Click, maybe things get bigger.e-mail to a friend:
I read once that in Catholic theology, the only unforgiveable sin is despair -- because it is an insult to God to believe He will not eventually restore and make better things which, to our myopia, seem hopeless.
But I wish He would hurry up and dump some hope on the seemingly hopeless Middle East. I am no longer a spring chicken, and the region has been violent and nasty all my life, with few signs of a turnaround.
My plan is to make the Holy Land 40 percent Less Holy -- perhaps about as Holy as Pittsburgh or Antwerp, where God instructs people to kill other people -- but very rarely, and these rare incidents are responded to psychiatrically, not with intractable popular theology.
Saddest, of course, is the erosion of Israel's civilian and democratic institutions, and the electorate's dwindling faith in these institutions. I don't believe the IDF ever wanted to be the predominate and most powerful force in Israeli leadership. But decade after decade the electorate has come to place more and more trust and confidence in only the armed forces. The ideal and vision of civilian control, debate and democratic rule has miserably evaporated.
And with both Lebanon wars and the Gaza war, they have finally hit the hard wall of Limits to military force as solution. Quick victories are long a thing of Israel's past. But the voters are loathe to let go the old belief that the IDF, with its mighty and well-trained and disciplined citizen-soldiers and superior (US-supplied) equipment, will continue to be the instrument that brings security and safety to Israelis.
One unhappy problem is Israel's changing demographics. The country was founded by, and its first political and intellectual elite were heavily Mitteleuropean, with lots of progressives and their ideals. But in the past 20 years the electorate has shifted heavily to Jews from Eastern Europe, from the former Soviet sphere -- and they tend to take for granted rule by force, leadership by a Strong Man or Thatcher-style Woman, and they have little interest in or experience with civilian democratic ways. The new Israeli voter does not see safety or security in diplomacy or negotiation or compromise or dialogue, and the government slides more and more to the militaristic right.
If you're a movie buff, remind yourself of Dalton Trumbo's astonishingly effective propaganda tale of "Exodus." That set the American view of Heroes and Villains in the Middle East for nearly a half-century. I admire Trumbo's career and movies enormously, but sometimes he was so good as to be downright dangerous. The skewed fairy tale of "Exodus" haunts American politics about the Middle East to this day.
A very odd and unexpected thing, a reminder that not all Israeli Jews swallow the Security Through Violence line, is the 2008 documentary "Waltz with Bashir."
Wikipedia:
In 1982, Ari Folman was a 19-year-old infantry soldier in the Israel Defense Forces. In 2006, he meets with a friend from his army service period, who tells him of the nightmares connected to his experiences from the Lebanon War. Folman is surprised to find that he does not remember a thing from that period. Later that night he has a vision from the night of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the reality of which he is unable to tell. In his memory, he and his soldier friends are bathing at night by the seaside in Beirut under the light of flares descending over the city. Folman rushes off to meet another friend from his army service, who advises him to discuss it with other people who were in Beirut at the same time in order to understand what happened there and to relive his own memory. Folman converses with friends, a psychologist and the reporter Ron Ben-Yishai who was in Beirut at the time.
"Waltz with Bashir" very much reflects the spirit of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five -- the ordinary soldier as Witness to the hidden dimensions of war. Just as Vonnegut used the odd conceit of science fiction in his Witness of the Dresden firebombing, Folman wraps his documentary in anime-style animation -- because so much of his story and message involves dreams and repressed memories. The film has been surprisingly welcomed and appreciated with international awards.
But you only have to lift the Israeli carpet a little to see very hopeful evidence of internal dissent about government policies of Safety Through Violence. To its credit, Israel is reasonably reluctant to accompany its policies with official repression of the political or artistic dialogue. I wish Egypt -- as heavily subsidized by the USA as Israel -- could risk the same.
I visited Theresienstadt / Terezin in '88. I have very little nice to say about the Socialist regime in Czechoslovakia -- Prague was the saddest city I have ever been to, you couldn't pay anyone to smile. But I was impressed (with a suspicious grain of salt) at the way the government stewarded the legacy of Theresienstadt and of the Prague Ghetto. Eastern Euro Socialism and antisemitism have always gone cordially hand-in-hand, but here this tendency seemed absent, and the Jewish wartime experience was preserved and presented with respect and dignity.
I have had the very good fortune of being able to see Prague again in 2003, and now you can't get the people to stop smiling -- there's even laughter, celebration, music, wonderful restaurants, naughtiness, nightlife, absinthe (with a touch of grandma's authentic thujone) ...
If miracles exist, the survival of Ullmann's music, and Der Kaiser von Atlantis, surely qualifies. In Israel today, in Theresienstadt in 1942, in Prague during the Socialist years, it is simply impossible to silence the best and most beautiful of the human spirit. I am slave to Weill's music, and his collaborations with Brecht, Langston Hughes ... every great poet and playwright of Europe and the USA was drawn to his music and his humanity. African-American jazz greats are particularly mesmerized by Weill songs, and teenagers keep rediscovering the Brecht-Weill collaborations with astonishment and thrill.
Stop raising topics which force me to bore you endlessly. You know me, you're just enabling me.
No comments:
Post a Comment