It takes more than being old to be an Elder.  Not every senior citizen can be an Elder.  Or wants to be one. And it doesn’t depend on whether you’re healthy.  Or “spry” as younger people would put it.  It depends on something far more elusive.  It depends on whether one actually occupies the role of being an Elder.   And how.

What does it mean to be an Elder?  I’m going to be 64 in October.  I imagine that I should be assuming the role of an Elder, and that I would like to do that.  Am I ready to do this or do I need more time?  Am I ready to be a beginning Elder?  A novice Elder?  Am I ready to  start paying my dues to Elderhood?

Well, sorta.  I’m not Harry Kemelman and this isn’t Barnard’s Crossing.    And it’s not 1964, though on some levels it feels like it.  I mean: there are a zillion right wing nutjobs trying to repeal the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution and deport 15 million people, and somehow those terrible ideas aren’t even being greeted with even the vituperation Barry Goldwater got when he suggested carpet bombing Vietnam back into the stone age (as if that were possible without killing everyone on Earth).  On the vituperate scale, Barry G got a 6.  The current mischagas gets about a 4.  Or less.  What I’m talking about is a country gone insane.  Just like 1964.

I know.  It’s hot.  Very hot.  When it’s August, all of the psychiatrists go to Martha’s Vineyard for the month, leaving behind voicemails that tell their distraught clientele to go to the emergency room if they need to.  If I were having cocktails right now in Chilmark, and I hasten to say that I’m not, I’d probably think that such a message was a good idea too.  But it’s not.  It doesn’t take into consideration the overwhelming, gigantic epidemic of mental disease and delusion now festering in America in the form of amnesiac tea baggers, Glenn Beck devotees,  birthers, racists, kooks of all stripes,  dittoheads and a Republican Congress that for all its orange skin and blow dried hair should have its own chapter in the DSM IV.  Yes, I know.  These loons don’t have shrinks who are on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard.  Correct.  The people whose shrinks are in Martha’s Vineyard, people like me, living in New York and Boston, are in far worse condition: they’re sweltering in an apartment that cannot make it cooler than 80 degrees, the air is awful, and the only thing on the tube is the constant, annoying blathering of people so deranged that they throw even those like me, those with minor, urban, post information age neuroses into serious crisis.  You could take me for an example.

Let’s look at one thing, ok?  I heard today that the oil from the BP spill is all but disappeared and that soon Louisiana fisherman are going to start fishing and shrimping again.  Because, allegedly, that’s now safe and we all believe the Government and the pants-on-fire team at BP about that.  It’s safe?  I’ll believe it when I see BP’s executives eating oysters off the halfshell. Till then,  I’m sorry,  I can’t accept that.  Oil and all that Corexit, all gone now?  Nonsense.  In fact, these stories enrage me.  They are, to me, like tickling dynamite with a blowtorch.  If I had a shrink, I’d be speed dialing already.  “Help me,” I’d whimper, grasping the Blackberry in icy, flinching hands, “The most violent, greedy, despicable inmates have taken over the asylum.  And I need your help to deal with it.”

I know Obama and the Democrats were supposed to be able to play 11-dimensional chess when they took over.  Right now, I’m wondering whether they can even play checkers.  It’s too hot to be charitable, and the neighbors, that is, the other occupants of this country, are becoming louder and more deranged every day.  The summer heat is making the country even more insane.

Maybe what I need is a cocktail and a new outgoing message.

simulposted at The Dream Antilles and dailyKos

Today I posted m 814th post at The Dream Antilles.  Sadly, it was meta: it said that 8/7/10 was the Fifth Blogaversary of the blog.

I have been plugging away, writing this blog, The Dream Antilles for five years.  That’s 35 woozle years.  It’s 30 pootie years.  And in the life of the Internet, it’s about 3 nanoseconds.  I’ve probably outlived about 10,000,000 other blogs, all of which you can still read.  If you want to.  And yet, I haven’t achieved fame, wealth, or any of the other benefits you might imagine.  There is no new Porsche in  my driveway.  I haven’t been on Rachel.

Why, you might ask, am I posting this here?  What’s the point?  

Every once in a while, something happens that is so completely wrong, so inexplicably confused, that it makes you shake your head in utter  disbelief.  Today was one of those days.  The Anti Defamation League  (ADL), an organization that has been in the forefront of the battle for religious tolerance for decades, announced that it opposed the building of a mosque near the former World Trade Center site.  I find this almost impossible to believe.

The New York Times reports:

The nation’s leading Jewish civil rights group has come out against the planned mosque and Islamic community center near ground zero, saying more information is needed about funding for the project and the location is ”counterproductive to the healing process.”

The Anti-Defamation League said it rejects any opposition to the center based on bigotry and acknowledged that the group behind the plan, the Cordoba Initiative, has the legal right to build at the site. But the ADL said ”some legitimate questions have been raised” about funding and possible ties with ”groups whose ideologies stand in contradiction to our shared values.”

”Ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right,” the ADL said in a statement. ”In our judgment, building an Islamic center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain — unnecessarily — and that is not right.”

Please read this carefully.  The Cordoba Initiative has an unquestionable legal right to build at the site.  But apparently, that’s not the end of the discussion.  The right to build the mosque is not in question.  No. Something trumps that.  ADL tells us that they have questions about funding, as if that were ADL’s business, and then there’s this magnificent urban planning point.  Apparently, there is theoretical penumbra around former World Trade Center site in which all of the construction should not be “counterproductive to the healing process.”  If the mosque were further away, say 2 more blocks, maybe it wouldn’t impinge on the theoretical penumbra, but as it is now, it’s too close for comfort.  What shameful rubbish.

The big question is what the construction of a mosque has to do with 9/11.  On any level.  Islam is a religion of peace. The people who brought down the World Trade Towers were fundamentalist lunatics.  Nobody is saying that the proposed mosque has anything at al to do with those people.  Or their views.  Or supported the events.  Or is subversive.  No.  There is no arguable connection.  The connection, if you want to call it that, is just this: the hijackers were muslim, and the mosque is muslim.  You see how that prevents healing?  I don’t.  You can put all of the whip cream you want on that steaming pile, and it will never, never, never be a dessert.

The Cordoba Institute says it will be transparent and will deal with the Attorney General’s Charity Bureau about its funding.  Great. That ought to be the end of that thread of the argument. We can expecct the Attorney General to check the funding. What remains, I am saddened to say, is the bigotry.

And whenever there is collossal bigotry,  people line up to justify it.  The  Community Board, the Mayor, and many others recognize that there is no legal, justifiable basis in a city to say that the Mosque that can legally be built on this site shouldn’t be built.  It has a right to be built.  Who can abrogate that right?  Nobody.  And whose against it?  Can you guess?  Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and a caterwauling mass of rightwing nut jobs. And joining them, to my shock and my great horror, ADL.

ADL’s position has horrified others as well:

The ADL, one of the most prominent groups in American Jewish life, is known for its advocacy of religious freedom and interfaith harmony. Its position on the mosque was met with shock and condemnation by several groups.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, head of J Street, the dovish, pro-Israel group, said he would hope ADL would be at the forefront in defending the freedom of a religious minority, ”rather than casting aspersions on its funders and giving in to the fear-mongerers.”

The Rev. Welton Gaddy, head of the Interfaith Alliance, a Washington advocacy group, said he read the ADL statement ”with a great deal of sorrow.”

”As an organization that for nearly 100 years has helped set the standard for fighting defamation and securing justice and fair treatment for all, it is disappointing to see the ADL arrived at this conclusion,” Gaddy said.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations urged ADL to retract its statement.

You can add my voice to those.  The ADL is seriously and embarrassingly off course here.  It needs to retract its statements.  But that doesn’t matter to ADL’s National Director:

Abraham Foxman, national director of the ADL, defended his position.

In a phone interview, he compared the idea of a mosque near ground zero to the Roman Catholic Carmelite nuns who had a convent at the Auschwitz death camp. In 1993, Pope John Paul II responded to Jewish protests by ordering the nuns to move.

”We’re saying if your purpose is to heal differences, it’s the wrong place,” Foxman said of the mosque. ”Don’t do it. The symbolism is wrong.”

Read that again.  It makes no sense whatsoever.  If your purpose is to heal differences, you don’t jump into disputes on the wrong side, when religious freedom is at stake, and you don’t attempt to justify your position by incendiarily invoking the Nazis.  That is just entirely too much.  And it show how terribly wrong ADL’s position is.

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simulposted at The Dream Antilles and The Stars Hollow Gazette and dailyKos

Is it chickens or is it eggs?  Is it that Governor Brewer’s immigration extremism gives cover to Nazis?  Or is it that Neo Nazis give cover to the ugliness that is SB 1070? Is it that Joe Apraio was thought to be as extreme as anyone could be, but people have emerged in Arizona who are even further beyond the Pale?

simulposted at The Dream Antilles and Stars Hollow Gazette and dailyKos

About 500 years ago, Cortez landed in Mexico. He told the people who were already living there that they had to become subjects of the King of Spain. But, they told him, they were already subjects of Montezuma, the Emperor who was in Tenochtitlan. Cortez told them that Montezuma had to become a subject of the King of Spain, too, and he took Montezuma prisoner. As if that weren’t enough, he told the People that they had to give up their Old Gods and accept his God. Cortez’s God, he told them, was far more powerful than their Gods, and if they didn’t accept his God and abandon their own Gods and abandon their practice of having idols and human sacrifices and ceremonies and dances to their Gods, they would be killed. Also, Cortez told them, they had to deliver to Cortez all of their gold and silver. So it was that the Spanish foothold came to what is now Mexico in 1517.

So far we’ve had two mega goalkeeping errors in the first days of World Cup.  England’s Robert Green let in a routine and weak shot because he didn’t follow a rule that even middle school goalkeepers know: get in front of the ball and smother it.  Don’t try to catch it from the side.  Ever.  The result was a 1-1 draw between the US, which was really stung early in the first half, and England, which for all its star power doesn’t play like a team.  The tabloid press in the UK today was really ugly: the error was called “Hand of Clod” and “Shock and Draw” and the Times said, it was “one disastrous spill the Yanks won’t complain about.”

This is what makes for such ugly press:

And then today, as if yesterday’s goof weren’t enough a wake up call, Slovenia, a country the size of Houston, beat Algeria on a goalkeeping error.  And, instead of just eating crow and moving on, the Algerian coach had this to say:

Algerian coach Rabah Saadane said the new World Cup ball was a challenge for goalkeepers.

“Everyone saw what happened with the ball, and what happened yesterday with England’s goalkeeper,” Saadane said. “You have to adjust to the flight of the ball.”

source

Yeah.  I saw what happened.  Here it is:

Coach, that’s not a problem with a ball. That’s called goalkeeper spacing out. Nice try though.

The world cup continues until July 11.  More about it occasionally.  

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cross posted and ON SIDES at The Dream Antilles and the almost always dreaded dailyKos