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Only if we let them…

This week I received an email with one of the irregular posts by the Public Professor, whose writing I cherish. Akim Reinhardt, whose shifts in careers and locations exceed even mine, has the gift to combine learnedness with humor and a way of simplifying complex issues in his writing so that pretty much everyone gets it. What could be easily didactic and preaching, instead often elicits a “Man, so clever and so true!” reaction in me.

When I saw the title – The Barbarians Won – I immediately thought of one of my favorite poems, C.P. Cavafy’s Waiting for the Barbarians, prescient lines written in 1898. The poem inspired Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) a novel by South African novelist J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. Both poem and novel are considered crucial metaphors in literary reactions to western colonialism and the war on terror.

But Cavafy’s poem was sardonic, while Reinhardt’s latest musings seemed atypically pessimistic (and they were written even before the abysmal farce happening at the SKCOTUS (Supreme Kangaroo Court) hearings this week.) He grants the Barbarians their overall victory and ends with a line, “I should leave.”

I agree that an occasional time-out, a pause to replenish, is restorative and necessary to keep up the good fight – to wit my last month which filled me with joy, among others, watching the ravens. But leave?

The Barbarians Won

The barbarians have won.

The barbarians and their fascination with gadgets have won, the newest one appearing daily.  Our eyes forever fixed on blinking toys.

The barbarians and their craving for the now have won, clocks all clicking in time.  We march, bedraggled, to the sound of clanging bells.

The barbarians and their printed words have won, page after page stacked and bound.  No matter what we want, they cite a passage of denial; no matter what we avoid, they read a mandate.

The barbarians and their lust for shiny trinkets have won, their new world a wasteland of flashy baubles.  The stars are washed out above us.

The barbarians and their cars have won, sleek tonnage racing along endlessly.  Road kill marks the miles.

The barbarians and their lines have won, squares and rectangles laid about and stacked all around.  The circle of life has been shaved and shoved into corners.

The barbarians and their foods have won, boxed mac n cheese and flour tortilla tacos washed down with Diet Coke.  We check our cholesterol and blood sugar.

The barbarians and their fashions have won, fast and ready to wear.  There’s elastic in our jeans and advertisements on our shirts and hats.

The barbarians and their time have won, clocks spinning and blinking and buzzing.  We march on their schedule.

The barbarians and their bar-bar talk have won, countless languages stricken from mouths and ears.  We can think only this way.

The barbarians and their arrogance have won, their shouted assertions offered up as commandments.  No one can be right who disagrees with them.

The barbarians and their freedom have won, forever doing whatever they want.  Individuals left alone to fend for themselves, to decide what miseries they will inflict upon others or endure alone.

The barbarians and their colors have won, white and gold exalted.  The black and brown discarded.

The barbarians and their bureaucracies have won, victory in triplicate.  We stand in line, waiting to fill out forms and be bound in red tape.

The barbarians and their erasures have won, clean scrubbings of the past.  Can we still remember what the barbarians did?

The barbarians have won, and now we are waiting for them to leave.

I should leave.

Generally, I think departing and declaring victory for the bad guys is premature. Let’s focus on some positive occurrences across the last weeks to keep us from despairing:

  • Ukraine Aid made it through congress, better late than never.
  • More student loan forgiveness
  • The FTC banned the use of non-compete clauses, huge bonus for labor.
  • The DOL strengthened overtime rules
  • The FCC restored net neutrality
  • The DOT expanded protections for airline passengers
  • The School Voucher scam in TN failed to make it through this legislative period.
  • The Arizona house repealed the 1864 law (even if it took three tries to get there.)
  • Major American Unions endorsed the democratic Presidential candidate.
  • Trump LOSES his bid for a new trial or a judgment overturning the more than $80 million verdict for E. Jean Carroll in the second trial.
  • Even though it looks like a majority of SC judges are perfectly happy to reinstall a monarch (as long as he is not a Democrat) the proceedings in other law arenas seem to indicate that accountability is still on the table. An Arizona Grand Jury charged 11 AZ Republicans and seven former Trump aides with felonies around a fake elector scheme. In NYC, the trial proceedings reveal a flailing, shrinking, feeble defendant – regardless of outcome, the image of a cult leader is starting to crack.

If you have time to read, here is a fascinating essay by John Ganz on the ways Trump embodies two different personae – the actual banal criminal (as seen in the Manhattan proceedings), and the sovereign king with impunity for all crimes (as discussed in the SC proceedings.) The man will eventually succumb, but the idol might very well be enshrined into our laws, if the extremist have their way.

If this is not enough of cheer leading, we can always turn to Marc Aurelius, who was born on this day in 121 AD: “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

I’ll go watch the birds some more…. while listening to music about ravens.

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Seeing and (Dis)Believing.

Changing times and changing technology can sometime steal from us things we once had. And sometimes what they steal is hard to replace. Consider the means we have all had and used for knowing the world, and knowing what is real. The common expression is “seeing is believing.” The courts rely on witness testimony and reject as hearsay second-hand evidence. And in a range of moral and religious settings, we emphasize the importance of bearing witness.

Photographs today are from my favorite Chilean Puppet Theatre Group SILENCIO BLANCO. Make believe where it belongs: in art and on the stage.

There is surely no question that first-hand viewing of an event or a situation is enormously compelling. Consider a peculiar Gedanken-experiment: imagine that we have you stand at the edge of a roof, blindfolded, and we urge you to step off the edge. We race to reassure you, though, that you will fall only 18 inches, because there is a safe and secure net positioned so that you are in no danger. We tell you this. We arrange for your best friend to tell you this. We arrange for your spiritual advisor to tell you this. But no matter who tells you, surely you would be more comfortable if you could lift the blindfold and inspect the safety net for yourself. There really is no substitute for first-hand, visual evidence.

This reliance on first hand-experience, and the powerful visual evidence it provides, is at risk from multiple threats. In a recent NYT editorial on partisan perception, Paul Krugman lamented that in our insanely polarized world, we have to reverse the original aphorism, because now “Believing is Seeing.” In other words, people’s opinions and beliefs are so heavily entrenched that they are ready to discount, or reinterpret, or flatly refuse the evidence of their own eyes. We see this, for example, in people’s refusing to acknowledge the videos by eyewitnesses documenting the horrors and war crimes happening in Gaza, or the carnage wrought by Hamas on October 7th.

In some cases, people are so committed to their views, that they refuse even to consider, even to look at visual evidence that will challenge their view. In other cases people choose not to look, because seeing would be too painful. This is understandable, but means people underestimate, or fully fail to understand, the extent of the horrors. Importantly, in many cases, people flatly deny the truth of what they see and declare it faked. In still other cases, people are not permitted to see the visual evidence – a state or an agency monitoring what gets published, fully aware of the impact the prohibited visuals might have.

All of these points are fueled by the rapid advances in digital photography. Speaking as a well practiced montage artist, I, of course, have a sense of how easily images can be manipulated to make them show what you want to show. But what artistry allows is dwarfed by what digital technology makes available to anyone who wishes to manufacture bogus evidence for almost any claim they wish to advance.

Here is a short list what bad actors using AI have already managed to fake in order to influence the 2024 elections. We are stuck with a situation where multiple factors combine: videos are either true or false, and we are told that they are either true or false (irrespective of their actual truth content) and we ourselves have to decide if we trust them or not- a difficult task, magnified by our desire to believe those we generally trust and who tell us to adopt their claims.

(If you are interested in a deeper exploration of the legal issues around regulating media deep fakes in the political arena, the Brennan Center for Justice has a great overview here.)

What to do? The power and immediacy of first hand experience is likely hardwired into us, making us appallingly vulnerable to things like deep fakes. The apprehension that we encounter fake input and fall for it can lead to a different disaster, however: to avoid being duped, we end up trusting no input. The solution may require a set of new habits. When you encounter information, do what you can to check it against other independent sources. (This is, of course, increasingly difficult as Murdoch and Sinclair take over more and more media outlets.) When you encounter information, do what you can to scrutinize who it is that is supplying the information. Be wary of “semi-anonymous” reporting, with entries like “a new study has shown…” or “it is reported that.”

The deepest problem here, though, is that many people don’t have the skills, resources or the inclination to take these cautionary steps. And so instead, they simply latch onto a single source that they deem trustworthy. Unfortunately this choice may lead them to rely on lunatic propaganda. Furthermore, selecting different sources of input as trustworthy, with the young relying on social media videos coming directly out of Gaza, filmed by eyewitnesses, and the old relying on Fox news, or the main stream media that avoid showing videos of the suffering unfolding in Gaza in the first place, further feeds the political polarization (one only has to look at the generational divide in people’s taking sides in this conflict, which doesn’t come out of nowhere.) “Propaganda!” each societal subset shouts against the other.

The habit of seeing is believing cements in place views that may be based on incomplete or distorted input. Something that once was a valuable capacity can these days become an obstacle to the truth. I wish I had a solution.

Music to day is Quieter than Silence.

And here is a short clip of the puppetry, a performance called Pescador.

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Not all is doom and gloom.

As an antidote to my habitually bleak news these days, I thought I’d collect and present what brought me fun, knowledge and/or encouragement across the last week.

HOPE:

In Germany literally millions of people marched against the far right now for two consecutive weeks, with demonstrations particularly strong on Holocaust remembrance day. “Germany’s constitutional court stripped a neo-Nazi party of the right to public financing and the tax advantages normally extended to political organizations, a decision that could have implications for countering the Alternative for Germany, a far-right party whose growing popularity has caused concerns among parts of the population.”

Below is what demonstrators got to see on a high-rise in Düsseldorf.

“The difference between 1933 and 2024? You!”

EDUCATION:

And also this…..

I did not know that.

RELIEF:

The International Court of Justice in The Hague walked a fine line in their ruling on the genocide case against Israel brought by South Africa; here is a compilation of short, informative expert opinions on the implications, offered by the Atlantic Council (not exactly a hotbed of progressivism). Here are the take-aways from The Guardian, slightly more to the left. And here the ruling is declared a historic victory for the Palestinians by The Intercept. Then again, Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir declares it: Hague Shmague. Fact is, the case is taken up, will stretch out for years, but importantly for now, the court ordered Israel to “take all measures” to avoid acts of genocide in Gaza, a ruling that is, however, unenforceable.

FUN:

I discovered a site, Artbutmakeitsports, that manages to combine knowledge of art and sports in ways that had even me, the least sportive person in the world, laugh with delight.

Autumn, by Mikhail Larionov, 1912

The Harvesters, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565.

Last, but not least,

CONTENTMENT:

I finally managed to bring some of my affairs in order, figuring out what to do in the case of eventual demise. Unlike those whose adherence to religion faiths proscribes what to do, I had to make difficult decisions myself. I’ve never wanted to imagine myself cooped up in a coffin. I did not like the idea of cremation due to its horrid environmental impact. They now offer an alternative, where your remains get literally composted and then, except what urns relatives might claim, gets used to fertilize reforesting projects in the PNW forests. “Mami Mulch!” as my beloved declared. And now I don’t have to think about it ever again…

When I am Among the Trees

 
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
 
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
 
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
 
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

By Mary Oliver

I might not shine in this world, but I can sure make it grow!

And here is sunlight and a breeze flittering through the tree canopy – Liszt‘s music at its best.


 

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Learning from the Best

I came across the document from 1944 by chance, but was immediately intrigued. The Simple Sabotage Field Manual was originally written by the OSS (Office of Strategic Services,) the forerunner to the CIA, an organization formed as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for all branches of the United States Armed Forces.

It gives detailed instructions how to harm productive outcomes in organizations of all kinds and was distributed by the Allies to cooperative citizens in Europe during the war. Declassified in 2008, finally, it has made the rounds in business schools and board rooms. (Ref.)

Part of the instructions focus on slow-walking the decision-making process, trusting that a delayed outcome, as it often does, has adverse consequences. In that regard it reminds me of the insane slow-walking by multiple players that we are seeing in our current political landscape. Those in power can delay and defer, until it is too late – court cases becoming moot, or their outcomes no longer able to influence real world results. Simple sabotage? I’d say a more serious one, if you consider the real life consequences of these actions.

As one example, think of gerrymandering election districts, which will remain on the ballot if the judges don’t pick up the cases or slow-walk them through the court system. A good example here is the Supreme Court’s glacial pace in the Alabama gerrymandering case which led to allowing maps it later held were unconstitutional and discriminatory to be used in the 2022 midterm election. Citizens were deprived of their rights simply through slow -walking.

Currently, the Ohio AG is slow-walking a petition to put an anti-gerrymandering amendment onto the November 2024 ballot, again potentially curtailing significant rights to Ohio citizens. (Ref.)

Another issues is connected to Congress’ slow-walking of aid decisions – any delay of potential help for Ukraine, for example, indirectly aides and abets the aggressor in this war, with irreversible consequences, if the delay leads to Russia winning the war. Here is an excellent essay about this topic by Yale historian Timothy Snyder from just yesterday.

Another example that springs to mind are the legal issues associated with Trump indictments, across multiple states and for diverse accusations.

Judge Cannon in Florida, presiding over the stolen documents case, for example, has managed to drag out the proceedings in ways that will open possibilities for the accused to claim political interference in the election campaign once he was chosen in the primary, or, worse, allow himself as future president to attempt self-pardoning.

Then there are the cases that are on hold while the issues of absolute immunity, claimed by Trump, are waiting for appellate or Supreme Court decisions.

In addition, we are waiting to see how the Supreme Court contorts to handle the Colorado and Maine 14th amendment cases where Trump was not permitted to appear on the ballot for the primaries (note, NOONE has said or argued that he is prohibited from the ballot in a general election, as afar as I know, so far.) A timely decision is of incredible importance, since recent polls reveal that Americans who plan to vote for Trump in 2024 claim they would change their vote if a jury convicts him of a crime.

The best summary of the 14th amendment issues, pro and against Trump, can be found here, by legal scholar Ian Millhiser. Another great break-down of what individual scholars of constitutional law fear or predict regarding the SC decision-making process was offered in yesterday’s Washington Post.

As you will see, slow-walking is high on the list for an institution that wants to see a certain outcome without making itself vulnerable to accusations of putting – yet again – a thumb on the scale of an election outcome….

Photographs today show cloud-laden vistas, the fog of war against democracy was my immediate association. The sabotage manual and its instructions to fog up the process is still in use.

Music is Debussy’s Fog (Brouillard) from the Preludes.

Here is the full Prelude set, if you want to have your dark winter evening filled with light….

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The Pear Tree revisited.

I figured I’d offer some reassurance at the beginning of 2024: YDP will be as eclectic as ever, as haphazard in what gets picked up and woven in with the rest of what fills my brain, so that you can rely on at least one thing remaining the same in your lives.

For a start it’ll be some thoughts by the Italian Marxist Antonin Gramsci, a poem by Ruth Awad, a Lebanese-American poet who is also a tattoo artist and an insurance manager who collects rescue Pomeranians, and some views of my pear tree. How is that for a mix?

House Finches

Regular readers are familiar with the pear tree, and its neighboring hawthorn tree, seen from my chair where I hang out when my body – what else is new – vetoes the plans for various hikes and outings yet again. It is where I found myself last week, amazed at the variety of birds who kept me company this late in the season, a humming bird included.

Anna’s Hummingbird

It gave me time to reread Gramsci, in particular his apropos musings on (not) celebrating the New Year. I don’t share his sentiment of hating the occasion, although I don’t love New Year’s either. At my age, frankly, one of the thoughts that is inescapable when you are feeling lousy and the numbers change from ’23 to ’24, is personal: will this be the year I die? After all we lost a lot of friends this year – here is an Oregon ArtsWatch list which included a mirror photograph I took of Henk Pander during our Mutual Portraits project, a close friend enormously missed.

But Gramsci sets me right in the rest of his one page-proclamation: you want to focus on continuity and spirit, not on breaking points and final balances, filled with resolutions that you will not keep.

“I want every morning to be a new year’s for me. Every day I want to reckon with myself, and every day I want to renew myself…..I would like every hour of my life to be new, though connected to the ones that have passed.”

Song Sparrow

In one of the stranger deliberations I’ve read in a while, he also hopes for the arrival of socialism in order to jettison the celebration dates handed down by the ancestors. I guess it would give us something to talk about, shared hopes for differing reasons….

Thrushes

Not so sure what I would talk about with today’s poet, Ruth Awad, whose work, as far as I’ve read it, lacks the balance of emotionality and intellect that I so crave. If that sounds condescending it is not meant to be – there is much to be said for the offerings of the Ruth Awads or Maggi Smiths of the world, embraced by contemporary readers for their accessibility and courage to be sentimental. If it keeps an interest in poetry alive, so be it.

I mean it.

Black capped chickadees

The poem below, published in The Atlantic at the end of the year, drew me in, though, for one specific sentiment, expressed in the last words:

“…if only you’ll let he world soften you with its touching.”

To let the world soften us, or even better, to comfort and fill us with occasional awe at a time when we tend to harden from fear and/or sorrow, we have to attend to it. The “world” is all around us, easily, constantly available, no extravagant or even local excursions needed. You just have to sit and look, birds perching in the pear tree, reminding us of an existence not governed by dates, or resolutions, just renewal from hour to hour, here, now, in 2024.

Gramsci’s theory of Hegemony, a strategy of power pursued through cultural work, can wait. So can my knitting. Or folding the laundry. I just look at the birds. It is healing.

White crowned sparrow

Reasons to Live

Because if you can survive
the violet night, you can survive

the next, and the fig tree will ache
with sweetness for you in sunlight that arrives

first at your window, quietly pawing
even when you can’t stand it,

and you’ll heavy the whining floorboards
of the house you filled with animals

as hurt and lost as you, and the bearded irises will form
fully in their roots, their golden manes

swaying with the want of spring—
live, live, live, live!—

one day you’ll put your hands in the earth
and understand an afterlife isn’t promised,

but the spray of scorpion grass keeps growing,
and the dogs will sing their whole bodies

in praise of you, and the redbuds will lay
down their pink crowns, and the rivers

will set their stones and ribbons
at your door if only

you’ll let the world
soften you with its touching.

by Ruth Awad

Chestnut backed Chickadees

Music today is conducted by a guy named Birnbaum – pear tree – the enchanting second movement of Schubert’ Symphony #8, the Great.

Here is the full version with a different orchestra, Mallwitz conducting.

Nuthatch

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On Warnings

Yes, the plan was to brighten the pre-Christmas week with something up-lifting. It has changed, wouldn’t you know it.

Yes, there were matters important enough to discard my good intentions, namely events in Germany with lessons for us here in the U.S. as well.

And yes, lots to read and digest today. I will reward the patient readers with Poulenc’s choral Christmas music in the end, however tangential it might be. It is of ethereal beauty.

Two seemingly irreconcilable events happened some days apart, both echoing a darker German past. One was the election of Germany’s first mayor as representative for a right-wing extremist party (as officially declared by the German FBI,) the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), in Pirna, Saxony.

The other was a shitstorm descending around the recipient of this year’s Hannah Arendt Prize for political thought, Russian-American journalist and writer, Masha Gessen. After they published an essay in the New Yorker that critically examined current events in the Middle East and compared them to a fascistic historical context, all hell broke loose. Jewish organizations in Germany officially complained and the foundation that awards the prize officially distanced themselves and retracted the invitations to a planned celebratory reception, as did the host city of Bremen. The prize itself could not legally be withdrawn, and a presentation of the award happened in the end, under much reduced publicity and with the police attending to “protect attendants.”

Let me provide some background on both events.

Pirna is a city the size of Portland, OR, in Saxony, a state known for its considerable base of right-wing extremists who carry anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic sentiments on their banner. The first round of this year’s mayoral elections (a 7 year cycle) saw three candidates split the vote pretty evenly. One from the conservative party CDU, one from the center-right Freie Wähler, a party mostly operating on communal levels, and Tim Lochner, a carpenter with no political experience, representing the AfD. He won the run-off election last Sunday, since the other two parties were unwilling to compromise and withdraw one of the candidates in order to consolidate the reciprocal vote which would have spelled a certain loss for the extremist. Clinging to power against the odds (as well as very low turnout) threw the election to a neo-fascist.

This is particularly horrifying in light of the history of the city.

Pirna was one of six sites that served as the laboratory for killing human beings in gas chambers on an industrial scale, before transferring the method to concentration camps. A psychiatric facility, located in the old fort/castle Sonnenstein above the city, housed mentally ill and people with disabilities from the 1800s to 1939. It was declared an euthanasia institution in the context of the “Aktion T4” (the systematic killing of “unworthy life”) and between June 1940 and August 1941 almost 14.000 patients from all over Germany and an additional 1000 prisoner transfers from the Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Auschwitz concentration camps were gassed in the basement showers. It took until the year 2000 (!) to inaugurate a memorial to the victims in situ.

So here the city elects a mayor who is affiliated with a party known to carry the legacy of national-socialistic times with gusto, hoping to re-install the “values” of the Reich, normalizing racism, violence and anti-democratic leanings, among others. His first actions upon taking office? “I will meet with all individual members of city hall and check their loyalty.” Sounds familiar?

Major Jewish organizations commented on the election results, including the International Auschwitz Committee, seated in Berlin. They see the outcome of the election as a bitter signal to democratic parties that their willful competition with each other plays into the hands of extremism, enabling the steady march of the right-wing extremists into positions of power across all of Europe. (Ref.) Think of this in our own election year, with the likes of No-Labels potentially wreaking havoc, but also inner-democratic-party fighting weakening what needs to be a united force not to loose the election to Trump. It will take astonishingly few votes to shift the outcome – here is a detailed analysis.

The warning is on the wall: only mobilization to vote and consolidation of democratic forces can stop the destruction of democracy.

***

Cancelation of speech is a time-honored tool of autocratic regimes. That does not prevent officially democratic societies to go there as well, Germany among them, with explicit, much more restrictive laws governing speech that is deemed as inciting hatred or, in particular, anti-semitic. Article 5 of our Grund Gesetz (the German Constitution) defines freedom of speech. The second paragraph of Article 5 restricts freedom of expression “in the provisions of general laws, in provisions for the protection of young persons and in the right to personal honor.” Big difference to the US regulations concerning freedom of speech.

Currently, people on all sides of the political spectrum agree that there is a wave of repression of political thought occurring in Germany.

“Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, virtually every major institution in Germany has been engaged in a wave of repression of ethnic minority communities — the scale and intensity of which is unprecedented in Germany’s postwar history. The targets are Palestinians, other people of color and Jewish anti-Zionists alike.”

In today’s climate, Jewish refugee Hanna Arendt herself, highly critical of the political positions of Israel and full of controversial opinions about contemporary Zionism, from 1942 until her death in 1975, would likely be silenced in Germany. Masha Gessen’s provocation, triggering the uproar around the prize they were awarded, was this paragraph of taboo comparison, from an essay in the New Yorker:

“But as in the Jewish ghettoes of Occupied Europe, there are no prison guards –Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term ‘ghetto’ would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.”

Some people would have predicted this to happen, scholars of history like A. Dirk Moses, the Anne und Bernard Spitzer Professor für Politikwissenschaft am City College of New York, among them. Here is a warning from 2 years ago, a critical view of Germany’s attempt to deal with the guilt of the past, a desperate grasp for redemption.

“For many, the memory of the Holocaust as a break with civilization is the moral foundation of the Federal Republic. To compare it with other genocides is therefore considered a heresy, an apostasy from the right faith. It is time to abandon this catechism.” (Ref.)

His description of the German “Catechism.”

  1. The Holocaust is unique because it was the unlimited Vernichtung der Juden um der Vernichtung willen(exterminating the Jews for the sake of extermination itself) distinguished from the limited and pragmatic aims of other genocides. It is the first time in history that a state had set out to destroy a people solely on ideological grounds.
  2. It was thus a Zivilisationsbruch (civilizational rupture) and the moral foundation of the nation.
  3. Germany has a special responsibility to Jews in Germany, and a special loyalty to Israel: “Die Sicherheit Israels ist Teil der Staatsräson unseres Landes” (Israel’s security is part of Germany’s reason of state)
  4. Antisemitism is a distinct prejudice – and was a distinctly German one. It should not be confused with racism.
  5. Antizionism is antisemitism.

Masha Gessen, Jewish herself with a greatgrandfather murdered by the Nazis in the Bialistok ghetto, violates the rule that equates anti-zionism with antisemitism and, further more, proves willing to engage in comparisons, questioning aspects of the uniqueness of a singular event. I am linking to their brilliant speech, given in the context of the truncated award ceremony, that explains the legitimacy, importance and necessity of such comparisons. If you cannot open the link (in english) I can send you the full text. ) Also, here is a smart interview with them, can be switched to English.)

Gessen’s message: historical events unfold over time. At some point it might be too late to prevent unimaginable horrors when our lack of imagination is surpassed by reality. But we, now, no longer have to imagine – we know what is possible.

Consider it another, urgent warning.

“The Holocaust was singular in part because of how many people were killed over a short period of time. But even the Holocaust took years. People lived, had hopes, tried to make sense of what was happening, and resisted…. Over time, political positions changed, imagination changed, the idea dawned that a Holocaust would be possible ….

We are not any smarter, kinder, wiser, or more moral than people who lived ninety years ago. We are just as likely to needlessly give up our political power and to remain willfully ignorant of darkness as it’s dawning. But we know something they didn’t know: we know that the Holocaust is possible….

And this is why we compare. To prevent what we know can happen from happening. To make “Never Again” a political project rather than a magic spell. And if we compare compellingly and bravely, then, in the best case scenario, the comparison is proven wrong.“

Here are Poulenc’s motets.

Don’t drop the ball….

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Maria durch den Dornwald ging

· Mary walking through a forest of thorns ·

This is the time of year that provides all of us, no matter the background, with some glorious and familiar music. If your first association is “Jingle Bells???” I have to disappoint you, although the song I am introducing today was sort of a jingle. Despite appearing like church music, it was a folk melody that revelers sang since the mid 1800s in Germany, going from house to house during the Advent season, begging for coins. It appeared in a collection of folk songs published by a passionate fan of that music, August von Haxthausen, helped in his endeavors by the Brothers Grimm.

The song became intensely popular around 1912 with the Wandervögel (migratory birds) movement, a movement of middle and upper class youths who despised industrialization and wanted to go back to nature, simplicity and freedom, hippies of yore, hiking in the countryside, singing around the camp fires and sleeping under the stars. The song was spread by them far and wide.

The movement succeeded enough that the establishment and the rising Hitlerites tried to emulate it in ways that would lure young members: The Catholic Youth Organization, The Boy Scouts, and later the Youth League of the National Socialist Workers’ Party (NSDAP) under the control of his storm trooper organization known as the SA (Sturmabteilung,) all sharing some of the same themes, opposing a return to the old social status quo, while working to create an idealistic new era, a better Germany. (Ref.) Hah.

Simple paper curling behind glass.

Ah, getting derailed. What else is new. Back to the song.

It uses simple language, sometimes interrupted by the Greek Kyrie Eleison – Lord, have Mercy – and has an archaic melody, with plain movements that ascend and descend and a dorian pitch (sort of like our minor key.) The narrative is set in woods entirely consisting of barren plants and thorns that have not shown life for seven years. When Mary, pregnant with G-d’s son, walks through this forest of thorns, it erupts into a blooming sea of roses. Let’s listen to two versions: a choir that might resemble the way it was sung on the street (albeit with the finesse of a world-class ensemble, the Vienna Boy Choir) and a version for wind instruments. I simply loved that song as a child, both for the pitch and the miracle, vividly imagining how roses would blossom all around you in the cold, long before animated movies would visualize these kinds of scenarios.

Little did I know – it is generally interpreted as a narrative pointing to divine intervention for those struggling with infertility, a benevolent power connecting the barren to new life, as symbolized by the pregnant virgin. The scourge of infertility is, of course, a massive sorrow for those dealing with it and a correspondingly frequent theme in the bible, of importance to early agrarian societies where the ability of having children proved existential (beyond the yearning) – large families were a guarantee for survival given the rates of child death and the need for labor.

The Hebrew Bible alone contains six stories of barren women: three of the four matriarchs, Sarah (Genesis 11:30), Rebekah(25:21), and Rachel (29:31); Hannah, mother of the prophet Samuel (1 Samuel 1-2); the anonymous wife of Manoah, mother of Samson (Judges 13); and the “great woman of Shunem,” also called the Shunammite, an acolyte of the prophet Elisha (2 Kings 4:8-44). Women were the ones exclusively blamed for infertility, and to add insult to injury, they were reproached by society, their situation attributed to some hidden wrong, or sin that made G-d close their wombs (biblical language), making them ashamed and allowing their husbands to add another wife to the household.

Our annual Rosh Hashana reading, one of the holiest days of the year, is all about the promise to a woman, Sarah, to be blessed with child after years of longing, in advanced age. We understand Genesis 21 as a sign of divine benevolence – a higher power that bestows a gift, makes thorny woods bloom, relieves women of reproach, their own and that of the society around them.

No such benevolence on the part of many contemporary men in power. In addition to the Catholic church which has long prohibited attempts to assuage the pain of infertility by means of using In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) we now have a generation of Republicans and other Right Wing forces who want to prohibit the use of IVF in the wake of the Dobbs decision around abortion. The disposal of unused fertilized eggs should be criminalized in their eyes, as a felony no less. Unless you want to carry all of those embryos, wether viable or not, you better not start the procedure!

Am I catastrophizing? Just look at what the new speaker of the house, Republican Mike Johnson, has to say. According to recent news reports, Johnson supports banning in vitro fertilization. He is a co-sponsorof the Life at Conception Act, a nationwide abortion ban that also would affect embryos created for IVF. Here is a detailed news report that spells out the names and the arguments used in the battle to prevent women and men from alleviating their suffering, deal with the effects of chemotherapy, or simply choose their own timing for starting a family, perhaps later in life after college loans have been paid off, or career demands settled down.

Worried yet? Some members of congress were enough so that they introduced a bill a year ago The Right to Build Families Act, which lingers in Committee, but has drawn the explicit ire of the Heritage Foundation. Contraception, mind you, is on the list of desired prohibitions as well. So riddle me that. In the current discourse around the “Great Replacement” fears, with far right voices calling for enlarging the size of – certain – families, it makes sense for the radical Right to prevent people from choosing not to have children. But for those who want to build a family, why foreclose one such avenue that makes it possible?

In any case: even the old fashioned methods of procreation, with divine intervention “opening women’s wombs” as the bible has it, did not necessarily lead to happily-ever- afters, lest we forget that the power to bestow is matched by the power to take away.

The lives of the conceived sons – and sons they were, exclusively, wouldn’t you know it – was often threatened, sometimes taken. Isaac is supposed to be sacrificed, Jacob runs from murderous brothers, Joseph is nearly killed by them and then sold as a slave, Samson dies a martyr’s death and Samuel is stashed away for life at a sanctuary at Shilo.

Not a stroll among the blooming roses…..

Photographs of the Virgin Mary today from my travels.

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“The Time is out of Joint.”

“The time is out of joint; O cursed spite!/That ever I was born to set it right!” [I.V.211-2])” Shakespeare’s Hamlet after being visited by a ghost.

In the small rural village where I grew up, Martinmas was a big occasion. Celebrating the altruism of a religious figure, a knight who shared his bread and cut his velvet cape in half to help a freezing beggar, the catholic regions across Europe put up a big parade every mid-November. Dressed in our warmest clothes, we were allowed to line the streets to cheer on a fake St. Martin riding on a horse in the evening, a subsequent bonfire at the village’s edge with dramatic reenactment and dispersement of yeast dough baked into little bread men with dried currants for eyes and a clay pipe in their mouths. Have no idea why, but it is a detail stuck in memory.

It was exciting as well as eerie. Quite a few small kids were scared to death, between darkness and fire reflected in his silver helmet and a huge horse getting restless, neighing and bucking. It was also a time when the geese were butchered and prepared for a feast.

I was reminded of those occasions when listening to a song Geträumt hab ich vom Martinszug (I dreamt of the St. Martin’s Parade,) music by Katie Rich and Christian Schoppik, a pair of contemporary surrealist folklore musicians in Germany. Lately they have teamed up with another artist, Johannes Scholar, who is more known for his electroacoustic, ambient music, that combines electronic aesthetic and nostalgia for a lost future.

The trio performs as Freundliche Kreisel (Affable Spinning Tops, album in the link), mixing experimental and acoustic sounds with lyrics that could come from German Romanticism, fairy tales, mythology and plain folk song. Lots of ghosts, sinister scenarios and temporal disjunctions, on another compilation album, Specter Land, as well.

Obviously more accessible to German language speakers, but the feeling of the disquieting undertones, directly and indirectly hinted at in the words, are certainly conveyed when you listen to the music only. The female vocalist (intentionally?) sings like a child, projecting a halting naiveté and vulnerability, before she switches to urgent warnings. Wouldn’t exactly call it riveting music, but with repeat listening its unease gets under your skin, settling like an ear worm – the German word for a melody colonizing your brain – or like the talking ferret alluded to in the lyrics, that lives in the walls and becomes a haunting menace, perhaps a specter. Of interest.

In his 1993 book Specters of Marx, Jaques Derrida coined the term Hauntology in reference to Marx’ and Engels’ claim that “a specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism.” Derrida’s concept embraced the idea of a return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, like a ghost, suggesting that Marxism haunted the Western world from beyond the grave. Hauntology has been applied to music as well, our culture’s affinity for a retro aesthetic and an emphasis on cultural memory found particularly in folk music.

For the musicians of Freundliche Kreisel it manifests, among others, in reverence to Friedrich Hölderlin (1770 – 1843) and Friedrich Alfred Schmid Noerr (1877 – 1969). Hölderlin was one of our finest lyrical poets who subsumed the form of classical Greek verse into the German language and tried to embrace a “spiritual renewal,” integrating Christian faith with the pantheon of Greek gods and all that implied. (He lived and died stricken with mental illness, no causality suggested, just a tragic figure.) Schmid Noerr also elevated the cultural contents of different systems, in particular Christianity’s effects on the Teutonic world. A philosopher and writer, he wove tales that bound historical figures to legend, the past forcibly infusing the present.

Despite his fervor for all things occult, mythical and Germanic, something he shared with the Nazi leadership of his time, he was active in the resistance and published, as late as 1939 and 1940 some radically anti-Nazi pamphlets and a draft of a new German constitution.

Which finally brings me to the specter I meant to write about from the get-go today, with your eyes presumably already glazing over: the return of social and cultural elements of the fascist past, a set of philosophical beliefs and linguistic usage that is reemerging into contemporary American and European discourse. A haunting presence.

Consider the historical situation in early 20th century Germany (I am summarizing a more detailed description from here, Eric Kurlander’s excellent book Hitler’s Monsters): modernity challenged traditional religious practices, with science and secularism progressing at a steady pace. The discarded spiritual worldview created a vacuum that was filled by new esoteric (and often science-hating) belief systems. Nazi leadership grafted onto these ideas of the supernatural, the occult, esoteric sciences and pagan religions. It allowed them to attract followers whose disenchantment in the wake of the industrialization of their world gave powerful incentive to cling to irrational ideas.

The content of these supernatural allusions were often racially tinged. Slavs were vampires, Jews were vermin, both trying to undermine the purity of German blood.

“The supernatural imaginary, which mixed science and occultism, history and mythology, also allowed Nazis to pick and choose the characteristics they would like to ascribe them to their enemy, comparing them to vampires, zombies, devils, and demons.”

Green light for dehumanization of those conveniently selected as out-groups that helped foster in-group cohesion among the electorate.

The rise of non-White races impelled people to adhere to a system of racial hierarchies, that assigned supremacy to White men and the history of Aryan or Nordic nations. Conspiracy theories to make sense of an increasingly complex world sprouted everywhere and were used by Nazi rhetoric for their emotional appeal.

“Firstly, the supernatural imaginary influenced Nazi geopolitical views, which manipulated archeology, folklore, and mythology for foreign policy purposes. Himmler and Rosenberg developed these arguments, based largely on folklore, mythology, and border science that for thousand of years the Nordic people were the dominant civilization in Europe and they had a right to reclaim that. Bad archeology, selective use of biology and anthropology, and mythology fueled a lot of ideas about the Eastern Europe and why Germans had a right, like the medieval Teutonic knights, to (re)conquer the East.” (Bolded by me.)

The steadfastly held belief that one group of people was elected to rule over others, biologically, historically and racially superior, helped set the ultimate catastrophe of fascism in motion. And that was before the advent of social media…here is a piece that lays out the implications of algorithms in shaping our understanding of realty.

I am including trees here because German oaks, birches, beeches and willows, as well as forests in general play such a major role in our mythology and fairy tales.

I don’t have to spell out, I presume, how this applies to our current situation. Am I seeing ghosts, drawing the devil on the wall? (The German idiom expresses that someone is being overly pessimistic or only focused on a worst-case scenario.)

You tell me. I certainly don’t seem to be the only one.

Photographs today of typical rural sights in Germany, from Lower Saxony, Saxony Anhalt, Schleswig Holstein and Hesse, with crumbling half-timbered houses offering refuge to all kinds of specters, ghosts and Poltergeists.

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Eaton Canyon, Revisited

October 21st was Ursula Le Guin’s birthday. I was reminded of that by, of all people, my beloved, who is not exactly into literature and/or poetry, but knows how much it – and her authorship – matters to me. Oblivious to that date, I had actually been thinking about her a few days earlier, while hiking Altadena’s Eaton Canyon, completely transformed from how I had experienced it the first time last April.

Verdant then, with roaring water, now dry, with but a trickle. Full of bloom then, color and the songs of birds, now reduced to pattern, lounging frogs and lizards. Still heartrending beautiful.

I was thinking of the many poems I had read where Le Guin describes the very essence of landscapes, desert as well as coast or woods, and how I could not remember a single one in its accurate wording.

That stood in contrast to one about war, that for obvious reasons now rose to the fore:

The Next War

It will take place,
it will take time,
it will take life,
and waste them.

I don’t know about you, but even when I try, when I immerse myself in beauty combined with physical exertion – something even a few miles will do these days – I cannot distract myself away from the sorrow of the extant and future loss of life in the Middle East. When I read about proposed solutions to the conflict, it seems to me that people are just throwing out words, hopes, and closer inspection reveals that no one really has a clue as to how to bring about realistic change, on ALL sides. (Ukraine, by the way, not forgotten by me, either.) Here is an essay worthwhile contemplating that tries to make a distinction between legality and morality of retaliatory actions, and here is one that talks about the difficulty of speaking to the issues without being labeled anti-semitic or islamo-phobic, rendered to silence when we need to speak up.

When I came home from the hike I tried to find a desert poem to post, but chanced on the one below, from her ultimate collection of poems,  So Far So Good, finished 2 weeks before her death in 2018.

The volume offers meditations on nature, the recurring topic of so much of her work, but also on aging and the relationship between body and soul. Meditations that are moving, wise, courageous – and also seem an incredible luxury provided by peace time, not available to those tortured, killed and abducted, starved or rained on by bombs. As a committed pacifist, she would have likely agreed.

How It Seems to Me 

In the vast abyss before time, self

is not, and soul commingles

with mist, and rock, and light. In time,

soul brings the misty self to be. 

Then slow time hardens self to stone

while ever lightening the soul,

till soul can loose its hold of self

and both are free and can return

to vastness and dissolve in light,

the long light after time. 

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Fauré seems fitting today for music.

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