ScottsShot

USA & Israel: who's in charge?

What follows is another account of naiveté and betrayal. These make an old, old tale so I’ll try to be quick in telling it. Many Americans of my generation already know it well in one form or another.

Born in the thirties, before WWII, when there was no such thing as Israel, I was a little WASP baby in New York. Followed a childhood passed on army bases and among cousins in the South. After the war, came later school years in a ‘restricted’ mile-square Westchester suburb called Bronxville where there were a few Catholics, no Jews and certainly no blacks. Thus the making of an innocent. Three years in the Marine Corps produced no gain in sophistication.

Until late adolescence, Jews were like homosexuals: I’d little notion either group existed. However, once gradually exposed to this exotic culture through travel and reading – early Salinger late in high school after someone’s parent complained, on moral grounds, about the teacher’s plan to do Tess of the d’Urbervilles - I adopted it eagerly, with wide-open arms, wondering where I’d been all my life. It was hard to get enough. Saul Bellow, Leon Uris, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, Isaac Babel and the hilarious Isaac Bashhevis Singer shone among my favourite authors. I dated ‘hot’ Jewish girls, I discovered the delicatessen, cheese cake, cold cuts, bagels, lox, pickled herring. I even began to preach, particularly to anti-Semites, the blessings on an earnest, sheltered US culture brought by Jewish immigration: respect for learning, appreciation of classical as well as folk music, much-needed variety in food, wryness and irony in humour. My vocabulary grew far richer. I day-dreamed about spending time in a kibbutz. A similarly besotted colleague and I dubbed ourselves ‘honorary Jews’.

In Paris in the sixties I met my first Israeli, a guy my age, a captain, as I remember, in the Israeli army. To my increasing horror, as he and I spoke about our nationalities and experiences, this young man grew steadily more and more repulsive: crass, boorish, fascistic, smug. Because of what had happened in history, and especially to European Jews during the Holocaust, Israelis, he claimed, had the perfect right to do whatever was necessary to protect themselves. Arabs were lazy scum standing in the way and got what was coming to them. He assured me that the great majority of Israelis felt as he did. The US government, he promised, was guaranteed to come to their rescue in the last resort.

From this point, my naiveté about Israel began in classic fashion at last to dissolve. Thus we grow. My guilt, though, in admitting genuine dislike of an individual Jew would, in time, slowly be replaced by a sense of wholesale betrayal. How could such things befall an ancient and worthy culture? Was this what Zionism entailed? Were most Israelis really of that young Army captain’s opinion? How could they be so certain that the US, my native country, would always back them up?

Seeking answers, not in any systematic way, to these and other questions has become for me latterly a kind of intellectual sideline. Incidental information about private funds sent regularly from the US to Israel, over and above massive government financial support, grows in significance. So too does dawning awareness and outrage over the power – self-confidently audacious activities – of the Israel lobbies in Washington and elsewhere. Knowledge of military arms and intelligence support in addition to finance has become almost banal. Evidence of the unexpected and oddly-vehement backing of Israeli causes by apparently unconnected yet influential US politicians has become equally routine. Swelling detestation of the US in surrounding Middle Eastern states now seems entirely understandable. The increasing, gratuitous brutality reported about Israeli military and security forces, the stories of foreign aid workers being discouraged to the point of assassination, and finally the evidence of war crime in the recent Gaza invasion by Israel, both on a personal as well as a national scale, all this, and more, has brought me to the tritely-named sadder but wiser condition in which I find myself.

It now seems very clear that the US must disengage, quickly and finally, with the state of Israel. The losers would be the extreme conservative wings of Israeli politics and religion. The rest of us stand to gain, don’t you think?

OBAMANIA

The following short article was written at the request of Attac's "Zindiens" for their November monthly bulletin. It was signed Big Griff and translated into French by "J.Nessoa".

OBAMANIA

The recent US presidential election has already occupied so much space in the French media that this American writer, (and it is a great relief, once again, to be able to confess to that nationality without guilt)feels a need to excuse himself for inflicting yet more about Obama on the patient denizens of the Haut Languedoc.

Now that the media frenzy is at last starting to cool - NO MORE BUSH!, FIRST US PRESIDENT OF COLOR!, PALIN IS HISTORY! and so forth - maybe it's time to pay attention to something more than symbolic realities. Barak Obama won't be sworn in as president until late January. Until then, he will be obliged to make so many difficult, almost impossible decisions that you have to wonder what might persuade any politician there seriously to run for president.

The answer - as usual in the US - is MONEY. Lots and lots of money. Obama, and the Democrat party, we need to remember, have forked over more dollars than anyone, anywhere, at any time has 'paid' to win this high office. Since the good man himself has little personal wealth, he now, as any of us would, owes a great many debts. To whom? True, there has been in this election an unprecedented number of small donations from enthusiastic, private individuals. These are people to whom he needs, ultimately, only to say a heartfelt thank-you.

However, like all US politicians, Obama and his party have also felt it necessary to accept large donations from even larger corporations. The are people - lest anyone be so foolish as to forget who REALLY runs the US these days - who will not be content with a mere thank-you. They will expect to be repaid. They will demand it. So - plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose, as Alphonse Karr remarked in 1849 - we must not be surprised if before long we again find, under Obama, as under Bush, international US trade and diplomatic agreements being written by private corporation lawyers, officials in government agencies granting privileges to selected businessmen, huge amounts of public money being diverted to already wealthy manufacturers of armaments. Continued 'war' on drugs,'war' on terror'.

It is difficult to imagine what can be done under such a system. How can the new president produce and set up a health system worthy of the name if doing so means asking the powerful insurance and drug industries to give up about eight billion dollars of their annual income? How can he reduce endemic violence in defiance of the powerful National Rifle Association? How can he expect to negotiate a fair and just path out of the Palestine problem when the powerful and influential pro-Israel lobby in the US opposes it? The public schools - to judge simply by the proportion of US citizens who believe Obama is a Muslim, or the number who believe Saddam had atomic weapons - is in need of serious funding, yet the US military is accustomed to getting more money to spend each year than all other countries' militaries combined, and won't like it if children get more consideration than they do.

And yet. At least now we have - WE in the world, as well as WE of the US - a leader who is, in fact, a leader. We have a man who speaks correctly and intelligently. We have someone who will try, we hope, to take small steps in a positive direction rather than large ones in the wrong direction. Let us have no illusions, but let us keep our fingers crossed.

# 7 MLK Day

MLK Day

Would have entirely forgotten about Martin Luther King Day – and how very fine it is that this day is declared an official occasion! – had it not been for assorted on-line tributes that kept popping up this past week. Back when I left the States, on 2^nd April 1963, to try life in Europe, MLK Day didn’t exist. That was before the soon-to-come wave of Sixties assassinations (Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King), of those promising young men, gunned down in the time-worn US tradition because someone considered them too much of a threat.

Clearly, I knew who King was. No one who’d demonstrated against what we then called racial prejudice, just as, conversely, no one who embraced racial prejudice in the thoughtless hope of feeling a faint but necessary sense of superiority, of “somebodiness”, could fail to know who King was. But I’d left the country behind and now depended on foreign media. US news came, thus, gradually to seem that much less immediate. Two weeks after our freighter left Brooklyn I was not aware – in Paris as it happens – that King was at that moment in jail in Birmingham, Alabama. I learned it only last week. A favourite on-line source, OpEdNews, published in tribute to the man his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail 1963”. I printed a copy to read aloud, at breakfast, as a way of honouring the occasion.

King’s letter, dated April 16^th 1963, is addressed to a group of fellow-clergymen, colleagues who had called his activities against racial segregation “unwise and untimely”. He’d come across their statement “While confined here in the Birmingham city jail” and was moved to try to respond to them in “patient and reasonable terms”. I’d never read the letter before. As a former teacher, now geezer, but still voracious reader, I place a good deal of trust in the sense I get of a person from the way he writes. Reading it was humbling; reading it aloud proved not quite possible without pauses for eye-wiping and throat-clearing.

We all know the sound of King: the rhetorical devices, the “I have a dream” repetitions, the faint pompousness, the drawing of parallels such as between the “dark dungeons of complacency” and the “bright hills of creative protest”, the ringing, prophetic tone and other echoes. These and others are all there in the letter. The reader can hear the man, indeed the reader comes, reading it aloud, almost to sound like the man himself. It can’t be helped.

What I found much more impressive on a cerebral rather than emotional level, was the man’s tolerance, his restraint, his logic and insistence on sticking to first principles. He deals head-on with all the usual criticisms which his fellow clergymen apparently have uttered again. Right at the start, King tackles, as he must, what he calls the argument of “outsiders coming in”. There is no need for him to rehearse all the familiar and predictable phrases about “Yankees” or “foreigners” coming “down here” and “interfering” or “meddling” with things that are “not their business” and “they know nothing about”. We’ve all heard them and know that they powerfully evoke strong feelings. Calmly, King makes the point that he was officially invited to be where he is. He notes that there is injustice in this part of the nation and that “Whatever affects one directly, affect all indirectly,” and he ends by rejecting the notion of “outside agitator” with “Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.” For me, part of his wisdom lies in his having written “anyone who lives inside the US” rather than “any citizen of the US”.

King then runs through his fellow preachers’ objections about his engaging in public demonstrations by showing conclusively that he had no choice. Their tut-tutting about law-breaking is subjected to a calmly devastating lesson about the difference between just and unjust laws. Their charge of inciting violence is compared to blaming the victim of robbery for having caused the robbery by his possession of money. Their plea to be patient, to let time cure their ills, he rejects with “the time is always ripe to do right” and their charge of extremism is simply rendered silly by pointing out what real extremism, like that of the Black Muslim movement of the time, is and can be if he is not permitted to allow black people to release their pent up resentments and their frustrations in a more orderly way.

In another of the many strengths of his letter, his width and aptness of reference, King goes on, now on the offensive, to examine his disappointment over the charge of extremism. He gently points out that Christ was an extremist of love, the Biblical prophet Amos an extremist of justice, Paul of Tarsus an extremist of the Christian gospel, John Bunyan an extremist of conscience, Abraham Lincolm an extremist of freedom, Thomas Jefferson an extremist of equality.

Another disappointment of his has been, with notable exceptions, the majority of his colleagues, the church itself, who have been “more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.” Assuring them that his disappointment is a disappointment of love, he cites a contrast between the early Christians, known for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators” and the complacent, ineffectual contemporary church as “archdefender of the status quo.”

King ends his letter – dotted throughout with impressive, easy reference to other thinkers, T.S. Eliot, Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Buber, Paul Tillich – by reminding his colleagues again of the sufferings of those in his cause, the bites of police dogs, the beating of young and old, male and female protestors, even the refusal of food by the Birmingham police department. He reasserts his adherence to principles of non-violence, and clarifies the difference between moral and immoral ends and means, and he commends the courage and the self-discipline of his protesting colleagues in the face of great provocation. “Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.”

Let me recall that this letter was written forty-five years ago. No friend of organized religion myself, I would yet recommend its being read aloud, on television, on the radio, around family dining tables annually, on Martin Luther King day.

# 6 US Presidential Circus

What, I think, accounts for the lapse of time since the last time I wrote something for this space is the obligation I feel to try to cope, somehow, with the rising flood of media verbiage downstream from the extraordinary, current US presidential election circus. My prolonged silence could always, on the other hand, stem from a sense of despair.

In any event, it is always worth reminding oneself that the present election circus is more properly a US one, not technically an American one. They have elections in Colombia and Chile and Canada too, after all. They’re just as ‘American’ as I am. Isn’t ‘circus’ a great metaphor, by the way?

As I write – these things move along quickly – serious allegations of chicanery in the New Hampshire results have just emerged. The exit polls showed Obama well in front; the count went to Clinton. What happened?

Now, in my recent experience, before anyone falls into intriguing speculation about the possible roles played by race, by sexism, by emotion, by any of that, one should first ask another question entirely: how were the votes counted? Isn’t that sad? Yet recent history demands that answer first, before all the others.

In this case, the great majority were counted by machines. Written, by hand, on paper ballots, yes, but instead of being counted by hand, they were counted by machines. Whose machines? Diebold’s, the most universally and officially derided machines of all, if I’m not mistaken. So bad they’ve had to change their name. As someone complained the other day, voting is supposed to be by secret ballot; by contrast, counting should be public and open to all to see. We should be so lucky.

As I write, I can report having just sent off by air mail to New York – the last
US address of record for me, back in 1963 – my absentee ballot in that state’s
Democrat primary election. I’ve never voted Republican in my life. And I’ve voted all my life, the first time being for John Kennedy. This time I indicated that I favored Dennis Kucinich. I hope that my ballot is counted by someone and not fed through a machine.

Why Kucinich? I’d scarcely even heard of him until two or three years ago. In that interval he has persuaded me that he is the most honest and the most courageous and the most sympathetic to me of all those seeking the Democrat nomination. He seems to me willing to speak truth to power, the consequences be damned. He declares, like the others, that the president and vice-president are disastrous; unlike the others, he introduces a bill to have them impeached.

He has known from the start that the Iraq adventure was wrong, seriously and hugely wrong, yet he is the only one to have followed the logic of that knowledge to its conclusion and voted against the war. For me, as a result, when he pledges to bring the US military back home right away, I believe he’ll actually do it. Is that not a refreshing prospect in a politician?

Similarly, Kucinich has tackled the knotty question of the US so-called health care arrangements uncompromisingly. He has proposed something very like a national health service which would, among other things like encouraging fairness and value for money, bring about an end to shameful public subsidies, which is the present case, of the huge insurance and pharmaceutical concerns.

That’s three good reasons. There are others. Let me admit that I simply like the man’s style: direct, often humorous, honest, intelligent, fluent, courageous. Though he’s poor, that means he’s not in the pocket of some group of financiers as his rivals are. He doesn’t invoke religion. As far as the US goes, that’s two strikes against him already. He can’t win. In the US they like a winner, I’m told.

Why vote for Kucinich then? I suppose that it’s because, life being short, I want to be able to look back to this time and say that I did. I agree with him. I am persuaded that he is right. I wish with all my heart that his was the very model of a modern politician, which it surely isn’t. For me, it seems more and more like a matter of principle. Why, when I’ve got him, vote for someone else? Someone who has a better chance of winning, of beating the opposition, of jumping all the right hurdles and crossing the line first. Someone who’s already compromised, with whom I’m not nearly as fully in agreement, who’s likely, once elected, soon to fall into the same, tired Washington routine as the others. No, that’s a politics of despair. I’ll stick with the one I think’s best, because it’s right. Voilà.

# 4 Grabbed

Must be living right: as I remarked to a long-time correspondent recently, I was well and truly grabbed last week by two, good-looking, black women. What I meant was that their work impressed me, and that I liked their respective dust jacket and New Yorker magazine portraits, but my correspondent can conclude what he likes.

The first one’s name is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She’s a Nigerian writer – great fan of Chinua Achebe – whose stirring novel, Purple Hibiscus, I’ve just completed reading. It was her first. I plan to read all the rest and any others as they are published.

As is, I suppose, proper for a first novel, the autobiographical thread all through this one is quite prominent. Purple Hibiscus tells the story, briefly, of an adolescent girl’s emotional, political, religious and intellectual awakening during a period of unrest in Nigeria. To make more telling the contrast between what she was at the start of the narrative and what she’s become by the end, Adichie casts the girl as
the younger of two children in a family tyrannised by a father who is, to put it mildly, a most sternly authoritarian Christian.

One of the great merits of Adichie’s first novel, for me, is that the characters, as do real people, have three dimensions. That father is no stereotype: his awful, deadening, violent Christianity is, we soon see, one aspect of his life-long striving to repress his inherited culture and become like a white man. A Catholic following the protestant ethic, he’s worked hard and succeeded, materially at least. At the same time, one of the pies he has his fingers in is a newspaper critical of the present regime so, while we can deplore his religious practices, his defence of his editor is altogether laudable. Such realities are vital lessons for adolescents to witness and ponder. He dispenses largesse to needy family and friends, yet he has cut off his own father who will not abandon the traditional ways and gods.

There are other fascinating influences in the girl’s life: her aunt, a teacher at the local university; the young priest on whom she conceives a profound crush; her less articulate brother with his own demons and his way of talking to her with his eyes. In the writing, among the recurring, telling detail of foods, plant life and weather, Adichie makes few concessions to those ignorant of her patois. The prose is sprinkled with native words, usually terms of address or affection, not always translated. If what she feels about this is that the contemporary anglophone reader needs help to make an effort of the imagination, I’m on her side.

Final praiseworthy detail: this novel remains, in the face of sadistic violence from family and army, a feminine novel. What I mean to say is that the ‘take’ on people and events, while unflinching, is also sympathetic, subtle and inclusive. There is a quiet wisdom beneath the goings on that I found very impressive.

My other grabber could, in many respects, be scarcely less like Adichie. A US artist, also young and black and good-looking, she seems, by contrast, assertively bold. All I know of her is what I encountered in a recent New Yorker magazine biography by Hilton Als, “The Shadow Act, a Kara Walker retrospective”. But I immediately liked what I read and saw.

Maybe it’s because she works in silhouettes, black paper cut-outs on a white surface, that the impact of her work is so abrupt and stark. Like the Nigerian writer, a strong theme of Kara Walker’s is the history and place of black people in a white-dominated world. In Walker’s case, however, there will be no fooling with convention. Her vision is a take-it-or-leave-it embracing of essences: eating, shitting, fucking, killing, birthing, toiling. Voilà. And who can deny it?

Not I.

#3 It Takes All Kinds

It Takes All Kinds

A Scottish pal had a saying for it. When handed evidence of yet more human folly in our world, she’d like as not shake her head and declare, “Ay, there’s nane sae queer as folk.” She comes to mind as I struggle to deal with this fresh outrage.

Scanning a favourite on-line news source just now, my eye was caught by the word Facebook. Why? Because not so long ago I’d been persuaded to join it. We’d just had a big family reunion, wanted to keep up the newly re-established contacts, share photos and news, the usual reasons, I imagine. Facebook’s trendy reputation, recent appearance in the Doonesbury comic strip and its association with youth, didn’t hurt. Once I’d mastered, with some help from my son, a few of the technicalities, I found myself thoroughly enjoying the experience, accreting a network of far-flung folk as Facebook friends. (Apologies to the poets among you for that irresistible alliteration).

Then, reading the link (http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/091307WA.shtml click on ‘Go to original’) I find that the Facebook people - these youthful, trail-blazing, inventive, clever people - have decided, in their wisdom, to ban their millions of clients from posting each other photos of themselves nursing their new babies. Already there is a growing cry of protest from young mothers in Australia, I gather. Power to them.

Disillusion, particularly when it comes along with a sense of outrage, is a stirring sensation. How in the world can this happen? What could be the possible objection? Does there in the whole world exist an image more innocently tender and hopeful and wholesome than that of a young mother breast-feeding her new child? I tell myself that there must be something I’m not understanding. There must be something behind this.

Meantime, I sent my daughter the above link, and she emailed back of hearing on a local phone-in program a male caller saying, “I wouldn’t spit in public, so I don’t see why they should breast feed… it’s disgusting.”

She also relates a personal experience of “…a news broadcaster at Sky TV, who got embarrassed at having been chatting to me without realising I was breast feeding… called my agent to lodge an official complaint!! I wasn’t to breast feed in the green room, because ‘not everybody was an arty liberal actor type’… the green room I might add had been empty, and he stuck his head round the door to talk to me, and I was so discreet he’d been standing there for 5 minutes before he noticed…” my own tiny grand-daughter being fed.

Can these experiences of young mothers be no more than another part of that mysterious reality to which men are never privy? I do notice a pronounced absence of young women on the posted list of directors at Facebook. I also notice that there is no address given as a way of sending any of them a message. They’ve cut themselves off from females and the outside world. The site’s being managed from the US leads me to wonder about money. Maybe these young guys are being squeezed by evil reactionaries clutching purse strings. On the other hand, the Facebook HQ is in Palo Alto, California. Can there be a trail of diseased thinking leading back to some local organized religious group?

Whatever the problem is at Facebook, breast-feeding wants to be encouraged, not deplored. I urge all Facebook members and their friends to let their organization know this in no uncertain terms. Such behaviour cannot be tolerated.