Cynthia Ozick's Blindspot

Everyone has blind spots. No one is immune to selective sight, even brilliant writers such as Cynthia Ozick. To wit: this is from an interview with Cynthia Ozick, The Writer's Chronicle (May/Summer 2009), p 13.

What you've said is profoundly pertinent--the European destiny of Jews and the American destiny of Jews. How different. Even at this very moment, anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe, and there is a mean-spirited effort in Britain to smash academic freedom and intellectual international intercourse through boycotts of Israeli scholars and universities. Europe is a particular problem for us because we love European culture. It's ours. America is a European offspring. Culturally, we are Europeans. The difference is that America has offered us a country without kinship rules.

I often see a parallel, as a matter of fact, between the notion of Torah, a set of moral and juridical principles open to anyone who chooses them, and the American Constitution. In other words, you don't commit to a bloodline in this country. We're all different. We all have different origins in terms of "blood." We all commit to an idea, a system of values. Europe has not had that ever because essentially they have been ethnic nations. If were a German, you were a German. If you were a Swede, you were a Swede. Of course, this is changing now. Europe is having a lot of multicultural trouble and they look to us to see how we have done it--or how the genius of our Founding Fathers has done it. We are all spokes that can feed into and draw nourishment from that central concept.

To live as a nation by an idea is enormously important, and it is so different from the old European idea that you lived as a nation through some kind of blood kinship, fraternal, maternal, paternal. These are European words--fatherland, motherland. We don't use them. We we saw fathers we think of the Founding Fathers, and they lead to the idea, the Constitutional idea. So the American difference for Jews is the same difference as for everybody--that we all belong.

My question is, to circle back to her original worry over the boycotts of Israeli scholars and universities--is not Israel a continuation, in crucial respects, of the idea of the nation "through some kind of blood kinship"? Certainly, there are differences, but her admiration for committing to an idea, a system of values, (i.e. citizenship based on common core values and race-blind laws and practices) may be in tension with her desire to support a Jewish state. Am I missing something?

"The Future of the Anti-War and Peace Movements": A Talk by Cindy Sheehan

The Future of the Anti-war and Peace Movements
Cindy Sheehan speaks in Cleveland Thursday, July 9
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Cindy Sheehan is an American anti-war activist whose son was killed during his service in the Iraq War on April 4, 2004. She attracted national and international media attention in August 2005 for her extended anti-war protest at a makeshift camp outside President George W. Bush's Texas ranch - a stand which drew both passionate support and angry criticism.

Cindy will appear in Cleveland, with special guest, Cleveland's Own Troubadour, Charlie Mosbrook, Thursday, July 9, 7:00-9:00pm at St. Colman's Church Parish Hall, 2027 W. 65th Street, Cleveland, Oh 44102. Parking
 
at 
Zone 
Recreation, 
W.
65th
 &
 Lorain 
which
 is 
about 

1/2
 blocks south of
 the
 church
 hall details.

Sheehan was one of the nine founding members of Gold Star Families for Peace, an
organization created in January 2005 that sought to end the U.S. occupation of
Iraq, and provides support for families of soldiers killed in Iraq.
Sheehan has been active in the US peace movements over the last several years —
speaking, writing, and organizing across the US and overseas.

Free and open to the public

The Future of the Anti-war and Peace Movements
Sponsored by the Northeast Ohio Anti-war Coalition and Cleveland Peace Action
For More Information call: 216-736-4716

"Poem for the Rooftops of Iran"

Why Josh Ritter Just Might Be The Next Bob Dylan

Thanks to Andrew Summerson for sharing Josh Ritter's tunes with me; both of these have this Dyanlesque (and Bragg-esque) way of weaving the personal and political into an art that is difficult to summarize. Of course, you Dylan lovers from the 60s will find his voice too clean, or his playing too straight, but just on the level of storytelling, Ritter is a bard to watch, and listen to.

Peter said to Paul
"All those words that we wrote
Are just the rules of the game and the rules are the first to go"
But now talkin' to God is Laurel beggin' Hardy for a gun
I gotta girl in the war, man I wonder what it is we done

Paul said to Petey
"You gotta rock yourself a little harder;
Pretend the dove from above is a dragon and your feet are on fire"
And I got a girl in the war, Paul the only thing I know to do
Is turn up the music and pray that she makes it through

Because the keys to the kingdom got locked inside the kingdom
And the angels fly around in there, but we can't see them
And I gotta girl in the war, Paul I know that they can hear me yell
If they can't find a way to help, they can go to Hell
If they can't find a way to help her, they can go to Hell

Paul to Petey "you gotta rock yourself a little harder;
Pretend the dove from above is a dragon and your feet are on fire"
But I gotta girl in the war, Paul her eyes are like champagne
They sparkle, bubble over, in the morning all you got is rain
Sparkle, bubble over, in the morning all you got is rain
They sparkle, bubble over, in the morning all you got is rain



If this was the Cold War we could keep each other warm
I said on the first occasion that I met Marie
We were crawling through the hatch that was the missile silo door
And I don't think that she really thought that much of me

I never had to learn to love her like I learned to love the Bomb
She just came along and started to ignore me
But as we waited for the Big One
I started singing her my songs
And I think she started feeling something for me

We passed the time with crosswords that she thought to bring inside
What five letters spell "apocalypse" she asked me
I won her over singin "W.W.I.I.I."
She smiled and we both knew that she'd misjudged me

Oh Marie it was so easy to fall in love with you
It felt almost like a home of sorts or something
And you would keep the warhead missile silo good as new
And I'd watch you with my thumb above the button

Then one night you found me in my army issue cot
And you told me of your flash of inspiration
You said fusion was the broken heart that's lonely's only thought
And all night long you drove me wild with your equations

Oh Marie do you remember all the time we used to take
We'd make our love and then ransack the rations
I think about you leaving now and the avalanche cascades
And my eyes get washed away in chain reactions

Oh Marie if you would stay then we could stick pins in the map
Of all the places where you thought that love would be found
But I would only need one pin to show where my love's at
In a top secret location three hundred feet under the ground

We could hold each other close and stay up every night
Looking up into the dark like it's the night sky
And pretend this giant missile is an old oak tree instead
And carve our name in hearts into the warhead

Oh Marie there's something tells me things just won't work out above
That our love would live a half-life on the surface
So at night while you are sleeping
I hold you closer just because
As our time grows short I get a little nervous

I think about the Big One, W.W.I.I.I.
Would we ever really care the world had ended
You could hold me here forever like you're holding me tonight
I think about that great big button and I'm tempted

Jason Jones in Iran: "The Entire Country is Evil"

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Jason Jones in Iran: Behind the Veil - Minarets of Menace
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Jason Jones in Iran

"Weaving a Web" from The Unpredictability of Light by Marguerite Bouvard

I recently read The Unpredictability of Light (2009) by Marguerite Bouvard, a poet and scholar whose work has included a broad range of subjects, from confronting chronic illness to chronicling women's activism in the Third World. In the constant shifting wonder that is the Internet, I've found myself in touch with people who for reasons of illness or geographical distance I would never have met; Marguerite is one such connection.

Her book of poems is a clear-sighted yet tender exploration of human violence and betrayal, balanced against our longings and rituals to make peace. From the first section of poems, "The World That Flames Around Us," where wars, violence, and human misery predominate, to the latter sections, "The Hymn Beginning and Ending with Our Naked Flesh" and "View from the Future," Bouvard moves into the pleasures of sensual being, the solaces of nature, grandchildren, and life after life. Here's one of the poems, "Weaving a Web," from the first section, that establishes her sense of connection to the wars both near and far.

WEAVING A WEB by Marguerite Bouvard


A spider is working diligently before me
this Sunday morning. Long silken threads stretch
from its mouth, waving in each gust of air.
It’s like the game of hide and seek where
only a burst of unexpected light reveals the intricate,
ever changing pattern. It’s skill is in
its invisibility so that we can walk
through our morning without seeing
its handwork as we turn our attention
to the World Cup soccer match. Meanwhile
Iman Abou Omar is snatched from the sidewalk
as he walks home from his mosque in Milan,
vanished in the web that stretches
from Cairo to Amman, to Timisoara, Kabul,
Islamabad and Guantanamo. No one ever
sees this network of secret renditions
and detentions, an underworld
that pulses beneath our secured houses:
thousands hurled outside of time.


One of the things that fascinated me about this poem was that I discovered an early draft of the piece online, which elaborates on one of her secret themes--the forgetting of history--those stories that connect and anchor us to whatever we call home. Here's the way the original version ends:

thousands hooded, naked and hurled outside of time.
I remember meeting a young German in the early 70s
when the history books were still cleansed.
I asked him about Auschwitz, Buchenwald,
and Dora Nordhausen. He looked at me
bewildered, answering What Camps?

In some sense, what Bouvard proposes is that, contrary to the idea of literary immortality (another form of being "hurled outside of time"), we need ways of imbricating ourselves in our time, to know our (collective) moment. In this sense, it is part of that globalist poetic that I wrote about in relation to "Children of Men."

Judith Weisman's hard testimony plus poem, "Lamentation"

"Like a man traveling in foggy weather..."

I've been thinking of the delusions that we each have, how we each think we have some kind of clarity of perspective, and came upon this quote from Jeff Gundy's Walker in the Fog:

"Like a man traveling in foggy weather, those at some distance before him on the road he sees wrapped up in the fog, as well as those behind him, and also the people in the fields on each side, but near him all appears clear, though in truth he is as much in the fog as any of them."

--Benjamin Franklin, from his Autobiography, chapter 8, (written 1771-90)

Children of Men as the Art of the Future (Toward a Globalist Poetics)

I was amazed and disturbed to discover Children of Men (2006) last night, thanks to Mike Croley, a dystopian science fictional film that hides in its "nativity" action story a heightened or hyperreal representation of the obscenity of global inequalities, exploitation, walls, ecological disaster.

For poetry and art fans, there are also a saliva-inducing number of allusions to great works of art and poetry (including Eliot's The Waste Land, another text about infertility, social breakdown, and the longing for transformation, though the poem is far more pessimistic and isolationist).

It also alludes to Abu Ghraib, the Holocaust, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, among many other historical traumas--all embedded in the frame of this rather conventional story.

This is the sort of art that we need, and one which is almost entirely absent in our poetry. It highlights how far our poetry is from a truly globalist awareness, how hermetic it remains, how bourgeois, how dangerous. I cannot claim to have reached this level of consciousness, even if it were possible, but the largeness of vision demonstrated in this film is the sort of thing I admire in great globalist poets like William Blake, Walt Whitman, among others.

The extras of the film are almost worth the rental fee. Here is one of them, philosopher Slavoj Zizek's reading of the film.
Another provides a kind of theoretical background for the film; it's in four parts, available on youtube, with such luminaries as Zizek, Tsvetan Todorov, James Lovelock, Naomi Klein, John Gray, Saskia Sassen, among others... Be forewarned, it might play upon your apocalyptic paranoia.

Meet Ezra Nawi

I received this from Jewish Voice for Peace. When you watch the video, Ezra shows himself to be a rather wily person, in addition to showing ridiculous courage. I love hearing him scold the soldiers, who themselves are as confused as the rest of us, though they laugh it off as the adrenaline is still surging in them after clearing out people from their home and then destroying it.

His name is Ezra Nawi.

You've probably never heard of him, but because you may know our names, now you will know his name.

Ezra Nawi is one of Israel's most courageous human rights activists and without your help, he will likely go to jail in less than 30 days.

His crime? He tried to stop a military bulldozer from destroying the homes of Palestinian Bedouins in the South Hebron region. These homes and the families who live in them have been under Israeli occupation for 42 years. They still live without electricity, running water and other basic services. They are continuously harassed by Jewish settlers and the military.

Nawi's friends have launched a campaign to generate tens of thousands of letters to Israeli embassies all over the world before he is due to be sentenced in July. They've asked for your help.

His name is Ezra Nawi



His name is Ezra Nawi.

We keep saying his name because we believe that the more people know him and know his name, the harder it will be for the Israeli military to send him quietly to jail.

And Ezra Nawi is anything but quiet.

He is a Jewish Israeli of Iraqi descent who speaks fluent Arabic.

He is a gay man in his fifties and a plumber by trade.

He has dedicated his life to helping those who are trampled on. He has stood by Jewish single mothers who pitched tents in front of the Knesset while struggling for a living wage, and by Palestinians threatened with expulsion from their homes.

He is loved by those with little power, to whom he dedicates his life, and hated by the Jewish settlers, military and police.

Now that you know Ezra, you have a chance to stand up for him, and for everything that he represents. Especially now, as Israel escalates its crackdown on human rights and pro-democracy activists.

He needs you. His friends need you. Those he helps every day need you. So please send a letter to the Consulate, to the media, to your family and friends.

Take just a moment to write your letter. Do it now. And then share his name with a friend. Do it for Ezra Nawi.