Reflections: Mi Gaza, Su Gaza

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In the aftermath of the homicidal attack made by the Israeli military on the “freedom flotilla” attempting to ship humanitarian aid into blockaded Gaza, there has been a lively discussion of Israel, pro- and con-, at Vox Nova. VN is relatively new-to-me daily read to which I was first led from Journeys in Alterity. Presented below is a revised and extended version of a comment of mine, pertaining to this post at VN. I have previously written more favorably about visiting Israel. These recent events have provoked memories of the dark side:

I saw a foreshadowing of the reasons for the growing condemnation of Israel while traveling there in 1979. I was traveling as an accompanying spouse with my wife’s modern dance company, under the auspices of the U.S. state department, in a “goodwill tour”-type situation. Because of the geopolitics of the region in those days, this was a very special tour. The company was to be the first group of individuals to cross the border with Jordan, over the Allenby Bridge (pictured above), since before the Six-Day War. In order to do this, each member of the dance company, as well as each fellow-traveler like me, had been issued a second U.S. passport. As I recall, the purpose of this special passport was to be able to present customs agents in the Arab nations with a passport which had not been stamped in Israel.

I was thrilled to be in Israel. It was a joy to walk the ancient streets of Jerusalem; to climb the slopes of the Mount of Olives; to pass from the blazing sunlight into the awesome obscurity of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. But my flaming enthusiasm for the visit was abruptly doused, on our last day there, by the treatment I received at the hands of Israeli officials.

To make a long story short, my billfold, containing traveler’s checks in the amount of several hundred dollars, as well as the equivalent in Israeli currency of about $250 cash, disappeared from a canvas bag stashed under a deck chair by the hotel swimming pool. This happened in the span of time that it took me to have a quick splash in the pool, just to cool off. My bag had been left under the watchful eyes of two of the “guides” assigned by the Israeli government to facilitate our visit.

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In order to be able to recoup the traveler’s checks, and to protect myself against the possibility that my credit card had already been used before the theft was discovered, I had to be taken to the local cop shop to make a report. With deliberate rudeness, the Israeli police spoke to each other only in Hebrew, although each of them showed that he was perfectly capable of questioning me in English. Throughout the interview they laughed amongst themselves, seeming to be greatly enjoying my obvious consternation. In the end, they shrugged and said, “Nothing we can do, Meester.”

The next morning, as we were packing to leave, having cancelled the credit card – an extreme inconvenience while on the road – I got a call from the hotel desk. They had found my billfold, so they said, in the bushes near the fencing around the pool. When I recovered it, I found that nothing – not even the cash – was missing. You do the math.

This is how Americans were being treated as guests of the state of Israel – a state that is able to survive only as an American client – in 1979, when Israel was still held in high regard by most Americans. By constrast, we were treated with respect and friendship by officials in both Egypt and Jordan. I had a particularly good experience in Jordan, also involving interaction with officials, which I may write about at some later time.

Incidentally, the hotel strip along the beach in Tel Aviv was literally swarming with hookers. I was several times openly solicited in broad daylight by young women on the sidewalks, or in cars parked along the sidewalks of the main drag, who exposed their breasts without shame and made enticing verbal suggestions—in pretty good English. On one of these occasions, I walking to our hotel with my wife! The beaches were covered in tar, so that one had to wear shoes while swimming or sunbathing in order to avoid having one’s feet semi-permanently blackened. And, although I loved being able to visit the Church of Holy Sepulcher, dealing with the money-hungry priest on duty (I’m not sure which of the several churches he was representing), was quite unpleasant. In the end, I was glad to be getting the hell out of Israel when the tour bus pulled up.

Bottom line: The Arabs can have it, for all I care. That would at least keep it out of the hands of the Southern Baptist Convention…

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Rants: LEGALLY BLIND!

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Q: What kind of man is this?

A: I dunno... Cro-Magnon?

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Update: new verb enters the lexicon:

Main Entry: joyce
Pronunciation: joy-sssssss
Function: intransitive verb
Date: 21st century
1 colloquial: FUCK UP BIG TIME
2 : a : derisive : joyced like a bandit ; b: to insert the thumb in the anal aperture and rhymthically stir while sleeping on the job : Panting like a hound, he shamelessly joyced in full view of the crowd

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Update.1: Anyone who would like to read something that is less adolescent, less emotional, and more fraught with goodwill is referred here.

Rants: WTF?

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Okay, I'll admit that I just don't get it. I mean, really -- how could squads of laser-guided underwater robots, armed with state-of-the-art diamond saws, so completely fail to accomplish a simple task that even Joe the Plumber -- despite the fact that his name's not really "Joe" and he's not really a plumber -- wielding only the primitive tools hanging on his belt... Oh. Wait...

....never mind.
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Reflections: Out of My Depth

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The entry in my journal for September 10, 1991 which immediately preceded the one quoted in my last post was this:

I once had dreams of wading, following a beautiful, shallow river to the outskirts of a city. I had dreams of discovering in the ground of cache of coins – and more turned up in the sand the deeper I dug. I dreamed of being in a night city, down in the train yards, and finding there a deep pool full of beautiful, glowing fish that swam up near the surface, and then dove again for the inky depths. It does not seem now that the strange fish I encountered in the city when I had arrived there in reality were equivalent to those dream fish – but it could be that I’m wrong; that something is being overlooked. So far as I can remember, I never dreamt of a fish with a coin in its mouth.

Dreams of buried talents… subconscious a-boil with hidden beauty…

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Reflections: In Dreamtime

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I have long been haunted by the memory of a dream that I had forty years ago, circa 1970-71. In 1991, my first year in Ohio after leaving New York, I kept a journal in which I examined my life up to that point. Included in this journal were sketches of any dream that I had dreamed in my lifetime, the power of which had been such that it was never forgotten. This morning, prodded into action by reading of some dreams related by Pentimento on her blog, I dug that journal out of its box. I was gratified to find that I had, indeed, written down what I remembered of the dream in question there. On September 10, 1991, I wrote:

The dream that I wish I could remember more clearly I had in Brooklyn, now twenty years ago. I was in the presence of, I think, three robed and hooded old men. I am certain that there were more than one. I usually dream in color, but there is no color associated with this dream, perhaps because the light is so dim. I am receiving instruction in some mystery. I have been asked a question that presumably I have been taught enough to answer. I feel anxiety that I will fail to answer correctly and that I will fail my instructors, who are plainly wise men, wizards. But suddenly, led on I think by some kind of prompting recapitulation on the part of the wise men, the answer comes to me and I blurt it out proudly and joyfully – “Oil!” If only I could remember the preceding instruction so that I could know the mystery to which “oil” is the correct answer.

I did not write in 1991 that I am quite certain that I was being instructed from a text. I am also quite certain that the three wise men were not of earthly provenance. In addition to being prompted by Pentimento, I was again set to musing about this dream by this illustration of the three “men” who visited Abraham, from Chapter 18 of Robert Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated:


I call this dream “haunting” because of my tentative but persistent belief that the mysterious question to which “oil” was the correct answer –and the key to knowledge – was: What will bring about the End of the World?

Prophetic prescience?
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Remembrances: Fugitive Days

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One of my daughter Laura's friends has asked to interview me about my experiences as a draft resister in the Vietnam era. Toward that end, I went spent some time this morning searching my archives for any graphics that might contribute to the project. The ones below are all that I have.

The b&w set were taken on my short-lived run to Canada. With my wife accompanying me, I traveled from Ann Arbor, Michigan on into Canada from Minnesota. We traveled in the vintage Mercedes of our friend, Steve Nasisse, later an officer in the Merchant Marine. We drove that old car across the great plains provinces of Canada, over the massive Rocky Mountains, eventually rendezvousing with some people in Vancouver, BC who had fled to Canada before us.


But I had already made up my mind, long before we got to the Pacific coast, that I was not going to allow myself to be run out of my own country, and that I would return to Ann Arbor to fight the draft as a conscientious objector. So the drive into exile turned into a kind of vacation. After spending a day or two with the people in Vancouver, we crossed the border, back into Washington state. My wife and I stayed with my friend and former roommate, Jim Rutherford, who was living in Seattle at the time. Steve went on down the coast to California to visit other friends.


The taller man standing by the car is Steve, who is also pictured driving below. The other shot is of Steve and me on the shores of Lake Superior in northern Minnesota:



While in Seattle, we bought a car--a used Plymouth Valiant--and headed for Athens, Ohio, where my parents were now living. We arrived in Athens just in time for me to accompany my father down to the College Green, where he, along with the rest of the faculty, had been asked to patrol in order to protect the infrastructure from vandalism by demonstrating students during what is known locally as "the Troubles," in the wake of the Kent State shootings:



After visiting with my parents in Athens, and resting up for a spell, my wife and I returned to Ann Arbor. I took a job in a Ford Motor Company plant in nearby Saline, Michigan, while I hasseled with the local draft board in an attempt to become reclassified as a conscientious objecter. We stayed with my wife's parents in Ann Arbor until I got paid by Mr. Ford, at which time we rented the second floor of a frame house on Packard Road, above the offices of a pediatrician. There we stayed until I won my final appeal with the Selective Service System. I am pictured below, chilling out in tie-dye shirt, Frye boots and jeans, on the couch of that furnished pad on Packard Road:

Once I had been reclassified, I had to find myself a job with a charity organization that would qualify as "alternate service," of which I was obligated to do two years. Through a friend living in New York City, I found both a job--at Planned Parenthood-World Population--and a cheap apartment in this building on Greene Avenue, in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn:




And that's what I did on my summer vacation.
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Photo credit: The Athens scene above is from the Ohio University Alumni Journal, August 1970 Special Edition
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Update: The interview went off, pretty much without a hitch, yesterday afternoon. Around fifty minutes of reminiscing will be boiled down to a three-minute presentation to fulfil the assignment for Kristen's multi-media class. I've been promised a copy of the final product. I imagine that viewing it will be cringe-making--like the first time you hear your own voice on tape: I SOUND LIKE THAT?!?!?X

Remembrances: Baseball 1961

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Several days ago, while looking for something else entirely, I came across the Tiger Stadium rain checks pictured above, dated September 17, 1961. I didn’t even remember that I had these little bits of memorabilia. But I certainly did remember that game. Or, at least I thought I did. One’s memory can play tricks. Sometimes a bit of research reveals that one’s most cherished memories have been manufactured out of proverbial whole cloth by one’s own mind.

The 1961 season lives in my baseball-lovin’ heart as the very best season ever. The home team—the Detroit Tigers of Al Kaline, Rocky Colavito, Charley Maxwell, Stormin’ Norman Cash, Frank Lary, and, yes—Jim Bunning—as well as a whole roster of other heroes, battled the monstrously strong New York Yankees neck-and-neck for the American League pennant for the first three quarters of the season. But the primary excitement was provided by the hated Yankees, as both Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle spent the season on a pace to break Babe Ruth’s single-season homerun record of 60 round-trippers. The fragile Mantle broke down late in the year, but Maris soldiered on. My father'd had the presence of mind to purchase advance sale tickets for a late-season Tiger-Yankee game. He took me, along with my friend Jimmy Malcolm, to the stadium early enough to watch BP. Although we didn't get the foul ball we hoped for, we were both in heaven throughout the entire twelve-inning contest.

My memory had been that we saw Roger Maris hit number 58 that day. This was a significant homerun, in that it tied Maris with legendary Tiger hero, Hank Greenberg, and the equally renowned slugger, Jimmie Foxx, as the only men other than the Babe himself to reach that figure. But was this a true memory, or merely some retroactive fantasy, concocted out of dreamstuff by my inner fan?

Maris, of course, went on to hit 61 homeruns that year. He didn’t get number 60 within the 154 games that measured the season in the Babe’s day; but he did set a new record, nonetheless. It was not difficult, after finding those rain check stubs and confirming the date of the game, to go online and find a day by day run-down of Maris’ homeruns. Happily, this confirmed my memory: I’d been in the house for number 58. You can have a gander at the nostalgia-provoking inventory here.

Fortuitously, 1961 was the one season during which I kept a day-by-day scrapbook. The write-up of this memorable game is on the page below:

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I was 14 years old during that season. I was on the brink of developing other interests—including, but not limited to, girls—that would somewhat dilute my obsession with baseball. But 1961 remains for me a season to remember. And remember I do.

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