alias Bruce.

Gunter Grass, Dave Eggers, Germany, Israel, Iran, and "What Must Be Said."

So Dave Eggers wins the $53,000 Gunter Grass Award for his book about American abuse of a Syrian-American humanitarian. And just before the scheduled award ceremony, Grass – who has admitted to having been in the SS in Nazi Germany – publishes a scathing poem about Israeli nuclear proliferation and aggression. Uproar ensues. Israel bans Grass from entering the country. And then Eggers announces he'll refuse to go to Germany to accept the award. He'll accept the money, though.

Here is a link to the Grass poem, titled "What Must Be Said."

And here is what must be said about this whole conflagration:

1.) Kudos to Grass. His poem is truthful, and more intellectuals of his celebrated stature need to rise up and declare in public – against the waiting accusations of anti-Semitism – that the contemporary Israeli regime has in some ways become the wickedness against which it claims to stand.

2.) It is horribly ironic but not shocking that the Israeli regime, over its lifetime, has plunged into such a long moral fall. Any psychologist who specializes in developmental trauma will tell you that awful suffering often later translates into exaggerated, delusional, or even sociopathic aggression.

3.) Grass's SS involvement as a young man hardly disqualifies him from condemning Israeli behavior. Grass has owned and rightly been culpable for his actions. One can argue, in fact, that Grass's first-hand knowledge of obedient or self-justifying groupthink informs his outrage at what he now sees in some Israeli trends. Not long ago I had a conversation with an Aryan German, who came of age during the Holocaust, who now recognizes much of what he saw in late-1930s Germany in early 21st-century America.

4.) Grass's poem is lousy as a poem. It's barely a poem, actually; it's more like a proclamation with lots of line breaks. But that's not the point anyway. Nobody cares about it as a poem. We care about what it says. Presenting it as a poem in a publication, actually, was a good move on Grass's part: it assured that his message would be disseminated intact, in its entirety. Had Grass simply called a press conference and issued the message as a statement, it would have been sound-bited and paraphrased beyond recognition.

5.) Eggers's refusing the personal tribute while accepting the money stinks to high heaven. His excuse in published reports that the controversy had become too much about Germany and Israel and Iran just doesn't hold water. A response of integrity would be to either be okay with the moral context of the award and to accept the prize and the money, or to not be okay with it and to reject the prize and the money. You can't have both. Good luck washing those dirty little hands of yours, Dave.

President Obama's call for the 1967 borders

as a starting point for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations was a refreshing breeze in the stale Israel-ruled room of recent American mideast diplomacy. That the comment came as such a shock to Bibi Netanyahu is an instructive indication of how far toward Israel the standard American policy line has drifted.

Good for Obama. It's about time a White House occupant offered something like a reality check to an Israeli regime that has careened out of control in its insatiable aggression and hunger for dominance.

My question -- and it's a question I've grown to hate because it has proven so endlessly justifiable -- is if Obama will, yet again, shift into chronic backpedaling mode once his sensibly provocative statement threatens to generate actual consequences. I have grown dog-tired of Obama's habit of blurting a truth and then just as quickly retreating from it. I told a friend a few days ago that I suspect Obama may suffer from a kind of political Tourette syndrome: he spits out an utterance or position, realizes he is not allowed to go there, and swiftly finds as safe a way as possible to withdraw the offending statement or stance.

Is there a demon inside President Obama devilishly channeling his Inner Truthteller? Or is it a medical issue? We may never know.

CUNY's withholding Tony Kushner's honorary degree

on the basis of his criticisms of Israeli policies is a bush-league witch hunt that does more damage to the reputation of the university than to that of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright.

As you may have heard, the board of trustees of the City University of New York voted Monday to withhold an honorary degree that had been slated to be awarded to Kushner. According to the NYT, the prevailing board contingent, led by trustee Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, claimed that Kushner, who like many artistic intellectuals has been critical of Israeli actions, "disparaged the State of Israel." The board's surprise kick in the teeth to Kushner, which has not happened to a would-be CUNY honoree since 1961, has set off a storm of criticism from CUNY faculty and students. Even the CUNY administration has tactfully distanced itself from the board's decision; a CUNY spokesperson said that “The CUNY board of trustees acted independently and exercised its authority.”

CUNY's leadership looks like a den of dunces right now. And it should.

Sadly, we have seen this kind of hard-line pro-Israel foolishness before, as in 2006 when the New York Theatre Workshop knuckled under to pressure to cancel a play depicting the life of activist Rachel Corrie, an American defender of Palestinian rights who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer as she stood in protest of Israeli demolition of a Palestinian home in the Gaza Strip. (See below.) Some apologists for the brutality of the contemporary Israeli regime – who will brook no criticism of Israel's hyper-militarized dominance of Palestinians – just plain lose their marbles when confronted with intelligent indictments of Israeli policy, especially from Jews such as Kushner. Like an exponential magnification of certain blacks' defending the actions of President Obama no matter what, such rationalizers of Israeli actions fiercely denounce critics as being anti-Israel and anti-semitic.

Most such accusations, including those against Kushner, are, of course, complete nonsense. Condemning the current Israeli regime's actions is no more anti-Israeli or anti-semitic than condemning the Bush 2 regime's behavior is anti-American. In fact, I believe that in the long run it is pro-Israeli to criticize current-day Israel's self-destructive contempt for the rights for Palestinians, just as it was pro-American to criticize the Bush 2 regime's trampling of due process and international rule of law.

Many Americans already know this, which is why CUNY now looks so stupid. In fact, I think the intransigence of defenders of Israel's self-pitying posture is in direct proportion to the growing backlash against Israel's hopeless aggressiveness. Decades from now, when reality has forced Israel to acknowledge the territorial and human rights of Palestinians, none of this will even be subject to debate.

Which is why Tony Kushner, a playwright who will be remembered long after the wild-eyed CUNY trustees have been entirely forgotten, doesn't need any stinking honorary degree.

_________________

Here is what I wrote on this blog in 2006 about the Rachel Corrie controversy:

A Sorry Showing.

With our official chroniclers being so generous these days in dispensing the mantle of "hero" (the title is now bestowed upon the tragic legacy of virtually every uniformed American man or woman who dies following senseless orders), the story of Rachel Corrie serves, like an ice-water dunking, to shock us back into understanding the meaning of the word.

You might remember her: the 23-year-old activist from Olympia, Washington who was crushed to death in 2003 by an Israeli military bulldozer as she stood with outstretched arms, wearing an orange vest, attempting to block the demolition of the home of a Palestinian family amid Israel's campaign to clear-cut Palestinian border neighborhoods in the name of security.

As it turns out, Corrie was a writer of some ability as well as an activist, and her copious and revealing journals were edited into a play, a one-woman show titled "My Name is Rachel Corrie," which took London by storm last year. The play was the biggest sellout in 50 years at London's Royal Court Theatre, and has since moved to the West End, London's equivalent of Broadway, where it is expected to be a smash.

This year, New Yorkers were also expecting to be able to see the play until, weeks before its scheduled March 22 opening at the New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW), the theater suddenly announced an open-ended postponement of the play's debut amid intense pressure from groups not pleased with the dramatic message of a blue-eyed blond American pro-Palestinian activist. It seems that in an age of quisling liberals diving for cover from post-9/11 political vigilantism, these tickets were, in the words of a cover story in The Nation, "too hot for New York."

The outrage from theatrical luminaries was deservedly swift and widespread. The play's co-creator, Alan Rickman, proclaimed in the Guardian of London, "This is censorship born out of fear." Nobel literary laureate Harold Pinter, in a letter to the New York Times signed by nearly 20 other well-known self-described Jewish playwrights and writers, said that NYTW's claims of recent Mideast developments making the Corrie play too controversial "make no sense," and asked, "what is it about Rachel Corrie's writings... that New York audiences must be protected from?" Actress Vanessa Redgrave declared to Pacifica Radio that NYTW's failure of will is "an act of catastrophic cowardice." Famed playwright Tony Kushner, whose own work has been featured at NYTW, wrote in a letter to the New York Observer that he is "disappointed and disheartened by this decision and... baffled by the subsequent attempts to justify it."

The record, sadly, illustrates NYTW's willing surgical removal of its own spine in this matter. In response to early opposition to the play from some quarters, the theater's leadership, by its own admission in a March 22 interview on Pacifica's Democracy Now!, began a community "dialogue" process that involved pro-Israel partisans but no Arab-Americans. It began backing away from previously-agreed commitments to stage the play. It started to suggest, after the fact, to the play's British creators the need for audience "discussions" including pro-Israel scholars after each performance to place the play in "context." Most damningly, NYTW revealed its own lack of stomach for defense of artistic and political principle in the face of politically and financially influential opposition.

It is to their credit that, after the compost hit the fan, NYTW Artistic Director James Nicola and Managing Director Lynn Moffat agreed to do the Pacifica interview at all; the broadcast was a debate between them on the one side and the play's co-editor, Katherine Viner, whose sense of offense at NYTW's moral cave-in reflects the feelings of the play's other British creators and backers as well as of Corrie's parents themselves [full transcript of the debate is at http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/22/1435259]. Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman is not known for lobbing softballs, and Nicola and Moffat, clearly no more morally steady on their feet than when they first took on the Corrie play, were out of their league. One might feel sorry for them but for the fact that the political cost of their cowardice is, for the broader artistic community, much greater than its personal cost for the two of them. Throughout the interview Nicola and Moffat betrayed, to their lasting shame, a feckless aversion to fighting back against the currently intimidating forces of cultural censorship.

I suggest that you go and hear (or read) Nicola's and Moffat's remarks for yourself. It wasn't pretty: Nicola stumbled, whimpered and equivocated through tortured attempts at self-justification by reiterating how very, very hard it is to try to mount a play when people get mad. And Moffat, for her part, stuck to a steely script of utter nonsense about the play's unique incorrigibility and the awful practical problems it posed. The British co-writer Viner, admirably restraining her likely desire to knock Nicola's and Moffat's squishy heads together, dispatched their hopeless arguments with civil precision. She also left them flat-footed by refusing, on the air, their plaintive offer to try to find some way for NYTW to stage the play; NYTW no longer merits any trust, she replied, and the play's creators have been inundated with offers from other American theaters to put on the play, one of which they hope to accept.

The heart of the matter, I think, is that theater people like Nicola and Moffat have been accepting toasts at cocktail parties and bowing for applauding trustees at board meetings for so long that they have forgotten how to take a flurry of punishing shots to the chops (or to the gut) for the sake of their mission. In the Pacifica interview, both Nicola and Moffat recited, like a mantra, that it was their Herculean task with the Corrie play to, in Nicola's words, make it "safe" for Corrie's message to be heard without its being "polluted" by the raging political argument surrounding the Israeli occupation. It is as if Nicola and Moffat hoped to shuffle mute audiences in and out of this political fireball of a play -- in Manhattan, no less -- with no muss, no fuss, and no need to take a fighting stance in the face of irate theater funders and infuriated political zealots. The essential and unavoidable need to stand up and fight in public for a work such as the Corrie play seems to have entirely taken these two by surprise. Even on the radio, one could sense their blinking disorientation. I think they are still in shock at having had such demands made of them.

Nicola's blubbering, in fact, reached its absurd peak in the interview when he cited, as if pointing to a newly-uncovered neutron bomb, a friend's having told him of an online claim that Rachel Corrie was a registered member of Hamas. People are out to slander Corrie and my play! he gasped. Well, duh. A lot of people hate the cause that Corrie supported, and some of them lie on the Internet, and a few are flat-out wacko, and others will go all-out with their financial and political clout against a theater that takes a stand for a Palestinian-sympathetic production. Hello? Earth to Jim. This is part of the job description for a theater artistic director who has principles. It is high time more artists posed dramatic challenges to the orthodoxy of American support for the amoral militarism and self-excusing atrocities of the current Israeli regime.

Welcome to the new McCarthyism: an era of contagious and officially-mongered fear that, like the 1950s, separates the heroes from the, er, James Nicolas.

(Posted 3/27/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)

NYT: "Oil Soars as Libyan Furor Shakes Markets."

More than ever, it's time to shop for a hybrid or an electric.

Thing-Centered societies such as ours

have tried their best to make poetry, and art in general, a commodity. A person who delves with passionate commitment into being creative with words or sound or form or color is categorized as an "art-ist," a particular kind of productive specialist in the marketplace of life, and what they create is spoken of as their "work," a term that even most of we creative types use to describe our body of poems or paintings or songs.

This lingo isn't all bad: artists work hard, arguably harder than most, and if a chain store vice-president gets credit for making a disciplined contribution to society then a lifelong sculptor damned well ought to as well.

Still, the whole "-ist" role can construct a stainless-steel canyon separating creativity from actual life. As troubadour John Trudell once said about deathly white 1950s America, "You didn't want to dance if you didn't know how."

That is why spoken-word poetry, along with the improvisatory genius of hip-hop, are, like jazz before them, among the best hopes for salvaging the strongest creative currents in modern America. Spoken word, for its part, is bringing a new burst of aural and conceptual inspiration to an American poetry industry lost in its tone-deaf rustling of words. Show me a poet who summarily dismisses spoken word as being beneath art, and I'll show you a poet who cannot read aloud worth a damn and who, likely, cannot write for the human ear.

Anyway, my point in bringing all of this up is that Egypt has a hugely popular television show called "Prince of Poets" in which contestants, in the long tradition of Arabic poetic recitation, compete before a national audience and a panel of poetically-well-versed judges. Contestant and poet Hisham al Gakh, who was already a national hero, is now pretty much an icon after performing his poem for the revolution, "An Honest View of Liberation Square," February 9 in front of an impassioned Prince of Poets audience.

Here is the video, in Arabic, followed by the full text in English. As with all translations, some lyricism and natural grace is bound to be lost. But you'll get the idea. (For video with English subtitles, go here.)

 

An Honest View of Liberation Square

Put away all of your old poems,
tear apart all of your old notebooks,
and write for Egypt today the poetry that she deserves.

Put away all of your old notebooks,
and write for Egypt today the poetry that she deserves.
No longer will silence impose its fear,
so write that Egypt and her people are the peace of the Nile.

You are the most beautiful one, O Egypt, who has decided
that this fear has passed and has ended.
The streets were toying with us,
the streets were toying with us with their coldness and their frost,
and we could not give an explanation at the time.

We warmed each other,
and as we saw you smile, we forgot the cold.
And when you grew angry,
you showed it.
And when you grew angry,
you showed your face.
And our conscience would not allow us to defile you.

Do not let them tell you that I
am a rebel, that I have betrayed the trust of my country or forgotten it.
Do not let them tell you that I
have become trivial or that I am manipulated.

For I am the child of your womb,
and the children of your womb are those who wanted to
and who deposed and who acknowledged and who forbid.

The defeated remained silent, fearfully, in cowardice,
and those who love you have said what they had to say.

– Hisham al Gakh (translated by Scott Cole)

The Egyptians' overthrow of Mubarak

is monumental almost beyond we Americans' ability to measure. It dwarfs zombie-ish American recitations about our love of Liberty and our legacy of Revolution. Modern Americans know as much about revolution as houseflies know about outer space. Tea Partiers who bray about the coming of The Revolution wouldn't know what to do if it arrived; they'd dive for cover beneath their SUVs when the tanks rolled into their cul-de-sacs. For most consumers in this spoiled land, politics has been literally drained of its blood; we view it, at its worst, as a matter of televised shouting and congressional gridlock.

Not so in Egypt, whose citizens have for 30 years lived with repression in all realms of public and private life – including fear of secret police and being disappeared – courtesy of a dictatorship that the United States quietly supported for the sake of convenience.

As they celebrate having now toppled Mubarak after decades of pent-up resistance, Egyptians are immersed, for real, in something that Americans only know how to yammer about: the actual battle for liberty and self-determination.

The Egyptian revolt and the West's possible responses

seem pretty well summed up by this paragraph from Laila Lalami's piece in The Nation:

For those of us who have grown up in dictatorship, the protests that have ignited throughout the Arab world feel like the fulfillment of a great promise. This promise was made to our parents and grandparents, to all those who fought for independence: that we would have the right to decide our future. Instead, our leaders delivered us into a world of silence and fear and told us that we must watch what we say and watch what we do. Our institutions were undermined or dismantled, our political parties were stifled or co-opted, their members disappeared or neutralized. And whenever we looked to the West for help, its presidents and prime ministers spoke with forked tongues, one moment lecturing us on democracy and another offering support to our dictators.

What is interesting about the U.S.'s position on Egypt is not its careful public statements in response to the current revolt but its utter silence throughout the years as the Mubarak regime has held Egypt in the yoke of brutal repression. It is clear that the American definition of good guys and bad guys in the Arab world has nothing to do with good and bad behavior and everything to do with convenience. Repressive Egypt with its willingness to torture for us and its tolerance for our pro-Israel policies? Good guy. Repressive Palestine? Bad guy. Repressive Saudi Arabia and Yemen, with their ruthlessly medieval but American-industry-friendly rulers? Good guys. Repressive Iran? Bad guy. And Israel, with its brutal expansionism and delusionally self-pitying dominance, remains politically untouchable in Washington, save for a mild chiding every now and then.

The sudden breaking of silence on Egypt extends to American news media as well. It is striking, for instance, to hear NPR's intrepid reporters now delivering gutsy, heart-rending reports from the streets of Cairo after -- you guessed it -- years of dead air on that network regarding the routine brutality of the America-friendly Mubarak regime. The same American media silence met the repression in Tunisia – until the recent popular explosion there – and has so far also applied to Saudi Arabia, which, presumably, will morph in our Western eyes from quiet monarchy to boiling tyranny when the first tens of thousands of protesters hit the streets.

It's a question that we and our Washington leaders will have to answer, once again, when the former underlings of presumed U.S. client regimes become holders of power: Where were you when we needed you?

Your nation at work:

The broad-daylight assassination of Salman Taseer, high-profile governor of Pakistan's Punjab Province, by one of his own bodyguards, apparently an Islamic militant, has blasted another bloody hole in the Obama Administration's fantasy that robot drones and widely-mistrusted American battalions have a prayer of altering the fundamental course of Pakistan and Afghanistan, two nations in which America refuses to confront the reasons for the public illegitimacy of the regimes it tries in vain to prop up.

Meanwhile, modern descendants of North America's most disastrous and violent tsunami of illegal immigrants -- centuries of invaders from Europe -- have grown ever more wickedly and delusionally selfish in their fervor to shut the gates behind themselves, most recently with a growing effort to deny citizenship to babies born in the United States whose parents came here illegally from the artificially-depressed and peril-wracked storehouse of desperately cheap labor to our south, otherwise known as Mexico.

At the White House, the Obama Administration has collapsed on the issue of Medicare coverage for end-of-life planning, doing a 180 to delete the provision, which had been hailed by doctors and hospice caregivers as a way of making end-of-life medical care both more humane and cost-effective. Any suggestions for names to be circulated for an alternative 2012 Democratic presidential nominee?

It's your country. Use it or lose it. And whatever you do, keep yourself grounded in things that are not subject to the decay and inevitable collapse of the unsustainable machinery that passes for current American normalcy.

The Israeli attack on the Gaza aid flotilla

raises global contempt for the Israeli regime's outrages to a new level. Excuses, excuses: Members of the flotilla supposedly attacked when Israelis first boarded? Excuse me, but if a known international sociopath climbed into my car without permission I'd be ready to conk him one, too. Flotilla members were "armed?" Sure: trained Israeli commandos with firearms up against people with pipes, rods, and (Israelis claim) knives; gosh, those poor Israeli enforcers. Militants were among the flotilla passengers? Sounds like the Bush Doctrine: let's attack people who we think might do something.

Israel milked its "victim" stance dry years ago. Now it is just another criminal regime. The fact that major American media speak of this latest atrocity as merely "straining" American relations with Israel speaks volumes about our nation's continuing indulgence of outrageous Israeli actions. Most of the world has retained more conscience. I am ready to boycott Israeli products and join a street march protesting the barbarism of the Israeli regime.

Petraeus tells it like it is on Israel.

You have got to read this from a Foreign Policy article by Mark Perry:

On Jan. 16, two days after a killer earthquake hit Haiti, a team of senior military officers from the U.S. Central Command (responsible for overseeing American security interests in the Middle East), arrived at the Pentagon to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The team had been dispatched by CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus to underline his growing worries at the lack of progress in resolving the issue. The 33-slide, 45-minute PowerPoint briefing stunned Mullen. The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM's mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) "too old, too slow ... and too late."

It's about time somebody on the Obama team said it. Sure, Biden lambasted the latest planned settlements, and the disastrous timing of their announcement, as a monkey wrench in current efforts for peace talks. But Petraeus went a gargantuan step further by saying, in effect, Israeli arrogance is gonna get American troops killed and weaken American power in the Mideast. He is right, of course, and there is nothing new about the revelation except the fact that a general of Petraeus' influence dared to say it.

FP's Perry went on to report, just as stunningly, that Petraeus has asked "that the West Bank and Gaza (which, with Israel, is a part of the European Command -- or EUCOM), be made a part of his area of operations. Petraeus's reason was straightforward: with U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military had to be perceived by Arab leaders as engaged in the region's most troublesome conflict."

Holy Cojones, Batman.

Petraeus' request was refused in an instant. But think about what this means: A general overseeing U.S. major military operations sees Israeli behavior as being so dangerous that he wants authority over the region in order to try to mitigate Israel's endangerment of American troops.

According to Perry, ripples of shock at Petraeus' candor are spreading in the Obama administration. One question, I guess, is whether the administration will silence the messenger or understand his having delivered a reality check. Or maybe both. In any case, American indulgence of Israel's destructive excesses has become harder to publicly defend over the years. Even the conservative Andrew Sullivan has become quite the critic of Israeli policy. He wrote a few days ago:

Petraeus sees what so much of Washington refuses to see: that Israel's year-long contempt for Obama, initiated by the Gaza campaign, entrenched by Netanyahu's victory and compounded by continued settlements and last week's humiliation of Biden is a problem. More then a problem, Israel's total impunity for its intransigence is becoming a liability for the advance of US interests around the world.

One thing is for certain: A general committed to protecting American military influence is not one of the usual easily-dismissed critics of the Israeli regime. Israel's shit is now seriously hitting the fan.