Better lives for our children’s grandchildren · by some friends

Posting 17. to The Jewish-Israeli Lobby category, by George Salzman

Bill Templer wrote on 21 April 2006:

VIDEO Cindy Sheehan: Hold Bush Accountable
www.truthout.org/multimedia.htm

      Listen and watch this video by Cindy against Bush and the war — and then imagine it filtered through the anti-Lobby discourse. Is that the kind of antiwar movement you want to build? Imagine the adjective ‘Jewish’ or ‘Zionist’ even one time in her discourse. Bill

Dear Bill,

      You’re a tough, determined, valuable ally. But so is Jeffrey Blankfort, and Noam Chomsky, and many others. I can barely stay in the swim. Obviously, with your latest post to the blog you’re attempting to raise the discussion to a higher level, tackling the “body language” of writing. I’m reminded of an earlier piece titled, “To the shoemaker, there’s nothing like leather”, just as To the plumber, there’s nothing like copper tubing, and now, To the linguist, there’s nothing like critical discourse analysis (CDA). Oi! Oi! Oi! There’s no end to how much I still have to learn. I’ve had for many years an allergic reaction to the word “semiotics”, ever since my daughter Erica first brought it home from Brookline High School, and when I came upon “sociosemiotics” in your essay, I felt an involuntary constriction in my throat, but that didn’t stop me. It’s a good essay, and you end it with your feet solidly on the ground: “Meanwhile, the real struggle is against Israeli fascist policy and U.S. geopolitics. Our comrades are in Budrus and Bil’in every week fighting that. Direct action. Palestinians and Jews shoulder to shoulder, facing the Israeli army.” But I’m by no means persuaded that your position on the matter of labelling is correct.

      Like you, I think Gabriel Ash’s two articles are excellent, though I’ve read them only once. It seems to me that he constructs a better frame of reference from which to think about what’s going on than the one we were using earlier. I’ll close this note with a few other facets of this multi-address correspondence.

1. I think we are building real trust among ourselves in this effort. An example is in the changing position of Karen Spence, who wrote me on 13 Apr 2006, “Are you trying to get me killed, or have my life ruined? What the hell is your strategy here?” Karen has moved, I think comfortably, back into participation in the discussion.

Subject: Re: The flood seems to be subsiding
From: George Salzman
Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 11:08:53 -0500
To: Karen Spence
CC: Jeffrey Blankfort , Adam D. Sacks

Karen, this is just to acknowledge your note that begins,
———————-
Subject: RE: The flood seems to be subsiding
From: Karen Spence <>
Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 10:56:18 -0400
To: George Salzman <>, Adam D. Sacks <>
CC: Jeffrey Blankfort <>

This is one issue, in particular, that I would welcome wholeheartedly to be wrong all of the time, especially when it comes to not giving someone the benefit of the doubt. …
———————-
Building trust in the movement for human liberation is a major problem. I’ve tried to explore it in an earlier writing, which starts:

Mutual Aid and Mutual Trust
essay 5 of the series
Building the Global Grassroots Infrastructure
December 29, 2001

this page is at http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Grass/Infra/Infra-5.htm
it is also available (without graphics) on the Boston Indymedia Center Website at http://boston.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=4544

Summary: In the context of ongoing terror promoted by the U.S. government, building mutual aid and mutual trust within the growing global grassroots infrastructure is considered.

THE IMMEDIATE CONTEXT
Instead of Mutual Aid, Mutual Horror

      Immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon the U.S. regime — George W. Bush and the rest of his Cabal — fully supported by mainstream U.S. corporate mass media, launched its War FOR Terrorism, a global attack on all fronts to further promote and assure U.S.-directed terrorism. It began in the U.S. with adoption of police-state control measures and military mobilization, and a sustained propaganda campaign by the Bush Cabal and its mainstream corporate media allies, looking towards broad government violations of traditional rights to privacy and many of the supposedly inviolable constitutional guarantees of Americans. Less than one month later, on October 7th, the U.S. regime began its massive bombing strikes against Afghanistan. …

and somewhat indirectly more recently in an essay that begins:

Out of the box!
Towards humane survival
G. S. <>
February 18, 2006

this page is at http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/2006-02-18.htm

      Once upon a time there lived a very smart Jew. At age 70 he received a letter from a rabbi, who explained that he had sought in vain to comfort his 19-year-old daughter over the death of her sister, “a sinless, beautiful, 16-year-old child.”

      In reply the elderly Jew wrote, “A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.” [1]

The Hamas electoral victory: a chance to break out of the box?
Or are we prisoners still?

NOTES:
[1] The exchange between the rabbi and Albert Einstein was in the New York Times obituary published one or a few days after Einstein’s death on April 18, 1955 at age 76.

      These efforts of mine reveal much of what I believe we need to do. Certainly trust among ourselves is a rock-bottom requirement. But it takes effort, and total honesty with each other.
Sincerely, and with best wishes,
George

2. One of the shortcomings of this entire discussion is, as it were, its stress on objective un-emotional analysis, as though only a commitment to purely logical discourse can serve us. Of course (excuse me, Bill) I know we need to be rational but we ought, I think, to let our passion for decency and love not be hidden by dedication to unemotional exchanges. There’s no sense of moral outrage — and I mean real, fierce rage — in, for example, the Mearsheimer-Walt paper. At least with Chomsky’s writing, his outrage usually ripples beneath the skin of his sarcastic prose, though I’m not sure his ZNet piece shows it. And Gabriel Ash’s fine work reads as though it were the product of a logic machine, at least that’s how it struck me. It’s like a straightjacket of academic discipline that we’re confined to. That’s no good for getting to the folks we really need to get to listen and learn. Here’s what Joe Bageant has to say about this in one of the numerous notes that already came in today:

Subject: from joe bageant
From: Bageant, Joseph <>
Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2006 08:30:59 -0500
To:

Greetings my fellow grizzled old coot!

      And thank you George for the reasonable voice of your reply in the face of my desperation. Times are hard and it “gets pretty drunk out” some nights. Working inside small town red state America has taken its toll on my nerves for sure. You’re right. The struggle is global and needs to be fought that way. It’s hard to remember from this vantage point. About the only way in which I would differ with your insightful reply is that … well, come to think of it, I would not disagree with a word of it.

      Another thing: It has occurred to me that Joe Sixpack may be irrelevant in the 2008 elections, if the battle is truly that of information, media, manufactured consent and all that stuff so discussed by internet intelligencia on the left. I just don’t know anymore who among us are pawns and who are not, such is the level of illusion and disinformation. (I can tell you for sure that Jeff Saint Clair is a Bildergerger-launched disinformation robot shape shifting as an internet leftist!) Seriously though, I know only one thing at this point: the battle for the consciousness and dignity of man is certainly benefiting from the Internet, but it will ultimately be fought right here in good old “meatspace.” Face to face, door to door and person to person. Sort of a Fallujah of the heart. But as long as we are all in different cultural silos of class and talking only to each other, the only result will be that we will coalesce as “the opposition,” for sure. But so what? So we get a little air time on NPR like we did this morning about the Israeli Lobby. So what? Again it is just one more group of elites arguing with another. Academics. Politicians. Media. Leftist Internet pundits…

      Meanwhile, there are tens of millions of Americans who have been blinded, then raised and fattened for profit like cattle by the capitalist state and its economic, cultural, military and political elite. And when the money elites set fire to the barn as they exit with all the dough for their offshore villas, the cattle will stampede in their rage most likely toward scapegoating some darker skinned mook, or war, or some other atrocity as they have been trained. And there will be no one to lead them.

      When that happens, it would be damned nice if the comfortable progressive liberal and leftist folks with the IRAs and the masters degrees and the aesthetics and insight that only education can bring knew just one poor working mook at the chicken plant well enough to call them on the phone. And I mean really know them. Have been to their cheap weddings and helped with their troubled kids. Really know them as human beings as friends, and god forbid! Maybe even loaned them a few bucks when they were behind on the heating bill. (LOL! Never happen! Leftists believe the government should do it.) Because then when the stampede starts the left could influence the direction in which it runs, the road that will be taken in the face of fear and insecurity and rage at having been betrayed. The culturally inflicted blindness of the working class voter in America is misused by both parties, we know that. But even a blind man can HEAR the truth when it is spoken. The trick for us is to deliver it to someone other than the choir in which we sing. Face to face. Hell we don’t even do that with each other for the most part. We do it on then net. However, I must say I was deeply humbled when you went to such great discomfort and expense to visit me in Winchester. I was moved to near tears, but never showed it, did I? The pride of old men…Southern men are the worst.)

      On the other hand, being raised in such meanness and poverty, maybe I just have too much residual class hate for everyone born even one more rung up the ladder than I was. I dunno. You are the only Jewish intellectual I seem to like personally. And if you find the sudden discovery of the Jewish Lobby by Jews themselves interesting, well hell ole buddy, so do I. It’s kinda like a dog finding its own ass, but what the hell? You’ve tolerated a lot of my blindnesses and even hand carried the books to me that would cure them. (I am still working on Peter Kropotkin.)

      Whatever the case, I have experienced hundreds of times what Jeff St. Clair quoted in his post: “One of the successes of the lobby’s merchandising of the Holocaust has been that people are fearful of saying or writing the word “Jew” in a negative manner whereas it is open season on every other group on the planet.”

      And even that doesn’t convince me that, fucked as the Jewish Lobby is, it is in no particular way near the heart of America’s problem. It is simply another one being acknowledged. The problem seems to be the heart itself.

Joe Bageant

Kiss Nancy for me, and when I get to Oaxaca some day, I will kiss her myself when you aren’t looking.
——————————————————–
Subject: PS: from joe bageant
Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2006 08:43:05 -0500

RE: I’m sending this out to a very limited list, still, if you want me to take your name off this list (it’s not my so-called e-mail distribution list of about 1400), please let me know.

Nah. Send it to all 1400 if you want I don’t care. I have no secrets. And besides, we all need to be more open, be more trusting, throw all our secrets out onto the porch for our neighbors to see.

Your brother,
joe

3. And here’s the start of “There’s nothing like sociosemiotics” — to the linguist:

To the shoemaker, there’s nothing like leather
November 11, 2003

this page is at http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/Salz/2003-11-11.htm

Subject: What about voting? Should we, and if so for whom?
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 08:40:53 -0600
From: George Salzman <>
BCC: (entire general list)

Oaxaca, Thursday, November 11, 2003

Friends:
      When I first went to live in Boston in 1964 I got a pair of Madre boots, made by Fabbiano in Italy. Although I already had heavy duty mountain boots, good for rough rocky terrain and ice fields in the Colorado Rockies; the lighter …

How do we get to the good people who, for example, are ordinary, everyday right-wing religious fanatics? Not with our intellectualizing — that’s for sure.

All the best,
George

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