JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

The MSM has labeled and endlessly repeated their own coinage: Arab Spring. The phenomenon, of repressed Arab populations attempting to overthrow dictators, is indeed in process and one can hope for the best; but Arab Spring implies an outcome — a treacly Disneyland of freedom and democracy. This is far from certain and probably unlikely. There is no supporting example.

Obama was feeling pressure from advisors: you have to say something about the Arab Spring or you will continue to “lead from behind”. (“Leading from behind” is an Orwellian construction — pure self-satire.) So Obama, obeying interior dictates only he can understand, marches to the microphone and makes a speech, prior to Netanyahu’s visit, declaring longstanding American policy. This is then enabled using just that argument: longstanding policy. But why stir the pot with a pro forma speech just before the visit of one of the parties in an upcoming negotiation if nothing new is being said? The MSM asked this question and…wait, no, they never did…

What the MSM does not suggest is what is left out — the elisions; such an Israeli / Palestinian agreement must be in accordance with “conditions on the ground,” which is also longstanding US policy. Obama has estranged our ally and not won any friends in his ingratiations. This is characteristic of his leadership chops; no sense of the actual issues or judgment about focus. A president who squanders opportunities and credibility.

Soon the Iranian client state in Gaza will be merging with the kleptocracy in the West Bank. What possible hope for peace can there be in that? No matter the public declarations, it is transparent what the nature of Palestinian governance is all about.

For there to be peace Palestinians will have to renounce a culture of hatred and murder. Obama could not bring himself to say that because he knew he could only pressure Israel. Abbas had made plain in a recent op-ed and his enthusiasm for a UN declaration preemptively establishing a state (which Obama begged to be rescinded) that Abbas could care less what Obama wants. Thus dissed, Obama turns to our ally to pressure so he seems to be doing something.

Although Obama could not say it, or probably conceive the idea, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor could:

Stop naming public squares and athletic teams after suicide bombers. And come to the negotiating table when you have prepared your people to forego hatred and renounce terrorism — and Israel will embrace you. Until that day, there can be no peace with Hamas. Peace at any price isn’t peace; it’s surrender.

UPDATE

Obama saying today (5/25/2011) in the UK what he should have said originally:

“Hamas… has not renounced violence and has not recognized the state of Israel,” he told reporters this morning at a joint-press conference with the U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron. ”Until they do, it is very difficult to expect the Israelis to have a serious conversation, because ultimately they have to have confidence that the Palestinian state is going to stick to whatever bargain is struck,” he said.
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“…I don’t want the Palestinians to forget that they have obligations as well…That is, I think, going to be a critical aspect of us being able to jump-start this process once again.”

A re-focus that was necessary for Obama to have any credibility as leader, peacemaker, or thinker.

An article in the NYT describes a controversy over giving an honorary Oscar to Jean-Luc Godard. Godard walks, talks and sounds anti-Semitic but the Oscar committee is debating if his work should be honored nevertheless. The NYT says,

…a debate that has raged around artists as august as the poet Ezra Pound and as popular as the actor and filmmaker Mel Gibson: Is the work somehow tainted by the attitudes of the man?

Ezra Pound, mentally ill and a poet, has no relation to dim entertainment guy Mel Gibson with his Holocaust denying daddy.

The best approach would be to parse the work itself. Years ago Susan Sontag wrote a NYRB review of a book of photographs by Leni Riefenstahl which incorporated, Sontag felt, Riefenstahl’s aesthetic — a grim fascist “taste” that was reflected in all Riefenstahl’s work. Leni was a fascist, through and through Sontag cogently asserted.

Degas, Cézanne, Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf … a slew of artists have been tainted by endemic European anti-Semitism. Except in the case of Shakespeare’s Shylock, the work of those artists doesn’t present their bigotry. People come out of a time and we make allowances for the currents in which they swim. Also, and most significantly, of their reaction to the toxic fumes wafting over them. How much has their spirit been infiltrated by the hate of their contemporaries? Does the work itself reflect the mental illness that is bigotry or does such malevolence live only in the quotidian life of the creator?

The secondary issue is a tough one in contemporary society: the issue of morality and fairness. Sometimes they are not the same thing. It might be fair to give an award to an influential filmmaker, but would it be right? Isn’t the work tainted? Again, you have to take this on a case by case basis.

In the case of Godard no award should be given. Ironically, Godard could care less, so this discussion in Hollywood is more — as usual — about Hollywood’s self-image than about the real issue of bigots who make films.

Many modern atheists are really pantheists. If you listen carefully, you will often hear, “I go out, look at the lake. That’s all I need. I am filled with awe.” Where the awe came from is an unanswered question…

The philosopher who magnetically attracts many contemporary atheists is Spinoza. Spinoza felt Nature was Immanent. Inhabited by the spiritual.

Wiki says,

Martial Guéroult suggested the term “Panentheism”, rather than “Pantheism” to describe Spinoza’s view of the relation between God and the world. The world is not God, but it is, in a strong sense, “in” God. Not only do finite things have God as their cause; they cannot be conceived without God.

It seems a comfy fit: Spinoza and atheism. But listen to Isaiah Berlin about Spinoza,

Spinoza has no sense of change and evolution. He has no sense of history. Spinoza thinks that correct solutions to all questions could have been thought of at any time, but unfortunately weren’t,.. Spinoza preaches a kind of timeless rationalism in a void. He thinks that any idea could have been born at any time. Who in the world has believed this after Hegel?
Conversations With Isaiah Berlin, “The Birth of Modern Politics”

The moving tale of the Ugandan Jews, called the Abayudaya, is described by photojournalist Richard Sobol:

For four generations the Abayudaya Jewish Community in Eastern Uganda has survived despite numerous hardships. Living in virtual isolation until the early 1990′s these struggling subsistence farmers have observed Jewish customs and celebrated the Sabbath and Festivals of the Jewish calendar together as families. Guided by their faith in the Jewish Laws of the Torah, they pray together in mud huts designated as synagogues and chant Hebrew prayers to an Afro beat. Spread out over many miles, the 600 members of this community have held on to their beliefs through civil wars and periods of religious intolerance. Although their faith has at times added to their economic perils, they affirm the power of religion each day, in a life filled with dignity and grace.

(Image © Richard Sobol and used with permission. All rights reserved.)

Richard’s photos are luminous with the human spirit.

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Richard’s site, with some of his photos.

Richard’s book, Abayudaya: The Jews of Uganda.

This wiki entry tells the remarkable tale.

The centerpiece, and not to be missed: You can hear the Abayudaya’s music here. The music reminds me of Paul Simon’s work with South African musicians. The Abayudaya’s music is sweeter, lighter, and more resonant.

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Tangentially related, but of great interest, is this bhtv online discussion about faith and its relation to science. Nick Wade, NYT science reporter, is enormously informative.

“Excerpts of the first Jewish broadcast that took place in occupied Germany in Aachen in 1944.”

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Iran’s lunatic president said today,

Mr. Ahmadinejad said confrontation with Israel was a “national and religious duty” and that the Holocaust was “a lie” used as a pretext for the country’s creation in 1948.

Quite a piece of work, the Iranian government,

The [Iranian] government had largely halted street protests in July, with a harsh government crackdown that left dozens of marchers dead and thousands in jail. But the authorities have been unable to silence the opposition’s leaders, who have kept up their criticism of the election and the government’s violent response. The opposition leaders raised tensions when they leveled accusations that some protesters were tortured and raped in prison. The rape accusations have been especially embarrassing for the government, which has denied them while acknowledging that some prisoners were tortured.

The thin tea of the Obama administration’s response,

“Obviously, we condemn what he said,” [Obama's press secretary] told reporters.

Obviously.

I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Michael Wex’s book about the Yiddish language, “Born to Kvetch”. The author reads the book himself, which is a good thing, given the requirements of pronunciation, and the flavor it lends the book. Wex is described in the blurb as a stand-up comic, among other accomplishments, but he is really a scholar of the Yiddish language, and seeks to revive Yiddish. World War II had a lot to do with the decline of Yiddish — another consequence of German toxicity in 20th century world history.

This is not a feel good book with chicken soup and Yiddish curses, although it has some of that. It is a book about language. It reveals the way language weaves itself into, and makes manifest, consciousness itself. The despair, anger, deep irony, cutting humor, deep anxieties expressed in Yiddish words and usage, are revelatory of the experience of a people. Language as living history. Yiddish has influenced English in very deep ways, right down to inflection and word order. Already you’re discouraged?

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Language is an expression of the collective genius of our species. All languages. It has always struck me how poetical many words are, more than single strokes of genius making a distinction, but extensions of our imaginative connection to the world.

The word “gimlet” means drill. The very object described, its very shape, in the form of a “T”, suggests it goes as far back as toolmaking itself. The expression “gimlet eye” means a hard stare — a look that drills.

Not a great surprise, but papers have been found which show how early on the Nazi plan of systematic genocide was in the planning.

The documents’ discovery was announced on the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht – the nights of November 9 and 10 1938, when Nazi thugs rampaged through towns destroying Jewish homes, shops and synagogues, in what came to be seen as the prelude to the Holocaust. Yesterday (09/09/08) across Germany the event was marked with ceremonies.

The diary of the Anne Frank of France. Hélène Berr was 21 when she began her diary in 1942.

“To think that every person arrested yesterday, today, this very minute, is probably destined to suffer this terrible fate. To think that it is not over yet, that it continues with diabolical regularity.

To think that if I am arrested this evening (which I have been expecting for ages now), in a week’s time I’ll be in Upper Silesia, maybe dead, and my whole life, with the infinity I sense within me, will be snuffed out…”

“Hélène survived the death march from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen. Sick with typhus, she was beaten to death because she was too weak to get up from her bunk for reveille.”

Anne and Hélène died a month apart at Bergen-Belsen. ‘It is raining Death on earth,” she wrote.

This slideshow with commentary says all you need to know about the birth of Israel. There is an associated article as well.

Ruth Gruber, working for the Department of the Interior, was a witness to history and the birth of a nation. Many of the displaced from the Holocaust were refused re-entry to their home country. The State Department, George Marshall, the English — none of them got it.

A young man approached us, his eyes bloodshot. In Romania, they killed 30,000 Jews in two hours, he said, his voice sounding as if it came straight from his guts. They took Jews to the slaughterhouse and hung them alive the way they hang cows, and they put knives to their throats and split them. Underneath them, they put a sign: Kosher Beef.

Gruber asked one of the children why he wanted to go to Palestine:

A 16-year-old orphan ‚Äî actually, we never used the word orphan because the term couldn’t convey the horrors these children had been through ‚Äî gave the most poignant answer. Everybody has a home, he said. The Americans. The British. The French. The Russians. Only we don’t have a home. Don’t ask us. Ask the world.

As usual Charles Krauthammer nails it:

To hear the world pass judgment on the Israel-Hezbollah war as it unfolds is to live in an Orwellian moral universe. With a few significant exceptions (the leadership of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and a very few others), the world — governments, the media, U.N. bureaucrats — has completely lost its moral bearings.

The word that obviates all thinking and magically inverts victim into aggressor is “disproportionate,” as in the universally decried “disproportionate Israeli response.”

A postage stamp issued for Hiram Bingham IV , a man Israel designates a Righteous Diplomat.

From the website that campaigned to honor Bingham’s “courageous dissent” :

Hiram Bingham IV, of Salem, Connecticut (who is the son of Hiram Bingham III, the explorer who discovered Machu Picchu in Peru in 1911) died in 1988 at age 84. When he was the US vice consul in Marseilles, France from 1939 to 1941, he boldly defied State Department policy by writing visas for those fleeing the Holocaust, by hiding refugees in his diplomatic residence who were most wanted by Hitler, and by coordinating daring escapes to other countries from Southern France. Harry helped rescue renowned painter Marc Chagall, …anti-Nazi author Leon Feuchtwanger, Nobel Prize physicist Otto Meyerhoff, and ordinary refugees.

Virtues often cluster — he was a modest man:

One time, he became ashen-faced with deep frowns when he painfully recalled long lines of refugees outside his Marseilles consulate window anxiously seeking visas. He said they were being “treated like cattle” —and he quickly changed the subject. His eleven children did not know the extent of his rescue efforts until recent years, when old documents of that era were found in his Salem farmhouse and at various museums.