Answer: He says one thing to one group and another to another.
And he gives both speeches within a couple of days of each other.
And then he does whatever he wants.
And anyone who believes his promises deserves what they get: betrayal.
[NOTE: See this.]
Talk about the sins of the fathers! In this case, it’s the sins of the grandfathers.
I’ve never quite understood blaming children or grandchildren for the evil their ancestors did. But nevertheless, I can understand why descendants might feel tainted by that history and find it hard to shake.
I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon in life: the least at fault are often the most tormented by guilt, and vice versa.
[NOTE: Here’s a book by the brother of a notorious murderer that reflects deeply on the issue of familial guilt by association.]
Glick sure doesn’t mince words.
And Ed Koch says he won’t be supporting Obama in 2012, but will instead cross party lines:
I believe this is the most dangerous and critical period that Israel has ever faced and regrettably it does not have the support of the President of the United States, which in past difficult situations it could count on.
It’s not strange that Koch is abandoning Obama. What’s strange is that he ever supported him in the first place:
I supported President Obama, believing he would be good on foreign policy, particularly with respect to the support of Israel. It turned out badly.
Let’s take a little trip back in time and take a look at the relevant parts of Koch’s endorsement of Obama in 2008:
One foreign policy issue that particularly concerned me in 2004 was the security of Israel. I thought in 2004 that issue was better left to President George W. Bush, and I believe I was right. President Bush understood the need to support the security of Israel and did so. I did not feel that way about Senator John Kerry.
That is not an issue in this election. Both parties and their candidates have made clear, before and during this election campaign their understanding of the need to support Israel and oppose acts of terrorism waged against it by Hamas and other Muslim supporters of terrorism.
So the issue for me is who will best protect and defend America.
I have concluded that the country is safer in the hands of Barack Obama, leader of the Democratic Party and protector of the philosophy of that party…
If the vice president were ever called on to lead the country, there is no question in my mind that the experience and demonstrated judgment of Joe Biden is superior to that of Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin is a plucky, exciting candidate, but when her record is examined, she fails miserably with respect to her views on the domestic issues that are so important to the people of the U.S., and to me. Frankly, it would scare me if she were to succeed John McCain in the presidency.
Anyone paying a particle of attention prior to the election should have known it would “turn out badly.” Thinking Obama would support Israel was wishful thinking and self-delusion of a high order.
And I wonder what Koch thinks of Palin now. Which would scare him more, a second term for Obama or a Palin presidency? Maybe he’ll get a chance to make that choice when he votes in 2012.
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a post from February of 2007. At the time I first wrote it, I didn’t know how to upload YouTube videos here. Since then, I’ve certainly mastered that skill. So I’m now able to include a video at the end that illustrates one of the scenes I was talking about.]
One of the most famous misunderstood lines in all of literature is Juliet’s balcony query: “Oh Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”
As most of you may know, the archaic “wherefore” means “why.” But the misconception that the word means “where” persists, even though the latter would make no sense in the context of the scene: Juliet is musing to herself and Romeo is eavesdropping, overhearing her words without her knowledge. She’s certainly not searching for him at that moment.
Shakespeare is difficult, and it’s not just because of his use of outdated words that require explanation in order to understand (well, we can hardly blame him; they weren’t outdated at the time). We’re simply not accustomed to hearing such sophisticated speech and being able to divine meaning from its poetry, its playful images and complex metaphors. Apparently in Shakespeare’s day people were more adept at that, but it’s since become a lost art.
Studying Shakespeare with a good teacher can bring the words and their meaning alive in a way that makes the plays the beloved masterpieces that they have been for centuries. I once had such a teacher; we’ll call him Mr. Jones.
Mr. Jones was an ex-actor with a vaguely British accent crossed with a hint of a Jamaican lilt. He was also a black man at a time when African American teachers weren’t all that common, back in my junior high school days. How he ended up at my school I don’t know, nor do I know much else about him except that he lived with his elderly mother.
Mr. Jones was very big on reading aloud. He had an old-fashioned over-the-top rhetorical style, a huge voice left over from his days treading the boards of un-miked stages, and a fearless disregard for giggle-prone eighth-graders. He would declaim in that commanding voice, and his presence would stifle any desire to laugh. The sounds would wash over us impressively, even if the meaning eluded us.
But he wanted us to understand the meaning, as well. And to this end we spent months studying Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” One would think that this work would be the best choice among all Shakespeare’s plays for a bunch of eighth-graders, and one would be right. After all, Juliet, at fourteen, could have been an eighth-grader herself.
But she wasn’t like any eighth-grader we’d ever known. And Romeo was no better. What were they talking about? It seemed an impenetrable thicket of verbiage.
Mr. Jones tackled the whole thing by making us read every single word aloud. He called on some students to act out each part for a few pages, then switched to other students, and on and on, right to the last line. It took months. No matter how embarrassed we were, or what poor actors we were, or how we stumbled and faltered, we had to read those words. And he was big on non-traditional casting, too; he’d sometimes call on the boys to read the female parts and vice-versa. Talk about embarrassment!
One boy, Carl Anderson, who had the platinum hair and fair skin of his Norwegian forebearers, blushed scarlet every time he was called on to read. Then he’d blush even more startlingly scarlet as embarrassing words were revealed (“Sleep dwell upon thine eyes, peace in thy breast! Would I were sleep and peace, so sweet to rest!”). But read he did.
Some read in monotones, some gave it pizazz. And then, after every couple of lines, Mr. Jones would have them pause and try to explain the meaning. If they couldn’t guess, the class would tackle it. If all else failed, Mr. Jones would tell us. But, line by line, the wonderful and sorrowful story emerged, and we slowly got better at deciphering it.
As the characters came alive for us, line by line, Shakespeare (and Mr. Jones) managed that feat at which the writers of so many modern movies fail abysmally: making us care about the characters, and making us believe the lovers actually love each other, and showing us why. We loved Romeo and Juliet, too; and we could see that they were exceptionally well-suited to one another, each able to express emotions in ways no other teenagers ever have or ever will.
When Romeo and Juliet first meet at the ball, they have a conversation in which both show an equal adeptness at imagery and playfulness. The whole scene is an extended metaphor that compares the religious (the hands in prayer) with the sexual (the lips in a kiss).
Classier pickup lines were never heard, at least not in my life:
ROM: If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
Juliet plays hard-to-get with an equally witty rejoinder:
JUL: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
Ah, but Romeo is not so easily put off from his goal:
ROM: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
But again, Juliet is equal to the task of parrying him:
JUL: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in pray’r.
But Romeo is not to be dissuaded. He cleverly extends the image in an attempt to get what he’s looking for—a kiss (to understand what he’s getting at here, think of two hands clasped together in prayer):
ROM: O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do!
They pray; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
Ah, who could resist? Certainly not Juliet, who clearly doesn’t even wish to hold him off, although she pays some final lip service (pun intended; after all, Shakespeare liked puns!) to restraint:
JUL: Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
And Romeo sees his opportunity:
ROM: Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take.
Thus from my lips, by thine my sin is purg’d. [Kisses her.]
Are they not well-matched? Precocious and intensely emotional, they exude the essence of heady young love, love that has as yet no experience of sorrow or betrayal (although they’ll know sorrow soon enough). These two love with all their hearts; they are made for each other, and the audience knows it immediately through their words.
A few years later when I saw the Zefferelli film version of “Romeo and Juliet,” I marveled at the scene as it was acted out with suitable hand gestures (oh, so that’s the way it works!) by the achingly-young Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting. If you’ve never seen that film, please take a look. Yes, it was roundly criticized for leaving at least half the play on the cutting-room floor and changing a few of the more archaic words here and there. And for including nakedness (as I recall, a rear shot of Romeo during the post-wedding rendezvous in Juliet’s bedroom). And for casting unknown actors who were so young they lacked the requisite Shakespearean gravitas.
But for me, the film made the play come alive. You believed they loved each other. You believed their desperation. And in the death scenes, you could not help but cry at the waste of these two beautiful young lives.
In the film, the meaning of all those Shakespearean lines was clear; a testament to the actors’ skill. But they wouldn’t have been anywhere near as clear to me—or as wonderful—without those efforts of Mr. Jones.
Spambot as thoughtful critic (the following appeared on a thread about searching for Chinese sesame donuts):
The very core of your writing whilst appearing agreeable originally, did not work well with me after some time. Someplace throughout the paragraphs you managed to make me a believer but just for a short while. I nevertheless have got a problem with your jumps in logic and one would do well to fill in all those gaps. In the event that you actually can accomplish that, I will undoubtedly end up being amazed.
Cornel West has long been known to be a loose cannon, but this is pretty vile, even for him:
Cornel West, a Princeton University professor and leading black intellectual, is harshly criticizing President Obama, a candidate he once supported but now calls “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats…I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men…It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white”¦When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening.
Does this make West racist? I certainly think so. It also makes him a self-aggrandizing blowhard, but anyone who follows West’s career already knew that about him.
West, 57, has spent most of his life in the halls of rarified academe, Princeton and Yale and Haverford and then Harvard again and now Princeton again. But he has taken pains in the past to establish his black bona fides:
“Owing to my family, church, and the black social movements of the 1960s”, he says, “I arrived at Harvard unashamed of my African, Christian, and militant de-colonized outlooks. More pointedly, I acknowledged and accented the empowerment of my black styles, mannerisms, and viewpoints, my Christian values of service, love, humility, and struggle, and my anti-colonial sense of self-determination for oppressed people and nations around the world.
West is mad at Obama for a lot of reasons. One of them is the old “you never call, you never write:”
I used to call my dear brother [Obama] every two weeks. I said a prayer on the phone for him, especially before a debate. And I never got a call back. And when I ran into him in the state Capitol in South Carolina when I was down there campaigning for him he was very kind. The first thing he told me was, ”˜Brother West, I feel so bad. I haven’t called you back. You been calling me so much. You been giving me so much love, so much support and what have you.’ And I said, ”˜I know you’re busy.’ But then a month and half later I would run into other people on the campaign and he’s calling them all the time. I said, wow, this is kind of strange.
And who is Obama friendly with instead? Why, take a guess:
He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want…He’s got two homes. He has got his family and whatever challenges go on there, and this other home. Larry Summers blows his mind because he’s so smart. He’s got Establishment connections. He’s embracing me. It is this smartness, this truncated brilliance, that titillates and stimulates brother Barack and makes him feel at home. That is very sad for me.
Perhaps I should have gotten used to it by now, but I continue to be astounded at some of the things that pass for intelligent discourse among the intelligentsia.
[NOTE: This rant by West makes Larry Summers look like a genius for taking him to task at Harvard. Does the following start sounding familiar?:
Summers refused to comment on the details of his conversation with West, except to express hope that West would remain at Harvard. Soon after, West was hospitalized for prostate cancer. West complained that Summers failed to send him get-well wishes until weeks after his surgery, whereas newly installed Princeton president Shirley Tilghman had contacted him frequently before and after his treatment.[ In 2002 West left Harvard University to return to Princeton. West lashed out at Summers in public interviews, calling him “the Ariel Sharon of higher education” on NPR’s Tavis Smiley Show.]
Dennis Prager asks the question.
He’s got a few more things to say:
For many non-leftist Democrats, it is emotionally impossible to vote Republican.
I can illustrate this best with a personal example that I often use in speeches to Jewish audiences.
I was raised both as an Orthodox Jew and a liberal Democrat. In my early 20s, not wanting to practice religious laws solely out of habit or fear, I experimented with religious non-observance.
I remember well the one time this yeshiva graduate ate ham. It was emotionally difficult.
I also well remember the first time this lifelong Democrat voted Republican. And it, too, was difficult. In fact, it was actually more emotionally difficult to vote Republican than to eat the ham.
Now, how could that be? How could it possibly have been more emotionally trying for a lifelong Democrat to vote Republican than for a lifelong observant Jew to eat ham? Isn’t religion a far deeper conviction than politics?
The question implies the answer.
Liberalism and leftism are religions. While I felt I would be sinning against God when I tasted ham, I was certain I was sinning against both God and man were I to vote Republican.
Obama’s Middle East speech (full text here) pays lip service to Assad of Syria needing to reform or quit, support for more rights for the Iranian people, and giving Egypt a financial break.
I can’t quite imagine either Assad or Ahmadinejad shaking in their shoes because Obama says so. Even the wave of pressure for democracy in the region doesn’t seem to have threatened them overmuch so far.
As for Israel and Palestine:
President Obama said the borders of Israel and a Palestinian state should be based on pre-1967 borders, referring to those that existed before the Six-Day War – which includes the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.
Correspondents say the apparent change of emphasis is set to anger Israel, which has previously said that endorsing the 1967 borders would prejudge peace negotiations.
This represents a break from previous administrations, and is sure to cause shockwaves throughout the region.
Even before this speech, Jewish donors to the Obama campaign were feeling a bit uneasy. It’s hard to imagine that this will reassure them—although for many, their liberalism will trump any sense of obligation to Israel’s continued existence.
I’m guessing that Obama feels quite secure in his support from wealthy Jews, no matter what he does or says regarding Israel and Palestine. But is he correct in that perception? Even a year ago, he had lost a surprising amount of support among Jewish voters.
Of course, Jewish voters are a tiny percentage of the voting public, and losing a few—even quite a few—probably doesn’t matter much. They are heavily concentrated in strongly liberal enclaves such as New York and Los Angeles, where the defection of some will hardly make a difference, although it could matter in Florida. But wealthy Jewish donors may be a different matter, and losing enough of them could smart.
[ADDENDUM: Romney channels neo-neocon.]
The news that college graduates have been having trouble finding jobs, especially positions in their fields, should come as no surprise whatsoever. Different generations have different patterns of luck, and those who come of age in a time of economic recession or depression are going to have trouble getting started in life.
They may never catch up.
I was raised by parents who were young adults during the Depression, the big one that was distinguished by having a capital “D” as its initial letter. My mother used to tell me tales of Depression woe quite regularly.
She had been engaged in college to a student at Columbia Law School, but he could not find work on graduation, so they never married. He ended up becoming a career Army officer, so he didn’t do half badly, but that was much later.
In the community where we lived, my mother knew the history of many of her friends with whom she’d gone to grade school and high school. She used to point out their sad career trajectories, or lack thereof, “He wanted to be a gym teacher,” (which had seemed a modest enough aspiration to me at the time), “but he had to quit school to help support his parents and never finished high school.” Now he pushed racks of clothing around the garment district.
This one, that one; all had tales. Some had done well, of course, but many had not. They were all still friends, by the way, despite their different circumstances in life. When I heard these stories, I felt a strong sense of the precariousness of plans and the random nature of fate. I also developed a deep respect for the power of economic cycles and their ability to affect a person’s life forever.
I had a relatively small taste of the same thing when my husband earned a doctorate during the Carter years and tried to get a job on his emergence from the grind. It was nearly impossible; hiring had dried up in his field. He went on interview after interview where hundreds of people were applying for a single job. Finally he found one, although it involved his doing something different from what he’d hoped, and in a part of the country far from where we’d wanted to set up stakes. But we were both grateful that he’d gotten it at all.
One of the differences between then and now is that fewer people incurred huge debts in going either to college and graduate school. Unlike today, tuition was more reasonable in comparison to the standard of living. Recent graduates now not only have to deal with unemployment, but their school debts tend to be massive.
What’s more—call them spoiled, call them privileged, call them anything you want—their expectations of life are higher, and therefore the disappointment greater when they fail to meet them. The go-go good years that they observed while growing up lasted longer, and the flying was higher. Today’s graduates know almost nothing else—nor did they have those Depression-era parents to warn them that it could all disappear at any moment.
I was thinking about conspiracy theories last night. In the garden of the forking paths that is internet research, that led me to read up on the Kennedy assassination.
It’s not as though I was previously unfamiliar with the facts. I was alive back then and remember it well, plus I’ve read many articles and books on the subject since. But I’m not one of those people who’s memorized all the details, and so when I revisit them I often find there are interesting surprises, things I had forgotten or never really paid attention to in the first place.
One is them is the story of Johnny Calvin Brewer, a 22-year-old shoe store manager who was instrumental in the capture of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Brewer had heard the news of the Kennedy shooting as well as that of Officer Tippit, the latter occurring in the neighborhood where Brewer worked. Shortly thereafter, Brewer noticed a man in the foyer of the shoe store. He appeared to have ducked in there to avoid some police cars passing by, which Brewer thought was suspicious behavior.
The alert Brewer followed the man to a nearby movie theater, where his quarry entered without paying and Brewer asked the management to call the police. Meanwhile Brewer and another man guarded the exits to make sure Oswald didn’t leave, and then pointed him out to the police, who apprehended him after a struggle (see Brewer’s Warren Commission testimony).
Brewer has faded into such obscurity that I had forgotten he existed. But he had his moment in history, partly because of an accident of proximity and partly because he was smart enough and assertive enough to have a good hunch and follow through on it. But for his actions, would Oswald ever have been caught? We’ll never know; but just imagine the extent of the conspiracy theories that would have been hatched if he hadn’t!
Another person who was accidentally made famous by the Kennedy assassination was Abraham Zapruder. All he did was watch the motorcade—and take his movie camera along to film it:
Not originally intending to bring his camera to the motorcade, at the insistence of his assistant he retrieved it from home before going to Dealey Plaza.
Zapruder’s was not the only film record of the assassination, but it was by far the best, partly because of his vantage point and timing, partly because he stood on a slightly elevated concrete pedestal to get a better view—and partly because, as he said in an early interview, despite the carnage and his own upset, “I kept on shooting.”
Zapruder sold the rights to the film to Life magazine for what was then the fairly princely sum of $150,000, but he retained some say in the matter of how it would be shown to the public of the time:
The night after the assassination, Zapruder is said to have had a nightmare in which he saw a booth in Times Square advertising “See the President’s head explode!” He determined that, while he was willing to make money from the film, he did not want the public to see the full horror of what he had seen. Therefore, a condition of the sale to Life was that frame 313, showing the fatal shot, would be withheld.
Zapruder also distinguished himself by giving $25,000 of his fee to Tippit’s widow. His wishes about the film were respected until after his 1970 death, when in 1975 ABC (and none other than Geraldo Rivera) showed the film—with frame 313 included—to a shocked American public for the first time.
Now, of course, it’s on YouTube. Our delicate sensibilities have become a lot less delicate over time. What’s more, when history happens now, there are a million cell phone cameras to record it from every possible angle.
But extraordinary events still make heroes out of seemingly ordinary people. Flight 93 is an excellent example. No doubt those heroes, and their families, would have given almost anything to have not been selected for that task. But their fate was otherwise.
Richard Fernandez speculates on why DSK may have risked it all to rape a hotel maid. His conclusion is that DSK didn’t perceive the behavior as having much risk at all:
For most of people in the world without influence or power, the probability of suffering punishment for rape is such that few would risk their liberty and fortune for the dubious and disgusting thrill of chasing a hotel cleaner around a room. That discount rate, even absent any morality, makes cowards of us all. But if a particular person believed that his individual risk of being punished was virtually zero then it would make perfect economic sense for that person to gratify his monstrous appetites. If in fact such a person did not believe he was risking anything by chasing the cleaner, nothing would deter him from doing it, excepting of course, his own character.
If this is true—and it makes a great deal of sense to me—why did DSK think there was so little risk for him? Apparently he had gotten away with risky sexual behavior many times in the past, although perhaps not this exact sort of behavior. After a while he probably thought himself immune to any consequences.
The same sort of thing explains Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sexual acting-out, and Bill Clinton’s, plus John Edwards’s and…well, you get the idea. There’s a lot of this going around among the famous, power-driven, and egotistical. It also makes perfect sense that the behavior would escalate over time. As the man feels safer and safer, and the need for sensation grows with age and repetition and perhaps boredom, he will cry for madder music and stronger wine.
I’ve got a new piece up at PJ entitled, “Perp-Walk the Ruling Class? L’Horreur!”
[ADDENDUM: One of Strauss-Kahn’s possible defenses seems to be shaping up as “it was consensual.”
Maybe he thought she was just wearing the French maid outfit.]