Post No. 999 - Know the Reason Why

 

“All of us -- as readers, as writers, as citizens; we have obligations.” Neil Gaiman

Quite a week, it’s hard to keep it all straight. When I took the dog out for her morning walk I thought it was Saturday, but then saw kids being dropped off by the high school. We were scheduled to be enjoying art and food and a change of atmosphere in Santa Fe, my son and mother-in-law, my wife and I, but on the eve of departure my wife turned her ankle and fractured a bone in her foot. All plans scuttled. 

Spending time with my son is always good for me, he’s funny, and he’s been helping his mother. 

Israel still preparing for a ground invasion, Biden defending freedom on the television, Trump scolded and fined $5K for violating his gag order in his NY fraud case, and down in Georgia, two last minute pleas of guilty by Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro. That’s a lot of political action. As I understand it, neither Powell or Chesebro is off the hook with the federal Special Prosecutor, and they are bound to testify against the other defendants, including the man at the top, Donald “Tiny Hands” Trump. Kingpin white collar criminal of his time. It wouldn’t shock me if we see a succession of plea deals in the coming weeks. Some folks, at least, are starting to understand the cost of doing dirty work for Donald Trump. It’s about damn time. 

In essence, Powell and Chesebro are exchanging lenient sentences for testimony against the other defendants. Powell and Chesebro have tea to spill, names to drop, and we can only guess at what else they can offer the prosecution. This should disrupt the slumber of their co-defendants, including Donald Trump.  

And for a cherry on top,  Jim Jordan of Ohio found out just how much his colleagues despise him. Oh, the many reasons why. For his manifest incompetence; for his being a Grade-A Asshole for nearly twenty years; and for his perverse subservience to Donald Trump. Jordan is a member of the Ass Kissers Hall of Fame. Anyone who has worked in a business or other organization knows one of Jim Jordan’s cousins. Fuckers, every last one. I don’t know what to make of Jordan’s Ohio constituents, some of whom are probably very decent people. Can you explain to me how you’re not embarrassed by this ridiculous man? What does he do for you, as a citizen? How does Jim Jordan make your American life better or richer or more predictable? What do you get out of voting for him? Talk to me, please, I want to listen. 

I’m reading Tyranny of the Minority by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, both professors of government at Harvard. They write with clarity. They explain the baked-in impediments (Electoral College, US Senate apportionment, lifetime terms for judges, etc) to a more robust democracy that reside in America’s foundational documents and its practices over time. They contrast and compare America’s democracy with democracies in Europe and South America. They show what an overthrow of an elected multiracial government looks like, here on American soil. They offer warnings, but also a number of potential solutions, some of which seem entirely unattainable when judged in the context of our current political situation, but that’s the thing about how social or political change is made: it has to start somewhere, with language and ideas, an understanding that things don’t have to remain the way they are today. Tyranny of the Minority is one of the most important books I’ve read this year. 

I’m also reading Alfred Kazin’s Journals, not quite halfway through it, one of those books you can tuck into at any time and come away with a literary gem. Interesting descriptions of the political scene in the early 1950’s, the era of Joe McCarthy and anti-communist madness; the New York intellectual scene; Brooklyn. 

When Mitch McConnell kicks the bucket and is buried beneath old home Kentucky soil, when a little time passes and the scholars dig into Mitch’s legacy, they’ll note how his actions carry weight beyond his death, and they will see that he is a primary example of the anti-democratic nature of the US Senate. Mitch killed legislation on abortion, gun control, the minimum wage, taxes and other proposals that were supported by majorities of Americans. Mitch gave all of us the finger. He employed the Senate’s arcane rules and the filibuster like Thor’s Hammer, and shepherded the confirmation of dozens of radical judges to the federal benches. McConnell is the consequence of a weak architecture; one man, unaccountable, even to his constituents. 

I see a flock of pigeons wheeling in the morning sunlight. 

Post No. 998 - Gaza, Again

 “The disaster that befell Israel on the holiday of Simchat Torah is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu.” Editorial, Haaretz, October 8, 2023

I think it’s fair to say that the world doesn’t care about Gaza or the plight of the Palestinians. Since I began this blog in 2004, Israel has pulverized Gaza with disproportionate military force at least five times (2006, 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021), causing massive destruction of critical infrastructure and thousands of civilian casualties. Israel targeted hospitals and schools, yet I don’t recall a single American official calling Israel’s actions “evil” or “merciless” or, heaven forbid, a “war crime.” What I remember are assertions from the State Department and the White House that Israel’s right to defend itself was sacrosanct.  

To be clear, I’m not defending Hamas for targeting civilians, shooting women and children, and taking more than 100 people hostage. But nor do I accept the idea that the attack by Hamas was unprovoked. The actions of the Netanyahu government in Gaza and the West Bank over the past decade is the provocation. Gaza is one of the most -- if not the most -- densely populated places in the world, often described as an open-air prison due to Israel’s complete control of access points, water, electricity, and the flow of foodstuffs, medicine, and other goods. Israel controls Gaza’s airspace as well as its coastal waters. 

In the West Bank, Israeli settlers with the active collusion of the Netanyahu governing coalition, police, the Israeli military and the courts, have waged a merciless campaign to drive Palestinians from their traditional lands, to appropriate Palestinian olive groves and water sources; entire villages have been reduced to rubble by Israeli army bulldozers, schools destroyed, homes invaded. Writing in the October 19, 2023 edition of the New York Review, David Shulman notes that in the South Hebron Hills, thirteen villages are in imminent danger of expulsion, with the backing of Israel’s High Court of Justice. 

Shulman also writes the following: “The moral foundation of the State of Israel has been severely compromised, perhaps beyond repair, and exchanged for the horrific reality of the occupation, which is further entrenched with each passing hour.”

Once again we see a disparity in the value of human life. The lives of Palestinians are simply not valued as highly as those of Israelis. Palestinians die at the hands of Israeli soldiers or settlers with no outpouring of shock or sympathy or calls for justice, and the United States certainly doesn’t rush aid to the survivors. Moral outrage is reserved for Israeli victims. Palestinians are dehumanized in the same way that Native Americans and African Americans were during America’s first century and a half. Palestinians are deprived of civil rights, legal redress, and can be killed with impunity, driven off their ancestral lands to make way for Jewish settlers. 

Benjamin Netanyahu is a narcissist in the same way that Donald Trump is a narcissist, and like Trump, is under indictment. For fifteen years he has preached division and hatred of Palestinians and surrounded himself with rabid ultra-nationalists. Netanyahu is responsible for the attack by Hamas as surely as Donald Trump is for the January 6 assault on Congress. 

I can’t bear to watch or read mainstream American media coverage of this war; it will be presented as a fair fight between equals, which isn’t even close to the reality. While Hamas is clearly being supported from without, presumably by Iran, the support comes nowhere close to what the US provides Israel on an annual basis. Israel has an overwhelming military advantage, the latest advanced missiles and bombs, fighter jets and ordnance. 

American media will also remind us that Israel is the Middle East’s only democracy, and therefore entitled to our undying support. This assertion is laughable. Netanyahu and his coalition of rabid ultra-nationalists care about democracy about as much as the American Republican Party does, which is to say, very little. 

Israel and the United States share an astonishing hubris. Both countries believe themselves entitled to oppress, invade, attack, disenfranchise and expropriate what belongs to others, and both react with shock and rage when those others rise up and strike back.