I am Raphael

It was the third night of Chanukah, so it was Dylan's turn to light the candles.
As I held his hand he used a candle to light the menorah while we recited the Shema.
Their mother was a quarter Jewish, and we casually observed Jewish Holy days.
An Israeli friend from work had given us the Menorah, and the boys seemed to enjoy the activities.
"Why do we celebrate Chanukah, Mikey?"
"It's when the Jews got the Temple back.
And they only had enough oil for one night, but the Menorah burned for eight days."
"Very good, Michael." I say and rub the back of his neck.
We spun the dreidel for a while and played some Israeli rock, including Dylan's favorite tune, a rock version of "la cha dodi".

Later Mikey and and I are playing tennis on the play station.
I'm McEnroe, he's Jimmy Connors.
He deftly maneuvers his man back and forth at the baseline as I prepare to serve.
I hit a smash.
It zooms past Connors, and Mikey calls out, "You cheated, Dad!"
"What?" I say, taken aback.
"Mom, Dad's cheating." Mikey yells.
Jeanne laughs, "Stop cheating, Dad."
"OK." I chuckle.
A few points later, as usual, Mikey wins the match.
I just can't beat him on the Play Station.
"Congratulations, Son, good match."
"I kicked your butt, Dad."
"In a game Son. In real life I could easily kick your butt."
Jeanne walked by with an armful of clothing, heading towards the washing machine.
"Don't threaten a small child, Dad." Jeanne says and playfully punches me in the arm.
We go into the kitchen, I make some spaghetti and the night winds down.
I look out towards the glassed in porch, and I see it's snowing, flakes dusting the grass outside.
A chill passes through me.
Like someone walking over my grave.
A feeling of foreboding.
I walked outside and lit a cigarette, the cold night air felt good, invigorating.
What is bothering you? I asked myself.
You have a wife, beautiful children, a job you love, with a future.
Something was about to happen, I answered myself.
What? I asked.
I don't know. I don't know. I replied.

Sweet Revenge

Raphael was a Renaissance painter who specialized in portraits.
I am a writer who specializes in portraits.
That is my only, tenuous, connection to Raphael, the Greatest Painter of all time.

Oh, I had a print of Raphael's painting of a young girl.
She was about my age
She was wearing a diaphanous gown, her skin was deep brown, it glowed softly, she was my love object for a time in my early youth,

As a young man, for a time, I was a Fighter.
I had some great fights, like every decent boxer, and some sad defeats, but I kept fighting until I felt I was prepared to defend myself and my loved ones with my hands alone.

I've knocked out lots of men.
Conversely, lots of men have knocked me out.

Once, when I was a high spirited but thoroughly wary young man of 14, my stepfather took me out to the barn to see what I had learned at the gym I was attending.
We laced up a pair of worn 14 ounce gloves and began sparring.
Al immediately came in and hit me with a hard left hook which rattled my brain.
stunned, I threw a flurry of mistimed and ineffectual punches, which Al blocked and answered with stiff hard blows to my head.

For the next ten minutes or so, he beat me up pretty badly.
After a while his brother Adolph who'd been watching the beating, pulled Al off of me.
I was almost out on my feet.
I spit blood onto the dirt covered floor of the barn, where I slept at night, I clenched my jaws and stared at Al.
I will pay you back, you bastard, I thought.

And I did.

Why seeing the world in black and white is so dangerous.

July 24, 2011  |  

Photo Credit: ajagendorf25

LIKE THIS ARTICLE ?

Join our mailing list:

Sign up to stay up to date on the latest headlines via email.

It would be wrong, of course, to suggest that anyone who hits these themes is a terrorist in waiting or supports violence.The revelation by CNN that Norwegian right wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik kept a diary in which he obsessed about the dangers of cultural Marxism, multiculturalism, and the “Islamification” of Europe will remind many Americans of the tactics of our own right wing (only these themes have been taken up by people much more mainstream in the US than Breivik is in Norway!) The movement to ban the shariah, the castigation of a progressive income tax as “Marxist,” the condemnation of multiculturalism as a threat to Western values, are all themes commonly heard in the US Tea Party .

But here is the reason for which such rhetoric is dangerous and can easily lead to social violence.

It is black and white, allowing no nuance. Immigration is not a smooth process, and is attended with problems in some cases. The history of the United States, an immigrant society, suggests that whatever the problems are, they are not insuperable. But Breivik saw Muslim immigration in particular as a threat to the very identity of Europe. That is, if the immigration from the Middle East were allowed to continue, then ultimately there would be no Europe, just a big Iran on all sides of the Mediterranean. Moreover, he imagined this process of Islamification as happening very quickly.

Breivik’s thinking is not new under the sun. Protestant Nativists of the “Native American” and later “Know-Nothing” (i.e. secret society) movement in the 1830s through 1850s in the United States felt exactly the same way about Catholic immigrants to the US. America wouldn’t be America if this went on. Their values were inherently incompatible with the Constitution. Their loyalties were to an anti-modern foreign court dedicated to reinforcement of political and intellectual tyranny. The hordes of them would take over the country before too long. The combination of black-and-white thinking and a conviction that undesirable change is coming very rapidly often provokes violence. Brian Porter’s When Nationalism Learned to Hate makes the point about Poland, that peaceful democratic processes depend crucially on patience and a conviction that the future can be won. When members of a movement become impatient and believe that the situation could quickly and unalterably shift against them, they are much more likely to turn to violence.

Catholic immigrants to the US, like Muslim immigrants to Europe, cannot in fact be characterized in a black and white way. Catholics in the contemporary US are politically and socially diverse, but on the whole are more socially liberal than evangelical Protestants. That is, if the Know-Nothings were afraid of an anti-Enlightenment religious movement, it would have been to their own, Protestant ranks, that they should have looked.

Likewise, making a black-and-white division between “Christian” Europe and “Islam” is frankly silly. The European continent is itself a fiction (it is geologically contiguous with North Africa, and there is no eastern geographical feature that divides it from Afro-Asia). Islam has been the religion of millions of Europeans over the past 1400 years, whether in Umayyad Spain, Arab Sicily, or Ottoman Eastern Europe, and Muslim contributions to European advances are widely acknowledged.

As for contemporary Muslims in Europe, they are diverse. Overwhelmingly, e.g., Parisian Muslims say that they are loyal to France. About half of the Turks in Germany are from the Alevi sect, a kind of folk Shiism, and most of those are not very religious and politically are just social democrats (oh, the horror of Breivik’s nightmare– Muslim progressives in Europe!) That the few hundred thousand Muslims in Spain (pop. 45 mn.) , or the 4 million in Turkey (5 percent of the population) could effect a revolution in European affairs of the sort Breivik fears is frankly absurd, especially since Muslims are not a political bloc who agree with one another about politics and society. They are from different countries and traditions. Many do not have full citizenship or voting rights, most of the rest are apolitical. But even if they became a substantial proportion of the population, they would be unlikely to change Europe’s way of doing things that much.

Breivik, of course, also exercised black-and-white thinking about the left of center currents in Europe, amalgamating them all to Marxism, presumably of a Soviet sort, and seeing them as taking over. In fact, ironically, it is parties and rhetoric that Breivik would have approved of that are making the most rapid strides in Europe. Right wing parties that would once have been pariahs have been power brokers in Sweden and Finland, and Nicolas Sarkozy has borrowed so much rhetoric from the LePens that some accuse him of legitimizing them.

Worrying about the impact of immigration is not pernicious. Opposing leftist political ideas is everyone’s right in a democracy. Disagreeing over religion is natural.

But when you hear people talking about lumping all these issues together; when you hear them obliterating distinctions and using black-and-white rhetoric; when you hear them talk of existential threats, and above all when you see that they are convinced that small movements that they hate are likely to have an immediate and revolutionary impact, then you should be afraid, be very afraid. That is when extremism learns to hate, and turns to violence.

Democracy depends on a different kind of rhetoric. Healthy politics is about specific programs, not about conspiracy theories as to what underlies someone’s commitment to a program. Most Americans don’t want people to die because of not being able to afford health care. Lambasting that sentiment as tyrannical Bolshevism is a recipe for social conflict.

Unfortunately, some unscrupulous billionaires, Rupert Murdoch and the Koch Brothers prominent among them, have honed their propaganda skills in the media and public life. The promotion of hate, panic, and fear, especially if it is tied to specific political, ethnic and religious groups, always risks violence.

The real message of Breivik is that we should all take a deep breath and step back from the precipice.

© 2011 Juan Cole

He is our Heavenly Father, and he loves us.

Oh, He made such wonderful things!

 Poison Ivy,  scorpions, bedbugs, flies.
Black widows, chiggers, head lice...tapeworms...

How about this game he invented....

If you believe in Him, despite all logic and history  and evidence
which indicates the fairy tale nature of God,  you are rewarded with
harps and angels and in the case of Muslims, hot to trot virgins.

OTOH, if you don't believe in Him, because you have not been
sufficiently indoctrinated, or you are a scientist or student of
history or comparative religion, or maybe Satan has a holt of ya, you
are thrown into a lake of fire for your error, forever.

He is our Heavenly Father, and he loves us.
We are his children.

And if we misbehave he will roast us forever. :-)

Whistle and Go Fishin' in heaven

Right wing pundits aside, one doesn't hear much denial of the global climate change situation.

It was 102 degrees in Bob Dylan's birthplace of Hibbings, Minnesota a couple of days ago.

In the last hundred years with the combination of oil and coal and exhaust the climate has changed.

While it's true that some areas are experiencing record cold weather and historically unique weather,

Most scientists agree that at some point the earth will resemble Venus, wrapped in a shroud of heated vapors, lifeless, unless we act.

You don't hear any prominent pols deny the real threat here, it's the far out radical fantasists that carry the banner of “global climate change is a commie plot” or a hoax, and so on.

This is an issue we need to unite around.

It shouldn't be difficult, knowing the facts, to see the correlation between what has happened to the weather and man's contribution to it.

What may be harder to visualize, but is ultimately more important, is to find wayus to reberse the damage already done.

If you have children, and you want them to have a beautiful planet to enjoy, you need to become part of the solution to this problem.