Be(a)ware...

      With all that is happening, I am reminded of a frustrated Jesus in the Broadway play, Jesus Christ Superstar, a scene where he becomes so inundated with people wanting to be healed or helped that he finally yells out, "heal yourselves."   And quite honestly, we seem to be nearing that point as school lunches and food stamps are bulldozed over like settlers being forced off of the West Bank.  People are generous to a fault, and generally helpful by nature; but what happens as we start to leave our view of "things will work out" to a point of "we'd better start planning because who knows?"  Who knows indeed?  Several things brought this to mind, everything from an article on apathy to yes, that play, Jesus Christ Superstar.  

      If you've never seen the play or listened to the album (the movie was forgettable so perhaps skip that format), the music and lyrics were quite controversial at the time, and perhaps controversial even now (it is still in production, even coming to the Hollywood Bowl in August).  Imagine portraying Judas as suddenly realizing that he'd probably been played by fate and that his name would be forever tarnished, but then wondering what would happen to the cosmic plan if he decided not to turn traitor.  And when an unimpressed Herod, and later Pontius Pilate ask Jesus whether he considers himself to be the "king of the Jews," Jesus replies that he only seeks truth; Pilate then asks: ...but what IS truth?  Is my truth the same as yours?   And after Jesus perishes, Judas asks about Buddha: ...is he where you are?   Could Mohammad move that mountain or was that just PR?  Did you mean to die like that?  Was that a mistake or...did you know your messy death would be a record-breaker?  Don't get me wrong, he says, ...only want to know.  The music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Tim Rice were both daring and shocking since questioning such an engrained ideology was like telling young children that Santa wasn't real.  And yet the world seemed ready for such questioning (the show played in London for 8 years with nearly 3500 performances).

     Only want to know, he asked.  Me too.  But I find that in today's world, I want to ask "the other side" what is it that they really want?  And truth be told, many of my far right friends are equally baffled...all those regulations, big government (hello, we're a country of over 300 million people), social equality, immigrants (conveniently forgetting that the Irish and German immigrants were equally shunned in the US in the mid-1800s and during both World Wars...or that Trump's heritage is German); why would anyone want those things, they would likely ask me.  And I would ask back, but why would you want to prevent the courts from enforcing contempt charges and hide it deep inside a budget bill, and then make it retroactive so that even previous contempt charges against a sitting president cannot be enforced (this was a long-time goal of Jim Jordan, who now heads the Judiciary Committee and inserted the language); and why would you want signs removed from national parks that mention Japanese internment camps, or slavery, or the slaughter of Native Americans (but not touch anything about the Civil War); and why would you want to allow even more pollution into the air; or want to take Greenland or Canada, by force if necessary (what??); and why would you want an unelected person to have access to all of our Social Security information? (the Supreme Court just granted DOGE full access to everyone's Social Security info, including numbers, birth dates, work, banking, and health info, as well as court records)  But the majority of us are not players in this game, but more like the spectators in the stands, as if watching rivals sending the tennis ball back and forth over and over.  Take a general poll in the stands and you'll likely find that the main concern would come down to one thing...will this mean less taxes and thus, more money I can spend for whatever (food, rent, car, vacation cruise)?  Indeed when Gallup took a poll a few weeks ago, debt and the trade deficit concerned just 4% of voters (ranked even lower were crime and poverty).   

      The democratic party has been skillfully spun as a party of doom: extinctions, forever chemicals, a heating planet, polluted water.  So I was drawn to a review of the new book by Richard Seymour on "the downfall of liberal nationalism."  In the LRB review, critic Daniel Trilling wrote: Are​ we, as Richard Seymour suggests, ‘in the early days of a new fascism’?  In Disaster Nationalism, Seymour argues that in trying to understand the new far right, we have been looking in the wrong places.  Parties and policy platforms, or the personalities of ‘strongman’ figureheads, can only take us so far.  What matters more is the particular mood that pervades both the extremist fringes and the political mainstream.  ‘The new far right is enthralled by images of disaster,’ Seymour writes.  Far-right populists promise to defend their people from migrant ‘invasions’ and ‘deep state’ traitors.  Conspiracy theorists chase cabals of Satanist paedophiles, while mass shooters believe they are resisting a Muslim takeover, or Jewish influence, or women who have emasculated them.  Large numbers of people contribute to moral panics about religious, ethnic and sexual minorities, or left-wing activism; a few even take matters into their own hands in outbreaks of pogromist violence.  These kinds of behaviour, in Seymour’s view, are evidence of the mix of reactionary and rebellious emotions peculiar to fascism; a new version of the mobilising passions identified by Paxton.  They are shot through with ‘apocalyptic desire’ –a fear of impending doom, combined with the contradictory impulse to throw oneself into the abyss– and reveal a ‘pervasive ambivalence about civilisation ...a submerged desire for it to fall apart’.   So here we sit in the stands, chatting back and forth like gossipers in The Music Man: Pick a little, talk a little, cheep, cheep, cheep, talk a lot pick a little more...

Palestinian woman watching illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank.  Photo: Marcus Yam

   What started this for me was a piece in The New York Review on the West Bank of Palestine which began with this: On October 29, after four soldiers were killed in Beit Lahiya, the army bombed a five-story apartment building; it claimed that a “lookout” had been sighted on the roof.  Nearly a hundred people died, at least twenty of them children, and we have no count of the wounded.  An obscene question arises: Was it worth it—for a presumed lookout? But I can’t help asking myself: For this we created a Jewish state?...What we are experiencing now in Israel, wrote author David Shulman, is a profound failure of our shared humanity, a deadly apathy of the soul.  Worse still is the taste for killing and inflicting pain that has infected so many,,.beginning at the top.  But it's not only in Israel.  When GOP Senator Thom Tillis questioned Trump's tariffs and it effects, he received threats from both sides, including this angry voicemail that said voters might: ...take a f--ing axe handle and cave his head in, and his kids heads, and them goddamn grandkids' heads.  What's happening?  When most of us watch a sporting event, we realize that one side will win and one will lose, but that there will be another match and besides, it's ONLY a match.  Some of us are jubilant and others are disappointed but we're not planning to firebomb a car or pull out a gun on children.  In another review in the same magazine about our withdrawal from Afghanistan (Trump ordered the timetable, Biden got the blame), author Sune Engel Rasmussen wrote: Modern American warfare has generally been waged not against states, but against ethereal dark forces and beliefs: for 'freedom' against 'evil,' light against darkness which makes Americans sound less Christian than mentally ill: the Americans as killer mystics, deranged tarot card readers.  Humanizing Afghans wouldn't make a dent in a worldview that hardly seems to be about people at all.  When the Los Angeles Times wrote about an art project that allowed free "goodbye" calls from payphones, one caller said: I'd like to apologize to my family.  I hope y'all make it to heaven.  I'm sorry I didn't make it.

      So what IS the goal of so many on the far right?  Poland just elected its own far-right leader, albeit by a slim margin.  We all understand the bloat of bureaucracy but beyond that?  To threaten both justices and others if things don't go your way?  Or it is simply a drive to obtain more money, at any cost, even to the everyday person just trying to get by?  To try and answer at least part of this sort of thinking, New Scientist featured psychologist Giulia Sesini and her colleagues who reviewed 226 papers that looked at a range of factors that affect a person's thoughts about money: age, personal values, income, personality, etc.: The more value someone places on wealth, they found the less likely people are to report feeling a sense of purpose, personal growth, self-acceptance, environmental mastery and life satisfaction, and the more negative emotions they tend to experience.  Sesini's work provides a clue as to why.  It shows that people who view money as a sign of power, status and prestige tend to be more impulsive, less friendly and more Machiavellian -- cunning, scheming and unscrupulous.  Be that as it may, one has to ask again: what is the end goal?  

     So to those of us sitting in the stands, watching this banter go back and forth, another question arose: brainwashing.  Wrote The New Yorker: ...professors would, of course, balk at the implication that they’ve brainwashed their students, but that’s exactly what their critics in the conservative media have long been accusing them of.  It’s a familiar pattern in our polarized age.  The right accuses the left of using the institutions it dominates—the federal bureaucracy, nonprofits, universities, Hollywood, and “legacy” media—to brainwash the public.  The left, in turn, levels the same charge against the right, pointing to talk radio, partisan television networks, and manosphere podcasts. (Each side condemns the other’s social-media activity.)  Naturally, no one admits to doing what they denounce in their opponents.  But that’s to be expected: persuasion is what we do; brainwashing is what they do...But, even when confronted with a world of people holding views we find baffling, why assume that they’re victims of a grand conspiracy—or victims at all?  Perhaps truth isn’t so obvious.  Uncovering it demands effort and a bit of luck.  Other people will take different things to be true because their paths—owing to differences in diligence or chance—diverged from ours.  That conspiracy-minded cousin isn’t necessarily a casualty of mind control; he may simply have wandered down intellectual rabbit holes where evidence matters less than belonging.  To depict him as a victim of manipulation grants him an unearned absolution.  The most disturbing possibility isn’t that millions have been brainwashed.  It’s that they haven’t.

     What is truth, asked Pilate in the play?  To question Christianity back then may prove little different than questioning democracy today.  Perhaps this surge of far-right thinking is once again a bit of fate entering the picture.  Or, as my wife suggests with the Musk-Trump "feud," are we (the people) being played?  Or is it that these world leaders are the ones being played?  Or is this simply history coming full circle as if in orbit?  We are, after all, the children of our parents...their genes and attitudes.  And perhaps beyond that is something determining our actions.  Who were we?, asked a NYB piece on public vs. private schools: Where did we come from?...Let the children of the rich and poor take their seats together and know of no distinction save that of industry, good conduct, and intellect.  The year was 1847...Or take this piece in The London Review which pointed out that the term "gender ideology" was "coined by the Vatican back in the 1990s."  Or that in another NYB piece which noted that after the Civil War, the Freedmen's Bureau was created for African-Americans ("Its schools taught more than 200,000 children over the course of seven years [and] ran orphan asylums and more than sixty hospitals.") and the Second American Republic was created in the hopes of guaranteeing peace for Native Americans.  But as the piece added: All these advances, of course, were doomed...It is poignant to imagine the America that could have been if the Second Republic had survived.  If Lincoln had lived, or if he had chosen a more enlightened vice-president; if more federal troops had remained in the South; if their presence hadn't been bargained away...there are many more ifs.  

     My brother used to constantly ask those what-ifs, as in what if these "leaders" such as Putin and Trump, Netanyahu and Victor Orban, used their charisma and insecurities to promote good in the world, to work for the betterment of all and not just a few, to help the disadvantaged instead of trying to destroy them?  Imagine where our world would --could-- be it that were the case.  People would follow, and unite, and feel good about themselves.  Or are those leaders and followers just acting as the crowd did in the play, telling Pilate to crucify Jesus, to which Pilate says: You hypocrites!  You hate us more than him!  To which the crowd responds: We have no king but Caesar!  Crucify him!  Perhaps the arts will prove stronger than we believe, and that while social media and airwaves continue to be bought out and edited to the wishes of a few moguls, it will again be the people speaking, acting out their frustrations, or watching them being acted out.  Influences, real or imagined, may want us to bury our heads even deeper in the sand, but we may want truth, and emotional provocation, and questioning, and a chance to once again be asked, "what do YOU think?"  Which begs the question, what DO you think? 

  

22-year old landscaper, Thomas Fugate

      The play left viewers with many questions, and now may be the time to be asking more questions regardless of which side you're favoring.  A review of the book By the Second Spring told of ordinary Ukrainians --a coffee shop owner, a mother, a police cadet, an engineer, a fashion designer-- adapting to: ...the violent end of their prewar life and a shocking descent into hell before finally adapting to life in a daily state of war, punctuated by the loss of homes, hideous injuries and the deaths of friends.  Another book, Erased, told the story of Sacagawea who was kidnapped from her Shoshone family and "sold" to a Frenchman, who then "rented" her to Lewis & Clark; she was by then 17 and pregnant.  Both books will likely be banned, as surely as the signs in our national parks.  But we must ask why so much of history is being "erased."  Why is it okay to have a 22-year old former yard worker head a national terror prevention team?  Instead of asking questions, we seem to have silence.  As Senator Chris Murphy said in an interview with The New Yorker: I do think that there’s an element out there that doesn’t actually want to have the really hard conversation about why we [Democrats] lost.  I mean, people knew who this guy was.  He said he was going to be a dictator on Day One.  He told you he was going to pardon the January 6th protesters.  He still won...Every single day, I think the chances are growing that we will not have a free and fair election in 2026.  Perhaps if and when that happens, those still in power will be asking us, much as the Centurions did in the play: I don't understand why you're filled with remorse.  The mob turned against him, you backed the right horse.  Questions, anyone?

     So I end with the words of editor Jennifer Sahn who was commenting in High Country News on the recent fires in Los Angeles: Let's be honest and call them climate refugees, like those displaced by flooding, desertification and rising sea levels.  They join the ranks of people fleeing war, oppression, hunger and humanitarian crises elsewhere.  When your basic human rights are denied --when your mere existence is seen as a threat to the powerful and you fear for your life-- you flee, often with nothing more than the clothes on your back.  Yet the same country that is obsessed with the celebrities who lost lavish home in the fires treats its own immigrants with disdain, whether their multigenerational Americans or recent arrivals, here legally or not...What happens to the generosity and mutual aid when the suffering is farther from home?  When there are differences in skin color, language, sexual preference, religion?   There are many ways in which a once-friendly place can become hostile...

Art Board print: Red Bubble

P.S. Might I recommend Tyler Perry's movie, Straw, if only to give those of us living a comfortable life a glimpse of how so many others may actually be experiencing quite a different version..."getting by" suddenly becomes quite real, and quite difficult, for many.