against hope. There's the ancient antisemitism everywhere we look. Living is hard enough without feeling like people you once esteemed could abandon your children to lifetimes of the old discrimination, isolation, violence and mass murder, and then their children in turn, until hundreds of years from now when again there's a brief blip of tolerance before the ancient curse of being Jewish continues.

One day soon I'll try to explain how it works again, but I wonder again and again, what difference does it make?

Last Night's Concert

 I went to a fascinating but dispiriting concert last night.

It started with a nearly masterly performance of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony from an unlikely source. I often think that James Conlon would be happier with a career like Jaimie Laredo's, in front of chamber orchestras where he can do utterly unfashionable performances of Haydn and Mozart. What we heard last night was the most gemutlich, large orchestra, vibrato laden, old-Vienna performance of Schubert's Unfinished one will ever hear. You'd think it was Josef Krips up there. He must have spent hours getting that high cholesterol string sonority from Baltimore musicians still trained in David Zinman's period punchiness. It was just short of heavenly, with extremely un-Conlon like rubato and ostentatious detailing in the phrasing. He seems to have spent his entire career scaling down Wagner, Verdi and Shostakovich to sound more like Schubert and Mozart, while in Schubert and Mozart he does all the operatic things you'd expect from Verdi and Wagner. After three years of watching this guy, I just don't understand him: a vastly skilled musician who's performed all around the world for fifty years, but whose conception of music has never moved on from the mistaken values of 1970s Juilliard.

I should have left after that, because then came 50 minutes of 'automatic' Wagner, played like a machine that you simply turn on and off. Hardly any phrasing, hardly any detail, barely a memorable moment: generic, generic, generic.

But it is utterly unbelievable how Wagner's orchestration still fits the modern orchestra like a glove, every detail speaks in the concert hall with utter clarity. It's the exact opposite of the older masters. In Mozart, Schubert, Brahms you have to work endlessly hard to get the music's details to speak properly. Many claim it's different for them with a period instrument ensemble, but I'm far from convinced. In those three particularly, it's almost as if the expression in is so high minded that they're barely even conscious of what instruments they use, and the work is on the composers. It's as Joachim said of Brahms that they don't write for musicians, they write against musicians.

But contra his reputation, Wagner fits the capabilities of instrument so easily, even proper Wagner voices are supposed to find it easy to sing with the way he divides vocal parts through the entire vocal range - whereas Verdi stays planted all night long in the voice's top 20 percent,

There's a reason Wagner makes every detail register: he is the music of sociopathy, manipulating emotions in the audience so effortlessly that he does feel himself. In Schubert, such emotions are a confession by the not composer, human communication from one heart to another. But emotions that exist in Schubert like a partnership of equals becomes emotional manipulation in Wagner - designed to excite audiences to fever pitch. Perhaps Wagner skeptics like me would find our responses more easily exploited if today's singers were better. The Brunnhilde last night was Christine Goerke, possessing a power tool of a mid range with a vibrato through which you can sometimes fit a mac truck. Aside from Lisa Davidsen, this is the best we'll do today, and how can Wagner make its proper effect without voices to equal his charisma?

You can't blame the singers: the expectations of singers are so high today. Not even Wagner can account for today's huge halls, loud orchestral instruments, slow tempos, and relative lack of emphasis on vocal technique. No modern singer can get through Wagner without blowing out their voice in a couple years.

As I've said many times, as everybody's said many times, one can't deny Wagner's genius. He is, as Auden argued, possibly the greatest artistic genius of all time. Wagner's is an endlessly meaningful art, for which there is no bottom in the numbers of ways it can be analyzed, interpreted, and felt, but there are problems in Wagner that stick out like a sociopath amid normal people, and next to Schubert, he can sound paltry indeed. One excites and disturbs the soul, one nourishes it.