"A Supermarket in California" by Allen Ginsberg

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whit-man, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees

with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images,
I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of
your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole fam-
ilies shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives
in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you,
Garcнa Lorca, what were you doing down by the
watermelons?


I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old
grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator
and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed
the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my
Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of
cans following you, and followed in my imagination
by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in
our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every
frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors
close in an hour. Which way does your beard point
tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets?
The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses,
we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming ofthe lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent
cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-
teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit
poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank
and stood watching the boat disappear on the black
waters of Lethe?


Berkeley 1955

Bat for Lashes

The Israel test

Caution: You're about to be hit by unabashed, unapologetic and highly positive views of Israel and the Jews--care of Michael Medved's book review in Commentary-- utterly free of the self-criticism and existential agony Jews take such pride in. I know, it was hard for me, too.

It wasn’t the author’s intention, to be sure, but George Gilder’s new book, The Israel Test, may infect some Jewish readers with a bad case of WASP envy: Only a Protestant patrician with no hint of Hebraic background would dare to write so positively about Israel and the Jews. To those who seek to explain murderous hostility to Israel with reference to its supposed policy failures or purportedly harsh treatment of Palestinians, Gilder elegantly responds: “Locked in a debate over Israel’s alleged vices, they miss the salient truth running through the long history of anti-Semitism: Israel is hated above all for its virtue.”
Chief among those virtues, in Gilder’s frankly philo-Semitic view, are Jewish intelligence, creativity, entrepreneurial energy, and economic productivity all of which are widely condemned as disproportionate and therefore inherently unjust. In this respect, hostility to Israel bears an unmistakable and significant connection to worldwide hostility toward capitalism:
Anti-capitalists, like anti-Semites throughout history; have always been obsessed with the “gaps” everywhere discernable between different groups: gaps of income, power, achievement and status. Against the background of Palestinian poverty, anti-capitalists and anti-Semites alike see Israel as primarily a creator not of wealth but of gaps.
This insight deftly solves the riddle of how secular Marxists like Hugo Chavez can make common cause with medieval-minded Islamists like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In their enmity toward Israel and the United States, they share a hatred of individual success, of dynamic and productive free markets, that transcends all their ideological differences. That obsessive hatred has proved vastly more destructive for those who harbor and encourage it than for the societies against which it is directed. The common thread binding brutal Muslim theocracies, failed socialist utopias, and fetid third-world kleptocracies is the insistence on blaming the accomplishments of others for their own manifold failures and explaining the stranglehold of local poverty as the result of the economic progress somewhere else.

A brilliant first year?

There are a million articles about how Obama is "failing" so far. Jacob Weisberg, in this piece in Slate, takes a different view. Whether you agree with him or not, it's good to hear all sides. 

The case for Obama's successful freshman year rests above all on the health care legislation now awaiting action in the Senate. Democrats have been trying to pass national health insurance for 60 years. Past presidents who tried to make it happen and failed include Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. Through the summer, Obama caught flak for letting Congress lead the process, as opposed to setting out his own proposal. Now his political strategy is being vindicated. The bill he signs may be flawed in any number of ways—weak on cost control, too tied to the employer-based system, and inadequate in terms of consumer choice. But given the vastness of the enterprise and the political obstacles, passing an imperfect behemoth and improving it later is probably the only way to succeed where his predecessors failed.
We are so submerged in the details of this debate—whether the bill will include a "public option," limit coverage for abortion, or tax Botox—that it's easy to lose sight of the magnitude of the impending change. For the federal government to take responsibility for health coverage will be a transformation of the American social contract and the single biggest change in government's role since the New Deal. If Obama governs for four or eight years and accomplishes nothing else, he may be judged the most consequential domestic president since LBJ. He will also undermine the view that Ronald Reagan permanently reversed a 50-year tide of American liberalism.
Obama's claim to a fertile first year doesn't rest on health care alone. There's mounting evidence that the $787 billion economic stimulus he signed in February—combined with the bank bailout package—prevented an economic depression. Should the stimulus have been larger? Should it have been more weighted to short-term spending, as opposed to long-term tax cuts? Would a second round be a good idea? Pundits and policymakers will argue these questions for years to come. But few mainstream economists seriously dispute that Obama's decisive action prevented a much deeper downturn and restored economic growth in the third quarter. The New York Times recently quoted Mark Zandi, who was one of candidate John McCain's economic advisers, on this point: "The stimulus is doing what it was supposed to do—it is contributing to ending the recession," he said. "In my view, without the stimulus, G.D.P would still be negative and unemployment would be firmly over 11 percent."
When it comes to foreign policy, Obama's accomplishment has been less tangible but hardly less significant: He has put America on a new footing with the rest of the world. In a series of foreign trips and speeches, which critics deride as trips and speeches, he replaced George W. Bush's unilateral, moralistic militarism with an approach that is multilateral, pragmatic, and conciliatory. Obama has already significantly reoriented policy toward Iran, China, Russia, Iraq, Israel, and the Islamic world. Next week, after a much-disparaged period of review, he will announce a new strategy in Afghanistan. No, the results do not yet merit his Nobel Peace Prize. But not since Reagan has a new president so swiftly and determinedly remodeled America's global role.

Breaking news: They might be legal!

I'm not kidding. Check out this piece about a little known treaty signed by the U.S. and British governments in 1924, which apparently makes settlement activity perfectly legal. Where did I find it? Oh, in The Jerusalem Post, a publication that's not in the habit of printing frivolous speculation. And now, these legal eagles are getting the attention of Hillary Clinton and Bibi, and are even threatening legal action. One question that won't help their credibility: Where have they been the last 40 years?

The Office for Israeli Constitutional Law, a non-governmental legal action organization, sent a letter to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week, warning that by labeling Jewish settlements in the West Bank illegal, she is violating international law.
The little-known Anglo-American Convention, a treaty signed by the US and British governments in 1924, stipulated that the US fully accepted upon itself the Mandate for Palestine, which declared all of the West Bank within its borders.
"The treaty has been hidden," said OFICL director Mark Kaplan. "But if you look at the House [of Representatives] deliberations during World War I, people are saying, 'Look, we've invested a lot of money in Palestine, and we expect that this treaty will be upheld.'"
Though the United Nations' 1947 partition plan declared the West Bank an Arab territory, the mandate's borders still hold today.
"The mandate expired in 1948 when Israel got its independence," Kaplan said. "But the American-Anglo convention was a treaty that was connected to the mandate. Treaties themselves have no statute of limitations, so their rights go on ad infinitum."
"The UN partition plan was just that-a plan," said OFICL chairman Michael Snidecor in a statement. "The General Assembly has no authority to create countries or change borders."

"Pathways" by Rainer Maria Rilke

Understand, I'll slip quietly

away from the noisy crowd

when I see the pale stars rising, 

blooming, over the oaks.

I'll pursue solitary pathways
through the pale twilit meadows,
with only this one dream: 
You come too.

Whistler & His Jug Band-- 1930

Generation D

Is reality TV dumbing down America and turning us into drama junkies? This withering essay by James Wolcott in Vanity Fair takes no prisoners.

I was recently in a Duane Reade drugstore, having a Hamlet fit of temporizing over which moisturizer to choose, when the normal tedium pervading the aisles was suddenly rent by the ranting distress of a young woman in her early 20s, pacing around and fuming into her cell phone. She made no effort to muffle her foulmouthed monologue, treating everyone to a one-sided tale of backstabbing betrayal—“She pretended to be my friend and shit all over me”—as mascara ran down her cheeks like raccoon tears. Judging from the unanimous round of stony expressions from customers and cashiers alike, her cri de coeur engendered no sympathy from the jury pool, partly because there was something phony about her angst, something “performative,” as they say in cultural studies. Her meltdown was reminding me of something, and then it flashed: this is how drama queens behave on Reality TV—a perfect mimicry of every spoiled snot licensed to pout on Bravo or VH1 or MTV. The thin-skinned, martyred pride, the petulant, self-centered psychodrama—she was playing the scene as if a camera crew were present, recording her wailing solo for the highlight reel. Proof, perhaps, that the ruinous effects of Reality TV have reached street level and invaded the behavioral bloodstream, goading attention junkies to act as if we’re all extras in their vanity production. There was a time when idealistic folksingers such as myself believed that Reality TV was a programming vogue that would peak and recede, leaving only its hardiest show-offs. Instead, it has metastasized like toxic mold, filling every nook and opening new crannies. Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s satire about a future society too dumb to wipe itself, now looks like a prescient documentary.

Friedman takes gloves off

While the world keeps tormenting Israel with the accusation that the settlements are the key obstacle to peace, the eminently reasonable Thomas Friedman of The New York Times lays down the real narrative that is blocking peace in the Middle East-- and it has nothing to do with Israel.

The Narrative is the cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies about America that have taken hold in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11. Propagated by jihadist Web sites, mosque preachers, Arab intellectuals, satellite news stations and books — and tacitly endorsed by some Arab regimes — this narrative posits that America has declared war on Islam, as part of a grand “American-Crusader-Zionist conspiracy” to keep Muslims down.
Yes, after two decades in which U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny — in Bosnia, Darfur, Kuwait, Somalia, Lebanon, Kurdistan, post-earthquake Pakistan, post-tsunami Indonesia, Iraq and Afghanistan — a narrative that says America is dedicated to keeping Muslims down is thriving.
Although most of the Muslims being killed today are being killed by jihadist suicide bombers in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Indonesia, you’d never know it from listening to their world. The dominant narrative there is that 9/11 was a kind of fraud: America’s unprovoked onslaught on Islam is the real story, and the Muslims are the real victims — of U.S. perfidy.
Have no doubt: we punched a fist into the Arab/Muslim world after 9/11, partly to send a message of deterrence, but primarily to destroy two tyrannical regimes — the Taliban and the Baathists — and to work with Afghans and Iraqis to build a different kind of politics. In the process, we did some stupid and bad things. But for every Abu Ghraib, our soldiers and diplomats perpetrated a million acts of kindness aimed at giving Arabs and Muslims a better chance to succeed with modernity and to elect their own leaders.
The Narrative was concocted by jihadists to obscure that.
It’s working. As a Jordanian-born counterterrorism expert, who asked to remain anonymous, said to me: “This narrative is now omnipresent in Arab and Muslim communities in the region and in migrant communities around the world. These communities are bombarded with this narrative in huge doses and on a daily basis. [It says] the West, and right now mostly the U.S. and Israel, is single-handedly and completely responsible for all the grievances of the Arab and the Muslim worlds. Ironically, the vast majority of the media outlets targeting these communities are Arab-government owned — mostly from the Gulf.”

Fed up with hunger? Two words

I keep seeing empty black bags in synagogues with the slogan "Fed up with hunger." Of course, getting rid of hunger is one of those causes no one can argue with-- the only question is, What is the most effective and efficient way to go about it? In other words, how do you help the maximum amount of needy people in the shortest period of time at the lowest cost? According to this report in The New York Times, the answer seems clear: food stamps.

With food stamp use at record highs and climbing every month, a program once scorned as a failed welfare scheme now helps feed one in eight Americans and one in four children.
It has grown so rapidly in places so diverse that it is becoming nearly as ordinary as the groceries it buys. More than 36 million people use inconspicuous plastic cards for staples like milk, bread and cheese, swiping them at counters in blighted cities and in suburbs pocked with foreclosure signs.
Virtually all have incomes near or below the federal poverty line, but their eclectic ranks testify to the range of people struggling with basic needs. They include single mothers and married couples, the newly jobless and the chronically poor, longtime recipients of welfare checks and workers whose reduced hours or slender wages leave pantries bare.
While the numbers have soared during the recession, the path was cleared in better times when the Bush administration led a campaign to erase the program’s stigma, calling food stamps “nutritional aid” instead of welfare, and made it easier to apply. That bipartisan effort capped an extraordinary reversal from the 1990s, when some conservatives tried to abolish the program, Congress enacted large cuts and bureaucratic hurdles chased many needy people away.

"And Because Love Battles" by Pablo Neruda

And because love battles
not only in its burning agricultures
but also in the mouth of men and women,
I will finish off by taking the path away
to those who between my chest and your fragrance
want to interpose their obscure plant.

About me, nothing worse
they will tell you, my love,
than what I told you.
I lived in the prairies
before I got to know you
and I did not wait love but I was
laying in wait for and I jumped on the rose.

What more can they tell you?
I am neither good nor bad but a man,
and they will then associate the danger
of my life, which you know
and which with your passion you shared.

And good, this danger
is danger of love, of complete love
for all life,
for all lives,
and if this love brings us
the death and the prisons,
I am sure that your big eyes,
as when I kiss them,
will then close with pride,
into double pride, love,
with your pride and my pride.

But to my ears they will come before
to wear down the tour
of the sweet and hard love which binds us,
and they will say: "The one you love,
is not a woman for you,
Why do you love her? I think
you could find one more beautiful,
more serious, more deep,
more other, you understand me,
look how she's light,
and what a head she has,
and look at how she dresses,
and etcetera and etcetera."

And I in these lines say:
Like this I want you, love,
love, Like this I love you,
as you dress
and how your hair lifts up
and how your mouth smiles,
light as the water
of the spring upon the pure stones,
Like this I love you, beloved.

To bread I do not ask to teach me
but only not to lack during every day of life.
I don't know anything about light, from where
it comes nor where it goes,
I only want the light to light up,
I do not ask to the night
explanations,
I wait for it and it envelops me,
And so you, bread and light
And shadow are.

You came to my life
with what you were bringing,
made of light and bread and shadow I expected you,
and Like this I need you,
Like this I love you,
and to those who want to hear tomorrow
that which I will not tell them, let them read it here,
and let them back off today because it is early
for these arguments.

Tomorrow we will only give them
a leaf of the tree of our love, a leaf
which will fall on the earth
like if it had been made by our lips
like a kiss which falls
from our invincible heights
to show the fire and the tenderness
of a true love.

Bohemian Rahpsody

Rolling Stones-- "Stripped"

Taste of Shabbat-- See you after sundown

The Gilad Shalit obsession

I wish Israel would announce one day a One-for-One policy when it comes to the exchange of prisoners, and explain it this way: We think it is insulting and dishonorable to the Arab and Muslim people to suggest that an Arab life is worth less than a Jewish one. That day will probably never happen. On this issue, Israel can't think straight, as this piece by Ari Shavit explains.

Bringing Gilad Shalit home is going to cost human lives. We do not know how many, we do not know their faces, we do not recognize their names. But we can assume that they walk among us. As a direct result of a Shalit deal they could lose their lives. When the Israeli government approves a deal at any price, this could be the price: dozens or perhaps hundreds of Israelis killed.
The victims of a Shalit deal might be killed in a number of ways: They might lose their lives in terror attacks. Others could die in a military operation that follows the attacks. There is a fear that some could be killed in missile attacks. Others might fall in the attempt to stop the missile attacks. If the deal erodes Israel's deterrence, it will weaken Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, flood the territories with skilled terrorists and lead to chaos. The chaos will cause violence, which means victims. Shalit will be redeemed at the cost of blood.
People will also be abducted, we may assume, because a Shalit deal will give future kidnappers an incentive. But future kidnappings will not necessarily take place on the Gaza border. They may take place in the West Bank, Galilee or Negev. Or in Turkey, Thailand or Nepal. The way Shalit is rescued from captivity could mean that in a year or two we will once again face heart-rending pictures of Israelis in captivity. But the next time it will not be one Israeli, but a number of them. We will not be able to save them because of the trauma of releasing hundreds of terrorists. We will not be able to pay the price to redeem them. Their fate is sealed. Does that mean that the deal should be rejected? Not necessarily. The deal will have serious repercussions on the relationship between Israel and its neighbors. It is likely that the deal has become unavoidable because of Israel's relationship with itself.
There is no doubt about it: When it comes to Gilad Shalit, Israel has lost its senses and good judgment. Every possible mistake has been made. Every emotional weakness has come to the fore. A failed government, a hasty media and a confused public has made the Shalit affair insufferable. Gilad has become an obsession, a focus for a national pathology. Perhaps to get well, we need to draw a line through what was and give up. To become itself again, Israel needs to get Gilad Shalit home to Mitzpeh Hila.
But there is one thing we must not do: whitewash things. The decision about Shalit is not tactical, but strategic. It might worsen the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at a particularly sensitive moment. It could cause serious bloodshed. And so a government that approves the deal is like a government that decides to go to war.

Paying them to lie to us

Why do Washington politicians have so little credibility? Because they've earned it. As John Stossel explains, they routinely play tricks and dissemble to tell us what they think we want to hear; and in their latest trick-- claiming that health care reform won't add a penny to the deficit-- they're in rare form. 

I happily suspend disbelief when a magician says he'll saw a woman in half. That's entertainment. But when Harry Reid says he'll give 30 million additional people health coverage while cutting the deficit, improving health care and reducing its cost, it's not entertaining. It's incredible.
The politicians have a hat full of tricks to make their schemes look cheaper than they are. The new revenues will pour in during Year One, but health care spending won't begin until Year Three or Four. To this the Cato Institute's Michael Tanner asks, "Wouldn't it be great if you could count a whole month's income, but only two weeks' expenditures in your household budget?"
To be deficit-reducers, the health care bills depend on a $200 billion cut in Medicare. Current law requires cuts in payments to doctors, but let's get real: Those cuts will never happen. The idea that Congress will "save $200 billion" by reducing payments for groups as influential as doctors and retirees is laughable. Since 2003, Congress has suspended those "required" cuts each year.
Our pandering congressmen rarely cut. They just spend. Even as the deficit grows, they vomit up our money onto new pet "green" projects, bailouts for irresponsible industries, gifts for special interests and guarantees to everyone.

McCartney chokes up

"After Apple Picking" by Robert Frost (1914)

 


My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

Turkey song

Talking tribe

In the Jewish tradition, holiday meals come with plenty of rituals-- prayers, blessings, songs, stories, etc. So what are Jews supposed to do on a secular holiday like Thanksgiving? Edmond Rodman at JTA has an idea: talk about your tribe.

Here’s my modest starter: On Thanksgiving, what do Jews have to be thankful for? We are thankful for our families, homes and health; maybe even a national health plan.
We are thankful for all that. But there’s more, isn’t there?
So, Jewish America, I am sitting at the Thanksgiving table with all of you, thanks for the invite, and the question’s been asked. Considering it’s my question, you would think that I could nail the answer.
I want to say as a Jew what I’m thankful for, but I can’t find the words.
Too personal a question? Maybe I’m just hungry.
Then I just blurt out, “Thank God I’m a Jew.”
Complete silence. Not everyone at the table is Jewishly involved, and I’ve taken what basically is a national nonsectarian meal and turned it into a Jewish conversation.
With no postmodern irony or sarcasm, I said it because I’m really thankful that’s who I am. Among the morning blessings, Jews say “praised is God who has made me a Jew."
So why can’t I say it at the Thanksgiving table?

Our little world

In response to my "Thankful for What?" column, my friend Rabbi Joel Rembaum wrote me these words:

In the Talmud the Rabbis teach us: Tafasta m'rubah lo tafasta, tafasta mu'at tafasta;
if you grab for too much, you have nothing to hold on to; if you grab for a little, you have something to hold on to. Each of us is an OLAM KATAN, a little world, a microcosm, and while we do not have total control over this microcosm, we can do more with it than with the big world. If lots of us do lots of good little things with with our little worlds, we can effect a big change for good in the big world. And for that we have to be thankful, indeed. That is why Jews are supposed to say 100 blessings a day, for all the good little things that we CAN do and that can come our way.

Thankful for what?

Here's the end of my column this week in the Jewish Journal, on something we can all be thankful for...

It struck me that perhaps this idea of having our own story is itself transformational.
Just like we can draw strength from the master story of the Jewish people, we each have our own stories that we can nurture and shape and draw strength from. As Rabbi Naomi Levy told me a few days ago, while talking about a new book she is writing, some of these stories are more difficult or tragic than others, some are easier, but for better or for worse they are our stories — the stories that we are called upon to make our own.
As we live out these stories, we make choices. We can choose to rally a community and help a friend with a brain tumor; we can choose to give a few hours of joy to a group of kids with special needs; and we can learn to appreciate the gifts of our tradition, which include a day of the week that can transcend the deepest grief.
Maybe, then, this is the blessing that we have to be most thankful for: the very idea that we each have a story we can call our own, and that we have the power to shape and influence that story — even if we can never write its ending.
Happy Thanksgiving.

"I was only my consciousness..."

You want a story of gratitude? Check out this story in the Jerusalem Post of Ron Houben, who was in a vegetative state for 20 years until a new scanning procedure discovered that he had all his wits about him. Now that he is barely able to communicate, he's grateful enough to call it his "second birth."

In 1983, at age 23, Ron Houben was involved in a car accident that left him completely paralyzed and in a coma. The young Belgian had been a martial arts expert and engineering student; now doctors diagnosed his condition as persistent vegetative state. His eyes could move; he had periods of sleep and wakefulness, but he appeared unconscious; unable to reason or respond.
In reality, Houben knew what was happening around him but had no way of signaling he was a sentient being. He could not even blink an eyelid.
His mother's intuition led her to believe that her son was not a hopeless case, and over the years she took him to the United States five times for sophisticated tests.
She eventually connected with Dr. Steven Laureys of Belgium's Coma Science Group, who put Ron through a PET scan that detects energy given off by a radioactive element injected into the patient. The exam, which was not available when Houben was first diagnosed, showed that he probably could think and reason after all, even if he was immobile and uncommunicative.
This stunning discovery, made three years ago, has only now come to light. Laureys came up with a computer-assisted touch screen that allows Houben, now 46, to use the partial mobility he has in one finger of his right hand to type out his thoughts - with the help of an aide.
"I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me," he wrote afterward. "It was my second birth. I was shouting, but no one could hear me."
Houben now sits in a wheelchair, his body twisted to one side as if in suspended animation, but his eyes are open and he can now "speak" via computer. He wrote that he maintained his sanity by dreaming himself away. "I was only my consciousness and nothing else."
His mother insists he is not depressed, that he is an optimist and that he wants to get the most out of his life.

"Thanks to You" by Brie Carter

Thanks to you
I can no longer open up and let my guard down
Thanks to you
I wonder if the next man I meet will be online fooling around
Thanks to you
I question if he will also be looking for the next best thing
Thanks to you
I have no hope in what tomorrow could bring
Thanks to you
I trust no one
Thanks to you
My days are no longer fun
Thanks to you
My tears still fall like rain
Thanks to you
Everyday my heart is in pain
Thanks to you
I obsess about what is so unloveable about me
Thanks to you
I am a prisoner to my own obsessive thought and you hold the key
Thanks to you
I have picked myself apart
Thanks to you
I dissected every piece of my heart
Thanks to you
I now reside in an emotional tomb
Thanks to you
Within my heart love will no longer bloom
Thanks to you

Tonight's song - Thank you, MO

Peace to my ears

Politics divide, culture unites. No better example than the love affair that has gone on for centuries between Jews and Muslims in the town of Essaouira in my home country of Morocco. For the past few years, the town has hosted a musical festival to celebrate that unity, as reported here in Ynet, thanks in large part to the efforts of a Jew named Andre Azoulay, counsellor to the king and aspiring Mideast peacemaker. This year, the festival featured a legendary chazzan, Rabbi Chaim Louk, who was in Los Angeles for most of the 1990s, and who is recognized in the Sephardic world as the master of the ancient melodies.
Until politicians learn to play music of a different kind, we'll have to be thankful for real musicians who bring real peace.

A music festival bringing Jews and Muslims together in the Moroccan windy, walled fishing port of Essaouira, along a crossroads of civilization, is a step in breaking down political divides, says festival founder Andre Azoulay. Azoulay, a high-profile businessman and advisor to Morocco's King Mohammed VI, who is a player in the Middle East peace process, is the driving force behind the Andalousies Atlantiques festival of Judeo-Arab music, whose sixth edition ended this weekend.
"Essaouira throughout its entire history and its entire way of living was a synthesis between Muslims and Jews," Azoulay told AFP. "It was not something artificially constructed, it was natural."
"And this festival is a reconstruction of that reality as it was historically. It is not cosmetic, it is real."

Picture of the day

Three tweets for the Web

We always hear about the negative effects of our ever-shrinking attention spans. Here's an essay in the Wilson Quarterly that takes a more even-handed approach to the effects of the Twitter-induced rewiring of modern minds.

The printed word is not dead. We are not about to see the demise of the novel or the shuttering of all the bookstores, and we won’t all end up on Twitter. But we are clearly in the midst of a cultural transformation. For today’s younger people, Google is more likely to provide a formative cultural experience than The Catcher in the Rye or Catch-22 or even the Harry Potter novels. There is no question that books are becoming less central to our cultural life.

The relative decline of the book is part of a broader shift toward short and to the point. Small cultural bits—written words, music, video—have never been easier to record, store, organize, and search, and thus they are a growing part of our enjoyment and education. The classic 1960s rock album has given way to the iTunes single. On YouTube, the most popular videos are usually just a few minutes long, and even then viewers may not watch them through to the end. At the extreme, there are Web sites offering five-word movie and song reviews, six-word memoirs (“Not Quite What I Was Planning”), seven-word wine reviews, and 50-word minisagas.*

The new brevity has many virtues. One appeal of following blogs is the expectation of receiving a new reward (and finishing off that reward) every day. Blogs feature everything from expert commentary on politics or graphic design to reviews of new Cuban music CDs to casual ruminations on feeding one’s cat. Whatever the subject, the content is replenished on a periodic basis, much as 19th-century novels were often delivered in installments, but at a faster pace and with far more authors and topics to choose from. In the realm of culture, a lot of our enjoyment has always come from the opening and unwrapping of each gift. Thanks to today’s hypercurrent online environment, this is a pleasure we can experience nearly constantly.

It may seem as if we have entered a nightmarish attention-deficit culture, but the situation is not nearly as gloomy as you have been told. Our culture of the short bit is making human minds more rather than less powerful.

Wilding Sarah Palin

Naive me. I used to think that leftist opposition to Sarah Palin was mostly political and ideological. I had no idea that behind the ridicule, there may be lurking some pretty dark and demeaning views of women, as Robin of Berkeley tells us in this rant in American Thinker.

I finally beheld what my eyes had refused to see: that leftists are Mr. and Ms. Misogyny. Neither the males nor the females care a whit about women.
Women are continually sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. If under radical Islam women are enshrouded and stoned and beheaded, so be it.
My other epiphanies: those ponytailed guys were marching for abortion rights not because they cherished women's reproductive freedom, but to keep women available for free and easy sex.
And the eagerness for women to make good money? If women work hard, leftist men don't have to.
Then along came Sarah, and the attacks became particularly heinous. And I realized something even more chilling about the Left. Leftists not only sacrifice and disrespect women, but it's far worse: many are perpetuators.
The Left's behavior towards Palin is not politics as usual. By their laser-focus on her body and her sexuality, leftists are defiling her.
They are wilding her. And they do this with the full knowledge and complicity of the White House.
The Left has declared war on Palin because she threatens their existence. Liberals need women dependent and scared so that women, like blacks, will vote Democrat.
A strong, self-sufficient woman, Palin eschews liberal protection. Drop her off in the Alaskan bush and she'll survive just fine, thank you very much. Palin doesn't need or want anything from liberals -- not hate crimes legislation that coddles her, and not abortion, which she abhors.
Palin is a woman of deep and abiding faith. She takes no marching orders from messiah-like wannabes like Obama.
And so the Left must try to destroy her. And they are doing this in the most malicious of ways: by symbolically raping her.
Just like a perpetuator, they dehumanize her by objectifying her body. They undress her with their eyes.
They turn her into a piece of ass.
Liberals do this by calling her a c__t, ogling her legs, demeaning her with names like "slutty flight attendant" and "Trailer Park Barbie," and exposing her flesh on the cover of Newsweek.

"The Three Kisses" by Pziad Yasao

The kiss of hello

The kiss that is never just a kiss
The kiss that spikes vein with precision orchestra
The kiss that heals in entirety
The kiss that hides the relent of vex
The kiss that suffocates rusting man
The kiss without detail/ed system)
The kiss that pounds each pore to state of heroin
The kiss that Hiroshimates euphoria
The kiss that approximates/parallels living
The kiss only
The kiss, the kiss

The kiss of neither hello nor goodbye

The kiss for the sake
The kiss to save face
The distracted kiss for/of domestic bliss

The kiss to bathe mania in generic valium, the kiss of the motions
The kiss of searing content, hindering suffocation and blasé defection
The default kiss, the efficient kiss, the alteria (motive) kiss
The kiss that makes sense
The new language of kiss
Le kiss, le kiss

The kiss of goodbye

The kiss that is never just a kiss
The kiss that spikes vein with precision orchestra
The kiss that deals in hypocrisy
The kiss that begins and ends each second
Job, health, kiss, marriage, car, security, kiss,
yearn, enjoyment, loss, holiday, kiss, loss holiday kiss

The kiss that Hiroshimates plague
The kiss that parallels living/approximates rage
The memory of kiss *acidifies brain
the kiss, the kiss, the end

Tonight's song-- Nostalgia from French Morocco

The power of Facebook

Humans love-- and need-- to connect. That's always been true. The difference today is that social networking on the Internet has taken this connection to a whole other level and in whole new directions, as this essay and book review in City Journal explains.  

Before Facebook, few of us asked others, explicitly, to be our friends. We didn’t monitor how many friends we had as an indication of our status or scroll through listings of friends of friends to pad our own list.
Yet the history of humanity is a history of social networking all the same, according to Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, authors of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. “Our connections affect every aspect of our daily lives,” they write. “How we feel, what we know, whom we marry, whether we fall ill, how much money we make, and whether we vote all depend on the ties that bind us.” And the burgeoning field of network research is revealing that “our connections do not end with the people we know.” Social networks take on lives of their own, transmitting information, germs, and habits between people who are nearly as tangentially linked as actors in the old parlor game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. “Friends of friends of friends can start chain reactions that eventually reach us,” the authors argue, “like waves from distant lands that wash up on our shores.”

Word of the year

They actually have such a thing at the "Word of the Year" at The New Oxford American Dictionary. Hope you won't unfriend me if I share it with you.

Birds are singing, the sun is shining and I am joyful first thing in the morning without caffeine. Why you ask? Because it is Word of the Year time (or WOTY as we refer to it around the office).  Every year the New Oxford American Dictionary prepares for the holidays by making its biggest announcement of the year.  This announcement is usually applauded by some and derided by others and the ongoing conversation it sparks is always a lot of fun, so I encourage you to let us know what you think in the comments.
Without further ado, the 2009 Word of the Year is: unfriend.
unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.
As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.”
“It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year. Most “un-” prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar “un-” verbs (uncap, unpack), but “unfriend” is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of “friend” that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal.”

Thank God?

Israel and cancer

While much of  the world treats Israel like a cancer, Israel helps the world deal with actual cancer, as this article from Haaretz reports.

A new Israeli invention allows cancerous tumors on the skin to be detected and examined before they become visible to the naked eye, Ben-Gurion University announced. In initial testing carried out in the Soroka Medical Center in Be'er Sheva, the new instruments managed to identify several types of skin tumors, including melanoma. The findings were presented yesterday at the Israeli Union of Plastic Surgery conference in Tel Aviv.
Dermatologists and plastic surgeons usually diagnose skin tumors by the appearance of the tumor, normally with the naked eye, only rarely using a dermatoscope - a magnifying tool that allows tumors to be examined in detail.
The newly developed instrument, known as OSPI, uses safe levels of radiation, projected at the tumor and returned to the gadget, which measures its character, including its contours and spread. OSPI also uses liquid crystals to carry out the examination.

They told him to go fly a kite

Be near me...by Tennyson

Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.

Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is rack'd with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
And weave their petty cells and die.

Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.

Daughter (Hat tip: Abigail Yasgur)

Words that think for us

I've always had a problem with words like "inappropriate" and "unacceptable", but I could never pinpoint exactly why. Now, thanks to this piece in Prospect, I know why. 

No words are more typical of our moral culture than “inappropriate” and “unacceptable.” They seem bland, gentle even, yet they carry the full force of official power. When you hear them, you feel that you are being tied up with little pieces of soft string.
Inappropriate and unacceptable began their modern careers in the 1980s as part of the jargon of political correctness. They have more or less replaced a number of older, more exact terms: coarse, tactless, vulgar, lewd. They encompass most of what would formerly have been called “improper” or “indecent.” An affair between a teacher and a pupil that was once improper is now inappropriate; a once indecent joke is now unacceptable.
This linguistic shift is revealing. Improper and indecent express moral judgements, whereas inappropriate and unacceptable suggest breaches of some purely social or professional convention. Such “non-judgemental” forms of speech are tailored to a society wary of explicit moral language. As liberal pluralists, we seek only adherence to rules of the game, not agreement on fundamentals. What was once an offence against decency must be recast as something akin to a faux pas.
But this new, neutralised language does not spell any increase in freedom. When I call your action indecent, I state a fact that can be controverted. When I call it inappropriate, I invoke an institutional context—one which, by implication, I know better than you. Who can gainsay the Lord Chamberlain when he pronounces it “inappropriate” to wear jeans to the Queen’s garden party? This is what makes the new idiom so sinister. Calling your action indecent appeals to you as a human being; calling it inappropriate asserts official power.

What's in a name?

How do you ever decide to rename a high school Hough High School and open it up to obvious ridicule? As this report in The Charlotte Observer explains, when it comes to school boards, sanity and creativity don't always prevail.  

For now, W.A. Hough (it rhymes with rough) High honors the legacy of a longtime North Mecklenburg High principal who died in 1998. He was principal from 1955 to 1974.
The name was recommended by a panel of parents, students and educators led by Terri Cockerham, principal of the new school. The school board OK'd the name Nov. 10.
Yet numerous parents whose children will attend Hough now say students at rival schools will purposely mispronounce the name in a way that describes women of ill repute.
"My two girls will never attend 'Ho High,'" James Good said in an e-mail to school board members, one of dozens sent by parents this week, most against the name.
Parent Lori Owen said her daughter cried when she learned the name of her new school.
"How can they expect the kids to enjoy and/or respect a high school that is going to be constantly ridiculed?" she e-mailed the board. "Huff" or "huffing" is also a form of drug use, Owen said.

9/11 Trial: The other side

Brilliant and compelling articles have been written explaining why the decision to try the 9/11 terrorist mastermind in a Manhattan civilian courtroom is a bad idea-- and I have highlighted a few on this blog. Here, Stuart Taylor of The National Journal makes the most reasonable case I've seen so far in favor of the civilian court. I'm still not convinced, but he makes some strong points.

But in the 9/11 prosecution -- in which the government's evidence is so strong that the defendants will almost certainly be convicted and sentenced to death or to life in prison without parole -- the advantages of a civilian trial seem to outweigh the risks.
One advantage is that a civilian trial will show Americans and the rest of the world that our government is sure it can prove the 9/11 defendants guilty in the fairest of all courts; is confident that the hate-filled propaganda of the accused will appeal only to barbarians like themselves; and will not let fear of more terrorist attacks drive the trial away from the most logical venue, which is the federal courthouse near the scene of the most horrific crime.
Trying the 9/11 defendants before military commissions, on the other hand, would be widely (if unfairly) denounced as designed to ensure convictions regardless of the evidence. A decision to continue holding the suspects without trial -- after eight years of presidential vows to put them on trial -- would be a damning admission that America is simply not up to the task of bringing war criminals to justice.

Water by Pablo Neruda

Everything on the earth bristled, the bramble
pricked and the green thread
nibbled away, the petal fell, falling
until the only flower was the falling itself.
Water is another matter,
has no direction but its own bright grace,
runs through all imaginable colors,
takes limpid lessons
from stone,
and in those functionings plays out
the unrealized ambitions of the foam.

Arcade Fire

Buy Israeli products!

Take a look at this video of sweet-looking people trying to convince Trader Joe's customers last summer not to buy Israeli products because of...well, because of that bloody "Apartheid wall", because "Israel won't let Palestinians return to their lands", because "Israel has violated 80 UN resolutions" and because and because. Notice how calm the manager looks while listening to the anti-Israel pitch, no doubt because he knew exactly how he would respond: "All I can do is send it up to my manager." Sometimes I love bureaucracy.

Health care revolution-- in India

While we prepare to throw $1 trillion at our inefficient and bloated health care system, In India, they are revolutionizing the health care industry by copying a U.S. model of retail innovation-- lower prices through efficient, "big box" operations like Target and Wal-Mart. Like this report in The Wall Street Journal explains, what health care needs more than anything today is process innovation, not product innovation.

Dr. Shetty, who entered the limelight in the early 1990s as Mother Teresa's cardiac surgeon, offers cutting-edge medical care in India at a fraction of what it costs elsewhere in the world. His flagship heart hospital charges $2,000, on average, for open-heart surgery, compared with hospitals in the U.S. that are paid between $20,000 and $100,000, depending on the complexity of the surgery.
The approach has transformed health care in India through a simple premise that works in other industries: economies of scale. By driving huge volumes, even of procedures as sophisticated, delicate and dangerous as heart surgery, Dr. Shetty has managed to drive down the cost of health care in his nation of one billion.
His model offers insights for countries worldwide that are struggling with soaring medical costs, including the U.S. as it debates major health-care overhaul.
"Japanese companies reinvented the process of making cars. That's what we're doing in health care," Dr. Shetty says. "What health care needs is process innovation, not product innovation."

Bouncing toad

Health care gone mad

Check out this little episode from LA Times columnist Steve Lopez on a two-hour, $5000 visit to a local emergency room. Pray you won't need stitches anytime soon.

After a short wait, a nurse took his vitals, an ER tech washed the gash with a saline solution and he got a tetanus shot because he couldn't remember when he'd had his last one.
Then the doctor came in, draped the area and sutured the wound, a two-layer job that required 29 stitches. Budris was on his way roughly two hours after arriving at the hospital.
That was in July.
The bill arrived last month.
Go ahead, take a wild guess before you read the next paragraph. Are you ready?
Two bills, one for ER costs and one for the doctor's fee, totaled nearly $5,000.
Dr. Budris was floored.
As a physician, he's well aware that emergency room treatment is very expensive. But knowing the true cost of the limited supplies and labor required to treat such a minor wound, he found the experience more than a little disturbing.
For one thing, he could barely understand the bill sent him by the hospital, which he asked me not to name. I agreed after checking around and finding that the charges were not out of whack with other ERs. Budris' story isn't about one hospital.
Instead, it's a snapshot of a healthcare system gone mad, in which doctors are discouraged, hospitals go out of business and costs are inflated in a shell game between health insurance companies and medical service providers, while the patients who pay their bills get shafted.

Irvine

Hallelujah-- Rufus Wainwright

Hallelujah-- the original

Conscience by Henry David Thoreau

Conscience is instinct bred in the house,

Feeling and Thinking propagate the sin

By an unnatural breeding in and in.

I say, Turn it out doors,

Into the moors.

I love a life whose plot is simple,

And does not thicken with every pimple,

A soul so sound no sickly conscience binds it,

That makes the universe no worse than 't finds it.

I love an earnest soul,

Whose mighty joy and sorrow

Are not drowned in a bowl,

And brought to life to-morrow;

That lives one tragedy,

And not seventy;

A conscience worth keeping;

Laughing not weeping;

A conscience wise and steady,

And forever ready;

Not changing with events,

Dealing in compliments;

A conscience exercised about

Large things, where one may doubt.

I love a soul not all of wood,

Predestinated to be good,

But true to the backbone

Unto itself alone,

And false to none;

Born to its own affairs,

Its own joys and own cares;

By whom the work which God begun

Is finished, and not undone;

Taken up where he left off,

Whether to worship or to scoff;

If not good, why then evil,

If not good god, good devil.

Goodness! you hypocrite, come out of that,

Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.

I have no patience towards

Such conscientious cowards.

Give me simple laboring folk,

Who love their work,

Whose virtue is song

To cheer God along.

Just Another Day

A little taste of Shabbat joy-- see you tomorrow night

The Jews of Tijuana

Check out this photo essay on the Jews of Tijuana by Paul Rockower at Jewcy.

Healing bones

One of the best ways to retaliate against the anti-semitic demonization of Israel is to remind the world about Israel's many contributions to humanity-- as in this piece in The Jerusalem Post on a medical advance in the healing of bones.

A team at Jerusalem's Hadassah University Medical Center has managed for the first time in the world to separate platelets and adult stem cells from the blood and bone marrow of patients with fractures and inject them - causing the bones to meld in a quarter to third of the time it usually takes to repair bones, and repairing some breaks that without the therapy would fail to heal at all.
Prof. Meir Liebergall, chairman of the orthopedics department on the Ein Kerem campus, gene therapy expert Prof. Eithan Galun and colleagues worked for years on the technique, which he said involves a "breakthrough in concept and overcomes major scientific and logistical problems."
All seven of those who received the experimental cell-based therapy have seen the broken tibias in their legs heal, even though the fractured bone in at least one control group patient who received only conventional treatment of screws or bone grafts failed to meld. Instead of taking six to nine months to heal, the fractures treated with adult stem cells and platelets healed in two months.

Why we yawn

Dogs do it, lions do it, even babies in the womb do it. Why do we yawn? Steve Jones, in this piece in The Telegraph, explores the idea of yawning as a sign of our humanity. 

However yawns arise, and whatever they signify, such a spontaneous copying response to a second person's signal of mood is an unmistakable sign of empathy; of an ability to understand and to react to someone else's state of mind. People with autism or with schizophrenia find it hard to do that – and they respond less to yawns than do most of us.
Empathy is what makes us into social and cooperative beings, and the speed and extent with which a person yawns in response to another's involuntary gape may be a quick and objective measure of to what degree he or she might be blessed with those useful talents.
Chimps do yawn, and they, like us, respond in kind when shown a computerised avatar indulging in the pastime. For them, though, the gesture is a statement of dominance rather than sympathy (with a strong hint of sexual aggression built in) and in other primates it may even be a sign of an imminent attack.
Perhaps what most people regard as an impolite act, to be disguised with a strategically placed hand when in company, is instead a deep insight into what it means to be human; a sign of an ancient shift from a quarrelsome and sexually violent mental universe to a generally cooperative and agreeable one. Man as a yawning rather than thinking ape – Homo oscitans rather than sapiens - may lack dignity, but reveals a new and attractive side to his personality.

The Mexican by Babe Ruth