hoenigg

[hoenigg]

Bitter Herbs

It’s Passover, and why does that always piss me off. 

A few months after my father died (this is more than 30 years ago) , my nephew asked me when and where we would be holding the seder. Why are you asking me, I said. Who else am I gonna ask, he said. I went dark after that

You see where I’m going here. I don't have the warm and fuzzles for Jewish holidays. I hate the rituals. I don't mean just that I philosophically oppose organized religion (I do), or that I’m so secularized I don’t even pay attention to when they come around (I am, though I do get an email when they relax the parking regs around them. Hallelujah!). 

I mean, I viscerally dislike them.

My father was raised as an Orthodox Jew, and though he was as lapsed as he could be for his generation, he insisted that I get an Orthodox education, the five-day-a-week after school kind, (and there’s an insight into why more Jews aren’t athletes). So I can read Hebrew, and I know a lot about the history of the Jews, and I take a certain pride in my very Jewish curiosity, best expressed in this joke:

Q: Why does a Jew always answer a question with a question?

A; Why not?

I had a wonderful rabbi, a thundering bearded bear of a man, given to emotional surges during his sermons, a man fully capable of transcending religious pieties for a higher moral purpose. Once he put a puzzle before us: You’re walking to temple on a Saturday and your little son is hit by a car. How do you get him to the hospital without violating the Sabbath?. My clever classmates devised schemes that would marginally satisfy both imperatives. My 11-year-old self stood up and said, you put him in your car and you get him help as quickly as possible. He ambled over and gave me a huge bear hug. Years later, when I’d long ago completed my 13-year-old rite of passage and left the school far behind, he wrote me after I made the local papers for storming noisily out of an anti-busing community meeting. My lessons, he said, have not been lost on you. 

It would be facile to say, after telling you all that, that my hatred of the holidays stems from how far Judaism has drifted from my version of it. But that would be a very small part of the story. Sure, I hate fundraising during the highest of holy days. I hate equating loyalty to Israel with being a Jew. I hate that the contemporary English translation of the Shema has transformed an ancient battle cry trumpeting the virtues of monotheism into a boring homily by adding a needless verb (this last may be a little bit of craziness on my part, and now we’re getting somewhere). 

I am the son of Austrian immigrants who left Vienna four months after Anschluss, which for those of you keeping score, would be a tad on the late side if you were hoping to avoid getting swept up by the Gestapo. But they made it. They brought their six-year-old daughter with them to New York City and then, at ages 46 and 44 respectively, had a son right after the war. The three of them spoke German to each other and found my clumsy attempts to join them hilarious, which no doubt they were. They spent every weekend and every summer and winter vacation with the same group of Viennese refugees, and while their kids were mostly nice enough, we all felt like dogs at a dog run unleashed and told to enjoy each other. 

I hated the claustrophobia of that life. And as I got older it came to represent to me the narrow ethnic exceptionalism I found in Jewish life. The objection to intermarriage. The clueless embrace of  loyalty to Israel over their own country’s interests. The awful (to me) replication of ghetto food. The nerdy obsession with scholarship. Yes, the damn skullcap (you think Samson wore a skullcap? King David? Fuck no!). When  I got old enough to have a life of my own, I ran as far away from that life as I could. I’d see my parents on those holidays (and go to temple with my Dad on them, because that was as lapsed as I could be), but once they were gone, it was over for me.

And yet my sister and her son and his kids felt differently. They wanted to go on, especially at Passover, and so I wearily agreed. When the kids were little, I would lead them in a comic interpretation of the Exodus, making it up as I went along, tethered only to the sound of the ten plagues intoned in Aramaic, in which I could still hear my father’s voice. 

So what am I to make of this last thing? Even now, after angrily terminating those family seders when my nephew went through an ugly divorce and the kids grew up, as I reluctantly pretend cheer at a seder I attend only out of love for my wife and for the friends who cherish holding it, I still intone those ten ancient words under my breath, and I see him and hear him  

In a family whose secrets and stories were hidden in a strange language and a thick layer of survivor’s guilt, my father reached across the divide to share his love of baseball with me. I don't want to turn this into a Field of Dreams narrative, because in a sense, it was just the vehicle, a lifeline for a lost child who felt like ET in a family of aliens.  But I still love baseball, love the sights and sounds of it, love the team he loved even though they moved three thousand miles away when I was 11 (and when I was 11, 3000 miles could not be breached by media). And though my father was spare in his shows of affection, just those things were enough to tether me to him, if not to the life he shared with my mother.

 Lately, I've been reading a lot of philosophically conservative writers on the subject of the national sickness. Many point to an absence of spirituality in American life, the loss of a common culture, a set of ideals and principles we all more or less share, and the corrosive substitution of secularism and materialism. Not my usual fare, but I’m feeling them. I’m older now, and I sense that vague disconnection, sharpened by the shock of the election and the layer of disbelief that accompanied it. I feel no connection to the lion’s share of people who voted for Trump, a laughably obvious liar with no chance of competently governing. Life may be bleak, but you don't get to use that as an excuse for a stupid vote, I’m not feeling it for Weimar-era Germans who voted for Hitler either, and their circumstances were a whole lot worse.  

So what America do I belong to, or for that matter, do they? I’m aware that while I love my friends and makeshift families, we’re a tribe, not a nation. And the dangers of tribalism are not unknown, and are amplified by the like-minded media aggregation that many of us practice. Are those of us like me, living in a materially comfortable bubble of like-minded friends, not creating the same little dog pens that my parents created? When our kids find that claustrophobic and run from it, should we be surprised? And is there really any other way to live, and if not, how do we find connection to those not in the pen? And if we can’t ...  

I don't have answers. But I am having dinner with my family tonight. I’ll try to enjoy it.

[hoenigg]

imho

To quote Hamilton: Who the F is this?

In the depressing aftermath of this election, I was struck with how responsible I felt for misleading and reassuring the people around me, many of whom are intelligent and successful people.  On the night of the vote, I sat with my dog in front of a black screen until two in the morning, brooding and bathing in embarassment. 

In the ensuing months I’ve tried to avoid the sewer of incremental flotsam written about Trump and his entourage. Mostly i’ve tried to gather information on what’s really going on, with the underlying perspective that Trump is an ugly eruption of a festering disease, and that he can’t be both omnipotent and incompetent, or ignorant and ingenious. If you assume that he’s incompetent and ignorant, and add on how desperate he is for attention and verification, all of which by now seems fairly obvious, then a whole set of concerns and assumptions follow.

Let’s take this week’s ego engorgement: The Syria missile strike. This struck me, as it struck a lot of more experienced people, as a sign of Trump the human, acting on an impulse that many shared. Assad killed children with nerve gas. I saw the video. I have to do something. The rest of us, though, are limited to contributions to refugee funds, or outraged calls to congressmen, or retweeting someone else’s outrage. We don’t have the missile option, and let’s be thankful for that. Children have been dying in Syria for six years (never mind the hundreds of thousands of others).  The best of us have been trying to do something about that for years. Until Thursday, though, Trump didn’t give a damn, and publicly said so, both before and after the election. Then he saw those videos, and responded as most of us did. Okay, good for him.

The problem, as seems evident 48 hours later, is that Trump is not us, but the head of state of the most powerful nation in the world. One day later Syrian jets were still taking off and bombing the same town; the interminable awfulness of the Assad regime and the civil war went on as before, and we were stuck with a bunch of pissed off friends and enemies wondering what to expect next. There was no policy, no mid- or long-term strategy. just a spasm of virtuous anger coupled to the desire to do the right thing and get people to maybe like him again. It seems likely that his generals, concerned over acting too impulsively, limited the attack to a cosmetic show of force, rather than an effective defanging of Assad’s air force, his major source of military leverage.

But Trump did get, at least for now, some relief from the endless contempt he’s been getting from mainstream media and politicians, even from those in his own party. It’s a “badly needed win”, we’ll no doubt hear on the talk shows. Coupled with the Gorsuch appointment, his approval ratings may even tick up a bit. The bad news for him is that the fringe folks he has so happily embraced for the last year are furious. He’s betrayed his promises, he’s fallen for the Deep State Sarin hoax (really, they believe this), and if he lets in Syrian refugees, as might be his next step, they’ll get “off the Trump train”.

Coupled with his unhappy experience with the so-called Freedom Caucus in  the House during the health care negotiations, and the pressure to move Steve Bannon out of the NSC, Trump is clearly facing an emotional crossroads. Stick with posing as a right wing tough guy, and most everyone hates you, especially when you try to take away their stuff, you know, like health care (Oh wait, you mean that’s what Obamacare is?). The people who elected you may have bought the campaign crap, but if you make their lives worse, promise them jobs you can’t give them, and then maybe get into another war, pretty soon those approval ratings all be headed the other way again. On top of that, the Republican party agenda, which you've inherited because you really don’t have one of your own, will only make people hate you more, because it is distinctly about helping the very people you ran against. 

And now two Christian churches in Egypt have been bombed, and you’ve sent  a carrier strike force to the Korean peninsula, and ... is there a strategy here, boss? Your new friend El-Sisi has been jailing and disappearing thousands of Egyptians since he turned the Arab spring into winter. You had a shot at getting the Chinese to help with North Korea, but then you surprised them with the Syrian caper. If there were actually people working in the State Department, they might have helped you out there, but who needs diplomats, right? If the public senses crises boiling up all over and you flailing wildly at solutions—and that’s the most likely scenario—your ratings will plummet further and your base will get even angrier. We know how you hate that.

So here’s a scenario I haven’t seen elsewhere. Trump does have an instinct for raw populism, but it’s not ideological. His true constituency—the old factory union guys, the coal miners, assembly line workers, people who used to make a living with their hands and were proud of it—are not really Republicans. They don’t want to hear about trickle-down economics, about tax cuts for investors, threadbare lives made worse by cutting holes in the safety net. They want jobs and a sense of self worth, a faith that life isn;t endlessly bleak, and that someone gives a shit. They turned against the Democratic party because their perception—mostly true— was the party turned away from them. 

For Trump to truly capture their hearts, he needs to turn left, and to make his signature program the massive infrastructure investment we actually need. And he’ll never get that from the likes of Paul Ryan and company. Even if the idea of a public-private partnership to fund infrastructure is viable, it would take so long to negotiate and so try Trump’s limited patience—not to mention his constituents’—as to be laughable as a solution.

I think at some point Trump not only turns to the Democrats, but declares himself a Democrat, and tries to capture and remake that party in a way that was never really possible with the Republicans. The superficial consistency with the old Roosevelt programs resonates better than Ryan Reaganomics.

 This could happen sooner rather than later, and most probably after a disastrous mid-term result. The consequences could be even more chaotic—despite the active verbs like capture and remake above, he would bring no overriding agenda to this, just endless thirst for popularity and reassurance. But imagine a Bannon with a leftist bent—purely ideological, equally infuriated by the permanent government and media elites—providing a campaign one-sheet for a remade Trump Democrat. It would be catnip to voters of a certain kind.

Can he do this and win again? Lose the evangelicals, who came out for him even though truly vetting him would have revealed a refugee from Sodom and Gomorrah? Lose the country club Republicans who held their noses and voted for him? Well, the wing nut contingent might come along. And maybe some Bernie people. It just might work.

Let’s hope it doesn’t