I'm going to try to keep myself from voting in the Massachusetts Democratic primary
tomorrow, in which Hillary is pitched against Bernie.
Monday, February 29, 2016
Saturday, February 27, 2016
Gandalf Was a Liberall
As of today, the Dark Riders have been seen issuing out of Mordor. The
shadow falls. Here they come in formation, behind Trump, chief of the Ringwraiths,
though the others chafe at each other, all at the behest of the Dark Lord.
Thursday, February 25, 2016
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Hillary, 2016
In the heated debate about Bernie v. Hillary, among my kind,
you know, liberals, to which I contribute my own miasma, my own squid ink
pertaining to inner debate, I rarely have time to think or say the obvious: wouldn't
it be good for a woman to break through the presidential glass ceiling?
Right after a black guy, with the middle name
"Hussein" yet, won two terms of presidency?
It would be good.
Wouldn't it affirm something decent, send good signals, about
the United States?
It would. Basic signals.
But that's not why I'm going to vote for her -- assuming I
am -- in the Massachusetts
primary.
Only one of the reasons I think I might.
Sunday, February 21, 2016
FDR, Reagan, Sanders
I've been asking myself this question, to which I don't have
a good answer: why does Bernie talk Danish -- or is it Swedish? -- socialism,
rather than New Deal?
Sanders is completely a New Deal kind of guy, as it would be
updated for the present, which is only just pulling out of the Great Recession.
Friday, February 19, 2016
Sanders Overreaching
I suspect one reason for my saying that Sanders wildly
overreaches when he calls for political revolution is autobiographical. In the
late 60's/70's, when I was the age of the young people Sanders is trying to
reach, and who seem to favor him over Clinton, I felt, correctly, that this
country was in a deep crisis, and, more foolishly, that my generation was part
of a vanguard capable of revolution.
Thursday, February 18, 2016
Burning building . . .
The tale of Israel as an emergency creation of Jews jumping
out of a burning building, Europe, and landing on the backs of an innocent
people, the Palestinians, has made its rounds. First I heard of it was in
something by Isaac Deutscher, probably in his "The Non-Jewish Jew," where he was
trying, best as he could, to come to terms with the necessity of a Jewish
state. Christopher Hitchens makes use of this parable, with minor modification,
in "Hitch-22."
My version is more problematic: yes, the Jews jumped out of a
burning Europe and landed on the backs of Palestinians who had no part in creating
the inferno. And yes, no question, the Jews continued to beat, belabor and even
evict Palestinians, as happens to this day.
What's missing from that account, though, is that the
Palestinians from the start wanted nothing more than to push the Jews back into
the sea, and have never been able to fully repress that urge.
A piece by Todd Gitlin presents the situation graphically,
by means of maps.
Palestinian maps, the ones Palestinian children are bought
up on, manage not to include a place called Israel; for them the whole place is
labeled Palestine.
Jewish maps, all too many of them, depict an Israel that
extends from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, without reference to a green
line, on the other side of which is a Palestinian territory known as the West
Bank, the basis, should justice someday prevail, for a Palestinian state.
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/196424/the-one-map-solution
Tuesday, February 16, 2016
Scalia & Spaldeens
The sudden negative space on the Supreme Court makes it
abundantly obvious, if it wasn't already, that THEY (I assume you are aware of
the Dark Riders flooding out of Barad-dûr to whom I allude) can't be allowed to
win, no matter how many utopian notions or revolutionary aspirations might
thereby have to be put into temporary if not permanent abeyance.
Having said that, I was fascinated to find, the other day,
re the death of Antonin Scalia, which death I find myself unable to sincerely mourn,
in the same way that I have never found his much vaunted prose worth much vaunting,
that he grew up in Queens, as I did in Brooklyn, and that, according to a NY
Times piece, he felt he had "misspent" his youth in large part by
devoting it to stickball.
I played the same game. Broomstick handles as bats, spaldeens,
as Spaldings were known in Brooklyn, Queens and probably the Bronx, as balls.
Spaldeens were the lively rubber balls that could be deployed
for punch, stick, stoop, or handball, and even for what was known, for whatever
reason, as Chinese handball. (I can tell you the rules but not why it was
called "Chinese." Similarly, I do remember that one kind of shot in
handball was known as a "Hindu" but not exactly why.)
Spaldeens would wear out eventually, lose their fresh bouncy
sheen, their surface tension, and you'd have to go and spend a quarter for a
new one. (Or you could go cheap and spend a dime, I think it was, for an egg
ball, a floppier, squishier version of the spaldeen, which lent a certain sort
of unpredictability to the usual games.)
I know that there are parts of Brooklyn, don't know about
Queens, much less the Bronx, where such schoolyard and street pursuits are
still enjoyed, though, to be honest, if crude, I suspect that mostly kids these
stay off the courts and masturbate, excuse me, play video games.
I gather from a NY Times piece that Scalia deemed: "The
game of stickball in Queens, . . . different from the game of stickball in
Brooklyn."
That's interesting, as Scalia's supposedly original "Originalist"
reading of the Constitution is not, since it boils down to the kind of hardcore
Catholic he was, reading a secular document as if were Holy Writ, where what was
true once — think St. Paul, not Jefferson — remains true throughout.
But enough about that.
Were Scalia around, and both of us on the same court, law or
handball, I’d ask only how stickball in Queens differed from stickball in
Brooklyn.
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
Nothing, nothing, nothing . . .
Karlos Marx nothing
Engels nothing
Bakunin and Kropotkin nothing
Leon Trotsky lots of nothing
Stalin less than nothing
The
Fugs, 1965
Rubio is nothing, though cute, and keeps on shining on.
Friday, February 5, 2016
Bernie v. Hillary 2/4/16
I feel like I saw a very different Hillary v. Bernie debate
last night than the news media reported. All outlets, including the Times,
reported it was angry, bitter. Not the debate I saw. Yes, for sure were some
very sharp, acrimonious exchanges. But the impression I came away with had at
least as much to do with a modicum of mutual respect and points of agreement.
Thursday, February 4, 2016
Tom Brady says football is too brutal and quits. Not.
Football is passé. Won't be focused on the collision_concussion_derby
this Sunday. The Ken Stabler story should lay all doubts to rest about the sport's
sanity and safety: Stabler was a
q'back, the most protected of the eleven, and yet, we learn, lost his brains.
Monday, February 1, 2016
Bernie Sanders, my kind of Jew . . .
A question about Bernie Sanders's Jewish bona fides has come
up, about his Jew creds.
I, for one, happen to feel just fine about his Jewishness. Before
him, there was Joe Lieberman, who could run for vice-president in 2000, a heart
beat away, as it were, because though he was Jewish he was observant, he
believed, he had faith.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)