Realism and Sacredness

As we all watch the news in disbelief, seeing our country turn into Nazi Germany before our eyes and the man in the White House condoning the most vile ideology produced by the human race, my thoughts go to a much more minor and mundane incident that happened a few days ago. No one was a monster and nothing turned to tragedy. And yet, I find myself still thinking about it. I was at a fitness instructor training for an acrobatic discipline. It was rigorous and required physical and mental concentration and effort. There was to be a practical exam at the end of the training, in which we were to teach a complicated, multi-step sequence of poses and transitions to the general public while spotting them for safety. With or without justification, the students were stressed out, fearing they would forget something or mess up the sequence. Some of us were truly gifted athletes and yoginis, whose ability to demonstrate poses exceeded their ability to spontaneously come up with rich and prec...

Tennessee Williams' shocking play Suddenly Last Summer  is one of his efforts to confront, with an overwhelming amount of courage and honesty, the horror of sexual dissociation. Young Catharine, suspected of mental illness and under threat of lobotomy, is injected with a truth serum, and under its influence tells a terrible story. Her cousin Sebastian, who traveled with her abroad, exploited her to lure young men he could have sex with (as he had exploited his mother before her.) Eventually, a heated, incited mob of hungry, abused children, chases Sebastian in the streets of Spain and exacts a terrible revenge: they mutilate and murder him and even feast on his flesh. The story is too much for Sebastian's relatives to handle. It horrifies us, as well, and at the same time captivates us, as horrible things often do. There's a reason why cultural heritage is universally infused with stories of mobs and sacrifice. The classic, of course, is the Greatest Story Ever Told. The lu...

Shortly before the election, David Brooks published a fascinating piece titled Donald Trump's Sad, Lonely Life . Among other things, he writes: Imagine you are Trump. You are trying to bluff your way through a debate. You’re running for an office you’re completely unqualified for. You are chasing some glimmer of validation that recedes ever further from view.  Your only rest comes when you are insulting somebody, when you are threatening to throw your opponent in jail, when you are looming over her menacingly like a mafioso thug on the precipice of a hit, when you are bellowing that she has “tremendous hate in her heart” when it is clear to everyone you are only projecting what is in your own.  Trump’s emotional makeup means he can hit only a few notes: fury and aggression. In some ways, his debate performances look like primate dominance displays — filled with chest beating and looming growls. But at least primates have bands to connect with, whereas Trump is so alone,...

Like pretty much every decent person I know, I was outraged to find out--via tweet, no less--that our president has decided to ban transgender people from military service. This is one more example of the casual afterthought with which this administration erases civil rights and is an absolute outrage. I also agree with those who commented this morning that simultaneous occurrence of bad things (efforts to deny healthcare to millions of Americans and efforts to marginalize trans people) does not imply that one is a "distraction" from the other. It is pouring bad news, and these are just two of those. And yet, I always find myself uneasy when our civil rights struggle revolves around military service. My discomfort stems, I imagine, from having grown up in an extremely militarized country, in which two massive fictions govern the idea of service: that everyone must serve (i.e., that the army is moral and ethical and is busy defending a small democracy in a sea of hostile c...

On election night I was at a party downtown, on the second floor of a new pub, with the architects of Prop. 62, may it rest in peace. A big TV screen showed the national election numbers, which grew more and more worrisome by the hour, and servers ascended the staircase with fried appetizers. I expressed concern to one of the guys who ran the campaign. Don't worry, he said, she's got it in the bag. But I kept looking at the screen with grave concern, and then the numbers on the local propositions started rolling in. That Prop. 64 passed was no big surprise, and that Prop. 62 did not look like it was going to pass was a disappointment. We didn't know yet that 66 was going to pass. But the national scene already looked pretty disturbing. Embarrassment and defeat stood in the room like stale air. I left the party and hopped on my scooter, riding to Hastings. The Democratic Club had invited me and Chad to see the election results with them on the 24th floor. The Sky Room of...

If you're anything like me, it has been difficult to get things done in the last few months, as the Russia probe slowly unraveled. Like roadside drivers slowing down because they can't take their eyes off a disastrous wreck, I have followed the newspapers, the posts, the tweets, and even been to the studio a couple of times to comment on key moments of the scandal (the Comey testimony had me holed up at KTVU for four hours.) Glee and furor about the discoveries turns into despair at the slim prospects that some of our Republican lawmakers will grow a backbone and strip the Emperor of Trumpistan of his new clothes. A couple of months ago I had some friends over for lunch and a viewing of Coppola's terrific All the President's Men with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. The intrigues on screen are absorbing and evoke a feeling of paranoia and a chase. But the movie also left me dismayed at how our naiveté has evaporated. In the seventies, a president who spies on his op...

January 12, 1900. A 19-year-old Yosef Haim Brenner, freshly disillusioned with religion and with a Yeshiva boy career--and two years before his first novel, In Winter , will launch his meteoric literary career, writes to his soulmate and friend, Uri Nissan Gnessin: We must sacrifice our soul and decrease the evil in the world, evil of hunger, slavery, dismissal, hypocrisy, and the like. It is essential to understand everything, understand and distance ourselves from mysticism and mirages. It is essential to increase the realism and sacredness in the world. It is essential to mend the Israeli People's life to make it normal. And the terrible agony of my soul is the outcome of my doubts in general: Is there a remedy? Are we going forward? ... A few days ago I became a plant eater (vegetarian.) You are writing a historical poem - and that I do not understand. Can we afford to distract ourselves, even for a moment, from the present? Do you know the situation of our youth? Do you rea...