Let's Normalize antishemioot part 2

(note: this is substantially rewritten from yesterday)

Part 2: A Simple Mind

The basic problem of antisemitism is that the experience of dealing with Jews stands everything on their heads and therefore exposes every moral hypocrisy mercilessly.

American left wingers accuse Jewish Zionists of squelching debate on Israel, and yet they squelch debate on the issues of every other minority: racial, sexual or gender.

On every other issue, conservatives are ordered by progressives to acclimate immediately to customs they hadn't even heard of until ten years ago or face a level of moral censure unprecedented in their times since the days of Birmingham bus rides. Perhaps conservatives deserve that level of moral censure, but so did we all until 2015, and if we can't understand that a hundred million Americans need time to acclimate to things like heteronormativity or patriarchy or gender affirming care without the same snap judgement of their character that we resent them always giving us, we'll set back our causes, not forward.

Meanwhile, it is only on this most important of all Jewish issues where debate is framed as a dire necessity, and progressive social democrats are so blinded by their idealism that they never see the contradiction. The whole world over, only Jews are demanded to willingly relinquish their state to let themselves be guinea pigs in a democracy where millions have voted for an organization that calls for killing them in their charter.

Let's also note the charter was changed from 'Jews' to 'Zionists' in 2017, but what does that matter when it's assumed that every Jew is a Zionist?

As anti-Israel types never tire of squawking like a parrot who knows only one phrase, there are anti-Zionist Jews out there. But to the vast majority of Jews, Israel is everything to us. It's the one guarantee that lets us sleep at night knowing that we have a safe haven from hypocrites like you.

The point is this: on the issue of Palestine, left wingers turn into neoconservatives--insisting on imposing democracy on a state where millions are commited to fighting against democracy by all means, Jews as well as Arabs. It would be just as lethal as American-occupied Iraq, and the left wing idealists who imposed it would be remembered as the same combination of evil and stupid that is the deserved fate of their neocon forerunners.

And then there's the right...

They're pro-Israel now, but that may change the moment peace talks with Palestine resume (and at some point, they will...). Like liberal American Jews, liberal Israelis will he charged with selling white people out to barbarian hordes of color.

There's a level of Republican insanity even past MAGA Trumpism. MAGA Trumpism is the light version of this insanity, but every day shows a new danger of how it might turbocharge. This insanity should be very familiar to us. Consider the most common antisemitic talking points:

1. Liberal Jews plotting to replace natives with unwanted immigrants.

2. The idea that Jews control government, media and finance.

You can hear these opinions aired with some regularity on places from the podcasts of Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate to uncountable thousands Twitter posts each day. It's getting much more common to hear right-wing holocaust denial, and on both left and right it's ever more common to hear revisionist history of World War II that casts Churchill as the villain over Hitler.

When it comes to Jews, today's left wingers disparage the vast majority of Jews for imposing a hard-headed authoritarian conservatism, tomorrow's right wingers will disparage a majority of us for imposing an authoritarianism that is sensitive and liberal. Combine these points about powerful liberal Jews colonizing places they're unwanted with other points the manosphere makes: the importance of gender roles and the poison of feminism, the honoring of biblical notions and religious customs, and you can't help noticing a parallel... at least I can't.

Today's left wingers sound like neocons, tommorow's right wingers begin to sound like radical Islamists. In both cases, their ideology warps them into the very people they fear most.

Both social democrats and conservatives are blinded by an idealism about their projects that's almost messianic, and so great is their self belief that along the way they pick up the dregs of the earth. The dregs are not along for the ride with them, they are along for the ride with the dregs.

Whether it's fundamentalist Christians or fundamentalist Muslims, these are people who believe eternity is at stake, and have therefore a will to power so exceeding your own that you could be killed rather than pushed aside and you wouldn't even know your fate until the last seconds. And yes, radical Christianity is still an equal threat to radical Islam.

The problem is that the two basic sides of world discourse are full of otherwise smart, sensible people who, when it comes to the Middle East, believe in things so simple minded, so dangerous, so willfully naive, that it calls into question every other thing in which they believe. Once they show themselves so idiotic on the issue of Jews, they can never be trusted to provide a solution for the world on any issue at all.

And even moreso, they can never be trusted by Jews.

Why?

Because there is nothing about Jews that can be understood by a simple mind.

So if these people are too simple minded to live among us, we have to adapt our complexity to live among them.

Let's normalize *nt*s*m*t*sm: Part 1 of... oy...

Part 1: What did you expect?

The basic plot of 21st century USA can be explained by "what the hell did you expect?" We could go through the whole plot of my adult lifetime of American history and make the results a result of "what the hell did you expect?"

But the nomination of Zohran Mamdani takes us back to original sins of this third age of the modern US, and the original sin is Clintonism and its compromises.

Bill Clinton was both a very good President and a disappointment. He basically governed like what we used to think of as a Republican: a pragmatic, responsible conservative of the type that used to be represented by Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Cabot Lodge. This Arkansian from nothing governed like New England old money: low-risk, consensus, fiscal thrift, and compromise everywhere. The paradox is that Clinton probably saved us from right wing ideologues taking us over much sooner. Reagan was fresh in the American mind, and in 90s US was basically a right wing country. Had Clinton governed like Lyndon Johnson, Republicans would have nominated a right wing demagogue in 96 like Pat Buchanan, and Clinton would be trounced.

America's lived under threat of a Trump moment since 1994, and most people only awoke to it in 2016. Somwhow, most people had no idea how we landed there: WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?!?!?!

In 1999, Clinton lifts the Glass-Steagall Act, thinking regulations on bank investments would put us on bad competitive footing with the Japanese (remember when they were our big economic threat?). This allows banks to play Candyland with our money. Profits for corporate investors go through the roof at the expense of middle class people who can no longer afford anything but the most conservative investments, along with stock prices skyrocketing the cost of the entire economy: once there are so many corporate profits, corporations have to charge more to keep up with the competiition, so every material cost goes up for houses, cars, appliances, electronics, manufacturing, and labor. America gets so profitable that nobody can afford anything anymore. It seemed sensible to many at the time, but ultimately, what did you expect?

In 1994, Clinton enacted the Crime Prevention Act: 100,000 new policemen, tough sentencing for light crimes, and new prisons to house the lawbreakers. This puts kids who have no idea what they're doing behind bars for decades, creates a whole African American class of 'prisoner families' without fathers who can help raise their children, which creates whole new generations of criminals, and raises America's prisoner total past a million and a half. It gives rise to a whole new industry of government contractors to build prisons. It gives policemen the green light to enforce laws by any means necessary, and incentivises judges to be trigger happy as interpreters of law on conviction and sentencing (that's the charitable interpretation of what judges did...). Crime was truly harrowing before this act, and the act was highly successful. Even so, what did you expect?

Most disastrously, Clinton was tasked with the herculean labor of overseeing the Russian transition from Communism to liberal democracy. As it seemed a given to so many that socialism and democracy were incompatible, Clinton insisted on privatizing Russia's government holdings immediately. Inevitably, the people who profited most from this were the earliest investors who knew what Russian resources were most valuable. This lead to the rapid wealth accumulation of those with insider information, meaning a relative handful of high level communist bureaucrats and KGB/intelligence officers, who became so disproportionately wealthy that they could run the Russian government behind the doors of their corporate offices. Thus was born the Russian oligarchy. What the hell did you expect?

Christians have it right. There is no life without original sin. Every solution requires compromise and results in compromise. There are no permanent solutions, only lesser evils for greater goods, and often we can only giess what those lesser evils are. If we're lucky, the solutions last for generations, as FDR's have, but great solutions require great sacrifices, and no sacrifices are greater than world wars. Clinton had many, many compromises to conservatives, but without those compromises, our generation would have grown up in the world of Donald Trump, and our children might have grown up in worse.

But there was one issue on which Clinton did not compromise to conservatives, maybe he compromised to liberals instead.

One of Clinton's first great accomplishments, and it was towering, was the Oslo Peace Accords of 1993. Or as Jews always called it, "The Peace Process." The Palestine Liberation Organization would become the Palestinian Authority and take control over disputed territory over a period of five years which would then comprise a Palestinian state. At the end of the five year period would come further talks about the status of borders, refugees and Jerusalem.

The very idea of peace in the Middle East seemed like an impossibility since Gallipoli and the fall of the not particularly peaceful Ottoman Empire. Clinton almost cracked the code, and he would have if not for the messy humans who had to follow it and their all too neat beliefs.

It's possible to impose peace on people who want war, but not without threats against all the things they care about, and any threat misapplied only increases war's chances.

In response to the Oslo Peace Accords the Israeli right mounted resistance in every corner within walking distance of them, particularly the orthodox communities. For the next two years there was nearly a rally a day agitating to resist peace, and not only resist peace but resist the leader who imposed it, and not only resist the leader but overthrow him, violently.

I don't know what the Palestinian zeitgeist felt like in those years, but it would seem that Palestinians were no less turbulent over the issue, and two little known Islamic resistance groups took to the rarely encountered act of suicide bombing as a means to further poison Israel against Rabin's push for peace: the resistance groups were called Islamic Jihad, and Hamas. If their push was successful, they knew that Israel would take retribution, which would further poison Palestinians against any solution with two states.

With every suicide bombing more Israelis called for an end to the peace process, and a surprising number of Israelis seemed comfortable with a particularly final solution to it. The solution came on November 4th, 1995, when Yitzhak Rabin left the stage after a peace rally, and Yigal Amir put three bullets into the person who will define heroism for me for all the days of my life.

But peace was never a full solution, nor was it supposed to be. Even the best Middle East peace would only last a generation or three, but those two generations would be a golden age, they would buy Israel time to develop unimpeded, so that when war next came, more could be saved and there would be more to save.

Clinton tried again with the next elected Prime Minister from Israel's Labor party, Ehud Barack. The effort to empower peace was even more extreme, more desperate, and resulted in still more desperate extremism. Many more suicide bombings, many more rallies inciting violence against Arabs. At the end of it, The Peace Process only resulted in twenty-five years of war. Those who wanted war craved it all the more. What did we expect?

One man who subtly encouraged Rabin's assassination was the leader of the right wing Likud opposition: a steamrolling smooth talker named Benyamin Netanyahu, not yet fifty, and already endowed with a brass narcissism that seemed to know that he would change the course of history in a manner that would erase Rabin. Netanyahu knew that even as controversial as he was, Rabin, described by Clinton as 'one tough sonofabitch' would be a tougher opponent than Rabin's foreign minister, Shimon Peres. Six months later Netanyahu eked out his first victory. Of his six victories so far, four were squeakers.

Rabin was no politician. He was a general, perhaps Israel's greatest, and he was a statesman. He clearly did not understand politics, but he understood the mentalities of leaders, and he particularly understood strategy.

Rabin did not view peace like a peacemaker, he viewed it like a military man. All the dictators next to Israel paid lip service to Islam, but none were true believers. Whether in pockets of East or West, their ideology was something called pan-Arabism, which had the ultimate aim of uniting all Arab peoples under one cause, one banner, and presumably, one nation. But were they to unite under one country, the question remained: under who's leadership?

These dictators were Arab nationalists, but more fundamentally, their ideology was themselves. During a period when Israel was the little democracy that could, it made perfect sense to use Israel as a rallying cry for their people: occupiers, killers, thieves, infidels. But once Israel was a capitalist nation with money to burn, it made more sense for these dictators to ally with Israel than oppose it.

But the reason for all this, the reason the peace process was and remains a necessity, is to isolate a country beyond their borders who could not be bought and cannot be bought. The aim of pan-Arab dictators was corruption, but the aim of Iranian mullahcracy is the resurrection of the Caliphates and the eviction of the infidels, with Iran as the ruler of the entire Islamic world. For fifty years, they've set their goals not in years but in eternity, and their goal was and is the spread the Iranian interpretation of Shi'a Islam around the world.

But until that glorious time when such goals are made tangible, the most important goal of the Islamic Republic of Iran is the eviction of Israel from Jerusalem. Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock is where Mohammed is believed to ascend to heaven. The second goal is the eviction of Jews from Islamic land. However unfeasible, however unbelievable, this goal is more important to them than their own citizenry, precisely because it's a goal that inspires their citizenry to a holy cause, and distracts then from their own material poverty. They say exactly that, and they mean it. Believe them.

No amount of money can buy Iran's ayatollahs off, and until the Islamic Republic is overthrown, no amount of time will distract them from their cause. The only limitation for their ambition is the incompetence caused by such an impractical worldview. The more totalitarian leaders control their population with impossible dreams, the more their people's reality is squalor, corruption, public incompetence. What did they expect?

Life is about transition, and all successful solutions are transitions between one problem and another. There is only one permanent solution, and eventually it comes for us all.

There are only temporary solutions, and anyone promising a permanent solution is asking to exploit you.

My Israeli Army Shirts

I love my Israeli army t-shirts nearly as much as Iove my violin. I have no idea where I got them, but they are without a doubt my favorite shirts, and I can never wear them outside the house again.

It don't love these shirts out of patriotism. I love them because they are the most comfortable shirts I own: no polyester, 100% cotton, pleasing against the skin, flattering to the physique, its breath perfect for humidity and exercise. Clearly Israeli higher ups knew that if their soldiers participate in the most controversial battles on earth, they ought to be wearing a comfortable shirt.

I haven't worn them for a social event in ten years, because whenever I did it became a conversation piece. And whenever the Middle East becomes a conversation, it either becomes a monologue or a fight. Ever since then, if I absentmindedly wear them in public, I drop everything and go home to change. I don't even wear them to check if my car is locked in the middle of the night. If, god forbid, a mugger picks on me, I can't have him knowing that I have any connection to the State of Israel.

We are at the point that those of us connected with Israel are being pressured to feel shame at it. What's worse is that some part of us does feel shame, and still worse, we feel shame at our shame.

Peer pressure is a hell of a drug. Jews are pressured to love Israel every day of our lives. And not just Israel but the Israeli army too. Even when I was a kid, I was never totally comfortable with pressure to love the army. Dealing with Jewish jocks was hard enough. Honoring an organization full of them? Something about it made me feel it deeply queasy.

Even if they're too honored, jocks need a place in this world too. As I'm older I see the dire need for national defense, and short of the most naive leftist, I think most liberals do too. But national defense is not there attack, it's there to deter. And if armed foces are used for offense, they are there to weaken opponents, not decimate them. God always punishes hubris, and there are few groups of people today more hubristic than the people who advocate war with Iran.

But now we're getting pressure from the other side. We always got some pressure to hate Israel, but now? It's everywhere. It's dozens of friends on social media. It's every time you pass by a college. You never know which street corner you turn on where a person will have a sign accusing your people of genocide.

To those who don't believe in either, the world seems like chaos. You can't go anywhere anymore and simply say 'I don't know' without people suspecting that you're the problem. Even a correct militant is a militant who can take what's right and make it deeply wrong.

And all of this is made more complicated by the extremity of your own beliefs. Even after all this, I maintain, Israel is worth dying for, it is worth killing for. Equality and freedom for the world means nothing if Jews dont have the same. And we've given the world 2000 years of chances to let us have it elsewhere. Jews suffered from white people 1500 years before most of the globe knew what a white person was, and even after they learned, our suffering didn't get any less.

But when you fight to that extent, you better be damn well sure you're fighting for the right thing.

Is this the right thing? We have no idea. We have inklings, surely I lean to the belief that this is a willful and deliberate mistake, but anybody who thinks they know beyond certainty is lying to you. There are known knowns, the things we know, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. No matter what our predictions, success or failure will make itself manifest over the next while. Even the people who predict correctly what happens don't deserve credit for it. The only option left to us is to wait, and watch, and recall our experiences of whatever comes for those who come after us.

There are so many unstable factors in the world today, so many faultlines that divide the world into halves, any one of them could flare up into conflict that engulfs us all: Gaza, Ukraine, Taiwan, the demilitarized zone, even Capitol Hill.

But if the gunpowder that starts it all is Israel's, then the old antisemitism will flame up like an inquisition pyre because we will be seen as the murderer of millions, perhaps more. Like antisemites since John Chrysostom, the new old antisemites will point their fingers at us and spout: 'THIS is what happens when you give Jews power. This is what happens when you give Jews independence, autonomy, equality. This is what happens when you treat Jews like human beings!'

It won't occur to them that 2000 years of hatred against us may be what provoked war. Must untold masses die so that Jews may live? Well, if billions didn't already hate us, nobody need have died.

But if Israel ever proves the flash point that engulfs global war, then who would be able to deny the State of Israel was a mistake? Who even knows if Israel would survive such a melee? Did we really found this country just to deliver ourselves to another Shoah?

We did the best we could in the wake of the most evil tragedy of the 20th century, and it was the most evil, no matter what progressives say about imperialism today. Millions of European Jews thought Zionism an irritating embarrassment, and they were all gassed and burnt because they had nowhere to go. But just as we didn't want another holocaust from doing nothing about Iran, we want to avoid another holocaust from doing something about Iran.

Being Jewish has meant impossible choices from age to age. Israel literally means 'he who wrestles with God,' and God has placed before us the most impossible choice in our whole history: potentially destroy the world or potentially destroy ourselves. We just made the choice.

Jews have always been punished for being conspicuously Jewish. Having a state of our own will never change that. Being Jewish means sleeping with one eye open as it does for any minority. We can be proud to be Jewish, but we pay for eberyfeeling of pride ih blood. The state of Israel may have been doomed no matter what the choice we made.

It's increasingly clear that Israel's existence depends upon US protection, but long after the US breaks apart, the Jews will still be here, absorbing the abuse of country after country. We can be proud that we've survived, but whenever we are proud in public, God sets a terrible price.

When events defy analysis

 

Few things have surprised me the last two years, but so many times I've put my neck onto the line to venture a prediction, and I've gotten it spectacularly wrong. I didn't think he was going to do it. Not so soon at least. I was an idiot.

God knoweth how, but against all evidence I lazily thought Trump would be a deterrent factor, bomb a few of the minor sites, fly some American planes to patrol the airspace, lend Israel the clusterbombs, and leave Israel to do the dirty work. I thought Trump's cowardice would triumph over his powerlust.

As ideologues of every stripe of this conflict could tell you, I am a completely untrustworthy and unreliable analyst.

But some patterns in history are so easy to perceive that even I can see them. One of the patterns is era after era when the establishment squeezes its grip on power so tightly that they lose complete touch with the reality of those they rule. They grow so disconnected with the world that they make a mistake so profound that they facilitate a collapse. Not just of their establishment, not just of their country, but of their entire era. That is the lesson of World War I, that is the lesson of the French Revolution, it's the lesson of the Reformation, of the Thirty Years War, of the Hundred Years War, the fall of the Roman republic, of Emperor Commodus and the Year of the Four Emperors. It's the lesson of the Judean dynasties Hasmonean and Herodian, and I'm sure the lesson confirms itself in instances I know too little of to list. Eventually there arises a ruler, or rulers, whose grip on reality is so vague that he causes a an entire generation of chaos and blood. In the generation that follows, no one is spared stories of grief or horror, and those who fall can only be honored in our memories as those who made the ultimate sacrifice to build the bright and hopeful new world that comes after.

Was the establishment provoked by those of us on the counterestablishment? In a sense, absolutely. But those who oppose the establishment were provoked in turn by prosperous people who would rather risk the ultimate fall than give up their prosperity. And eventually, such questions don't matter at all, because those who value the world will do as they can to help it survive, and those who don't will do all manner of dark things to help themselves survive. Most of us would do both, and most of us will.

Who's right? The politics of every era change, but the core issue never does. There are not two sides to most debates, there are three: Progress, stasis, and regress.

There's nothing inherently wrong with wanting to regress to the way things were, sometimes the way things were is preferable to a progress that doesn't work, but if you choose stasis, you can keep things as they are with minimal tension, but if you choose progress, you have to give something to the regressionists in return, or tensions will escalate, and escalate to the point that you can no longer control them. As Amos Oz said, compromise is life, and without compromise there is only death and fanaticism.

There are many issues on which we have to progress as a society: social and economic issues particularly. There are certain issues like national security where it's become quite clear that regression to vigilance might have saved us electoral interference from Russia and an unstable relationship with China--who, by the way, gets half their oil from Iran. Now we have a bastardized regression that mistakens offense for deterrence. This is not regression, this is regressive fundamentalism: fundamentalism no less dangerous than the radical Islam of Iran. The modern American right may not have beliefs as murderous as the other, but the American right has a million times the power, and next to no commitment to using it responsibly. When you lead the world, every flaw in belief accumulates exponentially like a butterfly effect, and before you know it your desire for tax cuts can put the world on a course that causes the death of billions.

Are we at August 1914 yet? Probably not. But surely things bad enough are coming.

What would I do if I were Iran's supreme leader? The answer is simple now. I wouldn't go after Israel, I'd go after the US. Bombing an Israeli hospital? That's no way to establish your prestige on the world stage (such as it is). Bomb America? Bomb something like the World Trade Center? THAT is a way to make America's opposition view Iran with respect.

It would be all too easy. Credible sources tell us that iran's sleeper terror cells are very real, and a function of a border that's too open--I support enormous waves of immigration, so long as everyone is VETTED. But even if it's not real, Iran doesn't need sleeper cells. Such is today's internet radicalization that lost youth will all but come to them: asking how they can help, how they can fight, how they can martyr themselves and butcher others.

The Trump administration has piled our national security wall high with official jokes. Not a single national security appointee is qualified for their job. Not a one. And it's almost like that's what Trump wants...

How did Putin become the Vladimir Putin we all know and love? Because of the 1999 apartment bombings. Four bombs that went off in apartment buildings in three Russian cities. Thus began the Second Chechen War. Did Chechnya do it or did Putin? Putin wasn't Russia's president yet, just another one of Yeltsin's heirs apparent. Still... probably. But after it happens, it doesn't really matter, because it's the perfect opportunity for an authoritarian power grab. Just like the Reichstag fire.

I have a good friend, an Israeli of perfectly sane politics, tell me that he strongly suspects that Netanyahu... well... he doesn't suspect Bibi of involvement in October 7th, he just suspects Bibi he left the door open, thinking Hamas would break through and kill twenty people. Excuse enough to distract Israelis with another war while his power is embattled, but not excuse enough to go down in history as Israel's worst day and level Gaza with more bombs than the US ever used in Iraq and Afghanistan combined over 20 years.

The playbook for this move has been written so many times, from Hitler to Putin, to Netanyahu's accidental power grab (which I suspects secretly delights him), it would be easy for Trump to maximize his power in the event of a major terror attack. Of course, it would be easier if some other country did it, but if it takes long enough, who can doubt by now that Trump has the will to power to do it himself?

Yet not even Israel had the bombs to level the Iranian nuclear program. The main part of Iran's nuclear program's buried deep in the mountains of Northern Iran, and only an American bunker buster can reach it. A conventional bunker buster is an immensely powerful weapon, for a conventional weapon. But then there's the nuclear. I doubt even Trump would use a nuclear bunker buster... yet... but a nuclear bunker buster, rather than a conventional, yields explosive power that vastly exceeds what was dropped on Hiroahima and Nagasaki.

Events this large defy analysis. They cannot be predicted, they can only be described. If this is Auguat 1914 or June 1789, you will remember every detail of this month fir the rest of your lives: where you were and how you heard as we took every step to war in an era when war means unprecedented destruction and mourning.

It still doesn't seem like that, but of we came so close, we can come much closer.

Brendel Belongs to the Ages

Brendel, for me, was a 'divine' pianist. To listen to him was an instantly cleansing experience. Even when I disagreed with him intellectually in Mozart and Beethoven, which was often, the spirituality of it won over instantly: the quarter-pedal induced seraphic sound, a force that delineated all those polyphonic lines and formal relationships with a clarity that seemed almost moral, his extremely underrated ability to phrase, the absolute sense of proportion, created a fusion between intellect and emotion that can only be described as lighting the soul of the music.

Very few pianists have that 'divine' quality. Kempff had it, Tureck had it, de Larrocha and Moravec had it, Schiff has it, Lupu often had it, and believe it or not, Rubinstein often had it. It's a function of proportions: the music is so tightly organized that it feels it could be no other way, and simultaneously feels completely spontaneous. It defines 'giusto.' Beautiful sounds and inventive phrasing at the exact right tempo so that every detail emerges at maximum impact. You'd think there's no rubato, but listen closely, there can be plenty of it. Great artists have many other transcendent qualities, but this quality makes you feel as though you've already arrived in heaven. You don't feel the presence of the artist, and yet no amount of expression feels lacking. It exists at a place beyond personality.

That was Brendel's gift. His memory will always be a blessing.

Danke meister.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwdiH9MQZHs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olmgg0y2o9A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFTre3vq6Tg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMaehuxici4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWF-48jIrSU

The Hospital...

 

I don't want to talk about the hospital.

I don't want to talk about the ****ing hospital.

I don't want to talk about the )(*&%*&$&^%#&&^%)*)_(*&_(*% hospital and you can't make me.

I don't want to talk about the hospital because you all dont want to hear it. This issue slimes everyone, and if you're honest with yourself, you all know why. One side cries crocodile tears about their hospital while blowing sick people to kingdom come, the other cries crocodile tears about sick people getting blown up until the sick are Jewish. One side claims that attacking hospitals is necessary while doing no due diligence about whether their government might sometimes lie about it, the other side claims hospitals are hotbeds of innocent victims while never stopping to wonder: 1. why would you ever protest for a side whose government uses their sick as human shields? 2. Is the medical staff of these hospitals complicit? Are they deliberately using their patients as bait?

The Israel/Palestine conflict infallibly exposes the rot in every person's morality, present company very much included, and the more outraged we get, the more gullible demagogues will find us.

As awful as this hospital attack was, the moral questions tell us nothing that we didn't know already. If you're pro-Israel, you're seething at the hypocrisy today, if you're pro-Palestine, you're seething at the futility of opposing Israel no more than you were yesterday. What we can learn is what this attack indicates about Iran's capabilities.

Using language straight from a 1980 terrorism press conference, Iran promised a surprise that would be remembered for centuries. So clearly, this is the surprise they meant.

That means three things:

1. This is the most damage Iran is capable of doing. Don't misunderstand, they can do a lot more, but not without a response that can bring down an entire Iranian city. If these two sides had anything like military parity, Iran would be ass*ssinating similarly high up Israeli officials to the equivalent Iran officials and inflicting massive damage on Israel's weaponry. But they're not, and if they're not doing it now, they never could. Iran can't fight a war on equal terms to Israel. So instead, Iran does what they always do: they kill weak Israelis, knowing that Israel's response will likely be to kill weak Iranians. Israel kills the weak too--and you have a legitimate right to feel however you like about that, but in the case of hospitals, Israel generally kills the weak to get at the strong. In this particular case, Iranians killed the weak to avenge the strong.

2. Iran knew exactly where it needed to point its missiles in order to get the desired results: it set a target that was a hospital in Be'er Sheva, the big Israeli city furthest away from Iran, and hit the hospital with lethal accuracy. If Iran ever has a weapon of mass destruction, they could point it wherever they like and there would be no hiding behind 'we didn't mean to hit this target.'

3. In the future, Iran could hit Muslim areas of Israel/Palestine and claim it was Israel. If they do, a vast, vast segment of the globe would believe them. It could be anything from the dead center of the Jabaliya Refugee Camp to the Dome of the Rock, and the would could think Israel did it. Even if the make of missile came from Iran, people would say that Israel planted it there. So in that sense, this could be a trial run for a surprise so infamous it just might be remembered for centuries.

That's the last I'll say about this hospital business. Let's talk about happier things like global warming.

I'm gonna do something I really don't like here

"No part of the Great War compares in interest with its opening. The measured, silent drawing together of gigantic forces, the uncertainty of their movements and positions, the number of unknown and unknowable facts made the first collision a drama never surpassed. Nor was there any other period in the War when the general battle was waged on so great a scale, when the slaughter was so swift or the stakes so high. Moreover, in the beginning our faculties of wonder, horror, or excitement had not been cauterized and deadened by the furnace fires of years."

Winston Churchill was full of shit. There are fourteen points in World War I as interesting as its opening, but he's right that no shock in the 20th century was as eruptive as the opening of World War I. Not even the Holocaust or Hiroshima could compare. The others might have been the low points of man's inhumanity to man, but before World War I, the Western world thought to itself that man might free itself from inhumanity.

We could spend paragraphs pointing out the course of hypocrisies that lead Europe to its horrifying collision, but that's not the point of this post. The point is to show that there are certain moments when events happen so quickly, with such dramatic, decisive impact that all analysis is dumb.

Whatever happens with Israel/Iran, whatever there is to talk about with the actual countries involved, the main hope we all should have is that this war does not spread. The importance of that possibility dwarfs everything else about this conflict. Donald Trump committed the US to it with alacrity. I don't know why we're all shocked, but I suppose even I'm a little surprised. There are many reasons Trump might have done it, but I suppose the most likely reason Trump got us involved is to prevent other major powers from involving themselves. If that's the case, then it's probably wiser than it looks.

That's the last time I'll praise Donald Trump for a long while, and if he did it for any other reason, he's as dumb/evil as ever. Has he involved us in yet another quagmire? It's certainly possible, but so long as Netanyahu insists on acting this idiotically, this is the best move to deter China from getting involved, and if China gets involved, the US is going to get involved anyway, and potentially at a far greater price than a quagmire.

It's highly likely that this is not August 1914. This is just a rehearsal, a preview. Never say never, but the very fact that America got involved this quickly dampens the likelihood that other world powers will get involved in this, because if they did, America would eventually get involved anyway, and then it really would be August 1914.

The world is advancing to a point of no return. Personally, I think we're long past the point that we can avoid it, but I don't think this will be the explosion that hurtles the world into something we can't yet fathom. This particular Middle Eastern conflict will probably be over when Bibi wins re-election in 2026, arranges his own pardon and starts planning a successor--and I'm gonna do the unwise and predict that that his re-election's a 'when.' Bibi Netanyahu does not care if a hundred thousand, a million, or ten million people die on his way to reelection, he sees his position as a mixture of messiah and game master. But if this regional war somehow drags on past 2026, there is no limit to what could happen next.

I have said, from the very beginning of this, that I don't support these wars, I just refuse to condemn them. Here's what I said twelve days after October 7th:

"If, on the off chance you care, you're looking for me to say I oppose a ground invasion of Gaza, there is no frozen hell in which that happens. Hamas is Israel's weakest enemy. If Israel doesn't do it, Hezbollah will do worse (than October 7th), and Iran might do still worse than that.

But with every fibre of my being, with every tzim-tzum of my essence, with every one of my soul's five names, I categorically oppose any ground invasion so long as Benyamin Netanyahu leads it, because until Netanyahu is gone, his lust for power will doom it to failure just as he doomed Israel to a day like last week."

Is the Gaza War a success? It might have been had it ended a long time ago, but Netanyahu allowed no end in sight for it. Why is it still going on? Why are Israeli troops implicating themselves in a massacre a day? A proper level of deterrence has so long since been established. If you haven't gotten rid of Hamas yet, you won't be able to, and even if you did, you could enable still worse. The point is that Netanyahu wants worse, just as Hamas does, and they will continue this fight until it's no longer useful for Netanyahu to do so.

I don't know how our people, so accustomed to the ways of the world, can't get it through their thick Yiddisher kops that Netanyahu really is that evil. He doesn't want to get rid of Hamas. He wants perpetual war, because perpetual war keeps him in power. After a year and a half, even the Gaza War wasn't enough to keep him secure there, and so this moment 'just happened to be the time that Iran was weeks away from a nuclear weapon, in spite of that Netanyahu authorized thisnoperation back in late November.

Now, let's allow for the small possibility that Bibi's telling the truth. The assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah's major leaders would obviously spook Iranian leaders (and rightly so it turns out...), so they know that a nuclear weapon is the one thing that will establish their safety. If I were an Iranian leader in September 2024, I'd pour all my money into nuclear research and resources.

But the fact remains that American intelligence released a report saying that Iran is three years away from a nuclear weapon. It's been three years away for... I don't even remember how many years. For twenty years we've heard everything from five years to six months. Is a nuclear Iran a threat to Israel? You better believe it. And with that threat to Israel comes a threat to all the Arabs who live in Israel or in occupied Palestinian territories, along with all Iran's many other enemies and rivals around the Middle East.

But the fact that Israel had such an easy time knocking out so many targets testifies to that this regime is stunningly stupid and corrupt. If Israel knew where this many military targets and leaders were, Iran must leak intelligence like a sieve. No achievement can hold solidly in such a regime. Iran may well have tried to develop a nuclear weapon for twenty years, but if Israel can execute a battle plan this easily, then they could easily have been sabotaging the Iranian nuclear program this whole time, and could go on temporarily sabotaging it for an indefinite future. Sure, it's preferable to take out the program entirely, but not at the risk of a global war. Not even Israel could win that with casualties less than they would incur from a detonated nuclear weapon.

I said at the beginning of this: at a time when events are moving so quickly, analysis is pointless. Why are people fascinated by wars which have no personal connection to them? Because war is the most dramatic of world events: it's a theater whose audience is the entire world. We find it fascinating because its enormity defies analysis. It's horror, heroism, incompetence and unpredictability are the decisive factor of our lives. War is the ultimate determinant of how we shall live, and sometimes, how we shall die. We're all its audience, and for the moment, all we can do is watch.

Some Kings?

 

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I couldn't go to No Kings this weekend. I was singing in a concert in a suburb outside DC and somehow there was no traffic on the way and a full audience in the seats. Multiple singers I spoke to felt weird not being there. I felt weird too. Then I realized that being there would feel weird too.

I don't like protests. I usually don't see the point to them. Effective protests have incredibly specific points. Every detail is planned and what seems like chaos is completely orchestrated order. That's what the SLC protests were during the Civil Rights movement. That's what the Solidarity rallies were in Poland. And that's why they eventually proved successful. But at most rallies, the agenda is extremely undirected, and the point of the protest is usually coopted by issues which have nothing to do with the stated reason.

What happened on Saturday was extraordinary: an eruption of six month's fear and rage into a prayer for hope. The attendance was an absolute triumph and held Trump's barely concealed effort at a despot's birthday parade up to ridicule. It will be that much harder for Trump to rule us as a dictator now, but at the end of it Donald Trump is still mandated to be President for the next three and a half years, he has basic control over all three branches of government, and holds the loyalty of hundreds of important state officials who live to make him a three term President. Part of me desperately wanted to be at a No Kings protest, but being there would have probably depressed me.

Because the point that usually coopts the stated reason for every protest is Israel. It happened at Occupy Wall Street, it happened at Black Lives Matter, it happened at the International Women's March, Slutwalk, Pride Festivals, Dyke Marches: all of them have instances of excluding Jews because of potential connections to Israel.

I've so often told the story of being at the counterinaugural protest when W. was first elected in 2001. We found ourselves amid the protest at a spontaneous rally for the New Black Panthers as they spoke about pardoning Mumia Abu-Jamal. They said that in his final presidential hours, Bill Clinton should 'rise above his cracker background' and rise above 'the evil control of the Zionist Jews.'

No matter how pure the progressive intentions, all of them are tainted by a faint smell of antisemitism, and even if you can't smell it, most Jews can. It's not outright aggression, in many ways the shadowbanning of Israel prevents further aggression. But progressive circles idealize zero tolerance for microaggressions against any other minority, yet somehow, all this is still permissible against Jews. Is it because of antisemitism? Is it because the whole concept of microaggressions is flawed? Or is it because Zionism is really so nefarious? I've written about the first answer many times and doubtless will many times again. But if you think it's the last of the three, do a thought experiment: how many justifications do you have to make for Zionist exclusion before it sounds to the average person like you believe in banning the vast majority of American Jews? And if it still doesn't sound that way to you, how many justifications do you have to make before it sounds to the average person like you think the vast majority of American Jews have uniquely evil beliefs among the American population?

As I said, I wasn't at the No Kings protests, so I have no sense of how much Israel/Palestine permeated it. But in the past, this issue that only has a figleaf's worth to do with the issues at hand becomes of enormous consequence on the platform of every unrelated progressive cause and can only distract from pushing through a societal change that is colossally difficult to effect. If it happened this many times already, it's going to happen all the moreso now.

Why does Israel always seem to win the battle for American policy? Just go to an Israel rally. Not a street protest, not a public demonstration on the Capitol Lawn, but an actual rally. There isn't even the appearance of chaos: no slogans, not even any marching. It's usually at a synagogue, the attendees dress nicely and sit in perfect silence until it's time to applaud each speaker. Everybody knows why they're there, so the stirring of righteous indignation is usually confined to a keynote speaker and an eyewitness testimonial to the most traumatic events. The rest? Speakers for how to take political action, how to raise money, which organizations to give money to, which politicians to pressure, which politicians to thank and give money to, which businesses to patronize, and yes, which businesses to boycott..., which organizations to volunteer their time to, and how to persuade the undecided on this issue (they exist...). Their success is not about anything that goes on on the streets, and it's not about any conspiracy of lobbying that goes on in deep cover. There is an Israel lobby, but there's no mendacious conspiracy. AIPAC's tactics are in plain sight and they could be imitated by anyone who cared enough to be effective. Those whose sympathies lean toward Palestine could easily beat the Israeli side if they imitated AIPAC's tactics. But they never have, usually because they think these tactics wreak of the same moral compromises that infect everything about the State of Israel.

Many Zionists hate Trump and Netanyahu with as much feeling as you do, maybe most of them. And just one of the many reasons we hate them is because they've caused so many fissures in our friendships. Until all this is over, we all wonder continually if there's a certain level of trust between friends that can't help going missing.

I can't believe I feel the need to say this, but I want Trump gone so bad. He is everything both loathsome and dangerous about America, authoritarianism, and the future. One of the many things I hate about them is that he deliberately forced Jews into Republican protection. The chances that future Democrats will advocate for Jewish security are very slim, because whether or not they realize it, many people see Jewish security as coming at the expense of other peoples, and therefore decide it's better to put Jews back to their eternal position as wanderers so they might enable other peoples their chance at thriving.

From the river to the sea, they think we're kings too.

A quick and scary observation

 There are a lot of things to analyze over the next while, but here's the first thing that scares me:

This war is the first time in a hundred years that a major and long cold war has truly gone hot.

In the early 21st century, there are four major cold wars. The US and China. The EU and Russia. India and Pakistan. Israel and Iran. India/Pakistan's had some terrifying flareups, but they always backed down from the brink. Obviously Ukraine is a kind of proxy war for Russia to expand near the EU's territory. If the Taiwan invasion happens (and it will, probably soon), it would be an ominous blow that cuts into the US's sphere of influence around East Asia and will only embolden China to claim more territory.

But none of them flared into direct conflict. There is a general consensus that too much is at risk for a cold war to ever go hot. At stake in the original Cold War were half a billion lives at least, and if enough WMD's were fired, an atmospheric poison could ignite that killed many more. If there are four separate cold wars, then at stake are far, far more lives than half a billion.

The difference with Israel/Iran is that Iran is the only one of these eight powers to not have nuclear weapons, and if Iran did, it would likely be much more willing to use them than any of the others.

But that said, you do not take a cold war hot without the gravest seriousness. A seriousness that Netanyahu clearly lacks. We'll get into Netanyahu's motivations another day, but in the meantime, just know this: Netanyahu authorized this operation in November 2024. What was he waiting for?

The answer, I'm afraid, is only too obvious.

War is an inevitable part of the human experience. When international norms break down, so do the guarantees that countries will remain secure. Therefore, there's a paradox that can't help occurring. Countries can only reestablish their security by initiating a war by surprise before their opponent does. And even if that's not true, there's almost never been an example of countries and leaders who think it isn't.

Not since Germany and England fought in the trenches have two major rivals met on the battlefield in a total war. If the precedent is set for one of these cold wars to go hot, the world's security is destabilized to likelihood that others will too.

Who by Fire?

 

On October 7th, the book was inscribed. Tonight, the book was sealed.

There will be plenty of time to analyze this situation when we know more. Right now, all you can comment on is how it feels.

Right now it feels like the world is going to end. It feels like we're running out the clock until World War III and this is just the trial run for something that will happen writ much larger in the rest of the world. More on that another day. Of course it probably won't happen; not soon at least, but tonight, that's how it feels.

Every Jew's prepared themselves for war with Iran for a quarter century. At this point we can be forgiven for thinking this day will never come, but the day is now here.

There's no position in our time quite so pathetic as a Zionist liberal. Whatever country you're from, your society's deserted you and so has the world. It doesn't matter what side we hold on the Gaza war, on attacking Iran, on Jewish society itself. If you're a liberal Zionist, you have as few people capable of sympathy for you as a black Republican or a socialist soldier, but at least those two small groups can go elsewhere and be viewed differently. Even James Baldwin talked about how in Europe he was identified as an American before the color of his skin. A Zionist? Well, long as you don't tell anyone... but assuming you're Jewish you'd have to conceal your religion too, because when people find out your religion, they'll want to know what you think of Israel.

There is no place now for a liberal Zionist, either among other liberals or among other Zionists. The only company is the intuition we have in our bones: that Zionism without liberalism will make a country that backfires for Jews everywhere, while any kind of liberalism that can't accommodate Jewish self-determination can't accommodate anyone else before long. Everybody thinks their views are right and everybody else's are wrong, but any patriotism that can't accommodate liberalism falls into violent authoritarianism, and so does any solidarity movement that can't accommodate patriotism.

After October 7th, we all felt destroyed, but there were a lot of Israelis and Jews who believed that the Jewish people achieved a unity and purpose in those days that we'd lacked for fifty years. Even if no one else could be reliable for us, we could be reliable for each other. It seemed a given to so many that Netanyahu would fall, and even if the wider world didn't accept us in the war's aftermath, we could live functionally without them for a little while, because as Jews we had each other. I never thought any of that, but most Jews did. What a farce that hope now seems to everybody. We're at least as divided as on October 6th, descending ever further into division with no bottom in distant sight.

Our divisions are a microcosm of the Western world. We're further down the road, we always are, but so often, whatever happens to us happens to you next. Whether Israel and America are locked in a dysfunctional codependent relationship, the two countries come to resemble each other in a degree that frightens. The next while may or may not be the scariest period any Jew's experienced since 1945. But if it is, what does this portend about the wider world next? If it's Netanyahu vs. Iran, how hard is it to believe that soon may come Trump vs. China?

Why Losing Brian Wilson Feels So Bad

 Look, reader, we both know that I'm out of my ultimate depth here. This is not my musical form, and even by talking about this I'm talking out of turn.

But I have so many memories of my twenties associated with the Beach Boys. Dancing and singing along to Sloop John B in the room of my post-college apartment with at least a dozen friends on the Saturday night before I moved to Israel. Late night drink soaked cigarettes while my roommate made sure I had a review course in the basic rock canon while I introduced him to Mahler, Bartok and Stravinsky. Friends jamming on their guitars while I noodled my fiddle around them. Missed romantic opportunities. And of course, beach trips. Basically, a normal American experience of the Beach Boys in a life story with very few normal experiences.

At their peak, the Beach Boys, really just Wilson, spoke to a basic human need that only a very few musicians arrive at: the ability to smile through tears. It's the greatest achievement of Mozart and Beethoven and Schubert and Brahms, it's the greatest achievement of Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, it's the greatest achievement of Ray Charles, Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin, and it's the greatest achievement of the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen and Brian Wilson.

The best thing art can do for us is remind ourselves in those dark moments that life is always worth living, always worth persisting for, that there are experiences, places, living beings, to whom we feel connected enough to mean something to us. It's art's most basic, deepest function: it puts is in touch with the essential need to keep embracing life, and it recharges us for whatever comes next.

Whenever Bob Dylan dies, it will be momentous, but it will feel like the passing of a god. Dylan does not feel like he belongs to us. He spent his life covered by a suit of armor, and perhaps he was able to stay prolific by giving nothing of himself. Brian Wilson shared so much humanity in Pet Sounds that the album will always feel like it belongs to us all as much as anything by The Beatles. It's like you can hear the moral character of the people who made the music by whether the music gives something to us or takes something of us. Wilson and the Beatles give, Dylan takes.

But Wilson was so vulnerable in Pet Sounds that the experience damn near killed him. The Beatles broke up, but they were all commited to creating something meaningful, and when they disbanded, they could all pursue their separate lives; but the Beach Boys were family, family that actively betrayed each other. Wilson had Mike Love breathing down his neck, his own cousin terrorizing him, rooting against him and plotting his failure so he could turn the Beach Boys into a the perfect band pfor t-shirt sales. Then he had to bury both his brothers. Wilson wasn't even able to finish his followup album for nearly forty years.

Why were so many rock gods British? It's an American artform, but at least half its biggest stars were from across the pond. The reason, I think, is that there's something about the American experience that demands so much compromise from its artists that it's nearly impossible to create great stuff for the entire length of a career. There is so much pressure to make money, so many moneymen telling you to water down your ideas, so many collaborators who demand their own input, so many demanding fans costing you every time you step out, so much invasion of private life from the press, it's impossible to live with any normality in the life of American celebrity, and eventually every American celebrity becomes just another American celebrity who has the exact same jet set life as other celebrities, and after a while, they have nothing original to contribute.

But Wilson was too distinct, maybe too crazy, to be funneled into the standard process. He had the added pressure of a wife who controlled him, perhaps forced him to perform and compose for decades past when he wanted to retire. Nobody really knows what was going on in his final decades. It's entirely possible that Wilsoj lived his entire life under the control of exploiters.

What we do know is that the ear for emotional ambiguity was not gone. These albums were no Pet Sounds, for example the spoken word stuff in That Lucky Old Sun is painfully awkward, and then there's that 'reimagines Gershwin' album: the less said the better. So often, the old poignance was entirely there, but Wilson, like so many artists, didn't evolve. The music was still good by the standards of nearly anybody, but a lot of the late songs couldn't help but be a faded copy of the original.

Wilson had a hard life, and I don't doubt part of what took its toll on him was sticking to music that was superficially so happy, but when you listen just beneath the surface, there is an ocean of hurt. But there is no joy without melancholy, there is no deeper, lasting happiness without the experience of pain. Brian Wilson's music knew both enjoyment and pain, and that is why millions now mourn the joy which he created.