Why we do not know the end of the War story.

 

 

So, here’s the deal.  The Trump administration thinks that it can change the government in Iran by bombing the shit out of them.  

 

President Trump thinks that airpower has changed the equation that internal political forces can be changed from the air.  Historical precedent basically says otherwise, but we do not know if the assumption is still correct because warfare has changed with the use of precision guided bombs, accurate intelligence as to the conditions on the ground.  We also don’t know if the CIA and the Mossad are organizing opposition on the ground or what political forces are being internally deployed yet.

 

We have never really seen an entire class of political leadership eliminated on the first day of an air war.  David Petraeus said that it was a remarkable accomplishment.  It probably was.  But as they say in the stock market, since past performance is no guarantee of future success, we do not know if this success story will continue.  It’s a huge gamble.

 

What I do not understand is the need for US government officials to make up reasons that will play out better for optics than the truth.   The American objective is to alter the threat of Iranian hegemony and a world order threatening Islamist revolution.   The idea that women must cover their heads, that there be a morality police, that civil rights are absent is unacceptable to us.  This is not within our control, though.  It must become unacceptable to the Iranian popple, whose track record of Jeffersonian principles is the same as Russians.  They lived under a Czar, or a Shah or a Communist dictator for hundreds or thousands of years.   Can we change those cultures?  Will they ever change?  The Czar was murdered, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Shah was ousted and we got Putin and Khamenei. One a murderous kleptocrat, the other a religious theocrat.  Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

 

Yes, the idea that Iran was moving toward nuclear weapons by amassing a huge conventional shield of missiles and armaments to protect its malign project is true.  But an increased inspection program could arguably have succeeded in delaying it for a few years. But kicking the can down the road was not an acceptable alternative for Trump or Netanyahu.   Most Israelis favor Trump, despite the love-hate relationship of American Jews who lean left.

 

The argument that a nuclear armed foe that has been at war with the US and Israel for 47 years, exporting terrorism through its proxies, killing Americans throughout the Middle East, supporting the erasure of Israel,  spending billions in support of that goal dispels the argument that the US has entered a war of choice, a somewhat puzzling position for the Democrats to take.   The idea that because Trump did it transforms it into an evil deed.    Maybe so, but maybe not.  Hakeem Jeffries reduces his credibility by arguing that housing costs have gone up and poor people are starving because of this war.

 

The jury is out on whether this will be a misbegotten adventure or an astounding success in eliminating a source of religious zealotry that threatens the world order.  Oil us up today, the stock market is down, but here in Miami, the sun is shining and the threat to Dade County does not feel as imminent as the Cuban missile crisis did so many years ago.  We simply do not know at this early stage what will happen.  Predicting success or failure is not possible—yet.

Unafraid and afraid

Are we sure that the currents of history are changing because of a President whose ideas are an anachronistic resemblance of an America gone by? A nostalgic view of a white country that existed before the internet, before social media, before cellphones, before smartphones. A country where gays were swept under a carpet of denial—whose existence was not even acknowledged by polite society? A Miami where hotels blatantly denied admission to Jews, Blacks, and Latinos? White and colored restrooms? Segregated lunch counters?

Where gentlemen’s agreements among the WASP class excluded all those who did not conform to the standards of whiteness that were de rigueur in polite society? I had a friend who belonged to those clubs and rationalized the membership because she wanted to be with her friends. “Would you want to be in a club if the people were not your friends?” she would actually say that.

 

I grew up in Miami Beach. My parents moved here permanently in 1948, and I attended first grade here. I attended North Beach Elementary, where we had to pray to Jesus in the morning with a devotional conducted by the principal, Mrs. Mizner, even though many, if not most, of us were Jewish. We learned Christmas carols, and our housekeeper took us to Burdines on Flagler Street to see Santa Claus. My parents were not around, because they were working at their hotel day and night during the busy Christmas season. In the spring, we would pack up and head north, closing our house, placing acrid “DampRid” crystals to absorb the humidity in the house and keep the palmetto bugs at bay. We had one television, and I was the remote control. “David, change the channel,” Dad would say, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth in his wife-beater undershirt. We had no air conditioning until later, and Dad did not want to run the monstrosity because it was in a wall by the dining room and created a hurricane-force wind of freezing air. Plus, it was too expensive. “Dad, it’s really hot.” “Nah,” he would say, “take off your shirt and air your body.”

 

Dad would watch the CBS Evening News with Douglas Edwards and then Walter Cronkite. He hated Republicans and would never vote for one. “There are no good Republicans; they just want to keep everything for themselves.” When Joe McCarthy came to Miami and stayed at Dad’s hotel, Dad put his principles aside after suffering through the McCarthy hearings and hosted the Wisconsin cheesemakers’ convention at his hotel. McCarthy was the guest speaker. Even though Dad hated McCarthy and was orgasmic when Murrow took him down, Dad was happy to pocket the revenue from the delegates, most of whom were just ordinary folks from Wisconsin trying to make a living and down here for a bit of sun and sand.

 

Dad was not a big fan of Ike either. He called him MacArthur’s aide-de-camp and did not like his treatment of Truman and Marshall, and that Ike took a long time to stand up to McCarthy and said nothing when Oppenheimer was blacklisted. Mostly he loved Truman and Roosevelt. When Kennedy was assassinated, we sat in front of the TV for three days, tears in our eyes. At least Kennedy had Marilyn Monroe, not Stormy Daniels. The other politicians simply did not measure up to the Democrats.

We would watch the early civil rights marchers on TV, and Dad would call them troublemakers but admitted that maybe they had a point. He understood prejudice, having been its victim in his youth and having lost all his family to the Nazis. He paid his Black employees the same low wages he paid his white ones. After all, he was a capitalist.

 

We had a housekeeper, Kay, who had lost her boyfriend in the war and worked for us for room and board plus $25 a week. She was our nurse, our babysitter, and referee between me and my spoiled princess sister.

 

Later on, when Nixon ran for President, Dad made no secret of how wicked and evil Nixon was. I was living in New York at the time and voted for Nixon. For this I was never forgiven. Even later, when I returned to Florida and lived through Watergate, refusing to acknowledge the crimes, I learned a good lesson. Dad understood good and evil better than I did. He also understood life a bit better. But I was young and unafraid.

 

Now I am afraid.

Cowardice

 

 

There are only about 15 million Jews in the world, compared with roughly 2.4 billion Christians and nearly 2 billion Muslims. Yet even in South Florida, where Jews are far more visible than in most places, we are still a minority. Miami‑Dade has about 130,000 Jews—around 5% of the population—living alongside a far larger Christian majority and a smaller but growing Muslim community; Broward has roughly 150,000–186,000 Jews, perhaps 10–15% of its residents, again dwarfed by Christians and sharing minority space with Muslims. But we are not treated as a minority. People who dislike us say we control all the money, the politicians, the banks, the media; we make wars happen to perpetuate our hegemony; we commit genocide.

In Germany with the rise of the Nazis, these myths to demonize our people. We poisoned the blood of the German volk, took advantage of the hard work of Aryan Germans and used the blood of German children to bake Passover matzos. The Catholic Church perpetuated the larger blood libel that the Jews killed Christ and signed a Reichskonkordat agreeing to early legitimacy of the Third Reich, neutralizing Catholic political opposition to Hitler, decimating political resistance to Jew hatred. Bottom line: as long as the Church was left alone Nazis could persecute Jews. This perfidious cowardice did not cause the later exterminationist enterprise, but it did grease the wheels to the greatest crime in recorded history—the Holocaust.

Here in Miami and Broward, Jews share sidewalks and supermarkets and waiting rooms with Haitians, Cubans, Colombians, Brazilians, Venezuelans, and African Americans, all of us speaking different languages but equally expendable when the powerful need a convenient scapegoat. The bitter joke is that in South Florida, minorities are the majority, but we are carefully taught to fear each other instead of noticing that we are all standing in the same line of fire.

The US Congress is a paradigm of cowardice. Senators and Congressmen, afraid to be “primaried,” have knuckled under to the fearmongering of Donald Trump’s call that diversity is “poisoning” the blood of America. He conducts a campaign to gaslight the public into thinking that foreigners and immigrants are the source of our problems. He has banned all immigrants from “shithole” countries (brown or black). Of course, there are some criminals who should be deported and have been denied admission through proper vetting. And it is correct to seal the border, so immigrants come in legally after vetting. But sledgehammering the problem solves nothing.

South Florida is a petri dish for this experiment in fear. A state government hundreds of miles away in Tallahassee passes anti‑immigrant measures that fall most heavily on Miami‑Dade and Broward, where immigrants clean our hotel rooms, cook our food, drive our Ubers, and care for our parents. They talk about “illegals” as abstractions. We meet them handing us towels on Collins Avenue and checking our blood pressure in the ER. The same cowardice that once looked away from antisemitism in Europe now looks away from cruelty here at home, as long as the tourists keep coming and the cranes keep building.

Undergirding the philosophy of people not trusting strangers are the reptilian fears of evolutionary biology. These fears must be moderated by laws and norms that have evolved through value systems both religious and secular. When those laws and norms become subject to attack those of us who care must stand up to the threat. People in positions of leadership must bear the burden of stepping up to tell the truth. Those who do not will not be treated kindly by history.

During the 1950s, the McCarthy era, Americans were paralyzed by fear of losing their jobs by being branded a Communist by a power‑hungry senator, until a courageous Edward R. Murrow exposed him as a fraud. These days, Morrows are hard to find. Social media has replaced CBS News as the national arbiter of responsible journalism. That is no arbiter at all.

The person who tackled the shooter in Australia and later suffered two bullets was courageous. These supposed leaders who are more fearful of losing their jobs speak strongly for term limits for Congress and the abolition of dark money in politics. The Supreme Court is about to consider a case that might extend this license for corruption on the faux argument of free speech.

Those who argue that they like what Trump is doing but acknowledge his depravity, greed and self‑dealing are complicit. Cutting health care benefits to the poor is the hallmark of a degraded society. A society that surrenders its decency to prejudice and scapegoating. Rationalizations of fiscal concern ring hollow when the oligarchy rules the land, creating billionaires floating on superyachts while the poor go hungry, get sick and cannot afford health care. The preposterous idea proposed by the Trump regime and its congressional acolytes saying that giving $2,500 to individuals instead of “giving it to insurance companies” to pay their health care bills in lieu of insurance is insulting.

You cannot fool all of the people all of the time. But history shows you can fool enough of them, long enough, if cowardice prevails. The question—for Jews, for immigrants, for every minority in South Florida and beyond—is whether we will once again stand quietly in line while someone else decides whose blood is worth poisoning.

 

 

Happy Anniversary Republican House, Senate, and Presidency

We’ve been treated to a year of chaos. Immigration roundups by masked men in the streets, trade disruption, and corruption unseen in American political history. The tariff regime, a brainchild of a president who does not understand economics, is undercutting American farmers and small businesses, let alone imposing a tax on hardworking Americans who now face the economic uncertainties of a world fraught with the perils of artificial intelligence coming to eat their jobs. Tariffs are inflationary. Ninety-nine percent of economists have said so. But Trump does not agree.

Let’s go on. A government shutdown causing mass flight delays and flight controllers calling in sick because they are not being paid. Thousands of government employees laid off. The House and Senate are now the Circumlocution Bureau, each passing responsibility to the other and refusing to do their job. Mike Johnson, the worst Speaker of the House in history—the most lickspittle—has closed down the House so they do not have to vote on health care subsidies and tax credits, effectively depriving people of accessible health care. And they have not funded SNAP payments and food stamps so poor people can go hungry. This bothers members of Congress not a bit, since they have their parking spaces at National Airport, their superior health care benefits, their staffs, and so they can do nothing for people who will go hungry. Let them eat cake. Donald Trump can use his wealthy donors to tear down the East Wing of the White House and build a golden ballroom. No chance for corruption there, eh? After all, these donors have government contracts based upon merit, no?

And what about Trump’s vacillating support for brave Ukrainians who are fighting a Russian dictator, killing thousands of Russian troops to stop aggression threatening all of Europe? We have seen this play out in 1939. Putin must be stopped. And NATO will eventually have to send troops into Ukraine, although no one in the West, least of all Trump, recognizes it. We need an FDR, not a DJT.

Federal workers, who live from paycheck to paycheck, are unable to put food on the table for their families, or pay their mortgages and car payments, or afford health care.

But wait. Elon Musk will become the first trillionaire. There is something obscene about that. What can one individual do to improve his lifestyle with one trillion rather than four hundred billion? This Dickensian dystopia did not exist even in the great writers’ cynical expressions of it. Trump has brought us Oliver Twist on steroids. Hungry children cannot get food stamps, but Musk gets a trillion?

The acquiescent Supreme Court expanded the power of a madman and will soon rule on his tariff agenda. The oral argument questions have the pundits predicting that they will strike down the destructive tariffs, but oral arguments are often deceptive. Long experience in the law has told me that. One cannot escape the ability of judges to craft decisions to their dispositions, despite Amy Coney Barrett’s new book artfully telling the tale of impartiality and respect for precedent. We’ve heard it all before, including mendacious confirmation-hearing songs and dances—from Barrett, from Kavanaugh, from Gorsuch, and from Alito. Liars all. It must be Alito’s wife’s fault—he being a scholar of sixteenth-century English jurisprudence as a rationale in his opinion in Dobbs, creating a mishmash of abortion rights in the overruling of Roe v. Wade and a half-century of judicial precedent.

In a revolt against the establishment, New York City has elected a mayor of electric campaign imagination, yet dubious qualifications to govern. We’ll see how far he can get with his government grocery stores, rent-frozen apartments, free buses, and higher taxes on small businesses. Let’s see how all those progressive young Jews and older leftists who voted for this anti-Zionist mayor fare. Let’s see how he manages the most Jewish city in America. Let’s see how he gets along with the Hasidim in Brooklyn. They are not Mets fans. They are Talmud fans. They are Zionists. And, by the way, they tried all that socialist nonsense. It was called the Soviet Union.

Judging from the Democratic victories this past week, voters seem to be waking up. Trump’s promise to bring inflation down, to lower the cost of living, to make life more affordable, has not come true. Democratic messaging on affordability is hitting its mark, aided by the reality of lost jobs, soaring grocery prices, and the distractions of masked ICE agents in the streets arresting schoolteachers and people with dark skin.

Somehow in this great land the sun is shining,
Somewhere the land is green,
Somewhere the path shall beckon;
But we know not when ’twill be seen.

The Democrats have failed us, the Republicans too.
Socialists will not help us,
We know that so well;
But in this land transformation shall brew.
We know from time to time
Someone, somehow arises
To bear the burden for us,
But we know not when.

When it all seems so hopeless,
It might be then.

Trump's Troops

It’s hard for me to discern whether Trump is a power-drunk madman, a politically savvy con man, a malevolent fascist, a corrupt politician, an ignoramus, or a narcissistic teenage bully. All of the above seems about right. His supporters would argue he's a clever diplomat, a forceful businessman-economist-president who’s been mischaracterized by the mainstream media and who will revivify American industrial might. I do not subscribe to the latter, however.

Still, I tell myself—and my despairing friends—that he’s done some things right. Jumping in to bomb the mullahs and his contribution to the Abraham Accords are signal achievements. His motivations toward these ends, whether ignoble or noble, are irrelevant. If he can achieve a real peace agreement there, he would deserve the Nobel Prize. He also bullied the Europeans into paying their fair share against a revanchist Putin. On the other hand, he allowed the appearance of being Putin’s puppet—subject to salacious blackmail involving kiddy porn, with the Russian holding the kompromat.

Does it really matter what the underlying psychopathy is if he muddles through? Well, yes. He’s done so much damage to the norms of our society. Will future presidents seek the same unbridled power? The old question—do the ends justify the means? To what end, and at what cost? The damage to our institutions—are they permanent, or will they heal when Donald leaves the scene? Will we return to normalcy?

In 1932, before FDR was elected, the U.S. and world economies were on life support. Communism seemed a plausible alternative for many elite American intellectuals, many of whom were embedded in the labor movement and the entertainment business. They had sickened of the Hoover administration doing little to intubate the dying patient. Unemployment was at 25%, Americans were starving, standing in soup kitchen lines, and a “Bonus Army” of hungry, dispossessed World War I veterans camped out on the Anacostia Flats near Pennsylvania Avenue. President Hoover sent Douglas MacArthur with troops to disperse the starving men and their families. Major George S. Patton—yes, that Patton—rode around on horseback, directing armed cavalry against the veterans. Tear gas was used. The nation was treated to a spectacle of abuse: men who had fought to “make the world safe for democracy” herded into paddy wagons and gassed—again. Their makeshift shelters were burned. The national reaction was outrage, contributing to Hoover’s landslide defeat by FDR later that year.

In New York City in July 1863, amidst the Civil War, four days of draft riots decimated parts of the city. 120 people were killed. Lincoln had to dispatch troops to quell the violence. The rioters turned on Black residents, who fled from lower Manhattan to Harlem. Lincoln had no choice—but it was necessary. A murderous, sanguinary, savage war raged on, ultimately taking 700,000 American lives. Battlefields across the country, littered with bloated corpses, filled the lenses of Matthew Brady’s camera.

Trump, meanwhile, is doing his best to provoke his own civil war—having polarized, with the help of social media and Rupert Murdoch, the American public.

He says, without evidence, that “Democrat sanctuary cities” are rampant with crime and that the Army must intervene. He claims these cities can’t police their own streets. Has anyone actually seen cities burning down? Crime is down, according to government data.

What we do see is an accumulation of tech oligarch wealth unseen even in the Gilded Age—wealth that would make Rockefeller blush. Corruption at the highest levels that would embarrass Boss Tweed. And let’s not forget the retribution: Trump’s campaign of prosecutorial revenge against opponents, and even career law enforcement officials assigned to his cases.

From crisis to crisis—mostly manufactured as distractions from his dubious trade policies and tariffs, which have damaged and even bankrupted American farmers—he’s left a trail of consequences. The government has had to issue subsidies to make up for lost markets in China and elsewhere. Half of America’s soybeans were going to China. Yes, the Treasury is collecting more money, but to what effect? Trump’s zero-sum game will ultimately boomerang. The raw accumulation of power for its own sake always plays out to tragic denouements.

Nothing is ever completely bad or completely good. Responsible leadership should do more good than harm. Benjamin Franklin said at the Constitutional Convention, “This Constitution can only end in despotism when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government.” Trump is pushing the envelope—but Americans must shoulder the blame and pay the price for electing him.

The King and the Vulgarian

The King and the Vulgarian

Many of my South Florida neighbors were riveted this year by the HBO series *The Gilded Age*, devoted to the foundations of America's old-money aristocracy and its competition with the newly monied class of the late 19th century. The loosely knitted history of the Vanderbilts (represented by the fictional Russells) cracking the New York establishment still resonates. The scandalous story of Consuelo Vanderbilt’s divorce—heaven forbid!—rocked New York society. Quelle horreur!

Julian Fellowes, the creator of this high-falutin’ soap opera, won a slew of Emmys for his earlier epic *Downton Abbey*—essentially a Noël Coward play, minus the acerbic wit (with the notable exception of the recently departed Maggie Smith as the Crawley clan’s dowager matriarch). In *The Gilded Age*, that contrarian spirit lives on through a wonderful Christine Baranski, who plays Mrs. Agnes Van Rhijn, a woman whose Mayflower pedigree allows her to look down her nose at the arriviste Russell family.

These programs tap into the American fascination with royalty—or at least our admiration for it, provided it resides across the pond.

But now, we have King Charles III, a real king, entertaining an imposter king: Trump. A vulgar paradigm of American excess—still snickered about in English royal circles—recently found himself seated beside the King of England, Defender of the Faith and titular head of an empire long vanished. There they were, together in a grand dining hall at Windsor Castle: the heir to the Britannia that once ruled the seas, the nation of Gladstone, Nelson, Disraeli, Churchill, and Queen Victoria, Empress of India… now prostrate before a gold-plated, orange-tanned, coiffed American president.

This president’s pedigree? Stiffing creditors, consorting with sexual predators, conducting incoherent foreign policy, taxing citizens through regressive tariffs, waging war on the less fortunate through a cabal of incompetent acolytes, and suggesting that criticism from the press should be subject to government sanction. Oh—and let’s not forget the insurrection and the Big Lie about the 2020 election.

I try to comfort despairing friends and fellow citizens by reminding them that we’ve been through worse: two world wars, the Great Depression, Vietnam, institutional anti-Semitism in the early 20th century, and earlier demagogues—Joseph McCarthy, the Red Scare, Father Coughlin, Huey Long, and the American Nazi Bund. Let’s not forget the original “America First” movement, which would have let England sink into the Nazi abyss. Or Charles Lindbergh, Nazi sympathizer.

But then, we had FDR. Truman. Eisenhower. And others in the Senate and the House who led the way through times that could have been even darker.

Now, however, we face exponential changes in societal structure—changes that demand even greater leadership. Perhaps an AI president and Congress? Does anyone seriously think Trump is smarter than ChatGPT? More literate? More informed?

Just imagine it: no more hot-air politicians on *Meet the Press*. No more Senate windbags. No more overpaid Congresspeople with better health insurance than their constituents. Just robots telling us what’s best. Some Soylent Green for lunch, a little Soma to sleep.

Sound far-fetched? So did AI.

Crossroads of Faith and Democracy

 

My father once told me, quoting Disraeli, that “the secret to success is constancy of purpose.”
Well, if this election cycle was a success, it succeeded mainly in driving Americans mad. And I mean mad in the bonkers sense, not the “angry” sense that American English so often misuses.

We’ve endured an unrelenting assault on our senses—by the media, by social networks, and by friends who’ve been so deranged by the onslaught of opinion, misinformation, disinformation, and rumor that we’ve algorithmically relegated them to the trash bin. There, they sit alongside solicitations from Amazon, the Vitamin Shoppe, and LA Fitness. Our email filters now tune them out entirely.

I can’t fully grasp the motivations of Americans who still support MAGA Republicans, despite having been fed a steady diet of explanations from journalists, friends, and even clergy. (Clergy, after all, have fewer topics to ruminate on these days, since many can no longer persuasively argue—except to the true believers—that God, or some facsimile thereof, still exists.) Polls suggest that only about half of Americans now say with certainty that God is “up there” on a cloud, answering prayers, His white beard festooned across the heavens.

Given that most of the Founding Fathers were deists—skeptical of prayer but believing in some form of divine creation without divine interference—it’s hard to see why evangelicals, fundamentalists, and conservative Catholics embrace recent Supreme Court decisions as “progress” in the American experiment enshrined in the Constitution of 1789.

Take abortion. It is a religiously fueled issue that has deeply divided the nation. Donald Trump—who lost the 2016 popular vote by three million—appointed three religious zealots to the Supreme Court. They misled Congress during confirmation hearings, then overturned abortion rights that had stood for over fifty years, with disastrous consequences. That Trump had no popular mandate did not trouble him or Mitch McConnell in the slightest.

Religion in America has flourished because of the separation of church and state, not in spite of it. The absence of a state religion was a guiding principle for the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock in 1620. The founders affirmed this freedom—though in early America, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Rhode Island were still settled by distinct religious factions. Back then, without a national polity or modern communications—no telegraph, no internet, no mass-circulation press—there was little exposure to competing points of view.

Today, the irony is stark: fundamentalists attacking the very separation that has allowed religion to thrive. Religion can be beneficial, but it is far too easily manipulated by unscrupulous politicians who profess no sincere faith, guided only by expedience.

The Electoral College is another relic of 1789—a compromise with slave states, many of which used biblical justification for human bondage. Eighty years later, the Civil War tore at the nation’s fabric to end that supposed divine sanction. Lincoln himself was no conventional Christian; his blend of rationalism and fatalism allowed him to evolve beyond the doctrinal defenses of slavery found in both Old and New Testaments. Some modern theologians have had to redefine those texts entirely to sidestep their endorsements of bondage.

We shouldn’t kid ourselves: religion fueled that war, as it has fueled countless crusades, pogroms, and inquisitions. And the persistent idea that “if Jews were Muslims there would be no war in the Middle East” ignores an even darker truth: without two thousand years of Christian teaching that Jews killed Christ—and thus were wicked, subhuman, and fit for extermination—there would have been no Holocaust.

Which brings us to today’s rising tide of anti-Semitism, still anchored in those ancient tropes. The claim that Israel is committing genocide against Hamas willfully inverts victim and aggressor. Hamas exists for the destruction of the “Zionist entity,” not for building a viable society. Building tunnels and firing rockets at your neighbor is no substitute for building schools, hospitals, and civil institutions—nor is kidnapping, raping, and slaughtering civilians.