Current Events

I heard the huge weekend edition of Haaretz land at my front door at 5:15, like an assignment in the ongoing course called "Current Events," in which I have been enrolled since I was in junior high school, way back in the 1950s, when I was made to believe (as I still do) that it was a citizen's duty to be well informed about his or her locality, country, and world.
A great deal has gone wrong since the end of World War II, when I was born, but the main thing, which everyone was afraid would go wrong, didn't happen. The US and the USSR didn't destroy each other and the whole world with nuclear weapons. Instead, humanity is rapidly destroying the world by increasing in population beyond the ability of the earth to sustain us: despoiling natural resources, causing animals to go extinct, filling the atmosphere with CO2 and other gases, fouling the oceans, over-fishing, and throwing off the balance of nature. And we are still threatened by nuclear war, which will just hasten what seems to be an inevitable end.
I still skim through the paper, and I wouldn't dream of cancelling my subscription to the printed Hebrew edition of Haaretz, because I still do believe that responsible, objective, investigative journalism is one of the few remaining protections that citizens have against abuses of power. But I can't say that I get any pleasure from knowing about endless corruption, mismanagement, violence, crime, obstinate stupidity, and boundless cupidity. The press hasn't proven to be the powerful bulwark against wrongdoing that we perennially hope it will be.
Now we citizens of Israel are learning that our Prime Minister wants to spend billions of euros on three more submarines, which he believes that Israel needs in order to deter Iran from sending nuclear missiles against us, and, incidentally, some of his close friends stand to make fortunes from the deal. We're back in the 1950s. The United States, Russia, and China still have nuclear arsenals and still, apparently, are prepared to use them to hasten the destruction of human life on the earth. And now the huge and powerful nations have been joined be less powerful countries like North Korea, India,  Pakistan, and, of course, little Israel -- soon to be joined by others.
Why are people willing to spend so much money on "defense" -- I have to put the word in quotation marks -- and so little on ending poverty, ignorance, disease, and making the world habitable again? The question is a boring cliche by now, but if no one answers it, and no one figures out how to change direction, it will be less fun to read the newspaper every day, until we're all dead, and the newspapers are extinct, too.
I was awake when the paper came, and it was boring to lie in bed, so at 5:30 I got up and took the paper in. But instead of beginning to read that heavy  bundle of paper, I turned on my computer at 5:30 and wrote this blog entry. Now it's past six, and I might as well make the coffee, unwrap the paper, and see what new misdeeds have been done in the past 24 hours.
I am not hopeful.

Ireland in Print

In honor of, as it were, our trip to Ireland in September, I read (and still plan to read) some contemporary Irish fiction. I started with The Gathering by Anne Enright, which won the Booker Prize in 2007, and nevertheless I couldn't stand it, mainly because the first-person narrator was a person in whose company I didn't want to spend as much time as it took to read the novel. But the book appeared to be a realistic portrayal of modern Irish society - post-Catholic, post-colonial struggle, and relentlessly cold and alienated. Why did it win the Booker Prize? Because the British enjoy nasty people.

Then I read fine collection of short stories by Frank O'Connor, My Oedipus Complex, with an eloquent and appreciative introduction by Julian Barnes. O'Connor, unlike Enright, projects an affable authorial presence. He is a master of description and an insightful portraitist, aware of his characters' weaknesses, not bashful about presenting them, but still very fond of them. Although O'Connor died more than fifty years ago, his fiction isn't dated, though the Ireland he depicts is long in the past.

After that I read a trilogy by Roddy Doyle, The Last Roundup, starring Henry Smart, born in 1900, a child of the Dublin slums, taking him through the revolution against the English, to America, and then back to post-WWII Ireland (improbably, to say the least, to 2010). Doyle writes in the realist tradition. Everything about the settings of the books is realistic, but almost nothing about the action of the characters. Henry was a political assassin as a teenager and remains fairly dishonest and occasionally violent throughout his fictional life, yet he remains sympathetic - perhaps because he is more like a folklore hero than a realistically intended character, and none of his exploits seems real. In truly realistic fiction he would have died at the end of the first volume. Doyle puts historical characters into his books, like Louis Armstrong and John Ford - and I wasn't convinced by that touch either. Nevertheless, the books have a good bit of energy, and I didn't stop reading till I got to the last page of the third volume.

I also bought The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien, which I expected to be a detective novel and turned out to be a wildly surrealistic riff, totally off the wall. My wife only managed to read about a third of it before being so confused that she gave up, but I pushed through the whole book (it's not long, though it feels that way) and, on balance, I'm glad I read it.

The unnamed narrator of the book somehow (we find out how in the end) wanders out of our familiar world into a strange and often beautiful countryside and is detained by two enormous policemen, who mainly talk double-talk: "The finding of the pump is a fortunate clue that may assist us in our mission of private detection and smart policework. Put it in your pocket and hide it because it is possible that we are watched and followed and dogged by a member of the gang."

There are frequent, highly poetical descriptions of the landscape, as well as detailed descriptions of impossible things: 

"He went over then to the dresser and took small articles like dry batteries out of a drawer and also an instrument like a prongs and glass barrels with wires inside them and other cruder articles resembling the hurricane lamps utilized the Country Council."

The two policemen are obsessed with bicycles, which, in this strange world, are animate and half-human (and humans are half-bicycles). This is not the world as we know it, but is realism what we want? Yes, because when a book is so weirdly non-realistic like The Third Policeman, we are fully disoriented.

 "A smell is the most complicated phenomenon in the world," he said, "and it cannot be unravelled by the human snout or understood properly although dogs have a better way with smells than we have." "But dogs are very poor riders on bicycles," MacCruiskeen said, presenting the other side of the comparison.

But if fiction is too realistic, it can be very depressing, because life, as one of O'Brien's characters says, is not always fun: 

"Many a man has spent a hundred years trying to get the dimensions of it and when he understands it at last and entertains the certain patterns of it in his head, by the hokey he takes to his bed and dies! ... It is a queer contraption, very dangerous, a certain death-trap. Life?"

We lose ourselves in fiction (of course including films and plays) to get away from life, but also to figure it out. Fiction takes us a couple of steps out of our lives, so we can turn around and view them from a new perspective. The Third Policeman took me a lot farther than I am used to being taken, into a kind of prolonged dream, which was funny at times and often deeply unsettling. (Samuel Beckett is an Irish relative in spirit to Flann O'Brien.)

My next Irish venture is going to be a real detective novel. Let's see how that goes.

Remembering Rabin and Trying to Forget Trump

Last night I attended an in-progress performance of  "November," a small-scale opera with words by Myra Noveck and music by Danny Paller (both friends of mine). I even made a small contribution to the performance by playing an 8 measure overture on tenor sax.
For those of us who lived through the period leading up to and following the assassination, this opera stirred up painful memories. I was at the demonstration where Rabin was shot. I even saw his car drive away and remember thinking how happy and satisfied he must feel, after the triumphant support he had received. Of course, I hadn't the slightest idea that he was mortally wounded and being rushed to the hospital.
Fortunately, no one was assassinated in the US presidential campaign, but for me, Hilary Clinton's defeat appears to be a tragic moment in modern political history, the beginning of a downward spiral. People who share my views were hoping that Hilary would win convincingly and bring in at least a democratic majority in the Senate, progressive justices on the Supreme Court, and so on. No need to elaborate.
I have read that Trump plans to appoint a "scientist" who denies climate change as head of the Environmental Protection Commission. Isn't that a little like the South African president who denied that AIDS was a STD?
Myra Noveck presented the opera about Rabin as part of the historical debate: great men versus great forces. Would the Bolsheviks have won without Lenin? Would the Nazis have risen without Hitler? Would the British have given up without Churchill? Would the extreme right have won in the US without Trump? Would we have come to a peace agreement with the Palestinians with Rabin and without Yigal Amir?
Obviously these hypothetical questions remain hypothetical. We had Lenin, Hitler, Churchill, Trump, and Amir. What's done can't be undone.
Nonetheless, I believe in what I call Reality, for want of a better word. Untenable situations do not, in the long run, abide. Whether or not the head of the EPC believes in climate change, the glaciers will keep melting, the sea will keep rising, the summers will keep growing longer, diseases will keep spreading, the deserts will expand, and, probably, we won't be able to do a thing about it -- and we wouldn't even if Elizabeth Kolbert were the head of the EPC.
Maybe when all of Florida and half of Manhattan are  under water, and half the islands in the Pacific have been wiped off the map, when droughts and famines have made today's refugee crisis look like a traffic jam in rush hour, people will start doing the right thing.

The Flood is no Longer After Me

People really don't know what horrible French aristocrat said, "Après moi le déluge" - the flood will come after me - Louis XV or his mistress, Madame de Pompadour - and whether it was said (if it was said) in despair - after me, the flood will come, I'm the only one holding back the waters - or in cynicism - the flood is coming after me, and I don't give a damn, because I'll be dead anyway.
Soon I'll be seventy-two. Leonard Cohen just died at 82, and no one thinks he died young. So do I have another ten years? Who knows?
When I'm in a particularly gloomy mood, I wonder which of my friends will attend my funeral, and which of their funerals I will attend.
When I read disastrous predictions about rising sea-levels and all the other attendant disasters of climate change, I comfort myself, egotistically, by thinking that I'll probably be dead by the time the catastrophic scenario plays out, though I'm not at all happy to think that my children and grandchildren will be around to suffer.
But the election of Donald Trump tells me that the deluge is already here.
I have lived to see the fatal malfunction of American democracy, probably a harbinger of the breakdown of democracy all over the world.
One of my favorite Jewish benedictions is the "shehekhianu" - thank you, God, for keeping us alive and sustaining us and bringing us to this time. But can any sober person thank God for getting us to this time, when a dangerously unqualified man is about to assume leadership of the most powerful country in human history?
So, the tidal wave has broken upon our shores.
The flood has come.
Is there any reason to think the waters will recede?

Disheartened

The final US election results were available in Israel early on Wednesday morning. When I woke up, I expected and hoped for a landslide in favor of Hilary Clinton, and the end of Donald Trump's political existence. Maybe that's what took place in an alternative universe.
The pundits are already busy with predictions and analyses, but they are irrelevant to the way I take the result personally: Hilary Clinton's defeat was the defeat of some of my deepest values.

***

I am no stranger to political alienation.
I grew up in a liberal democratic environment, and the Eisenhower years, as well as McCarthyism, were good training for a future of discontent.
After a brief flareup of hope, when Kennedy was elected -- hope that was tragically extinguished when he was assassinated -- my alienation grew. My decision to move to Israel in 1973 was motivated half by positive Jewish identification and half by that negative political alienation. Nixon was president, the end of the Vietnam War didn't appear to be in sight, and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been murdered.

***

Here in Israel, my political alienation might be even more extreme that it was back in the US, because I care so much about what happens. We are approaching the anniversary of the Rabin assassination, and the parties that fomented the hatred leading to that assassination have been ruling the country.
I don't want to be alienated. I want to be proud of my government and to believe that it has the best interests of all the citizens in mind. I'd even be pleased if I believed that the government and I agreed on what was in our collective best interest -- which I don't.
My only ray of hope regarding America is the thought that the winner-take-all system in the US makes the half of the people who voted against Trump invisible. But they are not going to go away.
I'm not sure I see a similar ray of hope here in Israel.
Here, too, many of my most deeply held values are brutally rejected by the people who govern the country.

Time Change, a Nightmare, the American Elections

In the few days since we set the clock back, I have been disoriented. I almost always know, pretty accurately, what time it is. I often check myself, saying, "It must be four-thirty now," and then I look at my watch and see that I wasn't far off. But now the clock on my computer is telling me that it's ten after five, and my sense of time is telling me that it's ten after six, and, until we set the clock back, I would have been out of bed by this hour. The coffee would be made, and I would be reading Haaretz in Hebrew, getting angry at another awful thing that my government has done or wants to do.

***

I woke up at half-past four in the morning out of a dream of disorientation. I was waiting for  the bus to my pottery class, close to downtown Jerusalem, but instead of waiting where I usually wait, on the Hebron Road, a very busy, wide street with heavy traffic, I was waiting on a quiet side street. A long time passed, and the bus didn't come. I was thinking of calling up my teacher and telling her that I was going to be late, because I am an obsessively punctual person and usually come early to the class, which is not always convenient for my teacher.
Actually, two days ago, when I was really waiting for the bus to my class, it came later than I expected, and I was afraid I would be late.
In my dream, after waiting for an inordinate amount of time, I took a  closer look at the bus stop  and saw that the bus I needed didn't pass by there at all, so I started walking, looking for the bus number I needed. Suddenly I was in a strange city, which I knew was Paris, but I didn't know where I was in "Paris," where I had to go, or how to get there. I asked a man in the street, who was extremely pleasant and anxious to set me on the right path. He had a little slip of paper in his hand, maybe with the address of my pottery class, and he kept squinting up at the street signs.
I realized that he didn't know how to get there either, so I gave up on trying to get to the class and left the man, the strange city, and the dream -- I woke up.
I often have Lost in a Strange City dreams, nightmares, really, where I take the wrong bus and can't figure out where it has taken me or how to get where I want to go.

***

A week from tomorrow the world will know who has won the elections in the United States, and I imagine I won't sleep very well from now till then. Most of my friends agree with me politically and support Hilary Clinton, but I have a couple of friends, men whom I like, who detest Hilary. One of them sent in an absentee ballot for Trump, and the other, for the first time, has decided not to vote at all.
I cannot explain the chasm between my way of thinking and theirs.

***

Since I live far away from America, and I don't watch television, my exposure to the campaign has been limited and more or less under my own control. I can read the articles in the paper if I feel like it, and I can watch the clips on my computer, if I feel like it. And I seldom feel like it. Nothing that has happened since the very beginning of the presidential campaign has changed the way I intended to and finally did vote.
It's hard for me to imagine someone who can't make up their mind, someone with no clear political leaning, someone who can be convinced to vote one way or another by a political campaign. But there are millions of them out there, and they are going to determine the outcome of the election and, to be dramatic, the fate of the world. Perhaps declaring oneself undecided is a way of feeling powerful. I certainly don't believe the public opinion polls that are published every minute or so. Hilary's lead doesn't make me confident. I won't rest easy until she has actually won - and even then the contest will be far from over.
I am fearful, because American power is so important, and the outcome of this election matters not only to America, but to the whole world. I am worried because so many citizens of the United States support Trump. He's too old and not ideological enough to start a true fascist movement, but he's shown the potential for it, and a younger demagogue will undoubtedly seize the opportunity his campaign has revealed. The huge pool of Trump supporters will not evaporate after he loses the election, and, if he wins, it will inundate the entire country.
In my working life, I am editing the translation from German of a biography of Werner Scholem, the elder brother of the eminent scholar of Kabbalah, Geshom Scholem. Werner was a devout Communist, a prominent leftist politician in his day, and he was murdered by the Nazis. I've reached 1933 in the book, the year that Hitler came to power, and the events are harrowing. Within weeks the German legal system was hijacked and placed in the service of the Nazi dictatorship.
The rightist government in Israel is also trying to pass anti-democratic laws, and a lot of citizens support the idea.
The next American president will nominate Supreme Court Justices, who will decide what is legal in the United States for decades. Reactionary judges will create a reactionary legal system. The prospect is horrifying - at least to me.

***

Is this connected to my dream?
I think so.
We are all waiting for a bus to take us somewhere, but it won't come, and we'll never get there.