Tales From the Old New Land - More of the Opening

What is the Old New Land? Where is the Old New Land? We have no idea what it is or where to look or where we'll find it, but the material who, the how and the whither, the warp and weft, the length width depth and time, the dwelling foundations splendor and even eternity, are mere surface on the face of the deep. The Old New Land is the space between space, where exists possibility, plane, history, law, condition, and infinity; glory, law, lovingkindness, the sources of wisdom, and the crown of creation itself. If it exists at all, and of that existence there shall always be doubt, then it abides in that apogee of maximal cosmic tension to which we all arrive in the instant before the great celestial snap, a place of the world of no end that by wrestling to realize, we seem to bring tiny emanations down to our own, if only for a specific and small indeed finite time, if only in a specific and small indeed definite place. It is that land that within all actions seem motivated by greatness, and much in that brief instant even by goodness, for from that unboundedness of spheres above, we carry those best selves which comprise our share of the divine creation. Once we see it, we work, and we work, and we work, and we wait, and we wait, and we wait, but we're always thrown out of the Old New Land. 

Tale Genesis: Reb Yaakov, Bransk, 1894

We begin in Bransk, 'Everyshtetl' Northeast Poland, comprising six-thousand inhabitants who are mostly farmers; half-Jewish, half-Christian, a locale of multicultural hicks from whence nobody of singular distinction ever hailed or created anything of note, except for the author's grandfather, Morris Tucker, formerly Meishel Tecoczki, and formerly before that Moshe Kharlap. 

The key event in Bransk history was in 1264, when occurred the historic 'Battle of Bransk' - pitting the poorly armed Yotvingians, a small Baltic tribe, against the mighty Krakovians, for whom the Polish city of Krakow was eponymously christened - latterly famed to anyone out there who cares as the capital of the Polish Renaissance, and genuinely adorned with sparkling Renaissance architecture and art which one would never associate with Poland. But Krakow would truly find its true fame in the personage of Karol Wojtila, latterly Pope John Paul II. 

One might think this battle merits sufficient distinction for mention in the illustrious archives of wikipedia because a David-like underdog crossed overwhelming odds to hammer Goliath with a mere slingshot. But no, the Krakovians massacred the Yotvingians at the Battle of Bransk, it was all over in two days, their general Komata, slaughtered along with the rest, and never again were the Yotvingians to plunder the Polish countryside.

All that we know of the Yotvingians is speculation, one of the thousands of peoples whose contributions to the world seem to be entirely oral, and therefore lost to the darkness of pre-history. But a bit of that speculation comes from Heroditus himself, Father of History, writing from his Athenian cultural paradise, who mentions a people called the Neuris who live near the Narew river in western Belarus and northeastern Poland, thought the mouth from which the Yotvingians emanated. But nothing truly definitive until a couple treaties in the 900s record that the Yotvingians joined the armies of Prince Igor, and later of Vladimir the Great, both of them ancestors of the Russian Czars. We don't even know if they were called the Yotvingians: they may have been called the Sudovians, and there is a separate line of documentation for the Sudovians whose pedigree begins in the 2nd Century AD with Ptolemy, writing from his particular cultural paradise in Alexandria. We hear not of the Sudovians for another thousand years until a Teutonic Knight treaty in 1260 refers to a tribe known as "Sudowite, Sudowia, in qua Sudowit." 

So we're not even sure if the Yotvingians and the Sudovians were the same tribe, but whomever they were, they were over shortly after their first definitive mentions. There was one eyeblink of glory in the 1260s when they managed to challenge the vaunted Krakovians, when they were led by a sovereign named Skomantas, who may in fact be the murdered general Komata, but seems to have lived more than twenty years past Komata's death. In 1263 Skomantas or Komata led the Yotvingians or Sudovians in a raid the city of Chelmno, known to Jews around the world as the town of Chelm, where all the stupidest Jews lived in the Pale of Settlement, and at some other unspecified year in that same period, raided the city of Pinsk, a very small city which in the Russian census of 1897 would be comprised of seventy-four percent Jews. Six hundred years after their glory, a similar census by Belarus in 1860 would list 30,929 inhabitants of the Belarus Grodno area as "Yatviags." 

The fate of Yotvingia is the fate of all things; one brief moment when all imagining seems possible, only for stark reality and all too common sense to plow itself through all possibility yet again, and thereafter tens of thousands live from generation to generation, passing on legends of barely remembered glories in past lifetimes and centuries to remember what might have been, and hope for what might still be. 

Liberal Guilt

Before there was the intersectional world wide web, there was conservative talk radio, and before there was "White Privilege," there was "Liberal Guilt."

The essence of liberal guilt is the idea is that liberals, who seem so affluent and educated to working class conservatives,  often even 'privileged,' pay lip service to guilt they don't really feel about their aristocratic lifestyles - noting at every point that many people are not able to enjoy the fineries of life which they enjoy at every job and school and meal at which they are invited to partake, while the vast majority of people are not. 'Liberal guilt' is a pretense to guilt to absolve themselves of guilt.  A disingenuous absolution of culpability in how they continue all refusals to amend their ways to benefit to lower classes, and allows them to look at lower classes with distaste. And therefore they allege that liberals pretend to be angry about urban poverty while spending hundreds of dollars every week on dinner, pretend to want better public education while sending their children to aristocratic private schools, put public housing in every working-class neighborhood while they live in gated communities, and give plum jobs to people of color on the basis of their identity which conservatives feel white people have merited by decades of work. On every issue, the Rush Limbaugh/Fox News crowd believes that because of this ruse of guilt, elite/elitist liberals foist upon working class conservatives the full bill of a liberal lifestyle they have no interest in giving up.

Like so many things in life, it is uncanny how two diametrically opposed viewpoints sound so much like each other. And it is especially uncanny how much this notion of 'Liberal Guilt' sounds like White Privilege.  and like White Privilege, the entire notion is as simultaneously true as it is disingenuous in who sends the message.

White Privilege most certainly exists. Look at where the protestors are right now, and look at where I am... And so too does liberal guilt. I always imagined that when the true anti-authoritarian protests of our time happen, I would position myself right on the front line, but reality never works so neatly. Every day I look at all those pictures and videos of the protestors, I look at the heroism of friends who put their bodies in front of cops holding night sticks and pepper spray in their hands, and I realize that aside from a three hour drive, all that holds me back from joining them, aside from fear - which I certainly feel, is despair. The nihilistic belief that these protests are just the first in an unbearably long line of protests and civil unrest. It is entirely an arrogant wish that prevents me: I would prefer to be around for the entirety of the generation-long struggle which I feel with every still unbroken bone in my body is coming, and observe on the sidelines so I may write it up, document it, survey all its nuances, and attempt some small and pathetic claim to the vindication of posterity for my all too privileged white life, and not spend much of that time languishing in a prison with no pen and paper. All I want to do is write, I my be deluded in believing that a contemplative pen may be of any use to the world, but somebody has to remain on the sidelines to think other people's actions through. I am not like other people. One day perhaps my already much too narcissistic keyboard will relate the roller coaster of my privileged white life story genuinely, and perhaps through it I can show that my struggle too can have some small meaning to others. But in a thirty year struggle with organizational disability, with some of the most severe mental illnesses known to man, but as I have disproportionate incapacities, I too have disproportionate gifts which my maladies have put so almost to waste, and when I am called to account for my life, I would prefer to show that I have made something of those strengths which I have that other people do not. Such is my white privilege that I can have so many infinities of chances to get it right, and not let these abilities go to waste after so many times when my mental afflictions assured they would remain so. The casting aside of both white privilege and liberal guilt will be for other, more generous souls than I, who have no intention of casting aside either, and I will remain at a beach house either physically or in spirit, and perhaps vainly hope that what I write can be of more use than any presence I can hold on the front lines.

There is so much more to say, and I hope to yet have decades to say it.

See you soon, but in words only.

Underrated Classical Musicians: Istvan Kertesz

In that incredibly disappointing, irresponsible generation of conductors who are now almost passed, the loss of none seems quite as heartbreaking as the vastly premature loss of Istvan Kertesz. It is almost unfathomable to think that he was the same age as Dohnanyi and Haitink, and two years younger than Blomstedt. If conducting is as much of a horserace as it's often treated, then no conductor of his generation had gotten so much music out of music as Kertesz did by the age of 43: not Dohnanyi or Haitink, not Abbado or Davis, not Pretre or Boulez, not Sawallisch or Svetlanov, certainly not Tennstedt or Mackerras or Skrowaczewski or Blomstedt or Zinman or Berglund or Jarvi whom all were just barely known to the international circuit at that age, and certainly not those all-flash prima donna jetsetters like Maazel, Dutoit, Previn, Ozawa, and Mehta, whom between them have the musical depth of a reflecting pool. The only four traditional conductors of that generation who seemed even remotely so perceptive so young were Guido Cantelli - killed at 36, Carlos Kleiber - drove himself crazy and spent his career in semiretirement, Peter Maag - who retired to a monastery and thereafter shunned stardom, and Gennadi Rozhdestvensky - who spent the bulk of his career in a totalitarian regime. He who goes into the conclave a Papabile never comes out a Pope, and pity those too talented too early.

We'll never know of the musicians who died before meeting their potential, but of the musicians who died after giving a glimpse of their potential, we can only mourn the unheard possibilities. Those who heard Kertesz at the Cologne Opera where he was director for nearly ten years before he died say that he was as gifted an opera conductor has the world has ever seen, and gifted all over a gigantic repertoire - but we have perhaps three opera recordings and I have yet to see a live Kertesz/Cologne opera broadcast turn up on youtube.

Some star conductors are promoted because of a good agent or good hair, they become famous too early, and they never have a chance to prepare their scores away from the spotlight of the camera and the critic. So if there are dozens of recordings from Zubin Mehta or Lorin Maazel faced the Vienna Philharmonic before they were forty-five, it's not a particular reflection on their achievements. That a not quite star young conductor could be engaged by the Vienna Philharmonic to record the complete Brahms and Schubert is a testament to just how good he was. But Kertesz was nowhere near so telegenic as those jet-setters, and while the musicians of the Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras both seemed to want him as their next director, Kertesz was not a big enough star to make their boards of directors take him seriously as a potential successor to Szell and Ormandy. When an informal poll was taken of the Cleveland Orchestra musicians over whom they would like to replace Szell, something like 77 of them voted Kertesz. Kertesz would have been ideal for Cleveland - he was as meticulous as Szell about rhythm and clarity, but he was nowhere near so martinet-like, Kertesz's performances relaxed and sung in a manner that couldn't help but escape a musical drill sergeant like Szell.

Kertesz was neither an overwhelming musical personality like Tennstedt or Bernstein who shaped music to the contours of his ideas, nor was he trying to disappear behind the music like Haitink or Abbado. He was simply a natural musician, and music simply flowed through him in much the same way it flowed through Mackerras or Dohnanyi or Blomstedt or Sawallisch, but Kertesz seemed already to be this kind of natural master of music by the time he was thirty-five - those others had to wait until they were virtually senior citizens to achieve the same mastery. Carlos Kleiber had that level of mastery, but Kertesz performances were never so high-strung or self-consciously virtuosic. Guido Cantelli had that complete mastery too, but a Cantelli performance was so regimented as to be almost cold, whereas a Kertesz performance, even if rigorously disciplined, was meltingly warm - until it turned white hot at the climaxes. So had Kertesz music in his bloodstream that he did not interpret, he simply played. Had he lived to twice his lifespan, Kertesz may well have been the obvious choice to inherit Berlin from Karajan.

What we have from Kertesz, all that Dvorak and Brahms and Schubert and Bartok and Mozart and Bruckner, tells us just how gifted he was and exactly what kind of musician. He was in that sweet middle spot between classical and romantic where music speaks best for itself - the performances neither draw attention to the performers ideas nor to the performer's meticulousness, the music simply speaks. Far more than Kleiber's self-conscious virtuosity or Haitink's self-effacement or Dohnanyi's meticulousness (note from 2025: this was during a rare period when I was a bit less enamored with Dohnanyi, whom I consider now the most accomplished living conductor, including Blomstedt), this is, to me at least, what ideal music making sounds like. Music must, to a small extent, 'swim in the sauce.' It has to be lived in, broken in like a shoe, else it is all immaculate surface on which one can perceive nothing beneath. When you listen to a musician like Kertesz, you're hearing music in more dimensions than how a simpler musician would transmit it. A Szell would try to contain the expression to fit within the contours of a perfect form, a Bernstein would distend the form to maximize the expression. It has all of a Szell's highly sprung rhythms, and all of a Bernstein's ability to make the orchestra sing appassionata.

This is what it means to be a true 10/10, or 11/10 conductor. Such a stupid rating system does not necessarily denote the best conductors, but perhaps it does denote the most talented. The ones who can continually capture the music's expressive essence, no matter how elusive or complex, who is able to meet the requirements of virtually any musical moment. Perhaps it's not a surprise then that those musicians so gifted that their abilities are unable to be adequately comprehended are the musicians who leave us relatively little.

Support the Protestors Because We Are Already 'Here'

I know I know I know,............ I know...................

I know.

Most people reading this, at least on my social media feed, will think that why we have to support the protestors is so absurdly obvious that it's almost offensive to take it as anything more than for granted, but it's not obvious that we have to support them. It's certainly neither obvious to most Times of Israel readers happening upon this post, nor is it obvious to most people I know over the age of forty, nor, for anybody who cares, was it ever obvious even to me, who worries that literally millions of lives including many people I love are currently at stake.  For better or worse, I've clearly never been shy about giving opinions and warnings, and if I truly thought it was the wrong move, come what may, I'd be shouting it from the rooftops. Such is my white male privilege,  but this particular privilege I intend to keep unto my dying breath, and I wonder if that comes sooner than anybody knows.

The fact remains that protests like these are exactly how civil wars get started. Where do you even begin? All, as always, you have to do is look around the world for examples of countries who were exactly here just a blink of an eye ago - there is not nor will there be checks on Trump's crackdowns, nor can there be any check on his opposition, this conflict can only escalate. In two weeks, we will most likely be back in our houses because coronavirus currently has opportunity to escalate to unprecedented levels and perhaps claim another hundred-thousand in even less time. When we leave the houses again, police around America may be ready with curfews and checkpoints and all the more willing to inflict violence, and their staunchest opposition will be all the more ready to challenge the violence and meet it with any manner of dissent.

Will all this escalate "merely" into the unrest of 1968 Paris and Prague? Will it escalate to 1848 Europe?  Will it escalate to 1979 Iran or 1917 Russia or 1789 France? Will it escalate to 1914 or 1939? Nobody knows. But look at Syria now vs. Syria ten years ago, look at the incinerated husks of Nigeria and the Congo now vs. the mediocre repressive states they were before they were before their civil wars. Read of the decimation that happened in midcentury Vietnam, Korea, and China, before they all began to rebuild, and just look at those parts of Korea and China that never were rebuilt. Think of what might happen if the American head of state so consolidates his power in the wake of this that he can attack other countries and peoples with absolute impunity. What might come next? Massacres on the Mexican border to eliminate migrants fleeing the Global draughts and floods which our pollution caused? War with China over Hong Kong or our presence in the South China Sea? A break with Putin or his successor? Aiding right-wing forces working to overthrow social democracy in Western Europe?

America is not the exception in either its virtue or its vice, we are in no sense unique or exempt from forces of history that can so easily be understood to anyone willing to read about them in scholarship untainted by ideological dirt, and examples of how these protests could escalate into unspeakable horror proliferate all around the world's timelines.

Chaos like this inevitably comes once in a century, and it almost inevitably comes particularly to the worlds' nerve centers of power and prosperity, where power has grown countries so decadent, with expectations for what life can afford us so high, that we declare war upon reality and fate themselves, which inevitably demand from our lives complete affliction in all our wishes and goals.
But for whomever has been paying attention, we are already here. We know not the war, and if/which/when/where/and whom is unquestionably not of our choosing, but the great crisis of the 21st century is almost certainly upon us, and there is no going back. And even if it isn't at exactly this historical hour, even if Biden wins in November, even if Trump somehow goes away, the forces are already unleashed. Totalitarianism is clearly unleashed upon the country, upon the world metastasizing everywhere with unprecedented intelligence gathering apparatus at the disposal of any head of state with the will to power to use it, with an unprecedented number and variety of weapons at the ready, with billions of people of every conceivable worldview reading statements on social media offensive to their deepest sensibilities every hour of every day until they are so outraged that what else could they resort to but violence to eliminate their opponents. And whether now or in 2040 when sea levels rise and a billion migrants move toward us, this jackbooted pendulum of chaos and total control is moving closer to our necks every day.

Shakespeare, of course, put it best in Hamlet Act 5 Scene 2, in what's perhaps the most profound line he ever wrote: "if it be now, 'tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come, the readiness is all." Better to prepare the country and the world now for the so almost certain cataclysms that yet will come, and be on the side of life over death.

This week's protests, riots, counter-riots of the police (and those are most certainly riots and far more dangerous ones), are forcing the hands of us all. We either pick a side or the side picks us. Police will use the weapons at their disposal as certainly as a man with a hammer looks for a nail, but when police are unleashed upon peaceful counter-demonstrators and a head of state operates by a cult of personality that no lever of government reins in, what choice is there? Whatever misgivings one has about mass casualties unleashed by protesting in the middle of a pandemic, however scared one gets that making excuses for riots gives cover for still more violent tactics in the protests' opposition, however much one finds people saying 'all cops are bastards' is the perfect way to mobilize to entrench the police as a Trumpian monolith for the duration of our lives, we're already here. The conflict has chosen us, and any shirking of hypervigilance against it is a state of denial.

As always, I seem to be a reluctant progressive ally who would far rather settle for stability and an uninterrupted life over betting it all over the chance of better lives that only will happen in a yet abstract future in a distant part of the globe for people I have little yet reason to care for. But even if I'll never stop being the annoying realist voice in the side of dangerous idealists for whom I obviously hold a certain measure of contempt, I'll send myself to hell before I shirk a moral responsibility to aid in the prevention of the same authoritarian trends from which my grandparents escaped by the skin of their teeth and killed so many family members of whom I know nothing. If and when the antecedents of today's protest movements embrace the same authoritarian urges the American right currently does (and it's probably a when, ever if not for another generation or two....) , I'll wash my hands of them too, but it's so, so far off yet. So in the meantime....

The people in protests now have so thoroughly committed to their cause that they are now, as generations of them were in the past without sufficient credit, our first line of defense against the villains of history. Heroes are people of action, who do not stop to think of what they might sabotage, charging into battle heedless of consequence and causing nearly as much death as the amount of lives they save. But that kind of triage ultimately what heroism requires. They saw long ago what it took me far too long to see.

We are already here.

These protestors are heroes.

Black Lives Matter.

Underrated Classical Musicians: Morton Gould

If we're going by sheer musical talent, then perhaps Morton Gould was our Mozart. His contemporary Leonard Bernstein a genius who happened upon music as his metier, but Gould was the real thing: a musical genius, a great composer, great conductor, great teacher, child prodigy whom as a child could improvise at the piano in the style of any composer you could name. If we can find the profundity in Mozart and Mendelssohn and Saint-Saens, we can find the profundity in Gould, and if Gould at his populist best were still played in the concert hall, it would ablaze the ears.

Gould was every bit as talented a musician. Were the world slightly different, Gould might have been as great a conductor as Bernstein. But while Gould was an enormous success with women and possessed all the same narcissism, he was as homely as Bernstein was handsome, and had little of Bernstein's oracular charisma. To the end of his life he spoke with a working class Brooklyn accent so strong that the indistinctness of early television would render it almost unintelligible.

And there was one other, perhaps surprising, detail of Gould's life that prevented him from ascending to Bernstein's heights. Whereas Bernstein's domineering father did everything he could to frustrate his son's musical aspirations, Gould's father became his manager. A once-successful businessman who lost everything in the Great Depression, Mr. Gould knew a meal ticket when he saw one, and ran Gould's early life, steering him in the direction of as many lucrative musical contracts with mass media as he could win. Gould first cut his adult teeth on scoring radio shows, and whereas Bernstein became the purveyor in the American mind of serious music, Gould was a conductor who purveyed of various kinds of light classics alongside Andre Kostelanetz, Arthur Fiedler, Mitch Miller... Names hardly anybody remembers anymore because why listen to popular classics when you can either listen to popular music or classical music?

But Morton Gould was clearly so much more than just a light classics arranger and conductor. If you listen to his recordings of Ives, Nielsen, Sibelius, Rimsky-Korsakov, Copland, even Miakovsky, you realize that this is a conductor who easily could have taken over one of the Big Five orchestras (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago) and given far greater performances over a far more diverse repertoire than a number of career 'maestri' chosen either for their photogenic flash or their ultra-traditional stolidity.

And then there is, quite simply, the music. If Mendelssohn were a Brooklyn Jew or the Art Deco era, this is how he would write, and just as Mendelssohn did, Gould was subsumed by the supposed waves of greater progress. As postwar American classical music gradually surrendered to Boulez, Babbit, and the atonal wave, Gould continued to evolve with light speed, assimilating new influences with the speed of a true genius. Here's something from wikipedia:

(click on link for the rest)

"Incorporating new styles into his repertoire as they emerged, Gould incorporated wildly disparate elements, including a rapping narrator titled "The Jogger and the Dinosaur," American tap dancing in his "Tap Dance Concerto" for dancer and orchestra, and a singing fire department titled "Hosedown" commissioned works for the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony. In 1993, his work "Ghost Waltzes" was commissioned for the ninth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. In the same year, he received the El Premio Billboard for his contributions to Latin music in the United States.[8] In 1994, Gould received the Kennedy Center Honor in recognition of lifetime contributions to American culture."

The best music is neither high nor lowbrow, it is, quite simply, high, low, middle and all of it simultaneously. Gould, at his best, exists somewhere in that neither region between it all. The 1930's American 'Sinfonettes', mini symphonies (and also a 'Concertette for Piano and Orchestra') which my musical friend the critic Steve Schwartz notes is probably the musical equivalent of that very 1930's innovation: the kitchenette; are virtually perfect pieces of music. Light and vital, tuneful, but also kind of Whitmanian in how they capture all the different musical influences of American life, Jazz, Salsa, Merengue, Blues, Old Time, Folk Ballads, Spirituals, Ragtime, it's all there, mixing with Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Bartok, Hindemith, and (of course) Gershwin, into work that instantly recognizable as Gould's alone. You find it in the Cowboy Rhapsody, in the Dance Variations for Two Pianos, in the ballet: Fall River Legend, in the Philharmonic Waltzes, in the American Ballads, in the Symphony of Spirituals, and of course, in the American fucking Salute which is the only piece. ofhis that gets played anymore, and only on the Fourth of July....

And like Bernstein (and like Mendelssohn) Gould could suffer from all the same gaucheries when his music became too serious and pretentious. And unfortunately, if Gould wanted to be played in his later years, he would only be taken seriously when he suppressed his fun. His symphonies, his piano sonatas, they are nowhere near as engaging, nowhere near as suffused with that joie de vivre we especially need so much in an era like ours which frankly looks more serious than in the 80s when serious people would not take Morton Gould seriously. When a composer like Gould suffered from importantitis, the work was almost never nearly so good. Very few American artists bring off the 'major statements' after the manner of all those ninth symphonies and thousand page Russian novels - maybe Walt Whitman, but Welles, Ellison, Melville, they all only got to do it once, and that turned out to be the only 'major statement' they had within themselves. That kind of epic magnitude in which the artist looms like a giant upon every horizon is not a particularly American thing to aspire to be, we are a democracy of equals, not emperors. But when the Gershwins and Bernsteins and Goulds tattoo the popular idiom with notated flesh and bone, the result is what a lighter American musical genius: an American Mozart or Liszt or Mendelssohn would sound like. There was something about America at its peak - its classical music, its theater, its novels, its high art of all kinds, never was better in the years just after World War II, and meanwhile its popular music and movies and graphic novels were never better than the years around Vietnam.

(click on link to get the rest of the piece)

So why is that? Well, if I can venture an answer, it's pretty simple; before 1970, two sides fundamentally regarded each other with mutual knowledge, understanding, sympathy, and respect. Their interplay infused them both, but once popular music was elevated to the status of high art, it became a monolith from which there was absolutely no escape - America has erased the whole historical tradition of culture from its entire lexicon with willful speed, and the loss is not just classical music but also to popular music. In the age of internet demotism, when democratic urge has grown us to chaos, none of us have any idea how to talk to each other anymore, and the result is painfully obvious. Everyone burrows further and further into their belief system, and the inevitable conflict is all around us.

(Here it is, the only fucking piece he's known for anymore...)

Tales from the Old New Land: Prologue - Chapters 1-15 Outline

Opening Paragraph: 

What is the Old New Land? Where is the Old New Land? We have no idea what it is or where to look or where we'll find it, but the material who, the how and the whither, the warp and weft, the length width depth and time, the dwelling foundations splendor and even eternity, are mere surface on the face of the deep. The Old New Land is the space between space, where exists possibility, plane, history, law, condition, and infinity; glory, law, lovingkindness, the sources of wisdom, and the crown of creation itself. If it exists at all, and of that existence there shall always be doubt, then it abides in that apogee of maximal cosmic tension to which we all arrive in the instant before the great celestial snap, a place of the world of no end that by wrestling to realize, we seem to bring tiny emanations down to our own, if only for a specific and small indeed finite time, if only in a specific and small indeed definite place. It is that land that within all actions seem motivated by greatness, and much in that brief instant even by goodness, for from that unboundedness of spheres above, we carry those best selves which comprise our share of the divine creation. Once we see it, we work, and we work, and we work, and we wait, and we wait, and we wait, but we're always thrown out of the Old New Land. 

Prologue: Reb Yaakov, Bransk, 1894

Suggested Reading (completely optional): 

Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

Collected Stories and Tevye the Milkman by Sholem Aleichem

Tales of Rabbi Nachman

(should there be secondary characters through multiple narrative arcs?)

We begin in Bransk, 'every-shtetl' Northeast Poland of six-thousand inhabitants who are mostly farmers, half-Jewish, half-Christian, a place of Jewish hicks where nobody of particular distinction ever hailed from, except for the author's grandfather, Morris Tucker, formerly Meishel Tecoczki, and formerly before that Moshe Kharlap. 

The name Kharlap is an acronym for 'Khiya, Rosh-l'Galut L'Polin', in Hebrew letters Khet-Reysh-Lamed-Pey, and translates to Khiya, head of the exiles in Poland; which means that the patrilineal line of the author's family is either descended from the first chief Rabbi of Poland, or some medieval Polish-Jewish merchant-grifter who realized he could mark up his prices if he lied about the eminence of his family lineage (his 'Yichus' as we say in Yiddish). 

Kharlap shall be the name of the fictionalized family to which we subject the ordeal of this book. It is a family that incarnates in somewhat mythical circumstances, akin to a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer (for those of you not familiar with Singer, think of a Jewish Gabriel Garcia Marquez if he accepted editors' suggestions).  

The year is 1894, it's just before Christmas, and Rebbe Yaakov Kharlap is a small town Rabbi, not even the synagogue rabbi for his town but merely a Kheder instructor - Kheder being the elementary school through which shtetl children are first taught their Hebrew letters, how to pray, how to read, how to memorize pages at a time of the Torah and Talmudic tractate. He is an alte mensch (old man )of the alte shul (old school), very free with the ruler upon the knuckles, and extremely proud, to the point of denial, about the brood of his twelve adolescent children: Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Yehuda, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Yissachar, Z'vulun, Dinah (a daughter), and Yoseph. 

You may recognize these names as the exact names of Jacob(Yaakov)'s children in the Old Testament or Tanakh. The reason for these names was because when the already middle aged Reb Yaakov was told that after he and his not particularly young wife's difficult years of conceiving, an angel appeared to Reb Yaakov in a dream, and in response to Reb Yaakov's insistent demand for a blessing, announced to Reb Yaakov that his wife would bear him twelve sons, which Reb Yaakov must in turn name after the twelve tribes of Israel. 

The children come in six sets of twins of absurdly quick succession over five years between 1876-1880. All of whom, like the miracle Reb Yaakov knew would happen that everyone else doubted, survive into adulthood, albeit with many illnesses along the way that were meant to test the unbreakable faith of Reb Yaakov. All eleven of his sons are now Bar Mitzvahed, and the septuagenerian Reb Yaakov eagerly awaits the birth any day now which his unnamed sexagenarian wife will give to what he absolutely knows will be his twelfth son, who shall be named Benyamin. 

Of course, Reb Yaakov has a twin brother himself, Ezra. Unlike Reb Yaakov who cannot make more money on his own than a small town teacher's salary can afford, Ezra is a wealthy man in Bialystok who the nearest Polish city. He has by and large abandoned Judaism, and Reb Yaakov is well aware that Ezra's much more 'enlightened' (re: assimilated) wife Ada has nothing but contempt for Reb Yaakov and through her perhaps correct pressure, Ezra is forced to consistently cut the sums he sends Reb Yaakov to feed his children, who now are old enough to work on their own. 

Chapter 1: 

As I said, we begin in the Kheder class of Reb Yaakov, who is very free with the ruler and constantly berating his luftmenschen (idler) charges for their lack of attention and refusal to sit still. He sits there and goes through the lesson, we'll decide which bible story it is later, but it should be a metaphor for the whole story, and therefore must be chosen well into the final drafts. But at witnessing, yet again, his students' obviously willful inability to retain the information he relates, he hits one student with the ruler shouting NIBZEH L'AZAZEL KHALERIYA! (basically untranslatable...), and shouts insult after insult at their stupid questions: their naarishkeit (simplemindedness/stupidity) and their skhok v'kalos rosh (light-mindedness). "Is Dreyfus going through all this just so you mamzerim (bastards) can dishonor his sacrifice!"

Incidentally to the story, the narration will be entirely in English, but the characters speak in a kind of Yid-lish patois which gives the character of the language while still being intelligible to the average American reader. 

Reb Yaakov then goes through a 'nervous breakdown of exposition' in which he tells his story as related above, and then tells all his tsuris, along with being passed over as the new Bransker Rabbi. 

"Every other nation needs land, they need governments, they need armies. But we only need de Toyreh. Every other religion has land and kings and weapons, but we only have de Toyreh, and we don't kill. Every other religion should be happy because they have everything they want, and they're only miserable. But we're miserable, and de Toyreh makes us happy. But you? What do you know from Toyreh?! Every day I ask you to quote me a daf and you  naarisher pischers ('bedwetters') learn NOTHING!

Compares them to his model Yiddisher Kops (Jewish heads) whom he raised correctly to be menschen (good people) and tzaddikim (righteous). 

Chapter 2:

We immediately cut to four of the brothers smoking cigarettes in the Jewish cemetery: Shimon, Asher, Naftali, and Z'vulun, the last of which is pissing (pishing) on the headstone of the old Bransker Rebbe. They're standing around a copy of a Yiddish newspaper, reading about the injustices done to some guy named Dreyfus in France, and making fun of how much the alter kockers ('old shitters') seem to care about this guy who, as far as anybody knows for sure, might not even be Jewish. They make fun of Dreyfus's very 19th century military uniform with its ridiculous plumage. One of them swears he heard that the French uniform is red white and blue, another disbelieves him "How did the zelners (soldiers) not know where to shoot from a hectare (hundred acres) away?" (which was the French army's biggest problem all through the 19th century until the first few months of World War I.). They say that with a fancy mustache like that he can't be Jewish "What the schtup is that mustache? No Yid, NOT even a Feinschmeker (meaning roughly gourmand) would walk into a barber and say MAKE MY MUSTACHE LOOK LIKE THE HAIR OVER MY PUTZ!" They make fun of their father's sermonizing about Dreyfus, they make fun of the new Rebbitzin (Rabbi's wife) who cries at the name of Dreyfus, and they make fun of the synagogue Hazzan (cantor) who's now including a prayer for Dreyfus. Ends with "Why the fuck do a bunch of alte trombeniks (old blowhards) give a fuck about some French faygaleh?"

Chapter 3: 

A pack of Polish shaget (male 'shiksa', derogatory terms for gentiles) hoodlums advance on them, seemingly from nowhere. The Polish kids speak in a Polish/English patois similar to the Yiddish kids'. They're much larger than the Jewish kids. The Poles make fun of the Jewish boys' ability to read, make fun of their dress, even make fun of the way they have fun. They snatch away the newspaper and tell the Jewish kids that these letters are probably where they learn the spells that killed one of their sisters. The Poles then say 'Tak, we heard about your family, a rodzina where all the kids live? That's fucking czarny (black) magic! You're probably here so nobody can hear your plans to poison our blyading (fucking) wells." Finally, Shimon, whom it's established early in scene 2 is a hothead, can't take it anymore: "Well maybe if your kind cleaned their shtupping wells once in a while your kid sister wouldn't get sick and die!" 

Everything goes silent, "What are you saying? That you fucking mordecas (murderers) of Christ have the solution to not getting chory (sick) this whole time and you've been keeping it from us?" 

Shimon's brothers try to talk him down but it's too late: 

"Go back to your shtupping Boyars and Preists, they knew it this whole time and they kept it from you to keep you stupid!"

"Are you calling our Holy Fathers liars!"

"They're fucking thieves, rapists and murderers."

By this time, two of the brothers have fled and the only one left is Asher, Shimon starts getting roughed up by the Pollacks, and he calls out for help from Asher but Asher hesitates and then runs away like his brothers. 

Shimon has to defend himself alone. he gets beaten to a pulp by the Russians who taunt him "Your brothers have left you!", eventually they leave him for dead. 

Chapter 4:

We're right outside a barn where Reuven and Levi are working for a Shokhet (Kosher butcher). They are shovelling hay for the butcher's prize lamb which he is keeping for the Bransker Rebbe to eat on the eighth day of Hanukkah. 

Levi is telling Reuven about his dreams again, about how like Tateh (Dad), he thinks he is being visited by angels, and Reuven, a very practical sort, tells him he's fertummelt (onomatopoetic term meaning confused/mixed up). "But you don't understand how vivid they are. They have to be real! They're as real as you right here." 

Reuven is half making fun of him "Are they emesdikker (really) real or are they 'falshen' real. 

Levi takes it more seriously: 'Well it's not real the way you and I are, it's like you can see them completely, but you can also see through them."

Reuven: "So your mind is falling for your own schvindle (swindle)?"

"Feh! (untranslatable) It's not a schvindle!"

"What do you know from schvindles..."

"I know what these malakhim (angels) tell me." 

"And what do they tell?"

"You obviously wouldn't believe them."

"No I wouldn't, but I want to hear them anyway."

"That this will be the Great Age of our people. That we will all be destroyed, and then we will all be saved."

"You mean like Moshiach (the Messiah) coming?"

"I don't know... they haven't said. I just know that we're about to live through the most important time in thousands of years." 

(beat)

"Feh!"

"That's what they said!"

"Levi I'm getting worried, has anyone ever told you you have a Lokhen Kop? (hole in the head)"

"You asked so I'm telling you!"

"Just don't you dare tell Tateh this! You used to be such a mensch! But you're getting really tschudne (weird)! If he knew this it would break his heart. 

They're interrupted by the butcher's wife who's coming out of the house: "Stop shtupping kibbitzing and get back to arbeit (work)!"

(both of them) "We're working!"

"You're schreking so much I can hear it from the bodroom, if you worked more you'd get angry less, it'll set you free!" 

Chapter 5:

Reuven goes inside, Levi goes about his work plucking the chickens for the butcher to kill, and suddenly the chickens start talking to Reuven. Their clucks sound like passages of Torah, "shalkheni ki alah hashakhar" ("Let me go for the dawn is breaking!" what the angel says to Jacob when they wrestle). One chicken says it, then another, then a third, and finally a giant chorus of chickens speaking Hebrew. 

The prize lamb speaks directly to Levi. "I am a descendent of the sheep slaughtered by Avel (Abel) and Avraham (Abraham). The yichus (lineage) of my bloodline was used on the slave doors of Mitzraim (Egypt). My ancestors were present at the death of Shmuel (Samuel) and were given to the Melech of Eretz Yisroel by Meesha the Moabite. And I must die immediately. There is so little time to explain, but a fault in how we say the khakham harazim brakha (it's a long story....) means that as many as 600,000 Jews will soon die if you do not kill me right now, terrible things are happening, and if you do not act, a calamity will befall the the entire people of Israel!"

"But!"

"Hurry! It may already be too late!"

Levi panics and immediately slits the lamb's throat and is covered in blood.

Chapter 6: 

Reuven goes inside the shokhet's house for a long narrative in which the many expensive wears of the schokhet are described, a foreshadowing of Reuven's future. While this is far from the first time, he finally works up the nerve to steal yet another candlestick. He is however discovered by the schokhet's wife: old, fat, sickly, who makes the price for her silence abundantly clear. She says "Oh, no, you didn't take it. Don't you remember I gave it to you as a geshank." And as she says it, she begins to unbutton Reuven's belt buckle. 

Chapter 7:

Gad works for a Jewish farming supplier as a debt collector, brings along Issachar on a collection trip to help train him, Issachar sees the shocking poverty of peasants at home for the first time and starvation in which these peasants live, one of the daughters is very ill and may die, the children are crying and the parents beg Gad to not force them to pay because they need the money for medicine. Gad is ready to force them to pay and Issachar calls him over and demands Gad not accept payment as a matter of conscience, Gad says 'you don't know what these people are capable of when they have the money they need. The parents servilely thank Gad with all their might and bless him and promise to remember him to Christ. 

Chapter 8: 

Gad and Issachar go back to the farming supplier and Gad has to tell him that he doesn't have the money. The farming supplier explodes at Issachar and fires him immediately. Issachar objects and tells him of the squalor in which they found the peasant family. The farming supplier shows Gad and Issachar a picture of his very young son, and then tells them how during a pogrom this starving peasant killed his son in cold blood. "I hope I can bleed him of enough gelt that all his kinder die!" "How can you, a Yid, act with such cruelty?" "Du hast nicht ken rekht to judge me! One day, it could be your kinder, and then let's see if you have it in you to act any more chesed!" 

Chapter 9:

Dina is pregnant, and the boy who impregnated her was expected by all to be her bashert (predestined one), but he was killed in mysterious circumstances while traveling to visit a nearby Rabbi. If anyone discovers her pregnancy, the town will forever view her as ruined woman, incapable of any marriage and unable to be received in respectable company. She went to a mekhasheyfe, a Jewish 'witch', who gave her a concoction to give her an abortion. She had terrible stomach pain, but the abortion did not work. 


The witch tells her that if the child does not die from it, then it is meant to be born and is very strong indeed. The witch issues an oracular pronouncement, her lot in life is one of hardship and servitude, but if it is a daughter which she is to have, the daughter will have the experiences of liberation unknown to women all through the world. 

Chapter 10: 

Z'vulun is a town pimp. He goes to see his korveh to collect this week's sum. When she complains about the amount he leaves her, he immediately gets very angry and threatens her, she immediately breaks down in tears, he immediately mollifies her, apologizes for his anger, and promises that soon they will get out of this place and go to a better place like Warsaw or Odessa. 

Chapter 11: 

Judah meets with the girl next door whom he expects to soon be his bashert. They swear love to each other and he expects another promise from her to marry, but she drops a terrible surprise: her family is moving to Israel. She begs him to come with her. "But I have no money." "The future calls us there! Our life is no longer here." "I will do everything to get there!" "Come and find me. I will wait for you!"

Chapter 12: 

Yosef, an intellectual prodigy, secretly goes for a weekly tutelage at the local gymnasium with a goyisher German instructor. Yosef is slightly more distracted than usual, and to whom he conveys his frustrations with town life, the instructor orders him to leave Bransk as soon as possible and seek his fortunes in the wider world 'just as Abraham did, just as dein namesvetterin Joseph did. The twentieth jahrhundert is anbruch, it will be the century of opportunity, of progress, of unlimited possibility. All that holds us back is our belief in unreason, and falsche götter. You've read what Nietzsche has to say! God is the greatest blasphemy!" "I don't know if I believe that." "One day, Yosef, you will. But until then, go forth from this backward place, a junge of your gifts languishing hier will nur know misery." 

Chapter 13: 

Dan, another intellectual prodigy, meets with the new Bransker Rebbe, an agreeable, freylich charismatic installed as Rebbe instead of the more ornery Reb Yaakov. The Rebbe is instructing him in advanced Gemara. At one point, Dan asks about the possibility of becoming a Rabbi himself, the Rebbe gives great encouragement and begins to sing Dan's praises as such a fine young mensch, at some point, something untoward happens and Dan exclaims 'Vos tutsach daw!?' Dan confronts him because whatever happened, this is not the first time the Rebbe has attempted anything. The Rebbe breaks down crying about his 'weakness' which Hashem tests him with and that he does not understand, he begs Dan to forgive him. Dan assures the Rebbe that it is all forgiven. It ends though with the Rebbe complaining about a terrible veytik in his shoulder. The Rebbe asks Dan to rub his shoulder as he continues to instruct Dan in gemara, Dan complies and the lesson continues. 

Chapter 14:

Begins with Asher reliving the scene where he watches as his brother is beaten and crying out for his help. Asher himself is still crying, unsure whether his brother is dead or not. He has to go into hiding as two of the goyisher hoodlums are reliving the glory of watching that 'Zhid' die, calling out for his brother while his brothers run away. One of the boys leaves, while the other stays to roll a cigarette. Asher picks up a large rock and bludgeons the goyisher boy until he's nearly headless. He has to run away. 

Chapter 15:

Naftali drunkenly practices with his fellow klezmorim who exchange Jewish jokes and talk 'nostalgic shit' about the towns many characters and the characters of the towns they've hailed from and travelled to. Eventually one of the other young musicians tells Naftali he's planning on leaving soon to become a klezmer musician in Vienna and Naftali should join him. 

Chapters 16-18: 

Benyamin's bris, the long denoument.... to be fleshed out later.

What Comes After?

In three months, America has undergone tragedies larger than any three months of American involvement in World War II. True, it's mostly not the young who are dying, but the casualty figures do not lie. 100,000 people in three months is a larger portion of Americans than have died at any point since the Civil War a hundred fifty-five years ago. And the sad fact is, very few civilizations go from zero to sixty as we have without going to a hundred next.

On the one hand, the American fixation on previous history not applying to them is deserving of contempt. I've said this before in these posts, but 'both sides' of the American political spectrum are deeply guilty of this. And, so, believe it or not, is the American 'center.' The 'right' always thinks of American exceptionalism as meaning that America 'got it right' as no other country ever has, and history as it's occurred until now does not apply now and here. To anyone remotely in touch with reality, the last three months should bury that notion int he ground forever. Unfortunately, lots of people divorced reality decades ago and have no interest in remarrying. The 'left', more than ever now, believes that history is a false construct, written by white men to portray themselves in the most flattering possible light - I really don't understand what was ever flattering about the light in which most historical figures were ever portrayed: history is almost a gallery of the effect which murderous psychopaths, corrupt narcissists, and spoiled monsters, have on us until the present day. But both of those notions are ultimately beside the point.

The point is that America has always been a country where history mostly doesn't happen. Until now, the American ethos was always 'of the future,' and it could afford to be of the future because, at least in comparison to 99% of the world's other countries, what we've experienced is rather trivial. Don't misunderstand, African-Americans have had it as horribly as anyone for centuries, but elsewhere in the world, whether in how whole continents were abused by white capitalists, or how native peasants all around the globe were exploited by their aristocracies, or religions both clerical and secular sacrificed millions to their cults of death, what we think of as the minority experience in America was the experience of the overwhelming majority in human history. Until so recently, the African-American experience was history's norm, not its exception. So in that sense, the left is absolutely right, and mainstream moderates and even liberals of the type that read David McCollough and Stephen Ambrose that flatter American sensibilities are deserving of some very real contempt, because they've willfully conditioned themselves to believe in stories with happy endings that trivialize global events of the most massive casualty statistics that only came to our shores in how we sentenced a whole community to centuries of horror for the crime of a differently hewed pigmentation. It is long past time that we pay in blood for this sin whose reckoning so many generations have forestalled. We, the most powerful country in the history of the world, are tearing ourselves apart from the inside, drawing ever closer to the kind of instability that befell Ancient Rome - our only true precedent in world history - so many times, no longer able to sustain a Republic but rather lurching back and forth between chaos, tyranny, and massacre.

But even as all this horrific potential keeps growing, the future insists upon itself. New generations are sprouting up. Babies are born into this maelstrom whom all too soon will render judgement on our lives just as we render judgement on those before us, and tell our stories to their own children. And perhaps their judgements will be even harsher than ours. The world is coming apart on our watch, and here are so many of us blaming those who came before when our biggest obligation is to leave enough behind for the next generation that their lives are worth living.

Everyone of course believes that what they're doing is for the benefit of the next generation. Everybody thinks that their point of view is is the correct point of view, how can any of us do otherwise? But what if we're all wrong? What if by doing everything we do to save what we value, we further entangle it in destruction? It would seem, at least from my point of view, that caution, not action, is the best way to preserve what we value for the next generation. There is no true change without a payment in blood, and that blood is not just our own that's spilled, it's potentially the blood of our direct descendants. Once upon a time, protests not unlike these occurred all the time in the socialist/progressive whirlwind of the years around 1900. The result was that the grip of right-wing authoritarians grew ever tighter, and tighter, and tighter, until so out of touch did the governments become from the extent of their power that their incompetence couldn't help but cause a generation-long series of world wars. The European socialists eventually effected much of the change they wanted to see, but the price was at the cost of their own children's generation: decimated by machine guns, aerial bombs, pandemics, and poisoned gas. The true benefits of their actions were not in Europe, but here in America, where liberalism evolved under Franklin Roosevelt to incorporate the best of socialism and filter the worst. Eventually America brought the seed of social democracy back to Western Europe, but the price for them getting it was more than fifty million lives in Europe alone, and a hundred to two hundred million lives across the world.

Roughly once a century, this friction grows so unbearable that all that remains is the incinerated husks of entire countries, continents, hemispheres, and whomever is left standing has to pick it all up together, working and living with all the very same people who once killed our family members as though none of it ever happened.

So however justifiable the grievances, it can get oh so much worse, and it very much does. The future is watching, and the future never judges us in the way we think they will. There is no simple binary metric of right and wrong, there is only life and death, and the objective of living is life. Our responsibility is to bring and preserve as much life into the world as possible. What is the point of bringing a system down if the price tag is sacrificing the lives of all the people we're trying to help?

The new generation is coming. We don't know how they will judge us. It's in the nature of things for future generations to judge their ancestors harshly, and often judge from the exact opposite point of view that we take. But we do have one advantage of perception they don't yet: we have connection to the past. We've now lived it, we've talked to those who've lived still more, and through reading we're connected to much much further into the past. We are just one generation, one connecting fibre, in an eternally unfolding story. The present is only one small instant that connects past to future, and our job is not just to rush into visions of a better future heedless of how the past will hit back at us, but also to understand past precedents of how so many better possible futures resulted in worse ones. Better things are possible, but it takes not just the demands of our moral compasses, it takes the practical sense of knowing when and where and how to make the demands, particularly because there's no convenient time to make them, and therefore all the odds are stacked against their implementation.

I really wish I knew what to say to people at the forefront of the present's struggles, telling them that I'm fully behind what they do, that I think they're enabling a better future rather than unleashing a worse one. But we're all prisoners of what our minds tell us is true, and my mind is screaming that we are entangling the next generation in a mess that dwarves our own, and that silence about it equals consent. As always, I could of course be wrong, but that will be for the next generation to judge.

America is

Rioting is not the language of the unheard any more than abuse is the language of the abused. Both sentences have a manipulative, selective half-truth partisanship about them, excusing the behavior of whomever is the hero of their narrative, aspiring to victory at the expense of other unheard victims. So in this one sense if only one, Dr. King was absolutely wrong. Every person who reads even the smallest bit of human history knows that riots can be sponsored, directed, and stoked by those in power to do their bidding, and every Jew knows that in their bones.

Humanity's a complicated thing. Roughly 1% of the population is psychopaths and 1% is sociopaths, circumstances which cannot be overcome. Roughly 7% have narcissistic tendencies which can be overcome with genuine effort. One has to figure that there might be a similarly saintly 2% of the population and another 7% that can aspire to altruism. But the rest of us are just doing what we can to respond best to every situation, content with the simple truths we're handed until life gets so difficult, so complicated, so adult, that everything we thought was true until difficult moments is true no longer, and the safety of our assumptions provide us no comfort at all, for all around us there are only nightmares.

Making decisions in pressure-filled moments is the most complicated thing we shall ever do; the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle carried into real life, when a thousand infinitesimal circumstances and details affect decisions we make. Eventually, we will either forgive each other for them, for we know not what we do, or we all will die with lives completely unsatisfied, and often prematurely.

Whether the riots are a spontaneous eruption of rage by normal African-American people who don't have fanatical bones in their all too often broken bodies, or coopted by Antifa-like elements searching for this moment to set America on fire, or by far right agent-provocateurs looking to make their opposition look bad just as perhaps Nazis once did to the Reichstag building, or some combination of all three, one can only shrug and understand that however one feels about this moment, it was completely inevitable: A country cooped up for ten weeks, yet another video of police lynching of African-Americans, a President stoking the fires of a country's rage for five whole years, mass death everywhere, and an unemployment rate already unseen even in the Great Depression. This is the American Carnage of which Trump long spoke, and he is now its ultimate visitor.

But the last round of widespread American riots, riots in the wake of the greatest gains in liberty ever achieved on American soil, resulted in the irrecoverable loss of urban prosperity that, fifty-two years later, still sets back every goal it ever set out for itself. Today, at a moment when cities finally appear poised for some sort of permanent renewal, the same frisson and synergy and cash flow and hyper-organization which makes cities the greatest of all human achievements also makes them the most dangerous - the kindling upon which thousands die of murder, and substance abuse, and now pandemic. In such moments, the people with money inevitably leave, and leave the people without money to rot in the remains. Whether it's morally justifiable that some people have more capital than others is almost irrelevant, some people always will, and from generation to generation it's usually the same people who used to have capital that still do. However unfair it is that the undue burden is placed on some people over others, that burden will not lift.

But there is a way to lighten the burden dramatically - not by changing the system, but by reforming it. The forces that maintain an invisible bias of favor, if such a system exists, is so much more infinitely complicated than anything socialists, anarchists, intersectionalists, communists, and so many other false ideologies allege, and however much they promise that the system can be overthrown and a better one put in its place, NEVER believe them. They are the same snakeoil recipes as conservatism, libertarianism, Christianism, and even fascism - all they do is put the same ingredients in the bowl in reverse order; they corrode every measure of security which liberals and their ancestors fought so hard to implement over hundreds of years.

The proof of it is all around America today in every major city. It will probably take another fifty years to recover from the self-inflicted economic hits of this weekend. How many thousands more will die from the spread of COVID during these protests? And whether Trump wins in 2020 or a much more competent fascist wins later, how many more thousands will die from the still worse coming poverty? How many more thousands will die from murder in un-policed streets or murder in over-policed streets? How many more millions will go into incarceration? How many more millions may die of still more pandemics and STILL have no proper medical care?

What can avert this evil decree is the kind of robust regulative state of the sort that liberals affected in the mid-20th century that ensured the greatest gains in civil rights in all of American history, perhaps all of human history. Putting back all the safeties that were once in place: federal taxes on the wealthy nearly three times as high as they are currently, a ban on trading between commercial and investment banks, no expense spared for a properly educated population and no procedural regulation spared for a properly trained police force, the most stringent environmental protections and the strongest division between state and church, ambitious infrastructure and maintenance initiatives, liberal immigration laws leavened by reliable background checks, strong reliance and stronger involvement in international-multilateral institutions, and yes, more obvious now than ever, truly universal health care. And there is only one candidate to vote for and volunteer for in whom that all remains a possibility.

America is not a dream or a nightmare, it is a reality. America is not a beacon nor an abyss, it is a mountain that must be climbed. It was a place to achieve greater liberty except through the most herculean efforts of strength and conscience, nor was it ever a place that preaches liberty while practicing only tyranny. It is a place comprised of very normal people with inclinations to both good and evil, and given more freedom to pursue both instincts than any other country in world history. It is a country naturally predisposed to extremes, and therefore when the regulatory state ceases to do its job at a moment when it is still the world's most powerful nation, it has greater capacity for extreme behavior than any other country in world history, capacities that have never even begun to realize their full potential. And therefore, within that potential for unspeakably violent warfare is the ability to eventually win a more perfect peace, but history amply demonstrates that peace is inevitably a purchase at the steepest possible price.

America is a struggle, a place where hundreds of millions arrived either on the chance to do better, or arrived because worse was done to them. It can never form a perfect union, only a more perfect one, and perhaps by definition, half the time it will fail. Jill Lepore's indispensible instant classic, These Truths, asks of the Declaration of Independence, "Does American History prove these truths, or does it belie them?" The answer, insofar as there can ever be one, is that America simultaneously does both. But now, as ever before, and perhaps quite a bit more, America is called to answer that question definitively.

I could of course be wrong, I have been many times, and this may be the result of the filter through which my ultradramatic temperament sees the world. But it seems to me that this moment is the very moment to which entire American experiment has been building, when we see whether a nation so conceived in liberty can long endure. Difficult days may be ahead, the type of hard days which many of us were assured in childhood could never happen in this country. But they seem to be almost here, and we, like so many billions before us, may be called to account to see how we respond in some of the most pressure-filled moments in human history. None of us know how we'll behave through them, and some of us may have to live with the guilt of our actions for the rest of our lives as so many adults always do, but our stories are all part of the larger story. And in that sense, whether for good or ill, our lives have meaning and lessons to be drawn for those who come after us. May we all set an example from which the future can draw lessons for good.

Amen.

(note from 2025: oh my holy shit did I get this one wrong...)