Well it’s past midnight here, but on the West Coast it’s still Bob Dylan’s birthday.

Took a few things to nudge me into realizing this.

When I checked out meteoriot’s site, lose the label I noticed an entry, crossposted from Docudharma, lol … and it had a video whose tragedy was it was more relevant today than ever.  As meteoriot noted, Dylan was only 22 when he did Masters of War:

‘Course he wasn’t too bad at the love songs, either:

The scuttlebut is that the Obama supporters are trying to figure out how to capture the Clinton supporters into joining the Obama supporters.

Those who have supported Clinton have been characterized as (among many other things) a bunch of old ladies who are bitter because their accomplishments as feminists are being belittled, and in the heat of the moment there are claims they won’t vote for Obama if he is the nominee.

And of course there are Obama supporters who vow they would never vote for the racist Clinton who played the race card and race baited, etc., if somehow she manages to steal the nomination.

It’s really quite fascinating to watch the thought processes.  Seems to me that most of the folks blogging about this aren’t really interested in either race or gender but for the purposes of this carnival we call a Presidential campaign, they’re dusting off whatever they may have gleaned from our culture, from teevee shows and magazines and books and have become instant experts on both race and gender issues.  Really quite remarkable.

I wonder why those who wish Clinton supporters to switch over to Obama don’t talk more about how Obama should court them … talk about feminism with respect, give them a bone for heaven’s sake?

But I don’t read much about that suggestion anywhere.  Probably because it’s unrealistic.  But what do I care about being realistic?  I’m just writing an essay and pontificating.  I’m in the mood for that.

Obligatory YouTube — The Harptones “OOH Wee Baby”:

I was reading NLinStPaul’s essay, Full-Blooded Americans and I read the linked article as well as the comments in the article, most of which agreed that heritage and culture and background were very important.

Reminded me of an old Jewish story from A Treasury of Jewish Folklore edited by Nathan Ausubel:

Usually the orthodox rabbis of Europe boasted distinguished rabbinical geneaologies, but Rabbi Yechiel of Ostrowce was an exception.  He was the son of a simple baker and he inherited some of the forthright qualities of a man of the people.

Once, when a number of rabbis had gathered at some festivity, each began to boast of his eminent rabbinical ancestors.  When Rabbi Yechiel’s turn came, he replied gravely, “In my family, I’m the first eminent ancestor.”

His colleagues were shocked by this piece of impudence, but said nothing.  Immediately after, the rabbis began to expound Torah.  Each one was asked to hold forth on a text culled from the sayings of one of his distinguished rabbinical ancestors.

One after another the rabbis delivered their learned dissertations.  At last it came time for Rabbi Yechiel to say something.  He arose and said, “My masters, my father was a baker.  He taught me that only fresh bread was appetizing and that I must avoid the stale.  This can also apply to learning.”

And with that Rabbi Yechiel sat down.

Last week I wrote about smashing idols.

Full-blooded Americans.  Aristocrats.  The Rich.  The Famous.  I guess here I would add “The Familiar.”

Abraham hung out at his father Terah’s idol store one day, while Terah was out doing some errand or another.  Abraham wasn’t terribly impressed by the idols.  He had some other ideas about what made the world go round.  The story goes that while Terah was gone, Abraham smashed all the idols except the largest one.

When Terah came home, he asked Abraham, “What happened?”  Abraham replied that all the idols had gotten into a big fight and the largest idol won!

Now of course Terah knew this was hogwash but he couldn’t very well respond that it was impossible for idols to get into fistfights without admitting that idols were not real and not worth worshipping.

I like Biblical stories.  Even though I am hardly a Biblical scholar of any kind, I find them useful as basic descriptions of so many of the joys and miseries of humanity.

I just finished reading a remarkable book, Heart Like Water by Joshua Clark, a memoir of his time spent in the French Quarter during and after Hurricane Katrina.

Josh experienced the storm, the days afterward with no electricity, finding other Quarter residents in various bars that stayed open the whole time, scrounging for food, exploring, dodging cops and soldiers who were driving around trying to enforce the evacuation.

He didn’t know as much as the rest of the nation what all too many folks were going through, at the Super Dome, the Convention Center, the 9th Ward, Plaquemines Parish — it wasn’t until later that he explored the Gulf Coast (including Mississippi), still dodging cops and soldiers, and saw the devastation.

And he wrote about it, in a wild stream of consciousness that sears the heart.

At the end of the book, Josh writes about apprehending the suffering of others.  He has been wandering the region, talking to people, hearing their stories.  But he senses something is missing:

… I look at the viscera of this place, the gray of predawn mixing with the gray of what was once a neighborhood to make everything once again like some dim reflection of a dream, and I want so badly to care, to ache, not from the head like we all do, but from the heart.  But I just can’t, no mater how hard I try, not now.

This is not an essay about New Orleans or Katrina.  It’s about human suffering and how we deal with it.

Obligatory youtube song, some New Orleans funk from Bonnie and Sheila, danced to by a goofy fellow up north:

My mother used to use a Yiddish word as her highest praise, she’d say “That one is a mensch.”

Lots of definitions of that term, but my mother took it to mean a “human being.”

Crazy times to be a human being.  I dunno, it’s not so much that we’re suffering more than we have in human history as we are able to view what is happening globally in a way never before experienced here on planet earth.

And that has its drawbacks as well … for there is always a difference between viewing an event whether on television or in photographs or on the tubez, and actually being there.

Case in point — 9/11.  Here in the City we were all glued to our TV screens because we only had such a small view of what had happened.  Yet our view was unique and charged by the experience.  We did not have more information, but we had close-up experience that information alone, in all of its manifestations, could not convey.

So we know and we don’t know.  Crazy times.

I got nothing.

Tank is empty.

But of course, that has never stopped me from writing scads of words before.  Heh.

Ahem.

Ahem.

The bad news is relentless and the good news is overwhelming.  Seeing so many smart and creative people writing such illuminating essays in the midst of such pain and suffering and injustice, wowsville.

Gives me a bit of cognitive dissonance, it does.

I am in a state of confusion when it comes to politics.  And that’s just fine with me.

I won’t fight confusion, just makes it stronger and somewhat painful!

I surf it like a big wave in the ocean, let it lift me right up out of it and end up going with the flow.

It’s these times, times of confusion, that new views and new ideas are formed.

From Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan says:

Innumerable force of Spirits armed,

That durst dislike his reign, and, me preferring,

His utmost power with adverse power opposed

In dubious battle on the plains of Heaven

And shook his throne. What though the field be lost?

All is not lost-the unconquerable will,

And study of revenge, immortal hate,

And courage never to submit or yield:

And what is else not to be overcome?

I always liked Milton’s Paradise Lost.  In high school I wrote a paper about the book, claiming that Milton never really did “justify the ways of God to man.”  He never showed, in my view, how God was better, but he certainly showed that God was more powerful!  

But as Satan put it:

He who rules by force rules but half his foe.

I’m quoting that line from memory, so I may be wrong about exactly how it goes.  But anyway, Milton made God stronger, more forceful, he had better weapons and such.

So I always had a soft spot for the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Everywhere I look these days there is so much to feel pain over.  What is happening in Tibet is heartbreaking for both the Chinese and the Tibetans, what is happening in Burma, the suffering all around the world.  And here in the United States (I don’t say America any more because … well, I don’t even know!) every day brings a new kind of suffering, people being treated so badly all across this land, whether it be dying from lack of health care, folks still suffering too much in New Orleans, soldiers coming home to homelessness and despair, the dreadful story of Don Siegelman which shows how blatantly one gets punished when trying to do the right thing … ah, the list goes on and on.  And those of us here, we don’t get hardened to it but sometimes we despair, for the suffering is so great and so continuous it seems impossible to take it all in.

And of course there is the pain of thinking “can I do more?  Have I done enough?  Am I more part of the problem than the solution?”  These doubts and fears, they are painful, too.

I read somewhere about suffering and joy.  I read how suffering that goes deep within us also makes a very deep place for joy as well.  And that if we do not face and allow the pain go deep into our hearts, our joys, when they arrive, and they always arrive, will not go very deep either.  I read that the depth of our joy is equal to the depth of our pain.  I don’t remember who said that, but it always stayed with me.

I’d like to write about deep joy, because I think we’ve all been exposed to so much that has caused us deep pain.  And I think deep joy is the well that is always available to us to draw from, whenever we wish, to give us strength to do what we know is right and to love and help each other as we all wish to do.