Category: Commentary

Killing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is a particularly galling move. True, I knew it was coming, but even so…it’s just so frustrating watching Republicans kill everything that actually made this the country I grew up in, as they set about creating some stupid fantasy cosplay version of the country they WISH they grew up in (and which a lot of them are going to realize is a country that sucks, once they’re actually LIVING in it).

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In the “Sometimes we laugh to keep from crying” department, a snippet from Friends that seems to me sadly applicable. Joey’s refrigerator has given up the ghost, and his solution was…this.

Happy birthday, America. I guess.

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Remembering this day those who lost their lives fighting in wars under the American flag. I make no attempt this day to adjudicate the justness of any of those wars; there are other days for that.

(image credit)

Every year on this date I listen to this song. It’s been done by many artists, so here it is by the Dropkick Murphys. This song is one of the best artistic meditations on the awful futility of war that I know, because those last words are so absolutely true: “It all happened again, and again, and again….” I don’t find a great deal of solace or even solemnity in Memorial Day, just a sadness that we keep coming back to this and that there will never, ever, be a Memorial Day when we can say, “Interesting, there are no new names to remember this time around.”

I’m also reminded of Lee Blessing’s play A Walk in the Woods, which dramatizes an event in the 1980s when two arms negotiators, one American and one Soviet, got frustrated with the lack of progress and wandered off to put together their own proposal, which was soundly rejected by both sides for being too realistic, I suppose. In that play, Blessing puts these words in the mouth of his Soviet negotiator:

“If mankind hated war, there would be millions of us, and only two soldiers.”

I fnd it hard to disagree with that sentiment.

Here are the Dropkick Murphys.

oh how do you do, young willy mcbride
do you mind if i sit here down by your graveside
and rest for a while in the warm summer sun
i’ve been walking all day, and im nearly done
and i see by your gravestone you were only nineteen
when you joined the great fallen in 1916
well i hope you died quick
and i hope you died clean
oh willy mcbride, was is it slow and obscene

did they beat the drums slowly
did the play the fife lowly
did they sound the death march as they lowered you down
did the band play the last post and chorus
did the pipes play the flowers of the forest

and did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
in some loyal heart is your memory enshrined
and though you died back in 1916
to that loyal heart you’re forever nineteen
or are you a stranger without even a name
forever enshrined behind some old glass pane
in an old photograph torn, tattered, and stained
and faded to yellow in a brown leather frame

did they beat the drums slowly
did the play the fife lowly
did they sound the death march as they lowered you down
did the band play the last post and chorus
did the pipes play the flowers of the forest

the sun shining down on these green fields of france
the warm wind blows gently and the red poppies dance
the trenches have vanished long under the plow
no gas, no barbed wire, no guns firing down
but here in this graveyard that’s still no mans land
the countless white crosses in mute witness stand
till’ man’s blind indifference to his fellow man
and a whole generation were butchered and damned

did they beat the drums slowly
did the play the fife lowly
did they sound the death march as they lowered you down
did the band play the last post and chorus
did the pipes play the flowers of the forest

and i can’t help but wonder oh willy mcbride
do all those who lie here know why they died
did you really believe them when they told you the cause
did you really believe that this war would end wars
well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame
the killing and dying it was all done in vain
oh willy mcbride it all happened again
and again, and again, and again, and again

did they beat the drums slowly
did the play the fife lowly
did they sound the death march as they lowered you down
did the band play the last post and chorus
did the pipes play the flowers of the forest

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One somber, one celebratory.

The first one happened three years ago today. The Wife and I were vacationing in the Finger Lakes region that weekend, and we got back to our cottage after a day visiting the Glass Museum in Corning (or maybe we were in Ithaca that day, and Corning the next)…we checked social media for the first time in hours, and I found multiple messages from people asking if I was safe because they knew I worked at a grocery store in Buffalo. That’s when I was horrified to learn that some racist lunatic decided to arm himself to the teeth, drive to a grocery store in Buffalo that he knew would be mainly frequented by Black people, and open fire.

It remains one of the most horrific days in local history, and will likely continue to be one for many years to come. And I can’t help contrasting that day, and the feelings that followed it, with the climate in this country right now as our elected leaders, placed in power by us, work hard to eliminate “DEI!” and “Woke!” and…look, we all know what that means, don’t we.

Buffalo poet laureate Jillian Hanesworth, who is an enormously gifted voice, wrote this poem in remembrance. It was printed large on the wall of an exhibit at the Buffalo AKG Museum for a while. (I might have my own photo of it, but I can’t find it right now.)

It’s also important to remember, and name, the lives taken that day in the name of hatred and fear and simple blind stupidity:

Roberta A. Drury
Margus D. Morrison
Andre Mackneil
Aaron Salter
Geraldine Talley
Celestine Chaney
Heyward Patterson
Katherine Massey
Pearl Young
Ruth Whitfield

May their memories be blessings for all who knew them…and for those of us who only learned their names when they ended.

UPDATE: I found my photos of the exhibit at the AKG. You can see them here. I somehow never actually uploaded them to Flickr. It was a beautiful and powerful exhibit, and I regret my oversight in not getting these photos posted.

::  On a happier note, today is the 81st birthday of one of the most important forces in my creative life, a man without whose work there is zero chance I’d be the person I am today.

Happy birthday, George Lucas!

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I’m not like many Americans when it comes to the “Founding Fathers”. I do not fall a dead-faint at their feet, the way many of my fellow Americans do. I find that sort of thing fairly performative, and I get a bit irritated whenever a political discussion is raging and the Founding Fathers are invoked: “What would the Founders think of [policy]?” It is fun, though, to see the sputtering that invariably results when I respond, “I don’t care about the Founders.”

We love to get all weepy and lump-in-throat about the Declaration of Independence, but really, we only pretend to get moved about very few of the actual words in that document. Right now, the important stuff probably isn’t the flowery first couple of paragraphs and the “life, liberty, pursuit of happiness” stuff, or the truths we hold to be “self-evident”, because honestly, nothing in recent American history suggests that we hold any of those truths to be evident at all, much less SELF-evident.

Right now the relevant part of the Declaration seems to actually be that long section that comes AFTER the flowery stuff, which is the long list of things that George III did that had those colonists thinking it was time to dissolve the political bonds, et cetera. Particularly interesting, in light of very recent events and the current administration’s activities, are these two items:

For depriving us in many cases, the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

How interesting to find those two things among the list of issues the Colonists had with their Royal government.

Like I said above, I’ve never been one to factor the Founders much into my political thinking–I see no logical reason why political thought in 2025 should be governed by that of a few rich white guys who lived closer to Shakespeare’s time than our own–but that doesn’t mean they’re useless, though. There are still lessons to be found in those dusty old documents, I think.

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Note: I have edited, and added to, this post several times since it went live. This is because my thoughts on this subject are a mess, and there’s a good chance they present as such in the material below.

GRADY: We’re trying to solve a problem here, Billy.
BILLY BEANE: Not like this, you’re not. You’re not even looking at the problem.

–Moneyball (2011)

I haven’t written about the situation in Gaza at all, going back to when it all began with the horrific and unprecedented attacks by Hamas terrorists against citizens of Israel on October 7, 2023. Why haven’t I mentioned it? Mainly because I find the topic of Middle Eastern violence unbelievably saddening, and I have no answers to offer on the situation. It’s been that way since before I was born, and more than that, it’s been that way since thousands of years before I was born.

But maybe that’s not a good enough reason to avoid discussing it entirely. At some point one must offer a testimony to one’s humanity by noting the horrors we keep making for ourselves. (“We” is meant to refer to the entire species here.) I don’t know if powerlessness is a good reason for silence. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t.

I did make one post on Facebook about the events that have taken place in Gaza since all of this current situation began. One, in reaction to a single incident in the ongoing Israeli response. A friend of mine who is actually an Israeli Jew took me to task for that post, and I had to quickly admit that she was right. I took down the post, and we shared an exchange of messages about what’s been happening over there.

My starting point here is that I have never liked or trusted Benjamin Netanyahu. He is far too conservative and belligerent for my tastes, and I do not trust his motivations or goals in the way he is prosecuting the current conflict. I think there is much to justifiably criticize of his worldview in general, and the way it is manifesting in the way he is directing the current war in Gaza.

Maybe it’s the liberal leftist peacenik in me, but I have found myself sympathetic to the throngs of people decrying the violence being visited upon innocent people in Gaza who have had Hamas thrust upon them for too long. Hamas is, after all, not a legitimate governmental body but a terrorist organization, and one of the most militant and violent, to boot. They have taken root in Gaza and assumed control of that region not through any legitimate means, and many Palestinians living in Gaza really are caught between awfulness on one side and a rage-filled response to that awfulness on the other. My sympathy was frustrated in the last American election by people who insisted that they would not vote for the existing administration under the assumption that there was some single act, or small selection of acts, that Joe Biden could have undertaken to end the violence entirely.

Those sympathies were real, but they had limits. And I’m not sure my limits were in the right place.

The Jewish Israeli friend I mention above, and another Jewish author friend, continued to decry what they saw as antisemitism on the part of people who protested the war. This I did not understand, for a long time. I did not see how disapproval of this war was also emblematic of disapproval of Jews in general.

But then, something clicked, during discussions over the last few days on Facebook regarding a recent release of Israeli prisoners by Hamas. One man, held since October 7, 2023, is reported to have stated eagerness to see his wife and children again, not knowing that his very captors murdered them that same day.

That was a brutal reminder that wars don’t happen in a vacuum, and there is never just one set of moral actors in any conflict. And someone, either one of my two friends or someone in their comments, noted something that stopped me in my tracks: Why did all the people who have condemned Israel’s response so stridently said nothing about anything that Hamas has done?

I’ll circle back to that in a minute. First, a literary memory.

(Yes, it will be relevant.)

There was an author in the 20th century named John D. Fitzgerald who is best known for a series of children’s books he wrote, called the Great Brain books. There’s no name for the entire series, but they start off with The Great Brain and those words feature in all the titles that followed. The books tell the story of a Catholic family living in rural Utah in the 1890s, and they are based on real events and experiences from Fitzgerald’s own life. The books are wildly entertaining, though they have admittedly not aged all that well in the nearly sixty years since the series began. As noted the books are loosely (very loosely, I later learned) autobiographical, and Fitzgerald writes them from his own viewpoint, but the main character–the “Great Brain” of the series–is his older brother Tom, who is incredibly intelligent and who never lets anybody forget it. He also has what Fitzgerald, writing as “J.D.”, his younger self, calls a “money-loving heart”. Thomas spends the books cooking up one scheme after another to move money from his brothers’ and his friends’ pockets into his own, and a lot of it is straight-up con-man stuff.

The books also depict what life might have been like in a small Utah town back then. I do not remember if the books take place just before or just after Utah was admitted to the Union, but relationships with Mormons form part of the backbone of the stories, along with the trials and tribulations of young boys growing up in that environment. The depiction of masculinity in these books is admittedly not the best; corporal punishment is routine and accepted, and backing up one’s boasts with one’s fists was always necessary. It’s the kind of world where no dare could be ignored and no fight backed away from.

In one of the first couple books–I don’t recall which one–an old Jewish man moves in to town. His intention is to open his own general store and make his living that way. I honestly don’t remember much about his story, except the end. His name in the book was Abie. Somehow, it’s discovered that Abie is very ill, and it turns out that he’s very ill because he is literally starving to death. His store has failed miserably, he has no money, and he has no food. The Fitzgeralds gather around Abie to try to revive him and give him food, but it’s too late and Abie dies.

Later on, they’re all wondering why Abie never said anything, why they didn’t know that this nice old Jew had starved to death right in the middle of their own community where everyone theoretically cares about everyone else. Fitzgerald’s father, who runs the local newspaper and is often depicted in the books as the smartest man in the town, provides the answer: it’s precisely because Abie was a Jew.

I don’t have copies of these books at all, so I can’t quote them directly, but the reason no one noticed a starving Jew in their own neighborhood was horrible and blunt (and honestly shocking, coming in the middle of a book that’s mostly an entertaining story for middle-grade readers). This isn’t anywhere near the way Fitzgerald has anybody say it in the book, but it boils down very simply to this:

Nobody cares what happens to a Jew.

I’ve thought about that passage off and on for many years. I read those books, several times, each, when I was a kid. I never understood it, not really, or why author Fitzgerald chose to put such a sad and stark lesson right in the middle of a children’s lit novel. And I still don’t, but Fitzgerald was himself a journalist and writer for a time and he wrote his novels in the 1960s, when knowledge of the Holocaust was still pretty new.

I haven’t understood it. I have to be honest about that. I took that anecdote, which stands quite alone in Fitzgerald’s books, to refer to our failure to address with concern the needs of people who are strangers to our community, to people who are “other”. There’s a lot of truth to that, yes. But I suspect that anyone who is a Jew who read those books recognized a different lesson loud and clear: it’s not just an illustration of general suspicion of people who are “other”, it’s that throughout just about all of human history during which Jews existed, Jews have always been “other”.

Back to the main problem, then.

That quote at the top of this post is a useful one, I think. It comes from a movie about baseball, but it’s absolutely true that you can’t hope to solve a problem unless you’ve at least actually identified the problem.

So what is the problem here, today, in Gaza and elsewhere?

It’s a problem with a lot of horrible facets, that much is sure. Can it be reduced to a single sentence? Here’s one way Aaron Sorkin summed it up in The West Wing:

PRESIDENT BARTLET: Ellie had a teacher named Mr. Pordy, who had no interest in nuance. He asked the class why there’s always been conflict in the Middle East and Ellie raised her hand and said “It’s a centuries old religious conflict involving land and suspicions and culture and…” “Wrong.” Mr. Pordy said, “It’s because it’s incredibly hot and there’s no water.”

Is that all it is? I honestly don’t know. That’s probably a bigger piece of it than many prefer to admit, but…well, come on, now. I have no idea what Sorkin was getting at when he wrote that. Yes, there’s a lot of hot and arid country in that part of the world. There are also several great river valleys that saw the rise of some of the greatest early civilizations in the history of our species.

All the other stuff can’t be discounted. Ancient religious hatreds can’t be ignored. (And lest I turn this into a screed against Aaron Sorkin, it baffles me that he takes this route here, because in the first season he dramatized a conflict between India and Pakistan that he directly attributed to “the Subcontinent’s religious malevolence”.) But when we look at the current events in Gaza, and when we’re confronted by people who are rightly horrified by the suffering being visited upon the Palestinians in that land, there’s a question, or a series of questions, that my Jewish friends, and only my Jewish friends, have asked:

Where is the similar condemnation of the attacks on October 7, 2023?

That question leads to others:

Are the Israelis to ignore those attacks? Are they allowed to make response to that level of unprovoked viciousness? Are they supposed to just…accept it? Take it?

And those questions lead to more, which ultimately boil down to one question:

Why is the suffering of Jews just a thing that’s to be accepted in this world?

I have no answer to that. I’m not sure an answer exists that satisfies. I mean, there is an obvious answer to that: it’s just good old garden-variety as-old-as-the-hills anti-Semitism.

So my question ends up being, Why in the world is anti-Semitism so permanent? How is it still a thing? Because I have to conclude that this is very much a part of the constant and ongoing discussion. After a year and a half of listening to folks online and off decrying this war, and as saddened as I am by the war and by my new President’s insanely unhelpful statements about what’s to come, I do have to wonder why it really seems as if the general idea is that the people of Israel, and by extension the worldwide Jewish community, are just supposed to suffer in silence. The suffering of Jews is just factored in, it seems. It’s the cost of doing business.

It saddens me that I’m just now seeing this. My Jewish friends have seen it all their lives, and their parents saw it, and their parents saw it before them. And their children are seeing it.

I’ve seen many protests on behalf of the innocent Palestinians in Gaza, but I haven’t seen any on behalf of the innocents on both sides of this horror, and that has to include Israelis. It has to include Jews. October 7, 2023 was one of the most horrific days for the worldwide Jewish community since the Holocaust itself ended. Were they really to make no response to this? Or have they made the wrong response? If the latter, then…what is the right response? I’m not seeing any of these questions being asked, and it seems to me they need to be. I understand the impulse to center the suffering of the Palestinian community in Gaza as everything has been unfolding, but too often that kind of commentary has shaded toward the idea that the Israelis contributed to the problem in the first place. And as a historical matter, there is absolutely some truth to that, because there is always some truth to that. Events like October 7, 2023 don’t happen out of nowhere.

But we have to be very careful about that line of thinking, because it’s really easy to frame that argument in such a way as to grant the premise that Hamas’s actions on October 7, 2023 were a reasonable and justifiable response to something Israel did previously. And I am unwilling to go that far.

I don’t know what the solution here is. I don’t know that endless war, and a concurrent and constant turning up of the heat, is ever going to accomplish anything. But I think that any movement toward any kind of lasting peace in that region must start with a rejection of the idea, subconscious though it may be, that there exists in this world a population of human beings whose suffering is just baked in to the whole affair. We really do seem largely accepting of the suffering of the Jews, and I don’t believe any of these issues can be solved without acknowledging that. Without looking at the whole problem.

Comments are off for this post. Also, I feel it necessary to note what is screamingly obvious: I am not a Jew, so these thoughts are those of an outsider who cannot ever fully grapple with this entire problem the way someone who is actually IN that community can.

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I’ve just drafted a letter that I will be printing out and mailing to my Representative tomorrow. I will be doing a lot more of this, and when I do, I will share the texts here. I have plans already to write similar letters to my two Senators.

Dear Representative Langworthy,

I am a constituent of yours from Orchard Park, NY. I have lived here since 2003, and in Western New York since my family moved here in 1981. I am writing to you today to express my deep dismay at the levels of power and access to our Federal Government’s financial infrastructure that the current Administration has apparently given to Elon Musk.

Mr. Musk has been very active since the President took office, and just over the last few days he and several underlings were apparently given full access to the nation’s payment systems by the Secretary of the Treasury. Mr. Musk has apparently taken it upon himself to demolish an entire government agency, USAID, which was created by an act of Congress and which presumably can only be legally ended by an act of Congress. He has also assumed control of the mechanisms for the Federal Government’s financial expenditures, which is a power that our Constitution gives to the Congress alone.

It is difficult to know what part of all this is the most alarming. Not only do Mr. Musk’s actions, which are assumed to be endorsed by the President, constitute a usurpation of power by the Executive Branch, but it also does so in deliberate and flagrant violation not just of existing laws but also our Constitution, which I have been led to believe you hold dear. Mr. Musk has been subject thus far to absolutely no Congressional oversight for his actions or of those under him, and for that matter, Mr. Musk now occupies a position of invented authority that was invented out of whole cloth, with no advice or consent by the Senate through the standard confirmation process.

Our nation’s government was constructed with many mechanisms designed to prevent the unwise concentration of power in one branch over another. My fear is that you, and others in the Congressional majority, are actively ignoring those mechanisms and choosing not to employ them in any way, in what is a de facto endorsement of the concentration of power in the Executive Branch, at either the President’s behest or at that of servants like Mr. Musk.

It is my hope, as a constituent of yours, that you will recognize the unacceptable degree of power-seizure that the President and Elon Musk have been carrying out, and that you, along with your colleagues in the United States Congress, will exercise your powers as lined out in the pages of the United States Constitution, to prevent these gross excesses. I do not wish to live in a time when concepts like “checks and balances” and “separation of powers” are judged to be quaint anachronisms, discarded in the dustbin of history in favor of what is clearly an advance of authoritarianism and a seizure of power by the current Executive Branch.

Thank you for your attention.

I’ve no idea what kind of response this will get. We’ll see. I feel I have to do something, and this is a start.

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