The Deep Talons of History and Hate

 

"Well, surely nobody will be so callous as to say that there is less despair among Palestinians today--especially since the terrible events in the Gaza Strip and the return to power of the Israeli right wing as well as the expansion of Jewish-zealot settler activity."

"There were also young women, some of whom, it seems, would otherwise have been killed for 'honor' reasons and who were offered the relatively painless alternative of a martyr's fate. Nasty, vicious, fanatical old men, not human emotions, were making decision and deciding the days and the hours of death. And the hysterical ululating street celebrations when such a mission was successful did not signify despair at all but a creepy form of religious exaltation in which relatives were encouraged to make a feast out of the death of their own children as well as those of other people...Women martyrs are obviously not offered the same level of bliss and promiscuity by the Koran."

--Christopher Hitchens

Slate, July 13, 2009

The striking thing about this essay is the year it was written: 14 years ago!

He was speaking about the decline in the number of suicide bombers in Palestine at the time which had people wondering if the Palestinian complaint was cooling off, even subsiding.

Hitchens noted elsewhere, when asked about the Palestinian "cause," their displacement from land they occupied by a European immigration to the Middle East, (sometimes referred to without a shred of irony as "The Holy Land," a land of peace and love, to be sure,) but what Hitchens said was the origin story of some, if not most, nations has been one of a great crime, or, at least of injustice. 

He did not have to say specifically he was thinking of, and he may have been thinking beyond the history of Europeans displacing Indians from the East Coast of America, and from the Great Plains, until they were all rounded up and contained, and then, in many cases, slaughtered in small "reservations" or death camps.

What he was saying was that this is the plain, lamentable history of the human race, likely as far back as the displacement of the Neanderthals by the Cro Magnon homo sapiens,  but what we have to deal with in the case of Palestine, is that this is another example, and we have to deal with the reality of newcomers displacing former wardens of the land. 

The story is so old and so consistent in its fastidious replications, that we can almost substitute the proper nouns for one another. 

"Settlers" move in and are, at first, massacred by "natives" who express their displeasure by savage offenses, whether by scalping, beheading, dismembering, burning or other more imaginative forms of torture, and these horrors  are then invoked by the offended settler group as reason to regard the natives as subhuman, beastial, barbarians and any reprisal, then, is justified.

Some of the tactics have been refined over the years to accommodate the power of mass communications which the Indians of America did not have at their disposal:  the Palestinian insurgents, hiding behind the skirts of the downtrodden group, hold up their dead women and children and appeal to the conscience of those powers who may work in concert with their oppressors. And the dead women and children are victims, innocent in the sense they never threw a bomb themselves. They are victims as the children of Hiroshima and Dresden were innocent.  

Of course, in the cases of Hiroshima and Dresden, we had those counter images of the raped victims of Nanking and the children of the concentration camps, and it was widely understood the bombings were to correct those wrongs. Never mind, the children of Hiroshima and Dresden knew nothing of these offenses.

The idea of a moral force behind such atrocities has been entertained at least as far back as Lincoln, who, wondering why such horror and devastation had been visited upon his nation, asked if a righteous God had demanded that for every drop of blood drawn by the bondsman's lash had to be repaid by one drawn by the sword.

Today, the Israelis say they will not stop until they have extirpated their Hamas tormenters. They speak, without appearing to notice the problem with the word, of "extermination," of Hamas, as if you could exterminate a movement. The Israelis, of course, need no lectures about extermination.

A people, of course, can be exterminated. Nobody knows that better than the European Jews. 

But you cannot kill an idea, especially one sauteed in hate.

Boston Globe Goes Down the Rabbit Hole with Grace Rubenstein

 

Did you know that the fact that men cannot have babies, as least with current technology is a prime case of "the highly inequitable realm of reproduction"?

I had never actually thought of it this way, but it is just so unfair and inequitable that when it comes to getting pregnant and having a baby, people who happen to have been dealt the biological deal of having an XY chromosome complement are just, well, you know, screwed.

But, there is hope on the (likely distant) horizon because "emerging technologies could increase equity for anyone trying to build a biological family missing a component, be that an egg, a sperm or a uterus." 

Grace Rubenstein

I learned all this from Grace Rubenstein, who, I learned from Linked in holds a BA in psychology from Williams College and is a "podcast coach"  not to mention a journalist and editor, and who wrote the story on the front page of The Boston Globe's Ideas section about the possibility that stem cells may someday allow male homosexuals to produce egg cells with their very own DNA, and those could be used to produced a baby with the sperm of their male partners. 

Now THAT would be EQUITY!

And all this may be possible because a brilliant scientist at the Branch Lab at Harvard, Christian Kramme, who has spun off a private start up company called Gameto (from the word, gamete, get it?) is working on something called an "ovaroid" and, he says, "we're trying to even out the burden" so it's not all on the woman with XX chromosomes to bear the burden of IVF which causes "bloating, headaches, mood disruptions and painful ovarian swelling" and "costs tens of thousands of dollars. And it's a process that the female partner may suffer through even when a couple's infertility problems are caused by the male partner."

Which really was news to me, because I thought IVF was basically a way to use male sperm to inseminate female eggs in a petri dish and if the male sperm is immotile or diminished, having an egg awaiting it in a petri dish is not likely to help much.

But that's just me. Maybe some IVF clinics will try anything, if you pay them.

And, oh, about paying, Dr. Kramme says that his work is likely to succeed eventually, given enough money.  Which is to say if you give him enough money and Gameto succeeds, then, as the CEO of Gameto says, women can have the same flexibility about when they get pregnant as men have when it comes to becoming a parent. Of course, the way I heard Dr. Kramme is: "Give me money." Ms. Rubenstein seems to have missed this aspect of Dr. Kramme's "passion" for his work. It's all about equity for Dr. Kramme, making child bearing as available to men as to women--as if men would really want that. What kind of market research has he done? But, nothing as crass as simply making money could possibly motivate Gameto.

It's always a clue when a professor at Harvard spins off his work to off campus and establishes a company, which apparently doesn't bother Harvard much.

Of course, they seem to have forgotten about the part where you have to carry the pregnancy for nine months at age 44, or whenever you are ready. But wait! They are even working on stem cell uteruses which can incubate the baby outside the body making surrogate parents obsolete.

Vardit Ravitsky

And don't worry about bioethics: Vardit Ravitsky, who is president of the bioethics research institute, the Hastings Center of the University of Montreal, says, "Any technology that allows us to do things we couldn't do before, my impulse says, if we manage to do this responsibly and wisely, who gets to join the party of reproduction?"

This should comfort Hei Juankui, the Chinese scientist who produced a gene edited baby and raised the specter of "designer babies," and was sent to prison for that particular reproductive party.

It is just so unjust that women cannot have babies after menopause, that men cannot make eggs, that transexual females (i.e. those who started life out as males) cannot have babies, and oh, the INEQUITY!

Of course, every year we are told about stem cells.  Folks with diabetes type 1, who cannot make a single hormone, insulin, could theoretically be cured if only we could implant into them stem cells which had been turned into insulin producing cells pumping out insulin. And every year for the past 30 years, we have been told that stem cells which can do this are only 10 years away. That cell has been 10 years away for 30 years. 

I won't hold my breath until that stem cell miracle occurs. 

But that won't stop Gameto from raising venture capital, and it won't stop Grace Rubenstein from dreaming of that last frontier of inequity, that only women can get pregnant and it won't stop Vardit Ravitsky from celebrating the idea that anything we haven't been able to do before must be something we should do now, especially if it allows more people to join the reproductive party.

But what I'm really wondering is: Have the lay offs at the Boston Globe meant that they have fired all the editors?

I mean, doesn't anybody over there even read these stories before they are published?

Freedom From to Freedom to Government Control of Religion in Hampton, NH

 Remarks on the Warrant Article

(Again)

February, 2024

Well, here we are again.

For me, it's the third time.

Looking about this room, watching people file in, I'm guessing we have about 300 people here tonight, about 200 of whom are congregants, or friends, of the Church of the Miraculous Medal. A priest in his collar is here, and I'm betting he is connected to that congregation.

And all these folks have come to vote to in favor of recommending this warrant article which allows taxpayer funds to pay for invoices from the Church of the Miraculous Medal, Sacred Heart school: invoices for paper crowns which may used for religious pageants, or computers for streaming religious services.  At our last meeting, a year ago the Treasurer who writes the checks, Ms. Curtis, admitted she had no idea how those specific items were used, for religious ceremonies or not.

The members of the School Board have voted to endorse the warrant article, although last year they declined to answer my question about whether using taxpayer money for religious purposes bothered them. Their answer was in their votes.

Or, actually, what some of the School Board members said, by implication, is we are not sure if taxpayer dollars fund these religious icons, but we really don't care if they do. Qui Tacit Consentit--silence implies consent.

Of course, I have no illusions about changing anyone's mind tonight. What I hope is that once you have cast your ballot to invalidate the First amendment of the Bill of Rights, you might reflect on what John F. Kennedy said about not allowing trying to be a good Catholic get in the way of being a good American.

This is what John F. Kennedy had to say on this subject:

"Because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured—perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again—not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me—but what kind of America I believe in.

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote—where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference...

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish—where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source—where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials—and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew—or a Quaker—or a Unitarian—or a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim—but tomorrow it may be you—until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.

Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end—where all men and all churches are treated as equal—where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice—where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind—and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood."

For some years, and even now, it is possible to believe we have swung in exactly the direction JFK had hoped we would: President Biden, it turns out, is a devout Catholic and yet you almost never hear a word said about that. He is attacked for being many other things--a senile old man, a Communist, a crook, but never "a Catholic."

Nobody here tonight will argue that Sacred Heart School is not worthy of support. I myself have supported it using my own private checking account. I have no objection to supporting Sacred Heart School. I encourage others to do it. But I object to using taxpayer funds to do it.

Some have said this is all a tempest in a teapot: The amount of money whether it is $65,000 or $55,000 in a given year is a pittance compared to the overall town budget. I can only say that  single dollar of taxpayer funds is too much.

.

Is this warrant article unconstitutional?  

Of course, it is, unless you subscribe to the cynical belief that what is unconstitutional or constitutional is whatever the current presiding Supreme Court says it is. 

Justice Sotomayor has said that the current Supreme Court has said that separation of church and state is unconstitutional. She places those 5 justices in the same boat as Representative Lauren Boebert who has declared separation of church and state is nowhere in the Constitution--her own willful blindness--and she has said furthermore that if it were there, it shouldn't be, because the United States is a Christian nation and always should be. And they call her Representative Boebert for a reason: she does represent her constituents. But I hope she could never represent constituents in New Hampshire.

It's a source of sadness, to see Hampton cling to this practice of sending taxpayer monies to a church which many people in Hampton love, to a school of that church which I've heard such good things about, I was moved to dip into my own bank account for that school. 

But, I have to admit, in the end, this insistence by some members of that church, which has enriched so many lives, seems to me somehow unworthy of that church, and is profoundly disappointing.

Gazing at Gaza from New Hampshire

 

Trying to make sense of the horrific events in Gaza from my hamlet in New Hampshire, one can only admit, we haven't a clue. 

Or, perhaps, all we have are clues, but no real clarity.

On the one hand, the rampaging Hamas twenty something men, beheading families, raping, stabbing, shooting, burning can be seen in only one way: Nothing can justify that.

Gaza 2023

On the other hand, these men did not erupt simply because they are monsters. Even monsters arise from some nest.

In white bred New Hampshire, where men wear plaid shirts, blue jeans held up with belts and suspenders, trying to fathom what the complaint is become surreal. We can only imagine.

Is Gaza simply another 9/11, with fanatic men acting from some generalized frenzy of inchoate resentment and loathing, men who would be unable to actually articulate their complaint beyond, "We are occupied! We are oppressed! We live in an apartheid land!"?

Warsaw 1939

Or is Gaza a sort of Warsaw ghetto, where conditions are unlivable, with incomprehensible poverty and destitution, and the destruction is triggered by the overwhelmingly powerful oppressors?

Or is Gaza like the inner cities of the United States in 1968, which exploded in flame, looting, shooting, incomprehensible, random destruction?

All we can tell, from the shire on the Seacoast is someone had a cause, but whatever that cause, they unleashed such random, generalized and untargeted horror it is almost impossible to sympathize with them.

Warsaw Ghetto

Then again, Goebbels and Hitler claimed the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto were violent, dangerous vermin who had to be ruthlessly crushed, and the Nazis wanted everyone to see the Jews in that ghetto as deserving of their fate and an example had to be made of them.

But, that's not the way others saw the people who lived in the ghetto, at whom the Nazis were aiming their wrath:

“We continued in the direction of the city center, but travelled only a few meters, because of the intense fighting…A never ending column of miserable people shuffled by. It was the most shocking site. Women, children, old people. Deadly tired faces without a shadow of hope, eyes swollen from smoke and tears, faces covered with shoot, a picture of despair and doubt. Policemen with machine guns walked beside them.”

Listening to the Israelis today, with the words of "we will crush and destroy these Hamas animals, so they can never arise again," does sound familiar--as if you can exterminate a people, erase them, rub them out.

Well, we did come close to doing that at Wounded Knee, so maybe it's possible.

Nowhere can we find what we really want to know: What is it like for the Palestinians in Gaza and in the rest of Israel?

One professor noted that the GDP per individual in Gaza is $1,000 a year where it is $56,000 for an Israeli. Does that mean this is the average yearly income? He said the Palestinian, making 1/56 of what the Israeli makes has to pay the same prices for goods in Gaza.

What restrictions does the Palestinian have in Gaza? Is it like the Warsaw Jew in his Ghetto, unable to cross out of the ghetto only a few hours a day and that with a special pass? Or can he come and go freely, earn a living anywhere in Israel?

What is life like for the people who Hamas says it speaks for? What does it mean to say they are "occupied?"

We can watch Netflix TV shows set in Palestine and Israel, and get some sense of the issues, but we are really in the dark without real objective information.

All we can know for sure, from New Hampshire, is we have no clue what the real issues are in Gaza.