Sometimes I wonder if I have stepped into a perverse variation of “Alice Through the Looking Glass.” Can it actually be happening? Can it be that in this year 2009 there are people defending torture? Can it?
The former Vice President of the United States defends pushing people’s heads under water until they almost drown. He defends stripping people naked and forcing them to undergo sleep and sensory deprivation. He defends using dogs, suffocation and other forms of “enhanced interrogation.” Hesupports torture of other human beings..
Now we know that this man, this former vice president of the United States is crude. One merely needs to look at him to see that his ugliness is more than skin deep. The architects of torture must be crude. There is no room for sensitivity. This former vice president of the United States was, after all, the man who told a Senator he disagreed with to “Go fuck yourself.”And that on the floor of the United States Senate while this vice president was still serving as the presiding officer. What a disgusting little man he is. That the media was not up in arms about this is just another example of how ineffective the media have become.
So let’s start with a basic. Torture of another human being is unacceptable. It is unacceptable morally. It is unacceptable according to the relatively civilized “rules of war” that have been supported by countries around the world, including our own.
The lawyers of the last administration who have found the legal parsing to support torture are of the same category as the lawyers who helped build the legal system of the Third Reich. The Deputy Attorney General of the United States famously declared that it would be justified to crush the testicles of a child to get information from his parent. To split hairs on torture is in the same genre as arguing the validity of race law and extermination.
Marx once called this period in human history the pre history of human beings. When one listens to the little man who was once the vice president of the United States we can see what he meant. This little man and all he represents is barbaric. That he still has an audience is both remarkable and tragic.
It’s too bad that so much of the discussion has centered on the effectiveness of torture. That misses the point. The point is that if we begin to act like Nazi’s, just what is it that we are defending?
On this Memorial Day weekend let us remember that in World War II, American and Allied forces died to destroy the very mentality that justified torture. Between fifty to seventy million people died in that struggle. There were almost a million American casualties in that war.
Our men and women died in a struggle to defeat fascism and the barbarism of Hitler and his group of Nazis. People like the former vice president spit on the legacy of that war.
Let us remember what this country is about. Let us remember those who have given their lives so that ugly little men cannot spread their barbarism.
Haaretz, founded in 1918, is Israel's oldest newspaper. This appeared on March 20,2009. Once again the criticism of the Israeli army's attack on Gaza is greater in Israel than in the United States. That, in itself, is disgraceful.
Less than a month after the end of Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip, dozens of graduates of the Yitzhak Rabin pre-military preparatory program convened at Oranim Academic College in Kiryat Tivon. Since 1998 the program has prepared participants for what is considered meaningful military service. Many assume command positions in combat and other elite units of the Israel Defense Forces. The program's founder, Danny Zamir, still heads it today and also serves as deputy battalion commander in a reserve unit.
The previous Friday, February 13, Zamir had invited combat soldiers and officers who graduated the program for a lengthy discussion of their experiences in Gaza. They spoke openly, but also with considerable frustration.
Following are extensive excerpts from the transcript of the meeting, as it appears in the program's bulletin, Briza, which was published on Wednesday. The names of the soldiers have been changed to preserve their anonymity. The editors have also left out some of the details concerning the identity of the units that operated in a problematic way in Gaza.
Danny Zamir: "I don't intend for us to evaluate the achievements and the diplomatic-political significance of Operation Cast Lead this evening, nor need we deal with the systemic military aspect [of it]. However, discussion is necessary because this was, all told, an exceptional war action in terms of the history of the IDF, which has set new limits for the army's ethical code and that of the State of Israel as a whole.
"This is an action that sowed massive destruction among civilians. It is not certain that it was possible do have done it differently, but ultimately we have emerged from this operation and are not facing real paralysis from the Qassams. It is very possible that we will repeat such an operation on a larger scale in the years to come, because the problem in the Gaza Strip is not simple and it is not at all certain that it has been solved. What we want this evening is to hear from the fighters."
Aviv: "I am squad commander of a company that is still in training, from the Givati Brigade. We went into a neighborhood in the southern part of Gaza City. Altogether, this is a special experience. In the course of the training, you wait for the day you will go into Gaza, and in the end it isn't really like they say it is. It's more like, you come, you take over a house, you kick the tenants out and you move in. We stayed in a house for something like a week.
"Toward the end of the operation there was a plan to go into a very densely populated area inside Gaza City itself. In the briefings they started to talk to us about orders for opening fire inside the city, because as you know they used a huge amount of firepower and killed a huge number of people along the way, so that we wouldn't get hurt and they wouldn't fire on us.
"At first the specified action was to go into a house. We were supposed to go in with an armored personnel carrier called an Achzarit [literally, Cruel] to burst through the lower door, to start shooting inside and then ... I call this murder ... in effect, we were supposed to go up floor by floor, and any person we identified - we were supposed to shoot. I initially asked myself: Where is the logic in this?
"From above they said it was permissible, because anyone who remained in the sector and inside Gaza City was in effect condemned, a terrorist, because they hadn't fled. I didn't really understand: On the one hand they don't really have anywhere to flee to, but on the other hand they're telling us they hadn't fled so it's their fault ... This also scared me a bit. I tried to exert some influence, insofar as is possible from within my subordinate position, to change this. In the end the specification involved going into a house, operating megaphones and telling [the tenants]: 'Come on, everyone get out, you have five minutes, leave the house, anyone who doesn't get out gets killed.'
"I went to our soldiers and said, 'The order has changed. We go into the house, they have five minutes to escape, we check each person who goes out individually to see that he has no weapons, and then we start going into the house floor by floor to clean it out ... This means going into the house, opening fire at everything that moves , throwing a grenade, all those things. And then there was a very annoying moment. One of my soldiers came to me and asked, 'Why?' I said, 'What isn't clear? We don't want to kill innocent civilians.' He goes, 'Yeah? Anyone who's in there is a terrorist, that's a known fact.' I said, 'Do you think the people there will really run away? No one will run away.' He says, 'That's clear,' and then his buddies join in: 'We need to murder any person who's in there. Yeah, any person who's in Gaza is a terrorist,' and all the other things that they stuff our heads with, in the media.
"And then I try to explain to the guy that not everyone who is in there is a terrorist, and that after he kills, say, three children and four mothers, we'll go upstairs and kill another 20 or so people. And in the end it turns out that [there are] eight floors times five apartments on a floor - something like a minimum of 40 or 50 families that you murder. I tried to explain why we had to let them leave, and only then go into the houses. It didn't really help. This is really frustrating, to see that they understand that inside Gaza you are allowed to do anything you want, to break down doors of houses for no reason other than it's cool.
"You do not get the impression from the officers that there is any logic to it, but they won't say anything. To write 'death to the Arabs' on the walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can. I think this is the main thing in understanding how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics, really. It's what I'll remember the most."
"One of our officers, a company commander, saw someone coming on some road, a woman, an old woman. She was walking along pretty far away, but close enough so you could take out someone you saw there. If she were suspicious, not suspicious - I don't know. In the end, he sent people up to the roof, to take her out with their weapons. From the description of this story, I simply felt it was murder in cold blood."
Zamir: "I don't understand. Why did he shoot her?"
Aviv: "That's what is so nice, supposedly, about Gaza: You see a person on a road, walking along a path. He doesn't have to be with a weapon, you don't have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him. With us it was an old woman, on whom I didn't see any weapon. The order was to take the person out, that woman, the moment you see her."
Zvi: "Aviv's descriptions are accurate, but it's possible to understand where this is coming from. And that woman, you don't know whether she's ... She wasn't supposed to be there, because there were announcements and there were bombings. Logic says she shouldn't be there. The way you describe it, as murder in cold blood, that isn't right. It's known that they have lookouts and that sort of thing."
Gilad: "Even before we went in, the battalion commander made it clear to everyone that a very important lesson from the Second Lebanon War was the way the IDF goes in - with a lot of fire. The intention was to protect soldiers' lives by means of firepower. In the operation the IDF's losses really were light and the price was that a lot of Palestinians got killed."
Ram: "I serve in an operations company in the Givati Brigade. After we'd gone into the first houses, there was a house with a family inside. Entry was relatively calm. We didn't open fire, we just yelled at everyone to come down. We put them in a room and then left the house and entered it from a different lot. A few days after we went in, there was an order to release the family. They had set up positions upstairs. There was a sharpshooters' position on the roof. The platoon commander let the family go and told them to go to the right. One mother and her two children didn't understand and went to the left, but they forgot to tell the sharpshooter on the roof they had let them go, and it was was okay and he should hold his fire and he ... he did what he was supposed to, like he was following his orders."
Question from the audience: "At what range was this?"
Ram: "Between 100 and 200 meters, something like that. They had also came out of the house that he was on the roof of, they had advanced a bit and suddenly he saw then, people moving around in an area where they were forbidden to move around. I don't think he felt too bad about it, because after all, as far as he was concerned, he did his job according to the orders he was given. And the atmosphere in general, from what I understood from most of my men who I talked to ... I don't know how to describe it .... The lives of Palestinians, let's say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers. So as far as they are concerned they can justify it that way."
Yuval Friedman (chief instructor at the Rabin program): "Wasn't there a standing order to request permission to open fire?"
Ram: "No. It exists, beyond a certain line. The idea is that you are afraid that they are going to escape from you. If a terrorist is approaching and he is too close, he could blow up the house or something like that."
Zamir: "After a killing like that, by mistake, do they do some sort of investigation in the IDF? Do they look into how they could have corrected it?"
Ram: "They haven't come from the Military Police's investigative unit yet. There hasn't been any ... For all incidents, there are individual investigations and general examinations, of all of the conduct of the war. But they haven't focused on this specifically."
Moshe: "The attitude is very simple: It isn't pleasant to say so, but no one cares at all. We aren't investigating this. This is what happens during fighting and this is what happens during routine security."
Ram: "What I do remember in particular at the beginning is the feeling of almost a religious mission. My sergeant is a student at a hesder yeshiva [a program that combines religious study and military service]. Before we went in, he assembled the whole platoon and led the prayer for those going into battle. A brigade rabbi was there, who afterward came into Gaza and went around patting us on the shoulder and encouraging us, and praying with people. And also when we were inside they sent in those booklets, full of Psalms, a ton of Psalms. I think that at least in the house I was in for a week, we could have filled a room with the Psalms they sent us, and other booklets like that.
"There was a huge gap between what the Education Corps sent out and what the IDF rabbinate sent out. The Education Corps published a pamphlet for commanders - something about the history of Israel's fighting in Gaza from 1948 to the present. The rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles, and ... their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war. From my position as a commander and 'explainer,' I attempted to talk about the politics - the streams in Palestinian society, about how not everyone who is in Gaza is Hamas, and not every inhabitant wants to vanquish us. I wanted to explain to the soldiers that this war is not a war for the sanctification of the holy name, but rather one to stop the Qassams."
Zamir: "I would like to ask the pilots who are here, Gideon and Yonatan, to tell us a little about their perspective. As an infantryman, this has always interested me. How does it feel when you bomb a city like that?"
Gideon: "First of all, about what you have said concerning the crazy amounts of firepower: Right in the first foray in the fighting, the quantities were very impressive, very large, and this is mainly what sent all the Hamasniks into hiding in the deepest shelters and kept them from showing their faces until some two weeks after the fighting.
"In general the way that it works for us, just so you will understand the differences a bit, is that at night I would come to the squadron, do one foray in Gaza and go home to sleep. I go home to sleep in Tel Aviv, in my warm bed. I'm not stuck in a bed in the home of a Palestinian family, so life is a little better.
"When I'm with the squadron, I don't see a terrorist who is launching a Qassam and then decide to fly out to get him. There is a whole system that supports us, that serves as eyes, ears and intelligence for every plane that takes off, and creates more and more targets in real-time, of one level of legitimacy or another. In any case, I try to believe that these are targets [determined according to] the highest possible level of legitimacy.
"They dropped leaflets over Gaza and would sometimes fire a missile from a helicopter into the corner of some house, just to shake up the house a bit so everyone inside would flee. These things worked. The families came out, and really people [i.e., soldiers] did enter houses that were pretty empty, at least of innocent civilians. From this perspective it works.
"In any case, I arrive at the squadron, I get a target with a description and coordinates, and basically just make sure it isn't within the line of our forces. I look at the picture of the house I am suppose to attack, I see that it matches reality, I take off, I push the button and the bomb takes itself exactly to within one meter of the target itself."
Zamir: "Among the pilots, is there also talk or thoughts of remorse? For example, I was terribly surprised by the enthusiasm surrounding the killing of the Gaza traffic police on the first day of the operation: They took out 180 traffic cops. As a pilot, I would have questioned that."
Gideon: "There are two parts to this. Tactically speaking, you call them 'police.' In any case, they are armed and belong to Hamas ... During better times, they take Fatah people and throw them off the roofs and see what happens.
"With regard to the thoughts, you sit with the squadron and there are lots of discussions about the value-related significance of the fighting, about what we are doing; there is a lot to talk about. From the moment you start the plane's engine until the moment you turn it off, all of your thoughts, all of your concentration and all of your attention are on the mission you have to carry out. If you have an unjustified doubt, you're liable to cause a far greater screw-up and knock down a school with 40 children. If the building I hit isn't the one I am supposed to hit, but rather a house with our guys inside - the price of the mistake is very, very high."
Question from the audience: "Was there anyone in the squadron who didn't push the button, who thought twice?"
Gideon: "That question should be addressed to those involved in the helicopter operation, or to the guys who see what they do. With the weapons I used, my ability to make a decision that contradicts what they told me up to that point is zero. I dispatch the bomb from a range within which I can see the entire Gaza Strip. I also see Haifa, I also see Sinai, but it's more or less the same. It's from really far away."
Yossi: "I am a platoon sergeant in an operations company of the Paratroops Brigade. We were in a house and discovered a family inside that wasn't supposed to be there. We assembled them all in the basement, posted two guards at all times and made sure they didn't make any trouble. Gradually, the emotional distance between us broke down - we had cigarettes with them, we drank coffee with them, we talked about the meaning of life and the fighting in Gaza. After very many conversations the owner of the house, a man of 70-plus, was saying it's good we are in Gaza and it's good that the IDF is doing what it is doing.
"The next day we sent the owner of the house and his son, a man of 40 or 50, for questioning. The day after that, we received an answer: We found out that both are political activists in Hamas. That was a little annoying - that they tell you how fine it is that you're here and good for you and blah-blah-blah, and then you find out that they were lying to your face the whole time.
"What annoyed me was that in the end, after we understood that the members of this family weren't exactly our good friends and they pretty much deserved to be forcibly ejected from there, my platoon commander suggested that when we left the house, we should clean up all the stuff, pick up and collect all the garbage in bags, sweep and wash the floor, fold up the blankets we used, make a pile of the mattresses and put them back on the beds."
Zamir: "What do you mean? Didn't every IDF unit that left a house do that?"
Yossi: "No. Not at all. On the contrary: In most of the houses graffiti was left behind and things like that."
Zamir: "That's simply behaving like animals."
Yossi: "You aren't supposed to be concentrating on folding blankets when you're being shot at."
Zamir: "I haven't heard all that much about you being shot at. It's not that I'm complaining, but if you've spent a week in a home, clean up your filth."
Aviv: "We got an order one day: All of the equipment, all of the furniture - just clean out the whole house. We threw everything, everything, out of the windows to make room. The entire contents of the house went flying out the windows."
Yossi: "There was one day when a Katyusha, a Grad, landed in Be'er Sheva and a mother and her baby were moderately to seriously injured. They were neighbors of one of my soldiers. We heard the whole story on the radio, and he didn't take it lightly - that his neighbors were seriously hurt. So the guy was a bit antsy, and you can understand him. To tell a person like that, 'Come on, let's wash the floor of the house of a political activist in Hamas, who has just fired a Katyusha at your neighbors that has amputated one of their legs' - this isn't easy to do, especially if you don't agree with it at all. When my platoon commander said, 'Okay, tell everyone to fold up blankets and pile up mattresses,' it wasn't easy for me to take. There was lot of shouting. In the end I was convinced and realized it really was the right thing to do. Today I appreciate and even admire him, the platoon commander, for what happened there. In the end I don't think that any army, the Syrian army, the Afghani army, would wash the floor of its enemy's houses, and it certainly wouldn't fold blankets and put them back in the closets."
Zamir: "I think it would be important for parents to sit here and hear this discussion. I think it would be an instructive discussion, and also very dismaying and depressing. You are describing an army with very low value norms, that's the truth ... I am not judging you and I am not complaining about you. I'm just reflecting what I'm feeling after hearing your stories. I wasn't in Gaza, and I assume that among reserve soldiers the level of restraint and control is higher, but I think that all in all, you are reflecting and describing the kind of situation we were in.
"After the Six-Day War, when people came back from the fighting, they sat in circles and described what they had been through. For many years the people who did this were said to be 'shooting and crying.' In 1983, when we came back from the Lebanon War, the same things were said about us. We need to think about the events we have been through. We need to grapple with them also, in terms of establishing a standard or different norms.
"It is quite possible that Hamas and the Syrian army would behave differently from me. The point is that we aren't Hamas and we aren't the Syrian army or the Egyptian army, and if clerics are anointing us with oil and sticking holy books in our hands, and if the soldiers in these units aren't representative of the whole spectrum in the Jewish people, but rather of certain segments of the population - what are we expecting? To whom are we complaining?
"As reservists we don't take relate seriously to the orders of the regional brigades. We let the old people go through and we let families go through. Why kill people when it's clear to you that they are civilians? Which aspect of Israel's security will be harmed, who will be harmed? Exercise judgment, be human."
I am about to head out to New Haven. It is always a pleasure. Not New Haven, but my daughter, Hira, my son in law, Todd, and my five year old grand daughter, Lucy. It's only two hours which is much better than the cross country trip that I would regularly take when they lived in Seattle.
This time is different. I was to drive Vish, the father of Hira's best friend and the grandfather of Ruby, who is a year and a half. But Vish just called to say that he has a flu. It has been going around. This is a possible scenario: Ruby got it and gave it to her dad. Her dad gave it to Lucy at a Christmas party we had. Lucy had a cough and a fever and finally got on antibiotics and is getting over it. And now Vish may have it and can start the cycle all over again.
Of course it's different when you have kids. Ailments go around and around and around. But neither Vish nor I wish to be the Typhoid Mary's for our respective grand children.
Soooo, I am encouraging my friend not to go. Usually I go for more than a weekend. And I thought about not going--for a millisecond. I called Hira and told her of the situation. There was a sound from the background--a Lucy sound.
Hira reported. "Lucy says you can come but you can't talk about war."
Don't get me wrong. Lucy loves her grandpa (who she sometimes calls "grandpoo"). I feel confident of that. That confidence is borne of the fact that she does not mince her words.
Lucy hates war. She hates everything that is connected to it. She hates the very mention of it. And there is nothing ideological about that.
I tell her stories. In fact I have been telling one that involves some of her stuffed animals and a few others to boot. I do not fill these stories with killing. In fact they are very benign. Yet, every time there is something that is scary in the very least, Lucy will tell me to stop.
I don't know when the issue of war entered into our discussion or stories. I can't even imagine. But I am sure there was something, sometime, somewhere. Maybe it was when I was telling her about the Civil War. And, perhaps, the fact that I can't remember is more a commentary on me than Lucy.
Fact is that my five year old grand daughter is very clear. She wants nothing to do with anything involving killing or war. And when she is clear she makes that clarity known.
Some people might smile and say that it is sweet that a child wants to avoid violence. Some people might say that this is something that she will outgrow as she learns what the "real" world is all about.
I say that my five year old grand daughter has a more civilized view of the world than most of the adults who are running it. For repulsion at the very thought of killing other human beings is the most human of sentiments. War is the sanctioned murder of others. It is barbaric and I am amazed and pleased that my grand daughter can feel and see this. Let us hope that the five year olds will run the world someday.
I am a Jew. Always have been. I never went to Hebrew school. I never got Bar Mitzvahed. But I am a Jew, nevertheless. In fact, being a secular Jew is as much a part of the Jewish tradition as being a devout Jew.
For me being a Jew is not about religion. Religion is a very personal thing. I never have been into organized religion. Never did like the idea of people telling me what to believe or not believe. Never did like rules even if they had been around for a few thousand years.
As I get older I am able to define just what it is about me that is Jewish, for it is ridiculous to say or think that culture makes no difference in the character of a person. More and more I see that there are aspects of Jewish culture that are part of who I am. Recent events have brought this to the fore.
As the armed forces of the State of Israel bombed and machine gunned people in Gaza I felt revolted. As the armed forces of the State of Israel made it impossible for hospitals to treat wounded, as the armed forces of the State of Israel blew apart women and children in the name of retribution, I felt sick to my stomach.
So let me contradict myself and propose a rule. Under no circumstances do you murder women and children. I am really not interested in the reasons. We Jews are smart. We have a history of intellectual discussion. This is rooted in the Talmud itself. Maybe that’s why there are so many Jewish lawyers.
We also have a healing tradition—a tradition of compassion. Maybe that’s why there are so many Jewish doctors.
As Jews we have been subjected to millennia of persecution. Mothers have been killed in front of their children. Jewish children have been gassed, burned, shot and tortured for thousands of years.
As a Jew, I cannot sanction the murder of women and children, no matter what excuse. I cannot support the killing of women and children at any time in any place. How can we?
Where is our morality? Where is our memory? Have the echoes of the machine guns at Baba Yar or Auschwitz faded out so far that we don’t realize that murdering of innocents is unforgivable?
There is a story of an ancient rabbi who sat with his students in an olive grove. He asked his students when we know the difference between dark and light.
One student answered, “When we can tell the difference between a donkey and a camel.”
The rabbi shook his head.
“Light is when we can distinguish the olive trees against the horizon,” another student said.
Again the rabbi shook his head.
The students were getting agitated. “Is it when we can see our hands in front of our face? Is that when we can distinguish light from darkness, rabbi?” asked a third student.
Again the rabbi shook his head.
“Tell us rabbi,” the students chorused. “When can we tell the difference between dark and light?”
The old man pointed to the horizon and then to his hands. “It is neither there nor here,” he said. “Light is when we see ourselves in others. All else is darkness.”
This, to me, is the essence of being a Jew. Even as we are outsiders we can see ourselves in others. Because we have been outsiders we can see ourselves in others and others in ourselves. For me, compassion is the essence of being a Jew. In that sense it is no wonder that Christ comes out of the Jewish tradition.
But governments have nothing to do with compassion. They never have. And armies are made for killing, whether they are Russian or German, Israeli or American. Finally, like that Dylan song, every country thinks they have God on their side. How many thousands of years have people slaughtered each other thinking that God was on their side?
Marx once spoke of this period in which we live as “prehistory”. It is prehistory when grown up human beings can actually justify the state murder of thousands.
Of course, the continual state sanctioned murder of women and children in Iraq is a modern atrocity that keeps on being renewed. This, too, is an abomination.
But the calculated Israeli destruction of people in Gaza has a different flavor for me. It is the constantly perpetuated myth that the state of Israel is somehow representative of Jewish culture. It is the constant lie that the State of Israel represents all Jews.
The State of Israel is a state. Like all states, it has no heart and can be cynical and destructive. And now it is engaging in the killing of women and children. It does not represent me. Nor does it represent what I love about the Jewish tradition—compassion, sensitivity and wisdom.
Just as the Vietnamese were able to distinguish between the people of the United States and the government which napalmed their population, so I distinguish between the State of Israel and the people of that country.Apparently there is more serious protest in Israel about the actions of the government than there is in this country. How strange is that?
I really don’t care “who started it.” There is something very childish about that argument. I mean really childish. Just yesterday I saw two brothers, age five and six fighting. “He started it,” said the five year old, but the fight was in the relationship not the acts.
Can we learn nothing from five year olds? Look at our family. Jews and Muslims are of one blood. We are brothers and are fighting a family feud that began a very long time ago. It is time to grow up.
Of course the irony is that Jews and Muslims have lived together in peace for quite some time before this last century. While the Inquisitors of Christian Spain were burning Jews at the stake, the Caliphs of Bagdad welcomed Jews into the civilized culture of their world.
I am not a pacifist by belief. In fact, I try not to believe in anything and really don’t hold much with the notion of faith. But in this day and age it is insane for states to operate as they have since Babylonia.
We, in this country, are emerging from an eight year period of darkness. Millions of people adapted the slogan of “Yes We Can”. Like all slogans that can be cheapened and we Americans can turn anything into a bubble gum ad. But there was something much deeper in this last election. It is the possibility that people can start thinking in new ways.
Maybe, in this tenth year of the twenty first century we can start thinking and acting in new ways. Maybe we can start to listen to our hearts. Maybe we can stop justifying the unjustifiable. Maybe.
Never has history been so alive for me as at this very moment. Thomas Jefferson’s campaign song has been ringing in my ears for over a year now. I have been waiting to sing it. Now I can: “The gloomy night before us flies, the reign of darkness now is over…”
We have been in darkness these past eight years. It has been a darkness of fear and suspicion. Fear of terror. Terror of fear. Fear of Muslims or those who look slightly different. Fear of those who are not “real Americans” as the losing Vice Presidential candidate put it. Fear of foreigners as if we were not all born of foreigners. It has been a darkness of division and exclusion. It has been a darkness where politicians have manipulated our lowest animal instincts—our lizard brains. Our fears.
We have been in darkness. Our congressional representatives in both parties have collaborated in the invasion of a country that posed no threat to us. We have watched as sons and daughters, father and mothers, sisters and brothers both American and Iraqi have been maimed and killed—for no good reason. We have watched super rich corporations get richer and richer in a war that has drained us dry. We have watched tax policies that grant the super wealthy tax cuts on a theory that was outdated seventy-five years ago. “Trickle down”??!! That went out with Herbert Hoover only to be resurrected by this moribund outgoing administration.
We have been in darkness. Not even during the notoriously corrupt administration of Warren G. Harding have the corporate partners of the ruling party so blatantly robbed the public coffers as they have these past eight years.
We have been in darkness where words have lost their meaning. “Freedom” has come to mean invasion and war. “Liberty” has come to mean government sanctioned torture and spying upon citizens without cause or legal permission. And “Prosperity” has come to mean growing indebtedness, crumbling roads and schools, unemployment, and economic collapse. Even George Orwell could not parody these past eight years.
We have been in darkness.And yet with darkness there is light. Always there is light, burning even brighter for the darkness itself.
We Americans have a history of independence. As a country we were born in a revolution for independence. We have a history of resisting attempts to tell us what to do or who to be. We are a nation of uprooted people. We are a nation of strangers in a strange land. Most of us are descended from folks who pulled up stakes in their homeland to seek a new life in a new world. Or we were ripped from our homelands to servitude across the vast oceans that divide North America from Africa.
Yet, for ninety years after the first guns of the American Revolution were fired at Lexington, the curse of slavery lay across us like a shadow. Our liberty could not be liberty while millions were enslaved.
There is no greater division in a country than civil war. The War came and slavery was abolished. It was a long and bloody war of brother against brother. And, at the helm of the Union government was Abraham Lincoln, a self educated lawyer from Illinois. It was Lincoln at his second inaugural address at the end of the War that called for “malice to none and charity to all.”It was Lincoln that called for healing after so many anguished years of death and division.
Today we stand divided. No civil war has torn us apart, but divided we are. This last campaign showed that. On one side there was an appeal to the “real” Americans. On one side there were as an article in Harper’s Magazine pointed out, more slime and lies than in any other campaign. On one side there was fear. There was hatred and there was anger. When the Republican candidate gave his concession speech, the crowd booed more than once at the mention of Obama. There was hatred. There was anger.
On the other side, Barak Obama, a Black man, called for unity. He has called for a gathering of our people to solve the issues that need to be solved. He called upon our country as a whole to realize its potential—to recognize its unique history and move into the unknown. For moving into the unknown is part of our history from the gates of Ellis Island to the shores of Plymouth, from the slave ships at Charleston harbor to the “prairie schooners” of Nebraska.
Barak Obama has consented to represent the best in us. And we have responded in kind.There is no arrogance here but the greatest humility which is probably why he is the most unique political leader we have had since Lincoln. President-Elect Obama has recognized his rendezvous with history profoundly. He nurtures the empowerment of an entire people. “Yes we can.” This is not just a slogan of a political campaign. It is something much larger even than the man himself. And he seems to clearly know that as well.
Never have I felt greater hope and excitement about our country than I do at this moment. Franklin D. Roosevelt took office at a time of crisis. “The only thing we have to fear,” he said, “is fear, itself.”
We are now in a moment of crisis. Yet there is a wave of hope throughout this land.
Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the constrictor. Fear is the opposite of love. President-elect Barak Obama is leading us out of fear by recognizing that we can change our lives---and ourselves. And the only way that healing and unity can occur is if people begin talking and listening and reaching out to each other. That can happen only on the basis of expansion and love. What a wondrous time this is!
Of course there are still private interests. Fact is, however, that ninety-nine per cent of the American people are potential friends. Fact is that improved quality of life is something that benefits us all.
This is not just about a man. It is about what that man has taken upon himself to represent. And that defines the greatness of the man.
Our history has been linked to song. At the LincolnMonument in 1963 Martin Luther King rang out the words “free at last! Free at last! Praise God almighty, we’re free at last.”
When the powerful British army confronted the rag tag armies of the American colonists, another song rang out. William Billings of Boston was a classical American misfit. He had one eye, was lame in one leg, had a deformed arm and wrote the battle song of the American Revolution, “Chester.”He wrote of how British
“vet'rans flee before our youth,
And gen'rals yield to beardless boys.
Today is a victory for the young in heart as well as young in age.
The song concluded. It rings down to all of us.
What grateful off'ring shall we bring,
What shall we render to the Lord?
Loud hallelujahs let us sing
From the mountains of Vermont to the harbor of San Diego, from churches, synagogues and mosques, from the Ninth Ward of New Orleans to the Finger Lakes of New York--Loud hallelujahs let us sing. Amen!
By the morning of November 5, 2008 there is an excellent chance that a majority of the people in the United States of America will have elected a Black man President of the United States.
By the morning of November 5, 2008 there is an amazingly good chance that the people of the United States will have elected someone whose father was African and whose mother was Caucasian.
By the morning of November 5, 2008, there is a wildly wonderful possibility that the people of the United States will elect someone who grew up in a non traditional family. He was raised by his single mother and his grandmother.
How far we have come in such a short period of time.
I remember my first visit to my relatives in New Orleans. It was in 1953 and I was fourteen. It was the first time I had ever seen the segregated south. There were water fountains for “Colored” and water fountains for “White”. There were adjustable seats in the trolleys where the rear section was “Colored” and the forward section was “White”. It seemed pretty stupid to me at the time and I liked to hear the story about how my grandma and her younger sister would come down South to visit and that the two old ladies would always march down to the “Colored” section and sit down. Nobody tried to tell my Grandma what to do.
It would be two years after my visit that Emmett Till, a fourteen year old Black boy from Chicago was beaten, shot and killed in Money, Mississippi. His crime was to have whistled at a white woman. He was beaten so badly that his face was unrecognizable. It was a a ring that he wore that provided clear identification.
It was only a few years earlier that the president of the United States abolished segregation in the military. Black soldiers did not mix with white before then. The catalyst for this change happened during the Korean War. A platoon of Black soldiers took a hill. Their white soldiers thought they were North Korean and shot them down.
A year after my visit to New Orleans the United States Supreme Court struck down segregation in the schools and Jim Crow began to die. It was hastened on its way by a whole generation of young folks, black and white, marching, sitting, , waiting for service in restaurants, getting people to vote. But uniquely, the leadership of this movement was mainly young black men.
The late Chou En Lai, Premier of the PeoplesRepublic of Chinawas a most sophisticated and well educated man. He had attended the Sorbonne in Paris. He knew a great deal about world history. A few years ago, some interviewer asked Chou whether the French Revolution had any effect on China and the world. He thought for a moment and answered, “It’s too soon to tell.” The French Revolution had been around for almost two hundred years. The Chinese have a different historical perspective.
A hundred and fifty years ago, the United States Supreme Court held that a Negro had no rights that a White man was bound to respect. That was the law of the land.
This same Supreme Court decision held that all people of African descent that were brought as slaves could never be citizens of the United States. It held that the United States Congress could not prohibit slavery in the federal territories that would become states. That was the Dred Scott decision of the United States Supreme Court. That was the law of the land one hundred and fifty years ago. Some perspective: when I was born there were people alive who were alive when the Dred Scott decision was made. Not so long ago.
Less than a decade after this decision, slavery was over. Less than a decade later, Congress and the country amended the Constitutionextended the right to vote regardless of “previous condition of servitude.”
How fast things change. How fast people drop old beliefs.
And then there’s the family. In that dulled period of the 1950’s the happy family was all over the place, on t.v., the movies.Divorces were much rarer then.
I went to a wonderfully nurturing very small camp called Journey’s End Farm. There were rarely more than twenty-four of us but there were a significant number of kids from “broken homes”. (My home was broken when I was nine and my dad died).
Single mothers were off my radar when I was a kid. With the exception of my own, of course. There just weren’t too many of them around.
When I was a kid the one thing that was quite a bit weirder than “broken homes” was “mixed marriages”. My step father had a very close friend, Ray Stowe. He was a direct descendant of Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. His wife, Bea, was Black. I think that they did not have kids because of just how complicated that could be. Even my open minded mother would lower her voice when talking about “mixed marriages” like it was a problem to be endured by those engaging in it.
We, the people of the United States by the morning of November 5, 2008 very likely will have elected a man born of a marriage between a Black man and a white woman. We will have elected a man brought up by a single mother and a grandmother.
More than this, we will have elected a man who rose like an American myth through his hard work and persevering to transcend and to help us transcend our false divisions. This truly is an independently tough human being. (The other presidential candidate has rarely done anything new. I mean, after all, he went into the family business of war. No originality there. McCain and Grandsons—Killers of Men. Some Maverick. Raise the Flag. My Country Right or Wrong. All That Jazz.)
It is, perhaps, the unique greatness of the man that allows us to drop our old biases. It is the individuality and honesty of the man that touches us before we even notice the color of his skin. His intelligence and sincerity are intelligent and sincere.
Point is that millions upon millions of voices will be raised to elect a man president who would not have been able to sit in a Woolworth lunch counter if he had been born forty years earlier.
We have got to this point, so many tens of millions of us. No matter what the results of November 4, we have got to this point. And for that we can be proud of ourselves as Americans.
We in Europe are at a loss to understand what is going in the USA. We can only think that the American people are being fed pure propaganda, as was the case in Hitler's Germany prior to the 2nd World War, and that because of this their ability to make reasoned and educated judgments has suffered a serious setback. Sadly, this is the only explanation that many of us can find. I, for one, find it almost beyond belief that Bush was re-elected. I would have thought that one term would have been more than enough. To me he is a madman in a Peter Sellers movie…..
Poet In Residence
[The above appeared as a comment to the previous article on this blog, “Feeding the Wolves, 2008”]
Dear Poet in Residence,
First, I want to say what a gas it is that we have already met. Both of us write haiku for the “Autumn Haiku” (which followed the “Summer Haiku”) site. I assume that’s where you found this site. So here we are, two poets mixed up in the center of things, trying to make sense out of insanity .Maybe politics really is too important to leave the politicians.
No Peter Sellers movie ever captured the loonyness of this moment. We have, I think, reached the point in this country where a satirist might merely be a cold reporter of the news. That’s why John Stewart’s show is so popular. He’s not making jokes. He’s just putting out the facts, usually without any opinion.
It’s hard to keep a sane head in this madness. And by madness I mean a presidential candidate making outright lies again and again. And these are lies that he knows are lies. The Republican candidate has lied about everything: his own record on regulation, his position on the economy. I don’t ever remember a presidential campaign where one of the candidates created such a litany of lies. And then, with the Vice Presidential candidate, the lying escalates. The Governor of Alaska is lying about her record as a “reformer”, “maverick” whatever.
Now, these two Republican candidates have expanded their level of lies to attack Barak Obama. It is almost at the point where I hesitate even to give examples. Like Obama never advocated sex education for five year olds. Jesus! Peter Sellers could not have created a tragic-comedy as powerfully unreal as this reality. Not even Bertholt Brecht could do that. And we are living in it.
After saying all this, I can’t imagine living in a more exciting time. No, I don’t think that Chinese wish, “may you live in interesting times,” is a curse. I think it is a blessing. I feel blessed to live in such times as these. And in such a place as this. Who needs boredom?
I used to think that it was overboard when people made analogies between us in the U.S. and the Germans in Nazi Germany. Of late, I have played with that analogy myself.
There are some similarities. I don’t mean the similarities of storm troopers knocking at the door and arresting Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Socialists, Liberals. We are very far from that even with the present administration’s disregard for constitutional process. There are real similarities between what is going on in this country and what went on in Nazi Germany. But it is not the concentration camps nor the secret police.
This country has invaded another country that posed it no threat. It has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of people for a war whose very reasons for existence evaporated years ago. Nazi Germany invaded other countries on the pretext that its self interest was threatened. There’s a similarity.
Young German boys bought the bullshit and died thinking they were protecting the homeland. How many American young men and young women have died thinking they were protecting our homeland? Homeland Security?
Another similarity is the big lie. The Nazi’s were really good at that. They would consciously create total lies and it seemed like a lot of folks believed them. Again, how many times does the Republican presidential candidate have to repeat the explicit and conscious lie that Barak Obama wants to teach sex education to five year olds? And the repetition gets stated over and over on the satellite propaganda machines of the media like Fox News. And what clever Republican Party Ph.D. in Psychological Manipulation thought of that wonderful way to link a child sexually to a Black Man?
The big lie is now the stock in trade of the Republican political machine and its candidates. Every time you think they can’t get any lower---they do.
Another similarity between the Nazi’s and our government is that it is totally of, by, and for giant corporations. The biggest economic beneficiaries of the Hitler years were the loyal corporations. And today? And here.
One other similarity between Nazi Germany and my country today is the manipulation of fear. There is no question that fear was the giant motivator in the Nazi invasions of other countries. Fear that the Germans would be brought to their knees again like they were after World War I. Fear that other countries feared them and would attack them. Fear. How many times did speakers use the word “terror” or “terrorist” at the Republican presidential nominating convention of 2004? This whole administration is based on fear—of terrorists—of losing your way of life—of gays—of [pick your own].
But there the similarities end. Karl Marx once said, “history repeats itself. The first time as tragedy and the second time as farce.” So you look at the Gotterdammerung of Nazi Germany—the fires that consumed a once proud people and raged into a Holocaust. An extermination of millions of people orchestrated by an intensely charismatic Fuehrer and his cohorts who consciously mobilized the power of the dark force in the psychic traditions of a people. Here truly was a Knight of Evil. This was tragedy beyond tragedy.
John McCain as the Fuehrer? That’s farce. What a sad and querulous old man who probably knows next to nothing about what moves him. This is farce. Or how about George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler? Dick Cheney would, I guess, love to be able to be a Fuehrer. But would you buy a used car from a face like that?
I love this country so very much. My study of American history was a labor of love from undergraduate school through a doctorate. Goose stepping is about as non American as you can get.
There is a strong element of truth about the pioneer spirit. Not the Fourth of July day speech pioneer spirit. Fact is that all of our ancestors are immigrants. These were two groups of folks. There were those of us whose ancestors pulled up their roots and chose to enter a new world—an unknown world. There were those who were pulled up by the roots and brought in chains to this new world. All of us and our families have been strangers in a strange land and I do believe we carry that spirit with us.
I do believe that the American people have a short bullshit span. In some ways Americans are as hard to corral as cats.
We Americans have been through periods of temporary insanity before. Take the McCarthy period. Please. I mean that guy really was leading the country with lie after lie after lie…….and fear.
I was a teenager during the McCarthy period and my parents were leftists. They were radicals. They were Reds. So I started off with a head start identifying the insanity. These were people I loved and they loved me. My stepfather, the guiding political light of the family, was a stubborn, bullheaded, dedicated, totally honest and caring human being. I guess he had to be single minded. The pressure during this period on anybody slightly left of center was great. And he lost job after job---as a professor of music, no less—after the F.B.I. whispered in the college president’s ear. Subversion of music was a serious thing back in the 1950’s. So I had a good view of the 1950’s madness that was quite different than that which people saw on the television program, “Happy Days”.
I was the enemy. I was the person that was going to subvert the government and destroy democracy. I was something to be feared. I, as the popular anti Communist t.v.show titled, “led three lives” or certainly two.
And yet I had friends. I connected with the folks in my class. We respected each other as human beings. We had proms. We all knew each other since the class only had fifty four people. There was sanity in the midst of the insanity.
By the time I graduated college, the 1960’s were dawning. It was like the heart of the country had opened up again. Where people were terrified to open their mouths in the 1950’s, ten years later, people were growing in the streets to express their opposition to American intervention in Vietnam.
There was a time in 1960, when I could actually feel a new and fresh wind blowing over the land. It was not, by the way, created by John F. Kennedy et familia, but was definitely used by them. In the midst of a horrendous war, it was the dawning of a new time. Aquarius or whatever.
I feel that dawning now. Thomas Jefferson was running against John Adams in 1800. Adams, despite his other attributes, was overtaken by fear of “the others”—in this case the French and their sympathizers at home. (Remember how Congress changed the name of French fries to freedom fries in 2003 when the French wouldn’t support the invasion of Iraq?) So the Adams administration, out of fear of others, passed a series of acts. These were the Alien and Sedition Acts, which provided, among other things that newspaper editors could be thrown in jail for criticizing the president. This was another period of insanity. Adams lost the election.
There was a campaign song in the presidential campaign of Thomas Jefferson. I have sung the first verse so many times with glee over the past several years. It begins,
“The gloomy night before us flies
The reign of darkness now is over
Its gags inquisitors and spies
Its herd of harpies is no more.
Rejoice Columbia’s sons, rejoice
To tyrants never bend the knee
But join with hand and heart and voice
For Jefferson and Liberty.”
Now the gloomy night is fleeing. The spark that has ignited in this country cannot be quenched. It cannot be quenched even if Obama was not elected. Here another song wills to mind. Peter Gabriel’s “Biko” about the murder of a Black South African leader by the government:
You can blow out a candle
But you can’t blow out a fire
Once the flames begin to catch
The wind will blow it higher.
The candidacy of Barak Obama has come to represent something infinitely larger than the man himself. It has come represent a swelling group of Americans that are tired of division. It has come to represent people who are feeling the possibility of empowerment. And I definitely include myself in that swelling group. It is not a group of others. It is a group of us. It is a group of people that recognize that the overwhelming majority of Americans are potential friends.
I am writing this before the second debate between the Republican presidential candidate and Barak Obama. Chances are that the Republican candidate will continue to lie blatantly. (I must say that there are few times in my life when I recall anybody, other than a kid worried about being punished, consciously lying openly to my face). The latest lie is that Obama pals around with terrorists because he sat on a community group board with Bill Ayers, a former Weatherman who committed his violent acts when Obama was eight.
Yes, there are people who believe the lies. But, like Lincoln said, “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time. But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” And less and less people are being fooled.
I am writing this at a time when the middle is disappearing. There really are choices this time around. And sure Obama has corporate supporters, but even many of them have not benefited by the mayhem of these past eight years. We are part of those legions of supporters that are not corporate but just folks. Not the “just folks” of the Republicans that excludes other folks who are not like them. I am talking about the “just folks” that all of us are. There are a lot of us.
I am writing this a time when there is something much larger than Barak Obama happening. And I think he has the wisdom, experience and humility to recognize that. That is the kind of leader we need now.
I am writing this at a time when millions of Americans are looking for ways to change their lives. They recognize that our government is founded to “Promote the general Welfare.” Community—people taking care of each other—is part of our American heritage as well.
On the frontier, in the slave cabins, in the trade unions, in the building of towns, community has been part of our history and our psyche. The Republican ideology has redefined community as corporate socialism and individualism as greed. What a perversion.
However, community always seems to surface. It’s one of those things that define us as human beings. It is one of those things that define us as Americans. How appropriate that a community organizer is running for president.
I am writing at a time when I feel more kinship with my fellow Americans than I have in a long time. I know that there will be people who will believe the lies. There always are. There always will be. And hucksters from Karl Rove to P.T.Barnum have used that one. Still, even those who are duped can be unduped if we are willing to listen as well as talk.
I am writing this at a time when there is a new burst of creativity in our land. It is the flip side of the dead old fears. I am writing this at a time where people are listening with their hearts as well as their minds. We come from the gloomy night of fear and suspicion into light.
It is a time of poets, singers and artists, of writers and dancers as much as it is a time of politics as we have narrowly defined it. It is a time of celebration.
