Checking in with the skeleton of my father

“Why are you still bothering yourself about this book, Elie?” asked the skeleton of my father from his grave outside of Peekskill.  “Isn’t it abundantly clear to you yet that you’ve been pursuing a mirage for the last few years?   An admirable mirage, I’d say, but a bodiless, speculative, profitless phantom nonetheless.   Why fret now?”

That’s a tough question, man.

“Might it not be time to face the facts, the sad facts and nothing but the brutal facts?  You have good ideas, you’re a bright guy, you can sometimes tell a story in a compelling way, but you don’t seem to understand that people who make their way in the world, roll up their sleeves, learn the ropes, do the hard work, undaunted, day after day no matter what, almost always also have the kind of help you will never have?”    

This is where I was afraid you were going.  

“Look, I’m not comparing your life, your desire to tell a story that’s important to you, to that heir of Maidenform Bras whose dynamic grandmother, with only the sackful of diamonds she was able to smuggle out of Europe as the Nazis closed in and her winning personality and hard work in her new country, provided a fabulous, privileged life for her author grandson, who was able to get a publisher to pay him to go back and visit the sorrows and lost treasures of the life they left behind in Vienna or wherever it was, to retrace his successful family’s journey from terror to prosperity.   You have nothing to go visit, no discoveries to make, no villa to walk through, picturing your grandparents’ knickknacks and heirlooms there.  Your family’s voyage, in almost every case, was from terror to anonymous mass death.

“Our people were poor, anonymous, the kind of Jews that other, wealthier, more cultured German Jews invented the word “kike” for.  We were the embarrassingly provincial Jews, smelling of garlic and body odor, who had no idea how to make their way in the larger world.   We come from wailing, superstitious, ignorant stock, Elie, and you should be honest about that. The fatalism of all those crazy victims is a factor in your fatal lack of real-world hubris.”

Jesus, dad, perhaps I should let you sleep today.

“Plenty of time for that, Elie, all I do here is sleep.   Look, I don’t want to make this sound like a moral failing on your part.  Your mother and I didn’t know how to help you, how to advise you about anything.   It was clear from an early age that you were a bright and a talented boy.   We had no clue how to guide you.  You were a challenge to us, always ready to fight us.  Granted, we started some of it, maybe most of it, but, as you know at this point, we were doing the best we knew how within the limits of our own demon-filled lives.”

I am thinking of the flight of the turkey vultures I saw earlier, far off in the grey sky over Northern Westchester.  Riding the thermals with their long, comical wings.  A life of searching for carrion, swooping in to chase off other scavengers and have a death-seasoned meal.  Not bad, I suppose.

 “Jesus, stop feeling sorry for yourself!   Nobody ever had an easy time getting a book published, unless you’re famous or something like that.   Jackie Onassis calls Carly Simon, croons in her ear that there is a fabulous memoir of her life to be written, encourages her, sends her a large advance.  People want to know about the beautiful, vulnerable, talented Carly Simon, so there’s a ready market for her book.  You know how it is if you want to get paid, it’s all about marketing, Elie.  

“Take off your fucking author’s hat and put on your marketing hat, figure out all that SEO shit, how to create multiple thirsty funnels to drive a flood of visitors (potential followers and subscribers, one and all) to your content-perfected, preferably monetized affiliate website where you can prove to a literary agent that you are a good bet, you and the 150,000 people already actively reading your work every day, that you are precisely the kind of ambitious and talented unknown writer to earn them a nice 15% for their hard work.

“On second thought, feel sorry for yourself, Elie.”   The skeleton of my father gave me a thoughtful look.

Yeah, I know, Proverbs 26:13.   The sluggard says “there is a lion in the way, yea, a lion is in the street!”

“Yay, indeed.  A lion, no doubt.  A lion in the street and then you die.  That’s life, Elie.   And into every life some lions must wander.   You should keep reading those guides about how to find a literary agent.   Yes, we know about the internet platform you have no idea how to build, the rambling, spaghetti-like path you have always taken in this world, but maybe you will stumble on something, somewhere, that will give you hope for a helping hand.  And remember, you are writing a quirky kind of creative non-fiction, this book about me, an unknown man who spoke so little about himself, except through temper tantrums and humor.   I was fucking funny, Elie, you have to admit that.”

Yes, pater, in more ways than one.

“Ha ha,” said the skeleton of the pater, deadpan.  

Well, this ain’t helping either one of us today, pops, so I’m out.

“Go in good health,” said the skeleton, somehow not making it sound like the famous Yiddish curse it also is.

Death Squads

Trying to take a break from the coverage of our petulant president’s vain and self-created “crisis”, his vanity project of a gigantic wall, and his unprecedented use of extremist “Tea Party” tactics, a president vetoing a bipartisan bill in order to force a government shutdown hostage crisis, I wake up today thinking about death squads, damn it.  

History is written in blood, much of it, and that blood is rarely the blood of kings, lords, popes, princes of industry and finance.  The tree of liberty, according to an eloquent slave owner who rebelled against British tyranny, is supposed to be occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots, though it’s often hard to sort the tyrants from the patriots without a scorecard.   The tally of blood spilled is probably a few dozen tyrants against millions and millions of voluntary and involuntary patriots, not to mention millions of innocent civilians caught in the crossfire.  Tyrant blood is very, very expensive, it turns out; the rest of our blood, incalculably cheap.

It’s easy to see how this works, it is done the same way over and over throughout human history.   You create a story in which people who think like you, or who belong to your identity group,  are good, and people who don’t think like you, or don’t look like you, are evil.   Then it’s all black and white.  You can send troops in to clear things up, kill the evil people while lovingly protecting, even sacrificing their own lives, for their brothers and sisters in arms.  Somebody called this selective empathy, and it’s a good way to think of it, infinite mercy for my beloved siblings, only death and destruction for evil motherfuckers like you.

In the war zones in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, it was often impossible to know who was “good” and who was “evil” just by looking, and often the only glimpse you got, seconds before somebody’s death, was fleeting.   The population was mixed, like every population is, many of them simply trying to avoid death during a war, enemy and friend were often impossible to tell apart.   That at least two of the three major recent American wars were based on lies, or faulty but often chanted theories (the Domino Theory, WMD) makes it even worse, but not that much worse.

War often brings a nation together, no matter how much we learn about it afterwards, no matter how cynical the calculation was, no matter how deadly and destructive war always is.   Dubya Bush had very low popularity numbers until, after the attacks on 9/11, he became a war time president.   His popularity soared.   A war time president is usually popular, particularly in a nation where military service is not mandatory and anybody who doesn’t want to die or be maimed in war can safely stay out of it.    Would I put it past this grandiose, increasingly beleaguered autocrat to start a war to goose his popularity above 40% ?   I’d put nothing past him, how could I?   I’d be surprised if he didn’t launch something huge.

Why Death Squad?  It’s how unpopular governments always maintain power, through brutality and terror.   You, priest, you gave a powerful speech talking about how strongly Jesus would denounce our regime’s torture and disappearance policies?   How about we crucify you to the door of your church, padre, for everyone to see how effective those policies actually are?   You want to save poor children?   How about we leave a pile of them, drenched in blood, at the feet of your crucified body?   

I have friends who sometimes poke me about seeing Nazis everywhere.   I come by this wariness somewhat honestly.   The town where my grandparents, my mother’s parents, came from had a mixed population with about 4,000 Jews, few survived the cold winter of 1942 and the final deadly night in August 1943, when the Nazis decided their fate.  

The town was in the Ukraine.  The Poles controlled it for many years, and Ukrainians, who remained nationalistic, worked with the Poles.   World War One was rough in that town, and then, after the Russian Revolution, the Red Army marched into the area and put up the flags of the USSR.   The Ukrainians hated the Russians who, in turn, once Stalin came in, starved literally millions of Ukrainians to death, right before World War Two was underway in earnest. 

My grandparents got the hell out while the getting was still possible.   My grandmother came to America in 1921, my grandfather in 1923.  It was a good thing, because in 1924 strict immigration quotas were put into effect, reducing the numbers from that area to a tiny trickle.   

Then my mother was born, in the Bronx, and my father, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.   As they grew up the world was marching inexorably through the Great Depression toward the second act of the Great War.   Stalin starved millions of Ukrainians to death while taking all their grain.   Hitler launched his invasion of the USSR.   German troops marched eastward, and behind his troops, einsatzgruppen, death squads.   These death squads were mobile units of the Security Police and SS Security Service that followed the German armies to Poland in 1939 and to the Soviet Union in June, 1941.   They rounded up and shot partisans, intellectuals and any Jews they encountered.   They experimented with gassing, using carbon monoxide from their trucks and vans, but it was inefficient and there were just too many people to kill that way.

Have your captives dig a huge ditch, have the people stand next to it, their clothes neatly piled somewhere else, and take aim at their heads, which pop like pumpkins or melons if you hit them just right.   It was a hard job and even dedicated SS men had a hard time doing it for very long.   It was the kind of work that could drive a person mad, no matter how strongly that person believed they were doing the right thing.

In my grandparents’ town in the Ukraine the einsatzgruppen were not, apparently, involved when the time came to cleanse the town of its remaining Jews .  By August 1943 you had trains running constantly eastward toward huge industrial killing facilities.   Jews would be concentrated in various ghettos and camps which would eventually be liquidated by sending them to death camps in long trains of cattle cars.  From the Nazi perspective this was a much better arrangement all around, what with the millions of Jews who needed to be eliminated.  Then there were small pockets of Jews, in fairly out of the way places, like the survivors of my grandparents’ town.

So the Jews of this Ukrainian town were forced to build a fence between their new ghetto and the rest of the town, while the Nazis took a few hostages, including a brother or nephew of my grandmother’s, to ensure the job was done quickly.   The Jews were persecuted, starved, frozen, beaten, many died during the harsh winter of 1942-43.   Everybody left in my grandmother’s family, and my grandfather’s (and each was one of seven siblings) was eventually marched to a ravine on the northwestern edge of the town, one night in August 1943.   There local Ukrainians, under the guidance of SS officers, took care of the surviving Jews, in the way that killers “take care” of their victims.  They acted as an ad hoc death squad, while the SS supervised.

None of this was ever discussed in our home.   My grandmother drank to excess as she got older, my grandfather was fearful and sometimes a little withdrawn, but they were otherwise fine.   I learned nothing from them, or from my parents, outside of the indigestible fact that everyone left behind in Europe had been killed.   It would be decades before I’d get the details, from an indispensable web site, which collected (and translated) the eye witness accounts of survivors, including an account of the schools in that town by a first cousin of my grandfather’s, a guy named Henry, who lived in Baltimore and who I met more than once when I was a kid.  His wife was named Goldie.

There was also, amazingly, this account, by either my grandfather’s youngest brother, or, more likely, a nephew.   Identified only as Y.   Through an amazing, twisted series of misadventures, he was spared the fate of everyone in his family, outside of my grandparents and Henry, who must have emigrated around the time my grandparents did.   A horrific story, the wartime experiences of Y. Mazur, but he lived to tell it, went back to his hometown and, after a long court fight, got paid for the family home and made his way to the new state of  Israel.  I had no idea.

I have searched in vain, as have other family historians, for the exact location of my maternal grandmother’s town, in the marsh south of Pinsk.  Wiped from the map without a trace, along with everybody there, like thousands of small hamlets where poor Jews made their homes in that part of the world.

So it never leaves me, the very real idea that when a death squad comes, you’re fucked. There is literally nothing you can do, outside of trying to escape.  By the time the death squad is on its way, good fucking luck to you, collateral damage.   If a maniac wants to kill you, they usually will.   Particularly if it’s nothing personal, you understand.

 

Compare and Contrast

This polarization in American life, so similar to the vicious divide that led to the Civil War, has been escalating for the last thirty years as the fucking Koch Brothers and their accursed ilk get closer to their eventual reward — and toward their mad political goal of limitless liberty for everyone, even if it means the destruction of the planet itself.   You have as much liberty as you can afford to buy, what could be more American than that?   The petulant, immature man they have as president now doesn’t have to be asked to do their bidding.   He has the same interest in unfettered liberty they do. He too was born with $400,000,000 worth of liberty.

Was there a time when there was still a bit of decency left in American bare knuckles politics?   You can argue that during the start of Reagan’s term there was still some, a little bipartisan recognition that some compromise is sometimes a good thing.   Look what happened to Reagan’s Supreme Court pick Douglas Ginsburg and let’s contrast it to the recent confirmation, by the slimmest margin since 1881, of partisan team player and conservative Republican party insider Brett “Justice” Kavanaugh.   The following summary is from Wikipedia:

On October 29, 1987, President Reagan nominated Ginsburg to the Supreme Court of the United States to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of Lewis Powell,[1][2] which had been announced on June 26.[14] Ginsburg, age 41, was chosen after the United States Senate, controlled by Democrats, had voted down the nomination of Judge Robert Bork after a bruising confirmation battle which ended with a 42–58 vote on October 23.[15]

Ginsburg’s nomination collapsed for entirely different reasons from Bork’s rejection, as he almost immediately came under some fire when NPR‘s Nina Totenberg[16] revealed that Ginsburg had used marijuana “on a few occasions” during his student days in the 1960s and while an assistant professor at Harvard in the 1970s. It was Ginsburg’s continued use of marijuana after graduation and as a professor that made his actions more serious in the minds of many senators and members of the public.[17] Ginsburg was also accused of a financial conflict of interest during his work in the Reagan Administration, but a Department of Justice investigation under the Ethics in Government Act found that allegation baseless in a February 1988 report.[18] [1]

Due to the allegations, Ginsburg withdrew his name from consideration on November 7,[4][5] and remained on the Court of Appeals, serving as chief judge for most of the 2000s. Anthony Kennedy was then nominated on November 11 and confirmed in early February 1988 as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.[19][20]

In contrast, here is the essence of Brett Kavanaugh’s indignant, winning response to allegations of drunken sexual impropriety.  He characterized the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, who had accused him of drunkenly locking her in a room, lying on top of her, groping her and trying to remove her clothes during a high school party as nothing more than part of:

“a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.”

Ginsburg, confronted with the unseemly fact that he liked marijuana, an illegal drug particularly reviled by conservatives (many of whom stated at the time that they’d still support his nomination), withdrew his name from consideration for the Supreme Court and remained on the federal bench until he retired many years later.   Kavanaugh, confronted with allegations of bad conduct and bad character, had a dedicated team working hard to make those allegations go away.

We have the burnt kettle calling the pot black here.   Kavanaugh, in fact, engaged in a calculated and orchestrated public relations campaign to save his good name and his lifelong dream of unappealable judicial power.   The night before his hearing he appeared on Fox News with his family, portraying himself as a God-fearing life-long choir boy.   He wrote an op ed in the Wall Street journal defending himself against the left wing smear campaign.   When, after Blasey Ford testified credibly and his confirmation seemed to be in doubt, he came back snarling, snorting and swinging, fueled by apparent pent-up anger over the fucking liberal conspiracy against good men like him.   His judicial record, and his record at Dubya Bush’s White House, both redacted by about 90%, were carefully hidden from the Senate Committee and the public.   His hatred of the Clintons and all they stand for, stemming from his diligent work as a partisan assistant to Independent Counsel Ken Starr, had been bolstered by millions of dollars in money from outside right-wing opposition groups and fellow extreme right travelers.  He freely admitted that he has always liked beer, even as he raged and resisted any real investigation into the allegations against him.

Rage in a man is now considered a good thing in a political confrontation, if you rage on behalf of Justice and Liberty and have the votes behind you to get your way.   Clearly Kavanaugh did that, and won his appointment, albeit by the slimmest margin in 137 years.  Much has been lost since the appearance of impropriety standard was clear to everyone and innocent men sought to clear their names rather than rage incoherently against their accusers.  

I know it may be far down the list of things to be investigated in this most corrupt of administrations, but I’d love to see that lying fuck subpoenaed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, confronted with his plainly untruthful testimony in confirmation hearings going back to when Dubya first put loyal Brett on the federal bench.

[1]   Note that Ginsburg was found innocent of the financial conflict of interest months after he withdrew his name from consideration for the Supreme Court.