Category: Commentary

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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America’s right wing is a lot of things. It’s impervious to facts, immune to empathy, and prone to conspiracy theory. It worships wealth and loathes its absence, and it is sexist and racist and homophobic and transphobic. All of these things inform the American right’s approach to everything, from how it manages its social lives to its approach to public policy. Writer Adam Serwer captured this notably when he said, “The cruelty is the point.”

But it’s not just the cruelty that’s the point. It’s the delight they feel in meting out that cruelty.

This was driven home for me twice in the last few days.

Actor-director Mel Gibson is a deeply talented man whose work I used to enjoy greatly, before he decided to out himself as a racist, a homophobe, and an anti-Semite. I remain gobsmacked that Gibson, who has made no secret of how much hate he’s carrying around in his heart, made a movie as empathetic as The Man Without a Face. But Gibson has been finding his voice welcomed again of late, as the rest of America’s right-wing has in general, with the victory of President 47*. Gibson has been sharing his thoughts on public health issues on the Joe Rogan podcast (because of course you should listen to a right-wing actor-director and a grifting podcaster for your health policy information), and then this weekend he popped up with more opinions about the wildfires in California.

It’s been an article of faith with Republicans that the wildfires have been particularly bad because the governor of California has been doing bad things and because the LA Fire Department is loaded with incompetent leaders who were all DEI hires**. Of course this is total nonsense, but whatever, it’s what they believe. And Gibson believes it too, and he’s been spouting it. But in one particular interview he said something that caught my eye because it crystalizes how America’s right-wing thinks in a very blunt and true way:

“It’s like Daddy arrive and he’s taking his belt off, you know?”

See, it’s not just that they want to craft public policy that’s mean. That’s a given. And it’s not just that their policy proposals aren’t backed by any factual information at all about how things work in the real world, because that’s also a given. It’s that not only do they know that their policies will hurt people, they want their policies to hurt people. And why?

Because they view their policies as punitive in nature.

They aren’t looking to reverse progressive policy because they disagree with it. They are looking to pass as much harmful policy as possible because they are angry with America for ever having passed it in the first place, and they want to punish Americans for it.

“Daddy’s home and he’s taking off his belt.”

Remember that metaphor. These are the people who want to be able to hit kids. These are the people who advocate for spanking. And this is why they join militias and pass “Stand your ground” laws and claim to “Back the Blue”: because not only do they not see progressive Americans as equal citizens, but as wrongdoers who need to be punished.

You see this everywhere. Every time some right-winger opens their mouth on social media, the desire to see people suffer comes through loud and clear. Check out this viral video from TikTok the other day, in which some woman openly states that people getting deported and families getting broken up by ICE agents “gives her great comfort”. (This woman has apparently been identified and let go by her employer, so there’s that.) She’s not just advocating for a policy that hurts people because she thinks that in the end it’s the best policy; she’s advocating for that policy because she likes the idea of hurting people who have somehow wronged her.

“Daddy’s home and he’s taking off his belt.”

They want to punish you for being American and not thinking the way they do. They want to punish you for thinking that your sexual orientation shouldn’t matter. They want to punish you for observing how awfully Black people have been treated. They want to punish you for advocating for the self-determination of women. They want to punish you for having advocated wearing a mask during a pandemic whose disease was conveyed by respiratory transmission. They want to punish you for admitting that climate change is a thing.

Not one policy of theirs is geared toward making anyone‘s life better, except for the rich. Their only policy goal is to punish you. Don’t ask for what. It doesn’t matter. Because ultimately they don’t care about that, either.

* His name will not appear on this site. If that’s a problem for you, bummer.

** “DEI” in this context always means, “non-white”.

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Everything that is to come is what we wanted.

That is all.

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That is all.

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I didn’t watch the debate the other night, but I sure heard about it, and even I had to get in on the meme fun the next day:

Apparently when asked for specifics of his plan for American healthcare once the Affordable Care Act is repealed under his next Presidency, our 45th President said, “I have the concepts of a plan.”

Which, for anyone who has ever paid more than eight seconds of attention to this guy, obviously means, “I have given it zero thought and I have no intention of doing so in the future.” And all the meme-making and joking to mock this obvious bullshit line was fun, but I think it points out another aspect of the news media’s coverage of this campaign that I find incredibly frustrating, even above the fact that they are insisting on treating this campaign and its two candidates as business-as-usual, and ignoring the utter insanity of a party nominating a former President who tried to engineer to a coup to stay in power and who has promised to pretty much follow every authoritarian instinct in his bones. The error here is in treating 45 as if he’s just a mere candidate for the Presidency, instead of treating him as what he is: a former President who served a full term and has a very real record that might just be instructive, if we looked at it once in a while.

Take the healthcare question: “Do you have a plan?” was the question. But that shouldn’t have been the question! He was President already! The question shouldn’t be “What is the plan?” but rather, “You already had four years and no plan was ever proposed. Why should we believe that you have a plan now?” And it would be true. During 45’s first term, at no point did he offer up any proposal or legislative agenda even pointing at a healthcare plan. He never made a single policy suggestion about it. So why on Earth should anybody be giving him any benefit of the doubt here that he’s going to come up with a plan this time?

He has already shown us who he is, so why is our media insisting on treating him as if he’s something totally new?

The best statement about this came, I think, from President Biden, who noted in his speech to the Democratic National Convention that 45 kept promising “Infrastructure Week”, and yet, in Biden’s words, “He never built a damned thing.”

That should be the response every time he says what he wants to do in the second term: “Why didn’t you do that in the first?” When he says we’re not going to have deficits, ask why he exploded them in the first term. When he says we’re going to have great healthcare, ask him why he didn’t touch healthcare in the first term. The man was already President, and his record of terrible policy, horrible court-packing, an economy managed solely for the rich, and eventually a bungled pandemic response and a disastrous economy exists. Let’s stop pretending that those are just things that happened, because the damned guy who made them happen wants another shot.

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