Israel

In the scorch of last summer, my Dad and I had a most combative argument right in the middle of family dinner, no less. I had so disappointed him with my disapproval of the Israeli occupation of Lebanon and Gaza that he rose from the sacred table and dashed upstairs to fetch his New Republic and use it to inform on just how crazy these Hamas and Hezbollah fascists are in their ideology and tactics. Somehow unconvinced, I held to my rebellious defiant stance.

I was so worked up by the whole affair that I filled the weekly space I enjoyed in the summer’s Daily Texan to renounce Israeli aggression. Regrettably, though, my opinion piece was too clouded by my passion about the subject and some magic banana bread to present a thoughtful, cogent argument. But I still hold the same views now, and I’m determined to speak about the spiritual homeland of my faith anew.

That connection seems to blind so many people in their views of Israel. Many of us Americans imply wrongheadedly that the sacred spots of our religions will only be safe if they are overseen by a specific nation-state that must be named Israel. This perspective relates philosophically to the doctrine of the Crusaders who follied to tramp all the way to goddamn Asia with only perfume to bathe themselves. They believed, as many Americans do, that the holy land had to be the property of the correct nation to remain sacred and pure. I do so wish that I could go back in time and alter the time-space continium by asking the Crusading brutes if it wouldn’t just be easier to have a massive sight-seeing tour instead.

The Holocaust is another roadblock to clarity. The founding of Israel, you see, is taught in both religious schools and high schools directly after the personally-significant Nazi human slaughterings. We Jews are raised to know that this truly horrible Anti-Semitic world owes us a place to call our own in return for its harsh blows. I appreciate the gesture of the American sentiment that we made the world perfectly right by our service in the Second World War, but I think I’d rather just be permitted to live in peace in the location of my choosing.

As for Jews who want to respond to the exclusivity of Western Civilization by making our own private nation, I feel obliged to point out the real relationship of Jews to nation-states in history. No group of people is better primed and educated for socialism because nobody has been seen as wretched by white people as long as we have. Almost every place we’ve lived, we’ve faced ghettoization, pograms, and the idea that somewhere on our body we have a permanent deformity because we killed Jesus. For that reason, we can definitively grasp that the notion of the pure nation is the chief cause of the world’s problems. It doesn’t seem right that we would be then so dedicated to perpetuating this system by manufacturing a new country with the aid of nuclear weaponry.

Speaking of us Jews, it’s worthwhile to mention that we have many fanatics on our side as well. Fundamentalist Evangelicals are perhaps the most powerful voice supporting Israel in these United States. I first learned of this repugnant influence behind American support for Israel in the authoritative New Republic magazine, which revealed that these vermin want Jews to govern the holy land because it represents the first Biblically-prescribed step to the Apocalypse.

But then, we have crazies in our own religion. Check out the Frontline documentary on a fascist Israeli political organization whose logo is a violent black Star of David emblazoned with a fist. Some of these people were luckily apprehended by Israeli police just moments before they were going to bomb a Palestinian elementary school, and they’re the same morons who want to huddle into armored settlements in all the most controversial districts of disputed regions. They escalate the tensions any bit as much as the suicide bombers.

The mere idea that I should align myself with these two groups of hooligans is more infuriating than keys locked inside a car.

Don’t think I don’t understand the spiritual connection of religious people to their homeland, though, and don’t think I don’t feel the same suspension bridge deep inside me. That link is actually the same reason why I want this war to end with all the others.

Gore 2008

Just around four a.m. last Saturday night, I had an extremely enlightening exchange with a couple of roommates. Although all of our brains were blinded by drugs of various sorts, none of us failed at building on each other’s sloppy 2000-pound blocks. First we made long soliloquies about how we hate everything about going to the dentist’s office, and agreed that we all just hate dentists. But then we had to admit that, in fact, dentists are very nice people and their services benefit millions.

Very shortly after this seemingly pointless dialogue, our talking paths led us to the 2008 election and to which presidential candidate we are lending our sizeable respective political capitols. That was a giant matzah ball indeed. Nothing less than the status of the purportedly free world rests on who will inherit the oval office, and it’s imperative that the next president should not be a complete moron.

I had yet to make up my mind before Saturday night. Usually, I try to make sure people know that the only individual I would actively support as President of these United States is the cunning linguist and prominent anarchist Noam Chomsky. If pressed for a personal favorite out of the odd assortment of horses’ asses that appear poised for a Democratic nomination, I habitually answered that I trusted Hillary to run a politically-shrewd campaign. I figured that she was therefore the deustch with the best chance of keeping a more slimy eel from occupying the white house. I know that this viewpoint is nothing less than brilliant because it was endorsed by one Dr. Robert Tostevin, a Trotskeyite history teacher for whom I’d do expository backflips.

But then my roommate brought up Albert Gore Jr, the man he and all of us should admire for winning the 2000 election and raising some degree of awareness about the warming of this green house. I had heard of Gore as a politically-supportable entity a lot from my own father, who also favors the Tennessean. I never did dismiss Gore outright myself, but I’ll admit to feeling a small amount of enmity towards the man who got my hopes up like I was a freshman boy on homecoming.

The question of the likelihood of Gore’s victory is the most significant dilemma about every Democratic candidate. If the Democrats do not take back the executive branch, the continuous stream of bullshit coming from our capitol will become wider than the Amazon. The Democrats can enact some frivolous pseudo changes, but they have to prevail to do it.

And Gore might be able to do just that. Americans hate Bush as much as they have hated any president in history, and they are just itching to install someone who appears to be the exact opposite of him. Who better to fill this void than the integrity-steeped former VP who graciously accepted what would have had most men in a burbling and gurgling Rage? America can completely wash its hands of Bush’s predictable mistakes by performing a do-over of 2000. We really do hate feeling guilty, and it will allow us to thrusts our chests once again into their forward state as the leaders of this world.

But Gore really is one of the few honest politicians I could name. He never did say he invented the Internet, even though we all know that he did. His Inconvenient Truth represents the first time I’ve ever really looked up to any slick-haired DC suit. And I bet he’s built up a veritable heap of sharp rhetoric over these last few years to shout from all the mountaintops.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I will steadfastly refuse to enlist myself in his minions and try to have really succinct, smart-ass, West-Wing style talks with political operatives. I have to insist on this because, during my drunken presidential discussion, my roommate and I were proclaiming that we would do everything we could for this man. Upon waking up drowsily the next morning, I realized that this pledge was only the half-honest ravings of two inebriated buffoons.

And also, this doesn’t mean I couldn’t support Hillary. I love how people hate her, and the thought of them being annoyed everyday by her speeches fills me with my most vicious pleasure. The same positive thoughts apply to exciting Obama. I’ve always been in favor of fewer white men on the inside of every institution, government being the most important of any.

But when it all comes down to it, I want this country to be led by a geek, the only type of people I trust. If there were no nerds, our teeth would be disgusting.

9-11 Truth

A couple of years ago, a close friend imed me an unfamiliar link. He wrote under the link, “See if you think this is legit or just bullshit.” I clicked on the link and unwittingly found myself watching a documentary that questioned just who really perpetrated the vicious crimes of 9-11.

Using all sorts of evidence, Loose Change asks simple, mostly unanswered questions about the day that all politicians talk about but never really examine. The implications of such inquires never fail to haunt the film’s viewers. I, for example, watched the damn thing at two in the morning high up in the towers of Jester and wondered if the government was watching from a concealed spot below my prison-like window.

The notion of an inside conspiracy is so alluring to those of us who bristle at the way suits have used a tragedy to foster insecurity and more violent forms of violence. It would explain so much to us, you know.

It’s no wonder, then, that the 9-11 truth movement is gaining momentum. It was alive and well last Thursday night at the Texas Union for a lecture by Alex Jones, one of the leading proponents of the inside-job theory. The place was packed with more than a thousand people and scarcely enough chairs to seat us all.

And we were there for the long haul, too. The first thing that Jones announced when he grabbed the microphone authoritatively was that it was going to be a two-hour event with three different speakers. Nobody in the audience flinched; we just got comfortable and let the hours pass by like it was nothing.

The crowd’s endurance really did impress me. For the only time in my life, we could put ourselves somewhere near the audiences of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, where Honest Abe and the Little General squared off in debate for more than three hours at every stop.

Of course, the rhetoric of Alex Jones in no way resembles the syntax and diction of the great dead white men. For one, Jones could easily kick both their asses. Looking something like a retired offensive lineman, he sagged beyond both ends of the podium. Yet, his speaking voice, that of a pro wrestler thundering out in a balls-vibrating bass from a moistening microphone, seemed to give his appendages the adrenaline they needed to gesture in the most intensely-agile manner imaginable.

Jones whipped the audience up into uproarious and frenzied shouts when he finished a thought by declaring, “The New World Order is in jeopardy! And WE’RE BRINGING IT DOWN!!!”

Yes, this was not just a meeting about the 9-11 conspiracy. It was a thoroughly political exhortation to organize against the elites who, according to Jones’s patriotically paranoid perspective, have deceived the people of the best country in the world.

You see, it’s not just that 9-11 was a massive conspiracy with a cover-up to match. So was JFK’s murder, the fact that George W. Bush’s grandfather was “America’s top Nazi sympathizer”, and the American political connections of the Reverend Sun-Myung Moon. And, as if that’s not enough, the government has plans to install microchips in our heads and brainwash us through water fluoridation. Either Jones completely lacks the capacity for irony or he has never enjoyed the sight of General Jack T. Ripper fearing the same process in Dr. Strangelove.

In this sense, I found the event disappointing. Though I had never heard this Jones character speak, I expected a complete examination of the facts of 9-11 and a thoughtful record of what has been confirmed and what hasn’t. That lecture would probably serve the truth movement a lot better than a pompous fat man speaking like the leader of the next revolution.

I think the audience shared my dismay by the end of the event. Jones often paused during his speech in an apparent gesture that it was ok for us to applaud. The claps would start slowly in the back and then coalesce into a politely loud ovation, but you could tell everyone was a little confused. It’s not easy to get excited and jubilant about the idea that 9-11 was a government conspiracy.

In all honesty, though, I’m still captivated by Loose Change and other questions about “the day that changed everything.” And even if it takes going down some misguided trails, I really do dig the fact that our generation is groping toward political participation with real-life political meetings like this one.

A Real Protest

Last Friday night, right when a lil shindig was becoming interesting and frenetic, I decided to make the announcement my roommate had suggested. I put “How do u want it?” on pause and started flicking the light on and off to grab everyone’s attention.

“Tomorrow,” I said, “There’s a protest to end this fucking war!”

Amidst a mixed crowd reception (our parties aren’t always as hip and alt as I visualize them in my head), I explained that the Austin edition of the national Iraq war protest day was going to feature a march and a rally at the state capitol. I really did figure that three in the afternoon was strategically late enough in the day to see college students up and active.

I’m not usually so presumptuous with my political thoughts as to throw sentiments like these ones out at raucous gatherings, but I feel strong antagonism to the notion of war itself, not to mention this one. My reasons are simple enough, you know. I just don’t think there’s anything worthwhile about shooting at each other, and the thought of people like me having to get shot at for Bush’s mistake punches me in the sternum.

I feel in my bones the putrid difference between my life and the lives of thousands of other young people. You and me get to suck all the nooks and crannies of the Earth’s resources like a WASP tearing into a high-class lobster, while people who very well could have been us attempt to navigate Death’s timeless rules using only unnatural GPS technology. Every day that American forces stay in Iraq, our brothers and sisters have been deemed acceptable losses.

I know my empathy for the armed forces sounds like the conciliatory “Support our Troops” and “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism” talk of Democrats and uninteresting speakers, but I do wish to bridge a gap between the soldier and the people who would like to get him the hell out of Iraq. The abyss separating these two groups of people is as inexplicable as war.

Needless to say, then, I had reason to get myself to the march the next day. Arriving at just the right time, we joined the procession up to the capitol at 2nd and Congress.

There is nothing that doesn’t feel liberating about walking in step with hundreds of people for a cause. Don’t mock us for gaining faith in the goodness of human nature, because you would have felt the same way. Percussively chanting, “No justice! No peace! US out of the Middle East!” we smiled and waived to cheering onlookers and realized that there are others who’d like to explode the military-industrial complex. I’d like to think the sun was shining because History is on our side, too.

The true count of the amount of people at the march can never impress me as much as these first-person experiences, but Saturday’s protest did make the last one I attended look like a Kerry ’08 rally. I still remember how the whirr of the fluorescent lights of the UTC auditorium completely overpowered the forced energy of 12-person crowd at an anti-war event last year. Less than a year since that embarrassing display, there’s a real movement.

One vital aspect of all movements is a leader, however, and I’m afraid the local movement doesn’t really have one. Not one of the many speakers that graced the stage seemed at all comfortable in front of a real crowd. In fact, one of them appeared to have stuck a fork in an electrical outlet earlier in the day.

Believe me, I’m not appointing myself, or anyone else for that matter. The dedicated individuals who have organized the twenty-three organizations that sponsored Saturday’s events deserve the privilege of selecting a charismatic leader. But they do need to sit around in a circle and figure this out very soon.

And something tells me they just might. Saturday’s crisp brightness confirmed that springtime is coming soon.