June 21, 2024
Propaganda
Right off Route 1 in Saugus is a national historic site called the Saugus Ironworks.
The first iron smelt in all the western hemisphere happened in Saugus, Massachusetts. The colonists saw that they needed an independent source of steel, so they set about constructing their own mill, complete with a massive stone furnace to smelt iron ore into workable metal.
Two massive bellows heated the furnace to thousands of degrees by pumping oxygen into the belly of the furnace. And they were driven by a water wheel!
Iron smelting is an amazing craft. While the colonists built a huge, mechanically driven operation with a blast furnace, iron can be created with less. Villages in West Africa have maintained the knowledge of the ancient techniques. In this documentary, they construct a clay bloomery and heat a chunk of iron to form an iron hoe.
I’m floored by this place. I intend to return soon.
Aaron had expected to move from his childhood home in Middleton (a massive single family home in Middleton Massachusetts with two showers that he has occupied alone for nine months) to his grandfather’s house in Malden at the end of May. 167 Floral ave was the address, and the house had housed three generations. Aaron’s mother had grown up on Floral Ave, and Aaron considered the place his.
Unfortunately, Aaron’s mother gave the room to Joe so that Joe’s girlfriend’s daughter could have a place to stay. They even took the mattress that Aaron had bought and unfurled from Costco months before. Purportedly, Joe was paying $3,700 to live there. Aaron was devastated. In retaliation, Aaron went to the house and dumped a pasta pot of water on his uncle Sam’s bed (Sam lived in the basement).
After that incident, Sam locked the door to the basement and hid the key. Aaron was still frustrated, however, so he went in the night a few days later and smeared dog shit around the handles and windshield of Sam’s car. Aaron was mad at Sam because he believed Sam was the real mastermind behind the sneaky sale, since Joe was his best friend. The truck was brand new, literally driven off the lot yesterday, a top of the line Ford. Aaron put some dog poop in the tailpipe hoping it might stink up the car of something. He got all the poop from his aunt, who kept it in little baggies in a metal bin next to her house. Aaron had collected it himself actually, because he walked his aunt’s dogs. Aaron smeared shit for a while, and then he went in to check the mail and went home.
Some time passed without any development on the matter. Sam and Felicia (Aaron’s mother) were already blocked, so they couldn’t reach Aaron anyway. They had Joe try to call Aaron, but Aaron hung up and blocked him too. At work, Aaron ruminated about all the mean things he would say to them when he eventually saw them again. The opportunity came quickly enough.
After visiting some friends in Malden, Aaron decided to stop by Floral Ave to check the mail and prepare the spot on the floor where he would sleep. It was still his registered address, and he had lost his lisence two weeks ago in New York so he figured he would check to see if it came in.
Aaron was walking around a bit. He noticed some of his grandfather’s pictures had been taken down from the wall. Particularly, one of his favorites was missing without a trace: his grandfather out cold on a beach chair with his little wooden tobacco pipe still in hand. As he was perusing, Aaron heard Joe come down stairs.
Aaron didn’t feel like talking to Joe, so decided to go on the back porch. The door was locked with the key in it. Joe followed him out. Joe tried to say “Hi” and Aaron squeaked a weird high pitched hi back. Joe followed Aaron out onto the porch and Aaron tried to say, “No you don’t have to do that.” Aaron stood over the porch looking out over the road. It was warm and a little humid. A single streetlight glowed bright white across the sidewalk.
Aaron tried to find a place to look anywhere but at Joe. Joe just stood there, silhouetted black against the light from the doorway.
“Can you leave me alone?”
“I want to know what kind of state you are in.” Joe finally said.
“Oh.” Aaron started to walk toward Joe, holding out his hand. “Let’s have a truce. I am satisfied. I won’t do anything else.”
They shook hands. Joe held up his arms and asked for a hug. Aaron stepped back.
“No.”
“Come on buddy.”
“I don’t want to give you a hug.” Aaron was circling around Joe to get back to the door.
Joe was insistent. “I want to be friends.”
“I’m not your friend Joe. I don’t like you. You are a deceptive person.”
Looking back, Aaron realized this was the tipping point. If he hugged Joe there and pretended to be his buddy, Joe probably would have let him go. But Aaron really hated Joe, and Joe did not like to be insulted.
Aaron walked through the house and tried to go upstairs. Joe was upset, he told Aaron, “I’m gonna call your mother so I don’t lay any hands on you.”
Aaron, climbing up the stairs faster now, said, “We don’t have to be friends, Joe. I’m going to live here and you’re going to live here and we don’t have to talk to each other.”
“I don’t want to live like that.”
Aaron got to his grandfather’s room and shut the door behind him. He texted his ex girlfriend, who he knew would be fascinated by this drama, “Just letting you know in case of witness needs, Joe just said ‘I’m gonna call your mother so I don’t put my hands on you’. Threatening violence in my own grandfather’s home.”
Joe opened the door and came in. The room was a mess of boxes and blankets and old furniture, piled across the bed and floor. They were planning to move all of Aaron’s grandfather’s things to the attic. He wasn’t even dead yet.
“Leave, Joe.”
“Buddy, you have to go.”
“What?”
“You have to go.” Joe was standing in the door way.
“This is my grandfather’s house. I’ve lived here for years.”
“You don’t live here. You have to go.”
“No. I live here.”
Joe didn’t budge. His girlfriend, Molly, a schoolteacher, came up behind him. She looked tired, eye bags all dark.
“Joe Joe, come on.” She tried to pull him away.
“Aaron, leave.”
“No.”
“You can’t stay here. You have to leave.”
“Please leave me alone Joe.”
Joe was getting frustrated.
“There is a little girl in the next room over, I am not leaving you alone with her.”
Aaron was sitting on the bed with his feet up on a piece of furniture. He had even taken his boots off.
“She’ll be fine.”
“You aren’t stable Aaron. You are scaring us.”
“Did I freak you guys out that bad with the dog shit? My uncle deserved it, I swear.”
“We don’t know what kind of state you are in.” Joe said.
“I am fine, Joe. Really. I have satisfied my taste for revenge with my uncle.”
“You can come back tomorrow, please Aaron.” Molly pleaded. “We can’t do this right now.”
“I had no intention of staying here tonight. I just wanted to move some boxes.” And indeed, the room that Aaron intended to share with his grandfather was littered with junk that made just walking through the room hazardous.
“Please just go. I don’t trust you, Aaron.”
“I will not.”
Joe’s patience was thinning. “Shut the door Molly.” And he went to push his girlfriend out the door to close it.
“Are you going to hurt me, Joe?”
“No, but I want to beat the shit out of you.”
“I knew you were a violent person Joe. Is that how you solve problems, hurting people?”
“No, I don’t hurt people. I’m a nice person.”
Aaron leaned back in the bed, practically laying down, and Joe stood over him, trying to crush Aaron with his beady, black eyes.
“Get out of my room Joe!”
“I am not leaving here while that little girl sleeps in the other room.” The whine of a dog could be heard behind a door somewhere. That dog, some kind of pit bull mix or something, had growled at, jumped on, and nipped at Aaron.
The back and forth went on a bit longer before Sam came up the stairs from the basement. Whether or not Joe woke him up or the commotion did is unknown.
Sam tried to shush them all. “There is a kid sleeping next door, Aaron. Why are you bothering these people?”
“They came in here. They started with me.”
“Aaron, it’s 11 o clock at night. We have work in the morning. Why are you doing this?”
“I just want to be left alone, please leave me alone.”
“You have to go Aaron.”
“No, I am not leaving.”
“Aaron you can’t stay here.”
“No.” Aaron persisted.
“Aaron, this isn’t your house. You don’t live here.” Joe finally said.
“Oh, it’s just my mattress and my desk your girlfriend’s daughter is sleeping on?”
“We’ll pay you. We can talk about it in the morning when you come back.”
“Just leave me alone.”
“No. Leave me alone.”
“We aren’t leaving until you go.”
“Then we are going to be here a long time.” Aaron replied, and lounged backwards in the bed with his hands behind his head.
“Leave.”
“No.
“Leave Now.”
“No, I’m not leaving. We are going to be here all night.”
“You have to leave.”
And so on. Sam was in and out at various times, as was Molly. Joe finally got the door closed and tried to pin Aaron against the bed. Aaron punched him back.
“Aaron just punched me! See, he’s crazy!”
“Punch me again, Joe. Do it.”
“I’ll break your face.”
Aaron tried to start recording at this point, but his phone stopped recording the second the screen turned off. This is a major design flaw of Android phones, clearly. Why does a recording app not come stock? In dangerous situations like these, individuals need to be able to quickly document the situation for legal and safety purposes.
“Why are you even here?” Molly asked.
“I wanted to move these boxes downstairs so I could set up my bed.”
“You said before you wanted to just walk around. See Aaron, you aren’t right in the head.” The gaslighting began in force. For the rest of the night, Joe would question Aaron of events as they happened, loudly commenting on Aaron’s stability and state of mind.
“Why did you smile? See you are smiling?” Molly asked, presenting her case.
“Do you guys think I am crazy?” Aaron felt clear headed and alert, completely in the moment. His nerves were firing like crazy.
“You aren’t right, Aaron.” Joe tapped his head to indicate craziness. “It’s because you are half-retard. You’re retarded.”
Aaron responded by letting Joe know he was a scumbag.
Sam came in with the phone again. He had his mother, Aaron’s grandmother on the line. She asked Aaron to go home and get some rest, and she and he would be back in the morning.
“I’m sorry Nanna, but I can’t leave. It will be the last time I ever step foot in this place.”
“No honey, we can work all this out in the morning.”
“Nanna, they are going to change the locks. They are going to lock me out of my own grandfather’s home.”
“I’ll go with you tomorrow, honey, please just go home and get a good night’s rest.”
Aaron continued to resist. “We are going to be here a long time.” He pulled out his phone and checked the time. “Yeah, I’ll give it till six am and then I’ll leave. God this is going to be a long night.”
“We’re gonna call the police,” Molly threatened.
“Good, do it. Do it, call the police.” Aaron looked at Sam. “Imagine the story. Being arrested in your own home.”
Sam simply said, “This is between you and your mother. Talk to her about it.”
Aaron responded, “This is extremely frustrating Sam. Extremely frustrating.”
“I know,” Sam said.
“What, are you waiting for Lenny to go cold? Is that what you are hoping for, Lenny to die?”
“Yep,” said Sam.
Joe was getting impatient again and wanted to beat up Aaron.
“You don’t even have a formal lease, Joe. You live here under the table.”
“Oh yeah? I pay your mother every month to live here. I have texts back and forth.”
At one point, Joe tried to tackle Aaron again. Aaron pushed back and slammed Joe against the wall. At the same time, Aaron reached down and grabbed Joe’s balls, squeezing as hard as he could. Joe went to the floor. Sam and Molly separated them.
“Do it, hit me again, Joe.” Aaron got back into bed and sat, criss-cross apple sauce. “I have an idea Joe, just let the dog out and let it bite me. You wont be responsible that way.”
“The dog would never bite!” Molly screamed.
“Aaron, you don’t live here. I pay rent. You don’t pay shit. The mattress isn’t even yours, your mom paid for it.”
“You have no idea, Joe.”
“What do you pay?”
“My parents use my name in a fraud scheme that nets them $3000-“
“Nothing. You pay nothing.”
“You have no idea about any of that, Joe. Leave me alone.”
“You pay nothing. NOTHING. I own this place.”
Sam tried to pipe up; “You smeared shit on my brand new truck, that cost me one hundred thousand dollars!”
Aaron wiped his eye like he was shedding a tear. Sam humphed, “See!”
“It came off in the car wash, right? It was harmless, and you deserved it.” Aaron figured that Sam would
“For what? I had nothing to do with any of this.” Sam insisted the entire arrangement was between Aaron and his mother. Even though Aaron had said to Sam’s face and over the phone repeatedly for months that he would be moving to Malden and wanted that room as soon as Mike moved out. Mike took his fucking time doing it.
“Sure, Sam. You just take a little money now and then when you need it.” Aaron smiled a shit eating grin. “Anyway, I promise from the bottom of my heart I won’t do anything again. Let’s have a truce.”
Sam refused.
“Come on, Joe and Molly please leave. I want to talk to my uncle. We haven’t really had any time to actually talk, especially with the divorce and all.”
“Now is not the time Aaron. You need to leave.”
“LEAVE! GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE.” Joe was screaming now, right into Aaron’s face. Aaron’s phone was ringing. His dad had been trying to call him nonstop.
“Shut up Joe.”
Joe kept calling Aaron a retard. He grabbed a big wad of Aaron’s grandfather’s stuff and threw it at Aaron hard.
Sam left again, talking on the phone. Molly tried to plead with Aaron while Joe continued to demand Aaron leave, sometimes up close and angry, sometimes back. Joe was saying something to Aaron when Aaron cut him off and tried to look behind him into the hallway where Sam was talking on speaker phone with some man.
“Wait wait, who is he talking to?” The voice was weird.
Sam came back in and handed the phone to Aaron. It was another man named Joe, Aaron’s grandma’s boyfriend.
“Hi Joe,” Aaron said. “Sorry you have to see me like this.”
The old Joe, off to the side, “You can’t SEE him, he’s on the phone.. see, he’s crazy!”
The new Joe on the phone said, “Hi Aaron. What the hell are you doing there?”
“It’s my grandfather’s house, I have a right to be here.”
“You don’t live there! What, do you want to live in New Hampshire, Middleton, and Malden all at the same time?” Aaron thought it was ironic that his grandfather’s ex wife’s boyfriend was lecturing him about this.
“I am my father’s son!” Aaron let out a laugh. It sounded fake, and he cringed at himself immediately. Aaron sometimes wondered if his weird sense of humor was really that unnerving.
“It is not your house! Your mother made a decision about it, you have no right to be there.” It was a little strange that Aaron’s grandfather’s ex wife’s boyfriend was
“My grandfather said I could live here.” Lenny had done exactly that, over and over for years. Aaron had lived with with Lenny after college and adored it. The freedom to work and create was incredible, and in a house with so much history! The Malden Public School System gave Aaron his first real job.
“It is not your house for Gods sake! You live in Middleton, go back to Middleton.”
Suddenly, Aaron had an idea. “I’ll leave if you pay me $300 dollars.”
Joe was in disbelief. But Aaron was looking at Sam, and Sam nodded.
Aaron continued, “Actually $350, for the mattress, desk, and sheets and stuff.”
“Okay, deal.” Joe said.
Molly was aghast. Sam reached out his hand for some reason and Aaron shook it.
Chaos continued, Aaron saying something flippant and Joe getting angry again. Molly finally demanded to know Aaron’s Venmo and he gave it to her. She showed him her phone and he selected the right profile.
“Leave!”
“I’m not leaving until I get my money!”
Molly wouldn’t send it until Aaron left.
“No way, if I leave now you won’t send it.”
“This is so disrespectful. You are so disrespectful,” Molly said, covering her face.
“No, Molly, you are right. I have no respect for you whatsoever. I think you are an awful person.”
Molly did finally send it, and Aaron confirmed on his end. Molly’s Venmo message read: “$350. To get you out of my house.”
Satisfied, Aaron prepared to leave. While he was tugging on his boots and tying them, Joe got agitated again. “You aren’t leaving until you give me your key.”
“I’m not giving you my key. Just change the locks.”
Aaron then tried to stand up on the bed, and Joe immediately pushed him down against the wooden frame at the end. Aaron punched him right back.
“HIT ME AGAIN JOE!”
Sam and Joe got up in Aaron’s face, like mobsters, and demanded he hand over the key. Aaron stuck his hands in his pockets, feeling his wallet, keys, phone etc. He looked at them and said, “No way. Change the locks yourself. You know how to do that, don’t you lugnut?”
Joe suddenly turned into the hallway and tried to open the door with the dog behind it. “Let the dog out. Come on, let the dog out.” Molly stopped him.
“See, it was a good idea, right?” Aaron smiled.
After some more posturing and shoving, they finally let Aaron go past, but they kept on his ass. As Aaron went to climb downstairs, Joe tried to push him down the steps. Aaron grabbed him back and tried to pull him with him. Molly pulled him off.
“Nice Joe, awesome. Keep hurting me. You are a violent person, a man-child. You have to hurt people to get what you want.”
“I’m a child! You’re a child.”
They finally pushed Aaron to the mudroom. Aaron had the glass door ajar and was preparing to leave when Sam said something to him. Aaron didn’t hear it, but Sam was right up against him. Aaron placed his index finger right on Sam’s chest and said to him in a low voice, “don’t ever betray me again, Sam. Don’t ever betray me.”
Sam lost it then. A pair of steep stone steps lead down to the concrete sidewalk below the door. Sam grabbed Aaron and attempted to throw him down the stairs, but Aaron dug in and twirled. He got the upper hand and managed to swing Sam so that he was about to tumble down the stairs. Just as Aaron went to heave all his weight against his uncle, Joe came from behind and pushed Aaron. Aaron had just enough time to grab Joe’s testicles again and squeeze. All three tumbled down the stairs, Sam sprawling on the sidewalk and Aaron on his back against the stairs. His arm hurt– it had been scraped.
Sam pulled himself up in the blink of an eye and was on top of Aaron. Joe was on the step above, loosely holding Aaron’s shoulders down while Aaron’s fist clung to his balls. Sam got right up close to Aaron’s face and whispered. “Don’t say a word about this to my kids or I’ll kill you. Don’t say a fucking word.”
“Of course I am going to tell them, Sam. I’m going to text them the second I get in the car.”
“You better not do anything to my kids.”
“I love your kids, Sam. They are my best friends.” That Sam could not understand that baffled Aaron. How absolutely obliterated does one’s sense of love have to be to think otherwise?
“Good,” Sam said.
“You gonna hold me down forever?”
Joe let go, but he slapped Aaron in the face as he got up. Aaron pushed back, yelling “Hit me again Joe, see what will happen.” Aaron wondered what the neighbors thought of this shit show.
Aaron started to walk to the car. Joe called after him that he was “half retarded” again, but then he came down the stairs and started following Aaron.
“Hey buddy I just want to shake your hand. Hey I just want to shake your hand come on.”
“Get away from me Joe, you are a creep.”
“Come on, I just want to hug you.”
Aaron had his key in his hand now, held like a knife. Joe reached out and touched Aaron’s shoulder and Aaron pushed the key against his chest. Aaron backed to the driver side door of his car.
“Go ahead Joe, break my car. I know its what you want to do.”
Surprisingly, Joe didn’t. He stood ominously beside the car as Aaron threw himself behind the wheel. He shifted into reverse and started to get the hell out of there.
“Fuck you Joe!”
Joe made after the car but Aaron pulled away. Adrenaline was pumping through him like crazy, he felt wired. After making it a ways down the street, Aaron decided to finally call his dad back.
“Dad, they are psychopaths, they are so insane.” Aaron was wired and tired at the same time. He gently turned the wheel to turn out of the street.
“Yeah, Sam has always been like that. If he wanted a new bike, he broke his old one and made him mom buy a new one. He tried to crash his truck once to collect insurance so he could get a new one. When they wouldn’t pay, he saddled his mother with the bill.”
They talked for a while while Aaron drove up Route 1. He noticed a restaurant he didn’t recognize in the Jimmy’s/IHOP lot. Casa Vallarta Mexican. Maybe it was good.
They chatted. Aaron’s dad told him he could stay in Middleton as long as he liked, he’d give him any money he ever needed, that he just needed to get a job. Aaron had to stop himself from crying.
“I’m such a loser.”
Him and his dad talked about redoing some of the floors in Middleton and painting the walls. Gary had a lot of ideas and plans that gestated for years.
Aaron’s grandfather called then. Aaron hung up on his dad to answer it.
“Hi Papa.”
“Aaron, are you alright?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“I’ll sort this out when I get home in two weeks.” Lenny was a snowbird, he stayed in Florida during the winter. He liked to drive the other old people around.
“It’s okay papa, don’t worry about me.”
“It’s just as much your house as it is mine, Aaron.”
“Well, they sold my room papa. I loved that house and I loved living with you. I don’t know why my mom did that.” Aaron was ugly crying a bit as he said this.
“I’m coming back in two weeks and I’ll sort it out.”
Aaron drove home to his estate in Middleton, parked the car, and immediately began writing this document. It is 4am.
***
A stain? Have you learned nothing? This is a badge of honor, the perfect smear against a saintly martyr!
America, hungry for any excuse to make war, is now sending weapons into space. Will we destroy the very sky too?
It is a little sickening to see the most amazing technology in the world put to work carving up the sky. Will space itself start to be partitioned into owned regions? Russian Space, Chinese Space, American Space? This should be unacceptable. The fact that we can connect every person on the planet to the internet with satellites but don’t is bad enough– now we are threatening to blow up the sky and go dark again.
Call it whatever you want.. it is a monstrosity. The destruction of an entire generation’s hopes and dreams. The loss of life would be unacceptable at 5,000. Mincing words after 30,000 is deranged.
Term limits? What are those? The fact that Netanyahu has been allowed to lead Israel for 16 years, twice the term modeled by George Washington himself, is abominable. I thank my stars every day that we do not have a parliamentary system.
“About 20 people attended an April 11 event billed as an ‘energy round table’ at Mr. Trump’s private club, according to those people, who asked not to be identified in order to discuss the private event. Attendees included executives from ExxonMobil, EQT Corporation and the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for the oil industry.
The event was organized by the oil billionaire Harold Hamm, who has for years helped to shape Republican energy policies.”
“Unleash energy dominance. Drive our cost down. Sell.” This is purportedly Trump’s plan for stopping inflation and saving America.
Question: is the current price of energy reflective of demand outstripping supply? Is there not enough oil? I don’t think the answer is yes. I want someone to prove me wrong. Please email or DM me if this is something you feel strongly about.
The argument is difficult to have because people point to their high heating bill and say, “bad expensive bad” and correlate that there isn’t enough supply. Like literally we are strapped for heating oil and that is why it is so expensive, as if the valve has been shut off.
I don’t think that’s true, but I don’t have the mental bandwidth to argue it right now.
Routes of inquiry:
Oil production levels are at a record high. So, on a fundamental level, humanity has never had so much fuel. What gives then?
Where is all that energy going? What has changed in our modern lives to increase the demand so massively? More electronics, more air conditioners, higher population?
Or is the price of oil arbitrary, not necessarily driven by supply and demand? I am suspicious. If I am wrong, I want to be proved wrong.
Tolerance of protest is always selective. Universities were extremely defensive of the BLM movement. Israel/Palestine is not as appealing though. We know that Vietnam was a pointless conflict today, but back in 1970, protesting the war in Vietnam made you a dissident. Forces from both sides of the aisle tried to paint the anti-Vietnam War protest as cringe. Law enforcement and even the military were called and used violent force to break up anti-war protests.
We are in a new era of American warfare fought on many new fronts. Will we let conflict in Ukraine and Israel drive us into a killing frenzy?
Anyway, Mike Johnson should maybe stop performing at universities and instead focus on writing up bills for more pressing issues… like the border? Or domestic manufacturing? Or inflation? IDK just spitballing.
Originally published on Jan. 10, 1999
Given the collapse of the Netanyahu Government over the Wye peace agreement, it is time to question whether the entire process begun in Oslo in 1993 is the right instrument for bringing peace between Palestinians and Israelis. It is my view that the peace process has in fact put off the real reconciliation that must occur if the hundred-year war between Zionism and the Palestinian people is to end. Oslo set the stage for separation, but real peace can come only with a binational Israeli-Palestinian state.
This is not easy to imagine. The Zionist-Israeli official narrative and the Palestinian one are irreconcilable. Israelis say they waged a war of liberation and so achieved independence; Palestinians say their society was destroyed, most of the population evicted. And, in fact, this irreconcilability was already quite obvious to several generations of early Zionist leaders and thinkers, as of course it was to all Palestinians.
”Zionism was not blind to the presence of Arabs in Palestine,” writes the distinguished Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell in his recent book, ”The Founding Myths of Israel.” ”Even Zionist figures who had never visited the country knew that it was not devoid of inhabitants. At the same time, neither the Zionist movement abroad nor the pioneers who were beginning to settle the country could frame a policy toward the Palestinian national movement. The real reason for this was not a lack of understanding of the problem but a clear recognition of the insurmountable contradiction between the basic objectives of the two sides. If Zionist intellectuals and leaders ignored the Arab dilemma, it was chiefly because they knew that this problem had no solution within the Zionist way of thinking.”
David Ben-Gurion, for instance, was always clear. ”There is no example in history,” he said in 1944, ”of a people saying we agree to renounce our country, let another people come and settle here and outnumber us.” Another Zionist leader, Berl Katznelson, likewise had no illusions that the opposition between Zionist and Palestinian aims could be surmounted. And binationalists like Martin Buber, Judah Magnes and Hannah Arendt were fully aware of what the clash would be like, if it came to fruition, as of course it did.
Vastly outnumbering the Jews, Palestinian Arabs during the period after the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate always refused anything that would compromise their dominance. It’s unfair to berate the Palestinians retrospectively for not accepting partition in 1947. Until 1948, Jews held only about 7 percent of the land. Why, the Arabs said when the partition resolution was proposed, should we concede 55 percent of Palestine to the Jews, who were a minority in Palestine? Neither the Balfour Declaration nor the mandate ever specifically conceded that Palestinians had political, as opposed to civil and religious, rights in Palestine. The idea of inequality between Jews and Arabs was therefore built into British, and subsequently Israeli and United States, policy from the start.
The conflict appears intractable because it is a contest over the same land by two peoples who always believed they had valid title to it and who hoped that the other side would in time give up or go away. One side won the war, the other lost, but the contest is as alive as ever. We Palestinians ask why a Jew born in Warsaw or New York has the right to settle here (according to Israel’s Law of Return), whereas we, the people who lived here for centuries, cannot. After 1967, the conflict between us was exacerbated. Years of military occupation have created in the weaker party anger, humiliation and hostility.
To its discredit, Oslo did little to change the situation. Arafat and his dwindling number of supporters were turned into enforcers of Israeli security, while Palestinians were made to endure the humiliation of dreadful and noncontiguous ”homelands” that make up about 10 percent of the West Bank and 60 percent of Gaza. Oslo required us to forget and renounce our history of loss, dispossessed by the very people who taught everyone the importance of not forgetting the past. Thus we are the victims of the victims, the refugees of the refugees.
Israel’s raison d’etre as a state has always been that there should be a separate country, a refuge, exclusively for Jews. Oslo itself was based on the principle of separation between Jews and others, as Yitzhak Rabin tirelessly repeated. Yet over the past 50 years, especially since Israeli settlements were first implanted on the occupied territories in 1967, the lives of Jews have become more and more enmeshed with those of non-Jews.
The effort to separate has occurred simultaneously and paradoxically with the effort to take more and more land, which has in turn meant that Israel has acquired more and more Palestinians. In Israel proper, Palestinians number about one million, almost 20 percent of the population. Among Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which is where settlements are the thickest, there are almost 2.5 million Palestinians. Israel has built an entire system of ”bypassing” roads, designed to go around Palestinian towns and villages, connecting settlements and avoiding Arabs. But so tiny is the land area of historical Palestine, so closely intertwined are Israelis and Palestinians, despite their inequality and antipathy, that clean separation simply won’t, can’t really, occur or work. It is estimated that by 2010 there will be demographic parity. What then?
Clearly, a system of privileging Israeli Jews will satisfy neither those who want an entirely homogenous Jewish state nor those who live there but are not Jewish. For the former, Palestinians are an obstacle to be disposed of somehow; for the latter, being Palestinian in a Jewish polity means forever chafing at inferior status. But Israeli Palestinians don’t want to move; they say they are already in their country and refuse any talk of joining a separate Palestinian state, should one come into being. Meanwhile, the impoverishing conditions imposed on Arafat are making it difficult for him to subdue the highly politicized inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank. These Palestinians have aspirations for self-determination that, contrary to Israeli calculations, show no sign of withering away. It is also evident that as an Arab people — and, given the despondently cold peace treaties between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Jordan, this fact is important — Palestinians want at all costs to preserve their Arab identity as part of the surrounding Arab and Islamic world.
For all this, the problem is that Palestinian self-determination in a separate state is unworkable, just as unworkable as the principle of separation between a demographically mixed, irreversibly connected Arab population without sovereignty and a Jewish population with it. The question, I believe, is not how to devise means for persisting in trying to separate them but to see whether it is possible for them to live together as fairly and peacefully as possible.
What exists now is a disheartening, not to say, bloody, impasse. Zionists in and outside Israel will not give up on their wish for a separate Jewish state; Palestinians want the same thing for themselves, despite having accepted much less from Oslo. Yet in both instances, the idea of a state for ”ourselves” simply flies in the face of the facts: short of ethnic cleansing or ”mass transfer,” as in 1948, there is no way for Israel to get rid of the Palestinians or for Palestinians to wish Israelis away. Neither side has a viable military option against the other, which, I am sorry to say, is why both opted for a peace that so patently tries to accomplish what war couldn’t.
The more that current patterns of Israeli settlement and Palestinian confinement and resistance persist, the less likely it is that there will be real security for either side. It was always patently absurd for Netanyahu’s obsession with security to be couched only in terms of Palestinian compliance with his demands. On the one hand, he and Ariel Sharon crowded Palestinians more and more with their shrill urgings to the settlers to grab what they could. On the other hand, Netanyahu expected such methods to bludgeon Palestinians into accepting everything Israel did, with no reciprocal Israeli measures.
Arafat, backed by Washington, is daily more repressive. Improbably citing the 1936 British Emergency Defense Regulations against Palestinians, he has recently decreed, for example, that it is a crime not only to incite violence, racial and religious strife but also to criticize the peace process. There is no Palestinian constitution or basic law: Arafat simply refuses to accept limitations on his power in light of American and Israeli support for him. Who actually thinks all this can bring Israel security and permanent Palestinian submission?
Violence, hatred and intolerance are bred out of injustice, poverty and a thwarted sense of political fulfillment. Last fall, hundreds of acres of Palestinian land were expropriated by the Israeli Army from the village of Umm al-Fahm, which isn’t in the West Bank but inside Israel. This drove home the fact that, even as Israeli citizens, Palestinians are treated as inferior, as basically a sort of underclass existing in a condition of apartheid.
At the same time, because Israel does not have a constitution either, and because the ultra-Orthodox parties are acquiring more and more political power, there are Israeli Jewish groups and individuals who have begun to organize around the notion of a full secular democracy for all Israeli citizens. The charismatic Azmi Bishara, an Arab member of the Knesset, has also been speaking about enlarging the concept of citizenship as a way to get beyond ethnic and religious criteria that now make Israel in effect an undemocratic state for 20 percent of its population.
In the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza, the situation is deeply unstable and exploitative. Protected by the army, Israeli settlers (almost 350,000 of them) live as extraterritorial, privileged people with rights that resident Palestinians do not have. (For example, West Bank Palestinians cannot go to Jerusalem and in 70 percent of the territory are still subject to Israeli military law, with their land available for confiscation.) Israel controls Palestinian water resources and security, as well as exits and entrances. Even the new Gaza airport is under Israeli security control. You don’t need to be an expert to see that this is a prescription for extending, not limiting, conflict. Here the truth must be faced, not avoided or denied.
There are Israeli Jews today who speak candidly about ”post-Zionism,” insofar as after 50 years of Israeli history, classic Zionism has neither provided a solution to the Palestinian presence nor an exclusively Jewish presence. I see no other way than to begin now to speak about sharing the land that has thrust us together, sharing it in a truly democratic way, with equal rights for each citizen. There can be no reconciliation unless both peoples, two communities of suffering, resolve that their existence is a secular fact, and that it has to be dealt with as such.
This does not mean a diminishing of Jewish life as Jewish life or a surrendering of Palestinian Arab aspirations and political existence. On the contrary, it means self-determination for both peoples. But it does mean being willing to soften, lessen and finally give up special status for one people at the expense of the other. The Law of Return for Jews and the right of return for Palestinian refugees have to be considered and trimmed together. Both the notions of Greater Israel as the land of the Jewish people given to them by God and of Palestine as an Arab land that cannot be alienated from the Arab homeland need to be reduced in scale and exclusivity.
Interestingly, the millennia-long history of Palestine provides at least two precedents for thinking in such secular and modest terms. First, Palestine is and haas always been a land of many histories; it is a radical simplification to think of it as principally or exclusively Jewish or Arab. While the Jewish presence is longstanding, it is by no means the main one. Other tenants have included Canaanites, Moabites, Jebusites and Philistines in ancient times, and Romans, Ottomans, Byzantines and Crusaders in the modern ages. Palestine is multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious. There is as little historical justification for homogeneity as there is for notions of national or ethnic and religious purity today.
Second, during the interwar period, a small but important group of Jewish thinkers (Judah Magnes, Buber, Arendt and others) argued and agitated for a binational state. The logic of Zionism naturally overwhelmed their efforts, but the idea is alive today here and there among Jewish and Arab individuals frustrated with the evident insufficiencies and depredations of the present. The essence of their vision is coexistence and sharing in ways that require an innovative, daring and theoretical willingness to get beyond the arid stalemate of assertion and rejection. Once the initial acknowledgment of the other as an equal is made, I believe the way forward becomes not only possible but also attractive.
The initial step, however, is a very difficult one to take. Israeli Jews are insulated from the Palestinian reality; most of them say that it does not really concern them. I remember the first time I drove from Ramallah into Israel, thinking it was like going straight from Bangladesh into Southern California. Yet reality is never that neat.
My generation of Palestinians, still reeling from the shock of losing everything in 1948, find it nearly impossible to accept that their homes and farms were taken over by another people. I see no way of evading the fact that in 1948 one people displaced another, thereby committing a grave injustice. Reading Palestinian and Jewish history together not only gives the tragedies of the Holocaust and of what subsequently happened to the Palestinians their full force but also reveals how in the course of interrelated Israeli and Palestinian life since 1948, one people, the Palestinians, has borne a disproportional share of the pain and loss.
Religious and right-wing Israelis and their supporters have no problem with such a formulation. Yes, they say, we won, but that’s how it should be. This land is the land of Israel, not of anyone else. I heard those words from an Israeli soldier guarding a bulldozer that was destroying a West Bank Palestinian’s field (its owner helplessly watching) to expand a bypass road.
But they are not the only Israelis. For others, who want peace as a result of reconciliation, there is dissatisfaction with the religious parties’ increasing hold on Israeli life and Oslo’s unfairness and frustrations. Many such Israelis demonstrate against their Government’s Palestinian land expropriations and house demolitions. So you sense a healthy willingness to look elsewhere for peace than in land-grabbing and suicide bombs.
For some Palestinians, because they are the weaker party, the losers, giving up on a full restoration of Arab Palestine is giving up on their own history. Most others, however, especially my children’s generation, are skeptical of their elders and look more unconventionally toward the future, beyond conflict and unending loss. Obviously, the establishments in both communities are too tied to present ”pragmatic” currents of thought and political formations to venture anything more risky, but a few others (Palestinian and Israeli) have begun to formulate radical alternatives to the status quo. They refuse to accept the limitations of Oslo, what one Israeli scholar has called ”peace without Palestinians,” while others tell me that the real struggle is over equal rights for Arabs and Jews, not a separate, necessarily dependent and weak Palestinian entity.
The beginning is to develop something entirely missing from both Israeli and Palestinian realities today: the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial community, as the main vehicle for coexistence. In a modern state, all its members are citizens by virtue of their presence and the sharing of rights and responsibilities. Citizenship therefore entitles an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Arab to the same privileges and resources. A constitution and a bill of rights thus become necessary for getting beyond Square 1 of the conflict because each group would have the same right to self-determination; that is, the right to practice communal life in its own (Jewish or Palestinian) way, perhaps in federated cantons, with a joint capital in Jerusalem, equal access to land and inalienable secular and juridical rights. Neither side should be held hostage to religious extremists.
Yet feelings of persecution, suffering and victimhood are so ingrained that it is nearly impossible to undertake political initiatives that hold Jews and Arabs to the same general principles of civil equality while avoiding the pitfall of us-versus-them. Palestinian intellectuals need to express their case directly to Israelis, in public forums, universities and the media. The challenge is both to and within civil society, which has long been subordinate to a nationalism that has developed into an obstacle to reconciliation. Moreover, the degradation of discourse — symbolized by Arafat and Netanyahu trading charges while Palestinian rights are compromised by exaggerated ”security” concerns — impedes any wider, more generous perpective from emerging.
The alternatives are unpleasantly simple: either the war continues (along with the onerous cost of the current peace process) or a way out, based on peace and equality (as in South Africa after apartheid) is actively sought, despite the many obstacles. Once we grant that Palestinians and Israelis are there to stay, then the decent conclusion has to be the need for peaceful coexistence and genuine reconciliation. Real self-determination. Unfortunately, injustice and belligerence don’t diminish by themselves: they have to be attacked by all concerned.
There is a change happening among Jews right now that I fear will divide us forever. Before, if you were a Jew, you were a Jew. You helped other Jews out, you were family no matter how long you knew them for. Political forces are working very hard now to drive a wedge into that bond. There are people that want to attach Jewishness to a set of political ideas, a code of authenticity in the brain. “Do you support Israel?” “Do you sympathize with Hamas?” “Wasn’t it awful how those Hamas savages fingered any Jewish woman they could get their hands on with their disgusting finger nails?” (That last one is a real thing someone said to me).
Tensions are very high right now, and Donald Trump has been busy fanning the flames of division:
Trump has been saying stuff like this for a long time. One of my earliest propaganda posts from 2022 was about this very subject: https://www.aaaahh.net/propaganda-8/
I greatly resent this trend. We ask to be born a Jew just as much as anybody can ask to be born a Palestinian, or a Christian, or Black, or short, or with weird ears. We grow up with our beliefs and our heritage and our history and we track our own course in life. To assign Jewishness to a nationality, a place, Israel, is coercive. And certainly, nobody is allowed to say you are or aren’t Jewish enough. Especially somebody that isn’t Jewish. You can’t make a political test of it, that’s for damn sure.
Now congress, instead of writing laws and fixing our country, is busy quizzing college boards to see if they respond with a sufficient degree of subservience to the narrative being written for us. Freedom of speech be damned!
Americans have not slowed their purchase of plastic. On the contrary, disposable plastic consumption continues to grow and is expected to grow for decades to come. Besides the physical largeness of our bodies, there is probably no greater marker of American gluttony than the landfills that we have created to hold all the plastic waste we produce. Great heaps of indestructible trash! Particles that will not degrade for a thousand years!
This is a new problem, less than a century old. Before WWII, tin and glass were the means of transporting things. You had jars and cans and wax paper. Our infrastructure has forsaken these materials in favor of oil-based plastics whose composition is non-standardized and largely unrecyclable.
Yes, unrecyclable. I think a lot of people have this idea in their mind that plastic is some sort of metal that can be melted down and reformed infinitely. No, plastic “recycling” is mostly “downcycling,” shredding and transforming used plastic into a lower quality plastic that will be used maybe once more to make another disposable product. Your water bottle does not get magically reforged into a perfect new water bottle when you toss it into the recycling bin. Hell, it probably isn’t being recycled at all.
There is no mandate on recycling. It is a market business where the transformed plastic product needs to be purchased by a company looking to use it. But in a world where simply making new, high quality plastic is CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP, why would anyone buy crappy recycled plastics? The whole thing is a fantasy maintained to make people feel better about their wasteful lifestyles.
The solution, thankfully, is pretty easy. Close your wallet to plastic products. Stop buying them. Hell, even if your tap water is bad, you can purchase refillable drums of water at Costco. Don’t use the plastic containers of fruits and veggies, grab them from the bin and put them in a paper bag. Stop using the little floss picks. Grab some standard size glass containers instead of getting a whole new set of plastic tupperware when you inevitably lose the lids to them. Just stop buying plastic?
On a legislative level, our congressional leaders could write up regulation to standardize plastic. Standard sizes, standard lids, standard composition. Such rules would make it easier to reuse the plastics that enter our lives. The greatest legislation of all would be to ban plastic outright, declare it an evil material. Glass and metal can be melted down and reformed again and again. We would be better served to return to that way of life.
I am about to go see Dune AGAIN, so I figured I better get my thoughts down from the first viewing before the second one inevitably changes thing…
First off: incredible sets. The technology, from Irulan’s etching device to the Harkonnen spicing suits, strikes a perfect primitive-futurism that Dune is marked by. Levitation is on full display. STUNNING! What can I say but that? This movie is beautiful.
Timothee Chalamet is a perfect little ego freak, though I sometimes wonder if that was intentional. Whenever he gets close to spice, he gets kind of manic. His love with Zendaya is sometimes even believable!
Feyd Rautha gets boxed. He gets Gom Jabar’d. The scene is hilarious. Instead of showing Count Fenring’s side, the movie gives us Lady Fenring collecting genetic material from Feyd. Feyd is a weird baldy by the way. Totally new interpretation of the character, and I love it!
Love Geidi Prime. They make it alien as hell. Its like a new kind of atmosphere. Glad to have seen it on the big screen.
No acid trip orgy. 🙁
Like the previous movie, the directors opted to make The Water of Life really solemn and weird. The fremen don’t just throw a spice party.
SEITCH TABUR, ESPECIALLY THE WATER ROOM, IS SOOOO COOOL OMG!!!
They chose to make Paul’s mom the soft antagonist of the movie. She goes psycho after drinking the worm piss and it is not made clear if she is talking to herself or unborn Alia. They REALLY play up the “Bene Geseret are manipulating the local population” theme, to the detriment of the film IMO.
Alia never gets born. 🙁
So no, Mr. Harkonen doesn’t get gom jabar’d. He gets stabbed in the neck by Paul. Not a satisfying revenge scene in the slightest. Oh well!
WORM RIDING IS SO COOL OMG. Paul riding his first worm is wild. The gondolas on the worms are wild!
Feyd Rautha is Tom Brady’s son.
Reverand Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam does scream “abomination,” but at Paul instead of Alia. Paul’s ascendency is not triumphant at all. It is cast as a descent into evil. The movie ends on a really downer note, which is a shame. The book ending is ultra triumphant even despite the impending Jihad. The director failed to translate a certain degree of hype and pacing, which is understandable. Dune, as un-adaptable as it is, manages to find a good home in Dune: Part 2.
The ending was not a true ending, however, which leads me to think they are banking HEAVILY on a Dune Messiah/Dune: Part 3!