August 1, 2006
DAVID GROSSMAN But the main goal of Samson, the reason for which he existed and the reason for which he became part of the story is to fight the Philistines and to liberate the sons of Israel from the tyranny of the Philistines. And by breaking the whole building on their heads and killing them and himself, he actually believed that he did what God wanted him to do.
BILL MOYERS: Sounds an awful lot like the suicide bombers of 9-11 if you read their diaries. They felt they were doing God's will as they dove those planes into those buildings.
DAVID GROSSMAN Yes, and I mention in my book, that actually he was the first suicide killer. Samson. And I don't know about any other previous examples for someone who uses his own body in order to destroy other people's life. And, of course, there's something common to all people who are doing something like that. They are acting in a hermetic system of faith.
BILL MOYERS: A hermetic system means?
DAVID GROSSMAN It's hermetic, because it's very difficult to justify it in terms of other systems. And according to their system, they have full justification to do what they are doing. For us, people like me, I assume like yourself, who are out of this system, it looks horrible. Looks so cruel. But they can justify it according to their own terms. This is, I think, one of the most interesting questions. What was the need of us, of the Jews, to have such a hero? Such a questionable, such a dubious hero for us. When you think about the Jews throughout history, you do not necessarily think about someone like Samson. In a way he seems to us not very Jewish. On the other hand, I can tell you there are many Jewish qualities to him that I think are very important even to us today.
…….
BILL MOYERS: It seems to me that Samson is archetypal. He keeps compulsively repeating destructive behavior.
DAVID GROSSMAN He is, yes. But is it a rarity? Don't you see around you people who are doing this again and again, as if they have no choice? Don't you see people acting this way? But when I look at my country, for example, or when I look at the Palestinians, at any crossroad, when we were given the chance, the miraculous chance sometimes by history, to take the right turn, the turn towards peace, towards reconciliation, towards stopping killing and destruction, we chose always the way to violence and to escalate hatred between us. You know there are so many similarities to Samson and the way Israel behaves. And one of them is the way we treat power.
BILL MOYERS: Power?
DAVID GROSSMAN Power, yeah. You know, you know three years after the Holocaust, after the Shoah, we created the state. We created an army that became immediately a regional superpower, maybe an international superpower. We are in a way like a mutation of power. From being the victims of the Shoah. From being these people who for 2000 years lived in exile, who had no power, no weapons, no army, nothing like that. We became a superpower. It's a mutation of power. And I am not sure that we really know how to deal with this enormous power.
And I think someone who experiences our situation is almost doomed, always, to choose the more aggressive way, the more vigorous way, as the first choice. And you can trace such a behavior in the history of Israel throughout the years. Now part of it is not our responsibility. Our neighbors and enemies were very productive and effective in creating this problem as well. But I am interested also in our side. What is in us that prevents us, even when we can, to come to a kind of more political definition of ourselves within borders. If you have no borders, it is like you live in a house that the walls are all the time moving. A house with mobile walls. You do not really know where you end and where the others start.
--From a conversation between David Grossman and Bill Moyers on PBS, May, 2006
Forget about trying to summarize 3,000 years of Jewish history into a few words on a web page. But some things need to be said. First of all it seems abominable that some Jews still think of themselves as the chosen people. On the other hand, the Jews stand in for all the rest of us, don’t they. Muslims, homosexuals, artists, American Indians, black people, the Irish, the French, the Basques, the Japanese, etc., etc., etc. We’re all chosen. In that sense, the Jews are our most enduring role models. I’m looking at a painting, for example, by a 19th century Jew (illustrating the Biblical story of Samson) and seeing it as a central metaphor for current world events, the history of the middle east, alas, for the human condition itself. A tall order for one small painting by a virtually forgotten Jewish painter. But we’ll see.
Shakespeare defined tragedy for the modern imagination. But tragedy is everywhere around us all the time. All that Shakespeare did was to create mythical talking points about the tragic sense of life itself—Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Lear. The Jewish people have become a living myth, not only to themselves, but to all the rest of us as well. Like Samson, they have a power and a place in history that the Bible says comes from God. To the Philistines—that is to say, to all the rest of us—they are a force to be reckoned with. Like weather. Like global warming. We’re all Jews. And we’re all Philistines. Like Samson--a Jew who couldn’t resist the charms of Philistine women.
Nothing I’ve said so far should be interpreted as mitigating my disgust with what Israel has been doing lately in Lebanon. But what they are doing is no different than what the British did to the Irish, the Japanese to the Chinese, the Chinese to the Tibetans, the Turkish did to the Kurds, the Americans to the American Indians and the Japanese, or what the Germans did to the Jews. What goes around keeps on coming around. So if Israel is being bad--which it is--we’re all bad.
Now. Let’s start from there.
There is a difference between a people and a government, whether that government is a democracy or whether it is a tyranny. So I don’t mean to pick on Jewish people any more than I mean to pick on the ordinary citizens of Iran who find themselves locked inside a fascist theocracy run by a madman. But the German case—Hitler and the Nazis—haunts all of us as it haunts the Jews. Where is the line between banality and evil. How can the Jews maintain their right to be Jews in a world of Hitlers without becoming Hitlers themselves?
My daughter and I went to see a performance of Macbeth in Central Park this summer, and as we were walking home, we talked about how fascinating it is to watch a tragedy unfold. The inevitable fate of the players is in some strange way both excruciating and cathartic.
Watching the tragedy of Israel unfold is excruciating, too. And the cathartic effect it is having (on its militaristic leaders, at least) is palpable. In the painting above, as Samson is being subdued by his Philistine conquerors he looks back at Delilah who is flaunting his freshly cut hair—once, but no longer, the source of his strength. Soon he will be blinded and thrown into a dungeon. His hair will grow back and he will eventually bring down the temple of the Philistines on his enemies and on himself as well. If Shakespeare had written this story, he might have placed Samson’s most famous line not at the point where he brings down the temple but here at the fateful moment in Delilah’s bed where his God-given mission and his tragic humanness intersect. “Let me die with the Philistines,” his raging eyes seem to be saying. Pain and Paradise can no longer be distinguished from each other. Suicide is the only way out. "I will show you all."
--Larry L. Dill
The View from the Left
The Triumph of Crackpot Realism
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
(published July 31, 2006 on the web page, www.counterpunch.org)
The frayed threads anchoring the American government to reality have finally snapped, just at the moment radiologists are reporting that Americans are getting too fat to be x-rayed or shoved into any existing MRI tube.
The gamma rays can't get through the blubber, same way actual conditions in the outside world bounces off the impenetrable dome of imbecility sheltering America's political leadership.
Twenty-three years after one of America's stupidest Presidents announced Star Wars, Reagan's dream has come true. Behind ramparts guarded by a coalition of liars extending from Rupert Murdoch to the New York Times, from Bill O'Reilly to PBS, America is totally shielded from truth.
Here we have a Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, who gazes at the rubble of Lebanon, 300,000 refugees being strafed with Israel's cluster bombs, and squeaks happily that we are "witnessing the birth pangs of a new Middle East."
Here we have a president, G. Bush, who urges Vladimir Putin to commence in Russia the same "institutional change" that is making Iraq a beacon of freedom and free expression. Not long after Bush extended this ludicrous invitation the UN relayed from Iraq's Ministry of Health Iraq's real casualty rate, which was running at least 100 a day, now probably twice that number.
Iraq's morgues reported receipts of 3,149 dead bodies in June; over 14,000 since the beginning of the year. Senior Iraqis in the government confide that break-up of Iraq into Sunni, Shia and Kurdish enclaves, each protected by its own militias, is now inevitable. Iraq as a viable country has been utterly destroyed, with even vaster carnage coming up over the horizon, and here's the numbskull President touting it as an advertisement for American nation-building at its best, and inviting its prime minister to Washington to proclaim Iraq's approaching renaissance, all in sync with the U.S. 2006 election campaigns.
Here we have a Congress which reacts with outrage when America's picked man in Iraq, Prime Minister al-Maliki, states the obvious, which is that Israel's attack is "dangerous" and that the world community is not doing enough to curb Israel's destruction of Lebanon.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi rushes out a statement "Unless Mr. Maliki disavows his critical comments of Israel and condemns terrorism, it is inappropriate to honor him with a joint meeting of Congress," Another twenty Democrats said al-Maliki shouldn't be allowed to set foot in the place.
Actually, I'm not so sure Congress is impervious to reality, particularly if reality spells out as a threat of withdrawal of support from the Israel lobby in the next electoral cycle. The place is about 98 percent bought and paid for by the Lobby. How these transactions spell out on the ground was well described by Tom Hayden the other day (www.counterpunch.org/Hayden07202006.htm) as he explained why he felt it necessary for his political future in Los Angeles to stand, Jane Fonda at his side, next to Israelis gunners shelling Beirut back in 1982.
What we are now witnessing is the simultaneous collapse of two countries-Iraq and Lebanon-as sponsored or encouraged by America's ruling bipartisan coalition and its ideological counselors-ranging from Christian nutballs like Falwell to secular nutballs like Hitchens. Wesley Clarke is now saying that back in late 2001 he visited the Pentagon and was told the planned hit list included Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan as part of a five-year campaign plan. Two down, five to go.
The attack on Lebanon was planned in detail at least a year ago. Israel picked the supposed provocation of the Hezbollah capture of two Israeli soldiers on July 25, but almost any excuse would have sufficed. In 1982 Israel lied flatly, and said it was responding to shells lobbed over the border, even though there'd been none for over a year.
With Bush and Rice and the policy-makers and intellectual courtiers surrounding them, crackpot realism is the prevailing mode.
"Crackpot realism" was the concept defined by the great Texan sociologist, C. Wright Mills in 1958, when he published The Causes of World War Three, also the year that Dwight Eisenhower sent the Marines into Lebanon to bolster local US factotum, Lebanese President Camille Chamoun.
"In crackpot realism," Mills wrote, " a high-flying moral rhetoric is joined with an opportunist crawling among a great scatter of unfocused fears and demands. .. The expectation of war solves many problems of the crackpot realists; ... instead of the unknown fear, the anxiety without end, some men of the higher circles prefer the simplification of known catastrophe....They know of no solutions to the paradoxes of the Middle East and Europe, the Far East and Africa except the landing of Marines. ... they prefer the bright, clear problems of war-as they used to be. For they still believe that 'winning' means something, although they never tell us what..."
The Israeli elites, so habituated to selling intransigeance to their ever- receptive opposite numbers in Washington, are now crackpot realists themselves to the very core. Their generals bellow about dumping ten rockets on south Beirut for every one landing in Israel and are astounded when people start talking about the fact that exacting reprisals on a civilian population -- which is what the onslaught has been all about -- is a war crime.
Israel is systematically trying to destroy Lebanon as a functioning social and economic entity, cleanse the south and reoccupy up to the Litani River The head of Lebanon's Industrial Association, Charles Arbid, told Agence France Presse on July 24 that Israel's strategy is to destroy the whole chain of manufacturing, from production to distribution. Bridges, airports, roads, trucks, ports have been methodically attacked.
Israel's hack legions here recycle the usual mad nonsense about extirpating the terrorist seed, just as they did in 1982, when Henry Kissinger, the crackpot realist supremo, announced after that onslaught that he could see "a fresh beginning" emerging from under the rubble. True in a way. What sprouted from under the rubble was Hezbollah. Only crackpot realists think they can suppress that inevitable cycle.
(Note: a version of this column originally ran in The Nation, which went to press last Thursday.)
Entre Chien et Loup:
Excerpts from Larry L. Dill's intimate journals.
July 5, 2006. Waynesville, 6:30 am. Wet blanket of heavy mist after rain.
Not sure where on earth is left to run to—the Dali Lama’s hypothetical refuge from the Apocalypse.
I wonder sometimes about the career of the Dali Lama. He has been in exile most of his life and so has become known the world over in a way he might never have been known had he stayed home.
I cut my “left-wing intellectual” teeth on Maoism and and its promises and so was always defensive about his excesses and the excesses of Chinese Communism. The truth about the starvation of millions under Mao’s regime seems unassailable now. Inexcusable. The invasion of Tibet, ordinary garden variety imperialism. And yet, now that China seems poised to become the dominant power in the world economy, with its slave labor camps turned to the service of American corporations, the French taking China’s money for armaments and running the way deals with the devil are always made, the Dali Lama’s message of compassion is as untenable in the “free world” as it would be in occupied Tibet.
The mourning dove in the dying hemlocks behind the house sings the blues this morning as any morning and the catbird cries in his cat-like mockery of territory and grace.
A giant oak tree in the neighbor’s yard is dying of old age (and ants) and beginning to threaten everything around it with destruction. Someone will come today to begin to trim away the dead limbs that threaten our house here. We’ll call the old tree, Liberty.
Safe places to hide seem as mythical as heaven. Exile becomes a state of mind at once delusional and really real. A letter comes over the transom. “We know you’re in there. We have frozen your assets. We are cutting off your sources of food and water. Come out with your hands up.” The dove moans softly in the grey dawn and we must work again today on our secret tunnel out of here.
July 6, 2006. 6:45 am. More rain last night. “Seems like it’s raining all over the world.”
More disturbing dreams. Paranoid dreams. Anxiety and despair. Too painful and too personal to tell. Sit and listen to the birdsong in the mist for hope and inspiration.
The imagination controls the rational mind, Napoleon said.
People talk of the disdain with which the north views the south in America. And visa versa. It is nothing compared to the animosity between the British and the French. Centuries of disdain codified into culture. America is Britain’s Napoleon. Its shining star. Its “Petite Corporal.” Its savior. Its fool.
In exile, reason is superseded by imagination. In prison, imagination rules. Reason is an outside force, like a prison guard. Like physics.
My life has become a prison of my own device. A sort of Chinese monkey puzzle of my own design. Houdini fakes his own demise. Napoleon creates his own legend and lives on. Fujimori in Peru effects a “self-coup.” Kicks himself out of office and takes over.
A wild flower growing in a wild field writes its own epitaph and reads it to itself.
Hell is other people, Sartre said. Or is it solitary confinement?
Or is Hell the existence of incompatible opposites?
I listen for the birdsong in the mist for hope and inspiration. I will go out today and gather up the wet white oak remains of yesterday’s tree surgery. The old grand master is still standing in the yard. Deformed, defiant, deluded. Still deseased and dangerous. Still beautiful. Grace is the triumph of imagination over reason.
The mourning dove has not forgotten to mourn this morning. Je suis un journaliste du coeur. Un Coeur pas de rouge mais de bleu. “Blue is the color of my true love’s eyes. Blue is the color of my heart.”
July 7, 2006. 6 am. Still dark outside. The bird chorus indicates clear skies even in darkness.
Liberty stands out there in its embattled glory, its dead limbs sawed off and strewn beneath it like bodies after a massacre. Be kind. Everyone you meet is fighting a battle. We saw “Munich” last night, followed afterwards, coincidentally, by a Bill Moyers interview with Salman Rushdie.
I would say this morning, without hesitation, that neither Rushdie nor Moyers, nay even the great filmmaker, Steven Spielberg, has a clue about the invidious role religion has played in human history. Or at least they are not prepared to talk about it in their public pronouncements. Spielberg’s movie is a tepid tribute to the tenacity of the Israelis to stand their ground in Israel. But religion itself is never questioned. The insanity of the incompatibility of competing religions is never questioned.
Rushdie’s heroic survival of the fatwa against him for his satirization of Islam seems to have qualified him in his own mind as an authority on religion. Neither Spielberg nor Rushdie addressed the intractable problem of how the illusory supernaturalism that is the hallmark of religion plays itself out in history with the same tragic consequences as a psychotic rampage.
Rushdie’s solution to religious fanaticism is to suggest, ludicrously, that Islam needs but to “modernize,” while Spielberg fails to recognize in his film that the raison d’etre of “modern” Israel is a primitive mystical tradition that still clings to the idea that an invisible God gives specific parcels of land to specific tribes of people and authorizes them to kill anyone not their own who tries to steal it.
The Christian apologist, Moyers, looks on at the spectacle with a self-righteous “compassion” that is clearly an attempt to straddle the fence between those disgusted with religion and those still caught up in its mythical promises. He seems completely unaware that in his attempt to appear unbiased he reveals his own weak intellect. He speaks of dialog between “faith and reason” as if he were arranging a meeting between two Sicilian families, vouching safe that his own charming sense of balance and fair play might mediate between two murderous strains of the human imagination.
Rushdie is right about one thing, it seems to me. The human sense of morality—the sense of knowing the distinction between right and wrong—pre-dates religion rather than issuing from it. But in his conversation with Moyers he doesn’t really address the problem of how right and wrong get defined (both before and after religious considerations) as relative to what a given human being defines as his own needs for survival. The Mafia wears its “code of silence” as a “badge of honor.” It is nothing more than terror. Terror, in fact, of one’s own family. Even without religion, terrorism seems a fact of life. The superglue of cults and communities. The Mafia is at once an honest metaphorical bluprint of family life and a primitive model of the origins of state power. The Opus Dei of the Da Vinci Code is a clumsy re-casting of this same sad myth. From ancient empires to modern communism, terror has been mankind’s stock in trade with or without religious justification. Religion seems merely a way of lining up weak minds and faint hearts to meet terror with more terror.
The light is up now and nothing is resolved. The reality of death is matched in its tragic finality only by the crushing reality of evil in the world. My virtue is your evil and yours mine. The I and Thou relationship is a dream of old men. Religion is a mere distraction in all this—a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
July 9, 2006. Sunday. 8 am. Waynesville.
There were more bodies and they were larger and heavier than I expected. The 6 ft long, roughly 18 inch diameter pieces of the great oak limb that had to be cut from old Liberty in the neighbor’s yard. Using ropes and chains, I have dragged them over into our yard to be cut into shorter lengths eventually and eventually spit into burnable size pieces. Oak is the queen of fire woods. It burns hot but steady and slow and creates coals that will last through the night.
Now that CO2 emissions from wood fires are known to be a contributing factor to global warming along with the emissions from the burning of fossil fuels in coal fired power plants, gasoline in automobiles and even lawnmowers, even small time operators in the modern world are guilty of crimes against humanity.
An environmentalist who does not really wish to live the life of an ascetic, must twist and shift his rationalizations as agilely as a boxer shifts his weight in order to swing at his opponent without being hit himself. I live in the mountains. Firewood is the only fuel I can afford. It is virtually free here. I must continue to have a car because public transportation in these mountains is virtually non-existent. I must use a gasoline powered chainsaw to cut up the virtually free firewood and I must use a gasoline powered lawnmower to mow this 1950s lawn that I’m stuck with because it belongs to someone else because the landscape here is so steep that a push mower would be impossible. Bob and weave. Bob and weave.
All this middle class remorse reminds me of Hannah Arendt’s book, “Eichmann in Jeruselem: the banality of evil.” The idea put forth in that book is what Ward Churchill was referring to when he got into trouble for calling the stockbrokers who worked in the World Trade Center “little Eichmanns.” People thought he meant they were guilty of crimes against humanity. But what Churchill meant (and what Arendt meant by the expression “banality of evil”) was that ordinary people who are “just doing their jobs,” consider themselves exempt from the moral judgements they would apply to others when such judgements interfere with their own ordinary bourgeois lifestyle. The favored line of the bourgeois, the line that can lead inevitably to the banality of evil, is buttressed now by the addition of “a man must feed his family.” In Israel now, the holocaust, the very tragedy that Eichmann’s banality produced, is now used as an excuse for every act of aggression and violence Israel deems necessary for the preservation of its own right to be banal if it wants to be.
The only way out of this moral double bind (as far as the environment goes) is to continue to recognize at all times one’s own indisputable contribution to the destruction of the planet while at the same time committing at least a portion of one’s own ordinary daily life to a resolution of the problem. Even this modest proposal runs the enormous risk of simply letting oneself off the hook through rationalizatrions.
I must get the rest of the fallen limbs out of my neighbor’s yard today as was agreed upon. I must walk the dog and shop for a birthday card for Deborah. I sit surrounded with books of social criticism, poetry and fiction, wondering who I really am and what if anyting I will ever do to be morally proud of myself.
The fire is out; the ashes, shifting,
Have dimmed the golden coal; half-seen,
A thread of smoke is upward drifting;
The hearth breathes warmth, and all’s serene;
Up through the flue the pipe-smoke passes;
Upon the table gleam the glasses,
Their rapid bubbles hissing still;
The shadows creep across the sill.
(A friendly glass, and friendly chatter
I’ve always thought well suited to
The hour called “entre chien et loup,”
The reason doesn’t really matter.)
But let us rather now inquire
What’s said beside the fading fire.
-Pushkin
July 11, 2006. 8am. Fog.
Ordinary day in the empire. Ordinary thoughts about nothing at all. Dreams about nothing in particular. Residential street in rural village. Blandness, and banality and no pain. And no gain. Refrigerator full of left-overs from a birthday party. Too much cheesecake left. Too much candy.
I wish I had a little girl. A granddaughter like the one in the photographs. I’d like to start over again teaching and learning the glory and the meaning of life. I could write a children’s book sitting right here. I could ride a bicycle around town. Little girls on bicycles are so fragile. Their fragile bodies are vectors of danger. A little girl is the meaning of life. Without them, no beauty or tenderness. No hope. The violence chosen by men as a way to protect their little girls is not—should not have been—the only way. The ancient Chinese arts of self defense. The Japanese offense. The bomb. Korea. Vietnam. Everything is always evolving like a kaleidoscope. Design and dissolution. “All that is solid melts into air.”
I remember her hair and how it whirled as she whirled, her eyes sparkling with devilment. She ran so fast, her long legs leaping over the logs. I chased after her but she was gone in the mist.
Three years of exile now. Is it only three? Is it really exile? Has the trail really gone cold? She left me in the fog-bound forest. Alone and talking to myself for the rest of my days. Entre l’heur de chien et loup. La nuit pour le loup. Maintenant c’est moi et le chien. We’ll walk down to the park and look for ducks. There will be no little girls to watch the ducks. The little girls have gone away. Into the dark trailer houses. Into the temples of commerce. Sold into slavery by selfish men obsessed with their holdings. Unfeeling arms. Octopus arms pulling and grabbing at the tender flowers of all our joy. Sour grapes make sweet wine. But waiting makes them sweeter on the vine.
I’ll walk my dog along the rushing creek. The day off workman fishing for trout stock will be in his reverie. I will not speak to him. He will not look at me. Somewhere the little girls will laugh. And their grandfathers, too.
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copyright 2006 by Larry L. Dill