I invite SF-IMC posters to continue this discussion there, where nessie can't hide every third response because he disagrees with it.
David Gehrig's Final SF-IMC Post
I've promised for the last year and a half -- every time nessie lost another argument and petulantly threatened to get Il Duce all over my ass -- that, should he one day carry through with his threat, I would make one last post here and then leave, my head held high, proud of my record here. I am now going to honor that promise. Presumably nessie will hide it instantly; he's that kind of guy. I will post another copy of it at my home IMC,
http://www.ucimc.org; I invite SF-IMC posters to continue this discussion there, where nessie can't hide every third response because he disagrees with it.
I've promised for the last year and a half -- every time nessie lost another argument and petulantly threatened to get Il Duce all over my ass -- that, should he one day carry through with his threat, I would make one last post here and then leave, my head held high, proud of my record here. I am now going to honor that promise. Presumably nessie will hide it instantly; he's that kind of guy. I will post another copy of it at my home IMC, http://www.ucimc.org on http://www.ucimc.org/newswire/display_any/15535; I invite SF-IMC posters to continue this discussion there, where nessie can't hide every third response because he disagrees with it.
It's long, natch, but I've broken it up into digestible little segments.
(1) "Racism" versus racism.
Nessie accuses me of racism. I am not a racist. The accusation is slander.
What I am is someone who believes -- and this is my sole crime in SF-IMC -- that Israel should continue to exist, and should work toward a peaceful coexistence, side by side with an independent Palestinian state, as has been the international vision all along.
To nessie, this is enough to scream "racism," and he claims "my fangs drip with blood" for it. It is my sole crime, but to nessie it's a banning offense.
I am not racist; I am "racist."
I am far from the only "racist." As demonstrated by a poll released last week, jointly sponsored by the Jewish organization Americans for Peace Now and the Arab American Institute, about three quarters of American Jews and about three quarters of Arab Americans support the principles of the Geneva Accord, which calls for the two-state solution. Only about two years ago the UN Security Council voted 14-0 for a resolution endorsing the two-state solution and referring to the nation of Palestine by name. This makes them all, by nessie's skewed standard, "racist."
By his standard, virtually every Jew in America is a "racist Zionist," and so -- even more remarkably -- are most Arab Americans. The same principle whereby nessie bans me would ban nearly every Jew in America, left, right, or center, because to disagree with nessie on merit of the one-state solution is to be a "racist."
Which would be okay, if he weren't at the helm of a website _founded on the principle of open publishing_ -- that is, founded on the principle that editorial censorship of the media for purely political reasons is an evil, and if he weren't using his editorial powers to enforce the nessie orthodoxy.
( 1a )
How extreme is nessie's position?
By his standards, the pro-Palestinian human rights organization B'tselem is "racist." Yesh Gvul -- the organization of Israeli "refuseniks" who won't serve in the West Bank -- is "racist." Peace Now, which has been pushing for a Palestinian state since, I think, 1967, is "racist." Israelis as far-far-far left as Uri Avneri are "racist." And, of course, the vast majority of Jewish Americans, Arab Americans, American Americans, and the entire UN Security Council are all "racist."
If fact, the only Jews who aren't "racist" are wingnuts like his Official Good Jew, Gilad "there's no such thing as antisemitism, but the Zionists killed Jesus anyway" Atzmon.
To nessie, "Zionists are all alike," and if you point to the rather obvious fact that there is an entire political spectrum on display in every election, the sort of spectrum that looks pretty appealing given the monochrome we're seeing here in the US election campaign, he will try to fob off the same tired Nazi analogy he uses every _other_ time someone has tried to get him to open his eyes on the topic. To him, anyone left of Atzmon is Kahane. Period, end of discussion, and if you disagree it's because you're "racist" "racist" "racist." (By the same reasoning, any crayon that isn't white must be black, since black isn't white.)
Of course, if I had ever posted anything actually _racist_, not "racist," nessie would have thrown me out long ago, and would be parading that post at every opportunity. He can't do that, though. Why? Because I'm not a racist.
But, again, the fundamental loonytude of nessie's stance wouldn't be relevant if he weren't using his power as an IMC editor to exercise a program of political censorship based on it.
(2) Why now?
If you believe that the timing of nessie's banning me last night has, at root, anything to do with his hyperbolic chants of "racist" "racist" "racist" hyperbollocks, you're being naive. It's personal. I'm banned because I have, using simple logic and commitment to the core values of the IMC movement, and maybe even the occasional flash of wit, dribbled him up and down the site like a basketball any time I wanted the exercise. He's gotten tired of losing at his own game, yet he couldn't ban me because I kept failing to turn into a fire-breathing raving loon the way Wendy Campbell did. So he just redefined "racism" instead, and what do you know, now Wendy and I are equally "racist" and can be banned simultaneously as an act of "balance."
It's also a petulant reaction to the spammer. He can't stop the spammer, but he can stop me, and he decided that's good enough for him. He _knows_ I'm not the spammer. He will, however, pretend here that he doesn't. He will tape that "Ee-e-evil Zi-i-i-ionist" mask over my face and then declare that "blood drips from my fangs," that I'm a paid agent of The Conspiracy, or that there are Zionist Mossad agents in his kosher cornflakes after all, or whatever other shriek!-shriek!-shriek! comes to his mind. After all, I am The Zionist, and no accusation or demonization can be too ridiculous against The Zionist. Slandering The Zionist is a good thing, not a bad thing, because The Zionist is ee-e-e-evil incarnate.
And, in particular, I am banned now because in the biggest long-standing argument we've had -- over the blatant antisemitism displayed by Wendy Campbell for more than a year and nessie's increasingly pathetic and increasingly inexplicable denial of same in light of the mountains of evidence I have amassed for him -- I was _right_. Turns out Wendy Campbell really _is_ a Jew-hating wretch after all, and really should have been banned from the ranch all along. That just burns nessie's ass intolerably: the Zionist was right. Nessie wanted to be able use my comments about Wendy as an example of "look how those Zionists are always screaming 'antisemitism,'" and then Wendy fucked it all up by being _exactly what I claimed she was all along_, a Jew-hating wretch. The timing of my banning at the very moment, the very instant nessie had to face his defeat on Windy Out Wendy is not a coincidence.
( 3 ) Interlude
For those who track trivia, I first started calling Windy Wendy Campbell "Windy Out Wendy" when she outed her antisemitism on what turned out to be the very same topic she ended up destroying herself with, the "Kosher Tax" canard. For nessie now to claim he's suddenly decided to "err on the side of caution" after letting Wendy shit in his birdbath for more than a year is downright Orwellian.
( 4 ) The pragmatic effect of the twisted quid pro quo
Despite being "banned," Wendy Campbell's already back on SF-IMC, using her own name but also using nonce nyms, pretending again just to be an ordinary anti-Zionist. I've spotted her five times already. From here on out, though, nessie, you'll have to watch for her yourself. You _can_ spot her, nessie, as she continues to poison your site with her "anti-Zionist" antisemitism, right?
Oh, what the hell, I'll give you one last one.
http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2004/02/1675151_comment.php#1675709
But that's the last freebie.
In other words, the net result of your twisted quid pro quo is that Wendy's still there, quietly seeping her lunatic antisemitism into your site under her cascade of pseudonyms, and I'm not going to point her out to you any more. That's how you wanted it, isn't it, nessie?
(5) Enabling antisemitism
Note that, for all our scrapping, I have never accused nessie of antisemitism. I truly believe he is against antisemitism when he recognizes it. But the extremism of his political stance and the dogmatism by which he cleaves to it sometimes short circuit that recognition capability. That's nessie's major malfunction.
Actually, it's not that. It's that he doesn't care whether or not it's been short circuited, and rejects being told when it has. That's where the hypocrisy comes in.
What I _have_ accused him of, and accuse him of now, is _enabling_ antisemitism by turning a blind eye to it on SF-IMC. Yesterday wasn't Windy Wendy's first major antisemitic meltdown, by any stretch. But each time, nessie always found a way to pretend he hadn't seen it, or couldn't prove it, or to pretend it was really Zionist roorback roorback roorback roorback roorback, or to go strategically Alzheimers, or to suddenly become agonizingly, gut-wrenchingly preoccupied to the exclusion of all else with the epistological conundrum that he couldn't prove with absolute certainty that the antisemitic post in question _wasn't_ actually made by a contingent of Keebler elves gone rogue after an encounter with what turns out not to have been powdered sugar after all, posted from their underground bakery compound in Amsterdam. (I mean, how do you really _know_ it's not, and how can nessie possibly be expected to ban Windy Wendy without knowing for sure?)
Time after time, he found a way to excuse the inexcusable.
What, me worry about antisemitism?
( 6 ) Those Jewish genes of mine
Some of the mental ankle-biters on this site have tried, straining their already unsustainable Nazi analogies, to maintain that Gehrig The Zionist believes he is somehow genetically superior to the poor unfortunate gentile who hasn't got the good luck to be one of The Chosen People.
Heh heh.
See, the thing is, I was born 100% pure gentile. My mom, my dad, my sister, my brother, all my grandfolks, literally every single blood relative I know of (except my son, whose bar mitzvah is this April) -- not a Jew among them.
I converted to Judaism more than twenty years ago.
So you have no idea how heartily I've been enjoying it every time nessie or some other lamer has chortled to himself over the "blood and soil" argument or every time NSDAP Wendy has told me that I think that I'm superior to non-Jews and hate them, or that I use "goy" as a pejorative term, or that I'm too enamored of my own Jewish genetics. I haven't _got_ Jewish genetics. Non-Jews are literally my family.
Literally my brother. Literally my sister. Literally my father. Literally my late mother. All my grandparents, my aunt, my late uncle, their children, their grandchildren, my brother's children. And so on.
And the Joseph Heller fan in me is particularly delighted to hear that I'm being called a "racist" for my role in defending a group I have personally demonstrated for more than half my life -- by electively joining it -- can't _be_ a "race."
Chew on that one, nessie.
Heh heh.
( 7 ) Spam sermonette
Spam is bad, spammer. Don't spam. And especially don't spam _my_ stuff, whoever you are. True, it drives nessie crazy, but not nearly as crazy as I did by consistently refuting him, out in the open, until he could do nothing but repeat his bumpersticker mantra, "Zionism is racism, Zionism is racism, Zionism is racism."
( 8 ) Jewish sermonette
One of Job's "comforters" refers to God as "the maker of peace in the heavens" -- "oseh shalom bim'romav." This phrase was developed, in the Jewish liturgy, into the closing line of the full Kaddish. (The Kaddish is sometimes mischaracterized as "a prayer for the dead"; it's really more of a liturgical semicolon, recurring in different forms and marking the division between different liturgical sections in the worship service. But I digress.) "Oseh shalom bim'romav, hu yaaseh shalom aleinu v'al kol yisrael, v'imru amen."
By a peculiarity of Hebrew verb forms, this can be read in two ways: either as a plea or as an affirmation. In other words, it means both "May the maker of peace in the heavens make peace for us and all the house of Israel, and we say 'amen'" and "The maker of peace in the heavens _will_ make peace for us and for all the house of Israel, and we say 'amen.'"
Bill Clinton said this line, in Hebrew, at the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin, and I wept. It is my favorite line in the liturgy.
In Leonard Bernstein's Third Symphony, "Kaddish," the speaker paraphrases it as follows:
"Great God / You who make peace in the high places, / Who commanded the mornings since the days began, / And caused the dawn to know its place; / Surely you can cause and command / A touch of order here below, / On this one, dazed speck, / And let us say again, Amen."
And I say, amen. Amen to the plea, and amen to the affirmation.
( 9 ) Secular sermonette
The little figure I sign my posts with -- every single post I will ever have made on SF-IMC, appearing here now for the last time below -- is a miniature caricature of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
Around the time I was born, Shostakovich went head-to-head with the politburo on the antisemitism issue. His Thirteenth Symphony was a setting of five poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the first of which was "Babii Yar," which attacked -- poetically -- the Party's failure to address antisemitism within its own ranks.
The Party responded by doing everything in its power to stop the concert. Like nessie, they thought the fight against antisemitism was simply too insignificant when compared to the defense of the party line. Shostakovich was far too internationally famous to lock up (although they did send his buddy Mstislav Rostropovich, the dissident cellist for whom Shostakovich wrote those two brilliant concerti, to be a brick mason in the gulag later on). But the Party frightened away Mravinsky, the conductor of every Shostakovich symphonic premiere for the previous thirty years or so. And they frightened away, at the last moment, the bass soloist who was to sing Yevtushenko's words. And they did try to frighten Kondrashin, who took over for Mravinksy, into performing the work without the "Babii Yar" movement.
But Shostakovich stood up for what was right, and Kondrashin stood up for Shostakovich, and the concert went ahead.
Here are the closing lines of Yevtushenko's poem, the posting of which I dedicate to Shostakovich's heroism:
"When the last antisemite on earth
is buried forever
let the "Internationale" ring out!
In me there is no Jewish blood,
but in their callous rage, all antisemites
hate me now as a Jew.
For that reason
I am a true Russian!"
Compare that to the nessie version, which is not heroism but the sound of moral disintegration and invertibrate weaselry:
Antisemitism doesn't exist
And when it does
It's all the Zionists' fault
And if you point it out
It's only because you planted it yourself.
And if it's the real deal, who cares anyway
Let's just bash Zionism instead
What, me worry about antisemitism?
What a good boy am I!
( 10 )
So this is me, signing off.
To those who've given me some kind words and support for my efforts to demonstrate to nessie what's in front of his own two eyes but he can't let himself see, my thanks. I'm through tilting at this particular windmill.
Nessie, she's your problem now. Enjoy her presence, which you can no longer detect, as she seeps her poison into SF-IMC's ground water. She's the albatross you earned with your hypocrisy about antisemitism. That is, in the words of John Lennon, the sound of Instant Karma.
And, I said I would, I now leave SF-IMC with my head held high, singing the words my hero Yip Harburg wrote for a melody from my hero Dmitri Shostakovich:
Make way for the day called tomorrow; make way for the day that is new.
I've promised for the last year and a half -- every time nessie lost another argument and petulantly threatened to get Il Duce all over my ass -- that, should he one day carry through with his threat, I would make one last post here and then leave, my head held high, proud of my record here. I am now going to honor that promise. Presumably nessie will hide it instantly; he's that kind of guy. I will post another copy of it at my home IMC,
http://www.ucimc.org; I invite SF-IMC posters to continue this discussion there, where nessie can't hide every third response because he disagrees with it. I've promised for the last year and a half -- every time nessie lost another argument and petulantly threatened to get Il Duce all over my ass -- that, should he one day carry through with his threat, I would make one last post here and then leave, my head held high, proud of my record here. I am now going to honor that promise. Presumably nessie will hide it instantly; he's that kind of guy. I will post another copy of it at my home IMC,
http://www.ucimc.org on http://www.ucimc.org/newswire/display_any/15535; I invite SF-IMC posters to continue this discussion there, where nessie can't hide every third response because he disagrees with it. It's long, natch, but I've broken it up into digestible little segments.
(1) "Racism" versus racism.
Nessie accuses me of racism. I am not a racist. The accusation is slander.
What I am is someone who believes -- and this is my sole crime in SF-IMC -- that Israel should continue to exist, and should work toward a peaceful coexistence, side by side with an independent Palestinian state, as has been the international vision all along.
To nessie, this is enough to scream "racism," and he claims "my fangs drip with blood" for it. It is my sole crime, but to nessie it's a banning offense.
I am not racist; I am "racist."
I am far from the only "racist." As demonstrated by a poll released last week, jointly sponsored by the Jewish organization Americans for Peace Now and the Arab American Institute, about three quarters of American Jews and about three quarters of Arab Americans support the principles of the Geneva Accord, which calls for the two-state solution. Only about two years ago the UN Security Council voted 14-0 for a resolution endorsing the two-state solution and referring to the nation of Palestine by name. This makes them all, by nessie's skewed standard, "racist."
By his standard, virtually every Jew in America is a "racist Zionist," and so -- even more remarkably -- are most Arab Americans. The same principle whereby nessie bans me would ban nearly every Jew in America, left, right, or center, because to disagree with nessie on merit of the one-state solution is to be a "racist."
Which would be okay, if he weren't at the helm of a website _founded on the principle of open publishing_ -- that is, founded on the principle that editorial censorship of the media for purely political reasons is an evil, and if he weren't using his editorial powers to enforce the nessie orthodoxy.
( 1a )
How extreme is nessie's position?
By his standards, the pro-Palestinian human rights organization B'tselem is "racist." Yesh Gvul -- the organization of Israeli "refuseniks" who won't serve in the West Bank -- is "racist." Peace Now, which has been pushing for a Palestinian state since, I think, 1967, is "racist." Israelis as far-far-far left as Uri Avneri are "racist." And, of course, the vast majority of Jewish Americans, Arab Americans, American Americans, and the entire UN Security Council are all "racist."
If fact, the only Jews who aren't "racist" are wingnuts like his Official Good Jew, Gilad "there's no such thing as antisemitism, but the Zionists killed Jesus anyway" Atzmon.
To nessie, "Zionists are all alike," and if you point to the rather obvious fact that there is an entire political spectrum on display in every election, the sort of spectrum that looks pretty appealing given the monochrome we're seeing here in the US election campaign, he will try to fob off the same tired Nazi analogy he uses every _other_ time someone has tried to get him to open his eyes on the topic. To him, anyone left of Atzmon is Kahane. Period, end of discussion, and if you disagree it's because you're "racist" "racist" "racist." (By the same reasoning, any crayon that isn't white must be black, since black isn't white.)
Of course, if I had ever posted anything actually _racist_, not "racist," nessie would have thrown me out long ago, and would be parading that post at every opportunity. He can't do that, though. Why? Because I'm not a racist.
But, again, the fundamental loonytude of nessie's stance wouldn't be relevant if he weren't using his power as an IMC editor to exercise a program of political censorship based on it.
(2) Why now?
If you believe that the timing of nessie's banning me last night has, at root, anything to do with his hyperbolic chants of "racist" "racist" "racist" hyperbollocks, you're being naive. It's personal. I'm banned because I have, using simple logic and commitment to the core values of the IMC movement, and maybe even the occasional flash of wit, dribbled him up and down the site like a basketball any time I wanted the exercise. He's gotten tired of losing at his own game, yet he couldn't ban me because I kept failing to turn into a fire-breathing raving loon the way Wendy Campbell did. So he just redefined "racism" instead, and what do you know, now Wendy and I are equally "racist" and can be banned simultaneously as an act of "balance."
It's also a petulant reaction to the spammer. He can't stop the spammer, but he can stop me, and he decided that's good enough for him. He _knows_ I'm not the spammer. He will, however, pretend here that he doesn't. He will tape that "Ee-e-evil Zi-i-i-ionist" mask over my face and then declare that "blood drips from my fangs," that I'm a paid agent of The Conspiracy, or that there are Zionist Mossad agents in his kosher cornflakes after all, or whatever other shriek!-shriek!-shriek! comes to his mind. After all, I am The Zionist, and no accusation or demonization can be too ridiculous against The Zionist. Slandering The Zionist is a good thing, not a bad thing, because The Zionist is ee-e-e-evil incarnate.
And, in particular, I am banned now because in the biggest long-standing argument we've had -- over the blatant antisemitism displayed by Wendy Campbell for more than a year and nessie's increasingly pathetic and increasingly inexplicable denial of same in light of the mountains of evidence I have amassed for him -- I was _right_. Turns out Wendy Campbell really _is_ a Jew-hating wretch after all, and really should have been banned from the ranch all along. That just burns nessie's ass intolerably: the Zionist was right. Nessie wanted to be able use my comments about Wendy as an example of "look how those Zionists are always screaming 'antisemitism,'" and then Wendy fucked it all up by being _exactly what I claimed she was all along_, a Jew-hating wretch. The timing of my banning at the very moment, the very instant nessie had to face his defeat on Windy Out Wendy is not a coincidence.
( 3 ) Interlude
For those who track trivia, I first started calling Windy Wendy Campbell "Windy Out Wendy" when she outed her antisemitism on what turned out to be the very same topic she ended up destroying herself with, the "Kosher Tax" canard. For nessie now to claim he's suddenly decided to "err on the side of caution" after letting Wendy shit in his birdbath for more than a year is downright Orwellian.
( 4 ) The pragmatic effect of the twisted quid pro quo
Despite being "banned," Wendy Campbell's already back on SF-IMC, using her own name but also using nonce nyms, pretending again just to be an ordinary anti-Zionist. I've spotted her five times already. From here on out, though, nessie, you'll have to watch for her yourself. You _can_ spot her, nessie, as she continues to poison your site with her "anti-Zionist" antisemitism, right?
Oh, what the hell, I'll give you one last one.
http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2004/02/1675151_comment.php#1675709 But that's the last freebie.
In other words, the net result of your twisted quid pro quo is that Wendy's still there, quietly seeping her lunatic antisemitism into your site under her cascade of pseudonyms, and I'm not going to point her out to you any more. That's how you wanted it, isn't it, nessie?
(5) Enabling antisemitism
Note that, for all our scrapping, I have never accused nessie of antisemitism. I truly believe he is against antisemitism when he recognizes it. But the extremism of his political stance and the dogmatism by which he cleaves to it sometimes short circuit that recognition capability. That's nessie's major malfunction.
Actually, it's not that. It's that he doesn't care whether or not it's been short circuited, and rejects being told when it has. That's where the hypocrisy comes in.
What I _have_ accused him of, and accuse him of now, is _enabling_ antisemitism by turning a blind eye to it on SF-IMC. Yesterday wasn't Windy Wendy's first major antisemitic meltdown, by any stretch. But each time, nessie always found a way to pretend he hadn't seen it, or couldn't prove it, or to pretend it was really Zionist roorback roorback roorback roorback roorback, or to go strategically Alzheimers, or to suddenly become agonizingly, gut-wrenchingly preoccupied to the exclusion of all else with the epistological conundrum that he couldn't prove with absolute certainty that the antisemitic post in question _wasn't_ actually made by a contingent of Keebler elves gone rogue after an encounter with what turns out not to have been powdered sugar after all, posted from their underground bakery compound in Amsterdam. (I mean, how do you really _know_ it's not, and how can nessie possibly be expected to ban Windy Wendy without knowing for sure?)
Time after time, he found a way to excuse the inexcusable.
What, me worry about antisemitism?
( 6 ) Those Jewish genes of mine
Some of the mental ankle-biters on this site have tried, straining their already unsustainable Nazi analogies, to maintain that Gehrig The Zionist believes he is somehow genetically superior to the poor unfortunate gentile who hasn't got the good luck to be one of The Chosen People.
Heh heh.
See, the thing is, I was born 100% pure gentile. My mom, my dad, my sister, my brother, all my grandfolks, literally every single blood relative I know of (except my son, whose bar mitzvah is this April) -- not a Jew among them.
I converted to Judaism more than twenty years ago.
So you have no idea how heartily I've been enjoying it every time nessie or some other lamer has chortled to himself over the "blood and soil" argument or every time NSDAP Wendy has told me that I think that I'm superior to non-Jews and hate them, or that I use "goy" as a pejorative term, or that I'm too enamored of my own Jewish genetics. I haven't _got_ Jewish genetics. Non-Jews are literally my family.
Literally my brother. Literally my sister. Literally my father. Literally my late mother. All my grandparents, my aunt, my late uncle, their children, their grandchildren, my brother's children. And so on.
And the Joseph Heller fan in me is particularly delighted to hear that I'm being called a "racist" for my role in defending a group I have personally demonstrated for more than half my life -- by electively joining it -- can't _be_ a "race."
Chew on that one, nessie.
Heh heh.
( 7 ) Spam sermonette
Spam is bad, spammer. Don't spam. And especially don't spam _my_ stuff, whoever you are. True, it drives nessie crazy, but not nearly as crazy as I did by consistently refuting him, out in the open, until he could do nothing but repeat his bumpersticker mantra, "Zionism is racism, Zionism is racism, Zionism is racism."
( 8 ) Jewish sermonette
One of Job's "comforters" refers to God as "the maker of peace in the heavens" -- "oseh shalom bim'romav." This phrase was developed, in the Jewish liturgy, into the closing line of the full Kaddish. (The Kaddish is sometimes mischaracterized as "a prayer for the dead"; it's really more of a liturgical semicolon, recurring in different forms and marking the division between different liturgical sections in the worship service. But I digress.) "Oseh shalom bim'romav, hu yaaseh shalom aleinu v'al kol yisrael, v'imru amen."
By a peculiarity of Hebrew verb forms, this can be read in two ways: either as a plea or as an affirmation. In other words, it means both "May the maker of peace in the heavens make peace for us and all the house of Israel, and we say 'amen'" and "The maker of peace in the heavens _will_ make peace for us and for all the house of Israel, and we say 'amen.'"
Bill Clinton said this line, in Hebrew, at the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin, and I wept. It is my favorite line in the liturgy.
In Leonard Bernstein's Third Symphony, "Kaddish," the speaker paraphrases it as follows:
"Great God / You who make peace in the high places, / Who commanded the mornings since the days began, / And caused the dawn to know its place; / Surely you can cause and command / A touch of order here below, / On this one, dazed speck, / And let us say again, Amen."
And I say, amen. Amen to the plea, and amen to the affirmation.
( 9 ) Secular sermonette
The little figure I sign my posts with -- every single post I will ever have made on SF-IMC, appearing here now for the last time below -- is a miniature caricature of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
Around the time I was born, Shostakovich went head-to-head with the politburo on the antisemitism issue. His Thirteenth Symphony was a setting of five poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the first of which was "Babii Yar," which attacked -- poetically -- the Party's failure to address antisemitism within its own ranks.
The Party responded by doing everything in its power to stop the concert. Like nessie, they thought the fight against antisemitism was simply too insignificant when compared to the defense of the party line. Shostakovich was far too internationally famous to lock up (although they did send his buddy Mstislav Rostropovich, the dissident cellist for whom Shostakovich wrote those two brilliant concerti, to be a brick mason in the gulag later on). But the Party frightened away Mravinsky, the conductor of every Shostakovich symphonic premiere for the previous thirty years or so. And they frightened away, at the last moment, the bass soloist who was to sing Yevtushenko's words. And they did try to frighten Kondrashin, who took over for Mravinksy, into performing the work without the "Babii Yar" movement.
But Shostakovich stood up for what was right, and Kondrashin stood up for Shostakovich, and the concert went ahead.
Here are the closing lines of Yevtushenko's poem, the posting of which I dedicate to Shostakovich's heroism:
"When the last antisemite on earth
is buried forever
let the "Internationale" ring out!
In me there is no Jewish blood,
but in their callous rage, all antisemites
hate me now as a Jew.
For that reason
I am a true Russian!"
Compare that to the nessie version, which is not heroism but the sound of moral disintegration and invertibrate weaselry:
Antisemitism doesn't exist
And when it does
It's all the Zionists' fault
And if you point it out
It's only because you planted it yourself.
And if it's the real deal, who cares anyway
Let's just bash Zionism instead
What, me worry about antisemitism?
What a good boy am I!
( 10 )
So this is me, signing off.
To those who've given me some kind words and support for my efforts to demonstrate to nessie what's in front of his own two eyes but he can't let himself see, my thanks. I'm through tilting at this particular windmill.
Nessie, she's your problem now. Enjoy her presence, which you can no longer detect, as she seeps her poison into SF-IMC's ground water. She's the albatross you earned with your hypocrisy about antisemitism. That is, in the words of John Lennon, the sound of Instant Karma.
And, I said I would, I now leave SF-IMC with my head held high, singing the words my hero Yip Harburg wrote for a melody from my hero Dmitri Shostakovich:
Make way for the day called tomorrow; make way for the day that is new.