The Paralysis of It All

 For days I've been staring at the screen, wondering what I should write next. There are just so many issues to deal with that the world itself seems to come to paralysis. 

And the paralysis is the nub of where we are. We've all reached the point of exhaustion.

It's not even emotional exhaustion: our generation knows we will probably deal with existential problems for the rest of our lives, and each of us, in our own way, is gathering strength from our guts and our feet for whatever comes, so that when our children reach their dotage, they will know the security we only felt as children. 

It's intellectual exhaustion: we've lost the ability to trace problems to their root, we've lost the ability to be shocked by developments we don't understand, we've lost the thread of where it all went wrong. One problem causes the next, which causes the initial problem to expand, they persist in compounding each other, and problems that used to grow arithmetically grow geometrically now. What is the point of studying problems during a moment when you don't know if there will be a half-dozen bigger ones by the end of the summer? We're past the point of understanding them, we're past the point of solving them, we're at the point of simply dealing with them. 

When you can't deal with the problems of today, you have to replenish yourself: not just with gratitude for what's right (though that's always important), but with the wisdom that comes from questions that transcend any era. More on that in a future essay...

Some people remain doggedly optimistic as a practice. I respect them, many of them deeply, and I always try against my better judgement to keep an open mind about why they may be right. Optimists were proven right plenty of times in the past, and I pray they're proven further right again and again. But speaking for myself, I'm pretty willing at the point to 'call it.' No series of policies can save us now. We are now in a state of triage. Global warming will not be solved, AI will not be solved, internet surveillance, income inequality, pandemics and global health, nuclear proliferation, mass migration, democratic collapse: all of these problems will probably hit the world with seriousness far greater than how we think of them today. 

Believe it or not, we may yet be rid of Trump. We may yet be rid of Netanyahu. Rumors have abounded of Putin's imminent death for ten years. All of the world leaders who are worldwide threats to democracy are over 70: Xi, Erdogan, Orban, Modi, they're all gerontocrats. They'll all be gone in fifteen years, probably even Xi, but their overweening ambitions and corruption are just the beginning of a generations long worldwide slide. 

The world did what it does when times are relatively good: it got complacent. When we were kids, the world had just emerged from a seventy-seven year struggle that began with World War I and went all the way to the collapse of Soviet Communism. Every person in the world was exhausted of dealing with problems, so they convinced themselves that the problems weren't pressing enough to confront--and in some senses they were right. Even the most horrific crises of the 90s: Rwanda, Somalia, the Balkans, were smaller than crises in every decade of the 20th century before them since the first, and even if they were gargantuan even so, they were far away, in countries that had little impact on our daily lives. 

Relatively speaking, times were good, and we were feeling generous: not to struggling people mind you, but rather, to people who had social stations as high or higher than our own--people who could compromise our quality of life. Against what now seems an obvious mountain of evidence, when the middle class world looked at Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney at home, at Vladimir Putin and the Chinese Central Committee abroad, we assumed they didn't mean ill. And even if we assumed they meant ill, we were too prosperous to identify the right villains. We depend on the right for vigilance on national security, but they chose to believe terrorism was the priority threat. We depend on the left to monitor our well-being, and they chose to believe neoliberalist capitalism was the priority threat rather than the American conservative philosophy that enacted what we now call neoliberalism. 

That was the time to stop these problems, and it ended with the stock market crash and Great Recession of 2008. Once the economy fell out from under the world, it was a given that the economy could only be rebuilt by making our biggest assets more secure: our banks, our oil companies, our corporations, our tech sector, our insurance companies, our pharmaceuticals, our billionaires, and all their governmental minions. They had already so kidnapped our system that rather than hold these actors accountable for creating an unstable situation, we rewarded them.

Et voila. Nous sommes la. 

We needn't feel too bad about it; not about this at least... It is human nature to face problems only when they become too urgent to be ignored. This is exactly what art and history is about, or at least it is when it's done well. The specifics change from era to era, country to country, but human folly will stay ever the same. Folly is built into the very fabric of existence. Every action in existence has causes and effects, and the effects are usually unintended. Even if AI comes to life and solves a trillion problems every second, every one of its solutions will cause new problems. AI will be subject to the same existential folly as its human progenitors, and on a far more cosmic scale. 

And yet it's also from unintended consequences that come unintended solutions. After World War II, nobody thought the 'cold peace' between the US and USSR could hold, and yet hold it fundamentally did for 46 years. Yes, the price was absolutely lethal in what--thanks to the Cold War--we now term the 'third world', and was particularly awful for China, but while China lost a hundred million people, the world got up every day for fifty years with the expectation that a billion of them would sometime be wiped out in the span of a day. As for China, for good or ill it emerged from its suffering as the potentially dominant power of the 21st and 22nd centuries (one could make a similar argument for Jewish suffering in the Shoah leading to Israel's prosperity, but I digress). 

Reciprocally, people always point to the gains of 1960s Civil Rights as a reason that we should maximally agitate against society's denial of rights, but what they neglect is that in the 1960s, civil rights and great society programs were procured by death. The American consensus reasoned that if blacks and the poor bled as Americans in wartime service to their country (and to a disproportionate extent), then they should be accorded the full rights of Americans. It unfortunately stands to reason that those who agitate for further gains in civil rights will only be able to effect it through a similar blood sacrifice. 

An existential problem is existential because it threatens your existence, and there's a good chance the threat will be carried out. So I'm sorry to say we have to switch our mentality. These problems are too overwhelming to solve before they hit us with the force of 15 kilotons of TNT. We have to move to triage: trying to save as many and much as we can in the face of imminent problems that can dwarf the wars of the last century. 

Just as in the 1990s we could solve the problems of most humans had we tried, in the 2020s, we can still save most humans from their problems were we to make provisions that work around governments that refuse to work for us. They want us to rely on private enterprise? OK, then it's up to private companies and entrepreneurs to make the solutions that governments will eventually be compelled to embrace. They want us to provide charity rather than government help? OK, then we have to not hesitate about donating our extra dollars to our causes. They want to defund our colleges? OK, we take our educations to the internet and put our educations in the hands of credentialed professionals we trust. We can still volunteer our time to the causes we prioritize. We know exactly what all the problems are, we just have to get up off our JD Vance couches and do things about them.

Will we do them? Probably not. It's human nature t...

Why Today Hurt So Bad

Today is a day of mourning. Every day has been a day of mourning since October 7th, no matter which 'side' you take if either, but for 'our side', today was particularly acute.

For 2000 years, every day of a Jewish life was in some senses a day of mourning, but up we rose every day for millennia and always gave life our best shot: a simcha here, a responsibility there, observing the 613 laws as though each one of them matters as much as much as the commandment not to kill, while Rabbis would contort the Bible in every direction to make practical accommodations to these absurd laws for their congregants... or at least they did when the congregants shoved them against a wall.

It's true, if you view it from moral absolutes, it's a little outrageous to care this much about two people's deaths when god knows how many thousands are dead in Gaza--and we don't know how many: I find it darkly humorous that the world believes the death statistics of a ministry run by Hamas, the organization who instigated this war through mass murder, but even so, I can't imagine the casualties aren't staggering. Who knows? The death toll may be even higher.

If both Jewish history and the Gaza war are accurately recorded, then Jewish history is full of death tolls that exceed whatever's happened in Gaza. Gaza is far from over, but these death tolls are never *just* about the death toll for Jews any more than death tolls are just death tolls for other ethnic groups. It's as much about the humiliation of the experience, it's as much about the inherited trauma, it's as much about the double standards set for us.

...OK, that's a lie....

It's precisely because of those large death tolls that we are acutely sensitive to everything Israel. Every new murder of a Jew is not just the murder in itself, it is the doorway to worry about whether the moloch is coming for us that's come for every era of Jewish history until now.

I'm not a believer in that inherited trauma is particularly acute in Jews. If inherited trauma exists, then every human being has the trauma of pre-history encoded into their DNA: a period lasting god knows how many epochs when the wrong animal spelled the instant death of a loved one.

What is particularly unique in Jews is how murder is uniquely encoded into the narrative of our history. Our history is not just three thousand years of beautiful tradition, it's a three-thousand year recorded history of exile, beatings, theft, rape, show trials, hard labor, humiliation; but especially of mass murder. Moreover, it is a three thousand year history of how every success is a false promise--a divine test meant to show the entire world that all earthly achievement means nothing when your host countries can take it away from you with the snap of a finger. If God exists, then this is clearly what the supposed Av HaRakhamim, the Merciful Father, meant by making us his Chosen People. He chose us to spread his word, but the real word of God seems to be a much darker text than the gospel generally spread. No one believes in mercy more than Christians, and no one ever showed less mercy than Christians did to Jews.

But that was a different era, and we had a very different relationship to the world. We had no place to retreat to, no place we could really call home, we had no insurance policy in case our world burned down. In the BC era, when we had Israel and Judea, we were safer--not much, just a little bit. It wasn't the glorious period day schools teach us about: we were both terrible killers and the horrifically killed, our rulers were every bit as corrupt and incompetent as any ruler on earth, our supposedly glorious temple in Jerusalem stank of animal shit and rotting meat. We had our great men, and in between those great fathers of our faith we had hundreds of years of disgrace to our history.

But at least we had a fighting chance to make our own mistakes and not make our lives the forfeit of everybody else's.

We're now in the third millennium after Christ. We don't have that relationship to Christianity anymore--not for the moment at least. It seems that for now, the worst of Christianity is behind us. What we do have is radical Islam.

I don't doubt that all through history, there were millions and millions of virtuous Christians who not only hated their peoples' oppressive rulers and mobs, but particularly hated what these fellow Christians did to Jews. I'm sure many of them actively worked to aid Jews in need and sabotage attempts to abuse them. I'm equally sure there are millions in every era of European history who would have helped in an instant had the price to help Jews not been to treat caught helpers like Jews.

Furthermore, I have no doubt that all through history, there was a well-meaning educated class who saw the suffering of the peasants, and saw that many Jews were disproportionately successful, and drew a substantial correlation. They saw that so many Jews were tax collectors, money lenders, merchants, jewelers, and bankers (to say nothing of doctors...), and concluded that Jews were the oppressor class. So when Jews were killed en masse, they'd think it a tragedy, but in private, they'd put an asterisk next to these tragedies they would never put next to any other sort of mass murder: 'you see how Jews oppress those under them so willingly, you can't be too surprised that vengeance was taken against them. Even the innocent Jews were a little complicit!' What these enlightened classes neglected is that if Jews were disproportionately successful on someone else's back, it's because they were forced into these professions of success.

Just as we were forced into moneylending because the Church prohibited Christians from handling money and Jews from owning land, we were forced into needing Israel because country after country refused to make a space for us to feel at home, and in the case of the Shoah, a space for us to even survive.

Now that we have Israel, you'll have to kill us all before we give it up; and there's still a large number of world leaders trying to do just that; along with millions upon millions of acolytes who would go to any length to help them, and millions of educated people who fancy themselves on the side of the oppressed but advocate for solutions that would only replace one set of oppressors with another. This second set of oppressors would temporarily be more even more violent than the regimes they replace so they could establish their authority. That's the story of 1979 Iran, that's the story of 1917 Russia, that's the story of 1789 France, that's the story of dozens of other radical dictatorships around the world, where violent men were all but given the reins of power by left-liberals, progressives, and socialists who thought they could control the most militant among them.

What has the last ten years demonstrated above all other things? What has it shown that's above and beyond anything about social media partisanship or AI automation, above America's capacity for authoritarianism, above Russia's continued capacity to manipulate world affairs, and above China's ability to dominate the world?

It's demonstrated that this supposedly modern, safe era, protected from the vicissitudes of history, has the potential to be just as dangerous as any era has ever been. If this era is as dangerous as it seems, then do you really think Jews would be any more protected than ever before in a world without a Jewish state? A Jewish army? A Jewish lobby?

Take away all those things for the chance of a binational state on what once was Israel, and you'd replace Israel with a slaughterhouse: whether it's Muslims killing Jews or Jews killing Muslims, the entire Middle East could become an abattoir of genocide that makes Gaza look like Switzerland. The belief that Israel can be replaced by a functional democracy that fully respects the rights of both nations is one of the most naive political beliefs on earth, and millions of totalitarians depend on this binational idealism to make war all the easier to wage: Jews as well as Muslims.

Jews gave the world two-thousand years of chances to show that our society was welcome in diaspora, but over and over, the world showed their Jews that we were as welcome as a plague epidemic. If the world is as dangerous as it seems right now, Jews without a state are likely to be thrust back into the same maelstrom as we lived in for literal millennia.

We live the most prosperous, joyous time in the entire history of our people, and we hope and pray every day that we do not live at this period's dusk, because what history shows, in mind-numbing iterations, is that Jewish success is an illusion, because eventually we are punished for it in manners completely disproportionate to our sins.

Whether or not you believe that, experience shows that fact to be the most seminal element in Jewish history.

THEY... KILLED... US... EVERYWHERE

I'm just going to call it right now.

 The Elias Rodriguez trial is going to be with us for a year and a half. The guy turned himself in in order to disseminate his manifesto and make himself a cause celebre. If he gets the death penalty he will be a martyr to billions. This is literally an attempt to put the entire Israel/Palestine debate on trial before the world, and it was an absolute bullseye. It's meant to turn soft radicals hard, it's meant to turn pro-Israel liberals conservative, it is meant to depopulate Jews of friends, it's meant to inspire still more drastic measures from Israel until the entire world holds Jews complicit. It will be celebrated as proof that t*rrorism works, and it will inspire others to do exactly as he did.

When people say 'intifada revolution' or 'globalize the intifada, THIS is what they mean, whether you realize it or not.

Some strident words for chaverim on 'The Situation Over There'

I've supported Israel as best I could through their toughest period, but this new planned invasion of Gaza is ethnic cleansing of the gravest variety, and all for the craven motive to keep Netanyahu in power by appealing to his far far right base. Roughly 2/3rds of the Israeli public realizes that, regardless of October 7th, what's about to happen is unconscionable. Nothing about this has to do with Israeli security. It makes the hostages more likely to die and only increases Israel's isolation. 550 top security officials have signed a document denouncing it with the harshest terminology.

The most likely explanation is that that Israel found a taker for Gazans in some other country to be named soon, so it's probable the inhumane conditions are not ancillary collateral damage. The point is to create ghetto conditions akin to 1940 Warsaw, the claustrophobia's the point, the putrefaction's the point, the famine is the point, the point is to make life in Gaza so unbearable that Palestinians have no choice but to leave if they want to prevent deaths on a scale truly unimaginable.

This is Israel: next to Silicon Valley the most productive tech hub on Earth. It's only a matter of months before it develops the technology to monitor activity in the tunnels and plug up any hole. But in these 311 miles of tunnels, Hamas could have let some Gazans in at any point. Instead, Hamas willingly pushed their citizens in death's way, putting the largest entrances to the tunnels in hospitals, schools, and the most heavily concentrated neighborhoods, knowing that when Israel next invades, Hamas has willfully maximized their people's own casualties. Why is this not recognized? Because of naive lefties who choose not to live in the real world where self-defense and security is a fact of existence.

At the same time, while I don't want to use the G-word because nothing yet has been remotely worthy of it, if there is no alternate plan and 20-30% of Gazans die from this, there isn't another word in our lexicon for it. There should be: it still wouldn't be a crime remotely comparable to the 6/7ths of Jews in the Nazi empire who perished in gas and ovens, and the international standard for what constitutes annihilation of a people is so low because international organizations are stacked with precisely the countries who've long wanted to finish what Hitler started. The G-word word was literally invented to describe the Shoah, and the standard was lowered precisely to frame Israel as genocidal for acts that were barely a fraction comparable to what was perpetrated on Jews.

So even now, I categorically reject any claim of moral legitimacy from the anti-Israel crowd which makes no distinction between any form of Zionism and attributes a monolithic evil to a movement they know nothing about and can only cite scholars of the worst conceivable faith and sloppiest methodology to justify themselves. Even the most dovish Israeli peaceniks are little different to them from the most loathsome human rights violators on earth. They invoked the g-word before the 10/7 dead were cold in the ground: not a single word of sympathy for dead Israelis and Jews, not a single word of comfort to friends who were terrified the whole world was about to turn on them, and of course, not a single word about Hamas's role in all this. They are nobody's ally, neither Jews nor Palestinians.

But there isn't another word for it. There is only genocide.

And just as there should be a different word than the g-word for what Israel may yet do, there should be a different word than the d-word for what Israel currently is. Israel is currently a quasi-democracy that makes even more of a mockery of the real thing than our country does, and every minute the Israeli hard right remains in power, it draws ever closer to that 'other' d-word, the dreaded one: dictatorship.

So perhaps there is a third d-word that will just barely suffice for what's coming in Gaza, should Gazans be trapped by famine, it will be a democide so base that democide may be entirely insufficient a term for the scale of what comes. This plan is ethical filth, and we let it happen by unconditionally supporting Israel through its forty-five year descent into Revisionist Zionism's embrace. We too made no distinction between any form of it: whether it was the liberal Zionism of Weizmann, Rabin and Ben-Gurion, or the revisionist Zionism of Jabotinsky, Begin and the Netanyahus. We did not speak out, we did not make our support conditional, and we pretended one of the most prosperous countries on earth was still the little and embattled social democracy of seventy years ago. For my entire lifetime, it was always a farce, and we willfully repressed that our eyes could see the metamorphosis step by step.

Part of how we know the anti-Zionists aren't serious about their mission is that not even they are warning on the widest scale about the unprecedented operation that seems to be imminent. Why? They've exhausted their emotional rhetoric, because to them, all horror is the same in degree, without any nuance of context, and they're incapable of making distinctions between self-defense and mass murder. Surely, they reason, nothing can be more monstrous than what's already happened: oh yes it can, so very much worse. So if they're not going to warn, we have to warn. We have to oppose it. We have to root for its failure. In the long run, it can destroy Israel.

This is not Zionism, this is the perversion of it that happens to every ideological movement if we do not make the movement pay a price for turning its back on its own better angels. This drastic ethical backslide came for Zionism, and one day it will come for every movement of our time whose ethical standard currently seems unimpeachable to so many.

We owe our support to Zionism just as we do to any movement whose cause was fundamentally conceived in liberal ideals, but we owe any perversion of it complete, unconditional opposition.

Hamas is our enemy, Netanyahu is our enemy too along with all the hydra arms of his coalition; a hydra which is the probable Israeli future. If there ever is to be an end to this conflict, every serious person needs to agitate hard for the removal of this governance by excrement in both Israel and Palestine.

The Nihilist Music of Eugene O'Neill.

America, land of Hollywood and Broadway, doesn't have too many transcendent world dramas--not that we know about at least. But one we have, one of the greatest family dramas in world history, is Long Day's Journey Into Night: the submergence of family life into hell. It's in part clearly autobiographical. Eugene O'Neill wrote it in the 1920s and kept it in his drawer until his death in the 1950s, probably because to see a production would be too painful for him. It deals with the most painful family issues: accusations, illness, drug addiction, money, alcoholism, isolation, secrets, suspicion, dissipation, nepotism, the anxiety of impending mortality, and worst of all--claustrophobia.

Encountering it is a rite of passage for the American intelligentsia. Once every few years, a new cast of the world's greatest Anglophone actors mount it: either in New York, or London, or LA. Somewhere, full tapes exist of Laurence Olivier and Constance Cummings, or Brian Dennehy and Vanessa Redgrave with the young Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robert Sean Leonard, or David Suchet and Laurie Metcalf, or Charles Dance and Jessica Lange with the young Michael Shannon, or Jeremy Irons and Lesley Manville, or Earle Hyman and Ruby Dee, or Jason Robards and Colleen Dewherst with the young Campbell Scott, and just last year, Brian Cox and Patricia Clarkson. The many sided and exhausting parts demand nothing but the best to respond to each other, endure the stamina of such exhausting roles, and bring their own conceptions and personality and nuance,

Sadly, the only live versions that exist complete on youtube are the two worst reviewed: one with Alfred Molina and Jane Kazmeryk, and another with Jack Lemmon (of all people) with Bethel Leslie with the young Kevin Spacey and Peter Gallagher.

Fortunately, we have this movie version, starring no less than Ralph Richardson, Katherine Hepburn, the young Jason Robards and Dean Stockwell. The whole cast inspires awe, but particularly Katherine Hepburn, who finally has a film role that stretches her genius to its full plumage, and Jason Robards, perhaps the distinguished performer of O'Neill in theater history. The movie is absolutely vicious, perhaps even overly so: an abusive family that tears each other to shreds and whose resentments hold barely any compassion for one another. And yet even here, we see just how moving this play can be. These actors interpret the roles as particularly vicious people, yet even they are deserving of compassion and love they don't get, and their emotional ugliness endows them with still more sublime pathos.

O'Neill wasn't a writer of great prose, yet his writing for the stage was pinpoint to the emotional bullseye. Like Chekhov and Hemingway, a paucity of words belied a devastatingly perfect choosing of them. Emotional tension is ratcheted like in Mahler 6 or Berg's Wozzeck, and like those works, it rises to heights that are greater than can be born in equilibrium.

I used to be afraid of this work. I saw David Suchet and Laurie Metcalf do it on the West End in 2012. It was extraordinary, and I couldn't stay for the whole thing. It was just too unbearably sad, and therefore I used to poo-pooh the play. But the reason is great is that it's the nightmare image of what we all fear family life is. I still can barely watch the play. A great performance should leave you shaking. In his most tragic plays, Shakespeare provides comic relief, and even Chekhov's most tragic moments are so ridiculous that they're comic too. O'Neill provides no such relief. This play exists to drive you mad.

Here is the magnum opus of American drama in its full sublimity. You owe it to yourself to experience it.

Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962) - YouTube