The relevant rule governing “retirement” for purposes of not paying the biennial $375 dues:
(g) Each registration statement filed pursuant to this section shall be accompanied by a registration fee of $375. No fee shall be required from an attorney who certifies that he or she has retired from the practice of law. For purposes of this section, the “practice of law” shall mean the giving of legal advice or counsel to, or providing legal representation for, particular body or individual in a particular situation in either the public or private sector in the State of New York or elsewhere, it shall include the appearance as an attorney before any court or administrative agency. An attorney is “retired” from the practice of law when, other than the performance of legal services without compensation, he or she does not practice law in any respect and does not intend ever to engage in acts that constitute the practice of law. For purposes of section 468-a of the Judiciary Law, a full-time judge or justice of the Unified Court System of the State of New York or of a court of any other state or of a federal court, shall be deemed “retired” from the practice of law. An attorney in good standing, at least 55 years old and with at least 10 years experience, who participates without compensation in an approved pro bono legal services program, may enroll as an “attorney emeritus.”
and does not intend ever to engage in acts that constitute the practice of law.
Which suggests retirement is final and irreversible. On that ground I paid my dues every two years, though I haven’t practiced law more than a few times in the last decade.
I was told by a bright man at the Office of Court Administration that coming out of retirement is easily done. It is a simple process, though, apparently, a secret one. You request a Rescind Waiver Form, fill it out, submit it along with the full biennial dues for that period, and take one Continuing Legal Education credit for each month going forward. A matter of a few weeks to come out of retirement, no problem.
I told him that I had no doubt about what he’d told me but that, as a lawyer, I needed something in writing to that effect. This is because if I acted relying on a statement of the rules he sent me in writing, I’d have an excellent defense if it ever came to that. He obliged by sending this email, which is not part of any rule or contained in any on-line guide one can access:
NYS does not have an inactive status as may be available in other jurisdictions.
The retirement certification may only be claimed if you do not practice law in New York or elsewhere and do not intend ever to engage in acts that constitute the practice of law. If you meet the definition you may sign the retirement exemption and the biennial registration fee of $375 is waived. As a retired attorney you would remain a duly admitted NY attorney and there would be no bar to you filing on a future registration as active – additionally, Part 118.1(g) allows retired attorneys to continue to perform legal services withoutcompensation. Therefore, since you remain a duly admitted attorney you would still be required to register every two years.
and do not intend ever to engage in acts that constitute the practice of law.
The devil cavorts in the legal details, yo. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, they say, including, I suppose, the intention never to engage in acts that constitute the practice of law.
Complicated is hard, simple is so much easier. It’s no wonder that buzzwords and the wearing of different colored hats so often carry the day in human affairs.
Keeping the countless gnarly complications in mind, remembering contradictions, comparing everything to your own situation and remembering that while you may be lucky, many just like you are cursed… the endless nuance and supreme challenge of trying to remain fair-minded, pursuing justice, mindful of history’s famously slippery slopes, the dependable unreliability of history, of homo sapiens — it is exhausting just to map it out in a sprawling sentence.
Complicated is difficult, takes too much goddamned work to work your way through, there is no end to complicated. Simple is better, clearly.
Hence the soundbite. The tweet. Slogans. If your slogan does not parse well and fit on a hat, the marketing folks will nix it. A great ad is supremely simple. It hits some essential truth we recognize immediately. The best of them bring tears, so simple, so true! We should make that long distance call to the poignantly adorable child who misses us. Oh, God, it’s all so simple.
Except, of course, that it’s not at all simple. “What do you think of Bernie Sanders?” someone asks simply, though it’s not likely you dislike Sanders or what he stands for based on the way you talk. So, carefully, sensing a mine field as the first few critical comments about him fly around the table, you say: if we remove the personality and the things you just said from the equation and put all the actual issues his campaign raised on the table, I think we’d all agree about most of them. I got as far as the importance of addressing catastrophic climate change before the heavy guns were wheeled into place. Sanders is a self-hating Jew, he only uses his Jewishness for his own purposes, he hates Israel, supports BDS (Boycott, Divest and Sanction Israel) [1] One raises his voice to say he’d vote for Trump before he’d vote for the hypocrite Jew-hater Sanders.
Now everything is simpler, easier to understand. My reflexes were a tad too slow, though I know the right thing to do at a moment like this. It is time to get up from the table and start washing dishes, or at least to clam up. Perhaps sit on a nearby chair and play the ukulele a bit, as this little storm passes. All these options I hope to keep in mind should this kind of thing arise again any time soon. There is no point, no nuance that can be brought up once somebody is peeved enough to say Trump is a better choice than Bernie because Trump loves Israel and Bernie is a grumpy old Jewish Nazi.
Simple: Anyone critical of Israel’s long, often brutal, occupation, and the ticking time bomb of millions of encamped enemies living close by, generations of haters, many raised in hellish, hopeless poverty, many living in camps, literally, with state violence the only means of keeping a lid on the anger of now literally generations of these hopeless and dispossessed people — anti-Semite.
We can agree that Bibi Netanyahu is clearly not an exemplar of the highest Jewish values. He’s a putz, a schmuck, a much smarter Israeli Trump. Fine. Perhaps we can agree that the mildly racist Avigdor Lieberman, former extremist now Israeli Minister of Defense, and his party, to the right of Netanyahu’s right wing group, is not a legitimate force for de-escalating tensions in the seemingly eternal war between former neighbors.
But, let’s keep this simple. BDS, Boycott, Divest and Sanction, the same economic tactics used to exert enough pressure to bring down apartheid in South Africa, is plainly anti-Semitic. Any Jew who thinks it might be a legitimate tactic to employ is simply a Jew hater, end of story.
Sitting here calmly, reflecting dispassionately, it is beyond dispute that there are numerous issues involved in this particular issue of BDS. It equates Israel to the racist South African regime — not entirely fairly. This equation requires its own long, sober conversation. It involves uncomfortable levels of candor, perhaps, or tamping down an angry reflex to dismiss anything comparing Israeli military policies and THINGS THE FUCKING NAZIs used to do.
Breaking down doors at night, grabbing and torturing suspects, an off the books detention or killing when required, doing secret violence here and there to keep the opposition from organizing, or bulldozing an entire block of homes because a terrorist was harbored in one of those homes, or forced relocation, or whatever you want to bring up, are reminiscent of things ruthless armies of occupation routinely do. There is a much larger discussion to be had of the particulars of all these policies.
All this is very uncomfortable terrain to negotiate, even among people who agree about most things in American politics, you have to walk through it very, very slowly, reassuring the other party of your good will at every step. Easier to just say Israel, eternally menaced by a world of haters, is justified no matter what or the equally emotional position that Israel is acting just like the fucking Nazis. The tic to view everything as a dichotomy blinds you to any truths that fall along that human gradient, seamlessly from black, to dark charcoal grey, to grey, to paler, mouse grey, to ash-colored grey, to white.
Truth is hard, true belief is easier. That ease is the reason so many still support their president, even as his policies are already starting to fuck them hard.
There are Israeli peace groups (example) working tirelessly against the right wing forces in Israel which have controlled the government, and the narrative, since a right wing religious fanatic murdered Itzhak Rabin more than twenty years ago. These right wing Israeli officials argue it’s perfectly fine, even restrained, to shoot protesters with live bullets if they come too close to the fence in Gaza. This policy is controversial and complicated, many difficult discussions can be had over whether it’s the best way for Israel to proceed toward any kind of peaceful resolution to the long conflict between Palestinians and Israel..
But, for the moment, let’s keep it simple, folks. Israel is a democracy and our greatest ally in the Middle East (along with Saudi Arabia, but why mention those publicly beheading motherfuckers?) Our U.N. ambassador applauded Israel’s restraint in killing and wounding so relatively few Palestinians in the recent outburst of mass ugliness between these enemy neighbors. Soon after her comments we [3] left the U.N. Human Rights Council who wouldn’t stop bitching about Israel’s use of deadly force against unarmed civilian protesters, even suggesting the shootings by sniper might constitute a war crime.
To cite but one example of the complexities involved. One Israeli peace group, The New Israel Fund, supports the right of people to use protest methods like BDS, or, more precisely, it opposes the proposed U.S. criminalization of BDS (their position is much more nuanced, New Israeli Fund actually explicitly OPPOSES BDS).
Yet to those Jews who seek to keep it simple at all costs, the New Israel Fund supports terrorism by opposing “pro-Israeli” laws to criminalize BDS, thereby supporting BDS and hatred of Israel. The New Israel Fund is a target of angry American Jews who believe Israelis who oppose their government’s extreme right wing tactics are traitors and anti-Semites, no better than Nazis, really. I actually heard this view expressed by a tiny gaggle of disgruntled protesters outside a Palestinian-Israeli peace concert we attended.
Keeping it simple: the New Israel Fund supports terrorism. Boom. End of story, synagogue hosting event is giving a forum to anti-Semites! The great David Broza, anti-Semite. Anyone looking for peace with the enemy– traitor!
The Israeli government’s moral position on the mass shootings at the Gaza-Israel fence is that it gave the Hamas-inspired protesters fair warning: come within this distance of the 37 mile long reinforced fence [2] and we will use deadly force. The warnings were dropped in the form of leaflets, plainly written in Arabic for anyone to read. Fair warning. Come near my fence and I will shoot you, even kill you. Still they came, protesting by the thousands, surging toward the hated fence, threatening to breach it and cause a bloodbath in Israel, whose right to exist they angrily deny.
The failing NY Times reported on the many Palestinian deaths, at least sixty, in the days around Ivanka and Jared’s photo op with Bibi Netanyahu as they cut the ribbon on the controversial U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. Palestinian and international sources give much higher numbers of dead and wounded at the Gaza fence. Easy enough to dismiss these numbers as fake news, anti-Israel propaganda, since it comes from people who have historically had a bloody ax to grind against Israel. Is there a number of medics shot that is justifiable? Is it legitimate to fire on medical personnel because they are aiding and abetting, by trying to save the lives of, those who surge toward the guns of their hated enemies?
It is so much easier to pick a side and just be on it than to try to consider all sides in an extremely complicated and intractable situation and take nuanced positions on a case by case basis. We can raise arguments about the Palestinian definition of refugees, as the Jerusalem Post apparently did recently. Simple, these fucks are not actual refugees, they just pretend to be victims under a definition they came up with. They can’t leave Gaza? Good for them! The simple view sees good guys and bad guys and good people stick with the good guys. Simple.
I was reminded, even sitting around a table with good friends, warm friends, people I love, all old friends who speak Hebrew and love Israel as much as I do, that some innocent questions are, to be simple about it, not innocent. Say the wrong thing and the conversation is over. Forget the fact that we all likely agree, to one extent or another, about the school to prison pipeline, intergenerational poverty going back directly to slavery, the fossil fuel industry-created denial of plainly observable climate catastrophes as part of a of pattern related to centuries of escalating human pollution, vast, escalating income inequality, the anti-democratic curse of concealing information of great public concern from the voting public, the recent gift of billions in tax breaks to the wealthiest, at the cost of cutting the social safety nets for the most vulnerable, our unforgivable and unaddressed national racism (we can pat ourselves on the back for banning the hateful word “nigger” and replacing it with the great neologism “n-word”, much less offensive!), the imminent dismantling of a woman’s federal right to choose to terminate an unwanted, or dangerous, pregnancy, the inevitable corruption of a democratic system where unlimited campaign money is “free speech” and dark money — if donated in a large enough pile — needn’t ever have its source exposed, as the recently rewritten law provides.
We did not get to this cruel president and his blundering administration by chance. The extremest, greediest billionaires found their donkey to ride to the promised land they’ve been dreaming of since the days of the John Birch Society. The Koch brothers’ wealthy, distant father was a founder of that society. The John Birchers were rich, paranoid men who suspected Dwight D. Eisenhower might be a secret Commie, or at least an unwitting dupe of the goddamned Commies. These canny billionaires built a national infrastructure over the last thirty years or more, methodically, think tank by think tank, state house by state house, created legislative/corporate partnerships, and finally, as the Kochs head toward their reward in heaven (both are old men now) their long-cherished dream has become reality for all of us. The cancerous chickens of our materialistic, profit-worshipping “libertarian” democracy have come home to roost.
It is a certain kind of torment to live in a world as inured to violence as our world is. Millions die violent, hopeless deaths, it’s just the way it is. Cherished principles are so easily tossed aside when policies are addressed directly to our terrors. THEY ARE GOING TO KILL US!!!! So we are morally justified in killing them first. THEY HATE US. Therefore, we can torture them, because if they hate us, fuck them, you know? They already hate us, so torture them, what are you being so squeamish about? They’d do the same to us, probably much worse.
At the same time, when we are calm, we can recognize that hate never conquers hate, that an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind, that we need our most creative, empathetic, ingenious solutions for intractable, historically violent problems, but those are just abstractions. All very exhausting abstractions!
BUILD THE WALL! BUILD THE WALL!!!! BUILD THE WALL!!!! Feels pretty good, actually.
[1] Not only is this a sticky factual issue, with many sources stating that Sanders actually opposes BDS, but there is a related and completely separate issue that is easily elided into “support for BDS”. Do you oppose a law criminalizing BDS? I do, vigorously. Do I support BDS? I don’t. What is Bernie’s position? Truly, I have no fucking idea, though it appears he doesn’t. I’m pretty sure he agrees that criminalizing selected nonviolent political expression is anti-democratic. Which in my book, makes Bernie Sanders no more an anti-Semite than I am– trying my best to live by my Jewish values, including dedication to protecting the weakest among us and not doing what is hateful to us to others.
[2] The fence is actually two parallel barriers built by the Israelis: a formidable one of barbed-wire within Gaza and a 10-foot-high metal “smart fence” packed with surveillance sensors along the Israel demarcation line. A restricted buffer zone as wide as 300 yards is between them. Israel has warned that people in the zone without authorization risk being subjected to deadly force.
It is late at night, has been a long day, an emotionally challenging day, but I wanted to get back to my cousin in Israel, so I dropped him an email just now. He has been searching for the traces of our family and recently found some real clues. The hamlet our people came from, on a fork in a marsh south of the Pina River a short ferry ride from Pinsk, has been erased from history, wiped off the map– the people who lived there and the name of the hamlet that all those who lived there called it by.
Truvovich was the name, wiped from every map in existence, as far as my cousin, and I, and a friend who lives in Poland and is a pretty fair researcher himself (and who searched in Polish), have been able to ascertain. Between us we turned up one map, with a Jewish star and the letter T at the place we suspect may have been that site where one of my grandmothers, and one of my cousin’s grandfathers, were born. The link I sent my cousin to that map no longer exists, though we have my screen shot of the pertinent section of the map.
This takes us into the realm of What the Fuck? We know the Nazis were fucked up, that the einsatzgruppen, the special killing units that followed the Wermacht, the army, as the secret police state was imposed in one occupied territory after another, were merciless (until they started going mad, becoming alcoholics, became unable, most of them, to continue murdering unarmed civilians and their children, usually by shooting them into ditches).
The Final Solution, with its mechanized extermination camps, was put in place partly because the number of Jews and others believed by those insane Nazi fucks to be genetic poison was too great to be wiped out by shooting alone, and partly because the killers they sent to massacre these folks just couldn’t keep doing it, psychologically. Those rare sadists among them who loved to kill became another kind of problem. Easier to just put them in charge of a crew in one of the death camps, where their perversion would be a virtue.
But I am getting ahead of the story. At one time all of my family members were alive and supremely insecure in the impoverished little shit hole in the marsh where they lived. Of two of them, Harry Aaron (who I always knew as Uncle Aren) and my grandmother, Chava, I know what can be known. Aren fled the Russo-Japanese war, made a life for himself in America, had three children, all of whom I knew. My cousin in Israel is the son of Aren’s daughter. I remember Aren too, he lived until I was eleven. Chava, Aren’s youngest sister, begat my father and my uncle and died in Peekskill a few years before I was born. There was a cousin, Dintsche, who had two kids in America, both still around,
Beyond that, the fate of the rest of our family is a statistic. The einsatzgruppen rounded up all the Jews of Pinsk, and the outlying areas, and wiped them out in two major aktions, a few months apart, in 1942. The details are here.
It is late, and airless, the humidity is like a continual punch in the face. Outside the sky is black. I haven’t the strength at the moment to follow all the thoughts that led me to begin to write this. Except to note the mystery, as we are alive here in this wink of an eye, and the need to know. The desire, like a serious thirst, to find something out, to learn even a single detail. It is too maddening to know nothing.
Recently my cousin learned that one of his great-uncles, a man I’d heard of as Volbear, a man he names Wolf Bear on his family tree, is listed in Yad Vashem as killed in 1942. This was big news, to see the testimony, our ancestor’s name in writing. The testimony consisted of a few names: Wolf Bear’s (born 1888), his wife Tzirel’s (age unknown), their two children, Leah Reizel, 14, and Yisrael, 10, and the year they died in the slaughterhouse that was Nazi-occupied Belarus in 1942. This is far more detail than we have about the fate, and lives, of Aren and Chava’s other brother Yudle or their sister Chaska.
The other day my cousin sent me this photo, taken in 1938, found among his mother’s papers (she lived to 104!). The niece and nephew of our common ancestor, named for the matriarch and patriarch as far back as our family tree goes (four generations). Those ancient ancestors would be my great-grandparents on my mother’s side, Leah and Azriel [1]. The nephew and niece in this photo are Azriel and Leah. Look at them:
1938, before Hitler’s war, the war the madman insisted the Jews made him start. Their photo, taken that year, came with a note, in Yiddish, which my cousin had translated into Hebrew. My cousin wrote: they state that life is difficult and they are looking for help.
Outside, the world is raging. People are actually arguing about what to call the cages they are throwing confiscated children into. One wealthy country’s criminally misguided drug laws put neighboring countries’ drug cartels into overdrive, people are killed, tortured, threatened. Citizens flee the violence of their impoverished home countries. They are caught at a border, have their kids grabbed, or are told that their children will wait for them while they’re being processed as potential illegal terrorist types [1]. Then, as the adults go with authorities, their kids are secretly whisked hundreds of miles away, no receipt given, the kids can be anywhere. Whose fault is that?
Outside, on the Fourth of July, freedom is no doubt loudly, ponderously on the march. Is it still freedom if it wears jackboots? Back in Germany, between the world wars, as the violent revenge fantasies were gestating in vats of nationalist, racist steroids, militant German youth marched chanting “wir sheissen auf die freiheit!“. The NY Times translated this as “we spit on freedom!’ though, of course, the active verb in that sentence means “shit”. WE SHIT ON FREEDOM!
In my mind, it is much more quiet. Nobody shitting on freedom, no bureaucrats sending children hundreds of miles from their parents with no records kept, no world leader threatening to detonate nuclear bombs and annihilate millions if he doesn’t get universal adulation — and a Nobel Peace Prize.
“You pretentious asshole,” says an old friend.
“Yes?” I say.
“You seriously believe you can write your way out of a world of festering horrors?”
Mmmm, result is unclear.
“Did you read that off the little screen of your magic 8 ball?”
It is likely.
“Look, you seem to feel you can just write out your thoughts and feelings and put them up for your dozens of mindless followers to salute.”
Here is my bottom line. If you are my friend, I give you the benefit of the doubt. I exert myself not to judge the things you do to survive, even if they are things I myself am unable to do.
“Fuck you!” says my old friend.
Didn’t mean to sound judgmental, old bean. I only mean to point out that my first duty, as your friend, is to give you every benefit of every doubt. I was directed to an interesting opinion piece in the Grey Skank the other day about the corrosive shame so many men feel, and how it leads to the disrespect of women, which fuels more shame. This cycle culminates, of course, in toxic masculinity. That is the kind of macho bluster that puts violence at the top of the list of ways to get people who say uncomfortable things to shut the fuck up.
“Jesus, the torture never stops! Will you get to the fucking point?” says my old friend.
Of course. Giving the benefit of the doubt starts with recognizing the feelings of another person. He did this because he felt he was about to be killed. Fair enough. In his shoes I might well have done the same thing. I certainly would have felt the same way he did.
“You are maddening!” he says.
Yes. Anyway, I’ve learned that you cannot argue, or it is pointless to argue, aggravating and counterproductive to argue (unless your goal is a good argument), that you should not feel what you are feeling. The feeling must be acknowledged, its reality accepted. The feeling is what it is, the reasons for it cannot be understood or addressed without first acknowledging the feeling. No productive conversation into overcoming the bad feelings can be had if the other person’s strong feelings are denied.
“Feel this, motherfucker,” says my old friend clenching his fist and brandishing it uselessly.
“Oh, uselessly, eh?” says my old friend, swinging his fist an inch from my nose.
I smile without showing my teeth. “Doan wase yourself…” I say through my smile/smirk, like Bruce Lee on the deck of that boat in Enter the Dragon, not even turning my head to the bully, watching the waves lapping in the distance.
My friend punches me full force in the mouth.
Feel better, do we?
“You self-righteous fucking asshole,” says my friend.
Yes?
Look, I get that your feelings are hurt. I seem to be blaming you for acting badly, even though it wasn’t your fault. You were in a total panic, afraid I was secretly angry at you, maliciously sabotaging your shaky marriage. I get all that. It was important for you to point out, at that time, that I always feel I’m right, never admit the possibility I could be wrong, never apologize about anything. I apologized to you, for what it was worth. Then you told me how hurt and angry you are that I see you as an anxious person who needs to be protected. I get it, I get all that, truly.
Thing is, though, strong feelings, stirred and unacknowledged by the people who are supposed to be your closest friends, lead to other strong feelings. This happens almost in direct proportion to the strength of the feeling that is left unacknowledged. If you deny my right to be angry, what am I to do with the feeling? You come to me in rage, I don’t acknowledge your right to be angry. Tell you you’re a fucking baby, advise you to “grow a pair”, man up, stop being a pussy(cat). What happens to the rage I tell you to fucking shut up about?
“One punch in the face wasn’t enough for you?” asks my friend.
Once is never enough, from a man like you. You remember that Captain and Tennille line, the pretty Tenille singing to the Captain: do that to me one more time, once is never enough, with a man like you. What the hell?
“I’m going to kill you,” says my friend.
No, you are not going to kill anyone. One thing I can assure you, I am not going to be killed by you today. You may feel like killing me, and we can talk about that, you toxic male you, but you ain’t going to kill me any more than I’m going to kill you.
Feel free, in the meantime, to punch me in the face as hard, and as many times, as you like. I’ve got to get back to my daydreaming on Independence Day, so forgive me if I don’t cry out. Rest assured, your punches are mighty, and terrible indeed.
[1] Not to make a gratuitous comparison between government lies told to helpless people, but when the Nazis forced the Jews at the killing centers to strip naked and line up, the Jews were told it was for a shower, not a gas chamber. Which would you rather step into? A nice hot shower, or a sealed room about to be pumped full of poison gas? Come on, is there even a choice?
The organized Right has had a longtime campaign against the public sphere, continually selling the idea that dynamic private enterprise is always preferable to public program solutions. This is undoubtedly true from the point of view of maximizing profits for private businesses, although it is a dubious claim in many areas, like education, fairness, access to opportunity, good public policy, etc. You’d think the failure of the charter schools and the explosion of privatized for-profit prisons (along with mandatory sentences and vast increases in the number of incarcerated Americans — including, today, the confiscated children of asylum seekers) would put this zombie theory to rest. You’d be wrong. Private freedom trumps improving the public sphere every time. Winners vs. Losers, it doesn’t get any simpler than that, chumps.
I was talking to a friend last night who told me that the only reason he got a decent public education in NYC in the 1960s was because he went to schools with a lot of white kids. He was not a white kid, nor is he a white man today. The elementary school he’d attended in the Bronx was like the one I attended in Queens, outwardly integrated (in the case of the school I went to only after an ugly battle among the parents and teachers) but internally segregated. Each grade had classes ranked from one on down, the one class being the top students, down to two, three, and, in the case of most larger public schools, four, five, six, etc. As my friend reminded me, the further down you went, the more predominantly non-white the classes became.
In my friend’s case, he was in a class closer to the one class every year and as a result had mostly white kids as classmates. Because of that, he got the same education as the local white kids. Expectations were higher for them, and the level of teaching was higher and more challenging. He had the same experience in Junior High School and High School, both schools having populations approximately evenly distributed between “whites”, “blacks” and “Hispanics”. He said the schools he went to are no longer integrated, neighborhood patterns having changed, and we agreed that the schools had probably all declined along with the exodus of “white” kids and the general lowering of educational expectations.
At one point I mentioned that I ‘d grown up about a mile from the birthplace and childhood homes of our current president. I recall my mother telling me that small, intimate P.S. 178, my alma mater, was the top rated public school in New York City. That was one reason some of the parents and teachers were so adamant about not admitting black students from nearby Jamaica. Jamaica was a predominantly black area and the schools there were much lower rated than P.S. 178, obviously.
The neighborhood around the school was called Jamaica Estates, and its tree-lined streets contained mansions and the children of some very rich people. (I grew up in the adjacent, more modest neighborhood called “Flushing”). Many of the kids from Jamaica Estates attended 178. I figured our current president might well have attended the highest rated public school in the city ten years before I did. I’d figured wrong, as Jeeves informed me when I asked what elementary school The Man had attended:
Trump grew up in Jamaica, Queens, and attended the Kew-Forest School from kindergarten through seventh grade. At age 13, he was enrolled in the New York Military Academy, a private boarding school, after his parents discovered that he had made frequent trips into Manhattan without their permission.
Imagine my surprise to find out he’d grown up in Jamaica, among the blacks! Puts the man and his alleged racism in a whole new light, as they say. Then again, not surprising that his parents would raise him to be truly elite — a man of the right people. Good breeding and all that. No need for the best public school in the city, a ten minute walk from his home, when he could meet the children of the truly elite at a private school where his childish bullying could blossom unrestrained by the laws of the schoolyard.
If you go to public school, you never know what kind of ruffian you might encounter as you begin to intimidate your little classmates. In a private school, where the student is also the child of a customer (and the customer, if wealthy, is always right) a lot more leeway can be given for this kind of behavior. In the interest of curbing their son’s impulse to bully, to ignore rules, to put himself always first, the parents sent the young man to military academy. The results speak for themselves.
If you have a limousine waiting to take you wherever you want to go, and a helicopter, and a private jet for longer trips, you are much better off than the sad sack who has to wait for a public subway train at eleven pm and squeeze into a crowded car where he will stand for the long ride home. There is no question about this.
As a matter of public policy, even if only for purposes of reducing traffic and air pollution from millions of cars, it would be best to have a first rate public transportation system in New York City. This, sadly, is not a priority of the wealthy people who make these decisions. As for the people who ride the subways at night, standing room only, fuck ’em. Seriously. What are they going to do about it, no matter how intolerably bad the service gets? Spend $50 for an uber? A rich person need never even know about this situation, and it is certainly not remotely among their problems if a bunch of low-income losers have to stand on a late-night subway train.
Those people who stayed in New Orleans during that hundred year hurricane and flood a few years ago. The question was asked: what, are those motherfuckers stupid? Didn’t they hear the warnings? Couldn’t they have gotten out, moved temporarily to one of their summer homes until the shit blew over in New Orleans? What were they doing on the roofs of their houses, crying for help as alligators, snakes and dead cows floated by? They fully expected the rest of us to save them from their own bad life choices. What can you do with those kind of people?
That’s why many of the most wealthy are so devoted to reducing the size of government so that it can be drowned in a bathtub. The public is dirty, overused, crowded, smelly. The private is clean, comfortable, plenty of space for everyone, smells nice. Why do poor motherfuckers keep acting like there is supposed to be a better choice? Who gets to choose? You, loser?
It’s funny, sometimes, to notice how one thing leads to another. Events and thoughts can proceed in a way that makes you suddenly see something in a completely new light.
The other day, in the sudden extreme heat (the real feel temperature got over 100 in New York City the last few days), I found myself walking around in just shorts. It was too onerous to wear a shirt, or socks, and since I was inside, moving from fan to fan, I simply wore the minimum to remain decent while walking past the many ground floor windows at the farm.
At some point, standing at the sink of the upstairs bathroom, looking into the mirror, I suddenly saw my immense, oblong gut in a new light– sunlight. Sunlight may be the best disinfectant for certain things, but it is the harshest possible light in which to see something like a watermelon-sized stomach ballooning over a waist band. The slanting sunlight lit my stomach from a merciless angle, with a light that made the bulk fully three dimensional in a way my own dim bathroom mirror does not.
I was suddenly filled with horror, true horror, as I turned and saw it from all angles (it was particularly grievous from the side). I immediately vowed to limit my caloric intake (and have so far, going on my third day, though today for brunch I had toast and home fries) as I rehab my knees, toward the day I will also get back on my former exercise regime. It was a visceral thing, truly. Not as if, mind you, I was unaware of the twenty or so pounds I have to lose, but seeing it in this harsh new light there was no longer any way for me to rationalize wearing this thick, bulbous vest of adipose tissue. Not good for my health, nor for wearing a bathing suit next weekend at our friends’ house by a lake.
From this thought to Hannah Arendt’s illuminating insight that totalitarianism, as distinct from normal despotism, military dictatorship, brutal monarchy and other familiar time-honored forms of authoritarianism, requires mobilization of the masses in the complete service of the leader and his State. This new mass authoritarianism only became possible with the advent of truly mass media. Hitler or Stalin, no matter what their genius for manipulating their followers, could not have exerted the complete social control they did without full ownership of the press and those two nascent mass media technologies, motion pictures and live broadcasts over radio waves (plus telephones and a few other useful technologies for keeping tabs and issuing orders).
Totalitarian society is always organized as a strict hierarchic bureaucracy, with party loyalists running every one of its hundreds of branches. Bureaucracy had been around before totalitarians harnessed it, but with the advent of new technologies, it became a much more efficient machine for social control. Technology, as it was developed, became instantly part of the administration of these bureaucracies.
International Business Machines (IBM), for example, caused a little bit of a stink (though it didn’t seem to hurt their corporate bottom line) when it was learned, after World War Two, that IBM had made its new punchcard technology available to Nazi bureaucrats who used it to ensure the cattle cars heading East were full, and to keep track of who was left to ship East for “resettlement”. Just a business doing business, corporate bottom line and all, no moral stance whatsoever, just money making money. [1]
The word bureaucracy conjures hellish images out of a Kafkaesque nightmare. That is for good reason. Bureaucracies are pyramids, and the vast bulk of the workers in a bureacucracy are powerless, hopeless ants serving their individual bosses on each level, without the slightest autonomy, or even much enthusiasm for their small, mechanical jobs, jobs they usually do with almost total indifference.
An ant seems undeterrably enthusiastic about moving crumbs back to the queen at the top of the anthill hierarchy because it is programmed to do so, not because that individual ant has a sense of agency or any kind of autonomy. A chemical impulse makes the ant behave as it does, and it is not the ant’s place to question anything. The human member of a bureaucracy, however, is by nature somewhat resigned, depressed and embittered. It is a job that can make you cynical and mean. You have responsibility for a limited set of mechanical tasks, a limitless amount of drudgery to get through each shift, a very small amount of power (if any at all) and, the best you can hope for, if you do the shit little job well, is upward promotion.
Reminds me of a great remark I once heard about the Rat Race. Even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.
To be human is to expect more, if only because we have powerful myths about our unlimited power as individuals to determine the course of our own lives. It is undeniable that human progress, and individual progress, is made by those who tirelessly work to make this potential real. But for the vast masses of individuals, it’s off to work, to a job that usually sucks, for less money than they need or feel they deserve.
As a low level bureaucrat, you tell the disgruntled member of the public you are forced to deal with that they must do such and such. When they complain you defensively tell them you didn’t make the rules, and that if they don’t want to give up their place on the long line they have already waited on, they’d better do what you’re telling them. In modern corporate and government bureaucracy your chance of being given correct information is about 50/50, at best [2]. Things are much simpler under totalitarian bureaucracy: you simply do what they say or they send someone to get you and they kill you.
Adding current digital, algorithm-driven technology to bureaucracy brings us into a whole new world of shit. Use your phone to look for a product, you get all the related ads almost instantly. When Hitler was pioneering the use of radio, he could get on the air and make a persuasive, lying pitch to millions of Germans at once. This ability to sell “on the air” helped make him a celebrity, a star, a man with seemingly superhuman powers. He was the first to address a nation from the air, as his plane flew over a disputed corridor, under Polish control, that he claimed should by right be part of the German Reich. This was something only a god could do back in 1932, thunder from the air to millions of people. In 2018, a three year-old on the toilet, tweeting incoherently from his celebrity mommy’s phone, is as godlike as a flying, thundering Hitler over the Polish corridor. OK, extreme example, maybe, and not the best. A public official with 20,000,000 twitter followers can reach them all instantly, 24/7, from wherever he/she/it is. How’s that for a god?
I don’t know where else to go at the moment with these thoughts. It’s not as if, thank God, we actually have a public official with 20,000,000 followers who can instantly send them ranting real-time temper tantrums at 5 a.m. while straining over his stools.
(More fiber, you imaginary costive motherfucker.)
[1] In our own time, recently Bill Gates had a tiny bit of dung flung his way when it was revealed that Microsoft facial recognition software had been sold (or perhaps given) to the current U.S. government to help I.C.E. recognize and root out the many potentially dangerous foreign rapists, murderers, terrorists and just plain undocumented “illegal aliens” and their so-tempting-to-cage children.
[2] Trying to log-in the other day to pay my $375 biennial fee to keep my law license intact, I encountered a series of technological cul de sacs that prevented me from completing my registration (or even starting it, really). Frustrating. I sent an email to the help desk and got a helpful reply instructing me on exactly what I needed to do to complete my registration. I did those things, got no further than the day before, wound up in the same cul de sac.
Fortunately, the email reply came with a phone number, which I then called. Unfortunately, the phone was eventually answered by an imbecile. The imbecile told me that I had to log-in with a computer, that I couldn’t use a Mac or an iPad to register. I told the imbecile that I’d logged in and registered successfully two years ago with a Mac, which is also, by the way, a computer. He soon grew impatient with my attitude.
I asked him for the number for tech support, which he said was located in Albany. He didn’t have the number. Connected me to somebody who told me what was going on: the site had been down the other day when I tried to log-in, there had also been many problems with the site’s functionality on Google chrome. He assured me that, of course, it had nothing to do with Mac or PC format. While I had this guy on the phone I logged in with another browser and found myself in the same cul de sac. The problem was not Google chrome.
He agreed that an email about the website being down the other day, or known problems with Google, would have been preferable to constant ambiguous error messages, incorrect instructions, or the idiotic invention about the Macs. I mentioned my former friend the computer programer who is on the Asperger’s scale, suggesting that many automated replies, such as the ones I kept getting were programmed by folks like him and were neither intuitive nor helpful. We agreed that often machine logic is simply not the same as human logic, much as we might wish it to be so. We talked for a while and found a work-around
He had more useful information for me, I could forego the $375 fee if I did such and such (I may do it next cycle, if I can confirm it’s true). We spoke for a while, I made notes, he verified everything I read back to him. Great guy. Asked his name. It was Joe. “Thank you, Joe,” I told him. The odds of talking to a person like that, in any bureaucracy, are about 10 to 1 against it.
In any bureaucracy, you have a more than 50/50 chance of talking to a peevish moron talking through his or her ass than to someone who actually knows how to help. Luck of the draw, really.
“The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error. The assumption of infallibility, moreover, is based not so much on superior intelligence as on the correct interpretation of the essentially reliable forces in history or nature, forces which neither defeat nor ruin can prove wrong because they’re bound to assert themselves in the long run. Mass leaders in power have one concern, which overrules all utilitarian considerations– to make their predictions come true.”
– Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
You can call this unending need to be unendingly infallible the hallmark of every overbearingly toxic type: the blowhard, petty tyrants of all stripes, bullies, unrepentant jackasses, stern overseers, vengeful teachers, viciously demanding bosses, bullied weaklings who grow up to get — and abuse– any measure of authority over others, small time authoritarians of every kind. The rule for infallibility is simple: never admit an error.
It is not that hard to insist on your own infallibility, if you are prepared to pay the cost to be the boss. For one thing, there is always somebody to blame: a liar who has it in for you, a thousand liars, a million liars, petty, mean bastards, the corrupt, the jealous, the weak, losers, insubordinate subordinates, traitors, leakers, blabber mouths, disloyal assholes, elites who claim they’re better than you are– hah! The list is limited only by your own infallible imagination.
Hannah Arendt makes this observation about mass leaders like Hitler and Stalin, the main subjects of part three of her treatise on totalitarianism. It is obvious, once pointed out, that every tyrant insists on his infallibility. Hitler was a great case– if Germany lost the war of aggression he started, and imbecilically prosecuted, overruling his generals and shouting that he was the smartest man in every room, until German defeat was a certainty, well– it only fulfilled his prediction that if the German Volk was weak that they deserved, every last one of them, to die. In the end he ordered German boys to man the barricades as the vengeful, brutal Red Army closed in on his bunker in Berlin. Every last German must die, because they had let their infallible selfless Fuhrer down. Nothing more he could do, he poisoned his idiot girlfriend, after hastily marrying her, shot his beloved dog and turned the gun on himself.
Which brings to mind the same thought I have every time some sick fuck kills a bunch of people and then “turns the gun on himself.” The thought: why didn’t he fucking turn the gun on himself BEFORE he murdered all those people? Makes me want to holler, although, of course, hollering doesn’t help much.
Another example Arendt gives of this infallibility/prophecy pathology is Hitler thundering to the Reichstag in 1939 that if international Jewry insists on forcing Germany into another world war, it will result in the annihilation of the “Jewish race”. You see how this prophecy business works among the infallible?
I’ve really got nothing more to add on this note, except to say that it appears those who most desperately claim to be to infallible are weak, vain, stupid, insecure, resentful, entitled, incompetent, jealous, petty, vindictive, hopelessly inferior feeling, empty, blindly hating, shallow, incurious, uninformed (yet supremely opinionated), envious, grasping, self-ignorant, desperate, persecuted, vicious types. Very fine people, fine people, no doubt, the finest people, if you know what I’m saying, but heaven help the nation that falls under the power of one of these headstrong, never wrong creatures.
Isaac Babel was a Jewish writer from Odessa, born in 1894, not terribly far from where my mother’s people come from. My grandparents were five or six years younger than him. A kind of prodigy who wrote fluently in French as well as in Russian, and a great admirer of Guy de Maupassant, he was told by Maxim Gorky, to whom he submitted his precocious work, that he had talent but nothing to say yet. Gorky told him to go live and come back when he had something to write about.
Babel joined a group of Bolshevik Cossacks who rode into my grandparents’ neighborhood of the Ukraine during the second bloody phase of the Russian Revolution. These Red Cossacks battled the White Cossacks for control of the Ukraine and Poland. Their savage, idealistic battle for human freedom won the hearts and minds of teenagers like my grandmother.
Babel’s stories of this bloody campaign, and his life as a bookish urban Jew riding with rough horseman who lived by a brutal code, collected as Red Cavalry, are incomparable. He wrote in an extremely compressed way, telling these merciless, human stories with an amazing, sometimes terrifying economy. His characters spoke a dialect I immediately recognized, though I didn’t know from where. It was my grandparents’ language, I realized years after they died. (see this, if you would like more details)
He became a hero in the Soviet Union after the publication of the Red Cavalry collection — though the brutally honest stories also contained the seeds of his undoing. Lenin died, Stalin seized power, Trotsky fled. With Stalin, a paranoid mass murdering maniac in charge, the dream of the Revolution to spread equality and liberate the workers of the world from their oppression melted into a peculiarly Russian form of totalitarianism.
Under Stalin Socialist Realism, a style flattering to the State, was required. Babel continued to write but published little, tried not to say anything that might get himself killed, had chances to flee, didn’t get out of the Soviet Union in time. Was eventually arrested by Stalin, held in an infamous hellhole, given a quick trial in a tiny room with no windows, and no witnesses. He was expected to sign a confession that he was a spy, a Trotskyist terrorist and a traitor to the revolution.
He asked to be allowed to finish his work. That was apparently the last thing he said. He was taken out and shot in a courtyard a few months before Hitler ‘s armies invaded the Soviet Union. He was one of millions quietly done in by the smiling maniac with the big mustache who many knew as Uncle Joe, America’s ferocious, indispensable ally in the war against Hitler.
A reviewer of his works offers these bits of grim, colorful detail:
Babel was shot by firing squad in the Lubyanka, in 1940. His immense popularity in Russia did not save him; and besides, it had been most unwise of him to conduct a long-standing affair with the wife of the head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov.
There was supposed to have been a trunk of Babel’s writings, hidden by his friends, a trove of his writings that were never published. It’s not clear if any of these pages were ever found.I know the trunk went the way of my mother’s blue, leather-bound poetry notebook I recall seeing as a child.A fucking tragedy every way you turn it.
I wrote the following as a footnote to the previous post. It seemed a waste to leave it as a footnote about a writer I love, an inspirational writer you may never have heard of, so here you go, those of you who may be unfamiliar with this genius’s work.
I am a great admirer of Isaac Babel’s writing. I put Babel’s writing in a class with Sam Cooke’s singing, Django’s guitar playing, Meryl Streep’s acting. I read Babel in English, of course, I know and love the 1955 translation (long out of print) by Walter Morison.
I was once told by a Russian poet that Isaac Babel’s Russian is “untranslatable”. I have always loved the Walter Morison translations, which this Russian poet told me captured Babel’s Russian surprisingly well. When I see other translations I am often struck by their clumsiness, the way they are nothing like the Babel I love.
Here is an excellent discussion, leavened by wryness, of the challenges of translating Babel’s Russian into English. I tip my cap to this writer, well done!
Here is the first article on the challenge of translating Babel I found, which struck me as great at the time. I thought it contained a section of Morison’s masterful rendering of Babel’s Guy de Maupassant (though the notes in the book I love apparently attributed the translation to Raymond Rosenthal and Waclaw Soski). It appears the author of the article linked above thought he was up to the challenge of improving this flowing translation. I say no, but, alas, am too lazy to rewrite the whole piece. To cut straight to the immortal passages in the beautiful translation I first read, skip to the last paragraphs of this post. Scroll to the double space above “Here, sorry about that.”
Here is Babel’s wonderful, laconic description of translating, of writing. This is possibly the best short description ever written about what we do when wrestling our thoughts into the best possible language (it comes after the other translator’s introduction of the story for context) (emphasis mine):
Babel himself was a translator from French and Yiddish. One of his best-known stories, “Guy de Maupassant,” is ostensibly about translation. Its narrator, a fictional Babel, has been hired by Raisa Berndersky, a rich Jewish Petersburg society wife, to help her with her attempts at translating Maupassant:
In her translation there was no trace of Maupassant’s free-flowing phrases with their drawn-out breath of passion. Mrs. Bendersky’s writing was tediously correct, lifeless and loud, the way Jews used to write Russian back in the day. I took the manuscript home with me…and spent all night hacking a path through someone else’s translation (*). The work was not as bad as it sounds. A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a barely discernible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm. You need to turn it once, but not twice. In the morning, I brought back the corrected manuscript. Raïsa wasn’t lying when she told me of her passion for Maupassant. She sat motionless, her hands clasped as I read it to her: these satin hands melted to the floor, her forehead went pale, and the lace between her bound breasts strained and trembled. “How did you do that?” So then I started talking about style, about an army of words, an army in which all manner of weapons come into play. No steel can pierce the human heart as cold as a period placed just right. She listened, her head bowed, her painted lips parted. A black light glowed in her lacquered hair, smoothly pressed and parted. Her legs, with their strong tender calves, were bathed in stockings and splayed wide on the carpet.
No, wait just a minute. This is not Morison’s translation, (or Raymond Rosenthal and Waclaw Soski’s) you treacherous fellow you. I get it now, you think you have improved on the “Morison” translation, made it more faithful to Babel’s writing, to the actual Russian words he chose. You haven’t, and I know this even though I don’t know a word of Russian. It is in the flow, the music of the language, the rhythm. Morison, the year before I was born, translated the phrase you style “hacking a path through somebody else’s translation” as “hacking my way through the tangled undergrowth of her prose” as far as I recall, I don’t have the tattered out-of-print paperback with me here at the farm. But compare those two phrases. Why would Babel have written the dry first phrase when the second is so full of flavor?
Now I see many small brutalities, inflicted no doubt, and without a sense of irony (especially considering the story itself, the passage about the subtle art of translation!) in the interest of making the translation more accurate, more tediously correct, if I may borrow your phrase for Raisa Bendersky’s stilted, painstaking, tuneless translation. I know that translation is a fine art, a very difficult art, no doubt, a kind of intoxicating dance (when working with something like Babel’s uniquely delicious prose). But sometimes you simply need to leave a fine translation alone.
“How did you do that?” with only the tiniest, almost imperceptible, turn of the warm lever, is inferior, and far less immediate, than Morison’s/Rosenthal’s & Soski’s breathless “How did you do it?”.
And fuck, the last line of the story, which made my young spine tingle and filled me with a longing to some day write a line like that, has been changed too! And not for the better, it ends the transcendent story rather flatly. It is rendered:
My heart felt tight. I was brushed by a premonition of the truth.
Nothing like the icy fingers grasping his heart as he has a premonition .. wait, I have found the original line, on-line:
My heart contracted as the foreboding of some essential truth touched me with light fingers.
Another great line, butchered also, damn it, made clumsy and clunky, along with the bit about needing to turn the lever once, not twice. The proof, if it was needed, that some phrases don’t need the lever turned at all. You took this:
No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.
and believe you’ve improved it, with only one turn of the lever, to this:
No steel can pierce the human heart as cold as a period placed just right.
Dunce!
Goddamn it, you fucker. Might be more accurate as a strict translation from the Russian, maybe the Russian word for “cold” is in there, “pierce” may be closer to the Russian than its close synonym “stab”, but for god’s sake, read the two lines in English.
Here, sorry about that. I mentioned I don’t have my moth-eaten copy of Babel with me. Read this, from the original translation, I found it in an old email I sent a friend in 2014. Observe the way it flows, without a word wasted:
I took the manuscript with me, and in Kazantsev’s attic, among my sleeping friends, spent the night cutting my way through the tangled undergrowth of her prose. It was not such dull work as it might seem. A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice.
Next morning I took back the corrected manuscript. Raisa wasn’t lying when she told me that Maupassant was her sole passion. She sat motionless, her hands clasped, as I read it to her. Her satin hands drooped to the floor, her forehead paled, and the lace between her constricted breasts danced and heaved.
“How did you do it?”
I began to speak of style, of the army of words, of the army in which all kinds of weapons may come into play. No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place. She listened with her head down and her painted lips half open. In her hair, pressed smooth, divided by a parting and looking like patent leather, shone a dark gleam. Her legs in tight-fitting stockings, with their strong, soft calves, were planted wide apart on the carpet.
The maid, glancing to the side with her petrified wanton eyes, brought in breakfast on a tray.
An audiobook of an excellent writer’s work, read by an expressive, intelligent reader is a wonderful thing. The audiobook of Eichmann in Jerusalem, read by the great Wanda McCaddon, is a fantastic aural read. I’d say Wanda’s reading is like a great translation of the original [1]. It is certainly “value added” and I’m sure Hannah Arendt would agree.
Listening to an audiobook requires a certain concentration, which can be improved with practice. Listening carefully is not something most people ever practice, we’re in a hurry, yo, get to the fucking point, did you hear… oh, sorry, were you still not getting to the point? I heard… wait, I thought you were done, were going to say the same thing you always say, are we still talking about that? — etc.
Wanda McCaddon read a line by Hannah Arendt that caused me to make a note to find the quote in Chapter IX of Eichmann in Jerusalem. It seemed to explain a lot. Why did the other countries of the world not help the Jews during the mass murder that went on for several years? Most of them did little or nothing to help (outside of Denmark) and looking back after most of one’s family has been murdered, like an Armenian after the slaughter by the Turks, it’s natural to feel betrayed, ask ‘what the fuck?’
Arendt writes (and it turns out to be merely a passing parenthetical), leaving aside the prevalent (though not Nazi level) anti-Semitism in Europe:
(As though those tightly organized European nation-states would have reacted any differently if any other group of foreigners had suddenly descended upon them in hordes– penniless, passportless, unable to speak the language of the country!)
How much light does this short observation shed on the worldwide refugee crisis the world is in the middle of today?
The United States refuels Saudi bombers in the air over Yemen so that our monarchist radical Islamic fundamentalist allies can continue bombing the towns and cities below. The Saudi planes and the bombs are made in the USA. We participate directly in creating the humanitarian crisis that has caused untold numbers of Yemeni civilians to flee their war-torn, cholera plagued country. When they flee the war that we are daily helping Saudi Arabia wage we make a new law: NO YEMENIS!!! None, no reason needs to be given, the great Oz has spoken.
The Koch brother’s boy, current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, releases an official State Department boast on International Refugee Day about how America has always been the world’s greatest supporter of those fleeing war and oppression. He mentions a dollar amount we’ve given, the rough equivalent of a dime, or maybe three cents, and says no other country has done more since the end of World War Two.
A few days later a highly partisan 5-4 Supreme Court vote comes down, along strict party lines, upholding President Turd’s Muslim Ban, er…”travel ban”. Under no circumstances (unless perhaps they are rich and doing business with one of the president’s businesses) will anyone from Yemen or several other Muslim countries be allowed to come to the United States.
USA! USA!!!!!
[1] I am a great admirer of Isaac Babel’s writing. I put Babel’s writing in a class with Sam Cooke’s singing, Django’s guitar playing, Meryl Streep’s acting. I read Babel in English, of course, I know and love the 1955 translation (long out of print) by Walter Morison.
I was once told by a Russian poet that Isaac Babel’s Russian is “untranslatable”. I have always loved the Walter Morison translations, which this Russian poet told me captured Babel’s Russian surprisingly well. When I see other translations I am often struck by their clumsiness, the way they are nothing like the Babel I love.
Here is an excellent discussion, leavened by wryness, of the challenges of translating Babel’s Russian into English. I tip my cap to this writer, well done!
Here is the first article on the challenge of translating Babel I found, which struck me as great at the time. I thought it contained a section of Morison’s masterful rendering of Babel’s Guy de Maupassant (though the notes in the book I love apparently attributed the translation to Raymond Rosenthal and Waclaw Soski) It appears the author of the article linked above thought he was up to the challenge of improving this flowing translation. I say no, but, alas, am too lazy to rewrite the whole piece. To cut straight to the immortal passages in the beautiful translation I first read, skip to the last paragraphs of this post. Scroll to the double space above “Here, sorry about that.”
Isaac Babel deserves his own post (and now, a few hours later, he has it), but here is Babel’s wonderful, laconic description of translating, of writing. This is possibly the best short description ever written about what we do when wrestling our thoughts into the best possible language (it comes after the other translator’s introduction of the story for context) (emphasis mine):
Babel himself was a translator from French and Yiddish. One of his best-known stories, “Guy de Maupassant,” is ostensibly about translation. Its narrator, a fictional Babel, has been hired by Raisa Berndersky, a rich Jewish Petersburg society wife, to help her with her attempts at translating Maupassant:
In her translation there was no trace of Maupassant’s free-flowing phrases with their drawn-out breath of passion. Mrs. Bendersky’s writing was tediously correct, lifeless and loud, the way Jews used to write Russian back in the day. I took the manuscript home with me…and spent all night hacking a path through someone else’s translation (*). The work was not as bad as it sounds. A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a barely discernible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm. You need to turn it once, but not twice. In the morning, I brought back the corrected manuscript. Raïsa wasn’t lying when she told me of her passion for Maupassant. She sat motionless, her hands clasped as I read it to her: these satin hands melted to the floor, her forehead went pale, and the lace between her bound breasts strained and trembled. “How did you do that?” So then I started talking about style, about an army of words, an army in which all manner of weapons come into play. No steel can pierce the human heart as cold as a period placed just right. She listened, her head bowed, her painted lips parted. A black light glowed in her lacquered hair, smoothly pressed and parted. Her legs, with their strong tender calves, were bathed in stockings and splayed wide on the carpet.
No, wait just a minute. This is not Morison’s translation, (or Raymond Rosenthal and Waclaw Soski’s) you treacherous fellow you. I get it now, you think you have improved on the “Morison” translation, made it more faithful to Babel’s writing, to the actual Russian words he chose. You haven’t, and I know this even though I don’t know a word of Russian. It is in the flow, the music of the language, the rhythm. Morison, the year before I was born, translated the phrase you style “hacking a path through somebody else’s translation” as “hacking my way through the tangled undergrowth of her prose” as far as I recall, I don’t have the tattered out-of-print paperback with me here at the farm. But compare those two phrases. Why would Babel have written the dry first phrase when the second is so full of flavor?
Now I see many small brutalities, inflicted no doubt, and without a sense of irony (especially considering the story itself, the passage about the subtle art of translation!) in the interest of making the translation more accurate, more tediously correct, if I may borrow your phrase for Raisa Bendersky’s stilted, painstaking, tuneless translation. I know that translation is a fine art, a very difficult art, no doubt, a kind of intoxicating dance (when working with something like Babel’s uniquely delicious prose). But sometimes you simply need to leave a fine translation alone.
“How did you do that?” with only the tiniest, almost imperceptible, turn of the warm lever, is inferior, and far less immediate, than Morison’s/Rosenthal’s & Soski’s breathless “How did you do it?”.
And fuck, the last line of the story, which made my young spine tingle and filled me with a longing to some day write a line like that, has been changed too! And not for the better, it ends the transcendent story rather flatly. It is rendered:
My heart felt tight. I was brushed by a premonition of the truth.
Nothing like the icy fingers grasping his heart as he has a premonition .. wait, I have found the original line, on-line:
My heart contracted as the foreboding of some essential truth touched me with light fingers.
Another great line, butchered also, damn it, made clumsy and clunky, along with the bit about needing to turn the lever once, not twice. The proof, if it was needed, that some phrases don’t need the lever turned at all. You took this:
No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.
and believe you’ve improved it, with only one turn of the lever, to this:
No steel can pierce the human heart as cold as a period placed just right.
Dunce!
Goddamn it, you fucker. Might be more accurate as a strict translation from the Russian, maybe the Russian word for “cold” is in there, “pierce” may be closer to the Russian than its close synonym “stab”, but for god’s sake, read the two lines in English.
Here, sorry about that. I mentioned I don’t have my moth-eaten copy of Babel with me. Read this, from the original translation, I found it in an old email I sent a friend in 2014. Observe the way it flows, without a word wasted:
I took the manuscript with me, and in Kazantsev’s attic, among my sleeping friends, spent the night cutting my way through the tangled undergrowth of her prose. It was not such dull work as it might seem. A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice.
Next morning I took back the corrected manuscript. Raisa wasn’t lying when she told me that Maupassant was her sole passion. She sat motionless, her hands clasped, as I read it to her. Her satin hands drooped to the floor, her forehead paled, and the lace between her constricted breasts danced and heaved.
“How did you do it?”
I began to speak of style, of the army of words, of the army in which all kinds of weapons may come into play. No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place. She listened with her head down and her painted lips half open. In her hair, pressed smooth, divided by a parting and looking like patent leather, shone a dark gleam. Her legs in tight-fitting stockings, with their strong, soft calves, were planted wide apart on the carpet.
The maid, glancing to the side with her petrified wanton eyes, brought in breakfast on a tray.
One point I didn’t hammer home in the post I wrote the other day is the ease with which false equivalencies are made. I didn’t mean to imply that there is equal validity to both sides of our current political impasse or that everything can be made better by polite compromise. Is there room to compromise over who is right, climate scientists who link the catastrophic climate events now very common to the warming of the oceans due to man-made pollution and the oil industry think tanks who insist we must be skeptical of these claims because unprecedented wild fires, hundred year storms, floods, droughts, earthquakes, deadly heat waves etc. sometimes just happen, by sheer coincidence, many times a year?
There is a lucrative advertising-driven industry based on false equivalencies that makes it virtually impossible for most people to get past their bitter partisan differences for the sake of seriously analyzing a larger problem. Partisanship drives commerce, whether it’s the sports team you root for or the political team. The CEO of the company that owns CBS made some comment mildly critical of the bully, then one of a dozen Republican presidential candidates, who went on to become our current president, then he smiled and said how good this stirrer of shit was for the corporate bottom line: viewer eyeballs and advertising dollars.
Only people of good will and good faith can sit down together and have a larger discussion that doesn’t degenerate into the dogmatic defense of their personal and political biases. People of good will and good faith are out there in significant numbers, but our commercialized political system has made such individuals rare in the public sphere. The public debate we get to see is conducted by hard-nosed partisans who fight each other in a way that makes powerless viewers tune in to fume. It is much easier to put on a blue hat, or a red one, and chant. It is everybody’s right to chant, but not all chants are created equal.
My mother asked me, when I was ten or so, something that struck me as a profound question. “Can you admire a great artist if you find out he’s a Nazi?” In other words, can you separate the art work from the deep personal beliefs of the person who created it? To my ten year-old mind this was a puzzler. Being a great artist was very important to me at ten, I had a grandmother who convinced me it was crucial for me to become a world famous artist. Her first cousin was world famous plaster casting sculptor George Segal. Somewhere I have a letter from Georgik, received shortly after my lone visit to his farm studio, seething, in tiny controlled handwriting, at my monstrous attitude toward the fucking rich, people he called the most generous in the world. They’d certainly been most generous to him.
Anyway, after living in the world long enough I no longer have any doubt about the correct answer to that now obvious question: if a Nazi produces great art work he’s still a Nazi and fuck him and his fucking art work. My friend and mentor Florence, a great artist and a lifelong political activist, told me the same thing the last time I saw her. It’s kind of obvious, really. Art is personal and also political. Picture the curator or gallery owner:
“Look at the unmatched delicacy of these watercolors, the subtle gradations in shade and color, the beautiful control of the brush, the bravura treatment of the sky, the sea. The way the pigment is deployed perfectly for the luminous effect…”
You say: and look at the great artist in his SS uniform, impeccable, looking so self-possessed as he points to the right and the left, sending people to slave labor or the gas chamber. Also done with great style and an almost unmatched delicacy. You can tell the man is an artist. A great Nazi artist. As for these breathtaking watercolors, they should be neatly, respectfully rolled and delicately shoved up his war criminal ass, along with the brushes and his other painting supplies.
Harsh? Perhaps. The point is that, although we routinely deny it here, our life choices are both personal and political. Compromise is not possible on certain matters. At one time most Americans thought it proper to tolerate the institution of slavery. It was unthinkable to imagine dismantling that great money-making machine that had created so much wealth, prosperity, that charmingly genteel way of life. The Abolitionists were often thought of as extremists, maniacs, hysterics. History now takes another view of them, since they now seem to have clearly been on the right moral side of the terrible issue. The issue, racially based human slavery, and chattel slavery at that, was a great controversy at one time.
I dare say even those who cheer and chant for our current overbearer-in-chief would hesitate to scream their approval of a proposal to reintroduce race-based chattel slavery in America, no matter how enthusiastically they love the school-to-prison pipeline, privatized for-profit prisons, free enterprise, freedom, the free market, no matter how passionately they believe in the vague goal of Making America Great Again. Maybe I am giving the crowd at a shallow, adulation-craving celebrity megalomaniac’s rally too much credit, but I feel it would only be a few, at least at first, chanting: Chain them up! Chain them up!!!!!
Which is not to say, of course, that many of them might not feel that choking anger, and fear, and in some shameful place in their angry, frightened hearts they might not wish for the good old days when those contentious matters were simply settled law.
Now we have right-wing partisans, salivating at the prospect of a 6-3 Conservative Supreme Court for the rest of my lifetime, calling the famous Roe v. Wade ruling, making the right to choose abortion a Constitutional right for women, the modern Dred Scott case, a ruling that held that a black person, once a slave, was always a fucking slave anywhere in the U.S.A. for purposes of the Fugitive Slave Act. Within a few years of Dred Scott Americans would be spilling each other’s blood in rivers to settle the question once and for all.
Another Civil War over the question of a twelve year-old rape victim’s right not to be forced to carry the rapist’s baby to term? I don’t imagine so, but I also have no doubt that the merciless application of the abstract principle that “life begins at conception” does not quite cover the entire moral landscape of the argument over a woman’s right to choose an abortion, if she must. Those who believe that abortion is murder, period, will not be convinced that mercy is ever involved in the issue, since it would be condoning murder, something no moral person would ever do.
Ronald Reagan, either quipping or already demented, said “the right to life ends at birth”. Funny, Ronnie. Also true. The proponents of banning abortion seldom provide for the lives of the sacred, unwanted little souls they are insisting have every right to be born. Once born, of course, you’re on your own, motherfucker, this is America, bitch, nobody owes you jack shit.
Oversimplification? Take the question of a medically complicated pregnancy that threatens the life of the mother. If the fetus continues to grow in the womb the mother will die. Still murder to spare the mother’s life by terminating the pregnancy?
Let’s ask God. Isn’t it true, God, that there is no justice without mercy?
God informs me that He was driven to despair by man’s misuse of free will. Broke His heart, He said He’s done with these motherfuckers, particularly the ones who insist they are righteously killing in His name. We’re on our own down here.
I thought this article was a pretty good discussion of the dilemma we citizens face in an increasingly tribal nation, presided over by a blustering, supremely entitled imbecile who has only one trick: attacking people who make him feel stupid or inadequate. Wait, he has two other tricks: shameless self-promotion and doubling down. If you make a bad bet, double it. The alternative, admitting error, is unthinkable. How can your brand be infallible if you admit making a mistake? It is important to be the most important and the very best person in the world. Period. End of story. Make America Great Again, bitches.
