A 19th Century View of American Jews

One of the happy effects of light and liberty upon a religious body is to divide it. . .  Black night is uniform: daylight shows a thousand hues. Ignorance is a unit: knowledge is manifold. As long as the Jews were persecuted, they clung to ancient usage and doctrine with thoughtless tenacity; their whole strength being employed in the mere clutch. But when the repressive and restrictive laws were relaxed, the mind of the Jews resumed its office; divisions arose among them; and the world began to hear of the Orthodox and the Reformed.

[from "Our Israelitish Brethren," James Parton, 1870] 

  
          The Atlantic Monthly (the dead-tree version of which I still get in the mail) has dusted off an old gem from its archive; believe it or not, it still shines after 141 years. It's probably the most perceptive piece I've ever read about Judaism. No, strike that: it's the most perceptive piece I've ever read about how a free society, if officially agnostic towards religion, encourages a proliferation of religious perspective that ennobles all: from the most adamant secular, to the middle-of-the-road heterodox, to the fastidiously devout.

        The authour, one James Parton, is an interesting character himself. A cursory glance at Parton's Wikipedia page suggests that he was the most popular biographer of his day in America; he wrote tomes about Jefferson, Franklin, and Voltaire, and also authoured The Life and Times of Aaron Burr. [Full disclosure: I'm a blood relation of Aaron Burr on three different branches of my family tree.] Anyway, when Parton's first wife died in 1872, he married her daughter from a previous marriage. That kind of puts the whole Woody Allen thing in perspective, huh? As is my wont, though, I digress. Parton's narrative, first-person in parts (he describes the voluminous array of Jewish texts spread out on his desk at one point), is of a piece with the other great liberals of his day. In particular, I'm thinking of John Stuart Mill, and his 1869 essay "The Subjection of Women." Parton, like Mill, was writing from an outsider-looking-in perspective, and both wrote with amazing clarity, humility, and compassion, and against the grain of the day.
         The central character in Parton's feature is the Jew, past and present (present being October 1870). The Jew is the most famous piñata in world history; a thousand desecrations have scarred his body, yes, but if you're receptive, if you seek to understand, you'll find that the greatest suffering comes from humiliation, from being falsely accused. Remember: it's humiliation that creates monsters, and monsters that create humiliation. The iconic Taoist image of the yin-yang is value-neutral, like Taoism itself (some might say like God). Everything contains its opposite, yes, but it also gives rise to its opposite. Engenders it. Births it. Pushes it out of itself. (This is why we're more like our grandparents than we are like our parents, although we don't realize that until it's too late.)

         What do I mean by value-neutral? Just that nature itself is profoundly agnostic about the human race. (Note here that the words "diagnosis," "prognosis," and "agnostic" all share the same Greek root.) Cycles are the natural order of things; but man is not entirely a natural creature. We are, in a very significant sense, the product of ourselves; we are artificial. And thus our fate is not dictated for us by social Darwinism or any other crackpot theory. The Jews are what they make of themselves, as are the rest of us. We can choose to continue the cycle of rerererevenge, or we can end it.

         I vote for ending it.

   



Fast neutrinos, fast booze, the IMF's prodder-in-chief, Saudi women can vote!, and the most important story of the week

. . .Neutrinos are wily creatures, able to pass through solid matter and change "flavors" en route; 65 billion of them just passed through your fingertip and you didn't notice a thing. Until now, though, they hadn't figured out how to make headlines. That changed this past Friday when a team of researchers announced that they had accidentally incited neutrinos to travel faster than the speed of light. It's possible this could allow Michael J. Fox to travel back to the summer of 2001 and convince George W. to allow stem-cell research. It'd be cake; Fox could trade on his future knowledge of the whole Chandra Levy thing.

          You're telling me you built a time machine. . . out of a neutrino?

. . .Speaking of changing flavors, here's a NY Times piece about how Sonic (the drive-in, not the hedgehog), Burger King, and Starbucks are testing the waters with serving alcohol at some of their "restaurants." I don't eat corporate food if I can avoid it. . . but most of this country is so infested by these chains, there are plenty of places in the heartland you can't find a nugget of non-corporate food in a hundred-mile radius. Trust me, I've been there. So I applaud this trend. . . although it doesn't look promising that it'll be in my neck of the woods any time soon.

Europeans: why haven't their societies crumbled?

. . . Former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn filed a Motion to Dismiss in a hotel maid's civil suit concerning a sexual encounter they had in a New York Hotel earlier this year. In the motion, his attorneys argue that his diplomatic immunity should protect him from the suit. Kind of a bogus notion if you ask me; if he did force her to perform oral sex on him (and wasn't afraid of her teeth), then I don't care if he's God's own ambassador, he should be held to account. No, the suit should be dismissed on account of the salient fact that it's clearly bullshit. Listen, I hate the IMF, and I despise those who act like they believe (with Henry Kissinger) that "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac," and that their status in society gives them the right to pressure others into sexual favours. But there's no worse fate than being falsely accused, and the courts in this country are stacked in favour of women. Judges and prosecutors bend over backwards to accommodate the most outrageous claims. Yet the prosecutors themselves dropped the criminal charges against Strauss-Kahn after realizing the alleged victim was lying to them left and right. That in itself should preclude a civil suit, and Ms. Diallo should be charged with making a false police report to boot.

. . .Speaking of Muhammad's wives. . . Khadija (خديجة) was a successful merchant when she first hired a young Muhammad to oversee her caravan, and later married him (he was fifteen years her junior). It may or may not be fair to describe Muhammad as a proto-feminist, but he certainly believed that men and women are equal before God. "You have rights over your women," he is reported to have said, "and your women have rights over you." Yet in Arabia, the land of Muhammad's birth and of his revelations, women are oppressed like nowhere else on earth. Not only is it illegal for women to drive, it's illegal for them to leave their house without a male chaperon. That's why it was so heartening to hear today that the absolute monarch of Saudi Arabia has decreed that women will henceforth be able to vote in muncipal elections, and even stand as candidates. Of course, Saudi Arabia is not a democracy in any meaningful sense; even men don't have full suffrage. Still, it's a positive change. Call it the Indian Arab Spring ("indian summer" plus. . . you get it, right?).

. . . And, finally, the most important story of the week.

Israel: the REAL Mad Dog of the Middle East

          Change we can believe in? You bet. Just a few months after taking office, Barack Obama sold 55 of these to Israel, something that even George W. refused to do (at least at first). Apparently the idea is for Israel to unleash them on Iran to destroy nuclear research and production facilities. The International Atomic Energy Agency (the same that correctly concluded that Iraq had no WMDs before the invasion) continues to verify that Iran has not diverted any nuclear material towards military purposes, although it says that it cannot confirm the absence of such activity. (Read the IAEA's report here.) Iran, like Iraq before it, has got a difficult task ahead of them if they have to provide evidence of absence. Can I prove that I'm not a child molester? I wouldn't know where to start.
          Meanwhile, Iran has called for a nuclear-free Middle East, and appears to be in compliance with the broad principles of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, a treaty that Israel has always refused to sign. In fact, Israel is the ONLY nation in the Middle East that hasn't signed (or acceded to) the NPT, and one of only four in the world that remain outside its purview (India and Pakistan are the others; North Korea withdrew in 2003). Here's a pretty stark graphical representation (green is for "we agree not to proliferate nuclear weapons"):

          Israel's nuclear weapons program is almost half a century old; they've had The Bomb since the time of the Six-Day War back in 1967. Israel refuses to admit that it has any nuclear program whatsoever; estimates of its arsenal range from as little as 60 to more than 400 thermonuclear devices, deliverable by aircraft, submarine, ICBMs, or in the form of "suitcase nukes." In 2009, the IAEA called on Israel to join the international community in fighting non-proliferation by signing on to the NPT; Israel's response was to "deplore" the idea (read the article at antiwar.com).
          Moreover, Israel has defied United Nations resolutions for decades. Notably, there's Resolution 242 (1967), which called for Israel to withdraw from the lebensraum it seized from Egypt, Syria, and Jordan (it still holds all of its seizures but the Sinai). And then there's Resolution 497 (1981), which reads in pertinent part:

[T]he Israeli decision to impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect.

          Since then, Israel has hid behind its "special" friend in the Security Council (that would be US) to avoid scores more such resolutions, to provide cover for its widely substantiated crimes against humanity, and just this week to prevent the international community from recognizing Palestine as an independent and sovereign country.

          So tell me, which is the real rogue nation?

          Why is our President selling bunker-buster bombs to Israel so they can take out Iranian nuclear capabilities, and not the other way around?

The Tucson Sentinel refuses to take the Green Party seriously

I had the opportunity recently to participate in a Q & A session at Pima College with Dylan Smith, editor and publisher of the Tucson Sentinel. Although I applaud the Sentinel's decision to refrain from endorsing candidates for public office, I was disappointed to hear him spouting the conventional wisdom about third-party candidates, i. e., "they're not likely to win, so why should we cover them?." From my point of view, the media in this country is in collusion with the over-represented parties (sometimes called the Repugnicrats) to enforce an information blockade between the other major political parties (the Greens and Libertarians) and the public at large. (Full disclosure: I currently sit on the Steering Committee of the Green Party of Pima County.)

An example of the Sentinel's unconscionable bias towards the two-party duopoly can be found in Mr. Smith's coverage of the recent primary election. An eighteen-minute video features long speeches by Republican mayoral nominee Rick Grinnell and Democratic nominee Jonathan Rothschild; there is no video coverage of either of the Green Party candidates, and scant mention of them in the text.

Green Party candidates have won hundreds of elections across the country, from Mayoral and City Council races to State Assembly seats. The Green Party of the U.S. is our third largest political party; in many places around the world, the national Green Party is the second largest. In Colombia, a Green Party candidate came in second in the 2010 Presidential race; Die Grünen, the German Greens, hold the state legislature in Baden-Württemberg, and have been part of the governing coalition of Germany on and off for years. The Greens also hold the balance of power in the Australian Senate.

In past City Council and Mayoral races in Tucson, Green candidates have won the votes of between one quarter and one third of the electorate. As citizens, we should demand full and equal coverage of all serious candidates for office.

Budrus v. bulldozers: Satyagraha in Palestine

I found this video on this blog, so check out the original post. Julia Bacha is a 30-year-old Brazilian-American filmmaker and director of Budrus, which chronicles the successful campaign of the residents of the tiny Palestinian village of Budrus (بدروس) to peacefully resist the Israeli army's attempts to build a "security barrier" through their town, next to their children's school, through their olive groves, and through their cemetery. The New York Times review describes the film as "Eyes on the Prize with olive trees." A pithy summation, to be sure, but a little too glib for the subject matter. The olive trees destroyed by the Israeli bulldozers are the bread and butter of the local economy, as well as their connection to their ancestors. (In the end, Israel pulled back and built the Wall along the pre-'67 borders to the west.)

In the above-embedded video, Bacha forcefully indicts the Western media for giving short shrift to the peaceful resistance displayed in the Budrus uprising, while sensationalizing those in the Palestinian community who instead engage in violence to get their point across. She invokes child psychology (I'm undecided about whether her analogy comes across as condescending) to explain how Western media are actually reinforcing the violent undercurrent in Palestinian society.

If you're interested in the tactics of peaceful resistance, an excellent (and brief) summary of the Gandhian concept of satyagraha can be found here. (The best in-depth study remains Gandhi's own Satyagraha in South Africa (1926). (You can find the full text here.) Satyagraha is a Hindi word which loosely translates as "truth-force" or "soul-force;" it calls for active resistance against injustice without the use of physical violence, for noncooperation without enmity. Courage in the face of overwhelming odds is its defining attribute.

Hope. . . and its discontents

But what is truly sinister about the positivity cult is that it seems to reduce our tolerance of other people's suffering. [from "Pathologies of Hope"]

Having read (and loved) Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich's tale of her anonymous immersion in the world of minimum-wage America, I'd argue her 2007 Harper's essay "Pathologies of Hope" is seriously predicated on that earlier experience with the unglossy side of high capitalism. Going with the flow of consumer culture might make you feel better and look younger, but I guarantee it's having the opposite effect on your fellow human beings further down the supply chain.

I grew up in a faraway land called the 1990s. Until September 11th blew it out of the water, our generation's "where were you?" moment was April 8, 1994, the day Kurt Cobain was found dead of a self-inflicted shotgun wound. Along with Cobain, Vedder, Corgan, Reznor, and their imitators, we had Seinfeld, a love letter to self-conscious cynicism, as the other lynchpin of our culture. Computers were lame, back then, and no one wore happy poofy skirts, but it was cool to be tortured. This was fortunate for me, because, more than anyone I knew, my family life was a maelstrom and I was tortured anyway.

But that was then; that was before "the President wants you to buy this magazine."

As Ehrenreich relates in her essay, the cult of positivity destroys as many lives as it saves; telling the long-term unemployed or the seriously depressed that their mental attitude is at the root of their problems is "victim-blaming at its cruelest." The most basic fact of life is that existence is suffering. Nihilo-hedonism is one response, of course; the archpriest of that faith famously told an audience (after denying belief in astrology) :

I think it's a bunch of bullshit, myself. . . but I tell you this: I don't know what's gonna happen, but I'm gonna have my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.

[Jim Morrison, if you haven't guessed.]

And yet, hope somehow still sprung in my breast, back then, and it carried me out of there. Hope, real hope, is about idealism, the notion that what we do matters whether or not we're rewarded for it. It used to be called "dignity," as in "He died with dignity." Like anything else, it comes down to semantics (sigh).

Ehrenreich is right to decry petty hope, hope-for-hope's sake. Gandhi did not "hope" to bring down the British Empire. But as a little green man once said, "Try? There is no try. Do. . . or do not."

That's self help.

Transcendence

I have always found peace in tombstones, and I still haven't seen one with an advertisement on it. You can find an interesting piece on the most "literary" graveyards here; most of them are in Europe, but we've got Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, MA, which houses the remains of Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau. Haven't read Emerson's powerful essay "Self Reliance?" The full text is here, or you can get the Dover Thrift edition for a dollar. Either way, read it; it will transform how you view your own mind.

While you're in that neck of the woods contemplating mortality and free will, drop into Lowell's Edson Cemetery and pay your respects to Jack Kerouac. I've done so several times, and I'm always profoundly moved by his simple stone. (And by the way, if all you've read is On the Road, you don't know Kerouac. Read Desolation Angels, The Subterraneans, and Visions of Gerard, and then tell me he was a hedonistic hack.)

Kerouac's great achievement lies not in his carefully crafted classic (in the tradition of Huck Finn and Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise), On the Road; it's to be found, instead, in the pure expressive prose of his panreligious writings and in his intense confessionalism, conditioned as they both are by the paradoxical view of reality implied by Buddhism.

Kerouac gazed into the mirror and was blinded; but he left his visions behind for us. I can't imagine a greater sacrifice.