Monday, March 4, 2024

Revisiting a Classic

This past weekend three quarters of my family drove up to Minnesota to look at colleges for our youngest child. Killing time during the six-hour drive, on her cellphone my wife opened up a random list of the 100 greatest films ever made. I'm kind of a sucker for these lists for many reasons, not the least of which is they provide an endless source of discussion, controversy and argument, due to their sins of commission and omission.

For starters, the film I brought up in my last post was not to be found on the list. Do you really mean to tell me that the comedies This is Spinal Tap and Airplane, funny for their time but not nearly as much today as when they were made, are deserving to be among the 100 greatest films ever made, but the sublime Local Hero is not???

You know, that kind of stuff. 

Frankly I could never put together a list like this as I don't think I've seen one hundred films in my life truly deserving of such a distinction. I mean, there are probably dozens of films by great directors like Kurosawa, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Fassbinder, Varda and scores of others I haven't seen yet that simply have to be better than say, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which might come in around number 100 of the top movies I have actually seen.

But in the end it's all subjective isn't it?

Well no, not really. There's a reason why certain films like Citizen Kane are always on these lists.

But not Casablanca, which some critics place at or near the top of their lists of greatest films ever made, while others like the authors of this list, don't think it even merits a spot in the top 100. I wasn't surprised by the snub as the 1942 Hollywood classic is somewhat polarizing; people either love it passionately or think it's overrated. Foremost among the latter group are the followers of the Auteur School of film criticism which places the worth of any film squarely upon the shoulders of its director, whom they consider the true author (auteur) of the work. Auteur criticism places a film within the context of its director's body of work and judge it primarily by whether it contributes to the particular vision and style of that director. Alfred Hitchcock would be a prime example of a director admired by the auteur critics as he has a unique vision and a definite visual and thematic style. *

Not so Michael Curtiz, who before directing Casablanca, already had dozens of Hollywood films and before that, many more in Austria and his native Hungary to his credit. Curtiz (an Americanization of his true surname Kertesz, a name familiar to anyone who is acquainted with the art of photography), made films in practically every popular genre at the time, from horror to mystery to film noir, from thriller to adventure, from love story to comedy to musical, including the Elvis Presley vehicle King Creole (probably the star's best film). Because of his tremendous output, Curtiz is often considered the ultimate Studio System director, one of many workers in the industry who were assigned films as much or more for practical reasons like his technical chops, his reputation for working within schedule and never going over budget, rather than for his personal vision. 

And because of that, as his output was all over the place stylistically and thematically, most auteur critics feel Curtiz represented the studio's vision rather than his own. To them he is a craftsman rather than an artist. In less generous terms, some would call him a studio hack, albeit a very, very good one. 

So where does Casablanca stand with the auteur critics? Respect, but often in the form of backhanded praise. This is from none less than Andrew Sarris, the American film critic who expanded upon the auteur theory from its origins in France:

...the director’s one enduring masterpiece is, of course, "Casablanca", the happiest of happy accidents, and the most decisive exception to the auteur theory.

Not all of the detractors of Casablanca were subscribers to the auteur theory, here's Paulene Kael:

It's far from a great film but it has a special appealingly schlocky romanticism, and you're never really pressed to take its melodramatic twists and turns seriously. 

Responding to that comment, in an essay for The Atlantic celebrating the 70th anniversary of the film in 2012, David W. Brown, himself a great fan of Casablanca writes this:

Nobody ever walked away from a screening of Casablanca and said, "Well I don't get it."  Not with regard to its reputation as a great work, nor to the nature of its characters or plot. It's not a challenging work. But its universal themes and accessibility are inseparable from its place in the American film canon.

Therein lies the issue with the movie, it's a great film because its themes are universal, we all get it; it's less than great because it doesn't challenge us.

Brown points out in his essay that greatness of any work of art comes from either smashing accepted standards to bits to create something entirely new, or taking those established standards to heights never realized before.  

Citizen Kane would fit into the first category, and Casablanca into the second. 

If you've seen the movie, you might be interested in this shot by shot analysis of Casablanca by one of its greatest supporters, the late Chicago based film critic Roger Ebert.

Ebert does a nice job putting everything into place. What the auteur critics seem to ignore is that film making is perhaps more than any other art, a collaborative effort as anyone who has ever sat through the closing credits of a movie realizes. Without minimizing the efforts of Curtiz one bit, Ebert points out that the greatness of Casablanca lies in the efforts of everyone involved from its producer Hal Wallis who probably shaped the final product more than anyone else, through the writers, (Julius J. Epstein, Phillip G. Epstein and Howard Koch), the cinematographer, (Arthur Edison), the editor, (Owen Marks), the music director, (Max Steiner), the costume and set designers (Orry-Kelly and George James Hopkins), the rest of the technical staff and of course, the amazing cast all the way down to the extras, truly one of the greatest collections of talent ever gathered for one film.

I admire Ebert for his point of view and keen sense of observation but there are a few points he makes here that I have some issues with.

THE SCREENPLAY
 
It's no secret that Casablanca is probably the most quotable movie ever, at least in American cinema. In his analysis, Roger Ebert says the true sign of a successful screenplay is when the audience leaves the theater quoting lines from the movie. I'm not sure I agree, it's kind of like saying the sign of a great work of music is if you're able to hum tunes from it after leaving the concert hall. That would certainly disqualify most western classical music written after 1850.

Regardless, for all its memorable snippets of dialog, Casablanca also has more than its share of roll-your-eye inducing lines as well. Consider the following:

"Was that cannon fire or is it my heart pounding?"

One would be hard pressed to write a cheesier line.

The son of actress Joy Paige who played the young Bulgarian bride in the movie, recounted in her 2008 obituary in the LA times that his mother, in 1942 a high school senior with family connections to the film industry, read an early draft of the screenplay but was not impressed. She told her son she felt it was "corny and old fashioned." Fortunately for her despite her reservations, she got and accepted the role which turned out to be her one true shot at silver screen immortality.

You be the judge. The following is a transcription of the screenplay highlighting Page's one big scene in the movie where her character, Annina, is looking for some advice from Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart). The action takes place in the dining room of Rick's Cafe Americain:
 

Annina meets Captain Renault, Chief of Police, in the hallway as she leaves the gambling room:

RENAULT: How's lady luck treating you? 
Annina looks down.
RENAULT: Aw, too bad, you'll find him over there.
 
Renault points in the direction of Rick. Annina sees him and goes to his table as Renault watches her attentively.

ANNINA: Monsieur Rick?

RICK: Yes?

ANNINA: Could I speak with you for just one moment please?

Rick looks at her.

RICK: How'd you get in here? You're underage.

ANNINA: I came with Captain Renault.

RICK (cynically): Oh I should have known.

ANNINA: My husband is with me too.

RICK:  He is? Well Captain Renault is getting broadminded. Sit down.
Will you have a drink?

Anina shakes her head.

RICK: No of course not, you mind if I do?

ANNINA: No.

Rick pours himself a drink.

ANNINA: Monsieur Rick, what kind of a man is Captain Renault?

RICK: Oh he's just like any other man, only more so...

ANNINA: No I mean, is he trustworthy, is his word...

RICK:  Now just a minute, who told you to ask me that?

ANNINA: He did, Captain Renault did.
 
RICK:  I thought so, where's your husband?

ANNINA: At the roulette table trying to win enough for our exit visa.
Well of course he's losing.

RICK:  How long have you been married?

ANNINA: Eight weeks, we come from Bulgaria.
Oh things are very bad there Monsieur, the devil has the people by the throat.
So Jan and I we, we do not want our children to grow up in such a country.

RICK (wearily): So you decided to go to America?

ANNINA: Yes but we haven't that much money and,
traveling is so expensive and difficult, it was much more than we thought to get here.
And then Captain Renault sees us. and he is so kind he wants to help us...

RICK: Yes I'll bet...

ANNINA: He tells me he can get us an exit visa but, but we have no money..

RICK: Does he know that?

ANNINA: Oh yes.

RICK: And he's still willing to give you a visa? 

ANNINA: Yes monsieur.

RICK: And you want to know...

ANNINA: Will he keep his word.?

RICK: He always has.

There is a silence. Annina is very disturbed.

ANNINA: Oh monsieur you are a man, if someone loved you very much so that your happiness was the only thing that she wanted in the world, and she did a bad thing to make certain of it, could you forgive her...

Rick stares off into space.

RICK: Nobody ever loved me that much.

ANNINA: ...and he never knew, and the girl kept this bad thing locked in her heart,
that would be alright, wouldn't it?

RICK (harshly): You want my advice?

ANNINA: Oh yes please.

RICK: Go back to Bulgaria.

ANNINA: Oh but if you knew what it means to us to get to America...
oh, but if Jan should find out, he's such a boy, in many ways I am so much older than he is.

RICK: Yes well everyone has problems in Casablanca maybe yours will work out. You'll excuse me.

Rick abruptly rises.

ANNINA (tonelessly): Thank you Monsieur.

He quickly goes off, leaving Annina alone at the table. She remains seated, too demoralized to move.
And... cut.

Are you moved to tears by reading that? Probably not.

The sincerity Joy Page brings to the role of Annina kind of sort of pulls off all that wonky dialog ("The Devil has people by the throat" really???). But I'm afraid even a more seasoned actor could never take that claptrap beyond grade B level melodrama. Conversely, Rick's one-line responses, at least on paper, convey the level of indifference and snarkiness we've come to expect from his character up to that point, not much more.

You wouldn't know it just from reading the dialog, but this is the pivotal scene in the movie, there's a lot going on here. 

First, Rick is defining for us his complicated relationship with Renault (Claude Rains). He knows full well that Renault is a scoundrel as his snide comments suggest. The conversation is rapid fire, both actors starting their lines before the other has a chance to finish, except for one time not indicated in the script. When Annina asks if Renault will keep his word, Rick pauses only for a second, but it seems much longer. For the first time in the scene, he speaks without irony:

"He always has."

Rick and Renault share a mutual admiration, even affection, yet neither would hesitate throwing the other under the bus if it were necessary. Here Rick withdraws his glance from the young woman as if to wash his hands of the sordid affair. He tells the young woman in not so many words that yes Renault, a man of his word, will indeed grant her and her husband the exit visas, after he fucks her. The way Bogart delivers that line, he conveys both fondness for the man, and contempt.

Talk about complicated. 

Then Rick exposes his vulnerability in the middle of Annina's sad confession about her dilemma.

His face changes from an expression of compassion to anguish when her words hit close to home as she talks about a woman loving a person so much she would do anything to make him happy. Rick has just been reacquainted with the love of his life Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) in the arms of another man. He allows himself a moment of self-pity when he responds: "Nobody loves me that much."

Then fatalism sets in as he crushes Annina's dream of a better life by advising her to just give up and go back home.

After some more mushy words from the poor girl, Rick abruptly gets up and leaves her in the lurch, telling her dismissively that everybody's got problems in Casablanca, so leave me alone and have a nice day.

Same old Rick sticking his neck out for no one.

At least that's what we're led to believe as the scene shifts to another part of Rick's place where back to business, he welcomes Ilsa and her husband Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) back to his nightclub. This scene is so filled with tension between Rick and Ilsa that we forget about poor Annina. 

But not Rick. In the subsequent scene Rick enters the gambling room where Annina's husband Jan is sitting dejectedly at the roulette wheel. The croupier Emil (played by the great French actor Marcel Dalio in an uncredited role) asks Jan, who is only holding a few chips, if he'd like to place another bet. "I'd better not" he says, those chips probably representing the last of the couple's savings. Rick, looking over his shoulder says: "have you tried 22?". "I said 22" he repeats a little louder, speaking to Jan but looking at Emil who gets the message. 
 
Of all the memorable lines from Casablanca that are quoted endlessly, the last one Rick says to Annina before darting out of the room...
Yes well everyone has problems in Casablanca maybe yours will work out.

... is not one of them. But it dawned on me after having seem the film for the umpteenth time this week that it should be.  When he says everyone has problems in Casablanca, perhaps he is referring to his own. Thinking of it in those terms, in his mind he is first diminishing his own suffering by empathizing with another person's pain. Doing his part to help ease that pain is step two.

In that gesture at the roulette wheel, coming at no small cost to both Rick and his business's reputation, he solves Annina'a dilemma, much to Renault's consternation. And there in one fell swoop, the pathologically guarded Rick at last reveals who he really is for all to see, including himself.

That seemingly dismissive line to Annina foreshadows the greatest line of the film:
I'm not good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that.
Screenwriters provide the architecture of a film, not just the dialog. They don't write for the printed page any more than an architect designs for the blueprint. They depend on the cast, the director, the cinematographer, the editor, and a whole cast of characters to make their words come to life. That's the magic of cinema.

Watch this clip of the two scenes involving the Bulgarian couple to see what I mean. Pay close attention to Bogart's physical reactions to Joy Page and especially to his exquisite timing. If you doubt what a great film actor he was, you have the script, give it a go yourself.

Unfortunately, the middle scene has been edited out of this clip. Better yet, watch the whole movie, watch it again if you've already seen it.


Do I consider this great screenwriting despite its not always stellar dialog? 

You bet I do, along with great acting directing, cinematography and you name it.

VICTOR LASZOW

Roger Ebert claims in his analysis that Casablanca is a near perfect movie. Then he points to some small issues such as continuity errors and the many parts of the story that challenge one's suspension of disbelief, all of which he admits, don't really take anything away from the film.

I agree.

It seems Ebert's main objection to the film is the performance of Paul Henreid in the role of the unassailable resistance hero, Victor Laszlo. Laszlo, a Czechoslovak with Hungarian name**, is a continuous thorn in the side of the Nazis. He has escaped from a concentration camp and found his way to Morocco, then part of unoccupied France.*** From there he hoped to obtain two official letters of transit that would permit him and his wife Ilsa to leave the country for neutral Portugal, then on to the United States, where he could continue his work in relative safety. 

If you've seen the movie you can skip the next paragraph. If not and you're interested in how Rick got involved in all this, read on:
FOR THAT WE MUST GO TO FLASHBACK, cue the harpist...

PARIS-1940: It turns out that while Victor was in Nazi captivity, Ilsa mistakenly learned that he was dead. Thinking herself a widow, Ilsa met Rick in Paris, fell in love with him, hears the first of many "here's looking at you kids", yadda yadda yadda, then in march the Nazis. Rick, himself no friend of the Third Reich, decides to skedaddle, but not before Ilsa finds out that Victor is very much alive, has escaped from the concentration camp, and is back in Paris. She can't face Rick with the news so instead of joining him on the last train out of town, she sends a note with Sam (Dooley Wilson, more on him later) telling Rick without explanation that she can never see him again, have a nice life. 
So back to the present and Victor and Ilsa end up unbeknownst to them at the club of Ilsa's lover and now we've got ourselves one barnburner of a love triangle.

So what's wrong with Henreid's performance according to Ebert? There's no chemistry between Victor and Ilsa, he claims. I believe at one point Ebert says that Henreid is too stiff, apparently not realizing the mixed message that term sends.

Anyway, stiff or flaccid, it hardly matters, the character of Victor is all about his work. He certainly loves Ilsa, we know that because he says so, even if Ebert is not convinced. Ingrid Bergman always said that when they were making the film, she asked director Michael Curtiz which character Ilsa was supposed to really be in love with. He reportedly told her to dole out the loving equally between the two and that they'd sort it out at the end of the story, which legend has it, was not determined until the day they shot the final scene.  

But it's clear to me in the final cut that Ilsa worships Laszlo (perhaps more like a father), but loves Rick.**** That is what defines her conflict. Had there been more "chemistry" between Laszlo and Ilsa as Ebert and others suggest, and all else had been the same, she would have chosen her husband in a heartbeat without all the drama.

Not a very interesting ending.  

AND SPEAKING OF THAT ENDING (spoiler alert!!!)

If you've read anything about the making of Casablanca, you know that the filmmakers were flying by the seat of their pants, making everything up as they went along. At times it is said, any given day's shooting could have included dialog that was written that very morning and rushed over to the set. As I mentioned above, Ingrid Bergman didn't know which man she was supposed to be in love with. Some suggest even the screenwriters had no clue which of the two, Laszlo or Rick, she would end up with in the end. 

Roger Ebert points out quite logically that there is no way Ilsa could have ended up with her lover Rick rather than her husband, as it would have been strictly forbidden by the enforcers of the extremely conservative Motion Picture Production Code, the self-regulating moral police force better known as the Hays Code. With its intimations of extramarital goings on, and even a not too subtle suggestion of latent homosexuality, (remember this is 1942), Casablanca was already pushing the envelope, and the producers had to do several end-runs around the censors to get the more titillating scenes on the screen. But an ending where Ilsa leaves her husband for her lover and not getting her comeuppance for it would have been a non-starter in 1942 Hollywood, strictly on moral grounds. *****

But there is a vastly more profound reason why Ilsa got on that plane with Victor and not Rick. It would have made no sense insofar as the trajectory of the story.

For decades, Casablanca has been described as a love story set to the backdrop of war. But the war was not a backdrop, it wasn't even the proverbial 800 pound gorilla in the room. World War II was the story. Without it, the film would not have been Casablanca, it would have been Paris, Oslo, Prague, New York, BerlinSophia and all the other places the characters escaped from to end up in Casablanca. In other words, without the war, there would be no Casablanca the movie because nobody in it would have met each other.

More important, the film was made during the war. When Rick in a perplexed drunken stupor cynically asks Ilsa how the story of their love triangle ends, she responds, "I don't know, the ending hasn't been written yet." That response has a double meaning clearly not lost to the people who were watching the film at the time of its release. On the surface she's saying she doesn't know which man she'll end up with. In a much deeper sense, she, everyone watching the film in 1942, and for that matter anyone alive all over the world at the time, had no idea how the only important story of the day would turn out. It certainly wasn't looking good at the time for those who preferred freedom, justice and democracy to fascism, tyranny and genocide.

By the time the film was released, the United States government was demanding sacrifice from every single American, Tragically and unjustly, Americans of Japanese descent were forced to sacrifice more than any other group. The government was drafting American sons (the daughters went voluntarily), asking of them the biggest sacrifice of all. 

Imagine an ending where Ilsa and Rick, both it turns out with skin in the game, throw away all their commitments and values to run off together and live happily ever after, while the rest of the world was sacrificing, suffering and dying.

Preposterous.

What most people who have written about Casablanca for the past fifty years or so seem to miss is its unmistakable role as a propaganda film.

As usual, I've gone on much too long, so we'll save that part of our story for another day.

Stay tuned, les jeux sont faits.


NOTES:

* There's definitely an auteur theory bias to this list. For the record, three Hitchcock films made the list but surprisingly none are in the top ten. Stanley Kubrick has five including number one, 2001: A Space Odessey.

**The writers probably thought a truly Czech name like Jiři Dvořák would be too hard to pronounce. Ebert could have commented on Henreid's Austrian accent too, but like the inappropriate name, that didn't seem to bother him either. Fortunately, none of the actors in the international cast bothered to fake an accent to mimic the nationality of the character they were supposed to be playing. I guess having any kind of foreign, i.e. non-American accent was enough to lend the film a hint of authenticity, at least to the American audience. The one exception is June Page, one of only three Americans in the credited cast, (Bogey and Dooley Wilson were the other two). Given the diverse accents in the film, Page's American accent is a little off putting when she says she's from Bulgaria. 

***A little history lesson. Roger Ebert claims one of the biggest inaccuracies in the film is the idea that Victor Laszlo, an enemy of the Third Reich, could arrive in French controlled Morocco and not be immediately arrested by the Gestapo as by this time France was occupied by the Germans. This is not quite so. While the northern portion of contiguous France, including Paris was occupied by the Nazis, the southern part of the country and its North African colonies were governed by l'État français (The French State) better known as Vichy France, named after the city which was its capital. While Vichy had signed a peace treaty with Germany and collaborated with the Nazis, it was still an independent state at the time the film takes place, and the Germans despite their influence, would have had no official jurisdiction there. Of course, to paraphrase Carl (S. K. Sakallthe ex-pat German waiter at Rick's: "being Germans they would have taken him anyway."

**** All the chemistry on screen may have been between Ilsa and Rick, not Ilsa and Laszlow, but in real life, legend has it that Ingrid Berman and Paul Henreid had an affair, while she and Humphrey Bogart barely spoke to each other off the set. I guess that's why they call it "acting."

***** The Hays Commission did let another moral transgression slide, in our day a far greater sin, the blatant sex crimes of Captain Renault. I'll get to that in my next post. 

Friday, February 16, 2024

Getting Mad and Getting Even

One of my favorite films is the 1983 comedy-drama written and directed by Bill Forsythe called Local Hero. It's about a a young oil company executive sent to a village on the coast of Scotland, to buy up all the property in town to make way for a massive refinery. The exec, "Mac" MacIntyre (played by Peter Riegert) starts out the movie as a typical American to much of the world: he has an MBA, he drives a Porche, he's a capitalist city-slicker and so on, your typical "yuppie" in the parlance of the day. As such, Mac is not a little put off by having to travel to a remote part of the British Isles when he could easily close the deal over the phone from his office in Houston. Little does he realize before he sets off, that the only telephone in town is inside a phone booth (phone box in local speak) on the beach.

Once there he slowly falls in love with the place, the fictional village of Ferness, for its charms, its breathtaking scenery, its slower pace of life, and its people, especially the woman who happens to be the wife of his chief contact in town. 

Soon enough, MacIntyre becomes conflicted about his mission to enable the destruction of the lovely Ferness and the countryside surrounding it.  

It turns out the villagers are two steps ahead of him. The moment they learn the plans of the oil company to buy them out, they start planning how best to spend their new found fortune. The devotion for the place they present to MacIntyre is only an act to drive up the price of their property. Even the local pastor is in on the act as his church serves as the meeting place for townsfolk to gather and discuss their plans to best cash in.

The only snag is Ben Knox, whose surname is the same as the oil company's. Ben lives in a dilapidated shack on the beach and, thanks to his family's century's old accord with the Crown, happens to own the entire beach, lock, stock and barrel. He does not intend to sell what turns out to be the most significant parcel of the site. 

So, Mac's boss, Knox Oil's president Felix Happer (played by Burt Lancaster), flies in from Houston to personally negotiate with Ben.

Funny thing, but in a case of life imitating art, another film made a generation later and its sequel documenting real-life events, have several parallels with the fictional Local Hero.

For starters, the documentaries are also set in the Scottish Highlands not far from the city of Aberdeen. An American company sets its sights on developing its own large-scale project on the coast. Many of the locals sell off their land to the developers, but a handful, one in particular whose story the film is centered around, flat out refuse.

The boss of the company in the documentary bears only a slight physical resemblance to Lancaster's Felix Happer, but there are a few parallels between the two. Both are oddball characters, their eccentricities at times defying credibility.  Narcissism also plays a role in both men's characters.

That is where their similarities end.

Happer's narcissism is garden variety, even charming at times.  His true passion is astronomy, and his greatest ambition it seems is to discover a celestial object and have it named after himself. * 

The other's narcissism is off-the-charts and toxic.

The similarities between the stories were not lost on the creator of the documentary, Anthony Baxter, who with the permission of the owner of its rights and the blessing of Bill Forsythe, incorporated scenes from Local Hero into his own films.

Local Hero isn't really about the construction of the plant, nor the planned destruction of the town. It's about history, nature, myths and legends, beauty, wonder, magic, transformation, the bonds that tie all human beings together, and other things that make life worth living. But mostly it's a love poem to Scotland. As such, it could be considered an allegorical fantasy. Here is a link to the original trailer which nicely captures the spirit of the film without giving too much away. 

The two documentaries sadly, are all too real. They are about hubris, deceit, pettiness, greed, the wanton destruction of nature, and people who do everything in their power to stand in the way of all that. 

In that last sense, one theme both films share is the indefatigable human spirit.

The Ben Knox of the original documentary is Michael Forbes, a quarry worker, farmer and part time salmon fisherman who refuses to sell his land and home of over forty years to the Americans who want to build a golf course and resort over it. Forbes is the star of Part I of the documentary as much of the film centers around his life, struggle, and his neighbors' and family's ordeal. The seeds of Part II are planted at the end of Part I, and the role of star switches over to Michael's mother, Molly Forbes. Her beauty, strength, dignity, pride, sense of humor, and love of her home, steal the show. The best line of both films comes at the beginning of Part II when after being informed that the American businessman claimed she reminds him of his mother, Molly responds with both a sneer and a gleam in her eye: "Well he hadn't been very good to her then."

If you haven't guessed by now, the Felix Happer of the documentaries is Donald Trump.

The name of the original documentary is You've Been Trumped, released in 2011and its sequel, You've been Trumped Too, released in 2016. **

I won't go into all the sordid details other than to say that Part I begins before ground is broken on the project, and over the course of its runtime, we see ancient dunes, at one time protected by the Scottish government as a unique ecosystem, home to numerous endangered species of flora and fauna, lost piece by piece as earth movers build the golf course. Adding insult to injury, the developers created giant berms to block the views of the homes Trump couldn't get his rapacious little hands on. He called the homes he couldn't destroy "eyesores".

Trump reserved his harshest words for Michael Forbes whose property he referred to as a "pigsty", and to Michael himself as a person whom "every Scot should be ashamed of."

That comment no doubt had great influence on the Scottish people because soon after the release of You've been Trumped, Michael Forbes won the "Top Scot" award, an annual popular public vote sponsored by the makers of Glenfiddich Scotch as a part of their Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Awards campaign. In response, Trump threw one of his trademark hissy fits condemning Glenfiddich, pledging never to serve the hooch in any of his properties ever again. I guess that sure showed 'em. 

The conflict between Forbes and Trump received world-wide coverage and some of the most poignant scenes in both films show the tremendous support Michael and his family have received from complete strangers all over the world.

Part I ends with a particularly troubling event. The Forbes family discovers their water supply has dried up after construction workers were seen digging in the vicinity of the natural spring, the source of their water, well as they were building a road. Despite the Forbes's rightful demand to restore their water, nothing happened except broken promises and the Trump Organization calling the police to arrest the filmmakers for having the nerve to ask why the group would not take care of their legal responsibility and repair the damages they made to the Forbes's water supply.

Much of Part II is devoted to Molly, by this time in her nineties, who spends much of her time hauling buckets in a wheelbarrow back and forth to obtain water from a nearby stream so she could flush her toilet. The only potable water available to her and the rest of her family was bottled water. Rather than the one-week fix Team Trump kept promising the Forbes family, the situation lasted for five years until Michael, in defiance of Trump and the local police he had in his pocket, took it upon himself to dig a trench in the access road for the golf course and fix the broken pipes himself. 

During the filming of Part II, before the water situation was resolved, Trump was running for President of the United States and Baxter had the inspired idea to fly Michael Forbes and his wife Sheila to Cleveland during the Republican National Convention. While there they struck up conversations with Trump supporters, some of whom were genuinely moved by their situation while others could not be swayed. One of them in justifying Trump's actions remarked that his man doesn't get mad, he gets even. 

Now where have I heard that before? 

Oh that's right, I heard it a couple weeks ago from Trump himself after winning the New Hampshire primary while he was trashing his opponent, Nikki Haley.

"I don't get mad, I get even" sounds kind of cool and defiant in a Clint Eastwood sort of way.

But what does it really mean?

On the surface, the phrase implies that getting mad and getting even are mutually exclusive things. Getting mad implies loosing one's cool, acting irrationally and uncontrollably, while getting even in this comparison anyway, implies a cool, measured response to an offense. As the saying goes: "revenge is a dish best served cold."

There is a certain logic to getting even, after all, doing unto others as they have done unto us is basic human nature, in stark contrast to the so called "Golden Rule" which suggests quite the opposite.

The Golden Rule in one wording or other, exists as the basis of the justice system of every culture I can think of, the primary tool to help human beings get along with one another by helping settle conflicts if not avoiding them altogether.

Yet doing unto others as we would have done unto us is not a one-size-fits-all rule for successful human relationships as it does not go nearly far enough. It hardly works in truly close relationships such as marriage for example where a more appropriate rule would be do unto her/him as she/he would have done to herself/himself. 

In other words, we're all different and have different expectations of one another, so treating our partner precisely as we would like to be treated ourselves is a recipe for disaster. I consider myself something of an expert on the issue. 
 
In the same vein, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to resolving conflicts because conflicts come in all shapes and sizes from petty to tragic. With the exception of the tragic, we all differ as to what conflict constitutes a true offense.  

For people used to always getting their way like Donald Trump, every conflict is a true offense, a personal affront worthy of getting even. Contrary to what Trump says about not getting mad, as borne out by Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony under oath before Congress, he does indeed get mad, a lot. It was she you might remember who had to clean the ketchup off the walls of the White House dining room after he threw his plate of lunch against it like a two-year-old, when he received some news that displeased him.

In reality, getting mad and getting even are joined at the hip. Getting even is just one of many responses to anger. If a conflict does not make us angry, we feel no need to get even. While it may be useful at times, especially to make the aggrieved party feel better, getting even, especially if it means eye-for-eye style justice, is rarely a useful tool to resolving conflicts, which you must admit is kind of a useful skill for someone who wants to be president.

Let's use Trump as an example. He got mad at Michael Forbes and got even by calling him names and making his ninety-year-old mother haul buckets of water from a stream in a wheelbarrow so she could flush her toilet. 

Yet Michael and Sheila Forbes continue to live in their home as Trump's disgruntled neighbors, no doubt still pissing him off to no end. (Molly unfortunately passed away in 2021 at the age of 96).

He got mad at a whiskey company because they published the results of a public poll he didn't like, so he got even by banning their whiskey at his establishments.

Seems to me Glenfiddich is still the first name most people come up with when they think of single malt scotch. Heck, I can even buy it at my local grocery store. 

And he got mad at the United States for not re-electing him president in 2020. So he got back at us by waging a riot in and around the Capitol in the hopes of overturning two cornerstones of our democracy, a free election and the peaceful transfer of power. 

Four indictments and 92 criminal counts against him later, he's running for president again for the sole purpose of keeping himself out of jail for the rest of his life.  

Seems to me like an awful lot of trouble just to get even with somebody.


CODA

On the flip side, there is no way that Michael and Sheila Forbes or their neighbors could ever get even at Trump for all the grief he put them through.

Yet there's always laughter which is the next best thing. This from 2017:



* The fictional Felix Happer's wish was granted in real life when in 1992, an asteroid was discovered and named by its discoverer (no doubt a fan of the film), 7345Happer.

** You've been Trumped is available on most streaming platforms. You can watch You've been Trumped Too for free on YouTube by clicking here. I don't feel it's necessary to watch them in the order in which they were made. In fact, as the sequel prominently features Molly, if you're like me you'll instantly fall in love with her and her story, so watching them in reverse order may even be preferable. 

Thursday, February 8, 2024

The Thrill of Victory, and...?

Quick, finish that phrase! 

If you can, you're old like me. 

If not, it's part of the intro to one of the longest running shows in American television history, ABC's Wide World of Sports. 

Here is the intro's narration in its entirety, written by Stanley Ralph Ross, and read by Jim McKay:

Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport... the thrill of victory... and the agony of defeat... the human drama of athletic competition... This is ABC's Wide World of Sports!

McKay's voiceover and its accompanying musical fanfare remained unchanged for most of the show's run from 1961 until 1998. The visuals, stock footage from sites around the world mixed with action shots of athletes from figure skaters to arm wrestlers to everything in between, were updated every year. 

Except for one clip.

It was the shot of ski jumper Vinko Bogotaj that illustrated the words: "the agony of defeat". Week after week, year after year, decade after decade, fans of the show saw Bogotaj losing control of his skis on the ramp just before he was about to make his jump. Instead of gracefully springing into the wild blue yonder like an eagle soaring off a cliff, his skis providing enough lift to keep him airborne for several seconds until he gently meets the hill below, Bogotaj tumbled off the ramp looking more like a bowling ball than an eagle, knocking down every stationary object in his way. 

If you've seen the clip, even only once, you've never forgotten it.

Here's a link to the 1974 iteration.

There may have been pedestrian reasons not to replace the clip for all those years. Maybe it was difficult convincing other athletes that it would be a good idea to allow footage of themselves screwing up used to illustrate defeat over and over again.

Or maybe the show's producers were sending us a message sticking with that clip of Bogotaj while all the other images of athletes experiencing the thrill of victory came and went. Could the message be that victory is fleeting while defeat is eternal? 

I don't know, I just made that up, kind of profound, isn't it? 

Consider this: in any sporting event, the honor of experiencing the thrill of victory only goes to one competitor, or team of them, while the agony of defeat is shared by many. In that sense, sports are kind of like life, only more so. 

Since I'm writing this the week before the Super Bowl, I have football on my mind, at least a little. The last few weeks of NFL playoffs featured many fantastic games that were competitive until the end, some of them won by three points or less. That means the difference in those games was one field goal. In at least three of those games leading up to the big game this Sunday, field goals not made were the deciding factor. Two of those were attempts missed by the kickers from Buffalo and Green Bay. The third was a field goal not attempted as the head coach of Detroit chose to "go for it" unsuccessfully on fourth down, rather than attempting a much less risky field goal and scoring the three points that go with it.

I propose that defeat is far more agonizing in team sports when the mistake of one member costs the team a victory, or at least the chance of one. Magnify that by at least one hundredfold and you might understand the pressure placed on the football kicker. While his teammates battle in the trenches fighting hand-to-hand combat against the defense, beating themselves up play after play trying to move the ball yard-by-yard into a position to score, the kicker sits and waits. If his teammates don't succeed in moving the ball past the goal line to score a touchdown for six points, the next best thing is to get within thirty or maybe forty yards. When and if that happens, the kicker has only one job, kick the ball between the goalposts for three points. Sounds simple, doesn't it?

Try it sometime.

It looks easy because professional football kickers are successful on average, about 90 percent of the time. If a FG attempt fails in the middle of a game as happened to the Green Bay and Buffalo kickers, hopefully there's time to make up for it. Consequently, there's usually not much public display of agony during a missed field goal, the game just goes on.

But when it happens at the end of a game, that's a different story. Some of the most famous football games in history including a few Super Bowls were decided by a field goal either made or missed in the last seconds.

Make it and you're the hero, miss it and you'd rather be swabbing the deck of a tramp steamer. 

Talk about the agony of defeat.

For me, one play along those lines stands out above the rest. It is known simply as the "double doink". The mere mention of those two words, or the name of the main player involved in the play is enough to drive any Chicago Bears fan into a deep state of melancholia.  

I won't go into much background, suffice it to say the opportunity to move on to the next round of the playoffs after their best season in years*, rested upon the foot of the team's kicker, Cody Parkey. 

Here is a link to the last play of consequence in the Chicago Bears' 2018-19 season. The call is from the Philadelphia Eagles' Spanish language announcer, Rickie Riccardo (I'm not kidding, that's really his name). You may not understand a word he's saying but the tone of his voice from the winning side, and the faces of the players and the head coach on the losing side, contrast the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat better than anything I can think of, with not a little humiliation thrown in for good measure.

If Wide World of Sports is revived and there is ever a need to redo the intro, I think Cody Parkey would be a noble successor to Vinko Bogotaj as the enduring symbol of agony.

There are many who claim that sports are a metaphor for life. There are probably an equal number who reject that assertion, after all, how many average people experience the kind of adulation bestowed upon a sports hero, or the public humiliation of an athlete whose mistake loses the big game for his or her team? But that's missing the point, the fact is, few professional athletes themselves are in a position to experience those things either. 

It's in the details I believe, where sports and real-life merge.  

For example, on the surface, every head-to-head athletic competition can be viewed as a zero-sum game, where you have one winner and at least one loser. But it goes much deeper than that. As much as sports like American football are often compared to war, (Check out George Carlin's brilliant comedy routine comparing baseball to football), in sports, the losers always live to play another day. 

What do running backs Barry Sanders, Gale Sayers, Eric Dickerson, quarterbacks Warren Moon, Dan Fouts, defensive linemen Deacon Jones, Merlin Olsen, the most intimidating tackler in the game, linebacker Dick Butkus, and perhaps the game's greatest wide receiver (before Jerry Rice came on the scene), Steve Largent have in common? They are all professional football Hall of Famers who have never won a championship. In a sense you could say great as they were as players, they were all perpetual losers. 

So obviously there is no shame in losing, it's an integral part of the game. 

What can we learn from that? 

One thing is that we have to look at the bigger picture. In football as in every other sport, the big picture is the Game itself. Teams don't exist in a vacuum, they depend on all the other teams to play against for their existence, otherwise, what would be the point? Teams depend upon the league to provide the structure in which to compete. And that structure depends upon a set of rules in which to play. 

Playing any sport or come to think of it, conducting any reasonable contest without rules that every participant agrees upon would be like a chess player knocking down all the pieces on the board in the middle of a game with the exception of his own king, then declaring himself the winner.

We have enough of that already in our society.

That's not to say the rules are always adjudicated correctly. Sometimes games are decided by bad calls. Check out this notoriously bad call, or more accurately, non-call. It was a foul that everyone in the world watching the game saw, except for the officials. Had a penalty (pass interference in case you're keeping score) been called as it should have, the New Orleans Saints would have been in a very advantageous position to win the game and move on to the Super Bowl. Instead sans call, regulation time ended with the game tied and the L.A. Rams won the game in sudden death overtime by you guessed it, kicking a field goal. Then THEY got the chance to lose to Tom Brady and the New England Patriots in the big game two weeks later. 

Yes the Saints protested and naturally got nowhere, even though the offending player received a fine from the league for his dirty play. It was a terrible no-call, perhaps one of the worst ever in a widely seen playoff game. But the league determined, rightly in my opinion, that it was nothing more than human error, pure and simple. Frustrating as that is, especially if your team is on the short end of the stick, that's part of the game as well.

The best we can do in situations like this is realize life isn't always fair, that the best team, ours of course, doesn't always win, brush ourselves off, and live to play another day, which of course is what they always do in New Orleans: laissez le bon temps rouler.

As with all sports, the Game is bigger than any one athlete or team. To illustrate that, tens of millions of football fans will gather this Sunday to watch a contest featuring two teams most of them are not fans of, as members of the team they root passionately for, having been long eliminated from competition, will also be watching. 

There are lots of reasons to watch the Super Bowl for people who are not football fans. It's an American ritual for starters. It's an excuse to get together with friends and family to have a party. There are the eagerly anticipated commercials, short films created just for the event that in some cases display remarkable creative talent of storyteller-artists, all in 60 seconds or less. There's the halftime show which in my opinion with the exception of one, Prince in 2007, usually sucks. This year there's the additional sideshow of hands down the world's most popular pop star at the moment who also happens to be the girlfriend of one of the players. She'll be there too.

Then on Monday morning, rest assured tens of millions of Americans will be discussing all that around the proverbial water cooler. 

And yes, there's the game itself, the ultimate achievement for any athlete who has ever stepped onto a gridiron wearing pads, cleats and a helmet. History has shown that it too is usually a disappointment, failing to live up to all the hype. We'll just have to wait and see this Sunday. **

Oh I almost forgot about the wagering, something that predates athletes wearing clothes when they perform their magic. 

For a few hours, at least a third of the country will be brought together to participate in a uniquely American ritual that has been around since 1967. 

We have few things to unite us these days and when we are united, it's usually over our mutual hatred of one thing or another, rather than our love of something. 

Maybe we should keep that in mind as we get together with our families, friends, colleagues and complete strangers to watch the game this Sunday, as football fans, and especially as Americans. 

Enjoy the game.

And go Bears!

Oh wait a minute...

 

CODA

*That 2018-19 season was the Chicago Bears' last winning season to date. Being a Chicago sports fan, and having unfortunately passed that trait on to my son, we both happen to know a little something about agony.


POSTSCRIPT

**Well it was a great game, perhaps a classic, at least after halftime. The Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers, 25-22 in overtime in Super Bowl LVIII. Once again, a kicker's miscue factored into the result as Jake Moody of the 49ers missed a one-point conversion after his team scored a touchdown to take the lead with two minutes left in regulation. Had the kick been successful, SF would have been up 4 points meaning the Chiefs would have had to score a touchdown to get back into the game. Instead, they only needed a field goal to tie and force overtime, which they did. 

It could be argued that the KC offense as they say, was running on all eight cylinders by the end of the game, and could have scored a touchdown if they needed one. Moody's attempt was also blocked. Still, I bet he didn't sleep well last night, and will probably relive that moment at least until he gets back onto the field next season. 

Such is the life of a kicker.

Sunday, January 28, 2024

Gotcha! Then and Now Part II

Members are reminded to abide by decorum of the House.

That little bit of irony was brought to us last year by none other than the queen of decorous behavior herself, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who while temporarily presiding over a session of the House of Representatives, admonished her colleagues to remain quiet during a speech. Her remark led to an outburst of laughter from the Democrats in the chamber, and no doubt several muffled guffaws from her fellow Republicans as well. You may remember it was Greene along with her partner in chaos Lauren Boebert who loudly heckled the President of the United States, interrupting his State of the Union Address last year, calling him a liar and chanting "Build the Wall!"

In the previous post I brought up how times have changed, politically speaking, in my life. When I was a child in the early sixties, there was anger and divisiveness among Americans to be sure. But the political divide among Americans today is perhaps at its greatest, most impervious point since the Civil War. Consider this: from a recent Economist/YouGov Poll, 38 percent of Americans responded they would not approve of one of their children marrying a member of a different political party. In 1960, that number was only about 4 percent, which also happens to be the percentage of current marriages between a Republican and a Democrat. 

Perhaps this explains why the deep-down respect Americans once had for the institutions of this country spelled out in the U.S. Constitution that made certain behavior, such as that of Greene and Bobert out of bounds, is sadly a thing of the past. 

All of that was thrown out the window during my life as a pall of cynicism, distrust and even outright hatred of fellow Americans with different opinions, has replaced the respect for those institutions meant to bring us all together.

That's not to say that as a society we don't respect anything anymore. I also pointed out in the post certain issues that are held sacred to many of us today such as equal rights for women. That in particular was a fringe issue sixty years ago, barely considered at all and when it was, it received the same kind of response then, as MTG calling for decorum on the floor of the House does now.

I guess we have to take the good with the bad.

Still, I have to say, where has all the decorum gone? 

The inspiration for this duo of posts was two recent incidents where public figures got into hot water over their inadequate responses to what could be considered "gotcha questions", that is to say, inquiries that are designed by the questioner specifically to discredit the respondent.

Many sources regard one of the first such questions directed at a public figure, thereby launching the era of the gotcha question, to be the one I mentioned in the previous post where in 1992 President George H.W. Bush was asked if he ever had an extra-marital affair. Such a question of a sitting president would have been unthinkable before.

We haven't looked back since. 

Neither of the two gotcha questions I speak of were asked by members of the press. One was made by a congressperson at a congressional hearing, the other by a private citizen. I'll start with that one.

A few weeks ago at a public forum in New Hampshire, Nikky Haley, a candidate for the Republican nomination for president, was asked the following: 

What caused the Civil War?

Haley responded ironically:

Now don't come with an easy question or anything...

Unless you're a Republican candidate for president from South Carolina (where the first shots of the Civil War were fired) as Haley is, this is not a difficult, let alone a gotcha question. It's not like asking for example, what caused World War I. 

No matter how much the good folks south of the Mason-Dixon Line want to claim that the causes for the American Civil War were complex, it is not a hard question at all, and indeed the question is possible to answer in one word:

Slavery.

After her comment about the difficulty of the question, Haley went into a familiar talking point saying the Civil War was:

basically [about] how the government was going to run [and] the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do.

She did not mention slavery as a contributing factor to the Civil War. 

Nikky Haley knows better. Unfortunately, many of her constituents whose votes she's depending upon in order to win the Republican nomination, are those folks in Dixie, many of whom don't take too kindly to folks upsetting the apple cart by trashing the Confederacy and making claims that what they learned all their lives in school is a misrepresentation of history. 

So for Haley this was a question with no good answer, a classic gotcha question. Had she answered honestly that yes, the Civil War WAS about state's rights and that the right they were fighting for was the right to own people, she may have just as well thrown in the towel as she would have certainly lost any momentum she might have had in the Southern primaries, especially the one in her home state whose primary takes place on February 24th. 

Instead, she followed the line of the Cult of the Lost Cause, the movement that took place in the post-reconstruction period in the south, where among other things, history was re-written to paint a rosier picture of the Confederacy. It was no doubt what she was taught as a young person in South Carolina herself and that line of reasoning probably served her well as a Southern politician, until that fateful evening in New Hampshire.

The questioner followed up by mentioning his surprise at her omission of slavery.

At that point Haley threw gasoline on the fire by defiantly responding:

What do you want me to say about slavery?

To which the questioner said triumphantly: "Thank you, you've answered my question." 

Ouch.

Nikky Haley is a consummate politician which is perhaps her biggest weakness. In a previous post I wrote about her tendency to speak out of both sides of her mouth, taking the most convenient path depending upon whom she is trying to reach. That makes it difficult to know exactly where she stands on the issues.

Her grievous omission in New Hampshire probably won't be much of a factor in her unlikely bid to become this year's Republican nominee for president, but it will come back to haunt her if she ever finds herself on a national ticket, either as candidate for president or vice president.

It's hard to know the motivation for asking a presidential candidate what has to be considered an off-the-wall question about a historical event that was settled 159 years ago. On the other hand, the reaction to Haley's gaffe proves one thing, we're still fighting that war to this day, which makes the question quite relevant. 

Well played Mr. Private Citizen. 

By contrast, there is no question about the motivation of U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik's classic gotcha question to the presidents of three major American universities at a congressional hearing looking into antisemitism at American universities, as illustrated by rallies that took place in the days following the Hamas attack on Israel this past October 7.

Similar rallies across the planet celebrating that attack as a legitimate act of protest, drew the ire of every reasonable citizen of the world who was paying attention, as their timing immediately following a despicable act of brutal terrorism, quite reasonably called Israel's 9/11, displayed (quoting myself here) remarkable "heartlessness, ignorance, stupidity and yes, antisemitism."

Many of these rallies took place on American campuses and while protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, nothing in that cherished document protects them or their participants from being criticized which sadly, few university presidents chose to do in the ensuing days.

In their defense I'd say that the October 7th terrorist attack took nearly the entire world by surprise, so the lack of preparation to deal with the reaction to it, regrettable as it was in a way, understandable.

Somewhat less understandable was the lack of preparation of the three presidents, Claudine Gay of Harvard, Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, and Sally Kornbluth of MIT, when it came to answering what they had to know would be tough, politically charged questions at the congressional hearing in December, two months after the attack. 

Here's the gotcha question Stefanik posed to each of them, demanding a yes or no answer:

Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate [your school’s] rules on bullying and harassment?

Like the question about the Civil War, on the surface this shouldn't be too difficult to answer. After all, American universities tend to bend over backwards in protecting their students' rights to not be harassed, bullied or just made to feel uncomfortable. It's obvious that Jewish students would feel harassed when confronted by a group demanding that they, their relatives, and every person on earth who identifies with the same ethno-religious group as they do, should be exterminated. Therefore, the answer to this question, if the universities in question are truly honest about protecting students' "safe spaces", should be an unqualified yes.

But here's where that tricky little thing called the First Amendment gets in the way. Hate speech, which is really what Stefanik is referring to here, reprehensible as it is, is protected by the Constitution, so long as it doesn't represent a direct threat to someone. This is something that every school administrator understands and that is why the three university presidents equivocated when answering the question. "It depends" they all said in one way or other. 

Elise Stefanik, herself a Harvard alumna also understands this and knew exactly how the three would have to respond. She phrased her hypothetical question in as vague terms as possible so that it could cover, depending upon one's point of view, anything from Nazi skinheads carrying baseball bats while chanting "all Jews must die", to a group of students wearing Keffiyehs, chanting "Free Palestine." 

Understanding that the job of an administrator is to consider the minutiae of everything that comes her way along with the big picture, Stefanik preaching to the masses looking only to the convenient sound bite, set a trap for the three, into which they all fell.

Despite the prepared statements of Gay, Magill and Kornbluth on the evils of anti-Semitism, (excerpts of which can be found below), and their commitment to eradicate it and all other forms of racial and ethnic hatred at their institutions, all the general public heard was their failure to put calling for the genocide of Jews at least up there with, (borrowing a line from Sam Harris), other "crimes students at college campuses lose sleep about such as cultural appropriation and using the wrong pronoun."

Elise Stefanik may or may not be sincere in her concern about antisemitism, I have no idea. But as a newly minted MAGA culture warrior on the short list of candidates as Donald Trump's running mate in the upcoming election, she made no bones about the fact that she was gunning for these three administrators who represent in the minds of the Americans she's trying to connect with, the woke, elite enemy who must be put down at all costs. 

Shortly after her testimony to the Congressional Committee and the evisceration she received for her response to Stefanik's line of questioning, Liz Magill stepped down as the President of Penn. Responding to that, Stefanik commented on social media: "That's one down and two to go."

Meanwhile up in Cambridge, the Harvard Community as well as the university's governing board the Harvard Corporation, threw their support behind Claudine Gay until reports of sloppy research work in her past became public. Facing tremendous pressure and harassment, Dr. Gay stepped down shortly thereafter. Annie Karmi of the New York Times, wrote that Stefanik, taking full credit for the administrator's demise, took a "victory lap" after Gay's resignation.

So far Stefanik has been denied the opportunity of dancing on the professional grave of Sally Kornbluth who remains president of MIT. Perhaps Stefanik's claim that Kornbluth is an antisemite has fallen upon deaf ears since Kornbluth is Jewish while Stefanik is not.

Crazy world we live in, no?

The good news in all of this is that the principle actors of this story with the exception of the guy who asked the Civil War question, are all women of tremendous influence, something that would have been unthinkable 60 years ago. 

Ever since I was a child, I've been told that the world would be a much better place if women were in charge. That always comforted me as the writing had been on the wall that women would be gaining more and more influence as time went on.

The bad news is that despite women of influence being eminently capable of leadership, strength, wisdom and insight, they are also just as capable of messing things up as men.

I guess that's what equality is all about. 

Happy 2024.


CODA: 

It would be a grave injustice for the three university presidents to be remembered primarily for the soundbites of their responses to a question designed specifically to discredit them. 

What follows are excerpts from each of the prepared statements of Claudine Gay, Liz Magill and Sally Kornbluth that were read before the House committee's hearing on antisemitism on December 5, 2023. 

Claudine Gay:
The free exchange of ideas is the foundation upon which Harvard is built, and safety and well-being are the prerequisites for engagement in our community. Without both of these things, our teaching and research mission founder. In the past two months, our bedrock commitments have guided our efforts. We have increased security measures, expanded reporting channels, and augmented counseling, mental health and support services.

We have reiterated that speech that incites violence threatens safety or violates Harvard’s policies against bullying and harassment is unacceptable. We have made it clear that any behaviors that disrupt our teaching and research efforts will not be tolerated, and where these lines have been crossed, we have taken action.

We have drawn on our academic expertise to create learning opportunities for our campus community. We have begun examinations of the ways in which anti-Semitism and other forms of hate manifest at Harvard and in American society. We have also repeatedly made clear that we at Harvard reject antisemitism and denounce any trace of it on our campus or within our community.

Antisemitism is a symptom of ignorance, and the cure for ignorance is knowledge. Harvard must model what it means to preserve free expression, while combating prejudice and preserving the security of our community. We are undertaking that hard, long term work with the attention and intensity it requires.

Liz Magill:

To ensure that our Jewish students have a direct channel to share their experiences with me, I’ve created a student advisory group on the student experience. Today’s hearing is focused on antisemitism and its direct impact on the Jewish community, but history teaches us that where antisemitism goes unchecked, other forms of hate spread, and ultimately can threaten democracy.

We are seeing a rise in our society in harassment, intimidation, and threats toward individuals based on their identity as Muslim, Palestinian, or Arab. At Penn, we are investigating all these allegations for members of our community and providing resources to support individuals experiencing threats, online harassment, and doxing.

We will continue to deploy all the necessary resources to support any member of the community experiencing hate. As president, I am committed to a safe, secure, and supportive educational environment so that our academic mission can thrive. It is crucial that ideas are exchanged and diverse viewpoints are debated.

 Sally Kornbluth:

I strongly believe that there is a difference — between what we can say to each other. That is what we have a right to say and what we should say as members of one community. Yet as president of MIT, in addition to my duties to keep the campus safe and to maintain the functioning of this national asset, I must at the same time ensure that we protect speech and viewpoint diversity for everyone.

This is in keeping with the Institute’s principles on free expression. Meeting those three goals is challenging and the results can be terribly uncomfortable, but it is essential to how we operate in the United States. Those who want us to shut down protest language are in effect arguing for a speech code.

But in practice, speech codes do not work. Problematic speech needs to be countered with other speech and with education. And we are doing that. However, the right to free speech does not extend to harassment, discrimination or incitement to violence in our community. MIT policies are clear on this. To keep the campus functioning, we also have policies to regulate the time, manner and place of demonstrations.

Then and Now: Part I

Several years ago when I commemorated the passing of Steve Jobs and his career that helped change the world, I contemplated my grandmother's life and many of the changes she experienced during the first nine decades of the twentieth century.

I focused on the earth-shattering innovations she witnessed, perhaps the most obvious being the fact that she was alive when the Wright Brothers made their first flight in 1903, but wouldn't have known about it for at least four years when mention of it finally was published in the newspapers. Sixty years later, she was still very much alive when we watched together as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, live on TV.

Now consider this: when my grandmother was born, much of the world was still under the dominion of a handful of imperial powers. In the year of her birth, Spain and Great Britain could both legitimately claim the sun never set upon their empires. It just so happened in that very year, 1898, Spain would lose its claim as the last remnants of its once vast empire, the Philippines and Cuba would be lost to them forever. 1898 continues to be a year of infamy to many Spaniards. In fact, "well it's not so bad, at least you didn't lose Cuba" is still a popular message of consolation in Spain.

After two world wars, the two-thousand-year-old world order of imperial domination would come to an end and national self-determination, or at least the desire for it, would take its place. We have a globe at home that was manufactured when my grandmother was in her forties. The names of regions printed on that globe, unrecognizable to those today with little concept of history attest to that fact, as does the omission of familiar place names such as Nigeria, Kenya, Pakistan, Iraq, Russia, and of course, Israel.

I think it's fair to say the world my grandmother left in the 1980s was unrecognizable from the world she entered in the 1898. 

The world didn't change as drastically for me, although things are considerably different since I came on the scene in 1958.

I was reminded of this after watching a program called "Thank You Mr. President" which features excerpts from some of the sixty-five presidential news conferences conducted during the John F. Kennedy administration. 

That number alone attests to the changing times as Kennedy, in his nearly three years as president, participated in an average of 22.9 news conferences per year while the current president Joe Biden's number is less than half that, 11.3. Only Richard Nixon's and Ronald Reagan's number of annual press conferences, 7 and 5.8 respectively are lower for all the presidents since Calvin Coolidge.  

The "modern" news conference where a president meets in a formal setting with members of the press which is broadcast to the public live on television, began during the administration of Kennedy's predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower. But I think it's fair to say that Kennedy raised the event to an art form with his charm and quick wit, his wealth of historic and cultural knowledge, and his ability to think on his feet.  

However, Kennedy's job was made easier compared to that of his successors by the tacit limits placed upon the reporters. There is no question that the public's attitude toward the office of President of the United States, and especially to the person who holds that job has changed drastically in the past sixty years. Like all presidents, JFK had his detractors, but in his time, there was enough respect for the office to mean that certain questions were off limits. 

Today, after his tragic demise, Kennedy in some circles is best remembered for the many indiscretions in his personal life. These were not unknown by members of the press during his presidency, but publicly disclosing them would have meant professional suicide as the public did not have the voracious appetite we have today for salacious information on the private lives of public figures. More importantly, an indiscreet journalist would lose his or her most valuable asset, access to the president. 

That was no longer the case some thirty years later when at a presidential news conference, a CNN reporter asked then President George H.W. Bush flat out if he ever had an extramarital affair. By then, after the public disillusionment and cynicism surrounding the government's handling of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Iran-Contra affair and numerous other issues, nothing was considered off limits anymore. Bush's indignant response to the question only fueled suspicions which may have played a part in his losing re-election in 1992 to Bill Clinton, himself no stranger to personal indiscretions. 

Attitudes about the office of POTUS barely scratch the surface of the differences between then and now as illustrated by the Kennedy news conferences. 

As one of the first prominent women journalists on the national scene including her stint as a World War II correspondent, May Craig was a true pioneer in the struggle for equal rights for women. You can read about Miss Craig here

In a time when the cause for women's rights was a back burner issue at best, Craig often found herself at odds with the most powerful men in the country including presidents, who while respecting her credentials, did their best to downplay her concerns. 

If you go to YouTube and type in "the wit of JFK", you will find dozens of videos featuring humorous responses from the 35th president during his 65 news conferences. Inevitably in each video there will be at least one appearance by May Craig addressing her concerns about women's issues, among others in the midst of a barrage of questions from male reporters about other "pressing" issues of the day such as nuclear weapons, the economy, the Cold War, segregation and Civil Rights.

Here's one of Miss Craig's questions verbatim, one that could easily be asked today:

The platform of the Democratic Party in which you ran promised to work for equal rights for women including equal pay to wipe out job opportunity discriminations. Now, you have made efforts on behalf of others, what have you done for the women according to the promises of the platform?

To which the president responded without missing a beat:

"Well, I'm sure we haven't done enough and uh..." 

That drew a roar of laughter from the predominantly male press corps. When the guffaws subsided, Kennedy assured Miss Craig that he was completely in favor of equal pay for equal work and that we ought to do better, adding sardonically: "..."and I'm glad you reminded me of it Miss Craig."

Which drew another round of laughter.

Imagine a male politician today with the exception of one, so blithely dismissing the rights of one half of the population.

As I said, times have changed, and not all for the worse.

Public officials in a democracy should be held accountable and taken to task by a vigilant press asking at times, difficult questions.

Up to a point that is. 

To be continued...

Sunday, December 31, 2023

Talking Point Number Three: Islamophobia

As long as I could remember, my mother dreamed of visiting Greece. While celebrating Christmas Eve 1994 at my parents' home shortly after her retirement, I opened a small package with my name on it under the tree. Inside was a ticket for an Aegean Cruise which was to be spent with my parents. Already in my thirties, I was between relationships and feeling particularly alone at the time, so it was the perfect moment for such a trip. "Maybe you'll meet someone" my mother suggested.

The trip took place in spring of the following year. It began in Athens, a city fascinating for its antiquities, less so for its more contemporary aspects. We spent a few days there before embarking on the cruise. It so happened there was a strike of dock workers at the port of Piraeus where we were scheduled to board the ship, aptly named the Marco Polo. That strike proved fortunate as the travel company arranged for us to meet up with the ship farther down the coast enabling us to visit more of mainland Greece including the ruins of the city of Corinth whose first century Church was the recipient of a series of letters from Saint Paul which would become part of the New Testament. 

Close by we boarded the ship which took us first to the picture postcard islands of Mykonos (famous for its windmills) and Santorini, before sailing to more substantial places, first south to Heraklion, the capital of Crete. There we visited the most ancient site of our trip, the Bronze Age Palace of Knossos, center of the ancient Minoan Civilization. From there we sailed east to the island of Rhodes where my mom and I took an excursion to the city of Lindos, featuring its own city in the air (Acropolis), its magnificence in my estimation anyway, eclipsing the more famous one in Athens. 

The following day was spent entirely at sea with a sail-by (if there is such a term) of the island of Patmos where legend has it, the Apostle John wrote the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible. 

Had our trip ended there, it would have been a smashing success. But in retrospect it was just getting started. We were headed for Turkey.

One of our stops on the western coast of Turkey was the city of Çanakkale, strategically located at the entrance to the Dardanelles (also known as the Straight of Gallipoli for you WWI buffs), the narrow inlet that connects the Aegean to the Sea of Marmara, then via the Bosporus which bisects the city of Istanbul, the Black Sea. About one half hour from Çanakkale sit the ruins of the ancient city of Troy. 

With that visit in mind, to get into the spirit of the trip, I bought along a copy of the Odyssey to read during our time at sea. As is often the fate of good intentions however, there were far too many distractions to seriously consider Homer's epic poem: attending to my father's fragile health, the result of his over-exposure to the Aegean sun, thoughts of my own sad state of affairs back home, and perhaps most of all the female members of the ship's staff, sunbathing topless on the top deck of the ship. 

My own twentieth century Odyssey, complete with the semi-naked sirens, ended up in Istanbul, the most breath-takingly beautiful, exhilarating, fascinating, complicated, exhausting, frustrating and magnificent place I've ever visited.

But that's a story for another day and besides, I'm way off track of the subject at hand.

I bring this up because of all the great experiences of our trip, there is one thing that has stuck in my head perhaps more than anything else with the exception of our time in Istanbul. It was a comment made by our tour guide in Kuşadası, Turkey en route to the location of another place that plays a key role in the history of Christianity, the city of Ephesus. Our guide was a Turk about my age who in addition to his engaging personality and encyclopedic knowledge of the material he presented to us, had a great command of colloquial English. As this was our first port-of-call in Turkey he took it upon himself to introduce us to the Turkish nation, its culture, its history (selected parts of it anyway), its language, and the predominant religion of its people, Islam. Then he made the comment I will always remember. He said emphatically:

"We are Turks, NOT Arabs."

That little tidbit was not news to me nor I'm guessing was it news to most of our fellow travelers, although I could be wrong. We Americans, who constituted the majority of our group, have a deserved reputation for being remarkably ignorant of the world outside our borders, as has been made quite obvious since the events of this past October 7, and I'm sure our guide was aware of that.

Of course, I can't read his mind nearly thirty years after the fact, but by the way he made that comment, not as an aside but rather as a talking point, I couldn't help but think what he was really saying to us was this:

"We are not terrorists."

For a little context, remember this was 1995, a little more than six years before the mother-of-all terrorist attacks that took place on September 11, 2001. By 1995, acts of terrorism were commonplace all around the world and their perpetrators were a varied lot with a diverse set of axes to grind. The terms jihad, al-Qaeda and Islamophobia were not yet household words in the non-Muslim world in 1995 and international terrorism was far from the exclusive domain of Arab-Islamic extremists, as it remains today.

Yet they were up there.

Shortly before our trip, the deadliest act of terrorism (at the time) on American soil, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building happened in Oklahoma City. 168 people lost their lives and hundreds more were injured. I distinctly remember early speculation on who were the perps. Al-Qaeda, who had already committed several acts of terrorism directed at Americans overseas was high on the list. Of course that was wrong, the barbarous act in Oklahoma was committed by home grown American ultra-right-wing extremist terrorists.

In my last post I mentioned that there is a problem with the term Islamophobia. It was probably coined in the 1920s but came into common usage sometime in the 1990s, resurrected some say by Islamists as a parallel term to antisemitism, that is, the distrust and hatred of Jewish people. Beyond describing hatred of Muslims, in a cynical sense this word could be used to deflect criticism of Islam, equating the criticism of the religion with racism, much as the charge of antisemitism is sometimes used to deflect criticism of Israel.

Let me say this: hatred directed at Muslim people is real and like antisemitism, it is a scourge on humanity. There should just be a better word for it.

The problem with the term "Islamophobia" is that it does not, at least in its etymological sense, mean the hatred of a people as does the word antisemitism *, but rather the fear of a religion.

As our friend the Turkish tour guide pointed out, Islam is not confined to a single ethnicity or race. Because it is a missionary faith like Christianity, anyone can be a Muslim.

Given that, it should be obvious that the fear of a particular religion is not the same as the hatred of a people. The next question then should be this, can it be reasonable to fear a religion?

Well, when someone invokes the name of God before blowing him or herself up along with several innocent people on a bus, or intentionally flying an airplane into a skyscraper filled with thousands, or raping, torturing and butchering men women and children in their homes as they go about their daily lives, I'd say, yes, it is reasonable to fear that.

It is argued that all of these acts when done in the name of Islam, are a perversion of the religion, that Islam actually condemns in no uncertain terms the killing of innocent people. I have argued that myself in this space. 

Unfortunately like all religious dogma, there are loopholes. 

Some, such as the contemporary atheist philosopher and popular commentator Sam Harris, would say there are more such loopholes in Islam than in other contemporary religions, making it particularly dangerous. As I am far from an expert on Islam, I am not in any position to say if that is true.

What I do feel qualified to discuss is my own faith tradition, Christianity, specifically that of the Roman Catholic Church.

One obvious loophole in Catholicism is perhaps its most beautiful attribute, the spirit of forgiveness raised to an act of God through the Sacrament of Reconciliation, otherwise known as Confession. By openly revealing our sins we humble ourselves before God (through the intervention of a priest) and come to terms with the fact that yet another thing that binds us humans together is that we all make mistakes; we all fall short of the perfection of God. Most important of all, while forgiving our sins, God calls upon us to "forgive those who transgress against us". 

For me, one of the most powerful passages of the New Testament concerns forgiveness:


Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.


Matthew 18:18


In other words, we are bound by our grudges big and small that we carry around through life like millstones around our necks. Forgiveness unbinds us of the millstone. Forgive, and we will be free of the burden, and can be forgiven ourselves.


This is one of the central tenets of Christianity.


However, in practice, like so many aspects of Catholic dogma, confession long ago came to be a ritual whose spirit got lost somewhere along the way. For many Catholics, reconciliation is all about one's own redemption while forgetting all that other boring stuff. Confession to many, is like a get out of jail free card in Monopoly, justifying bad actions in advance, knowing full well that a trip to the confessional and the penance of few Hail Marys will make everything AOK.


Obviously, that's not how it was intended to work. 


Yet for innumerable Catholics from little old ladies picking flowers without permission to professional hitmen, from priests abusing children to their bishops who swept their actions under the rug, sins big, small and enormous are intentionally committed by Catholics with the full expectation that God has their back, so long as they jump through the right hoops.


So much for good intentions.


Now anyone with a shred of history in their head, knows that the sins of the Roman Catholic Church are profound and numerous. The Crusades, the Inquisition, need I say more? I could go on all day but I won't. If there ever was a religion worthy of inciting fear, it would be the one in which I am a member.

I'm not certain how much the two acts of the Church I just mentioned were inspired by Christian scripture, or simply the acting out of tribal instincts in response to socio/political/economic events of the day, while using a cut and paste version of scripture to justify them. I suspect more the latter than the former. My guess is that Sam Harris would agree when he compares Christianity favorably to Islam, (remember he's an atheist so he rejects both). When Harris compares the two faiths as he has done recently, he doesn't point out those quite obvious examples of brutality committed in the name of Christ. Instead, Harris argues that morally speaking, we in the West (whatever that entails), as a civilization have come a long way since the days of the Crusades, and that the East has a lot of catching up to do. This, according to Harris, is a result of Islam holding them back. 

Sam Harris is not alone in defying current political correctness by singling out Islam as a backwards force. Here is link to a video of a lecture given by the popular astro-physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson introduced by Steven Weinberg, discussing the relationship between Islam and science.

I'm fairly certain that a vast number of people in the non-Muslim world, are not aware of the golden age of Islam of which Professor Tyson speaks. Coinciding with the Arab Empire, at the time the largest empire the world had ever known, it was a period of tremendous breakthroughs in human knowledge all brought to the world by Arab scholars, inventors, mathematicians, scientists, philosophers and other learned individuals. All this took place in what we in the West refer to as the "Dark Ages", a time when in Tyson's words, "the Europeans were busy disemboweling heretics". I might add that the Europeans at the same time, under the authority of the Church, were also busy burning books, attempting to destroy much of the accumulated knowledge of the world at the time, especially that written by pagans such as Plato and Aristotle, under the assumption that the only knowledge worth preserving was to be found in the Bible. 

Meanwhile the Arabs were taking much of that knowledge and translating it into Arabic. Had they not, scores of works of ancient philosophy, science, medicine and mathematics, may have been lost forever. 

And then it all stopped according to Tyson; scientific inquiry among Arabs ground to a halt somewhere in the 13th Century. He attributes this decline to one man, Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali. According to Tyson, al-Ghazali codified Islam, much in the same way that St. Augustine codified Christianity. Among the tenets that al-Ghazali came up with Tyson says, is that "mathematics is the work of the devil." 

"Nothing good can come out of that philosophy" Tyson retorted.

Neil deGrasse Tyson has made a brilliant career of making complex scientific ideas accessible to the masses. I am a member of those masses. But simplification in order to explain an idea is not the same as dumbing something down in order to make a point, which he unfortunately does here. 

Parts of his premise are correct, in the period between 750 and 1258 CE, corresponding to the years of the Arab Empire, or more accurately the Abbasid Caliphate, centered in Baghdad and extending from Spain through Persia, there was an explosion of ground-breaking contributions made by Arabs in the fields of science, medicine, philosophy and education. He is also correct about the decline of those contributions, (although not nearly as abrupt as he claims) at the end of that period and from which there has been no significant recovery.

And yes, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, was indeed a profoundly influential Muslim cleric. some say second only to Mohammad himself regarding his influence on the faith. But al-Ghazali was also a polymath: an intellectual, a scholar, mystic, philosopher as well as theologian. He was as much a part of the golden age of Islam as anyone, as well as being a great influence on many non-Muslim philosophers including Maimonidies, Thomas Aquinas, and David Hume

Tyson states that al Ghazali taught people "how to be good Muslims", implying that to mean strict, unquestioning fealty to the Quran being the cornerstone of the faith, and that all earthly pursuits such as mathematics and science were not only fruitless but also contrary to the teachings of scripture. 

This could not be further from the truth. Al Ghazali was a firm advocate of reason and critical thinking and judgement. He insisted that earthly pursuits like math and science, which he groups together with philosophy, were essential studies, not in conflict with matters of faith. Reading a bit of his work, you can judge for yourself:

There are those things in which the philosophers believe, and which do not come into conflict with any religious principle. And, therefore, disagreement with the philosophers with respect to those things is not a necessary condition for the faith in the prophets and the apostles (may God bless them all). An example is their theory that the lunar eclipse occurs when the light of the Moon disappears as a consequence of the interposition of the Earth between the Moon and the Sun. ….

We are not interested in refuting such theories either; for the refutation will serve no purpose. He who thinks that it is his religious duty to disbelieve such things is really unjust to religion, and weakens its cause. For these things have been established by astronomical and mathematical evidence which leaves no room for doubt. If you tell a man, who has studied these things— so that he has sifted all the data relating to them, and is, therefore, in a position to forecast when a lunar or a solar eclipse will take place: whether it will be total or partial; and how long it will last —that these things are contrary to religion, your assertion will shake his faith in religion, not in these things. Greater harm is done to religion by an immethodical helper than by an enemy whose actions, however hostile, are in his yet regular. For, as the proverb goes, a wise enemy is better than an ignorant friend.

From  Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (Incoherence of the Philosophers)

In his thesis, Tyson gives little credence to the reasonable possibility that the decline of the scientific contributions of Arabs is likely to be attributable to the decline of their Empire after the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols (incidentally, ancestors of the modern-day Turks) in 1258, and the subsequent centuries of invasions by the Crusaders.  Instead, he insists that the strict religion foisted upon the Muslim people by al-Ghazali is the sole culprit.

Why? 

Well, al-Ghazali gets the last laugh on this one as he seems to have anticipated Neil deGrasse Tyson's comments by some nine centuries:
The greatest thing in which the atheists rejoice is for the defender of religion to declare these [astronomical demonstrations] and their like are contrary to religion thus the path for refuting religion becomes easy if the likes [of this argument defending religion] are rendered a condition [for its truth].

Again, from  Tahāfut al-Falāsifa

As one commentator noted, had Tyson spent five minutes reading the Wikipedia entry on al Ghazali, it "could have prevented him from completely misquoting Al Ghazali and shamelessly misrepresenting history." 

Indeed.

Yet even the staunchest defenders of Islam are at a loss to fully explain why there was never a rekindling of the glory days of scientific inquiry in the Arab and more broadly, the Muslim world since the twelfth century.

And the same people are even more at a loss to explain the horrific acts committed in the name of Allah.

But in this respect at least, Muslims are not alone in lamenting the fact that some of their brothers and sisters in faith have used their sacred scripture to justify abhorrent acts. 

Here is what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Israeli people shortly after the 10/7 Hamas attacks in their country:
You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.
Amalek, or the Amalekites, were enemies of the nation of Israel from biblical times.  

This is from the First book of Samuel, Chapter 15:
Thus says the Lord of hosts: ‘I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel, how he ambushed him on the way when he came up from Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’ 
The God of the Old Testament didn't fool around.

It's hard to look at Israel's response in Gaza after the 10/7 attacks and not think this is what Netanyahu had in mind.

But for my money, historically speaking, the most devastating line of scripture found in any of the sacred texts of all three of the Abrahamic religions combined, (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) is found in the same Gospel of Matthew of the New Testament that I quoted from above.

You probably know the story. Jesus has been brought to the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate by the people of Jerusalem who insist he be punished for blasphemy for claiming he was the Son of God, and for other stuff that pissed them off. Pilate, the story goes, was warned by his wife to spare the life of Jesus because she had a troubling dream about him the night before. Despite his efforts to grant his wife's wishes, the last thing Pilate needed was an uprising on his hands, so he gave in to the crowd but not before admonishing them and passing the responsibility of Jesus' fate on to them, literally "washing his hands" of the affair. Here is their response to him:
Then answered all the people, and said, 'His blood be on us, and on our children.'

Matthew 27:25


"The people" the writer of the Gospel is referring to here, are the Jews. There you have it, scriptural proof that the Jews killed Jesus, This is their confession. Not only are they condemning themselves, but their children as well, into eternity. Two millennia and counting worth of antisemitism along with all the pain, suffering and unspeakable horror that came from it, can be summed up in nine simple words. They are scriptural justification for hatred.

Take a deep breath to put all that into perspective. 

Of course, anyone who has ever taken those nine words to heart, and there have been many hundreds of millions throughout history, didn't bother with a couple other crucial verses in the same story, one taking place a few hours before, the other a few hours later in the narrative. 

When the officials came to arrest Jesus, one of his disciples took his sword and cut off the ear of one of the officials. This is what follows:

Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.

Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?

But how then shall the scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?
Matthew 26:52-54

If you are a Christian, you believe that the death and resurrection of Jesus are God's plan for the salvation of the world. That is why the day we commemorate Jesus' death is called "Good" Friday. Without Good Friday, there would be no Easter Sunday commemorating the central event of the faith.

The people who sent Jesus to his death were merely actors in God's plot.

And how are we to think of those people?

For that we turn to another Gospel:
And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they crucified him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand, and the other on the left. Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. And they parted his raiment and cast lots.

Luke 23:34-35

There you have it, if Jesus himself is asking God for the forgiveness of the people who arrested him, spit at him, mocked him, beat him, nailed him to a tree to die then cast lots for his clothing, then who are we to condemn them?

This brings us to what I believe is the central question at hand, what comes first, scriptural verses that inspire hatred, or the hatred itself which becomes justified through a selected reading of scripture?

I would strongly advocate for the latter-- that hatred comes first. People who see religion only as a negative force in the world single out all the horrific acts that have taken place in the name of God, but are loath to point out the acts of good that come from religion. I've heard Sam Harris claim that you don't need religion in your life to be a good person, to which I agree. At the risk of sounding like a cliché, some of the best people I've known have been atheists. Conversely, I think it's obvious that you don't need religion to be a bad person either. Some of the gravest acts against humanity, especially in the last 150 years have been carried out without any religious pretext at all.

In defense of religion I will say this: fear and hatred are very natural human responses to adversity; they are self-defense mechanisms we inherited from our pre-historic ancestors. No, we don't need religion to teach us how to hate those who have done us wrong, real or imagined, we're all very capable of that on our own, thank you very much. 

But what about virtues such as kindness, charity, patience, selflessness, justice and the "golden rule" which all faiths promote and aspire to?

These virtues do not come naturally, they need to be taught.

What about loving our enemies as Jesus commanded? 

That idea is so outrageous, absurd and un-natural that despite all my doubts about whether God exists, it  is the one thing that truly confirms my faith, simply because it's hard for me to believe that this command was made up by a mere mortal as it goes against every instinct of our earthly being. 

Yet there it is.

Religion, like all human inventions (Artificial Intelligence immediately comes to mind), is a tool that can be put to good use and bad. Today being New Years Eve, it is customary to think of the people we have lost over the previous 364 days. The person I'm thinking about at the moment is Rosalyn Carter, who along with her husband the former president, spent the last half of her life in service, building homes with her own hands for the homeless. The Carters are examples of people who put their faith to good use. They are far from unique as there are people of all creeds in every corner of the planet who put their faith to good use in the service of others and help make the world a better place. 

Which makes me think of one of the humblest tools the Carters put into service in their work for Habitat for Humanity, the lowly hammer. 

In the right hands, that hammer can be used to build homes for the homeless and other wondrous things. 

In the wrong hands it can be used to bash somebody's head in.

Religion is no different. 



CODA

* There is a bit of a problem with the word antisemitism as well, as included in the Semitic peoples are Arabs. Yet the word is exclusively used to describe prejudice against Jewish people. 

** An even more demonstrable error in Neil deGrasse Tyson's lecture on Islam and science is his mention of a quote President George W. Bush made supposedly after the 9/11 attacks. Bush did say "Our God named the stars", loosely quoting Psalm 147:4, but he did not deliver those words after the terrorist attack, and certainly not as a means to compare and contrast Christians and Muslims as Tyson implies. 

Rather, Bush made the remark during a tribute to the seven astronauts killed in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003. The president in fact made it crystal clear after 9/11 that Muslims are as much a part of the fabric of American life as any other group and denounced in no uncertain terms the prejudice and hatred against them that followed the attack and continues to this day. Here is a link to a speech the former president gave during a visit to the Islamic Centre in Washington, D.C., less than a week after the attack.