One day, maybe a month ago, I noticed that my new socks came with letters.  Letters from the alphabet.  Well, only two letters, actually.  One of them I at first believed to be a symbol for the corner of something — the kind of thing you see on your screen when you carelessly press a wrong key on a remote part of the keyboard. 

But then on the partner sock there was a different symbol — not a symbol but really an “R” — the letter “R”!  At once I deduced that the symbol on the first sock was an “L.”  In this way “They” were telling me that, you guessed it, one sock was designed to be worn on one particular foot, the other on the remaining foot.  “Whew,” I congratulated myself, I’d done a good morning’s work.

But how did I even know the difference between a right sock — or a right lane or turn, or right hand — and its left counterpart?  How did I know which hand was my right hand?  Wasn’t I supposed to know which was left and which right by feel?

But didn’t this, for some unexplained reason, have something-or-other to do with the American Revolution, or maybe, at least, with Benjamin Franklin and his key up in the lightning storm and his intuitive proclamation about which way electric current flowed, which I believed meant left to right — which confused me even more because I didn’t know which was left or right…

But somehow it began to dawn on me, maybe knowing left and right wasn’t political at all… and instead, to get at today’s Truth I had to go back, fade way back, deep into my own history…

What Else I Didn’t (or maybe did?) Learn in Queens

In 1951 my parents bought the first car they actually owned since I, for my part, emerged from the womb and put my lungs to use.  It was a brand-new “Deluxe” Chevrolet¹ with automatic transmission to make it easier for my mother to learn to drive — and thus to relieve my father on a coast-to-coast trip to California. 

Previously, the only car I was familiar with really belonged to Mr. Cullenin, my father’s silent partner at Bonita Bra.  Or maybe Mr. Cullenin had discarded the car, a serviceable maroon Oldsmobile, having acquired a fancier.  My understanding is that Mr. Cullenin supplied the money to establish this women’s undergarment factory while my father designed the products — bras and girdles — and managed the workers, with whom he was very popular.  Watching him, perhaps I became prejudiced in favor of those who carried out the work, ran the machines and produced the goods — as opposed to those who profited, often cruelly, from the workers’ efforts.

Outside the factory, on the street, on the driver’s side of the Oldsmobile (was this the right side or the left? — I wasn’t equipped to say!) at a spot below where you could crank the window till it disappeared inside the door, there was a bronze-colored little oval with initials that weren’t ours: “RC”  To me that oval was a reminder of the tentativeness of our status in this city of eight million: the car wasn’t owned by us and could be taken away at any point when the mysterious laws of this ­­universe so chose.

Still, weren’t we better off than the workers who had the use of no cars and took home a wage that covered only what they needed to survive — and to rear the next generation of workers — though their hours at labor created far greater value?²

Mr. Cullenin occasionally sat in an enclosed front office, insulated from the ranks of workers at their machines, behind a mahogany desk and beneath a big swordfish plaque.  I had assumed this was a real fish that Mr. C. had caught, though its wood-like appearance told my brain there was a contradiction, something to be learned here.  But to speak true I’m not altogether sure, in spite of these memory-images, that I’d ever even met this Mr. C.

So, I suppose this means I came from a petit-bourgeois background — and experienced what Lenin characterized as an unreliable petty-bourgeois revolutionariness (which he distrusted but still managed to use effectively).  Even Mr. C. wasn’t much of a capitalist: but enough that when in 1951 he wanted to sell the business my father had to let it go — he didn’t have the money.³  

So in this way Mr. C. — this small capitalist — precipitated

• our trip to California,
• the purchase of the first car that my parents actually owned,
• and my total confusion about right and left! (See below.)

The Bonita Bra factory, on the second floor of a five-story building on East 21^st Street, had three or four rows of Singer sewing machines, maybe a total of 70, all operated (as far as I can remember) by women.  My father was a whiz at these Singers; I can picture him demonstrating a stitch or a feature to a “new girl.”

They sold a lot of bras to Sears.  For example, on our 1951 California trip Dad went into a Sears store in Mitchell, South Dakota⁴ and found last year’s Chanteuse Form-Fit model Bonita Bra in a 34 double D, rather on the racy side for those days…

On this same trip, somewhere between Mitchell and Wall, South Dakota, Dad told us a story of his own trip out West as a young man, in 1935, a year before he and my mother married.  At that time he was traveling with Frank Wallman — partner in an Upper East Side linoleum store with my father’s best friend Sidney Price, a.k.a. “Pinya.”  And it sounded like one of my aunts was along. 

I wasn’t sharp enough to pursue the nature of Frank’s connection with, like, a girl — a bona fide member of the opposite gender!  But Dad’s story had to do rather with the nature of the Great Plains water.  According to the story, Dad — in pretend or real shock — had “spritzed” the mineral-laden terrible-tasting water out of his mouth — and it made a hole in Frank’s shoe!! 

I actually met this Frank once, in his lonely later years, but failed to carefully check his shoes.

I remember we spent a couple of days in the tiny town of Kadoka, South Dakota, I don’t know why, but it was long enough for me, 7, to nearly complete defeating Susan, 10, in a game of Monopoly that luckily we’d brought along.  

Did I inherit business-sense from my father?  Or was it just my ability to focus so totally on the game in hand to the exclusion of all else?  Was I contemptuous of the monopolist even while becoming a game-version of one?  Well, I had learned to be a good sport so that others would not fear to play with me.  Though before that, at 3, when I’d actually lost, I was said to have hit Susan on the head with the folding checkerboard. 

But isn’t this about knowing right and left and how I learned to tell one from the other?  Let’s get back to that question, and how it played out on our family’s cross-country trip.

Well, Clue Number 1: you need to know that until I was seven my father was the only driver in the family.  Then in September 1951 we made the big two-month trip to California.  Was there a ‘Why?’  My parents thought they (“we”?  Did we ever buy into this idea?) would sell our home in Queens and move to California (!!).

Never happened.  Many others made precisely that move but not us.  There were two stories, more like myths, to explain this failure.  

• One, Southern California was, according to my disappointed and ordinarily unpretentious parents, a “cultural wilderness.”  At the time I thought this translated to “There was no equivalent to the New York Philharmonic and almost no theatre.”  Maybe it also meant the left-wing political scene wasn’t very developed…?
• The second story was that my father, who tried out a job near Riverside for a month, could make only one-quarter what he was making in New York.

In any case, a side-effect of their California plan was that our mother learned to drive (Clue Number 2).  And it must have been a little daunting to her when my sister and I sighed with frustration and impatience whenever it was time for her shift at the wheel, when we kept pushing her to drive faster.  We were little underminers.

At the same time my mother had to deal with not only us but with the declining sun in her eyes — for that’s when Dad, each day, thoughtfully stopped the car and turned the wheel over to her.

But in the most dramatic episode — in Yellowstone Park — Susan complained so much about Mom’s driving that she was put out of the car.  We drove off, as though Susan were being abandoned to the hungry bears.  But it was daytime and the bears were napping and we collected a steaming but somewhat chastened Susan a few minutes later.  Susan, unlike me, wasn’t scared of anything.

Okay, but here’s the key:  Up until that trip, “Right” meant simply the side of the car in which sat my mother.  “Left” meant my father’s side.  But now, with my mother driving I wasn’t sure which side she was on.  Was her “Rightness” portable, like cell phone numbers nowadays?  Or was the “Leftness” of where the driver was sitting — either driver — primary?  To be sure, the steering wheel itself remained on the left side of the car, but what exactly did this betoken?  We already had a problem understanding the clock-change to Daylight and back to Standard time.

Naturally (as I think) I was confused about Right and Left for another year or more — maybe even till I was 12…  That other kids my age already had it squared away used to amaze and embarrass me.  I dread to think what extended confusion would have resulted in these years had we traveled in England, where even the steering wheel seemed to have no certain location…

Aqueduct

Fast forward — starting from Dad in South Dakota, 1935:  16 years to our 1951 California trip, then 17 more to 1968.  July 4^th.  My friend Al and I, plus his friend Ted, whom I’d not met before and wouldn’t meet again, are at Aqueduct not so much to celebrate our love of country but rather to watch the Suburban Handicap and the rivalry between thoroughbreds Damascus and Dr. Fager. 

By this time, while I was an expert at left and right, these weren’t directions that adequately described the movements of the horses.  Sometimes they were running left to right, like at the start and finish, but sometimes right to left, as when they entered the backstretch.  There was something more for me to learn here: Their route was neither right nor left but — as horseracing people all know — counterclockwise.

I didn’t bet but I believe Ted made a bet on Damascus.  However much he lost, how meaningless it proved to be compared to losing his life two years later in the Greenwich Village Town House Explosion.  It is believed Ted was not in the sub-basement, where the courageous, misguided but in any case tragically bumbling Weather Underground women were trying to make a bomb; he was just coming in the front door.  Sadly it’s hard to always know what’s right or best in the chaos of real life. This was a kind of counterclockwise movement of the New Left…

Because of that July 4^th at Aqueduct, did it feel like I was close to these events and their ugly outcomes?  No: too relaxed and too lazy; as though laziness and stupidity had the power to protect me…

Nevertheless, whatever my limitations, I’d learned a powerful political meaning of left and right that has stuck with me in the ensuing sixty years.  Right-Wing meant “Reactionary,” according to my parents — said of a person that wanted to “turn the clock back.”  Naturally that would have to be counterclockwise.  Nowadays people on the Right are called Conservatives.  Left was the side I identified with — the side of what I considered ‘progress.’

While I am aware that in most daily use, right- and left-hand have no political meaning, in a hotel I find that I feel more comfortable taking the left-side towels and leaving those on the right for my partner.  If I wind up with the right-side towels I experience a feeling like mild shame…

Back up now 8 years, from 1968 to Spring 1960: Jamaica High School with its award-grasping, racist principal Louis Shucker.

First of all, it should be stated unambiguously, unequivocally and at once that KeSSeLabs, the chemicals and apparatus company I had founded in 1959, had no connection with the tragic Town House event.

It’s true that our premier KeSSeLabs customer Mad George Cole threw a pound of pure sodium — it had been packed in what looked like a canister of tennis balls — into Jamaica High’s beautiful Goose Pond and created a noteworthy spectacle…

It was rumored that the FBI had staked out Goose Pond in the hopes of apprehending a certain Civil Rights activist but this was never confirmed.⁵  George claimed that no one prosecuted or even approached him, left-handed as he was, in regard to the Sodium Spectacle.

Of course those were calmer times.  And in those pre-New Left years, I was Captain of the Math Team, and one day I was proposed as a third-party candidate for student org president.  The force behind this endeavor to shake the dominance of the established parties — themselves dominated by mysterious fraternities — came from the Math Team crowd, which was in turn energized by a little, non-mainstream Pete Seeger-folksinging crowd.

Though I sensed I was a mere figurehead in this quixotic attempt, I prepared a tight campaign speech for the delegates who would select the nominee of the Red and Blue party.  When I got into the room where the delegates were sitting it was still more clear that the process’s outcome was a foregone conclusion: Even though my sponsors thought I was the only Math Teamer who could “pass,” I was still too academic, nerdish and uncool for this election.  I certainly was not a member of what was considered the popular crowd. 

A woman teacher directed me to a seat, as it happened, on the left side of the room.  Fifteen nervous minutes later I heard mainstream candidate Steve G.’s speech.⁶  And then I had an opportunity to deliver my own speech. 

I knew I was a minority: Of the 60 votes I expected 6 or 8.

But against Steve’s 40 I received 20 — far better than I’d imagined.  So there was a lot more (unharnessed) discontent lying around…

By my twelfth-grade American history class I came out as decidedly of the Left. We had been studying slavery, the Civil War and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement.  One day Mrs. Gottlieb asked us, how many thought the United States was mainly democratic, and then, afterward, how many mainly undemocratic? I raised my (left) hand for undemocratic.  My friend Mike Borah exclaimed “All the girls and Jerry!” So perhaps this was when I made public my identification with the Left …

This buddy Mike and my “archrival” Pierre (nowadays a good friend) were on the Conservative end and as we walked to school we argued.  Pierre was elected Vice President, on the Steve G. ticket.  I believed that he supported the “fraternity-mafia” control of school elections (as I imagined it) until just this past Fall, when he told me that actually he was the anti-fraternity candidate…. But on these walks it was my Chinese-American (left-handed) friend Gerry, easily the best athlete of us all, and Daniel⁷ till he went back to France, who held up the Left end.

What Kind of Left?

 But shouldn’t I be putting all these political bits in a separate Tirade or essay?  Aren’t they kind of taking over the story?  Can’t we get back to the quirky left- and right-side story that gets into driving and my father’s design and production of women’s undergarments and a monopoly game in South Dakota in 1951 and a Deluxe Chevrolet? 

Okay, back to Jamaica High.

Our walk-to-school group later added a militant right-wing element.  John Seel’s house was on the way and John was one of the three other ‘board members’ of KeSSeLabs, the chemical and apparatus retailing company that I’d founded; John was the first S; I was the K.⁸

John was engaged in guns and hunting and kept Brandy Alexanders in his freezer, but it was a year or two before I connected the dots.  He was also on the Rifle Team, but as it turned out, so were the other two members of my company.

Not many years later John’s young life sadly ended outside Da Nang, in a fragging episode gone awry.  A soldier had targeted a lieutenant who’d denied him a weekend’s R&R in Thailand or Singapore, relying on a bomb that would explode when the lieutenant opened his locker.   The lieutenant would have died instead of John if intentions determined outcomes.  Think of poor Ted Gold’s intentions as he crossed the threshold of that Town House… And years later this lieutenant was still alive and still able to keep denying others’ requests because he’d been too lazy to get up and had sent John to get the cigarettes from his locker…  John believed in the official, government-sanctioned view of the war.  Already a Dartmouth-educated lawyer with dreams of a political career, he had volunteered.

Ted’s death was almost the same year.  For once, instead of the thousands and thousands of bombs raining down on the peasants and villagers all over Indochina, there would be a counter-bomb going the other way! — a single bomb to the home front, intended to point out the massive campaign of the hundreds of thousands of far more powerful bombs.  The fragging soldier’s bomb was aimed at his commanding officer; did that make him an ally of Ted Gold?   

Among other things that bombs don’t grasp is any awareness of either their own intentions or the intentions of those who wield them.  Both bombs went astray.

Well, that was the clockwise story.  There were several stories of John’s demise, some no doubt designed to protect the feelings of John’s widow Laura, who’d already suffered her family’s narrowmindedness when she refused to cancel her marriage to a Gentile.  Perhaps she imagined a scene in which she shouted, “Are you happy now he’s dead?” — as if they had killed him or at least were responsible for his death and her unhappiness.  The emotions if not the details fit this way…⁹                                    

In any case, by the end of 10^th grade Mike, Gerry and Daniel had all moved away, as it seemed every best friend did every year, and I was left with only John Seel and my archrival Pierre.

As it happens, a Saturday previous to Mrs. Gottlieb’s handraiser questions I had gone into downtown Flushing — where I didn’t remember ever having been before — to picket Woolworth’s, in solidarity with Black activists who’d been arrested in North Carolina for sitting in “Whites Only” sections of their lunch counters.  We marched with picket signs, going counterclockwise like the horses Ted Gold and I had watched at Aqueduct… My mental picture of the anti-White Supremacist marchers in Charlottesville has them going clockwise…

Here’s where I began to put together a life that flowed from my developing values and anger at injustice. 

The Backstory

In my final semester of high school I remember I was always arguing with the Cuban exiles in my Spanish class — seated to my left…  I was positively impressed with the Cuban revolution but the Beato family had been so disaffected that they’d emigrated to the States.  It was Fall 1960, six months before the Bay of Pigs, but they’d been in the country already a year.  Eduardo wrote in my autograph book the memorable line, “Politics don’t count in friendship.”  Too bad Eduardo’s dictum is now so out-of-date… His younger sister Vivien was sweet and pretty and many times seemed to suggest she’d like to be a lot closer to me, but she was young, and besides, her brother was right there….

But by that time I was already “leading” a little group of friends, boys who were not yet politicized.  But the combination of the Civil Rights movement, the Sane Nuclear Policy movement and eventually what became the anti-Vietnam War movement — plus my familiarity and relative comfort with political action — contributed to molding them, eventually — to my amazement — into forceful, risk-taking political operatives.

I left for college and in January — this was 1962 — I took a bus to join the Peace March in Washington.  I think I may have met up briefly with the young woman from my high school who became my first political girlfriend — and certainly the most sexually significant girlfriend up till that time.  But a more likely route into that closeness was through the frequent (pre-email!) exchange of political and intensely personal letters — that developed into love letters and a Spring Weekend visit that employed a motel room and the use of an arboretum to find enough privacy to carry out intimate experiments…

After 9 months we lost track of each other.  But separately we’d become members of the new Students for a Democratic Society.  She was on SDS staff in Ann Arbor.

Between freshman and senior year I went through a political education that included the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, civil rights rallies, SDS’s Roxbury Project, the Kennedy assassination, and building resistance to the Vietnam War.  

And with my New Left arrogance and pride, I dismissed the arguments of the “discredited” Old Left, from whose experiences we might have learned valuable lessons and further developed our reach and strength.¹⁰  And as for the Generation Gap, our clarity and stupidity (politely put, blindness) left the possibility of learning and taking strength from elders foredoomed to failure.  Not altogether unlike the contemptuous tendencies in today’s left toward those whose attitudes and ‘awareness’ might appear to some to be imperfect.¹¹

Meanwhile, with my personal life badly entangled with my political activities, I’d fallen in love with an impossibly beautiful Black woman I’d met during a summer in Chicago — Freedom Summer in Mississippi for some braver and more committed souls: 1964.  But I’d met Marilyn not at a meeting or an action but on a July 4^th trip to a lake beach near Kalamazoo — in an unbelievable bathing suit…. The relationship sputtered over a month or so but then really picked up steam with many letters around Thanksgiving.  Turns out she’d quit Skidmore — to work full-time in New York, for SDS!

At the Christmas break I attended the New York SDS convention but she was so busy it was hard for us to meet up.  Finally we’d get to have a drink at the White Horse Tavern, known for having been frequented by Dylan Thomas.  Then we’d get to the apartment Marilyn shared with Andrea on Jane Street but we tried to arrange it so that “Andi” would be elsewhere — and thus not constrained to hear sounds likely to emanate from our intimate acts.  More important, the thought of her listening would in turn distract and inhibit us.

The highpoint came in late January, a week between semesters for me, when I came back to New York.  Andi had gone to visit her parents in Ohio, leaving Marilyn in sole charge of the apartment.  We made the most of the chance to be altogether alone there.  Each evening I would drive in by the Midtown Tunnel, collect her after she finished at the SDS office, enjoy that drink together, spend some quality hours with her, and drive back to my parents’ through the empty 3 a.m. tunnel.  Briefly, it was too good to be true.  And it felt as though having achieved this intimacy, having this girlfriend who was Black, was in practice already building a multiracial society, was working toward our political goals, We Shall Overcome.  My eyes teared when we sang…¹²

Remember this was 1965.  And in February came Selma.  Marilyn was close to several people risking their lives in Selma, as she reminded me more than once.  Me she criticized for being so focused on love and romance and staying in an elite college while committed people were courageously making changes.  Pretty soon she had a different boyfriend.  Our connection ended badly.  Future girlfriends were no longer SDS types.

We Shall Overcome wasn’t going to be that easy after all…

The next phase began in Berkeley.  A few weeks after my arrival the Vietnam Day Committee staged a march through Oakland.  I marched much of the way with Carolyn, Marilyn’s almost equally beautiful twin sister, who’d married her Goucher College¹³ professor and dropped out of school, just before Marilyn dropped out of Skidmore.  I’d met Carolyn in my 1964 Chicago Summer when, in the distance from a folkdancing group in Hyde Park I’d seen her fall — recognized her as Marilyn’s twin — and was the first to arrive to help her up — from what proved to be a broken leg!  In Fall 1965 she was about to become a television news host for KQED.

More than her sister Marilyn, throughout the Sixties Carolyn had been the one who seemed to have everything worked out….  Sadly, in the late Seventies she was assaulted by a serial rapist and in 2000, at age 55, died of cancer.

I think of the three of them, John, Ted and Carolyn, as casualties of a confused and arbitrarily cruel society.

Besides John and Ted and his comrades, 58,000 U.S. soldiers died in the war over Indochina that we on the left provided some help in bringing to an end — but not before the lives of two to three million local people were cut short by U.S. bombs and military muscle.  Even that catastrophe doesn’t count U.S. complicity in millions more deaths by creating the conditions that brought the Khmer Rouge to power in Cambodia.

When I put on my socks the other day and checked the “L” and the “R” and compared one sock with the other, it occurred to me that in fact there may be — other than the letters “L” and “R” themselves — absolutely zero difference between the two socks; that they are the same in every way but cost 2 or 3 dollars more than the equivalent socks that lack the “L” and “R” and make no claim; that it is just another hustle….

Where does that leave us?  Should we still wear socks?  That’s choice number 1.

2)        …with Left and Right wrestling sockless with each other over taxes on the poor and windfalls for the rich, rolling on the ground?

3)        Or, can this be the moment when, using our openmindedness and compassion, our hearts and brains, establishing trust and working together with each other, it is possible we can change course and restore ourselves and our planet to real health and beauty…?

Let our clocks move forward…

But it looks like it has to be now.¹⁴

Footnotes

¹ In Detroit on November 3, 1911 race car driver Louis Chevrolet and GM founder William C. “Billy” Durant co-founded the Chevrolet Motor Company.  In those thriving but cutthroat early capitalist days, only 8 years after the Wright brothers 59-second flight, there were 270 brutally competing American automotive brands. That was then.

² K. Marx based on David Ricardo:  labor-power itself is a “commodity” whose price — just like a product like, say, corn flakes — is determined by either supply and demand (mainstream economics) or by the wage needed to keep a laborer healthy enough to work and to rear the next generation of laborers (heterodox economics).

³ At 7 I’d asked my father, why can’t you just get another partner?  He said something about needing to really trust the person.

⁴ Mitchell, of course, site of the Corn Palace, which was ever after one of my favorite buildings to return to.

⁵ A friend of mine from summer camp years before had told me how the FBI had come to their apartment in Rego Park, in Queens.

When the agents asked, was his father home, he said no but he wouldn’t let them in.  When they asked, was his father’s name such-and-such — his father was running for governor on a left-wing party ticket — he said he didn’t know. 

⁶ Steve was popular and did well enough in some of my honor classes, and he was Captain of the Basketball Team and President of the Student Org., distinctions that likely contributed to his admission to Harvard.  We would have made a rare two from Jamaica, but for some reason he decided, or his parents constrained him to decide, to decline the offer.  When I saw him at Jamaica’s 25^th Reunion he hadn’t aged well and was much shrunken — like Mark R. and others who had involved themselves in those small businesses, but a generation after my father and Mr. C.’s.  It did not seem to me that Bonita Bra had shrunk and aged my father.  But selling industrial chemicals might have, if he hadn’t been laid off so fast.

⁷ Daniel’s older brother Bernard (my sister and other girls in her grade considered him quite dashing), had a conservative bent in later years.  But when the OAS rose up and attempted a coup in 1961 and the government distributed arms to the people, Bernard was said to have gone around defending the Champs-Élysées with a machine gun.

⁸ The second S was for Bob Spindel, a technology whiz who, in the late Fifties, built his own television and computer and later was heading an oceanography unit in charge of the found Titanic.  The L was for Arthur Liolin, who played the organ, was interested in biology and was called “Albert Schweitzer” by amused and possibly impressed high school classmates.  Much later he became Archpriest of the Albanian Archdiocese of the Orthodox Church in America and at the 25^th Reunion referred to himself as We.

⁹ Back in high school Laura had been in my home room and afterward she was also my Michigan girlfriend’s best friend.  But that was the summer Laura had broken up with John — under pressure, to be sure — and we’d double-dated with her and what proved to be her temporary boyfriend Richie, two years older and showing her off in a Corvette convertible.  In high school she’d seemed tough and working-class but a year after graduating she was middle-class Jewish and gentle and appealing.  Decades later she married a man from Wales, whose own reunion event across the Atlantic caused her to miss our 50^th.  She lived by that time in San Antonio.

¹⁰ Fifty years on, it is possible to imagine that, back in the cauldron of the Sixties and with half a million U.S. troops struggling to crush a powerful national liberation struggle, that the North Vietnamese leadership may have made certain key errors in judgment.  Isn’t it possible to believe that with a little more patience could they have saved the lives of some hundreds of thousands of their supporters?  Maybe they were more impatient than— by hindsight — they needed to be.  No doubt, by hindsight, they overestimated the United States determination to conquer and maintain control over Indochina.  And perhaps they lacked confidence that their own people would outlast the United States attacks.  And lastly, I believe they underestimated the effectiveness of the U.S. anti-war movement, that — to augment the persistent effectiveness of the Vietnamese fighters — was making it harder and harder for the warmakers to continue to supply troops and materiel that they needed to continue that war…

 ¹¹ In my lifetime coming together has often been a key challenge for the Left. It could be framed, “Do you want to have a nice little comfortable clique — or do you want to inspire people to respond to an injustice?”  To stay isolated or to initiate actions based on human needs and values?

¹² I was thrown into some confusion that Marilyn considered Jews “almost white”… Up till then I’d considered myself clearly part of the “white” majority in the country, which seemed to offer a kind of personal safety.  To the extent that I believed that, and dismissed Marilyn’s point of view (which at the time sounded crazy), it would be embarrassing to admit that I had — or believed I had — a kind of protection that not everybody had.  Protection that, for example, Marilyn did not have.

Even more embarrassing would be to admit to any secret hesitation to part with such protection.

On the other hand, if I could accept Marilyn’s point of view that in truth I was not altogether white, could I not then link arms with my ‘non-white brethren’ and join in the Festival of the Oppressed?

In spite of many Jews’ habitual disbelief that it was possible that they were being pursued, in the Trump era they are in fact the targets of white supremacists, lumped with Blacks, Latinos, Arabs, Muslims, American Indians, women, members of the LGBTQ community and others.

And whether you believe it this time or not, just last century European Jews were in fact on the brink of annihilation.

I presume Jared Kushner is safe, but unlike most of us he has a lot of money and a connection with Trump’s daughter we couldn’t duplicate…

¹³ This was the first time I’d ever heard of Goucher College, and it gave me a favorable impression of the place.  Subsequently I served as an Assistant Professor there.

¹⁴ If not now, it looks like there will be no ‘when.’

© Jerry Kurtz 2021

Bard endorses Biden in full-throated repugnance for would-be tyrant!

The Trial of Donald the Imbecile

For many it can be hard to pin down and fully characterize his behavior to any one thing.  Would it be fair to say that he alternates between criminally incompetent and just outright malicious?

It’s hard for me to understand — I’m truly puzzled — why people are so hesitant to call him a Murderer.  As though calling him that were improperly harsh; as if he first needed to kill another hundred thousand individuals.  Something must be confusing people.  Does he seem somehow cute, so ridiculous and so out-of-touch with the world — as if we were talking about a chipmunk.  I mean, you don’t bring a chipmunk to trial…   

On the other hand, his idiotic tweets and his latest deranged executive orders create confusion and chaotic non-understanding — like a natural disinformation machine. 

Can we bring such a creature-machine to trial?  Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and try him like a human being — responsible for his actions.  (Many have called him, incorrectly, a dog.)

Pre-Trial Introduction.

That being agreed [i.e., that Trump should face trial as a human being], to me it seems like much of his tweeting and chatter is designed, consciously or non-consciously, to mislead, to create distraction, to set up camouflage and above all to make further deception possible…

This is Trump’s default, the position his switch has been set to, perhaps all the way back to dinosaur time when he had a deal with the meat-eaters…

Prosecutor’s Question: 2^nd degree or 1^st?

But a harder question, what has his ability to create confusion and make possible deception been used for?  Is — or was there once — a goal?  Hard to answer that question when the individual lacks beliefs or values other than repeated, excessive self-glorification.

Is it easier to grasp his motives if instead we look at what he avoids?  How about thinking?  To be sure he avoids that.  How about brooding over difficult decisions?  How about listening?  Reading?  Trying to understand what’s happening, what’s needed, what’s the problem?

Okay, so maybe that approach didn’t work either.  Well, what if we instead observe what his actions are and what these actions do…. Might that lead to greater clarity, and maybe some insight…?

Or should we just give up on this hunt for motives; maybe, like Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, he is a “motiveless malignity”… In that play, when Iago is finally exposed and caught and the others feel they need to understand his motivation to ‘explain’ these horrific evil acts, Iago declares he will not give any clues: “What you know, you know.”

Final Preparation.

But the Trial is already under way and we must prepare.  There’s plenty of material, so let’s say we skip his first 3 years as President, no matter how ugly and horrible his behavior, based on or hidden behind his absurdities: the treatment of immigrants, the poor, Black people, Latinos and other minorities, the LGBTQ, the people who live in the cities, in the big states; the attacks on journalists; and the endless lies, small, medium and — his favorite kind — huge. 

No matter what happens from here on out, we will have to live with much of this damage — like the hijacking of the Supreme Court, where the building’s frieze still reads “Equal Justice Under Law” — for decades to come.

But now it’s this year, 2020, and here comes the coronavirus.  Trump says it’s nothing, we’ll blow past it in no time.  He doesn’t dare to risk scaring Wall Street by creating a breakneck program to make up for the lack of ventilators and masks.  He doesn’t even want to do too many tests, or create test kits for the virus.  Sadly, and criminally, Trump had already cut these public health programs, leaving us in a sorry, unprepared state to face the most deadly plague in 500 years…

And before we go to the Trial itself, we need to introduce one more party, Trump’s close friend the Stuffed Snake, Ezra by name, the former Secretary of Abuse.  Ezra’s remarkable turn against Trump strengthens the Prosecution and disables much of the defense attorney’s cover.

Let us now join the Trial in progress, on the third day of testimony, in the Manhattan District Attorney’s courtroom.

PROSECUTOR: As a result of Mr. Trump’s criminally incompetent behavior, we are required by law to charge him with 394,208 counts of second-degree murder.

MAN IN AUDIENCE:  You killed my wife and my mother!

OTHERS IN AUDIENCE: Murderer!  Killer!  Lock him up!

[Judge bangs gavel.]

JUDGE:  Quiet in the court!

RUDY GIULIANI:  I object, Your Honor.  As Trump’s attorney I cannot let stand a maximum sentence that would take my illustrious client into not the next Ice Age but the one following.  That is cruel and unusual punishment!

[The medical workers in the back row shout him down.]

AUDIENCE MEMBERS:  Dog!  Bastard!  Filth!  You’re evil! 

JUDGE:  Quiet please!

PROSECUTOR:  Furthermore, we note that more than 100,000 of your victims were in New York City — a fact that we consider no accident, considering that New York has a large disproportion of minorities, LGBTQ and liberals.  That makes this a hate crime!

RUDY GULIANI:  I object, Your Honor!  My client is beloved to 120 million people —

WOMAN IN AUDIENCE:  And despised by the other 200 million! —

RUDY GULIANI:  Your honor —

[Shouting in the crowd drowns out Giuliani]

RUDY GULIANI:  Your honor —

[Judge bangs gavel]

PROSECUTOR:  Call Mr. Stuffed von Snake, Ezra by name, to the stand.

BAILIFF:  Mr. Stuffed von Snake to the stand!

BAILIFF:  Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

EZRA:  What’s that?

PROSECUTOR:  Never mind.  — Isn’t it true, Mr. von Snake —

SNAKE: ‘Snake’ will do.

PROSECUTOR: — Mr. Snake, Ezra by name, isn’t it true that Trump has repeatedly supported the police when they kill Black men?

SNAKE: I doubt it.  He never thinks about Black people, and not much about men either.  In recent months he’s mostly focused on women, especially if he thinks he can buy them.  It helps him feel that maybe he’s not so fundamentally repulsive.

PROSECUTOR:  Do you mean to say that he doesn’t buy men?  Doesn’t he need their loyalty somehow?

SNAKE: [Rolling his eyes]  Oh, please.  You’re wasting my time.

PROSECUTOR:  Isn’t it true that Trump told you, Mr. Stuffed von Snake, Ezra by name, that, in order to win the electoral vote, he needed to reduce the population in certain big states?

[Snake turns a palm up and down, as if “yes and no.”]

PROSECUTOR: Don’t you know evil when you see it, Sir?  Even a Stuffed Snake should be able to tell, that if the man wanted to liquidate ‘excess’ people from, say, California and New York, his handling of Covid-19 should be construed as murder, bald and deliberate, murder in the first-degree!  Yes, not to mention tens of millions of attempted murders.

VOICES IN AUDIENCE: Murderer!  Killer!  Lock him up!  Let him be lynched!

JUDGE:  Easy now.  [Pointing his gavel at the middle-aged man who proposed lynching] Easy, fella. 

PROSECUTOR:  Now comes the George Floyd catastrophe… and another boatload of evidence.

SNAKE:  He couldn’t stop himself, the moron.  His instincts were on full view during the protests.  A pig is a pig I guess.

PROSECUTOR:  A pig is worse than a snake? — Aren’t there snakes that eat pigs? 

SNAKE: We Stuffed Snakes have an extremely limited diet…

PROSECUTOR: Enough snake-banter. Now,Mr. Snake, didn’t Trump ignore the tragedy, in a long line of similar tragedies, didn’t he dismiss the outrages and fears — in order to threaten looters, foster discord and division, repeat the slurs of his Russian trolls and make himself the “Law and Order” candidate?

SNAKE:  Fake news Buddy.

PROSECUTOR:  Furthermore, Mr. Snake, Ezra by name, didn’t Trump tell you that he plans to claim he has won the election regardless of the people’s popular and electoral votes? Isn’t it true that he plans to dismiss the results as one more hoax — created by the Deep-State Enemy-of-the-People-Media?

SNAKE:  So what?  So what if he does?

PROSECUTOR:  Isn’t it also true that he has done his best to make sure those in his base stay well-armed, and possibly able to impose his desired verdict on the nation?

SNAKE:  Sez who?

PROSECUTOR:  Sez you, Snake-Boy!  Remember, you wrote all this down for us…?  Remember that little plea bargain we worked out?

SNAKE:  Izzatso? Oh, you mean when you waterboarded me?

PROSECUTOR:  No, that’s your bag of tricks, not ours.  [Turns back and drinks water from his glass as the murmuring in the gallery subsides and the Snake smirks..  Facing the witness again…] And moreover, Mr. von Snake, didn’t a member of the White House staff, William Barr-Doe, a.k.a.”The Hatchet,” discuss with you the possibility of postponing the election?

SNAKE:  My memory fails.  Nine out of ten doctors say, Stuffed Snakes historically have limited gray matter.

PROSECUTOR:  Call William Barr-Doe to the stand!

BAILIFF:  William Barr-Doe, a.k.a.”The Hatchet,” a.k.a. “Crook,” to the stand!

[A Listerine/Xanax commercial is aired, followed by a promotion for the revival of “Ozzie & Harriet,” as William Barr-Doe makes his way to the witness stand.]

PROSECUTOR:  Mr. Hatchet, aren’t you a —

WILLIAM BARR-DOE: The surname, Sir, is Doe.  Or maybe Barr-Doe.

PROSECUTOR: Yes, of course, Mr. Doe, sorry.  Isn’t it true that you, William Barr-Doe, a.k.a. “The Hatchet,” are a member of the White House advisers who tell Trump what to do? 

DOE:  I decline to answer on the grounds that it may tend to incriminate me.

PROSECUTOR:  So you want to take the 5^th so early?  Well, let me at least ask you, why were you willing to join the Trump administration?

DOE:  Because I was an opportunist, you idiot! 

PROSECUTOR:  What precisely, Mr. Doe, was your job at the Goebbels Lab?  Isn’t it true that you were tasked with developing new and better lies, lies that could stand up to a salvo of 88mm truth?

DOE:  Will you stop?

PROSECUTOR:  Call Savanarola to the stand!

[Buzzing in the courtroom as no one appears.  The Judge receives a note from the Bailiff, bangs his gavel.]

JUDGE [reading note]: “On account of his execution Savanarola has withdrawn and pledges his delegates to Trump.”

PROSECUTOR:  Call Dr. David Goebbels to the stand!

BAILIFF:  David Goebbels to the stand!

BAILIFF:  Dr. Goebbels, do you solemnly swear blah blah and all that?

GOEBBELS:  Of course [rolling his eyes]

PROSECUTOR:  Dr Goebbels, were you disappointed that Trump didn’t get the country into a war of some kind, preferably a nuclear exchange with casualties in the tens or hundreds of millions?

GOEBBELS:  What if I was?  What’s it to you?

JUDGE:  The witness must answer the District Attorney’s question.

GOEBBELS: [to the Judge] Get lost you old codger!

[Judge bangs gavel]

PROSECUTOR:  Dr. Goebbels, isn’t it true that you defended Trump only because you are executive director of the Opportunist Party?  And that, considering your deviousness and carpetbaggery, when you began to see that Trump was on the way out, you couldn’t wait to make a few denunciations? 

GOEBBELS:  Oh I don’t know… Maybe.  It’s not like I have any principles to worry about, unlike you tenderminded bleeding hearts, ha!

PROSECUTOR:  And in particular, wasn’t it in fact you, Dr. Goebbels, who revealed that Trump was in discussions toward a possible postponement of the November election?  And that you have managed to bring this idea from the lunatic fringe like you — to the mainstream!

[AUDIENCE murmuring erupts, Judge bangs gavel.]

GOEBBELS:  If I were you, Hotshot, I’d be smarter and more careful what I said — considering all the dirt that we have on you!

PROSECUTOR:  Yes, I’ve received these threats before…

GOEBBELS:  We know you stole a Hershey bar from Safeway when you were 7.  And didn’t you squeeze your babysitter’s breast when you were 9? 

PROSECUTOR:  Your surveillance systems are impressive, we get it.  You certainly have the power to embarrass me, or anyone…. [Takes a measured breath as Goebbels gloats.]. What exactly is your job at the Goebbels Lab?  Isn’t it to invent new, principle-free methods to support bad values?

GOEBBELS:  A libel and a slur!  WE have no values!  At the Goebbels Lab and the Department of Lies we have been trashing the Truth for years.  We seek to deceive the voters about who is responsible for their suffering. 

PROSECUTOR:  Ever heard of Abraham Lincoln?  “You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” And Trump’s limit — and yours — has been reached…

GOEBBELS:  We shall see, won’t we?

PROSECUTOR:  Call Vlad the Impaler to the stand!

BAILIFF:  Vlad the Impaler to the stand!

[Vlad takes a seat with his 7-foot Impaler standing to his right.]

BAILIFF:  Do you….  Uh, go ahead, Counsel.

PROSECUTOR:  Isn’t it true, Mr. Impaler, that under contract to the White House advisers, you provided threats to ‘encourage’ certain governors to call out National Guard from their states and form a Trump-friendly perimeter around the White House?

VLAD:  Oh no, I was only a little… scratching their backs. [Smiling derisively and demonstrating the ‘scratching’ with his famous Impaler.]  I don’t know anything about Trump or any electoral votes or any erections.

PROSECUTOR:  Didn’t you in fact ‘encourage’ Trump when he loses the election to refuse to leave the White House and otherwise break the law?

VLAD:  No, all that was his hare-brained idea.  The man’s a jerk and a barbarian.  He needs to get out more.

[Oops! — Your XFINITY-Prime Courtroom Correspondent has just learned  (tapping his right ear) that in 45 seconds we will hear the verdict!  But while we await the return of the Jury and the results of their deliberations, we get an exclusive look into the climax of the annual meeting of the Chester Glumly Nuboff Society where Trump is striving for a third consecutive victory.  Stay tuned!]

The Chester Glumly Nuboff Medal.

This medal is awarded annually to an individual for having caused the most suffering in one calendar year.  The 2018 medal was ultimately awarded to Trump.

Meanwhile, we see Enablers & Provocateurs LLC, Trump’s people, are sitting around in a lavishly-styled jail, no masks, all thinking of ways to insure, as a matter of pride, that he wins the title of Chief Sleaze.  He could parlay another victory in the Sleaze competition into extra points in the Nuboff contest.

In the 3-way contest with Savanarola and Vlad the Impaler, Trump’s attorney tried to arrange for him to receive credits for suffering caused in 2 previous years by changing the procedure to use median instead of average suffering. 

His attorneys also submitted numerous documents in support of his candidacy, including his favorite disasters, calamities, catastrophes and generally his best-known apocalyptic outcomes.

Yesterday when the 3-judge panel disqualified Trump by mistake, his Personal Thug & Terrorist Service (“PTTS”)” — just to be on the safe side — made sure to put in still another Supreme Court justice that they owned.  And in the end, in the contest for the Nuboff Medal, Trump was finally awarded extra points for having achieved, for 3 years running, his first place finish as Chief Sleaze and Buffoon. 

XFINITY-Prime Correspondent [breathlessly]:  The Jury has returned!

The court officials are already filtering lazily back into the courtroom.  But now the spectators clamor as they surge back in to hear the Jury’s verdict!  Some elbow each other aside in hopes of gaining a front-row seat for this historic occasion.

JUDGE:  [Banging his gavel over and over.]  All right, all right.  Settle down now.  All right.  [To the Jury]:  Has the Jury reached a verdict?

FOREWOMAN:  Yes Your Honor, we have.

JUDGE:  Please tell the Court the verdict you have reached.

FOREWOMAN:  We find the Defendant ‘Guilty As Could Be’ on all counts.  In addition we find the Defendant ‘Guilty as Sin.’

Sentencing Phase.

JUDGE:  Thank you, Forewoman.  And thanks to the Jury for their time and effort.  The Jury is hereby dismissed.  Mr. Trump is hereby sentenced to Suffering Much Milder Than He Caused or Deserved.  [Bangs gavel.]

The people are livid and cry out, “Justice!”

And when Trump is brought before the cameras in chains many call out “Lock him up!” 

And when he cries out for “Pity” and “Mercy,” there is silence — and Wonder, that the long night of Trump… is finally over. 

But it’s Trump’s old cronies who shout the longest and hardest to betray him, now that doing so has been made safe.  As if in their unscrupulousness they can prove their separation from him by the cruelty and viciousness of the punishment they insist on.   They call their group the Revengers, and they are not very compassionate or forgiving…

POMPEO, SECRETARY OF STATE:  Trump should have double the punishment as the Minneapolis officer who murdered George Floyd!  And if that police worm manages to squirm off the hook, we’ll automatically add another 20 years to Trump’s time.  For God’s sake, we’re talking about a mass murderer!

Shouting and booing greet these attacks and the crowd drives off a woman with a “POMPEO 2024!” sign.                                      

Now the scene grows more and more tumultuous.

Now a Gold Star Father who lost his son in Afghanistan — on an afternoon when Trump played golf at his Mar-a-Lago resort— shouts out a vivid dream.  In the dream Trump — for killing so many individuals, women and men, old and young, black and white, liberal and conservative — at last receives punishment that he in truth deserves…

But these were punishments not to be visited on any human being, too horrible even to bring to any written or spoken utterance.  So you can imagine how difficult a task your author must face, whose duty it is to provide a fully even-handed chronicle of these events…

First of all, let all of our gentle readership under the age of 59 return to their regular chairs and select a romantic comedy.  The remaining cohort must resolve to harden their hearts before continuing.  And remember, we believe this narrative is no more than a dream, a Gold Star Father’s imagined revenge for the oppression by — as he says when interrogated by the FBI — “a school bully.”

Oops, now even my publisher objects, oh so politely, to putting these descriptions (of what many, to be sure, would call torture) into words.  Your author is trying to bargain with her, offering to “redact” (as is now fashionable) some of the most offensive parts.  She denies having ties with Facebook-Trump but unfortunately —

“Lock him up!” and “Kill him!” shout the dream’s swarming audience members.

[YOUR AUTHOR: Ulp!  She cut me off!  I can’t— ]

“Auntie Em, Auntie Em!” screams this murderer in the dream.  But his former helpers’ hearts have been hardened.

[YOUR AUTHOR: I guess that’s good-bye folks — ]

“Auntie Em, Auntie Em!” — [Louder! ] — “Help me, please!

The scene gets more and more tumultuous.

Well, the imagined punishment goes on and on, but this is only what the Gold Star Father describes in his sleep.  When questioned by the authorities he says that he dreamt up this illusory retribution for a certain classroom bully who oppressed him for 4 miserable years…

DR FREUD: Hmmm, let me see, could the schoolyard bully deserving of major punishment represent possibly a high official in your nation’s Government?

Finally our secondary source manages to get hold of us for the non-classified piece of the briefing on Trump’s punishment.  Our publisher considers this content nothing special.

SECONDARY SOURCE for Trump’s punishment:

A boy hit him with a ripe tomato, then broke an egg on him.

A well-dressed woman passing by tore a piece out of his suit jacket. 

A Yemeni mother punched Trump in the stomach as hard as she could, doubling him over.

Next a Black man threw him to the floor and kicked the crap out of him, over and over.

“How does it feel, Dirt-Bag,” said the man, “to be on the receiving end?” Secretary Pompeo, who had tried to join the anti-Trump part of the team, experiences some kicks too.

An immigrant woman who had been separated from her toddler came up to Trump’s frightened face, denounced him and nearly spat on him. “Shame, shame!” she shouted in his ear as loud as she could.

A translator told Trump what she’s said, in Mayan: “We’d like you to have to live as a homeless person but for you that wouldn’t be safe…”

To be so dirtied and without power Trump is embarrassed and humiliated.

Others attached a harness to him and to a pickup truck and seemed to prepare to drag him through the streets.  He begged them to be kind to him. But after merely gunning the engine they released him and enjoyed a long series of kneeslappers.

Trump appeals to the Supreme Court, “Brett, didn’t I save you from a life as a molester and rapist?”

But Brett Kavanaugh ignores him and says, chuckling to his golf-buddy, “What’s the big deal? Let him sit in solitary for 2 or 3 years, let’s see what that does for him…”

My publisher, still cool as a cucumber, assures me that this is nothing compared to how much Trump suffered in his unreportable punishment,

Now a figure emerges from the darkness in the rear.  It’s…the LION KING! — future Secretary of the Interior in the Biden Administration!

GIULIANI and Miscellaneous Trump Enablers: Why are YOU here? [Scoffs.] What sense does this make?

LION KING: I represent the Earth as a whole: National Parks; the environment that Trump’s corporate filth have been poisoning; animals, trees, you know. Sorry to intrude into your Tirade but I couldn’t wait a minute longer!  I can’t— [gasps]

GOOD PEOPLE coming forward and speaking as a Group: Couldn’t this bully at least — for all his ugly and cruel actions — have a conscience that tortured him? 

DR FREUD:  It doesn’t look like we can find evidence that he did, or if he did he would have long ago murdered it away… 

DR JUNG: There are clues that this delusional type belongs to a certain subset that has turned against their creative psychic force and identifies with an archetype, blah blah and all that, known for having at the center of their soul, not a conscience but a big yellow cake that the subject talks with.  The individual might go so far as to give the cake a pet name, e.g, “Greed B. Good,” and to believe that they themselves are in fact the cake.

GOOD PEOPLE: What in the hell is he talking about?

LION KING [standing with Good People]: I don’t get this cake thing.  He’s still a very bad man.  But the question is, how can we let someone so cartoonish and so easy to make fun of create such horrific suffering and destroy so many people’s lives — do so much damage to the nation and the planet, and be so all-around evil?

GOOD PEOPLE: Expose this killer, expose his handlers and enablers!  And stop him!

Author’s Note.

Your author needs to acknowledge that the passages that we called a dream with the hoped-for punishment (and that our publisher in the end did not allow us to use), were stolen from The Unfortunate Traveller, a picaresque tale by Thomas Nashe published in 1594, when the plague closed the London theatres for a year and Shakespeare was writing Taming of the Shrew and Two Gentlemen of Verona.  It is often called the first novel written in English.

© Jerry Kurtz 2020

Maybe because I was noticing that people I knew have achieved something important — some of them — while others reach the end of their alive-time without… 

Or at least without my knowing of such accomplishments…

Maybe because of this I was searching for something important I might have done. 

Could be, say, it was invading the offices of the most popular TV station in Baltimore, and getting them to send a crew to film the twelve antiwar students who, one-by-one, denounced President Nixon’s Christmas bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong.  Or it could be something dramatic on the community level: organizing what proved to be an interracial sit-in of 65 individuals that carried on till 3 a.m. — rain notwithstanding; resulting in my firing being reversed and my evil boss being himself fired.

Okay, so, actions that I’m proud of, but do they qualify?  Are they truly important in the Grand Scheme?

Well, I remembered I once had a 5-page résumé so I must have done something world-changing — even if I don’t remember with any precision what that thing I’d done might have been…

But it turns out, oddly enough, that I might have in fact saved the world.

The recently unearthed photo shown above triggered this realization.

I was a freshman in college.  The Bay of Pigs (“Playa Girón”) was already history, the Cuban missile crisis a year in the offing.  I’d been assigned by the Public Affairs director at the college radio station to interview the renowned physicist Leo Szilárd, who was passing through the Boston area.  She intimated that Szilárd might use the interview to launch an anti-nuclear or anti-testing movement.

Now as it happens there was only a week left in the Fall Competition that would determine which of the students were considered worthy to become part of WHRB — and which could be let go.  This interview, it occurred to me, could provide the scoop that would burnish my credentials! 

The first few moments of the Szilárd meeting went well:  At the Harvard Square subway exit, at noon, I managed to get close enough to him to introduce myself and shake his hand.  I thought he nodded to me when I held up the little tape recorder.  But as we walked along Massachusetts Avenue I saw that the 8 or 9 people moving with him and fussing over him never seemed to go away or give me easy access to the man…

In 1933 Szilárd, a brilliant Hungarian Jewish physicist, had developed — just as he prepared to escape Germany — the idea of a nuclear chain reaction.  And in 1934 he went on to patent, with Enrico Fermi, the idea of a nuclear reactor.  And once he finally settled in the safety of the United States, Szilárd initiated a number of other projects, like the cyclotron and the electron microscope, that he handed off to collaborators who ultimately received Nobel Prizes themselves.

But most crucially he grasped that German physicists were burning the midnight oil to develop some version of an atom bomb — whereas there was no such research going on in the U.S.  In the end Szilárd managed to get Albert Einstein to sign a letter that he, Szilárd, had written to President Franklin D. Roosevelt — which in the upshot led to the establishment of the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb.

This might be the appropriate moment to note that, under Trump rules and procedures, Szilárd’s admission to the U.S. would have been iffy at best.  Thus, in the 1930s, while we kept almost all Jews and foreigners out of our country, Hitler would have been free to develop a nuclear weapon years ahead of a bewildered America.  Vast numbers of Americans — however “protected” from the imaginary “crimes” that Trump likes to claim additional immigrants would carry out — might well have been incinerated in a nuclear holocaust.  Or if the U.S. had surrendered in time, we would have lived for decades under the most onerous Nazi constraints and controls.  Blacks, Jews, Muslims and Asians other than Japanese would have been sent to extermination camps.

 And it wouldn’t be long before Japan — useful ally of Germany — wasn’t needed any more, and long-term Japanese-Americans would have been found ripe for the old “relocation” camps, now turned to gas-ovens.  That action would have been to insure that the German “Aryan” race-type had no competition.

As it happened, Szilárd experienced persecution analogous to what Trump may have in mind for immigrants and/or enemies — and may hope to carry out in his next phase.  But Szilárd’s persecution happened in Hungary, where nationalist anti-Semitic students, like Trump’s Charlottesville white nationalists, physically prevented Szilárd’s attempt to continue his engineering studies. 

However, Szilárd was as determined as he was brilliant. He pulled up stakes and moved to Berlin.  And later, bored with engineering, he went elsewhere for physics — and managed to be able to work under inspiring lecturers that included Einstein and Max Planck.  And finally, when the Nazis took power in 1933, Szilárd understood it was no longer safe for him.  Fortunately — for him and us! — he succeeded in taking advantage of a crack in the U.S. wall designed to keep out the many who hoped to immigrate.

Perhaps we need to give an under-the-table thanks to the racists, Nazis and similar fascists who drove those brilliant minds out of Europe and to our shores, enabling us to prevent Hitler from acquiring this doomsday weapon with the power to dictate surrender terms — perhaps after the incineration of a couple of cities like New York and Washington…

All Szilárd’s breakthroughs he’d achieved in the 1930s and 1940s.  Now, for our November 1961 lunchtime meeting here in Boston, he was about something equally extraordinary but at the same time altogether different: establishing a mass peace and anti-nuclear movement!

All right, so how did I save the world already?  Well, we have to expand our canvas to see what was going on in other venues and in the brains and hearts of other people around the earth…. For isn’t it true that we live amidst the swirl of mutually interacting reciprocal relationships? 

In Washington President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was secretly working on his own peace plan — a nuclear test ban treaty that would be ratified in two years, months after Szilárd and only months before Kennedy himself left the stage.

And on the other side of the world Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev was apparently concerned about the risk of accidental nuclear war and about the Soviet Union being so far behind in technology and nuclear throw weight.  The hardliners were repeatedly undermining and trying to outmaneuver and overthrow him but he had nearly 3 years before they would succeed.  In the meantime he labored among the factions to create a test ban treaty that would avoid major inspections, save face and forestall his detractors.

Well, it’s most of a century later and we have some perspective.  My best theory — why not? — was that Szilárd and JFK had already spoken, and Kennedy was indeed listening for and deeply interested in — and perhaps dreading — the expected lunchtime radio interview… that never came!

Why no interview?  What happened at our lunch?  Well, Szilárd figured he needed to eat before he talked.  Who could argue with that?  But who was this kid fresh off the streets of Queens — a walking demonstration of how unimportant WHRB considered so important a person as himself and his fledgling anti-nuclear peace movement.  Worst of all Szilárd knew he had only a year, maybe two, to accomplish this second mission, before the cancer removed him from the playing field of this particular universe.

Valiantly I tried to talk with Szilárd during lunch, with the crush of others all around him, but he wouldn’t let me turn on the recorder.

As he slowly chewed his corned beef sandwich, he quickly began to grasp that his prospective interviewer knew nothing about him or his underlying motivation, had read none of his books or articles and had not the slightest idea of what he’d been through, first in Hungary, then in Germany and elsewhere. 

I made a last attempt to turn on the recorder — but Szilárd himself covered the switch with his hand.

­­That afternoon when I got back to WHRB — without the tape I was assigned to get — in my frustration I wrote angry words in the station Comment Book — something that was Not Done!  (And even if it Was done, it wouldn’t Be done by a College freshman candidate.  So was I soon told — many times — both in writing and in face-to-face dressing-downs.)  This action insured that, when the WHRB Fall Competition ended, I would have no future in that organization.¹  (But I soon found what I considered better things to do, though I don’t remember what they were….)

John Kennedy was kind of an erudite guy, I figure.  What did he make of his college radio station airing no interview with this Szilárd who’d made it possible to get the A-bomb ahead of Hitler and win the war?

Let’s figure that, according to my theory, Kennedy had pressured Szilárd to skip the interview and postpone the actual launching of his movement.  Whereas if Szilárd plowed ahead, Kennedy would be under pressure before he himself had his ducks lined up to support and sign the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, his signature presidential accomplishment.  Even an impeachment can be derailed by moving too swiftly; one needs to take the trouble to actually buckle down to the hard work of building an adequate foundation…

But Szilárd had not agreed to a postponement and with Szilárd’s push for a test ban agreement now, Kennedy knew the agreement he himself was planning would fail to get the needed support.²  And if he spent his political capital too soon, with the Cuban missile crisis looming ten months down the calendar, he might feel constrained to respond more aggressively — and dangerously!

But my failure, unexpectedly and unknowingly, kept the president’s powder dry, saved him from having to go in whole hog too early — and essentially gave JFK a free hand.  With the extra time he got all the deals he needed made on his own schedule before his own time too ran out.

Now, on the one hand — speaking just for my own self — how self-serving a history can one imagine?

But on the other hand, a person might wonder nowadays, did I, Jerry, ever receive recognition for this all-important achievement, at least akin to my success (also unrecognized) in promoting Pinot Noir throughout the country in the Eighties?

I understand that there were discussions in the corridors of power about some kind of medal, perhaps the Unheralded Hero of the Nation plaque and trophy set, but in the end it was thought smarter, and safer, to classify the information for 75 years.

I’m not bothered; saving the world, as I sit in my twi-lit dining room, is, more than most tasks, its own reward.

© Jerry Kurtz 2019

Notes.

¹ All this took place in Fall 1961 when Indochina was only simmering.  Eight years later, during some of the worst of the Vietnam War, WHRB acquitted themselves better in the SDS-led University Hall occupation.  Chris Wallace and other station heavies stayed all night and were clubbed along with the ordinary students when police broke down the doors at dawn.

² Some have compared the danger of a too hasty attempt to win on a highly polarized issue — like, in Kennedy’s case, getting a nuclear test ban treaty through the Senate — to, in our case, impeaching and convicting a president.

In either case there was a need to slow the speed of a movement in order to make it possible to gain the additional needed support, and in particular to avoid alienating lawmakers who might ultimately join that movement.

What would Italian food be without the possibility of a tomato?

A question not to be asked.

Or what about a steak — for those of you still eating them, or half-converted to Paleo — without a mashed potato?  Or Chilli Crab without the chili pepper?

Or, say, your morning without its cup of French Roast coffee?

Well, if you lived in Europe before around 1500, these items were unknown, or maybe found only in mysterious rumors.

To begin to make them known and ultimately available to a significant fraction of the European public required voyages of exploration, especially to the New World.  Or, for the Ottoman Turks, to Yemen for coffee beans.  And for the people in China unconsciously waiting to get their knives on the hot peppers that originated in Mexico, and to learn to cook with them, they had to wait for Portuguese and Arab traders.

And much more recently – over, say, the past 15-20 years — what about the sudden improvement in British and Swiss cuisine?  Likely this is a result of diversity and rising sophistication and worldwide standards of taste. 

So wouldn’t these appear to be benefits of globalization?

Ah, but not so fast!

Part 1.

Weren’t whole peoples wiped out by the diseases that these Europeans brought along?  And weren’t many or most of the others enslaved, famously in cane cutting and sugar processing and mining?  And weren’t the rest exploited, many of their descendants down to this very day, half a millennium later?  Conquistadors and other globalizers had heard of the idea of mercy, after all a central principle of the Catholic Church, and might — in theory — have been generous and gentle and truly helpful to these they defeated.  But in practice, when it came to those human beings, mercy and fellow-love proved to be in shockingly short supply…

In North America the aboriginal peoples experienced the human cost of the resettling and “development” — or from their point of view, rape and pillaging — of a continent.  They lost much of a beautiful and practical relationship with nature and, more often than not, their language and culture, their sense of safety, the lives of their loved ones and all too often their own.

But the explorers and settlers who followed and displaced the natives did not benefit the tribes who managed to survive them.  This piece of history does not immediately reassure us that globalization is moving us toward world peace…

According to one cohort of television and movie Westerns that many of us grew up watching, the Europeans not only brought rifles never seen in the Americas – like now, supposedly a force for Good — they also sold them to the Indians. 

This stage of establishing a global economic system – that made its mechanisms all but impossible to restrain – made not only grains and rifles but also human labor-power into commodities, their prices set just like pork bellies by supply and demand.  Neither the smartest nor the most immovable among the Europeans could stand up to the irresistible force of this early globalization in which guns and all other commodities demanded larger and larger markets.

But back on the positive side of globalization…  Haven’t there been millions of hardworking immigrants, people who weren’t colonialists, refugees fleeing oppression themselves, who like my grandmother believed the stories of gold in the streets and suchlike?  These were human beings who brought their food preferences and recipes to North America, while supplying the muscle to build the cross-country railroads, the towns and cities, the steel mills, the wineries.  And more recently, others from far-flung parts came who provided insight and brain-power to further develop the technologies that would continue to transform daily life throughout much of the world.

Nor would I ever have laid eyes on my late wife unless the airplane had been invented.  And then only if a globalizing U.S. biotech company opened a branch in Singapore to sell their instruments and supplies in East and South Asia.  On a personal level this was an extraordinary benefit for me.

 But what is the real connection between globalization and immigration?

There is a kind of immigration in which individuals and groups are fleeing oppression, sometimes in fear for their lives, seeking a safe haven.

But the larger movement is driven by the globalization economy in which the labor-power of human beings is treated as a commodity almost indistinguishably from the treatment of pork bellies.

For example, in California the economy demands cheap Mexican labor-power to get the berries picked.  

Growers pay for this labor-power according to the quantity of available humans to supply it and the competition among growers seeking to buy it.  Similarly, in Singapore “Guest Workers” from Bangladesh are brought in to provide the bulk of the labor-power to run the oil refineries.  It should be noted that in this way the workers do not become full-fledged immigrants or citizens.

In an earlier approach, when the British controlled what was then called Malaya, they first invited Cantonese to come and exploit the land and run the industries.  When members of this group threatened to organize, risking the continuance of low costs and foreign control, the British responded by importing Indians – people from an altogether different language group — to impede communication and erode trust with the Cantonese-speakers.

My wife, a Hokkien Chinese Singaporean, was an immigrant naturalized in 1975. I became attuned to the level of racism and prejudice that undermined the lives of immigrants arriving in the U.S. — not to mention the rapacious business practices they were ill-equipped to fight, and finally physical danger and a prevalence of gun culture. 

But perhaps, to be entirely fair, we can recognize that the dominant culture within the U.S., limiting and homogenizing as it typically is, closed and oppressive as it may be in many circumstances, provides at least a partial check on some absolutely unacceptable rituals – like honor killing, female genital mutilation, human sacrifice and so forth — that may be condoned by various cultures of origin. 

In what might prove to be another healthful development, I read the other day that in the U.S., perhaps in part a result of significant immigration, one in six marriages – like mine to my late wife — is now interracial.  If true, this could be construed as the species’ unconscious attack on inbreeding. 

But in terms of the globalization I’m tracking, we can recognize that races and ethnicities have long been separated from their traditional regions of origin.  And even when these individuals, couples and groups settle to create and raise the next generation, they are in a foreign and unexpected location, a place that their history provides no guide to. 

Nevertheless, whatever the benefits for society and for a comparatively small number of individuals in these globalizing movements of goods and services and people, they must be weighed against the dislocation and heartbreak of lost jobs, shuttered factories, drug addiction, violence, and all the other downstream effects that flow from the resulting destruction and decimation.

These effects are exacerbated and the uprooted people further undermined by the loss of signposts in the old cultures – holidays, rituals, traditions, stories, even whole languages — that prevented those now living far from their place of origin from being unmoored and at a loss to grasp where in this universe they stood…

What about (1) religion, (2) trade?  Aren’t there good things that develop in these categories?

Religion has been trucked around the world just as soon as neighboring cultures bumped into each other, just as Islam pushed into Indonesia in the 16^th Century a step ahead of Christian Dutch colonizers.  Nowadays we have Catholics proselytizing in Africa while Pentecostals steamroll into Latin America.  Whether such developments are a happy or unhappy outcome is up to the point of view of the reader…

And famously, technologies made it possible to establish long-distance trade.  As a blueberry fanatic, I’ve been thrilled to be able to get baskets and baskets of them at reasonable prices in winter – arrived from Chile, Argentina, sometimes Perú, and Mexico.  This goes too for raspberries, strawberries and blackberries.  What a change from my youth, where you could get these items only “in season.”  And that is still the case for most — less globalized — locations in the world. 

We are likely to be familiar with the clothing, shoes and other gear made cheaply in developing-world sweatshops, by recent arrivals from the countryside who work 12-hour days, six and seven days a week, often carrying out their repetitious tasks in semi-darkness. 

Less visible on the surface, machinery began to be shipped around the world, and then that machinery could be made around the world.

The largely poor people driven from the rural precincts — increasingly to bi- and multi-cultural trading ports that feed a global economy — achieved a certain freedom from the oppressiveness they had lived with in the countryside — but then found themselves thrown, as for example in China, into the cauldron of a wild and heartless, insensible capitalism.

That system, now in its ascendancy, is driven by the voracious needs of faraway markets and those who can profit from them, most of them happily unaware of and uninterested in the damage done to the humans ground up in the production process.

And as we are all aware by now, recent and potential immigrants to the West have been singled out for not merely unwelcoming but downright hostile and unjust treatment.  Trump’s anti-immigrant schemes, for example, are a bad thing for everybody. 

But selected effects of the current globalization give him a chance to arouse elements of a threatened populace with fear of lost jobs, shuttered factories, lost security, lost (false) memories of a golden age, and a frightening and unprovided old age.  For Trump and his ilk, evaporating livelihoods, fleeing businesses, desolate and impoverished towns provide an ideal backdrop for his destructive schemes.

Part 2.

When I was back in Switzerland last summer — my 5^th or maybe 6^th trip there but the first in 13 years — I was startled to find that the kinds of people I saw seemed considerably changed:  Whereas 13 years ago the people on the streets were overwhelmingly white Europeans and North Americans, now there were, besides the Japanese tourists, and the mass Chinese tours, many Asian residents.  And too there were Arabs from the Middle East, largely looking wealthy, as well as Indians and Pakistanis, both those who had found work in Switzerland, and moneyed tourists.  And in somewhat smaller numbers, black Africans from Nigeria and Kenya.

This recent, somewhat sudden diversity is in no small measure driven by globalization.

To be sure, these were subjective impressions.  But to me it was remarkable to find this diversity in a country not historically welcoming or altogether sympathetic to refugees or poor or oppressed people of any kind or stripe.  In spite of Switzerland’s preferred reputation — for originating the Red Cross and for their historical humanitarian gestures¹ —Switzerland refused entry to many thousands of Jews fleeing Hitler who were later, consequently, murdered. 

On the other hand, to be fair, largely cowed by and partly sympathetic with the Nazis as they were, they did, in that period, take in some batches of Jews and perhaps other endangered refugees.² 

I supposed, without, to be sure, any avalanche of evidence, that this fresh diversity had much to do with the improvement in quality and variety of cuisine in Switzerland.  And I felt this diversity was a good thing in important ways, dispelling some prejudice, increasing tolerance, and generally, vaguely, possibly moving this region of the planet – hesitatingly — toward world peace.  But on the other hand, there have been many — in Hungary, Poland, in Germany and Italy — who have felt threatened, who in diversity find not a hope for peace but a call to war; many who have joined with unapologetic racists and are swept up in the tide of right-wing nationalism; many who resist even the remotest hint that we might be inching toward a more diverse society.

And even here in Switzerland, something felt wrong. 

Most strikingly to me, I saw no effort to welcome the Chinese tourists.  They were left to themselves and their tour leader.  No doubt the Europeans had already learned that communicating with these typically lower middleclass visitors was difficult or impossible since they — unlike the typically upper middleclass Japanese tourists — were not English speakers. 

To be sure, each culture, from the point of view of a foreign culture, has its seemingly “uncivilized” practices.  In Switzerland, the dominance of the Western ear can spell — at worst — contempt for a non-Western minority’s behavior, like the perception that their voices are loud or harsh.

But as a courtesy to the East Asians, there was sometimes a menu in Japanese and/or Chinese.  Then again, more often there was not, instead relying on an English menu for those among them who could read and understand that language. 

Partly as a result of that phenomenon — a fringe benefit for us, of course! — there was now almost always a menu written in English, the most widespread of the various languages of the foreign tourists.  For the same reason English — driven especially by the tourism industry but also by the technology industry — was also far more widely spoken than it had been 13 years before.  I remember a two-hour conversation by the banks of the Reuss in 1989 with two young men, one of whose wallet I’d found — in German.  In the current millennium, in 2018, their English would have been far better than my German.  Would this new version of Switzerland, or at least the German-speaking regions, with better English skills, foster world peace better?

Or should we rather ask:  Is “Globalization” really only a euphemism for domination by English-speakers — a fig leaf for North American control?

Okay, so where else does this diversity occur?  While the 20 most ethnically diverse countries in the world are all in Africa, it is also true that many European cities have become impressively, and for some, uncomfortably diverse.  In North America this could also be said of cities like New York, Toronto, Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles.

Part 3.

Does this mean that globalization moves, on the whole, toward equality and/or all “civilizing” potentials?  Absolutely not true.  Rather it’s an overwhelming, unstoppable tide that sweeps all before it, whether good or bad, whether anybody wishes it or not.

So on trade, for example, there’s no easy fix…

Does the good stuff get included by a kind of “natural selection” process – pizza, bagels, tacos?  But then the elegance of many foods can get watered down to suit the tastes of the masses of Newly-Exposed Consumers (“NEC”)

Does this “watering-down” move more and more toward homogenization, risking the loss not only of foods but of non-umbrella languages — of languages downgraded to mere “dialects” because they lack the protection of an army — with an accompanying loss of literatures, written in languages now certified as dead?

Igor, an anti-government tour guide I’d hired in late Soviet times, loved only the few surviving Renaissance buildings in L’viv – from a culture and style now extinct — and complained that the high-rise apartments there and around the world were “everywhere the same.”

So:  Finally:  What is to be done?

First: recognize what’s happening.  And where, precisely, it is inexorable, like a tsunami.  To suss this out is already difficult and perhaps impossible to know for sure.  But to skip this step can mean we’ve lost before we’ve even begun.

Get clear on the benefits and consequences, immediate and long-term, affecting not only our own lives but the lives of our children and grandchildren, the workers ensnared in globalized production and shipping, other humans and, probably, other residents of our planet’s biosphere.

Then develop strategies – hard-nosed as needed³ — to welcome the plusses and forestall the losses.

Then comes the question of understanding and compassion Remember how the Chinese tourists in Luzern were treated?  How can they be helped to feel included, listened to?  A question to be asked, here and in many stages and formats of globalization.  Customs, whole cultures and religions that had been isolated from each other by geography now come face-to-face — for better or worse, whether anybody had wished for it or not — on account of new technology and the forces it has set loose.  Perhaps we’re at an early stage of this coming-together — or should we say “confrontation”?  Unknown.

What about that world peace?

And that “bias of nature”⁴?  Will the bad guys triumph and the world go down the toilet to enrich them and enhance their luxuries?  Or will the good people of this earth come from behind to save us and free us all from the stake to which we are currently tied?

The ball is still in the air. 

Notes

1. In 1871 the Swiss rescued the starving Bourbaki soldiers, as dramatized in the multimedia diorama in Lucerne, above.

2. More recently the country has seemed divided, polarized, in their attitude to these wartime failures, resulting in a halting and hesitant attitude to returning the wealth that the Nazis had looted from the murdered Jews, assets they had laundered in Swiss banks.

3. For example, we want to stop the extinction of Monarch butterflies, threatened by Mexican avocado growers who’ve rooted out the milkweed that the Monarchs must feed on. The farmers seek to take advantage of the skyrocketing popularity of avocados and profitable market in the U.S.  To turn the situation around we can compensate the farmers and require them to replant the milkweed over 2/3 of the acreage.

4. A Shakespearean term from King Lear: Which way does the universe tilt?  Can the universe correct worldwide catastrophes and run down holocaust-level errors to a stop?  Can a few hanging chads plunge us into a world war starting in the Middle East from which our good judgment and all our resources will never be able to extricate us?  Can poor judgment or blindness on the part of a fraction of us — and the larger fraction’s doing too little to expose them — undo all the civilizing movement of a century and risk the planet’s life with nuclear devastation?

© Jerry Kurtz 2018

It was 1957 when I first laid feet on the Athabasca Glacier in the Columbia Icefields near Jasper, Alberta.

I was with my parents and my grandmother, 70 years old.

We and twenty others went out on what was called a “snowmobile”: It had skis on the front so it could slide on the surface of the ice, and on the snow that had accumulated on top.  It was July — summer, as my 13-year-old brain insisted.  That was an eye-opener for me, and an experience that burst past the gates of memory with the brilliance of fireworks.

Forty-nine summers later no grandmother, mother or father was still drawing breath.

My father— highly amused — prepares a snowball in front of two 1957-era snowmobiles.

But my wife was alive, and we were making a trip across Canada. We’d got off the train at Jasper, rented a car, and spent a couple of expensive nights based at Lake Louise, about the most beautiful place I’d ever seen.

Then we drove north, returning to the train.  En route we found where the glacier lived — but it was unrecognizable. 

Less than a human lifetime had passed, but our glacier had aged along with us.  Our poor glacier began a mile farther away…  

Did that mean that 434,000 tons of ice had melted?  I think Yes!

Since that teenage visit the snowmobile, a device created by us endlessly inventive humans, had been revolutionized four times, as we learned in the outdoor museum and photo exhibit.  The current model, the fifth, looked like an enormous insect with jumbo rubber tires — something like the transport that had taken us out on the beach to where the Skagerrak strait connects the North Sea and the Baltic, a few weeks earlier in northern Denmark. 

Grace and 2006-model snowmobiles.

With the new vehicle we managed to reach what remained of the glacier with no difficulty.  But this time, unlike the home movies, there were no laughing faces or snowballs thrown.  My late wife and I looked at each other as people do when they feel something that they’d counted on to be solid and strong was sliding through their fingers like so much dry sand. 

For us individual humans, the clock hands had spun around many, almost countless times.  Sunrises and sunsets for my grandmother, father and mother — who’d accompanied me on the glacier surface so much earlier in our lives — had decades before run out; for my wife there were still 5 years left.  But weren’t glaciers supposed to endure, to grow and shrink in their own time-frame, of thousands or tens of thousands of years? – beyond, certainly, any ordinary sequence of individual human deaths and births.  Instead here was a massive shrinking within a single lightning flash in the earth’s history.

Wasn’t this awfully quick, to see so vast a shrinking in less than one’s own threescore and ten?  And apart from the loss of beauty, apart from the loss of an effortless apprehension of wonder — apart from the indication that the earth was somehow running down — what would be the consequences of this disappearance?

Four years previous, when we’d based ourselves in Lucerne, we drove to the canton of Grisons, and along the Em River, where I thought it would be easy to get Emmenthaler Swiss cheese.  And in Pontresina we found a modern hotel with a good one, plus good red wine and a friendly fire. 

Next day we went to explore the glacier which had once begun several kilometers closer to the hotel.  We passed signs with dates from the last 40 years marking where the glacier had then extended to.  And of what remained, much of it looked to be full of holes — unsafe to traverse.  A modern hotel, good cheese, yes — but beauty and wonder were fading at head-spinning speed; speed that was, for our part of the solar system, difficult or impossible to grasp.

2004. Since Switzerland the earth’s made just a circuit and a half around our sun, so it’s January — but somehow it’s summer again. Well, that’s how it works when you’re in the Southern Hemisphere — in New Zealand, not far from Aoraki: Mt. Cook.

We’re taking a boat ride on the lake where the glacier — who felt like an old, old friend — like a doddering old man — was breaking down, “calving,” its ice-cliffs collapsing and tumbling as though in slow-motion into the lake, in some grandeur.

As we approached, we were surrounded by milky-gray glacier water.  

And this meltwater, having been locked in thick-ribbed ice¹ for eons, looked different from normal, ice-cube meltwater from your refrigerator’s freezer.  Indeed we were told that the water being released from the glacier was thousands of years old.  Was this in some way like being released from prison?

As we hiked back from the drop-off point and went in and out of views of beautiful snow-capped peaks, I brooded.  And when we crossed a long skinny, shaky rope bridge — I have a fear of heights — I could, finally, seem to see where we — all of us — were. 

It once seemed to be but “early” in human history.  We know now we have the means to make it very late… And here, late in 2017, an enormous chunk of Antarctica has broken loose and drifted off in the ocean, a chunk so big that cartographers have complained they need to revise their maps.

What about the north end of the planet? In fourth grade they kept telling us there was a search for the fabled Northwest Passage to the East Indies that supposedly inspired Columbus’s voyages.  The Hudson Bay Company and the Dutch East India Company and their European explorers of yesteryear who pursued this mercantile holy grail can at last claim a success as the polar icecap rapidly melts down to nothing.  In addition many newer corporations are thrilled to have only a familiar liquid for their smiling cargo-laden ships to plow through.  And the mighty Titanic, a mere hundred years later, could have lived up to its abortive boast of being tougher than Nature’s quaint defenses and could merrily steam on to a career of wondrous exploits to compete with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.

The most calamitous effects we face are not centuries away but only years.  We may be watching not the beginning of our short history but what could be the beginning of the end…

It’s now eleven years since my second trip to Athabasca Glacier.  What revolution in snow vehicles will have taken place — perhaps they’ve reached the 7^th generation?  And for me what unknown number of winters and summers remain, to keep recording developments that are worrying?  In fact so worrying that I find them impossible to truly believe — because they involve actual annihilation.

Astronomically the earth will be here for billions of years more, no matter how we wound it and mess it up — even as a burned-out rock; it will survive no matter how quickly and how thoroughly we may destroy ourselves and most of the life-forms we count on.  But the brave new world my wife and I had been viewing in 2006 wasn’t exactly the eternal and magnificent one we hoped to leave for future generations.  As a thirteen-year-old in 1957, I imagined all this would be forever.  How terribly sad…  Sad, to finally recognize that our planet, in the age of humans, can no longer take care of itself — and frustrating, that humankind has made it that way — humankind — us — this resourceful but careless species who have been here for not even a ten-thousandth of the earth’s existence — sad, that we are failing in our stewardship — failing catastrophically — and that at best we have to work with all our strength and all our resources to keep the worst from happening.

© Jerry Kurtz 2018

 Notes

1.  Interested parties should see Claudio’s speech in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Act 3, scene 1:

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; 
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become  
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit  
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside  
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;  
To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,  
And blown with restless violence round about  
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst  
Of those that lawless and incertain thought  
Imagine howling: ’tis too horrible!  
The weariest and most loathed worldly life  
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment  
Can lay on nature is a paradise    
To what we fear of death.  

Somehow we’d lost our passports the afternoon before. Frantically we’d searched for the embroidered little Chinese purse that held them — I’d given it to Hannah just ahead of the trip — which had suddenly gone missing from her wrist. We’d combed every section of pavement and scraggly patch of grass — everywhere that we’d walked, sat or talked over the previous hours. But we might have done better if we’d been less panicky and stood stock still…

We had as yet no idea, much less a clear one, what we’d need to do to continue our trip, or even to get home from there; this was 1985, a Cold War year, and we were located deep within the Other. We had hopes, which some encouraged, that a good citizen might find our passports and pass them along to the police to return to us. Others, more cynical, imagined the passports were worth real money and would be used to move another person across a frontier like in the movies, or maybe transport valuable contraband. You know, “smuggling.”

But meanwhile, the next day was May 9^th, Victory Day throughout the USSR. And it was the fortieth anniversary of that historic event. Considering that almost every current resident of Kiev had lost at least one family member in the Great Patriotic War, it was a staggeringly more powerful and more personal holiday for many locals than July 4^th is for most Americans. I hope it won’t disappoint you if we lay aside the sad recounting of individual suffering and private losses of the war years in Kiev, and the woeful tale of struggles with the opportunists and collaborators, which I am ill-equipped to write. Instead I’ll stick to our more modest ambition and dive at once into the 1985 Victory Day story. 

The authorities, in recognition of so momentous a holiday, had renamed various days of the week — e.g., Thursday, the next day, became “Saturday” — with the result that they had created a super, four-day holiday. Our friends had planned a picnic for us on a grassy island in a lake we could walk to, with a few of their Kiev friends and, passports or no, we were determined to celebrate. 

We’d already learned the protocol. Friends of exotic foreigners like Americans were kept in separate cells, so to speak; considering no one knew which individuals were working for the authorities, the separation protected these friends. And since anyone willing to talk with Americans could fall under suspicion, these people were taking a risk.

Everyone spoke more quietly than Americans, partly out of general courtesy but also out of fear of being overheard. To be sure, American tourists have long been known for speaking decibels beyond any local norm; but in Ukraine in 1985 there were those extra risks…

Our Baltimore friend Stan who’d been living in Kiev eight months cautioned us about saying anything revealing in our hotel. Indeed, my expectation was that the KGB or police listened to every conversation emanating from the various bugged hotel rooms, and other private and public rooms. But another friend said there was so much bugging and it had been done over and over so many times that no one could be sure any more, not even the police, which hotel rooms were bugged and which weren’t.

That was our first surprise and it struck me as a little funny, and hinted at some distant limit to evil. But we were cautioned constantly that it was unsafe to speak freely and the police were anything but bumbling; they were effective and dangerous.

Trams/Street.

None of that was about to stop us from enjoying our holiday, exploring the city, and trying to experience something of the habits and customs of the locals. That being said, the faces in the tram and on the street seemed somber compared to those on an average American busload — dour. Oddly — to us — they made no effort to appear as though they were enjoying themselves, delighted with their jobs, thrilled with their partners and their lives. They weren’t smiling. But a friend from Missouri claimed that, paradoxically, the Kievans were less unhappy than Americans! — that Americans felt pressure to pretend joy and to push aside worries that were in fact real; while the Kievans, who’d experienced — certainly in recent generations — more severe suffering on several levels, were content to accept their joys and fears of all kinds.  I told Missouri I didn’t see much in the way of “joys”…

Be all that as it may, on May 9^th, Victory Day, we set out for the picnic by tram.  It was a beautiful spring morning, the chestnut flowers that were the symbol of Kiev and that had appeared that week were now in full bloom. We met with Yevgeny, Pyotr and Bela the Hungarian but not Nikolai — he was in a different ‘cell.’ 

We arrived on the island and selected a spot for our blanket and began to set our things and ourselves down. The remaining clouds slid away and the sun beamed; we were in a different world — all spring and laughter and greenness, all freedom and countryside. We passed around the vodka till everyone had loaded their glass. No more reason to speak carefully now… We carried out the Ukrainian toast: “Boot moh hey, Boot moh hey, Boot moh hey hey hey!” As soon as each individual had downed the contents of the glass — all at once — they bit into a pickle or a piece of sausage or salami or, if nothing else was available, grabbed a companion around the forehead and inhaled the smell of their hair to the bottom of the lungs.

End of Part One

Part Two. Later the same day…

What did we talk about there? Cultural differences between the U.S. and Ukraine, Russia, Hungary? Personal history, stories. How the office workers here spent workday afternoons at the movies… Much much later, the last bottle providing only drops, the picnic was over and we started back. 

The locals gradually peeled themselves off and Stan’s wife Edna went back to take care of an errand. She was to meet us in an hour, at a shuttered bakery on the edge of Red Oktober Square, during the Victory Day celebration.  At the picnic Edvard had told us that the fireworks were a big draw, but also that this was typically the “most spontaneous” rally of the year. Not saying much: Any action that smacked of what we would consider real spontaneity was at once suppressed. 

By the time we left the island and headed back into town, it was altogether dark. Beautiful lights made streets and alleyways glow in the soft spring and illuminated the ubiquitous chestnut blossoms.  When we reached the square, already lively with holiday and vodka and excitement at being together, there was an underground street-crossing, a perezhod in Russian, and the three of us started to descend the steps, as per local custom, to avoid the busy traffic on the surface. That was the beginning of our troubles.

Halfway down there was a great view, toward one stairway in the foreground and another in the distance. Without hesitation I snapped a photo.

Instantly two men came up to me and demanded the film. From their air of high-handed authority, there was no confusion about who they were. Less than two months had passed since the Soviet leader Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko had died and a man from the provinces named Gorbachev had been named the new leader. But it would be many months before his inclinations and intentions would begin to show. Meanwhile the KGB would do what it had habitually done.

Impressed, I suppose, by my own courage, cleverness and presence of mind, I played dumb tourist, pretending not to understand what the man wanted. Stan didn’t share this view of my smart tactic and translated — or ordered, rather — “Give him the film.”

I complied and the man’s fist closed over it.

Then he wanted us to go back up the stairs. On the street he ordered some local police who were loafing in their patrol car to get out and made it clear to us that we should get in. It was a small car, and with the three of us — plus our KGB guy at the wheel and his sidekick in the front — this was a tight fit. We set off.

We didn’t know how far we were going. The car stopped along the street apparently for our captors to notify another operative what was happening.  We could hear the detonations and in the sky we could see jaw-dropping fireworks over Red Oktober Square — from which, in the movies, ordinary people would still be able to come to our rescue and free us from indefinite detention. But without Tom Cruise or a mass of drunken revelers in sight, we alighted and were marched upstairs. This seemed to be a police station; not secret police, just a non-secret police station.

They sat Hannah and me on a bench and invited Stan into an office and closed the door.

Unexpectedly they kept him a good 45 minutes. Meanwhile we were afraid of compromising the Kiev friends — they had more to lose than we, who would likely suffer no more serious fate than expulsion from the USSR. Of course these police, if they were interested enough, determined enough, could develop the film, with photos of Stan and Edna’s local friends, though I preferred to believe they’d just expose it.

Assuming we would be interrogated soon, and individually, as per U.S. television, we needed a story that was agreed on — among Hannah and me and Stan. But we didn’t know what he’d say — and Hannah and I couldn’t (assuming the room was bugged) risk talking to each other.  And if we wrote notes, they could be confiscated and read. I decided that, this being 1985, they wouldn’t have video, so we could use our fingers to draw letters in the air, or on Hannah’s leg.

Hannah feared that we might be put in separate jails: I for men and she for women. And with the 4-day holiday we likely wouldn’t be able to get hold of anyone at the American Consulate to help us get out…

End of Part Two

Part Three.

Eventually we were called into the Room. There were four officers, all in street clothes, but no one interrogated us. There was after all no need to get our story straight, or even to have a story. We were somehow in a second, unrecognizable phase, a world that didn’t fit the movies, and it was a relief. Evidently they didn’t care. These police weren’t determined at all. One man explained, using Stan as his translator, that we’d broken the law by taking a photo of a military target or sensitive installation. We learned much later, at the U.S. Embassy back in Moscow, that this was in fact true — there was such a law, and it was taken seriously. 

But here, the officers seemed eager to get this rigmarole over with and begin the four-day holiday. Soon we were dismissed and headed home to Stan and Edna’s apartment, again being reminded as we passed some open windows not to talk so loud. 

But once we were free enough to speak with each other, we learned from Stan that the police were not as relaxed and lackadaisical as it had appeared. In fact, while we were working to “get our story straight,” they were exhausting themselves on Stan: Under the direction of an officer wearing a shoulder-holstered pistol, a confession for all of us to sign had been typed up, with impressive slowness, on a manual typewriter. Then they had pulled two holiday-clad citizens off the street to witness the expected signatures. But Stan insisted, repeatedly, that we needed a representative of our embassy — and would not sign. So this was a Phase Three that called to mind those famous Cold War era movie interrogation scenes, in one of which I remembered a kind of torture: the hosts positioned a giant bell over the hero’s head and ears and then struck it repeatedly…

At any rate, Edna was greatly relieved to see us, but agitated, having worried over our failure to appear anywhere near the designated bakery for the whole two hours. All this was still in the pre-cell phone era.

So we didn’t get to see much of the Victory Day celebraton (or “rally”), nor any of the fireworks…

End of Part Three

Part Four.

We hung out with our friends in Kiev through the 4-day holiday, but as far as we knew, no one turned in our passports. 

Babi Yar.

We got to visit Babi Yar where possibly 150,000 individuals were murdered. The largest group of these were Jews, who at that time made up 20% of Kiev’s population. The decision that all the Jews should be killed was made by the military governor, Major-General Kurt Eberhard, the Police Commander for Army Group South, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, and the Einsatzgruppe C Commander Otto Rasch.

Now, 44 years later — and 31 years ago today — we two Jews needed to go back to Moscow, to the U.S. Embassy, to be issued new passports. For the next ten years immigration officers of numerous nations — in Asia, Europe and Latin America — took an unplanned second look at me when they read “Issued at Moscow, USSR.”

Ice Cream.

Unlike the U.S. where semi-endless choices create anxiety and spur competition to make and eat more and more, in the USSR of that period there would be a single ice cream flavor each day — and it was excellent! In fact all their dairy products seemed pure and wonderful. 

End of Part 4

Part 4 continued; call it Part 4b.

We took the train to Minsk, Belarus, and in the brief stop nearly failed to get off the train. This is where Hannah’s grandparents came from.

From Minsk we took a day trip to Khatyn, an award-winning memorial. On March 22, 1943 the Germans had locked the 156 inhabitants of this typical town in a shed and set the building on fire. Those few who finally broke out were machine-gunned. Each of the town’s households was now represented by a concrete gate and a concrete chimney, and every thirty seconds, at each household, a bell rang.

War crimes like these were not atypical. At least 5,295 Belarusian settlements were burned and destroyed by the Nazis.

This Khatyn is not to be confused with the similarly-spelled Katyn massacre where, in 1940, several thousand Polish officers were massacred, apparently by the Soviet People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (“NKVD”).

End of Part 4b

Part 5.

After a night in Minsk, we were back on the train for Lithuania, following roughly the route of the retreating Germans into the Baltics in late 1944, disembarking at Vilnius. We stared up at one of the gates, then walked through the city, once the capital of East European Judaism, “Jerusalem of the East,” with 125 synagogues. To be sure, that was then, now there was a single synagogue.

Not only that, but now men on the street outside that synagogue were struggling to find a tenth Jew for a minyan, so they could hold a service. They quickly scooped me up. Hannah, though she could read Hebrew, could not — on account of a gender problem — be considered; I who knew nothing made the tenth man. 

Next on the street we stumbled on a Jewish refusenik. He was called a ‘double-refusenik’ because he had been twice refused permission to leave the country, presumably to go to Israel. His request led to a state of being unemployed and unemployable, and this did not immediately foster a sense of being re-integrated into society.

This man did say one thing that I’d expected to hear at the earlier stations of our trip, where we’d been told that everyone was happy with everyone else, the East Germans were good people now that they’d got past capitalism, the Ukrainians and Poles were at peace, as were the Belarusians and Lithuanians and Jews, people who’d fought and bled across these fields over hundreds of years. The refusenik said, “They’d kill each other if they could…”

 End of Part 5

 Part 6.

We’d hoped to visit Western Ukraine where my father and my maternal grandmother were born. Back in the States the Soviet agency Intourist told us we couldn’t go there. There were no adequate tourist facilities was their line. Just as on a 1966 trip the AAA had insisted, falsely, that we could not go to East Berlin. As it happened there was no problem visiting East Berlin and now none flying into L’vov — now known as Lviv.¹ 

We arrived on a Friday afternoon, five o’clock. The tourist office people were happy to accommodate us but they took the weekend seriously. However, efficiently enough, they arranged with us for a tour to my grandmother’s birth-town Radzuwill, then called Chernovoarmeisk (as we’d accidentally learned from Sergei in Kiev) in honor of the Red Army. We also wanted to arrange a guide and a car for a trip to my father’s birthplace, which was in almost the same district, but that was too much to ask of workers already more than half launched into the weekend-prepping happy hour… 

Next morning we met our Intourist guide Igor. The city’s many beautiful Austrian buildings, which we loved, he pooh-poohed — as in fact he did to anything other than the few Renaissance buildings that had withstood the ravages and struggles of recent centuries. For the ugly high-rise apartments he had contempt: “Around the world,” he said, “everywhere the same.”

My grandmother had said Radzuwill (the old name was restored since our trip, perhaps in 1989 or 1991) was a quarter-hour by rail from Brody, the first real stop out of Lviv. We reached it by car in an hour.

We walked around and saw what was once the market. There was also a crumbling church. What was most startling was that there were no particularly old people. The oldest woman we could find was only 65, and she said that after the War “Only stovepipes were left…”

Back in Lviv Saturday night we stopped in at an ice cream shop and bought their version of sundaes: not hot fudge but local fruit preserves as a topping, always good. The shop’s window listed 10 (“22:00”) as closing time but at 9.40 the employees were already barricading the door. 

A provision store was still open.  I went in and bought 100 g of hard cheese, labeled “CIR.” I also bought the same amount of what looked like a softer cheese labeled “ZHIR,” which I assumed was Ukrainian for the Russian “CIR.” Back in our hotel, we hungrily tried these without bread but the “Zhir” was painfully unsatisfactory. Our dictionary revealed “Zhir” was actually a Russian word for suet: beef fat.

End of Part 6

Part 7.

Back home I sought with the utmost care to develop the nine remaining rolls of film that I’d managed to bring back from our trip. I asked the artistic director of the company I worked for to name the best, most reliable shop for this purpose. Accordingly, with maximum alertness I made my way to Regester Photo’s North Baltimore shop and with proud confidence delivered them my treasure — specially telling them to exercise the most fastidious attention to my irreplaceable rolls. 

When I returned three days later to collect the prints I learned that — perhaps on orders from the KGB — they had destroyed the two most important rolls. They apologized and gave me two rolls of spotlessly unexposed film.

Nevertheless, a print that sneaked through Regester’s process and evaded the long arm of the Committee for State Security provided a kind of reward: It showed Hannah with the silk Chinese purse I’d given her within which she carried our passports. It was on her wrist in front of a park where we’d been only a minute before we discovered it was missing… If it was stolen, it was not stolen just yet but in the moments that followed. If it had slid off Hannah’s wrist into the grass, it had not yet done so. Instead of searching a square mile we’d been wiser to open our eyes and really see where we stood. But such a skill can take a lifetime to hone.

We would never know whether — according to melodramatic Cold War expectations — our passports were stolen and used to transport weapons across frontiers. Or whether the cheap Chinese purse that held these documents lay on the grass at our feet and, unnoticed by malefactors, was swept into a drain by one of the ubiquitous janitors, distractedly humming either the Internationale or an old Sinatra chestnut, “Fly Me to the Moon.”

Notes

1. In 1939 there were 97 synagogues and one-third of the population were Jews — almost all murdered. The city had slid from empire to empire over the centuries, usually through no action of its own.

My mother loved to say I was a ‘Recessory for Useless Information.’ Presumably she believed information intrinsically had — or needed to have — utility, and that a lot of mine didn’t. But isn’t it true that no information is in fact entirely useless? Doesn’t so-called basic research in science yield the most important results and breakthroughs? I think even my mother conceded this, under duress.

And how about that movie, the Academy Award-winning Slumdog Millionaire? Didn’t a few bits of information come in awfully handy? [more…]

Back in the dark bunk after Vertigo, Alan, wavy blonde hair slicked back like the ‘hood’ he was trying to be (it was 1958), opened his big switchblade and stuck it in my arm saying, “You keep away from Iris, understand?” I nodded (I suppose), sleepily, as people will with certain kinds of threats, and partly grasped that what he was saying was no doubt important to know for my health. But what I remembered best was that the knife didn’t go in. It must have been too dull.

To be sure I felt I was not in an ideal bargaining position. But that position was moot a few days later when [more…]

(An Anti-Tirade)

What will it be like? A slightly colder place, albeit only infinitesimally. There will be others who come along; but no one with exactly my sort of humor to entertain them and offer them insight. No one with a certain love and generosity that helped sustain some. No one with the exact same grasping selfishness that few seemed to recognize but that in any case helped to drive me. There would be a small loss of liveliness, as though the laughter and excitement in the cafés that delighted me were dimmed a tiny notch and the chairs were empty a few minutes earlier. A few people would be sad.

Maybe too the world will be slightly calmer, less frantic, its schedules less packed with stuff, with things I wanted to do or learn, papers I intended to read over but mostly never got to.

But to speak truly, I think the world will be very largely the same. Wouldn’t it be arrogant and “grandiose,” as Barbara¹ might say, to expect otherwise? [more…]