What Happened in Israel Yesterday

 Blink and you missed it. A January 6th like riot happened, and if you don't follow Jewish media, you wouldn't know about it. I'm not even sure the international media thought it worthy of mention.

Basically, masked members of the ultra-right tried to storm an Israeli detention center. This includes masked Israeli soldiers currently serving in the army, even a member of the Knesset (Israeli parliament). Why? Because soldiers inside were being investigated for misconduct against potential 10/7 perpetrators.

The Israeli military wants to police itself, but it's the organization the world charges as perpetrators of apartheid and dictatorship. The military is in fact the functional, pragmatic arm of Israeli life. Many generals try to maintain resistance to pressure to prosecute the war much more aggressively. Often they fail, because the civilian government is a lunatic fringe. This hated fringe tries to politicize the military, the facet of the country most Israelis deem too important to be politicized.

So in summation, the Israeli ultra-right tries to violently intimidate Israel to be the repressive military state the world already thinks Israel is. And yet, if this fringe government can't be dislodged, maybe, just maybe, Israel is already the kind of state the world says it is.

There's a war in the Jewish soul. I have to imagine every Jew in the world feels either nonstop rage or completely stretched out on a rack. Jews are demanded to defend Israel when a large part of the Jewish world wants Israel to become an indefensible country.

Israel is not the apartheid state the world thinks it is, but a huge segment of the Jewish world wants Israel to be that state and may yet get their way. Millions of Jews looked the other way at these other millions for decades. It was exhausting. We were caught up in a constant melee of propaganda and social pressure to defend the actions of a country whose actions were often wrong, counterproductive, and exploitative of our good will.

No ideological movement is immune from its own manichean extremities, not Zionism, not liberalism, not the progressive ideologies people think beyond question today. If you believe your movement can only be criticized for not pursuing its actions more forcefully, you and your movement become in the most dire need of criticism.

But just as in the case of those ideologies we won't mention, part of this war in the Jewish soul is the knowledge that a large part of Israel still needs our defense, and separating the good from the bad is extremely messy. The reason nobody outside Israel pays attention to this riot is that the world doesn't concede there's another side to the Israel establishment, a liberal side, that tries to rein in its brutality.

I'm a Zionist because without a Jewish state, Jews died in the millions. Not just in the Holocaust but for millennia before it. I am not a Zionist because I believe God promised a land to the Jewish people. Even were I to believe in God, I categorically reject that interpretation, and so do millions of other Jews. Once any movement believes their rights are God given, there is no limit to what they justify in God's name.

And even in the pursuit of defending Israel, I categorically reject the idea that soldiers should not be held accountable for any brutality that has no necessity, and so do millions of other Jews, including Israelis. If a Jew has even a tenuous grip on reality, they'll soon realize that this war should have been over months ago. It only still goes on for the Prime Minister's gain.All react

Kamala. Good for....?

 All you have to do is take one look at $81 million in the first day of her candidacy to realize that Kamala Harris is suddenly likely to be the next President - at least she is barring a third, fourth, or fifth world historic event in the next few weeks. She still might not. She has yet to undergo the coming orgy of Republican slutshaming (she started in politics as the girlfriend of legendary San Francisco mayor Willie Brown), and for all the leftshaming of Harris for being a prosecutor, Republicans will charge that she was disgustingly lax on crime. She'll be thought of as the 'Border Czar,' a thankless job that will cause the right to charge she was absurdly lax on immigration, and the left to charge that she was absurdly strict.

Why is that? Because Kamala Harris has made a career taking on thankless jobs nobody else would take. As California's attorney general she took on what amounted to a political suicide mission and took on the US's five biggest banks all at once and refused an aid package for California of 2-4 billion dollars and even more suicidally, she won. The relief package she got? $18.4 billion! She also took on cases against all the major drug cartels. Imagine the threats to her safety, and all the while she instituted body cameras on police, antagonizing the very people charged with protecting her.

So we may have thought last week that Donald Trump was a shoo-in, but the US is so starved for a new generation of leadership that they will take even the appearance of it.

Kamala Harris may yet prove a greater President than Obama, but does Harris have Obama-level charisma? Let's not pretend she does, but we are all so scared right now that the appearance of any energy that resists Trump's blitzkrieg of negativity is met as though the leader is the reincarnation of Churchill. A number of female politicians can inspire a crowd better than Harris can: Elizabeth Warren most obvious among potential candidates, but unlike Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris can work in a team without burning bridges, she can fade into self-effacement, she can give credit to other people, can you tell I soured on Elizabeth Warren?

So its with maximum schadenfreude that, in this week of reversed fortunes, Netanyahu comes to America. It was supposed to be a Roman triumph of spite to enable Bibi to crow 'Biden's disappearing, but I'm still here.' Instead, Netanyahu is arriving at a moment of maximal Republican panic, and surely must read into the bad timing that his own days are numbered.

And yet... is she good for the Jews?

Kamala Harris would be the first President with a Jewish spouse. The frontrunner to be her running mate is Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania and very, very Jewish - though I still think it will be Mark Kelly. Even if Shapiro is not the Vice-President, this will be, by far, the Jewyest White House the country's ever seen. There is no better time or cover to reorient the US's Middle East policy. What kind of Jew is our potential First Gentleman, ('Doug')? We don't really know, but we do know that his daughter was arrested at a protest against Israel's actions.

We don't really know what Kamala Harris's opinions are on foreign policy. We can guess but they're only guesses. I'd imagine her opinions run much closer to Obama's than Biden's, and even if the difference between the two is much smaller than the difference to any Republican, the difference in approach is enormous. Biden is a man of the 20th century, growing up on stories of the camps and gulags, taking the lesson that totalitarianism is the worst of all possible governments, whether the right-wing totalitarianism of Hitler or the left-wing varieties of Stalin and Mao. Obama literally defined the early 21st, growing up on stories of Hiroshima and Congo, taking from them the lesson that democracy unchecked can be as lethal as any totalitarian power.

Perhaps, being this Jewy, I'm too much a creature of the 20th, but I'm clearly more with Biden than Obama. There are other looming American threats worse than anything in our sometimes shameful history, but most of them would be facilitated by America taking some kind of authoritarian turn. Unfair as I may be, I hold Obama's discomfort with American power partially responsible for the authoritarian turn of the world. Part of Obama is a peacenik who believes that when offered reason, people listen to it. Whether in foreign relations with Vladimir Putin, or domestically with Mitch McConnell, the refusal to wage political war emboldened them. Force occasionally has to be met with force, and not just in those moments when the ends are absolutely definite.

Had Obama been President on October 7th, it's hard to believe he would have tolerated the Israel-Hamas war going on anything like this long, but he would have allowed for a retributive war just like Biden did, and would have been savaged by the left for letting it happen a single day.

And it's reasonable to assume that regardless of what happens, a war like the Israel-Hamas war will never happen under a Harris administration, no matter how extreme the act against Israelis. No matter what her opinion of Israel, with such close Jewish contacts, Harris is particularly susceptible to accusations of collusion, and however she really feels, she will have to go to extreme lengths to give the appearance of impartiality with Israel, no matter how reasonable or unreasonable Israel is in the coming years.

Let's not kid ourselves: Israel deserves a turn against it - how much of a turn is an open question, but the idea that Netanyahu is celebrated in the Capitol tells you all you need to know about Netanyahu or about Republicans. Israel's own authoritarian turn may be gradual, but government by government, Israel turns more and more into the enemies it loathes: an overmilitarized gerontocratic theocracy where constitutional rule of law can be overridden by a leader with no limitations on his power.

Make no mistake, Israel on its worse day is no Iran on its best, but in fifty years on its current trajectory? Are you kidding? The average secular Israeli family has 2.08 children. The average ultra-orthodox Israeli family has 6.6 children. For all the right's handwringing about Islamic birthrates in the west, Israel is being overtaken by its own bellicose fundamentalists so much more quickly. Eventually, all that would be needed is for the ultraorthodox to militarize and the transformation to a halachic state (run by Jewish law) would happen overnight.

But nothing would facilitate that Israeli transition quicker than an economic boycott which dried up opportunities around the country for Israeli business to flourish. Every educated Israeli would move away, leaving nothing but a dried out husk of a boycotted country sitting atop a nuclear stockpile.

None of that is likely, not for a while at least. But if Harris doesn't turn against Israeli defense, the worldwide left will take matters into their own hands, and the spread of a grassroots economic boycott becomes so much more likely.

So brace yourselves, being a Jew is probably not getting easier any time soon.All reactions

Great American Art: Part 1

 The Musicals of Stephen Sondheim: If I had to go to bat that there is one American creator that can inspire the immortal love that generation after generation get from Shakespeare, Mozart, Rembrandt, Montaigne, Pushkin (read him if you don't believe me...). Leaving aside that he's one of three creators I can think of who unquestionably transcends the classical/popular divide (Gershwin and Joplin, more on them anon), his musicals are owners' manuals for life itself - packed with the wisdom of the world. In Sondheim comedy stands proudly next to tragedy, realism next to the most astonishing fantastical flights - often in the same show, along with a gallery of characters possibly as unforgettable as Hamlet and Juliet. Look particularly to Gypsy, Company, A Little Night Music, and especially West Side Story and Into The Woods. 

New Hollywood: when we talk about 'New Hollywood', we really mean the years 1967-1983. These were the years that movies, beset by television, had no idea what to do to keep audiences interested, so they did the only thing they could: trust the moviemakers to make the movies they wanted to make. There were a lot of creators who had one-off conferences with the mysterium, but they had it because Hollywood was, for that brief period, more interested in art than money, and many of the usual impediments to making something great just weren't there. Look particularly to The Godfather Epic and Star Wars obviously, but just a little more obscurely: Bonnie and Clyde, The Producers, M*A*S*H, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Harold and Maude, Cabaret, American Graffiti, Chinatown, Blazing Saddles, Nashville, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Network, Carrie, Being There, The Right Stuff.

Scorsese and Spielberg: but there are two creators from that period whose entire output courts the kind of lastingness we attribute to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. No prizes for guessing who they are. Now that they're on either side of 80, they're still doing much of their best work as though it's still 1975. If Sondheim plants a bullseye between classical and popular, Scorsese and even Spielberg exist just barely on either side of the high/low divide - again, no prizes for guessing which is which. Scorsese, for all his encyclopedic art, would be nowhere near so compelling without the streetwise dialogue and the pop music soundtracks, and that's nearly as true for his historical epics as his gangster ones - epics like Last Temptation of Christ and Killers of the Flower Moon seem to exist as much in the times they were made as they do in the times they're set. Spielberg, on the other hand, would not be Spielberg without shots that use light and darkness with all the virtuosic beauty of Rembrandt or Caravaggio, and whether popular blockbusters or historical epics, seem to have the spiritual charge of painting's old masters. I won't say which to look to by either, they're too well-known to need any recs from me, except to make a special plea for late Spielberg nobody went to the theater for like West Side Story and The Fabelmans, and certain less known  early Scorsese like Mean Streets and After Hours. 

The Simpsons, seasons 1-8: Screw you, it's my list, and any list of great art from me is going to have it. You either get why it's there or you don't. Whether its comedy will need footnotes in 50 years, all of American life is in it. If you want to understand what it means to be American, that's what you watch. 

Louis Armstrong Symphony Hall Concert, Boston, 1947: It was with Satchmo that it all began. Play a single trumpet on a microphone loud enough, it can blow a 100 piece orchestra away. Whether the best pop music is great music as traditional poetics understand it, it is perfect like the great folk art, perhaps the greatest folk art we will ever know. And Louis Armstrong is greater than nearly anything that comes later. Like Mozart and Sondheim, all the comedy and tragedy of the world is in it, often compressed into two minute perfection, along with a type of rhythmic vitality that was almost entirely new to music. But as great as those 1920s recordings are, they only give a dim idea of what Satchmo sounded like live. The Symphony Hall Concert is doubtless a little grander than how dance hall and bar audiences were accustomed to hearing him, but this is him at his best in sound vivid enough for three dimensions. 

Golden Age Disney: Leave aside the universality of stories, simultaneously leave aside any 'problematic' elements in their archetypal narratives, look at any drawing from Pinocchio, Bambi, Snow White, even Dumbo, and ask yourself if there is any less art that goes into it than the greatest art. Then ask yourself how the lightest elements in the human experience can exist next to forces that are so oppressively dark. There may be terrible holes in their storytelling, but narratives as absorbing as any there have ever been are told with art from the ages. 

The Muppet Show - original run 1976-1981: Like The Simpsons, you could not explain the Muppets without watching them. I don't know what else to say. 

The Gershwin Songbook: We tend to remember George Gershwin for his few orchestral pieces, and if people are lucky they get to hear Porgy and Bess, but the best Gershwin, the most perfect, the most vital, is isolated from any show, it's simply the songs themselves with lyrics by brother Ira. Like Sondheim, they perfectly straddle that line between high and low, comedy and tragedy. But if Sondheim exceeds Gershwin, it's because while Sondheim is interested in the hard work of relationships, Gershwin is interested in beginnings, the allure of possibility, particularly sexual possibility, which is the allure of so much sophistication personified by early 20th century Hollywood and Broadway. And yet, like Sondheim, the songs have meanings so much deeper than their surface. Just think of that famous line, 'who could ask for anything more?', when you think about it, he's got rhythm, he's got music, he's got sunshine, he could ask for a shitload more... Start with Ella Fitzgerald, but find as many of the great jazz singers doing Gershwin as you can: Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, and crown it all with  Nina Simone doing her towering, tragic cover of I Loves You Porgy. 

Rags by Scott Joplin: The mysterious double life of Joplin. Play it fast and it's a barroom brawl, play it slow and it's Chopin. It fits just as appropriately in the parlor as it does in the whorehouse. Everybody knows The Entertainer and the Maple Leaf Rag, even if they think they don't, but find especially The Entertainer done by Henry Butler (just this once I'll provide a link)), then Maple Leaf Rag done by Sidney Bechet and Solace played by Marvin Hamlisch (as heard in the soundtrack to The Sting). So much of American popular music is in the interpretation rather than the creation, and only jazz has scratched the surface of how you can transform standards you think you know. If you want to hear more originals by Joplin, hear the Cascades Rag and the Elite Syncopations Rag.

Citizen Kane: It's almost impossible to talk about Kane without talking about technique, and literally impossible to talk about it without talking about its making. I'm going to try the former, won't even touch the latter. There were movies before Kane, but there were not Movies, and Kane is more than a movie, it's proof that if the work is great enough, it's dangerous. It's a work so good that it proved dangerous to its makers. So damning seemed this antihero who resembled a newspaper tycoon to an actual newspaper tycoon that the movie was almost destroyed unseen, while its director barely ever worked in Hollywood again, its screenwriter never did, and the studio which bankrolled it went bankrupt. Kane is proof that movies are often as much an artform as anything in Beethoven or Dante, and just as visceral as those two. Two hours go by in a flash of lightning, and so alchemically did Kane tap into the American spirit that it can be interpreted as a prophecy of Donald Trump.

Plenty more if I finish this...

Henry Butler 'The Entertainer' (youtube.com). 

Artists, get ready

Artists, get ready. If America is beginning to look like what we fear it might, it's the artists who get us through the dark periods and help us endure what we can't endure.

We don't like artists in the USA, we don't understand them, we never had all that much use for 'art' rather than 'entertainment.' Sure, we honor a few, but so often we've treated our artists like shit, particularly the good ones. We make it impossible to work at their best because they're too busy having to get an audience interested in their stuff to do the damn work. And so often, even if they get an audience interested, it's by pandering to their very fickle tastes and never doing the work they want to do. Even if you count rock stars and movie directors among our greatest artists, and if they're good enough there's no reason not to, how many of them created cosmically great art their whole lives long the way Michelangelo and Rembrandt did?

We barely let our entertainers be more than one-hit wonders, but think of how many of our great American artists did one great work, or had one great period of a few years, then sauntered on as a shell of what they were, sapped of the ability to create as they used to because they encountered so much resistance along the way. Now imagine how many artists you've never heard of. Many of them did some great works that you'll never experience, even more of them were deprived of the ability to work with their best selves. How many American artists can you think of that got the opportunity to do a whole lifetime of work that fulfills their potential and continually evolves with new influences, new techniques, new insights? I know more about this subject than most people I know and my list would probably be around a dozen; maybe two dozen if I'm being charitable.

But, paradoxical as it seems, great art thrives in times of troubles because that's when audiences are most receptive to it. Art thrives on ambiguity like double meanings and subtle implications that audiences can spend a lifetime parsing and never fully understand. If the audience is receptive enough, they pick up on every implication in the work then add a few of their own.

Obviously, art can't much thrive in a totalitarian state where everyone is in danger of going to jail for treason (though it did in the Soviet Union until they all were killed off), but art can and has thrived in dysfunctional, repressive states where censorship is rife and we are desperate for people to tell the truth about what's happening, even if the truth has to be told slant. If art thrived anywhere in American history, it was in the African-American community. Why? Precisely because they were limited in the truths they could speak, and had to find creative ways to say the unsayable.

When politics ceases to work, that's when art has to.All reactions

Chronic Illness

My forties are likely defined by it: bloating, burping, nausea, and other details of which I will spare you. I no longer eat dairy, gluten, garlic, onion, chocolate, more than half the world's fruits and vegetables, and every restaurant outing is a gamble that can lead to two weeks' illness. Whatever mental capacity I had to concentrate, to work hard, is pretty well gone. Concentration on mental problems becomes minimal. The ability to be spontaneously facile with words begins to dry up, along with the ability to write more than one essay a week. The concentration for reading can feel colossal and comprehension is certainly not what it was. Travel? Well, one can only pray that eventually you...

It's the result of a twenties and thirties of ravenous appetites. One mood medication induced a massive appetite for food, another slowed my colon like a tortoise. I knew the inevitable result would be something like this or still worse, yet I felt completely powerless to stop. I take the most minimal amount now of the former medication, but for the latter there is no antidepressant that will not induce something similar, and potentially a bit worse.

The kingdom of the perpetually mad is a tough enough place, but to be a dual citizen with the kingdom of the perpetually sick is another level of madness. To bear it forces you, however mad, to find strength you didn't know you had as you descend into still new realms of suffering.

And yet the perspective one gains is helpful as well. It instills a new hunger to discover those available bits of life. The concentration on the physical means that there is less mental energy that feeds into mental suffering. Physical suffering forces you to hope in precisely the way that mental suffering takes hope away from you. The two become locked in a battle and one begins to realize that hope is not a state so much as a practice. If one 'performs' hope enough, one can convince oneself to become the performance.

A conclusion later, if I can concentrate...All reactions