Childhood Memory
I posted this on Twitter / X today in response to a question asking people to describe one of the happiest memories from my childhood:
A quiet grey morning in early Spring when my mother and I visited the Central Park Zoo; an elephant ate peanuts from my hand and we looked into each other’s eyes.
50 years. Still remembered, still missed.
Toast
For all the Saturdays missed,
For the sad Sinatra lyrics unheard
on countless grey evenings,
For one soft kiss
From a sister to her kid brother,
For half a century
of having to make each memory last,
I raise this glass.
To you.
News Comments in the Parler
Our local online news source allows registered readers to comment. They have turned a parlor game into a Parler game, exercising their free speech by trashing Joe Biden, the CDC, the FDA, etc. But this does not stop even when the topics are not political or do not deal with the pandemic. Even a simple weather update receives a slew of negative political diatribes, complete with name-calling and insults.
Coyotes howl at the moon
as if the moon had caused the night.
Wild dogs fear the snow
and blame the President.
A 9-Minute Summary
This tweet from Leslie Jones contains a video clip that perfectly summarizes in a little over 9 minutes exactly what has gone wrong.
The Parade Around Wannsee
In 1990, attorney Mike Godwin stated that as an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope) the probability of a comparison involving nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches certainty. This became known as Godwin’s Law, and if you evoke such a comparison you’re automatically derided online. I’m sure I’ll be accused of invoking Godwin’s Law for this. Don’t bother to register your criticism; you’re wrong. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar (per Freud) — and sometimes a nazi is just a nazi.
Here begins my transgression of Godwin’s Law.
Once again, republicans have blocked the rights of Americans to vote. They used the filibuster, a political tactic that emerged in order to preserve racist policies after the Civil War. Adding insult to this injury, they defend blocking voting rights through the use of indirect language — almost a code — with terms that conceal their real intentions.
Hiding goals behind benign language is an old technique. It’s ironic and appropriate that this is the 80th anniversary of the nazi Wannsee meeting (held 1/20/1942). At that conference, 15 nazi officials devoted a mere 90 minutes to develop and lay out their “final solution” for slaughtering millions of people. They deliberately concealed their goals through neutral, even benign, language. For a more thorough account of Wannsee, see this New York Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/20/world/europe/lake-wannsee-conference-final-solution-holocaust.html
Of the the 15 nazi officials who participated in the Wannsee conference, some ended up commanding or organizing murder squads, while others set up a legal framework for genocide. By the end of the war in 1945, 6 had died; 3 were tried for unrelated offenses and given mild sentences; and 4 were never even charged with their crimes. Only 2 ever stood trial for war crimes, the more well-known being Adolf Eichmann — who had hidden out in Argentina for years until he was taken to Israel, tried and eventually executed.
That trial and execution took place when I was a child, and I vividly remember animated discussions in my neighborhood about whether the trial was fair. Even as a child, I was surprised to hear adults argue about this. It was shocking to hear some of my own neighbors defending a man who engineered the murder of millions of people. I was embarrassed for my neighbors, because I expected that — one day — they would come to regret their defense of the indefensible. I hope they did. Defending nazi atrocities isn’t a good look.
A common defense of past errors of moral judgment is that “those were different times.” Maybe genocide was ok then? After all, the Wannsee nazi Gerhard Klopfer continued working as a lawyer after the war, and his 1987 obituary celebrated “a fulfilled life that was to the benefit of all those who came under his sphere of influence.”
That obit is a perfect example of denial and self-justification beyond the point of insanity.
So now we’re back to Godwin. Is my reference nothing more than “Reductio ad Hitlerum“? No. The republican goals are not entirely dissimilar from the nazis. Sure, they don’t say they’d like to slaughter millions of people (although their media outlets have recently celebrated the murderers of a number of Black Americans) — but the first step toward genocide is to de-legitimize The Other. Thus, the republicans remove the ability of The Other to vote; they separate The Other from Us, as Mitch McConnell did when he differentiated African-Americans from Americans in his statement. And while you’re at it, minimize murder of The Other; this will help when you try a violent overthrow of the government in a coup.
The republicans already helped promote an attempted coup — their lame version of the Reichstag fire, I suppose. And they deny that it was an attempted coup.
The slope is not slippery at all; it isn’t even a slope. It is a deliberate march around the perimeter of Wannsee, with McConnell, Greene, Boebert, McCarthy, Cruz et al. leading the troops.
And they’re closing in.
“A Three-Hour Riot”
Majorly Failure Greene now characterizes the coup attempt as “just a 3-hour riot.”
Reading that, I couldn’t get the theme of Gilligan’s Island out of my head.
So I wrote this and tweeted it out in a string of Replies to a post.
Just sit right down and shut your mouth
And hear a tale of fear.
About a little gathering
Earlier this year.
The leader was an orange man,
Who said he’d like to try it:
Some hundreds all set out that day
For a three hour riot, a three hour riot.
The crowd began to demonstrate,
They broke down every fence,
If not for the exit of the congress folk
They would’ve hanged Mike Pence, they would’ve hanged Mike Pence.
The crowd dispersed and sent out tweets, before long they were caught
With Failure Greene,
The Turtle too,
The fake billionaire and his wife,
The Proudest Boys and the rest
Here on Giuliani Isle.
Closed
All I can say after the latest round of republican party maneuvers to restrict voting and impose new, biased limits on the right to vote.
75 Years Ago
It’s amazing how much life can be compressed into such a small paper artifact.
Nestled in an old cardboard box, amid my mother’s canceled checks, I discovered a purple ticket stub from the Ethel Barrymore Theater, dated March 30, 1946.
A search online* revealed that from December 26, 1945 through July 1, 1946 Pygmalion was playing there.
So now I know one more fragment of information about my parents and their shared love for the theater.
More research uncovered more information. The Playbill site** told me who was in the cast: Gertrude Lawrence played Eliza Doolittle and Raymond Massey played Henry Higgins. Cedrick Hardwicke is credited with Staging.
These details give me a sense — possibly illusory — that I know a bit more about what they experienced that evening. And I see them as a young couple, out on the town for a Saturday night; enjoying the new, post-war era of peace; looking forward, ready to dance into the future.
A few months later, they were married.
It was 75 years ago.
The decades since that evening brought their changes. The hope of a new home. Adorable children. Debts that grew with the slow inevitability of a mountain range emerging from an ancient plain. Mortgage. One child after another is frighteningly ill. Someone develops cancer. More debts. One child after another is a rebellious disappointment. Eventually, the festering conflicts resolve; or they do not.
After 75 years, the story’s various endings are clear, and they all seem unbearably sad. I have never been comfortable with change. Do all stories end in death?
I can see two simultaneous images of my brother: a giggling little boy who was his father’s great joy; and an old man in pain, swollen with malignancy and the burden of years, regretting his mistakes and his lost innocence — every breath an effort despite the mechanical ventilator beeping with the regularity of a loyal dog sighing at his bedside. Meanwhile, the little boy is sitting in a row boat, waiting for his father to take him out fishing on a warm sunny morning.
I prefer to see that little boy.
For the same reason, I choose not to see my father in his final moments — sick and weak, a thin replica of his younger self; or my mother — 15 years later, experiencing the same symptoms in the same room. I prefer to see them at the Barrymore, eagerly anticipating an evening of theatrical magic. They are happy, in love and at the height of their powers.
They are entering the theater and the show.
— Robert Gengerke
4/26/2021–4/27/2021
* At https://broadwayscene.com/h-m/the-ethyl-barrymore-theatre
** At https://www.playbill.com/production/pygmalion-ethel-barrymore-theatre-vault-0000004406
On Derek Chauvin
Amid the somber celebration of this victory for justice, there are sobering facts we should consider about the trial of Derek Chauvin. The circumstances of the trial show us how far we have fallen from the ideal of justice rendered impartially to all.
What? How can this be? Wasn’t the killer convicted? Doesn’t this prove that the system works? Well, yes — kind of.
If I (or anyone I know — i.e., non-police, non-celebrity folks) was recorded on camera committing an obvious murder, there would not be a trial; there would be only a brief plea-bargaining session during which I would be begging for the lightest possible sentence in exchange for not making more trouble by causing delays and incurring court expenses, costing prosecutors time, etc. I would not take the risk that a jury would ignore the obvious evidence of my guilt. I would not assume that exoneration was my right by birth. I certainly would not brazenly tough it out, slouching in court every day and sneering at the prosecution’s witnesses.
But then there is Derek Chauvin. He’s different. He gambled that a jury wouldn’t dare convict him, regardless of the undeniable, incontrovertible evidence. Fortunately, his gamble failed.
What’s sad is that this is not the end. We can’t relax and sit back, confident that because the system worked this time everything is just fine. It isn’t fine. This case was so incredibly open-and-shut that we should not have felt uncertainty about the outcome. Even the trial itself wasn’t a given; it took protests and many months of hard work to get to court. Had there not been a separate video recorded by a witness, we might never have known the truth about George Floyd’s death. Nothing in this case was certain — although it should have been. All of the uncertainties demonstrate how lost our nation is with regard to equal justice under the law. If Derek Chauvin had been a black man, the trial — if there was one — would have been over quickly, with an easy “guilty” verdict that was never in doubt.
The next case may not be so easy nor the proof so obvious; many similar cases are less well documented. Police body cameras “fail” at critical moments with suspicious frequency. Witnesses may testify, but if there’s no clear, clean video recording then all witness testimony is typically challenged. This means that tomorrow’s Chauvin case may not be so easy. The effort to root out rogue actors and to restore honor to law enforcement is arduous, but it must continue.
This work may be daunting, but there is an up side. The outcome of this case is one more stone in the creation of a monument to justice. We simply need to keep hewing, cutting and carving.
We need more stones.
The Philosophy of Immanuel Rant 
Disturbing The Peace
Feb 22
Posted by RJGnyc
Every week, I drive my wife to physical therapy. During her session, I sit in the waiting area silently reading news on my tablet. Midway through the hour, I take a break for a slice of bread and a low-calorie protein drink for breakfast. I mind my own business and don’t make noise. It’s typically uneventful. Except for today.
An older man — certainly closer to 80 than I by a good 10 years or so — came in, plunked himself down noisily and proceeded to have several loud phone conversations. He didn’t simply subject everyone to his half of the conversation; he put the entire discussion on his phone’s speaker so that everyone was forced to hear his personal business. I have some hearing loss, yet I could still hear every syllable clearly — passwords spelled out, his car license number, his social security number and so on. He called his BMW dealership to find out why his car wasn’t ready yet. He called his broker. He called his bank. He called someone about a delivery that had not arrived yet. And throughout it all, no matter who was on the other end of the call, he was angry. Not impatient. Not irritated. Not curt. Unabatedly furious. He was derisive and offensive.
“No, you may NOT call me Steve. We’re not friends. My name is Steve Inwood. You may call me Mister Inwood. What’s YOUR name? Spell that.”
“Well, you said to give you a minute to look that up. You just used up 30 seconds. You have 30 seconds left.”
“AT&T service is down today — fix it.”
“I’m in the United States. Where are YOU located?”
“Do you think you’re even CAPABLE of checking the delivery status?”
And so on. It was an unrelenting display of entitlement and privilege by an older white man who wasn’t all that far ahead of me in my age group. And I was not merely irritated by the intrusion, but deeply embarrassed by his display. He could not have been more on-target if he had been deliberately trying to model the Worst Possible Behaviors of the Wealthy Entitled Baby Boomer. I felt like apologizing to everyone else in the room on his behalf.
During the drive home, I thought about this man. It seemed to me that he was emblematic of the mindset that infuriates younger people and leads them to blame Baby Boomers for catastrophic events like trump’s 2016 election. But he isn’t all of us; he’s just one jerk in the crowd. The problem is that jerks like him often overpower everyone else in the waiting room, so they receive attention that is disproportionately larger than their actual weight. Their argumentative nature and interminable complaints drown out quieter, more reasonable discourse.
But at the bottom of it all, he’s still — and will always be — the most disagreeable voice in the room. He won’t be right; he’ll just be loud.
Posted in Philosophy, Politics, Writing
Leave a comment
Tags: politics, social commentary