Escaping the mud

The New Neo Posted on by

Right now even though it’s almost April, and technically the last day of winter, there are huge mounds of snow here, as well as the occasional sidewalk of ice. Soon that will be followed by what’s known as mud season. It looks exactly like it sounds; brown and mushy, no green leaves or new grass in sight.

But today’s a travel day. I’m on a trip to warmer climes to see family and friends: Los Angeles, for starters. I’ve got my laptop and my headset, and my plan is that the blog posts and podcasts continue relatively uninterrupted.

Those were the days, my friend: Vietnam and Iraq protests, protesters, and nostalgia

The New Neo Posted on by

A succinct headline in the Washington Times summed it up nicely: “Anti-war protesters echo Vietnam.” The accent is on the word “echo”—as in “a distant, fainter, repetition.”

The anti-Iraq War demonstrations in DC over this weekend were self-consciously and purposefully designed to mimic the protests of yesteryear. But like all retro fashions, they didn’t quite resemble the originals.

Approximately forty years ago, on October 21, 1967, before Tet and before Nixon, the first mammoth Vietnam antiwar demonstration was held. Participation was estimated at 100,000 plus, and clashes with police resulted in 600 arrested.

I wasn’t at that one—and I wasn’t at Woodstock either, although most people my age claim they were. But I was there for the next big one, on the cold clear day of November 15, 1969, along with what are estimated to have been between 250,000 and 500,000 of my peers.

It was a group event all the way; I drove down from Boston with a carful of housemates and their boyfriends, including mine. I recall the sky in DC that day as being a deep and startlingly clear blue–almost as blue as the bluest sky I’ve ever seen, on a certain sad day in September almost thirty-two years later.

Back in DC in 1969, the crowd was very calm:

…the government had figured out how to handle the huge crowds, monitoring the demonstration with 3,000 police officers, 9,000 Army troops (who were kept out of sight in reserve), 200 lawyers and 75 clergymen. The New Mobe [the group organizing the event] had recruited thousands of its own armband-wearing “parade marshals” to help keep order.

By November of 1969 major US involvement in the Vietnam War had gone on for about five years and caused approximately 22,000 US deaths. The draft was still very much in operation, and it’s no coincidence that the demonstrators were mostly of college age; the immediacy of the draft fueled the size of the protests.

What did we expect as a result of our efforts? Demonstrations always have an element of self-indulgent theater, it’s true. But I believe many of us did think we’d actually make a difference. Our own template may have been the Martin Luther King Civil Rights march of 1963, which predated the passage of the historic Civil Rights legislation of the mid-60s, even though there was no simple one-on-one cause and effect involved.

I’ve already written at length about the 60s, Vietnam, and my own small participation in the antiwar effort, in the multi-part Section 4 (it starts here) of my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series. So I’m not going to go into depth about that right now. Suffice to say I’ve rethought the entire era and come to different conclusions.

Some, of course, have not. And some have, but have moved in a different direction. An example is good old Ramsey Clark, who was at this weekend’s festivities, fresh from his failed attempt to save Saddam Hussein from the noose. It’s been almost forty years since that 1967 march, an event Clark feels was the turning point in rallying sentiment against the Vietnam War. Clark, of course, was on the other side of the barricades back then (literally) as Lyndon Johnson’s Attorney General, engaged in some of the administration’s preparations to deal with the march.

But it just ain’t like it used to be. You can’t go home again, according to Clark. “I can’t tell you that we have the depth of passion or breadth of commitment today that we had then,” he said (although the “we” back then to whom Clark refers remains a bit obscure, given his position at the time).

The numbers this past weekend? Estimated at between 10,000 and 20,000, with counterprotesters—many of them, interestingly enough, Vietnam vets—numbering “in the thousands,” as well. The Vietnam vets were on both sides of this demonstration, of course, as would be expected.

Differences are vast between these two wars. There is no draft now, for one thing. For another, the number of US casualties in this war is significantly less. I can’t speak for everyone, of course, but to us back in 1967-1969 a US win in Vietnam seemed (rightly or wrongly) to be of more marginal importance, the consequences of withdrawal less grave. And remember, we did not have the example of what happened in 1975 and afterwards in South Vietnam before our eyes; it hadn’t happened yet (see this and this for my more recent thoughts on the end of the Vietnam War and its aftermath).

This is not true of today’s protesters, who should at least be aware of that history, however they may interpret it. Some of them, such as 36-year-old Maggie Johnson, show an astounding inability to understand differences in scale when making historical comparisons. This quote from her referring to World War II is a good example:

We’ve been in Iraq longer than we were in World War II and we’ve accomplished a heck of a lot less. It’s time we wrap it up.

Does this woman understand how many men fought in World War II? How many died to achieve what was accomplished then? Would she for a single moment have stood for such numbers?

Here are the figures: the estimates are that between thirteen and sixteen million Americans fought in that war. About 311,000 were killed. Many millions more died all over the world; here are some figures to ponder. The numbers are staggering, and these are just the military deaths, although during WWII civilians in Europe and Asia suffered and died almost as readily.

Ms. Johnson is making some other errors of comparison. Because the length of World War II to which she refers was the length of the “hot” war, the one that in Iraq lasted a matter of mere weeks. World War II was followed by lengthy occupations and rebuildings of both Germany and Japan before it was over and its “accomplishments” solidified.

Apparently, people were more patient then. Here’s a quote on the subject from General Abizaid, due to retire soon as Centcom commander:

How do you win a “long war” against Islamic extremism if your country has a short attention span? That’s an overarching concern for Abizaid in a conflict where time — not troops, not tactics — is the true strategic resource. “The biggest problem we’ve got is lack of patience,” he says. “When we take upon ourselves the task of rebuilding shattered societies, we need not to be in a hurry. We need to be patient, but our patience is limited. That makes it difficult to accomplish our purposes.”

The protesters are nostalgic for the heady days of the 60s, when hundreds of thousands could be mobilized for the street theater of the time. They may forget that, when the draft ended, so did most of the protests. Or perhaps they don’t; maybe that’s what’s behind the call by some of them to resume the draft.

Ah, nostalgia; ain’t it wonderful? They’re nostalgic for the good old days of the mega-demonstrations. I’m nostalgic for the days when the American public had more patience for the fight against an evil that they seemed to see more clearly, and the endurance for the long hard slog of rebuilding a broken country afterwards.

You heard it here first: decline in divorce rate predicted

The New Neo Posted on by

Confession: now that I’m the proud owner of an ipod, I’ve been buying headsets like Imelda Marcos bought shoes. It’s a futile search for listening perfection of the noise-cancelling variety.

But I’m different from Imelda; I return all the pairs I don’t use.

And so I happened to find myself in Radio Shack the other day returning a headset. As I was leaving, a display of GPS navigators caught my eye. They were pricey although pretty tempting, so I’m happy to say I resisted.

It occurs to me that, once GPS systems become a commonplace technology in every car, you can expect the divorce rate to plummet. It will be the merciful end of those fascinating arguments about whether to stop for directions, or whose turn it might be to ask for them.

Remember, you heard it here first.

Blog Week in Review

The New Neo Posted on by

This week was a two-podcaster for me. I was kindly invited by writer, Colonel, and all-around Renaissance man Austin Bay to be on the Blog Week in Review along with the insightful and articulate Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom (yes, Jeff, you’re a Renaissance man, too, and yes, Austin, you are insightful and articulate!).

We talked about identitarianism, otherwise known as identity politics, as well as how the truth in the Wilson/Plame/Libby case looks quite different to people on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Twas ever thus.

Twanging, from Homer to Cohen and back: music and poetry

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I’m still on a bit of a Leonard Cohen kick, as well as a YouTube fling.

Stay with me here, though; this isn’t just about Cohen.

As Gerard Vanderleun has noted, Cohen has an even darker side than the one I pointed out—which was already dark enough, to be sure, but with its redemptive qualities.

Follow the above link to a video of Cohen performing his very disturbing song “The Future.” While pondering its bleak vision of violence and anarchy, consider the fact that it was written around 1992 (although probably started years before; Cohen is on record as saying in interviews that it usually takes him years, if not decades, to write each song).

Cohen doesn’t turn to political matters often, but when he does, he has been known to demonstrate a certain prescience. Could it be that poets can sometimes sense things before others can? At least, certain poets. Then again, it may just be blowin’ in the wind.

In this interview on the subject of the song “The Future” back in 1992, Cohen says:

That’s a terrible song…It’s a grim vision, I think I left my anti-depressant pills at home.

Indeed. Here are just a few of the lyrics:

There’ll be the breaking of the ancient
western code
Your private life will suddenly explode
There’ll be phantoms
There’ll be fires on the road
and the white man dancing
You’ll see a woman
hanging upside down
her features covered by her fallen gown…

Cohen has said (scroll down to the last article) that the impetus for this song was the fall of the Berlin Wall, “which all my friends rejoiced about. I was the only dour person at the party, saying, ‘This isn’t that good news. This is going to produce a great deal of suffering. You’re going to settle for the Berlin wall when you see what’s coming next.'”

Well, it might be some type of foresight into the twenty-first century. Then again, it just might be Cohen seeing the always-half-empty glass; he is a pretty gloomy guy. But there’s an even more strangely disturbing foreshadowing song Cohen wrote, entitled “First We Take Manhattan.”

Here are some lyrics from that little ditty, published in 1988 on the album “I’m Your Man” [emphasis mine]:

I’m guided by a signal in the heavens
I’m guided by this birthmark on my skin
I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin…

Ah you loved me as a loser, but now you’re worried that I just might win
You know the way to stop me, but you don’t have the discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin…

(If you want to watch Cohen performing it, go here.)

Another fact about Cohen I learned from that interview is that—at least in 1992—he thought Hillary Clinton to be “immensely attractive.” Make of that what you will; after all, Cohen is a self-described “Ladies’ Man” (and please note the plural possessive).

But why am I going into all of this? Aside from the fact that Cohen’s songs, listened to with regularity, create some rather spectacularly tenacious earworms in the listener (although, to be sure, they are mercifully tuneful ones, unlike the notorious “It’s a Small World After All”)?

A while back I wrote about how poetry insinuates itself into our brains—or at least it used to, back when it rhymed. And about how modern poetry, with its general lack of rhyme or meter, has no such qualities. It’s difficult to memorize and eminently forgettable, even if enjoyed at first reading; it doesn’t create the poetic equivalent of earworms.

Relatively few poets today write what’s called formal poetry; that is, with rhyme and meter, or even simply with meter. True, there has been a small revival of forms, called—appropriately enough–the “new formalism,” somewhat analogous to a recent revival of representative art. Neo-neocon that I am, I’ve always been attracted to forms in poetry—and, in recent years, even before my political conversion, have written in forms. In some ways, my attraction to forms in writing (sonnets, for example, or villanelles, or terza rima), and in dancing (ballet), may have foreshadowed my later political changes—a closet conservative all the time, no doubt, despite my artsy-fartsy ways.

All of this is a lengthy means of coming around to saying that Cohen, as a poet, may have been drawn to songwriting partly because it afforded him the opportunity to use those archaic things known as rhyme and meter without running the risk of being called old-fashioned. No doubt there were plenty of other reasons—from his interviews, I’d say the man is pretty driven—but my guess is that this was one of them.

In my thread about rhyme and remembering poetry, many of the commenters wrote that in some ways songwriting has filled in the slack taken by the departure of forms in poetry. It’s true that there’s always been quite a bit of overlap, at least historically; “minstrels.” for example.

Homer, one of the earliest poets of whom we’re aware, is known to have used a lyre when he recited. But, apparently, he didn’t actually sing of Troy; he accompanied himself on the lyre in a sort of hybrid:

Homer not only recited his poems but used a κίθαρις, a sort of stringed instrument similar to a lyre. Homer did not sing his poems however, but he used the κίθαρις to mark rhythm, to play a musical interlude while he was thinking of something (let us not forget there was a certain amount of improvisation involved) and to indicate tone, pitch, and even mood (playing in a major chord to begin a thought, heightening it to a minor as the action or suspense rises, and resolving into major after some climax.) This musical accompaniment was indispensable to Homer and his contemporaries.

And then there was David, author of the psalms, and inspiration for many of the lyrics in Cohen’s much-beloved work, “Hallelujah” (“I’ve heard there was a secret chord/That David played, and it pleased the Lord”). The very word “psalm” means “songs sung to a harp.” Their longevity and memorizability, even in translation, are legendary. My understanding is that although they do not rhyme in the original, but rely on a sort of echoing quality of repetition of similar thoughts expressed in different words, their musicality is profound.

Poetry occupies some hybrid ground between words and music, but is neither. As I quoted Frost not long ago:

I have a tune [when writing poetry], but it’s a tune of the blend of [meter and rhythm]. Something rises–it’s neither one of those things. It’s neither the meter nor the rhythm,; it’s a tune arising from the stress on those–same as your fingers on the strings, you know. The twang!

Both poetry and song speak to arenas of the soul that prose can rarely reach. Poetry and song are linked to each other, and both are linked to the deepest wellsprings of human feeling. Both can descend into doggerel, but both can reach that height known as art—and, when they do, they can last for millenia.

Dangerous Nation: another look at the Spanish American War (Part II)

The New Neo Posted on by

[See Part I.]

After Proctor’s turnaround speech, more and more former naysayers came on board in support of war with Spain for the liberation of Cuba. But still, McKinley tried his best at negotiations to avoid it, machinations that ultimately failed.

Finally, when McKinley felt war to be inevitable, his stated reasons for the conflict (and, Kagan believes, his deeper reasons, as well) were mostly—although not totally—humanitarian. The proximity of Cuba to our shores was part of the motivation, as was the fact that the US was flexing newly acquired muscles; it liberated Cuba in part because it could. But the liberation nevertheless had deeply idealistic motivations.

Europe, however, wasn’t having any of it. Many monarchs there quite naturally sympathized with Spain and were against US intervention. Queen Victoria’s reaction summed up this attitude about the perceived threat to European interests, “They might just as soon declare Ireland independent!”

But it wasn’t just the royals who were against the US drive for war. Europeans had long had a love-hate relationship with America, with the accent often on the hate. The asserted the superiority and refinement of the Old World over the crass New, and world-weary European cynicism trumped American claims of altruistic motives:

European commentators of all ideological stripes took the occasion of the war to revive long-standing images of American “materialism, greed, vulgarity, selfishness, hypocrisy, and barbarism.”…[E]ven outside Spain few accepted American claims that the war was for the liberation of Cuba or to relieve Cuban suffering. This was seen as more rank hypocrisy…Across Europe there was an “astonishing scarcity” of any discussion of Cuban suffering or aspirations.

But there was more. Even many of those who had previously seen America as a beacon of light, advocating and defending its republican principles, were disillusioned. It’s not all that clear why, but one of the reasons was that the US move was seen by many as a threat to the international legal order in which they’d been placing much hope.

Many US commentators were no less upset than the Europeans, and no less doubtful that the US could not possibly be truly going to war for mainly humanitarian motives. They sought to explain the war drive as a sort of mass psychosis; quotes such as “hysteria” and “emotional outburst” were not uncommon. Kagan writes:

Other historians have solved the problem differently, insisting that American expressions of moral outrage and humanitarian concern were just a cover for selfish economic reasons…Still others have argued that the American goal was, above all, to prevent Cuban independence and thereby gain control of the island; that this was a war, “deliberated and by design, for the purpose of territorial expansion.” This, even though McKinley made it clear he did not want to annex Cuba and even though the United States did not, if fact, annex it.

I doubt I need to point out how familiar this all sounds.

Kagan places the Spanish American War squarely in a prior tradition of a humanitarian and idealistic United States, one not entirely reluctant to intervene when necessary in the affairs of others. Some, of course, consider this a tradition that needs to be ended. But those who look at US activities in fighting WWI, WWII, and the Cold War, even though the conflicts were not on our own shores, find that our interventionist and freedom-defending proclivities might not be such a bad thing, after all. Certainly they are not above asking for our help when needed, even in haughty Europe.

There’s no doubt, of course, that the US—like every other nation on earth that ever has been and ever will be—has had its own selfish interests at heart, as well, in all these activities. Countries are not saints, nor could they ever be.

But the US, a country founded on an idealistic set of ideas, is an unusual combination of altruism and self-interest. This is a brew that has indeed led to our entry in wars in the past, and certainly the Iraq War is an example of such a war in the present.

Kagan mentions that, in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War:

The United States succeeded in putting an end to the civil war in Cuba and to the suffering of the reconcentrados. The intervention saved many lives, probably tens of thousands. But it left the United States saddled with the occupation of Cuba for the next four years, an occupation that ultimately produced mixed results that fell far short of most Americans hopes and expectations when they had entered the war, as well as most Cubans’ hopes and expectations.

It also led to some other unforeseen consequences, including the war in the Philippines, a much more morally ambiguous and problematic endeavor.

Kagan points out that the Spanish American War [my emphasis], “like all wars, solved one set of problems but unleashed another set.” It seems that in recent years this simple truth has been forgotten by many, war supporters and antiwar activists among them. War is the answer to certain questions, but it doesn’t come easy, and it sets up a host of other questions that may have other answers—including more wars.

But then again, so does the decision not to go to war.

Dangerous Nation: another look at the Spanish-American War (Part I)

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember the Spanish-American War? You probably learned about it in your history classes–which was a long time ago, perhaps.

If you were anything like me, you only remember a few key phrases: “yellow journalism.” “Remember the Maine.” The American people whipped up into a frenzy of warmongering by the hungry press. Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, looking like overgrown boy scouts. The US as an imperial power.

Robert Kagan’s Dangerous Nation has the unwieldy subtitle “America’s place in the world from its earliest days to the dawn of the twentieth century.” The book advances Kagan’s thesis that the US was never all that isolationist to begin with—and that, from the founding of our nation, the US had demonstrated a strain of self-interested economic and geographic expansionism combined with an idealistic universalism about liberty and its spread.

This is only the first volume of a projected two-volume work. It ends with the buildup to the Spanish-American War. The next volume will pick up where the book left off, with the conduct of that war and its aftermath.

Kagan goes back to original sources to maintain that the impetus towards the Spanish-American War was not the lies told by a jingoistic and overreaching press eager for the conflict. In fact, by the time the war began, bipartisan support was strong, even among many of those who had originally opposed it. And the newspapers hadn’t gotten it very wrong.

Kagan points out [emphasis mine]:

It was true that the press did print some fabrications–sometimes fed to reporters by the Cuban junta–just as it did in every other conflict in American history. But the main thrust of what the press reported about events in Cuba was accurate. Even Hearst could not exaggerate the horrors of the [re]concentration camps, or tell a story more “sensational” than three hundred thousand Cubans dying of starvation and disease….The pressure [for war]…was the product of Cuban reality and American outrage over actual human suffering.

You’ll have to go to Kagan’s book to read the details of the political and diplomatic maneuverings engaged in with Spain by the McKinley administration in its efforts to avoid the war. Suffice to say there were many.

A turning point, after the explosion of the Maine, was a visit to Cuba and a subsequent speech by Senator Redfield Proctor of Maine.

Proctor had heretofore been against going to war over Cuba. He had traveled there to see the situation for himself and to evaluate it, with a “strong conviction that the picture had been overdrawn” in terms of the suffering of the Cuban people.

What he saw there profoundly shocked him. What the press had said about what were euphemistically known as “reconcentration camps”—places of widespread death and suffering in which huge numbers of Cubans who had wanted to be free from Spanish rule were housed—was quite true. Addressing the Senate, Proctor reversed his previous antiwar stance, stating that the reason for this war was neither the Maine nor revenge, it was “the spectacle of a million and a half of people, the entire native population of Cuba, struggling for freedom and deliverance from the worst misgovernment of which I ever had knowledge.”

In other words, liberation from oppression.

[Part II, dealing with the continuation of the buildup to the Spanish-American war, and how it was seen by Europe and subsequent US historians—as well as how it might be compared to the war in Iraq—will appear tomorrow.]

Democrats and Republican: civil rights and history

The New Neo Posted on by

I keep reading (slowly, ever-so-slowly) the Robert Kagan book Dangerous Nation, his take on the history of what he contends was a non-isolationist United States from its very inception (and yes, you might call him a neocon historian.)

I plan a couple of posts soon on his discussion of the Spanish-American War, including a comparison that comes to my mind about the Iraq War.

But for today, instead, here’s a bit of history about the Democratic and Republican parties. The 1960s are widely acknowledged to have been a time of great transition and upheaval, and this was true of the parties, as well. In a few respects, it seems as though they actually changed places. In other respects, they just changed.

You’ll have to read Kagan’s book to get the details and the full flavor of it all, but here are some excerpts:

…the Republican Party throughout the last half of the nineteenth century was the party of federal power and the active state, of “nationalism,” the Democratic Party remained in the 1889s and the early 1890s the party of States’ rights, local control, and suspicion of federal power.

Doesn’t sound very familiar. Of course, the Republican post-60s reputation as the party of smaller government—at least on domestic issues, spending, and local vs. federal control—has been attenuated to the point that many strict Libertarians feel they haven’t a home there any more. But they have even less of a home in the Democratic Party.

The post-Reconstruction period was the era of southern yellow-dog Democrats, a time in which the South was so solidly Democratic that the only contest was between members of that party for the nomination, and no Republicans need apply. This lasted for nearly a century. The long legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction (championed, of course, by Republicans—a fact the South did not forget) meant that Democrats were essentially the only game in town, and they were dramatically opposed to voting rights for blacks. One reason, of course, is that blacks were assumed to be on track to becoming overwhelmingly Republican voters were they ever to get the vote. And there was no reason to believe otherwise.

Kagan points out the interesting fact that the post-Civil War South was the only part of the country that had known defeat in a major war (prior to Vietnam, that is, which I believe should also be counted as a defeat—whether self-imposed or not, we could argue ad nauseum). Subsequent to losing the war, the South underwent occupation as well, which was designed to radically alter that society.

Here’s Kagan:

Since the end of that occupation [the Reconstruction], southern leaders had aimed to restore the South’s economy, to win a measure of economic and political independence, to restore white supremacy and “home rule,” and to gain freedom from federal, which is to say northern, dictates. Not surprisingly, it was the common view in the South, as one southern leader put it, that “[n]o man has the right or duty to impose his own convictions upon others.”….If Republicans celebrated Lincoln and the Civil War, therefore, and looked fondly back to the nationalist tradition of Clay and Hamilton, Democrats looked back to the era of Jackson and adhered to the Jeffersonian principle that the federal government “governs best that governs least.”

I am old enough to remember this position. “States’ rights” was still the banner of the South when I was a child, and Orville Faubus standing in that Little Rock school door to block integration was one of its last gasps.

But this era came to an end in the 60s, and with it ultimately went the solidly Democratic nature of the South. It was left to Lyndon Johnson, a southerner and a Democrat, to change all that. Maybe that’s how it had to happen, just as it was Nixon who opened China. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a watershed not only for the country as a whole, but for the South and the Democratic Party:johnson-civil-rights.gif

It puzzles me how the Republican Party has subsequently become linked in some people’s minds with racial bigotry. Surely there are individual Republicans who are bigots, as well as individual Democrats—and we’ve heard a bit from both in recent years. But historically, civil rights is an arena in which the Republican Party shone, with the Democratic Party coming rather late to the game.

Of course, what matters now is the stance of the parties at the moment, not their history. But, once again, the Republican Party certainly continues to believe in equality for people of all races. The only difference I can see between the two parties on that score is that Republicans are more likely to favor equality of opportunity and Democrats equality of outcome—which, for the latter, means supporting policies such as affirmative action based on group membership.

And many Democrats are also inclined to think that African-Americans who are Republicans are anomalous traitors to their race. But nothing could be further from the truth.

[ADDENDUM: Obama should brush up on his history, as well.]

Sanity Squad: The Oslo Syndrome

The New Neo Posted on by

In a clever turn on the phrase “Stockholm Syndrome,” Dr. Kenneth Levin, author of The Oslo Syndrome: delusions of a people under seige and the Sanity Squad’s guest in its podcast this week, offers some answers to the question of why Israel ever felt it had a partner in peace in Arafat, who called for their destruction even as he negotiated with them.

Psychiatrist Dr. Levin joins Squad regulars Shrinkwrapped, Siggy, and Dr. Sanity for some thought-provoking conversation. Along the way, we also discuss how the Oslo Syndrome might apply to the US today.

Dance me to Leonard Cohen

The New Neo Posted on by

I reacquainted myself with the music of singer/songwriter/poet Leonard Cohen recently, as a result of this post by The Anchoress. It links, not to the lugubrious Cohen himself, but to a YouTube video of John Cales singing Cohen’s much-covered “Hallelujah.” Then there was this rejoinder by Siggy, which originally linked to a version of Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love.”

Don’t bother looking for the latter. Unfortunately, it’s been taken off YouTube due to copyright difficulties. It featured Cohen standing in front of a sceen showing couples’ wedding pictures from long ago, and then those very same couples, elderly and nearly unrecognizable as themselves but still dancing together slowly as he sang the haunting, beautiful tune. Some of the older couples were actually just a single person and an empty chair where the other would have been sitting, if still alive.

I challenge anyone with a heart to have watched that thing and remain dry-eyed.

The two links started me on a YouTube jaunt. You know how it goes—you watch one video, click on related ones, they lead you to others, and suddenly a couple of hours have passed and you don’t know how it happened. That’s how I ended up re-evalutating Cohen, that sad-eyed chanteur of my youth.

Back in the 60s he was vaguely popular, mostly as the creator of “Suzanne,” covered by Judy Collins. I was avant-garde enough to own his record “Songs of Leonard Cohen” when it first came out, so I’m sure I saw that photo of him on the cover (follow the link), but I can’t say I remembered it. Who was interested? He was so old, after all—well over thirty! Since MTV and music videos had not been born, all I had to go on was the sound.

I wasn’t much of a fan of Cohen’s sound. Yes, many of his songs were pretty good—but sooooo slooooow. And that voice—strange, slightly nasal, a featureless toneless drone. Good for insomniacs and not much else. Anyone and everyone sounded better singing his songs than he did.

And then I didn’t hear or think of Cohen again, till those posts and that YouTube search. And I discovered something odd—the guy’s amazing.

He’s still got that monotonous voice. But it’s morphed into something different and even stranger—low, lower, lowest. Watching the video clips from different decades and eras, I could see the man change and age, but not in the usual ways.

Most of us get heavier; Cohen remains elegantly thin. Most of us have a face that gets puffier. His merely gets craggier, with only slightly deeper fault lines—and they started out pretty deep already. Not a hair on his head has been lost; it’s just gone gray, now that he’s in his early seventies (yep, he’s still a lot older than I am). Or maybe he’s finally stopped dyeing it.

Early on, Cohen was totally deadpan in his delivery. He never smiled. His mournful air combined with that voice and the slow delivery had a hypnotic effect; here was a man who knew the value of stillness.

In recent years, though, a slow smile curves his mouth every now and then, and even reaches a bit into his eyes. His Wiki biography says he’s suffered from depression all his life, but it has lifted in his older years. Cohen’s “lifted,” however, is most people’s “been down so long it looks like up to me.”

One of the reasons Cohen might be feeling happier lately is that, despite his advanced age, he’s got himself quite a girlfriend.

I think if I’d seen Cohen in performance earlier, or a video of him, I would have understood better what all the fuss was about. The word “hypnotic” seems to have been coined for the sole purpose of describing him. He doesn’t just sing; he weaves a spell, and strange as his delivery and stage presence is, it works.

He’s a poet, as well—a real one. In fact, he was a prize-winning poet before he became a songwriter. His lyrics are especially complex and evocative, and can bear many repeatings. The melodies, likewise. Many of them feature a vaguely Eastern European Jewish flavor. His themes vary, but the vagaries of love—especially love lost—is a favorite, and one look into his eyes tells you he knows whereof he sings.

Cohen is a famous and renowned womanizer. Almost all of his live performances through the 80s to the present follow a certain formula: backup instruments such as the violin, slow and catchy rhythms and melodies, and two female singers, one blond and one dark. The women seem mesmerized as well; they sing almost as in a trance, swaying slowly as though floating underwater. Cohen appears linked to them in some way; he often gazes into the eyes of one or the other as he sings. Some almost-palpable electricity seems to be arcing gently between them, and then rippling out to the audience like a force-field.

Cohen’s songs are frequently covered, and many people prefer those more tuneful versions to the idiosynchratic Cohen-groan. But I guess you could say I’m not one of them; I’ve become a Cohen fan after all these years.

[Note: Want to see (and hear) the aging process, right before your eyes (and ears)? Here’s the young higher-voiced Cohen. Then, the dreamy, deepening middle years. And finally, the not-sadder and wiser croak of the old guy.]

[ADDENDUM: I’m happy to report to anyone who still might be reading this that I’ve found the “Dance Me To the End of Love” video that I described above.]

“Most of my Chinese friends are Jewish”

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an article from the NY Times that I came across through that “most frequently e-mailed articles” function the Times has. The title caught my eye, “Journey From a Chinese Orphanage to a Jewish Rite of Passage.”

It’s not a very deep piece. But it describes one of those interesting unforeseen social phenomena. Over a decade ago, adoption of Chinese infants became possible and popular in the US, due to the shortage of adoptable babies here and a surplus there. At the beginning, because of a combination of restrictions on family size in China and a preference for boys, the vast majority of adoptees were girls.

And so now we have the result: a fairly substantial group of female teenagers of Chinese ethnicity, some of them adopted by Jewish couples and coming of Bat Mitzvah age.

The article spotlights a few of these girls, who sound pretty well-adjusted to me. In the case of Cece, the girl most featured, this is despite a rather complex familial background, including—in addition to her transracial adoption—Lesbian parents, one of whom is a convert to Judaism.

But as another girl, Olivia, says, “Judaism is a religion, Chinese is my heritage and somewhat my culture, and I’m looking at them in a different way,” she said. “I don’t feel like they conflict with each other at all.”

And Olivia is quite, quite correct—perhaps more correct than even she knows.

Contrary to what many people believe, not only is Judaism a religion that accepts converts of any race or ethnicity, but there are already Jews in virtually every nation on earth (or there were until they were killed, driven out of some of those countries, and/or emigrated to Israel in recent years).

And so yes, even China has had a Jewish community–for over a thousand years. Take a look:

Archaelogical evidence suggests that Jews were in China as early as the 8th Century, having arrived from Persia along the Silk Road. In 1163 the Emperor ordered the Jews to live in Kaifeng, where they built the first Chinese synagogue. Marco Polo recorded that Kublai Khan celebrated the festivals of the Muslims, Christians and Jews, indicating that there were a significant number of Jews in China in the 13th Century.

There were other Jewish people in China who were more recent arrivals, but this earlier community ended up being physically indistinguishable from the other Chinese people surrounding them. In other words, they looked ethnically Chinese. Ultimately, they appear to have assimilated:

Of those [six Jewish communities in China], only Kaifeng Jewry flourished sufficiently to survive for a millennium, preserving some traces of their Jewishness until their synagogue was destroyed by an earthquake in the 1840s and the last of them assimilated. The only remnants of the community today are a knowledge of the site of the synagogue, upon which another building now stands; a stele from the Middle Ages with inscriptions of major events in the history of the community carved into it, but no longer legible; and a practice, still preserved by some, of avoiding the eating of pork.

But for Cece and Olivia and the others—who, to be sure, are extremely unlikely to be the actual biological descendents of these original Chinese Jews—it all begins again. As Cece herself says, “Most of my Chinese friends are Jewish.”