Tag: Friday Night at 8

Let us talk about the problem of evil, Mr. Loran.  Where do we read about evil as a separate manifestation, as a result of too abundant a growth of the quality of judgment separated from the quality of mercy?

  –The Book of Lights by Chaim Potok

I read the NOLA blogs every day.  I read blogs in the diversosphere every day.  I read diaries and posts about undocumented migrants every day.

On all these subjects, I often find myself battling posters at Daily Kos who say things like “Oh well those folks in New Orleans shouldn’t have built their homes there, and they should just bulldoze the place, it’s environmentally unsafe!”  Or “I’m not a racist, so really that doesn’t apply to me, those folks are just oversensitive, besides that boy in Jena was a criminal, and Martin Luther King wouldn’t have defended him.”  Or “those illegal aliens are making it harder for those who are coming here legally and playing by the rules!  Why should I care about them — and besides, they’re hurting labor!”

I’ve experimented with many different responses, from aggressive and even profanity-laden to understanding and kind.  But those comments always hurt.  I don’t even know if I could explain why, they’re just words on a screen, aren’t they?

Judgment.  Well of course we are always using our judgment, from mundane things like choosing which toothpaste to buy to big philosophical and political decisions such as who to vote for, who to fight against and why.

And then there’s the judgment implied in the law.  This is wrong — if you do this you will pay the consequences, whether it be a fine, jail time, or even execution, even death.

In keeping with Buhdy’s vision of a manifesto (or whatever we end up calling it), I am grappling with the problems of social justice in the United States today.

There’s a book I’ve read over and over since I was a child, so many times that I’ve memorized most of its stories.  My father and brothers also knew these stories and we’d often use them to illustrate whatever conversation we were having.

The book is entitled A Treasury of Jewish Folklore, edited by Nathan Ausubel.  It was published in 1948.

The stories are great, but Ausubel’s introduction to each section is wonderful, I think.

So I’m thinking about some of the more absurd arguments all of us get into every now and then — no, not flamewars, just minutiae unto absurdity at times, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin kind of stuff.  And I thought about the town of Chelm and the stories about the folks there.

Before I get to the stories, I’d like to share part of Ausubel’s introduction to the section of the book entitled “The Human Comedy:”

The overtones of satire, irony and quip we hear even in the Old Testament.  For example, there is the gay mockery of the Prophet Elijah as he listens to the idol-worshipping soothsayers of Baal, invoking their god morning, noon and night:  “O Baal, hear us!”  To this, the rational-minded Elijah remarks tauntingly: “Cry ye louder, for he is a god; he is perhaps talking or walking, or he is on a journey or peradventure he sleepeth and must be awaked.”

We also find satire and irony in the Prophets, especially in the writings of Amos and Isaiah.  With matchless skill they lay bare the weaknesses and the follies of their contemporaries.  They satirize the hypocrite, the miser, the skinflint, the profligate, the coquette, the self-satisfied and the self-righteous.  It is from this acid portraiture that much of Jewish folklore found its inspiration and themes.  The fables, parables, anecdotes and sayings in the Talmud and Midrash, as the reader of this book will find out for himself, were rich in those very characteristics with which we associate Jewish humor today.

…

The liveliness and the many-sidedness of Jewish humor make it possible for everyone to find in it that which will suit his taste.  It is a treasury in which lies stored up three thousand years of a people’s laughter.  Its variety recalls the words of Bar-Hebraeus, the Thirteenth Century Syrian-Jewish folklorist, in his introduction to his Laughable Stories: “And let this book be a devoted friend to the reader, whether he be Muslim, Jew, or Aramean, or a man belonging to a foreign country or nation.  And let the man who is learned, I mean to say the man who hath a bright understanding, and the man that babbleth conceitedly even though he drives everyone mad, and also every other man, choose what is best for himself.  And let each pluck the flowers that please him.  In this way the book will succeed in bringing together the things which are alike, each to the other.”

So onward … to the town of Chelm, and why these particular stories remind me of the kinds of knots we can tie ourselves into when it comes to arguing the finer points of any issue.

Hello, hello, hello!  As an experiment tonight, I’ve audioblogged a bit of stuff, including an original protest song.  It’s all explained … well sort of … in the audioblog.

Before I post the audioblog, I’ll share my fantasy protest.  Big bands, big brass bands, big brass bands from New Orleans with that tuba blowing the rhythm, loud, folks marching along right to the nation’s capital.

Can you imagine that?  A giant sound, all wild and brassy, there’s no way anyone – including the media – could ignore that.

Ok, end of fantasy protest.  Onward.  Below is the audioblog and the words to the protest tune.

Rock and roll.  Started out black music, started out being the blues.  Started out sung in the fields by slaves, trying to get through their lives day by day.

Changed over the years, but folks never forgot where it came from, which is why there was so much furor over rock and roll when it started to affect white kids.  It was why Alan Freed was really destroyed, not because of the official story of payola.

And while Little Richard was blasting this new music into the waiting ears of young black kids, Pat Boone was the one making all the money (try, once, to listen to Little Richard do “Tutti Fruitti” and then listen to Pat Boone singing it — you may just go mad).

It all boiled down to sex, though.  It did.  Listen to the blues, to early rhythm & blues, listen to that beat and try not to move your body to it, try  not to get turned on.  Can’t be done, sez I.

But this isn’t going to be a political essay about racism or the music business.  And I have no particular judgment over what I’m about to write.  I just find it interesting, and hope some of you will find it interesting as well.

Walking down Lexington Avenue in the 20s with my teenaged niece, it was in the mid-80’s, a homeless man jumped in front of us and yelled out with a fierce look on his face “HOMELESS!”  Not missing a beat, I shouted back “SAGITTARIUS!”  He looked bewildered and walked away.  My niece thought I was cool.

Some time in the 80’s, if I recall correctly, they changed the commitment laws, folks couldn’t be forced into mental institutions any more, so many were released.  I remember the Big Apple when the streets were lined with homeless people, sure not all of them were mentally ill, but plenty were.

Senior year in high school, in the midwest, I volunteered for a summer as a candy striper at the county mental institution — I was put to work with the occupational therapists in the chronic ward.

I read some of the case histories, people who were mentally retarded being put away and after long years they became psychotic as well.  One day during the summer they had a fire drill — I got separated from the staff and ended up milling about with the folks from the locked ward — none of them made me feel threatened, on the contrary, being among them I felt as though I were the odd woman out, and perhaps I should start babbling and carrying on as the normal thing to do.

My Unified Theory of Everything

Well not really.  It’s not anything so fancy as a theory.

My manifesto, by the way, can be expressed in one phrase:

THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX

Let us assess where we are now in the grand old blogosphere:

We have performed approximately seven trillion “gotcha” attacks on the media, reversing memes at the speed of light!

We have helped to elect a Democratic majority in the Senate and Congress.

We have spouted bloviations on every imaginable topic that if laid end to end would easily wrap around the circumfrence of the universe 50,000 times.

We have called to the media’s attention stories they would not otherwise have covered.

What we have NOT done is change policy in our government.  Bush and Cheney have more power now than they did before the 2006 election.  The War in Iraq is still raging, and I see no end in sight, no vote that points to our representatives ending this war.  We have seen no real opposition — NONE.

So, athough the blogosphere has accomplishments to its credit, ultimately we are all frustrated … which is why we are clamoring for a manifesto in the first place!

I don’t know what to say.  I read a diary over at Daily Kos by Robert Naiman saying that the death toll in Iraq has reached one million.  One million dead.  One million dead.

Oh the old intertubes aren’t working very well at casa del Nightprowlkitty, but hopefully I’ll get this posted in time.  If I don’t comment right away, you’ll know why.

Does anyone else share the feeling I have today, a feeling of something impending?  Because I don’t have anything to say about current events or culture or even personal anecdotes.  I feel a sense of apprehension.  And of course it’s about America.

I think even the boys at the big blogs are now aware that business is not as usual.  We’ve even got kos yelling at the Democrats over their incomprehensible behavior when it comes to opposing this misAdministration.

Something has changed.  August was the lull before the storm.  Folks all over the country are waiting for someone to pull the plug on these criminals.  Everyone agrees they are criminals, everyone knows they want to take us into a world of unending war, unending governmental incompetence, unending theft and corruption.  That’s simply how they operate.  They don’t know how to do anything else.

And now we are all awaiting a report by David Petraeus and everyone already knows the White House has rewritten it, everyone knows this misAdministration is doing its best to discredit the GAO’s report, shout down any dissent on what is going on in Iraq.  And here we sit, wondering what’s going to happen.

This isn’t like Viet Nam.  We’re older and wiser now.  We see this happening in real time, all of us.  It’s strange and surreal in so many ways.

Eastern Standard Time, that is.  I'm live from New York.  (Well, woulda been 8 pm EST, but I screwed up the formatting on the time.  Sorry 'bout that!)

I had all sorts of ideas on what I wanted my weekly essay to be about.  Fuck it.  I couldn't be consistent if you put a gun to my head.

But today's essay will be about diversity.