Memories of the War

Roger Cohen has an article this last weekend in the Times and the Herald Tribune about asking teenagers in the former East Berlin (now just eastern Berlin) about communism. None of them know what it is. One promises to check out Wikipedia.

We discussed it in sixth grade - age 11 - when I were a young 'un - not very coherently perhaps - we knew it was this horrible unAmerican system they had in Russia and China and East Berlin and Cuba - thought control and prison camps and bad food - I don't think we knew anything more about it. But of course it was real then; it was a living, breathing bugaboo; one had to know, and care, and worry. It was the enemy boldly combated on the big screen by Jimmy Cagney in One, Two, Three, where communist secret service were shown torturing dissidents with rock n roll records.

Young people think of the Cold War or the Vietnam War or even the War on AIDS the way I thought of World War II when I was that young: however recent, however close its end had been to my personal beginning, it was deeply and irremovably over before I actually became conscious. There was a LINE across the pages of history, and NOW was the place beyond it. FDR was the last great monumental figure, because he died before I was born. Stalin had still been alive (just barely) when I was born. Richard Strauss died a few weeks before I emerged. Strauss and FDR and Mahatma Gandhi were the past, Stalin and King George VI and Senator McCarthy the recent past, Ike and the 4th Republic and Battista were now but out of fashion (and power), JFK and LBJ and Mao and Khruschchev and Castro were now (but not for long).

I have to make myself remember World War II when I talk to my friends' kids about the Cold War - it's already that far gone to them, the thing that seemed eternal to me as late as my first visit to Berlin in 1988. I don't know how other people keep track of time - rock songs by the year, I gather.

It's morbid to care about the past. Even historians are concerned with future events such as publication and tenure. But I really focus on the past. Morbid. The future does not inspire me. I haven't much faith in it. The environment is in free-fall. The state of the Union is dubious at best. Pop music will be worse than ever.

Lots of bright young faces at the opera these days: kudos to Peter Gelb after all. Even at Die Walküre!

Jews with Christmas Trees

I've long been pondering (as those who know my other blog, Cafeteria Rusticana, hanslick.blogger.com/ will know, especially by the posts on Mike Leigh's play Two Thousand Years) the influence (or lack of it) of Tradition and Religion on secular and assimilated Jews such as my enormous extended family. According to family legend, we didn't take religion seriously back on the shtetls, and we rather looked down at than up to the local rabbis there. Once the Yohalems reached America (1886 et seq), our passion to be American as quickly as possible (a common feeling among immigrants here, of all ancestries) left us ever less involved in religious rites. And yet we were Jews, and knew it, and never thought of being anything else, and did not intermarry till after World War II. And of course we kept, and were proud of, our Torah-sourced surname: Yohalem.

Last night phone call from Naomi, a woman I did not remember from summer camp; she had grown up with a distant cousin of mine and had recently dined with still another. We each knew an unknown half of the other's stories. And this is an unfamiliar take on Christmas trees:

When she and Mimi (my cousin) were girls together, and best friends, they used to save their pennies and purchase a small Christmas tree, which they would set up and decorate in some corner of Naomi's house where it would not be visible outside. Naomi's mother did not have a tree, and did not want one to be seen by the neighbors - who were often not Jewish. She did not want Christian neighbors to see the tree and think either (a) that her family was also Christian, or (b) that they were pretending to be Christian to "pass," or (c) that they weren't proud of being Jewish even though they were not in the least observant. It would be interesting to ask (but I gather Naomi's mother is no longer ask-able) what the logic was. I can easily imagine forbidding a Christmas tree because one is not Christian (though we always had one in our house, and like all small children, I adored it) or calling it a Hanukkah bush (though I deplore that, and my parents would never have sunk so low), or even having one and concealing it from Jewish friends and neighbors because it might seem to be yielding to the popular culture (though we certainly wouldn't have cared what anyone thought, and never tried to hide our enormous and handsome tree from our many, mostly Jewish, friends).

But to conceal the tree from non-Jewish neighbors who might be shocked by the practice of this non-Jewish - and actually quite secular and, in fact, pagan - custom is mysterious. Think it through: do non-Jews (except the ones who are interested in Judaism, usually from a most sympathetic standpoint) even know enough of Jewish custom to be sure this doesn't qualify? I suspect Naomi's mother of terrific self-conscious neurosis and would love to know just how she felt about things Jewish. (Naomi says the family was barely observant, and was more into being Communist.) People who insist on their identity so loudly, and who wish to control the perceptions of that identity on the part of others are, in my interpretation, doubtful about it, or at least about its acceptability.

We had a Christmas tree, and Christmas dinner (at the home of my one Catholic greataunt, though everyone else at the table was Jewish), and it seemed no more religious to us than Thanksgiving (at our house or some aunt or uncle's) or, the first autumn holiday, my grandfather's birthday (usually at his house). Yom kippur meant a day off school, but fasting was not an option. (The holiday was explained to me and I had the option of fasting, but no one else did it, and I didn't see the point.)

Christmas in the U.S. is the holiday of commerce (the national religion); it has no religious content so far as I can detect. Even Clement Moore, an Episcopalian clergyman, left the religious content out, and on a recent trip to (Muslim but with a secular ruling class) Turkey I noticed Santa in shop windows. My hostess told me they give presents at New Year's Day - Gregorian New Year (same as ours), not Muslim New Year (which goes by a lunar calendar and is two weeks earlier each solar year, creeping slowly backwards). Thus they give gifts because they got the bug from the West, which Ataturk's Turkey admired above all other identities. Beside the Santa figures and masks, by the way, were masks of Dracula - these are the two American (Dutch/Irish/Romanian if you will) icons that rule the world, exported via Hollywood. They cross all cultural boundaries. They are the New Manichaeanism: Santa is the God of Light, Dracula the God of Darkness - but the Manichees believed all the material world was the work of Darkness, of Evil, of Damnation, and the God of Light was the God of spirit, the soul, the immaterial. Plainly Santa has broken that ancient prejudice down.

For doth not the Madonna say, "We are living in a material world" ?

Responding to Rudy

Tim Egan had a most enjoyable column on the self-destruction of the Rudy Giuliani presidential campaign in the Times this week. {http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/goodbye-rudy-tuesday/index.html?ref=opinion
} though I can't say it was quite the delicious dessert of the piece earlier in the week {http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/us/politics/22giuliani.html?scp=4&sq=Giuliani&st=nyt} on what it was like to live in New York when he was mayor. That's the piece I want to send to anyone who considers voting for Il Duce.

Here is my comment (#111) on Egan's post:

An enjoyable column. I’m not crazy about any of the candidates, but Rudy is the one who terrifies me. I don’t know quite what HRC, for example, believes any more (I think she believes only in the polls), but I’m not afraid she’ll lock me up if I look at her cross-eyed, and that’s a real possibility if Rudy has the to-heck-with-the-First-Amendment powers Bush has arrogated to himself in this disastrous, anti-constitutional presidency. It is lucky for the reputations of both Nixon and Reagan (and probably LBJ) that they did not have remotely such fascist tools in hand when they were in charge — does anyone doubt they’d have used them? The thing that checked them was a Congress willing to fight them — Bush has never had to face that, so he’s trashed the U.S. at his leisure and whim.

I’m still terrified that Rudy will get on the ticket, aspiring to be the new Dick Cheney (which one is more ghastly? well, Cheney loves money and power as much as Rudy loves only himself — you do the math) and roughshodding over whoever the poor shlumpf is atop the ticket. That could be neat sabotage to electability, a la Ford-Dole, but I’m terrified of even the possibility of Rudy near the White House.

On the other hand, I’m still not crazy about any of the Democrats (though of course I’ll vote for anyone they nominate). They’re so good at losing. That was one good thing (not the only) about Bill: he knew how to win. It didn’t rub off on Gore, a much better and deeper man with NO bonhommie, no gift for interaction with the common folk — and I don’t think it rubbed off on Mrs. C either.

I too have lived to realize Nixon wasn’t as bad as he seemed, that there are worse possibilities … and Reagan and W have incarnated them already, thanks. But a new Nixon wouldn’t charm me. And a Nixon with Bush’s powers …? Time to think of retiring to Nova Scotia.

-- That's what I said to the Times. Here I will add a P.S.:

A book I picked up and reread for, I think, the first time since it came out nearly twenty unimaginable years ago: Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On. What a difference a couple of decades make! Almost impossible to remember the early 80s when we were all (anyway, the gay men among us) so shell-shocked and so terrified and so mystified by this ghastly thing, and no one knew what caused it, or how to stop it, or how not to get it, and we were all of us kind of hysterical. As late as 1984, I just didn't think about it. It was always at the back of my mind. But. No one I knew was sick. (I thought; I was wrong.) More important, no one I had known – carnally, y'know – was sick. (I thought; I was wrong.)

In 1984, if Shilts is to be believed (and why not? I just wasn't paying attention) the run from diagnosis to death was often to be measured in months. Remember that? "See you next life!" gay guys would sometimes say, bidding farewell to a friend visiting from the opposite coast. Unimaginable now – as is the reluctance of the culture at large, the public culture, even to mention the situation.

1984 is the year (the epidemic had been going on, perceived by the medical authorities, for three years, though government response had been infinitesimal) when my friend Chris de Blasio mentioned that our friend Calvin Hampton had pneumonia, and that he, Chris, would be spending occasional nights sleeping in Calvin's hospital room. It all seemed excessive to me – pneumonia was perfectly curable in a young (Calvin was 44, and seemed venerable but certainly not old to me) and healthy man. It was a month or two, not till Calvin (looking none the worse for wear) had got out to celebrate Christmas, that I got the message: that kind of pneumonia. And of course he went down hill – there were no effective treatments. He was dead before the end of the year. And then the relentless parade through the clique: Roger, Eric, Joel, Clint, Chris, scads I didn't know. (The tops didn't get it; the bottoms and the versatile did. Nobody wants to talk about that, but it's true.)

So I'm reading through Shilts's not always measured but very well pieced together narrative of these events from his West Coast perspective (he died in 1993, like Joel and Chris, just a year before AZT and "cocktailing" finally slowed the death rate) and the thing that really gets me (as it did Shilts) is the fucking scandal of government lack of response, of the years of ignoring (while insisting they were not ignoring) a potentially (and, we know, actually) devastating, world-shaking medical emergency is a principal legacy of Ronald Reagan, who is saluted on all (almost all) sides as the man responsible for America "feeling good about itself" again.

Is it all labels and Morning in America – leap out of bed and put on your imperial new clothes, and no one thinks about substance as long as the grin is unfazed? Well, yes, I know the answer to that: we live by TV, not reality. I am out of the loop because I never turn on the tube.

But what a ghastly figure to emblematize America feeling good, recovering from the horrors of Vietnam and Watergate! And the result of all that? We feel so good we get into wars and demolish our military and our constitution. As Cole Porter put it, "Sometimes you feel so happy you land in jail." That is our national motto. In God we do not trust – we trust our Old Man's ability to pay off the judge and set us free to do more harm.

Another words: French Letters: the bank fraud scandal
Can you even imagine stealing seven billion dollars and not even enjoying it? Being so stuck to your computer that you don't go out – and it's Paris out there for goshsakes – and blow a few mill on champagne, truffels, a chic blonde (gender unspecified), a chateau, a Maserati? The French do not live up to their reputation when the chips are down – Belmondo they're not. (But we've known that since at least M. Butterfly.)

Addendum to previous: What I said in the Times

The question is: when, in the evolutionary process, was the soul inserted? Other life forms do not have them; we think we do. Is this entirely imaginary? It can't be proved by science; you believe it or you don't. (I don't, and have fights with all my friends, and they all believe devoutly in both evolution and the soul.)

But the reality or unreality, as objectively provable, has nothing to do with Religion. Religion is not God; it is all about human societies. It may or may not be true, but that isn't necessary for it to be useful. Religion has produced so much of what society found, and continues to find, valuable, and the objective (not a member of any organized religion) observer finds most interesting in the human-created universe: the architecture, the music, the painting, the poetry, the prose, the theater, the traditions of learning and debate - not to mention a selfless attitude among many religious and a place to hang out and feel part of "family" with other people at least once a week. Far too useful. God, the question of God, is only an excuse to be human. Soul food, you might say.

I agree with everyone who blames the debate on lousy reading habits and low teaching standards in this society.

Faith and Evolution and Judy (and Punch)

My favorite paragraph from the readers' debate in today's on-line Times about Evolution vs. Faith {http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2008/01/04/us/04evolve.html}:

"Religion isn't science. It is the belief in the unseen and untestable. Does evolution mean God doesn't exist? No. But God, as a hypothesis cannot be tested from personal experience. The assertion, "I have a personal relationship with God" doesn't wash. There is no way to determine whether that personal relationship is with the Almighty or with the Ever Hopeful/Needy Self. I once thought I had a personal relationship with God and, specifically Jesus. The sensation of that relationship was palpable. Then, one day, I was watching "A Star is Born" with Judy Garland. When she stood up at the end of the movie and said to the Hollywood crowd, "My name is Mrs. Norman Mane," I had an experience that was so close to my religious experience that I suddenly realized that I had no clue as to whether my religious experiences were, well, religious."

(The contributor is named Thurly. Thanks, Thurly! Judy forever! Art is religion!)

By the way: all the contributors, believers and otherwise, are pro-evolution -- but it IS the Times, and early in the morning - only 25 contributors so far. Wait till there are 400. Wait till the Bible Belt gets out of bed and starts reading. But who would want to read them all then?

I agreed with all the posters who said the problem was the lousiness of the educational system in this country coupled with the fact that people no longer read. My current reading is a terrific novel, Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red, about a society - Turkey in 1591 - where people are murdered by religious fanatics for deviating, artistically, from tradition. Or were there other reasons for the murder? Lust? Greed? Fear? Among the narrators are a corpse, a murderer, a woman in love, a Jewish go-between, a small boy named Orhan, several miniaturists, a dog in a storyteller's tale, a horse in a miniaturist's drawing, Death, Satan, a counterfeit gold coin and the color red. So much better than The Name of the Rose.

Pamuk rules, dudes, I mean, effendi. (No - that can't be true - or he wouldn't have been prosecuted under the anti-Turkishness paragraph of the constitution.)

P.S. I did not contribute to the NYTimes discussion. Gaea drew Ouranos from Chaos and they mated and had the Titans and the hundred-armed Giants ... Hesiod said it, I believe it, that settles it.

Bad dreams for the new year

I don't entirely rule out the influence of the smoked turkey I munched at midnight, but I had ominous bad dreams on New Year's Night. New Year's Eve I was mostly sleepless, wondering why I'd rejected the advances of the Russian (Seryozha) who wanted to come home with me from Ty's (ten years younger, looked ten years older - I blame cigarettes). But then I wouldn't have slept at all, because the presence of unfamiliar folk in my bed keeps me awake like nothing else, and I can't even turn on the light and read.

Anyway, the first part of this morning's dream was fun: attending a Handel opera, David Daniels playing Hercules (which opera was this? Perhaps Ercole sul Termodonte, or Hercules Among the Dinosaurs, Vivaldi score based on an old Steve Reeves script), and I had a complimentary press seat, and all was hunky-dory, except that they kept pausing the performance to reconfigure the bleacher seating, and the audience would patiently move around, and each time they did it, my seat was harder and harder to find, and I felt conspicuous, as if it were my fault that the performance was being delayed, and there was no sign of Mr. D!

But then I found myself in a lab with my beloved Dr. Ellen Gold, my oncologist, who cured me of lymphoma way back when (1997), who was doing some sort of routine exam, and I was fixating rather on her hair, as black as I remembered it but far longer and more exotic seeming (I've been reading too much poetic Orhan Pamuk fiction, eh?) , with spangly colors in it like a peacock's tail, and all this (perhaps she had removed it while she went to do some tests) in a blasé frame of mind until she returned with something or other, some removable body part, or some petri dish, or some X-ray, and said, "This isn't good."

She sounded so calm that I did not fluster. I asked, "Not good as in ... how?" And she said, glumly, "Very not good." I said, "It's back?" and she replied, "Yes, it's back." And we both knew, on the instant, that chemo would not work this time, that the cancer would kill me this time, that I had rolled the dice (or played the hand) and lost big-time. Did I still have time to visit St. Petersburg? Palermo? Isfahan? Havana? Did I still have time to get to 500 operas? (I'm up to 484.) Did I still have time to finish writing a book? Did I -- ?

"I don't know," she said. She sounded hopeless, as despairing as I felt. I certainly didn't blame her. If anything I felt lousy about letting her down. E muoio disperato.... No doubt that will come in time. But not yet. We were examining the bloody sample, whatever it was. It didn't look good. Even I could see that. Too depressed to ask for a second opinion, I took the easy way out - I woke up.

This would depress me but I'm too busy with various jobs to give it a thought. And Chris wants to haul me to Film Forum for a Joan Crawford film noir.

A Hanukkah Posting

This time of year makes me think back to perhaps my first encounter with religious history. Of course, there had been the unspoken rituals handed down in my family for at least a decade or two from which I had imbibed unexplicated lessons, but the first time it all came out in the open, as I recall it (or as my internal Talmudic fabulist scribe chooses to arrange it for maximum moral value), I was, at the age of seven or eight, given a book: The Story of Hanukkah.

Probably a publication of the Golden Books division of Simon & Schuster, source of much of my childhood entertainment (some of their executives were patients of my father's, I believe), it was a very large book with big illustrations and it told the story you all know: the Jews were conquered by nasty Greeks who ordered them to bow down to Greek idols; they resisted; they were oppressed; five brothers named Maccabee led a revolt; took the Temple; couldn't find enough consecrated oil for the proper ritual; a miracle occurred. This was followed by the menorah, the dreidel and other customs later spoofed on South Park. The Hanukkah Bush was not mentioned – just as well, since my parents had a Christmas Tree and called it that, and its colors and lights thrilled me from the first. I never questioned why my grandparents did not have such trees – they lived in Manhattan, in apartments; we lived in New Rochelle, in a house. People who lived in apartments did not have trees; people who lived in houses had children and trees. The logic was clear.

The book told a subtler story, or many stories. Who were these thriftless people with their Temple that didn't have storage space for more than one tiny bottle of oil? Who were the Greeks and what were they doing out of Greece? Who were those annoying kids willing to be put to death rather than pray to an idol, and why was it even an issue? Who were these rather ruthless Maccabees? (The later history of the dynasty was, mercifully, omitted: a bloody bunch.) Does the establishment of a holiday that is all about light, light returning ceremoniously, night by night, at precisely the Winter Solstice, not seem awfully pagan, awfully typical of earth-based rituals throughout the northern hemisphere? (It was ten years or more before I got around to asking that question.) Was the whole Hanukkah business, complete with bush and presents and carols (dear heavens! yes – even in high school choir – no doubt inevitable in so Jewish a suburb as New Rochelle), not a pasty me-too imitation of the great American consumerist Christmas?

My mother said this, early and often – she still does. When she was a child, Hanukkah was almost unheard of, and she had watched its growth and emulation of Currier & Ives custom with disquiet and contempt – but then, when she was a child, there had not been any recent attempt to wipe Judaism off the earth, and that event certainly had something to do with the revived and modernized, Second Coming as it were, of Hanukkah after the war.

So I got the book, and though puzzled, devoured it, especially noting the illustrations (which ancient Jewry so wisely forbade in their books): a bunch of muscular but slovenly men attacking a bunch of rather stiff centurion types, breaking into the Temple precincts, throwing down and demolishing statues of a rather pretty lady with a helmet on her head.

My response was instantaneous: Who was the pretty lady, and why would anyone break her statue? (Only much later did I discover that statues of her can be found all over New York – her family and friends too. I guess the Maccabees didn't get them all.)

Kiddie though I was, I had already been taken by my grandmothers, with great solemnity, in familial rite, to enormous, pervasively silent temple-type buildings filled with wonders and with echoes and with a great sense of awe and tradition. The Met Museum, for instance, was a palace and a temple, and there are lots of helmeted ladies there. (Also naughty pictures of ladies with nothing on at all, but I don't remember visiting those galleries. I wasn't much of one for painting till I was about 20, actually.) (There were also statues of men wearing nothing at all, and I knew I shouldn't look at certain parts of their bodies, but no doubt because of my childish lack of height, I did tend to stare. Being uncut, they didn't look at all like mine.)

Somehow I knew that it was wicked – wicked for those brutal men to knock down statues of that lovely lady. Somehow the book made me curious about her, and her rites, and the Greeks who loved her if not wisely perhaps too well. From my parents and grandparents, I had already imbibed the family religion: beautiful objects should be preserved and gazed at, appreciated and understood, shared with the world. Privately, of course, I wanted to keep them to myself – not the Met, which is a bit unwieldy, but I wanted the whole Cloisters all to myself, and maybe the Frick as well. But I didn't get them, either one, and regular access seemed the next best thing.

My family faith was in the works of human art – or so it seemed to me. The manifestations of all men and women, the arts that inspire and never inflict harm, the statues and buildings and paintings and (later) books and songs and dramas, that we all of us share, that cannot replace themselves and depend on us for their creation and preservation and glory: worshipful as evidence of the glory of human mind and skill, ranking us with the creation of nature itself (if it was created). Nature tends to have better taste, less subject to fashion. That is how one knows it is above art. But by my personal faith, it is possible to worship both. Both are worshipful, and worthy.

Worship is not required by deities; they don't need it. It's good for us, and it's good for nature and for works of art, because the worship inspires us to preserve them. But the deities can get along without it. They did before (if they're real); they will when we're gone.