A first visit to the Western Wall

Last week, my wife and I were in Jerusalem, me for my first time, and though somewhere between non-believer and scoffer, I sense and celebrate the power of places, history, and the meaning of human striving. In those categories and in the category that continues to elude me (for surely the loser in this lack of connection is not God), Jerusalem’s Western Wall is among the world’s most sacred places.

I remember images of the wall on television as a child growing up in a small Vermont town. For us, ethnicity was Irish or everything else and creed was either Catholic or not, and I remember thinking it odd, this dress, this sobbing, this utter sense of transportation they were experiencing (perfectly unperturbed as I recall with the cardinals' sea of little red hats). Mine was the kind of narrow outlook travel is unparalleled at befuddling.

Though not part of my religious education and family traditions, I intended to participate fully in my first visit to this venerated place, so I parted from my wife (the male and female areas of the Western Wall are separated) and entered the courtyard. Debra told me I needed to cover my head to approach the wall, and I assumed I would be spotted and provided a yarmulke. Invoking the absent-minded-professor component of my personality, I walked directly past a repository of gratis yarmulkes and waited.

Debra observed all of this and corralled a stranger to bring one of the yarmulkes down to where I was standing. Once fitted, I drew a deep breath and began my approach. There was an open space at the extreme right side of the wall, and I angled my direction toward it. Orthodox Jews in black Borsalinos and knee-length greatcoats, and Chassidics in shtreimels lined the wall, all whispering prayers and schuckling back and forth, flames seeking to loose the grip of the wick. 

With each step closer, the gravitas of where I was, the meaning and history of the place began to envelop me. The lash of the pharaoh, the wheels of Rome’s chariots, the swords of The Crusades, the pogroms of 19^th century Russia, Eichmann, Hitler, all of it, ALL OF IT, was right here, in the living rock. I noticed for the first time as I got closer thousands of pieces of paper, notes of prayer and devotion to a God that had only this past century begun once again to fulfill his promise and coalesce the global diaspora. This two-thousand year old explosion of imagination, talent, comedy, tragedy and humanity across the world and at the same time away from itself has made Moses’ forty-year wanderings a blink by comparison. And there they were, the dreams and griefs of that past year or that whole lifetime, summarized in scribbled sentences and stuffed into the wall. I lay my hands on the smooth limestone, and feeling a sudden deep, low vibration, I fell into a meditation over a tragic loss my family had undergone in the past year, over the scarring my father’s early death had caused since my boyhood, and of a personal woe I learned of just a few days before.

This juddering pulse arced into my hands and through my body, and found its ground through the bottoms of my feet and onto the stone plaza, dolomite and limestone slabs mined from ancient Israel’s begrudging bosom, foundation to this last remaining vestige against Rome’s conquest. I retreated as a pilgrim to the wall ought to, humbled, reverent and changed. So was God trying to make a deal after all? I still don’t think so. But it is a place that can be represented by no image, described by no words, and for me adds to a long list of reasons for wonder.

George H. W. Bush, some parting shots...

What’s that rustling sound? It’s the hedge I’m peeking over to see if sufficient time has passed to discuss the real George H.W. Bush: the rudderless operative, the corporate shill, the butcher. I learned something when I released my Reagan obituary the day after his passing and received 106 pieces of hate mail (death threats included), and that is is to let some time go by before issuing disparaging language about recently deceased beloved public figures.

De mortuis nihil nisi bonum (speak only well of the dead) invites omission. Which has been my strategy all week. It is a time to sit on your hands a while, and then collect and share your thoughts. It's poor form to boo the hearse, but public figures do merit and even require frank assessment, hopefully during their lifetimes, but also in times when their careers are in the public mind and that is, naturally, upon their passing. You can’t wait too long, as the hive mind’s appetite for mulling it over passes. It’s been a week. I hope that threads the needle adequately.

As a side note, on that blessed day when Trump at long last sucks down his last fast-food burrito and finally goes moobs-up with an esophageal hemorrhage, I can’t imaging not violating that conventional wisdom, and I expect I’ll join the rest of the munchkins in a few rousing choruses of “Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead,” probably while the body’s still warm (if it ever was).

Bush earns at least that amount of deference, a respectful passage of time to a father and a soldier, but given his role as chief facilitator for the most domestically destructive president in US history, Bush the elder earns revilement both for his own atrocities, and also for carrying Reagan’s water through Iran/Contra, the Garn-St. Germain Act, the War on Drugs, prison privatization and myriad other policies and positions that exacerbated US economic and cultural disparity, and encouraged what I have always felt to be the United Sates' two greatest enemies—racism and materialism. While we’re still saying nice things about him though, and this is not surprising as a former head of the CIA, Bush was a guy who could really keep a secret.

One common take on 41’s ethics and belief system this past week is that he “recognized political realities.” A more apt description would be to say he had no code apart from political expediency. On a topic as quintessentially divisive as abortion, Bush’s policy positions swung from a zealotry that puts a gun against a pregnant teenager’s head to family planning position that practically has him escorting her to the clinic. 

Bush was as in on the joke of trickle-down economics as anyone, himself having referred to it as “voodoo economics,” but that was before he became its leading mouthpiece. And even though he knew it was a naked transfer of wealth to the wealthy, he sold the Reagan policies with his WASPy chin and grin as the divide between the haves and have-nots in the United States became a chasm. Even when he succeeded Reagan and had the opportunity to adapt what he knew were more sound fiscal policies, he deferred instead to his new owners and a decidedly un-presidential path-of-least-resistance pledge to be a third term of Reagan.

Many have made a compelling case that the invasion of Panama was an illegal war of aggression under International Law, and that bombing slum villages and killing thousands of peasants in order to capture a pineapple-faced narco-trafficker for not having supported his predecessor's Nicaraguan death squads falls outside the scope of presidential authority. Seems reasonable. It is likewise commonly asserted that Desert Storm was prosecuted against the standards of the laws of war. While you could say that according to my own imagined doctrinal oversight, every American president should be thrown in leg irons and dragged before The Hague (and that may be true) the cases against Bush have a ripeness all their own, most especially in Iraq.

What with the now defunct Soviet Union’s Russian leadership momentarily in retreat, caprices in Iraq became too much for oil lobbies and GOP colonialists to resist. In a conscious effort to disabuse US citizens from “Vietnam Syndrome,” or a broad distaste for war (that in itself a depraved goal), and as a means of making some vague statement of purpose about reshaping the Middle East, Desert Shield was launched along with a string of specious rhetoric about Iraq dipping its straw at a diagonal into Kuwait’s oil fields. Iraq moved troops to the Kuwaiti border over Kuwaiti oil production quota violations and Bush had everything he needed. After rejecting every backpedal Hussein made from this tactical error, Desert Shield was set up as a farcical drumroll of feigned restraint to the planned cymbal crash of Desert Storm. It was the beginning of an involvement that was completed by George W. Bush in the most disastrous foreign policy petard in my lifetime—a two-decades-long slick of blood and oil that has as its bumbling progenitor the grinning, hapless and thoughtless policy architect, George Herbert Walker Bush, about whom he himself said, doesn’t “do the vision thing.”

False causes aside, the prosecution of that war, notably the “Highway of Death” was an exercise in wholesale slaughter that impressed even hardened soldiers. “Even in Vietnam I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic,” Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer, was quoted as saying. Does ten thousand fish shot in a barrel merit a war crimes tribunal? How about strafing enemy lifeboats after sinking a trawler? That’s a thing you’d have to ask a twenty-something George H. W. Bush.

Bush's hands on the intelligence spigot resulted in the October Surprise to end all October Surprises in 1980. In a move eerily reminiscent of Nixon sandbagging Johnson’s Vietnam talks in 1968, Reagan campaign operatives were sabotaging Carter’s talks with Iran to free the hostages. William Casey, Reagan’s campaign chairman, was in secret negotiations with Iranian officials promising a better deal with Reagan if the Ayatollah would hang on to the hostages through the election, and Bush kept his thumb on reports to that effect. He ran interference for Reagan during and after this illegal process that like the Nixon case, invokes the Logan Act. Bush had his own unseemly entry into the presidency with the notorious Willie Horton ad campaign.

Bush’s political career of towering ordinariness and political cowardice stands in sum as a weight on the ankle of justice as it makes it tireless slog up a hill the United States keeps trying to make steeper. There is a lot more to say and to regret about the brief Bush presidency, but I’ll leave you with the Hunter S. Thompson’s description of Bush the elder with his most perfectly selected spirit animal, the hyena, from “The Fix is In,” a brief paean to the run-up of his son’s stolen election: 

“There was one exact moment, in fact, when I knew for sure that Al Gore would never be President of the United States, no matter what the experts were saying -- and that was when the whole Bush family suddenly appeared on TV and openly scoffed at the idea of Gore winning Florida. It was Nonsense, said the Candidate, Utter nonsense. ... Anybody who believed Bush had lost Florida was a Fool. The Media, all of them, were liars and dunces or treacherous whores trying to sabotage his victory….The old man was the real tip-off. The leer on his face was almost frightening. It was like looking into the eyes of a tall hyena with a living sheep in its mouth. The sheep's fate was sealed, and so was Al Gore's.”

First, hats off to the master, Dr. Thompson, but what he and I both want you to take away from all of this is that the Bushes are in a club you’re not in, and they’d like to keep it that way.

An empathic look at Kavanaugh's problems

I am a little older than Brett Kavanaugh and not quite as Irish (according to The Irish Times, he clocks in at 87.5%, out-Irishing me by 25%). We share an alma mater as well as boarding-school college preparatory experience. My guess is that we also share the Irish curse, so between these three items, I think I can offer some conscionable speculation and anecdotal observations on the Kavanaugh controversy. 

Alcohol affects Judge Kavanaugh in extreme ways. Old school Irish alcoholism management seems to be his method of handling it, though he could possibly be involved with a self-help organization that respects and preserves his anonymity. While he was figuring all of this out in high school and in college, he was simultaneously reckoning with his emerging sexuality, perhaps perturbed with his choir-boy impishness, which seemed to be dooming him to a lifetime of being cute rather than handsome.

 Having been groomed for greatness and raised for an open-arms welcome into the American elite, when cherchez la femme came to him far less naturally than writing history papers, the dissonance between these two realities infuriated him and belied the sense of privilege he had always presumed to be his birthright. That frustration manifest itself in developing a methodology for sexual conquest with the handicap due him over his button nose and being less than six feet tall. That handicap turned out to be booze, both for him and his targets; he was a creature of his nature, and also of his nurture.

I played in a rock band that made a little hay on the university circuit in the 1980s. It was common for the available free beverage, especially at fraternies, to be a crippling grain alcohol punch, often self-served from a 30-gallon Rubbermaid trash barrel. The sight of drunken, staggering teenagers was a common one at these gigs. In my late teens and early twenties, I eschewed alcohol entirely, so these recollections are clear and vivid.

I have also been aware of drunken gang rapes or “trains” that had taken place in other areas of the dormitories and frat houses where we played. It struck me as disgusting, and in retrospect, I wish I had taken it upon myself to find one and put an end to it with round-base straight microphone stand (still the finest on-the-gig weapon available to musicians). I had heard of this custom in more than one fraternity at the University of New Hampshire. My sense is that this was a common practice across many universities all across the country. That it made its way to Georgetown Prep makes perfect sense.

I know how it feels to be addicted to alcohol, I know how it feels to strike out with girls at an elite American prep school, and I’ve seen this kind of presumptive king-of-the-universe behavior in the Ivy environment. There’s your armchair psychiatry for the day, but I believe I have enough anecdotal exposure to parallel or identical environments to be able to offer a perspective born of familiarity with knowing the type, knowing the environment, and knowing the disease of alcoholism. In terms of a smell test, there’s a turd around here somewhere.

Trumpeting the Call for Firearms Regulation Reform

I’m not a professional trumpet player. I am an enthusiastic hobbyist. That is true of more than 95% of musicians. Even if you do gigs and get paid for them, unless you rely on it for sustenance income, then like me, you’re not a professional. However, I do have professional equipment.

Likewise, more than 95% of firearms owners are not professionals. They are enthusiastic hobbyists. They are neither soldiers nor instructors. They are refreshed by the escape they find at the shooting range and are personally bettered by the process of improving themselves in a measureable skill. They enjoy it. And they too are often equipped with professional gear. 

Were it the case that thousands of people were killed by professional-quality trumpets every year, and if there were a government directive that required me to trade in my XO Roger Ingram trumpet for a Yamaha YTR-4335, I would, without drama or protest, comply. Or if in order to keep it, I would be required to take a series of lessons at my own expense with a professional trumpet player, I would also comply. Likewise if I needed to submit a detailed application that included a background check, I would comply. 

However, the suggestion that hobbyist owners of military-grade weaponry make a similar adjustment, trading their AR-15 for a rifle with a lower-capacity magazine and stopping power that falls short of charging elephant herds, undergoing intensive training in order to qualify for purchase, or enduring waiting periods and background checks, any suggestion of reform whatsoever is met with howls of indignation invoking tyrannical government run amok, essential elements of the Constitution defiled, and even claims of blaspheming the intentions of the divine. 

Enthusiasts claim their weapons caches are a bulwark against a government they fear may kick down their doors and hustle them off to labor camps. It’s not a viable argument. First, there isn’t enough agreement in any administration for such pogroms to be initiated. I’m not afraid of it under Trump and people who worried about it through eight years of Obama were proven wrong. And second, were that to occur, an AR-15 is no match for a tank or a remotely piloted drone loaded with Hellfire missiles.

Shooting powerful weapons is fun. Playing a $2500 trumpet is fun. There is nothing like dropping an AK-47 with a fifteen-round magazine to your hip and dumping the full clip into a car seat, pile of watermelons, row of frozen bowling pins or whatever the target might be. There is nothing like getting a lower lungful of air and ripping a monster jazz lick at triple forte on a great trumpet. I understand both thrills, and I could live without either if it proved beneficial to society. I believe that many of the arguments being fashioned to support the continued legality of military-style weapons are being made disingenuously. 

The argument of, “I enjoy it,” doesn’t carry with it the gravitas of the other ones, so you don’t hear it. But it’s true. It’s the beginning and the end of the real motivation, and the handwringing over essential freedoms violated and tyrannical governments held at bay are either misguided or mendacious. Powerful guns are fun. But that’s not a good enough argument given the state of affairs in America right now, so all of this false melodrama get presented instead. And it's a great big lie.

It’s time to begin the discussion. It's time for sensible reform, and it's time to talk to rather than at one another. Gun restriction advocates have to stop seeing any gun owner as an instant enemy, and responsible gun owners have to understand that their best strategy is to participate in a reform process that will preserve their most essential freedoms while providing sensible controls over licensure and equipment. 

A punchline and the truth: some thoughts on political comedy

It is a common view that the chief unifying element of all comedy is truth. Conduct an experiment: think of a comedian’s particular routine that you appreciate, or even any single joke that is in your own quiver of available party tricks, and consider it in terms of its function as a courier of truth. Quite nearly every comedy category, and indeed very nearly every joke you will be able to think of serves in at least partial support of this notion, right down to humor that trades on racial, ethnic and heritage stereotypes.

The underlying “truth” of Polish jokes is that Poles are stupid, the underlying “truth” of Hispanic jokes is that Latinos are lazy, and the underlying “truth” of black jokes is that they are, well, you name it. Flip that ugly coin over and you can instead illuminate a righteous and difficult truth: when Robin Williams was asked on a German radio show by a German radio host why there were no great German comedians, Williams answered, “Because you killed them all.” The underlying truths here are that a disproportionate percentage of Jews are comedians and that Hitler’s Germany perpetrated a Jewish genocide. From its ugliest ascriptions of what is truthful to courageous examples of plainly speaking the truths of history’s greatest crimes, comedy that reaffirms an existing truth in the listener’s mind can for good or ill deliver a powerful strike to the funny bone.

I was having this discussion with a friend, and he offered the hardly debatable observation that the left has always been better at using comedy to promote their view of the truth than the right. And why is that? Is it because more of the truth is on their side? Or, is it merely that progressivism by its very nature is required to illuminate the folly of the status quo? Some elements of both of these explanations are perhaps present, but the larger factor I see is a preference of most audiences for folly to be pointed out on those who aren’t already suffering. Cruel comedy can work, but only if the joke’s butt is perceived as being able to survive the treatment. This is why comedy roasts work. The person in the hot seat is typically a successful celebrity, and whatever public gaffe is going to be rubbed in their face has already been there before and can be processed anew without it appearing to be a gratuitous swipe.

Pretend for a moment to appreciate slapstick and think that a man slipping on a banana peel is funny. Now, which scenario makes it just a bit funnier: if the man slipping on the banana peel is wearing a silk suit and a cravat, or if the man slipping on the banana peel has a seeing-eye dog? The answer is obvious. We much prefer the injury coming to a fellow who has other deep advantages in life.

We don’t take particular delight in the further degradation of the already downtrodden. The right contains industrialists, bankers and men in silk suits and cravats, and the truths that a corporatist comedy orientation would have to take would be against its antagonists: environmental advocates, university professors, scientists, intellectuals, the myriad poor and various legions of the hapless. Not a lot of laughs there. For most people, none of those categories provide quite the satisfaction of our friend in the silk suit making that three-point landing. Now if the seeing-eye dog could slip on the banana peel, you'd have some irony, but with the average person's preference that the recipients of their schadenfreude be able to withstand the storm, along with dogs in general being off limits as a joke's ultimate victim, we will always prefer the pratfalls of the rich and famous.