This.
Category Archives: musing
Excellent short piece on one of three discreet mentions of the peculiar institution in the Constitution
Not being at home, where I have a short paper I once wrote about the three slimy and well-camouflaged Constitutional foundations for American slavery, the “Peculiar Institution”, I hit the internets to find the three discreet, coded, legally binding devil-in-the fucking-detail phrases.
I found this one first, the timeless reference to “the Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit”; lucked on to this excellent one page discussion of the slave trade clause, well worth a read:
http://abolition.nypl.org/essays/us_constitution/3/
Glad to see there are some excellent teaching materials on-line. My niece teaches American History in High School and I’m glad to see high quality discussions like these are easily accessible, with teaching notes. Here’s another excellent short discussion (citing all three clauses) of one of the three legal foundations for the Peculiar Institution (I’ll leave the fucking 3/5 compromise — which apportioned representatives to Congress based on total population, including 3/5 of each slave, slaves comprising 40% of the population in the South — out of this post):
Fugitive Slave Clause — Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3
Essay by Matthew Spalding (pp. 275–276)
A model of circumlocution, the Fugitive Slave Clause comes the closest of the so called Slave Clauses (Article I, Section 2, Clause 3; Article I, Section 9, Clause 1; and Article V) to recognizing slavery as a protected institution. The Fugitive Slave Clause was one of the most controversial clauses in the Constitution because it provided that escaped slaves would be returned to those who claimed ownership.
The Framers carefully drafted the clause to ensure that the Constitution did not give moral sanction to slavery. The final revision emphasized that slaves were held according to the laws of individual states and that slavery was not based on natural or common law. The language also implies that a slave owner’s property did not extend to federal territories if Congress chose to prohibit slavery there. Indeed, according to the legal requirements of the clause, an escaped slave was no longer a slave upon entering a state that did not recognize slavery under its law.
Unlike other clauses in Article IV, which vest power either in Congress directly or in the United States, this clause is written in the passive voice…
Matthew Spalding, author of the above, does an excellent job breaking down this “carefully drafted” clause, showing in very few words the complexities of political compromise I generally leave out of my morally indignant posts. I frequently take a less nuanced route:
A “model of circumlocution”, “written in the passive voice”– this is how the fucking devil speaks and writes. Just goes to show, once again, if showing again were needed (not to say it’s not): one needn’t be Hitler’s legal counsel to do excellent work, as a result of which, many millions are humiliated, maimed and killed.
467
150 years since slavery was abolished
Slavery, at one time enshrined, in coded language, in our Constitution, was abolished by the 13th Amendment, apparently passed 150 years ago today. The justice and mercy of Law, what can one say? I am about to go on a bike ride before tackling other things, but thought I’d tackle this old chestnut briefly first.
l always love the racist complaint that when it comes to slavery American Blacks should “just get over it”. It was 150 years ago! they will heatedly remind you today. A brief survey of those 150 years may be in order. American states seceded from the Union, took up arms to defend their rights, including the Constitutional right to hold humans as property, to do with such property as they saw fit. Although today most people consider slavery inexcusably evil, it was Constitutionally protected, more vigorously protected than many rights enjoyed by American citizens.
Treatment of American citizens was, and remains, largely a States Rights matter. Advocates of States Rights seem brazen about the fact that the states most loudly demanding their rights are the same ones who took up arms against the government they felt, with mixed justice, was interfering with their Constitutional rights. Demanding unthinkable things like the end of our genteel way of life, sir! Damn you, sir, I say, damn you!
After a monstrously bloody war slavery was abolished by a Constitutional Amendment, the thirteenth. The defeated rebel states had to endorse this amendment or forfeit the right to Federal funds to rebuild their war torn infrastructure (most of the fighting was in the Confederacy). “Reconstruction” was a short-lived project, it lasted about as long as Prohibition and, though it began with great promise, did about the same amount of lasting good before it was abandoned. When federal troops were removed from the South, and the Supreme Court severely limited the scope of the other Amendments designed to insure rights to the freed slaves, it was time for States Rights again.
We had states ruled in many cases by outfits like the Ku Klux Klan. Can’t be sheriff, son, nor mayor, nor governor, neither, unless you move up in the Klan. Black Codes in these states made it a crime for a black man to be unemployed and walking the streets without a certain amount of money in his pocket Wealthy white men with fields to plow could bail out imprisoned Negroes and have them work to pay off their bail money. The repayment was structured to last a lifetime. The arrangement lasted less than a century, but surely seemed longer to those freed slaves who, on paper, had the same rights as anyone else.
A war was waged steadily throughout the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s and the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s finally restored much of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, passed a century earlier. Then it was only a matter of 50 years or so after that until the question of widespread poverty among the descendants of American slaves, and hopelessness, violence, racial profiling, killing by police and so forth would be back in the news.
Malcolm X questioned why such barbarous conditions were considered a matter of Civil Rights when, more properly, they should be regarded as violations of Human Rights. Let the U.N. decide whether America is still denying basic Human Rights to millions of its citizens, he demanded. The ballot or the bullet, you know. They chose, as they so often do, the bullet. February 21, 1965. Another big anniversary, less than a year ago, sir.
The Lifespan of Friendship
Having time, that most precious of resources, I sometimes brood, that most useless of uses for time. I don’t brood at random, mind you. I brood about specific vexing details of this life here, the life we try to celebrate, and wring every bit of joy, gratefulness and amazement from. We try to appreciate the good things in our lives to the cadence of a constantly banging drum, and not only one drum, a million drums.
The beat is constant, purposeful, and often drowns out everything else. It is amplified and throbs over the wall to wall speakers of mass media. Recently it was Paris, the murderous motherfuckers who slaughtered some innocent people there. That was the only story. Everywhere. Oh, yes, and the accompanying footnote story of a similar slaughter in Beirut where less people were killed that same day in a part of the world where many are killed daily. Then the only story was about some insane American motherfucker with a gun killing people he believed were killers because they worked in a clinic that sometimes performed abortions. Trump. The idiocy or atrocity of the day. The kid who was killed by an enraged policeman in Chicago, the city paid the family $5,000,000 for the kid’s “wrongful death”. The eventual release of the videotape, after a year of government stone-walling, showing there was probable cause to believe the policeman murdered the kid in the first degree. Friday was Black Friday, run to stand on line for amazing deals. Today is Cyber Monday, big savings on line, go go go!
But I am not thinking of any of these things today. I am thinking about the death of friendship, how it happens, why. As a kid I watched my father toss old friends over the side, not even look back as they disappeared without a trace in the wake of his mighty ship. I thought this was horrible. Over time I’d learn it is even more horrible to have vengeful people scowling and skulking on deck, spewing hatred, jealousy, anger, poison, insisting they are your best friends and that you don’t deserve any fucking better, asshole. If you ask them nicely and they don’t play nice, don’t play with them. If they won’t leave, it is kind of a moral duty to throw them over the side.
It is a matter of luck and sensitivity, and valuing the rare thing that true friendship is, to find and keep good friends. A certain amount of work is involved in keeping a friendship alive and healthy. I believe there are many people who do not have the luck and sensitivity to others to find and keep good friends. It is much more important to them to be right, and feel superior, and justified in their anger, and not take any shit from anyone, ever. I have been there, prepared to take no shit from anyone, ever. But taking a little shit once in a rare while, from someone who sometimes needs to give it, as all of us do, well, OK, the price to be a good a friend, to have a good friend. A little shit can be overlooked, within reason.
But then there is the line drawn in the sand: all shit all the time! I didn’t sign on for this, you will think to yourself, protest to the friend who declares this drastic new policy. Doesn’t matter, your friend will say, you’re the only one I can throw this on, need to get it out of my large intestine, can’t leave it on the floor. The color goes nicely with your eyes. Makes kind of a warm hat and scarf for you, my friend. At first, anyway.
This is really disgusting. Is this really the best I can do at the moment?
I like to think not. I like to think I can do better. It is not always possible. Time is money. Tick tick tick.
If you want your friend to listen to you, not cut you off, consider the things you say: listen to your friend, do not cut them off, consider the things they say. The Golden Rule, from the mouth of Jesus, was Love your neighbor as yourself. This may be possible for the son of God, or a saint, but does not seem possible for the average human. The Golden Rule, from the mouth of Hillel: What is hateful to you do not unto another. This gives us a handle on a better way to act, seems more practical. Everyone knows what they hate. If you hate it, don’t do it to someone else. What are you, a sadist?
Many are sadists, sad to say, and sadism, it seems to me, comes from being victimized by another sadist. What is hateful to you do to anyone who is weaker than you– the credo of the sadist. Some victims are made more sensitive by what they have been forced to undergo, become protectors of others. Many, sadly, become fucking sadists. Is it possible to be friends with a sadist? If you are a masochist, I suppose. The old one: the masochist says ‘hurt me, hurt me!’ and the sadist says ‘no…’
This is most muddled, my friend. Is there some lesson to be drawn from this? I do not see it. Are you saying your friends will treat you no better than you treat them? Are you once more taking a bold stand for the obvious, that it is better to be a mensch than an asshole? Those things are kind of subjective, no? Don’t most of us consider ourselves justified in our actions, on the high road, compromisers taken advantage of when things go south?
I think of the line between mensch and asshole like that Supreme Court justice wrote of obscenity: we know it when we see it. In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man, as it is written in the Book of Proverbs. Or maybe it was in Pirkey Avot. I’m sure every religion and culture has some variation on this. Our’s in the west is: go someplace where there is something of material value, claim it, stand tall and use your quick drawn gun to kill anyone who contests your claim to it.
Madness creeps down like a curtain, like the darkening sky at dusk, like a thumb on to an ant. I don’t know what to make of this. Hopefully the next page will be a little more edifying and entertaining.
De gustibus
The young musician often played for her father and was always dismayed at his lack of reaction. He showed no pleasure, no appreciation, nothing. He sat, politely, and never said anything afterwards.
Many years later, as he was dying, he said to his daughter “I’m sorry, I just never liked music. Any music.”
She blinked at him, and he added “it wasn’t you, it was me.”
A light went on in the room, a glow of important insight illuminated the death chamber for a moment. In another wink, the old man was gone.
Walking Pneumonia
I got up with the sun several days in a row, the reverse of my usual practice of retreating to a darkened room as the sun begins prying open the blinds here. I walked many miles every day, seeing cool things, noticing and photographing great signs, calligraphy, sights. Walking with others, I did not stop when tired, although I often wanted to.
I did notice the extraordinary heaviness in my lungs while climbing a steep hill. I thought I might have suddenly aged forty years. What the fuck? I stood there gasping like a fish on the floor of the rowboat. It took me a startlingly long moment to regain my breath. My lungs were full of phlegm, green at first, lighter as time went on. Was this the result of ten hours in the lung ward on the back of an international flight? Sitting next to a robustly hacking man who also used my right side as a kind of body pillow?
I was sleepless on the plane coming back, looked with envy at the blissfully snoring Sekhnet across the aisle. Afterwards she told me she’d felt my hand on her arm, periodically trying to get her attention so I could express my misery. Wise of her, not a facial muscle twitched as I prodded her.
On arriving home I immediately crawled under the covers for a nap. I slept five hours without turning over. Glanced at the clock, it was already afternoon. Next time I saw the clock it was the evening.
“Why am I so tired?” I asked Sekhnet, stumbling downstairs after a ten hour nap.
“Maybe you have walking pneumonia,” she said, helpfully.
The next few days passed in a kind of fog. Shoot. Maybe I do have walking pneumonia. Glad my free Obamacare physical is coming up in a few days. The last trip to that office, to see a clueless physician’s assistant, cost me almost $500.
Truculence in Human Affairs
I had originally thought of “vehemence”, but truculence, which has none of the better associations of vehemence and contains all the violence, cruelty, heartlessness and unyieldingness, conveys it better. Once you see truculence on someone’s face, it cannot be unseen.
I think of my father, whose mother affectionately called him “Sonny”. I picture looking at her through his indescribably colored eyes– hazel, maybe, a diffuse, pale greenish color like the sea in a certain stormy light, but always guarded so it was hard to make out any color at all. Those eyes, as an infant, had seen, too many times to forget, this little red-haired woman rising suddenly from her chair as a savage, whip-brandishing maniac. Not only did she brandish the whip, her face turned merciless as she vehemently brought the whip down on his babyish face, grunting and cursing and acting out an insane and unslakable rage. The pain of the whipping was only half of the pain, the other was that the mother who was supposed to be protecting and nurturing you was, instead, attacking you violently and as only an insane person could.
How could my father ever unsee this when he looked at his mother? He could not.
The role this kind of savagery plays in human life, it seems to me, cannot be overstated. How does a person kill another person (excluding self-defense situations) without having experienced this overwhelming feeling of betrayal, abuse, humiliation? It’s hard to imagine. Having seen the truculence of someone determined to do you harm, it’s easy to imagine why people buy weapons, insist on their right to carry them around, have no moral problems with war, torture, or any policy designed to kill, injure, starve or weaken potentially truculent enemies.
I was reminded of this truly vicious cycle by a dream I had the other night. In the dream a former friend was resolutely determined not to apologize, too niggardly, he admitted, though he also allowed that he owed me an apology. He told me that, considering he was being such an unyielding jerk about it, it would not be wrong of me to punch him in the face. I was unable to do so, each time I tried my fist would stop right before the moment of impact and just touch his jaw lightly.
Seeing me unable to punish him he laughed, mockingly, and began over-acting, the way a weak man goes about demonstrating what he thinks of as superiority. He may have said something unkind about me trying to be fucking Ahimsa-Boy, but whatever he said, that and the satisfied, sadistic expression on his face finally did the trick. I saw that merciless, unrepentant, provocative face and no thought or effort was involved– I punched it. Hard. The moment of impact was satisfying, but the moment after, quite bad.
It wasn’t so much that I had departed from my vow to remain mild, or that I’d given vent to a violent impulse. I saw I’d given him a black eye, and he was glaring at me, afraid and enraged. I pictured a likely outcome– an assault complaint, being fingerprinted at the police station, fees to lawyers, a long bureaucratic hassle for doing something I’d felt completely entitled to, had, in fact, been invited to do. I was angry at myself for letting my anger put me in this vulnerable position.
Think of human history. It is, as often as not, the story of armed bands of men attacking, starving, brutalizing other groups of people, taking their land, their livestock, raping, pillaging. How do people do this? It’s easy, it turns out.
We took a walk to a beautiful nature preserve built on the site of an ancient city and a fortress. The signs told the story eloquently. People lived here, built these walls to live in peace within them. In 490 BCE a violent group came, besieged the place for 36 days, sacked it, killed everyone they didn’t enslave and renamed it after their glorious leader. Next to indications of the year, perhaps a dozen or more times over the centuries, descriptions of the who and how the place had been besieged, sacked, inhabitants killed or enslaved, the name changed: glory to the victors. Romans, Crusaders, Muslim warriors, men of God killing for peace, paving the road to heaven with the bones of their faceless enemies, painting the signposts with their blood.
Hard to understand, any of it, unless we make it personal. Picture the implacable face of someone who has hurt you. Picture it trying to stare you down, make you turn your eyes away. It is a face you will not forget soon and, among all the faces you can imagine, probably the most likely to make you forget your vow to do no harm.
Specific Excellence
There is a notion I recall from my absurd study of Philosophy at City College in the 1970s. Most of what I read and heard as a young truth seeker in those classes has fled from memory like so much impenetrably dense, badly translated, unhelpful bullshit, fascinating though a small fraction of it was to a youth searching for meaning in a world like our’s. But this notion stays in my head and I think of it today, many years after encountering it. That concept is arete which I recall noting as “the specific excellence of a thing”. I’d have to consult google to see which of the famous Greeks of antiquity it was who set forth this concept, though it was one of the Big Three. The smart money says “Play Dough”.
Speaking of City College in the 1970s, he said, discursively, philosophy classes were held in a dark, oddly narrow, drafty hall on South Campus that would have made an excellent set for most Kafka stories. The long ago demolished hall, an ancient, cramped, soot covered, two or three story tower-like structure, was reached by a second story passageway from another, larger, building, also very venerable and long gone. It’s almost like trying to remember a long ago dream, piecing together these lost halls, one was called Wagner Hall, I’m pretty sure. Was the other Mott Hall? Shephard? Was Wagner the philosophy tower? There’s nobody to call to puzzle out and clarify any of it too easily. I had no real friends at City College, I commuted there, attended classes, met with professors, interacted with classmates in class, said hi on the rare occasions I went to the cafeteria, but I recall making no friends during the years I was there, on and off, dropping in and out. I was surprised to learn, when I returned at the end for one last nine credit semester, that I had spent most of those semesters on the Dean’s List.
This was a different Dean’s List than the one kept in the bowels of the high school I went to. I appeared on that list by dint of approximately two hundred days turning up late for class. I’d found that not being in homeroom to check in first thing in the morning (I’ve always hated the early hours of the day, except for sleeping) made it much easier to slip out of classes without causing a fuss, since, technically, I was already absent, until retroactively marked present at the end of the day after I’d shown up in a few classes. If a friend was doing something interesting, or a brilliant guitar player from, say, Evander Childs High School, was cutting school that day and had turned up at my school, I’d skip some drag of a class to take part in something more nourishing to my soul.
Which brings us back to what google confirms is Plato’s concept of arete. My memory of it may have changed the meaning slightly, but possibly not. Wikipedia is impersonally coy on this matter, though the third sentence suggests an original meaning close to what I’m talking about. Each of us is born with certain specific virtues that mark us as unique individuals. When our “potential” is spoken of, it is the potential to do what we are born best suited to do. Arete is manifest when we are actually doing what fulfills best our specific virtues.
A dog has a different arete than a cat– the perfect expression of one is no less perfect than the perfect expression of the other though a perfect dog is as different from a perfect cat as a perfect entrepreneur is different from a perfect painter, a perfect songwriter. A dog and a cat can be good friends, play, sleep and eat together, but they are different animals. A perfect painter had better also be, or know, an excellent entrepreneur, because that’s business in the arete of capitalism, if you want to paint and eat, because your specific excellence is painting (and you also need to eat) if you get the point. Do you get the point?
I may not be making much sense with this, there is much to do today and little enough time, or will, to tackle it, but tackle it I shall. Or think hard about tackling it anyway, there is a lot to tackle. I am thinking, above all the other thoughts at the moment, how close I may have come to my own arete, fulfilling my own specific excellence. It is something that has occupied my mind many times over the years, occupies it now. Doing a thing as well as it can be done is a virtue.
Art needs hard work more than hard work needs art, quoth Kafka, raven-like as a besooted NYC pigeon on the windowsill of that almost forgotten philosophy hall in Harlem forty years back. Something more to think about, if that thing was needed.
Why My Mother Loved Jon Stewart, but Hated Stephen Colbert (Draft 1)
It’s easy to understand why my mother loved Jon Stewart, what Jewish mother could not love him? My mother was a secular Jew from the Bronx, raised to believe in equality, human rights and social justice. I recall her telling me when I was young that she didn’t think much of Howard Fast as a writer, but that the idealistic man who’d been blacklisted as a suspected Communist had his heart in the right place. As an old woman she was discouraged by the many signs that our country did not always have its heart in the right place. She would clench her teeth every time President Bush came on TV.
“How an obvious imbecile like that got to be president… every time I see him it makes me sick.”
She regarded him as the worst American president, definitely the worst of her lifetime. One of the last things she said to me on her deathbed at the hospice, and she said it urgently: “please promise me Sarah Palin will never be president of the United States!”
I promised her, thinking to myself “certainly not in your lifetime, mom.”
She watched Jon Stewart every night. Whenever I was in Florida with her she’d call me in to watch when his show was about to start. She found him adorable, as, of course, he is. He made her laugh, with his trenchant insights, facial expressions and overall comic brilliance. He, almost alone among the media in the years of her widowhood, gave her hope that not everyone in the world was insane. She was doubly delighted when Bill Moyers interviewed Jon Stewart and the discussion quickly became an intelligent hour long mutual admiration society between two of her favorite media personalities.
As much as she loved Jon Stewart, she had an almost visceral dislike of his gifted protege Stephen Colbert. As soon as Stewart’s show ended, even before Colbert’s American eagle swept beak and talons first toward the camera, she had the remote in hand and was looking for something else to watch. I never understood this. She couldn’t explain it, she just couldn’t stand him.
“You realize that the overbearing right wing blowhard persona is parody, he’s playing a character. He’s hilarious, mom.”
She shook her head. “I know. I don’t know what it is, I can’t watch him. I know it’s a parody, I just can’t stand him.”
So it wasn’t that she was like President Bush’s team who’d hired Colbert to do the Correspondents’ Club dinner, most likely in the mistaken belief that he was a fellow traveler, a very funny, popular comedian who happened to be patriotic and believe in the unquestionable greatness of America, right or wrong. In 2006 nobody in the media was saying too much out loud about Bush and Cheney’s muscular excesses. It was as if they were all afraid of being shot in the face with a blunderbuss full of birdshot or something.
I showed my mother the video of Colbert fearlessly skewering the president at the Correspondents’ Club. I recall at the time feeling great admiration for him, he was about the first person to publicly suggest the Emperor and those around him were naked. He showed impressive sang froid by doing it, literally, in the president’s face. My mother admitted it was a great routine. He began:
Mark Smith, ladies and gentlemen of the press corps, Madame First Lady, Mr. President, my name is Stephen Colbert and tonight it’s my privilege to celebrate this president. We’re not so different, he and I. We get it. We’re not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We’re not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That’s where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say “I did look it up, and that’s not true.” That’s ’cause you looked it up in a book.
Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works. Every night on my show, the Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut, OK? I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument. (the rest is here)
Bush is still smiling gamely at this point, but his smile becomes more and more brittle until it falls off his face after a few moments. Good sport and nice guy that I’ve often heard George W. Bush is, his politics aside, I’m pretty sure he shook Colbert’s hand at the end, told him he’d done a heck of a job. But he clearly understood in pretty short order that he was being roasted by a merciless chef with a bullet-proof persona. You can see that watching his reactions on the video. My mother loved it.
I tried to get her to watch Colbert’s show a few times, but she never lasted through the opening, switching to an in progress re-run of NCIS, CSI or other murder mystery as I left, befuddled. She loved murder mysteries, particularly NCIS. Murder mysteries were increasingly all she read as she got older. No less a mystery than any of these was her intense dislike of the brilliant Mr. Colbert.
One night I was going through a box of black and white family photographs. I found a photo that made me feel like a great detective from one of her mysteries. It was a shot of my uncle, my father’s younger brother, as a young man, dressed in a well-fitting suit. It could have been a photograph of Stephen Colbert, in character as the rooster-like right-wing talk show host. My mother strongly disliked my uncle. She found him narcissistic, tyrannical, unreasonable, demanding and petty. In a word, Colbert’s character on the show. She once desperately offered me a huge monetary bribe to spend a week in Florida when my uncle and aunt planned to visit her, after my father died. She kept upping the dollar amount as I hesitated.
“Please,” she begged over the phone, “you can’t leave me alone with them! For a week! A week, Elie! There will be bloodshed.”
I rushed into her room with the photograph of my uncle.
“Is this why you hate Colbert?” I asked, handing her the photo.
“Oh, my God,” she said, staring at the picture, “oh, my God!” And then she began to laugh. Another mystery satisfyingly solved.
Draft two is here, complete with a couple of moronic editorial improvements.
Epilogue to Childhood Memory
The ideologically driven filmmakers of “Let My People Go” (see previous post) certainly made their point to an eight year-old viewer, at least until the moment he was forced to make a dash to vomit. In the fifty years since that visceral moment, history, like freedom, has been on the march.
There were several wars in those years between the Jewish State and its neighbors including a decisive one, in 1967, when the virtually indefensible 1948 borders of Israel were expanded to include the buffers of the Occupied Territories of Gaza, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Sinai. Since that time, various Israeli governments have put permanent, strategically placed settlements in some of those territories. There has been a shit-storm of controversy, with violent fanatics on both sides having way too much say over the outcome. No doubt, given the choice, most people on each side would prefer peace to endless war. The tragedy is that the voices of modest, decent people are rarely as loud and persuasive as the voices of violent haters ready to kill, everybody and anybody. Take no chances, don’t trust their words, kill them! Make them pay!
Intellectual understanding only goes so far. I can understand why powerless people living in hopeless camps for generations, subjected to curfews, checkpoints, searches, rough treatment, detention, torture, would feel desperate enough to resort to and celebrate violence. I can understand why peaceful citizens on the other side would demand curfews, checkpoints and heavy-handed tactics in order to avoid being killed by people desperate enough to blow themselves up. Like I say, understanding with the mind only goes so far. Certain things, in the word of one peace-loving Israeli I once knew, are un-understandable.
In hindsight, as they say, many things snap into the old 20/20 focus. If you think of a handful of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, determined to take some Nazis with them to hell as the Nazis were ‘liquidating’ the ghetto, you have a clue how this rear-view moral vision works.
There is no real choosing which was worse, the killing of millions during the Middle Passage over the course of three centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, or the killing of millions during a frenzied three or four year industrialized killing machine fueled by German ingenuity and efficiency. I could not say, generations later, that either atrocity gives anyone a right to kill anyone else over it.
I’ve got no answer, propose no equivalencies, no justifications, nada. It’s a horrible situation over there in Palestine/Israel, Israel/Palestine, as in many parts of the world, many of them in the immediate neighborhood. Violence and brutality are always passionately justified by the practitioners. History shows that the violent and brutal often carry the day while voices of reason usually get their brains blown out if they speak clearly enough and get enough attention. I’d like to believe that in the long run human decency and our eternal longing for peace win out, but, looking around, I realize I may be with Anne Frank there, and Jesus, and right before he got shot, the Gandhi I was cursing just the other day.
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