L'Shanah Tovah!

Actually, over the last couple of months, I've realized how forced and inane my intermittent contributions to this web-log have been. Time for an indefinite hiatus. This link will remain active, but I can't predict when I will start posting to this log again. Spending more time thinking up witty graphic design for the banner than on the posting should have clued me in months ago. Time to go back to my roots - language is powerful, and I abused it to no small degree with uncalibrated hyperbole.

Pithy, like lab-slaughtered rats' skulls

I am horribly dismayed.

Let me restate that. That disgusts me. That the bureaucratic application of a label to a human being and legal citizen of the United States of America - an arbitrary marker of "enemy combatant" - is sufficient to convert a legal person into rightless chattel for processing in an administrative-bureaucratic machine, is an outrage and a desecration. It is the blithe smearing of excrement on lawbooks. It is the wink and the nod, and the outstretched palm, and the ranks of clients in the antechambers.

I wrote the following, in response to the White House plan for using military tribunals (not under the regulation of the UCMJ, but under the direct supervision of the Secretary of Defense and the President) to try foreign citizens in secret:

From: djg7@cornell.edu (David Joseph Greenbaum)
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Subject: Re: This is some nightmare and I will wake up soon.
Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2001 04:25:46 GMT
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In a fit of divine composition, Mark Atwood inscribed in fleeting electrons:

That's it. That's exactly it. It is so infuriating, I lack the words to express the depths of my scorn and contempt for Ashcroftian chazerei. They recognize no law but privilege and convenience.

And this is different from what? When? It has been just as true from all the other political types in history,and more so, in fact.

More so of what, Mark? Fact is, this is posse comitatus Feme for furriners. It's about expediting vengeance on easy targets - more easily targeted for not having access to the civilian court system or the civilian protections of the law - and having *that* victory labeled as progress in victory over terrorism.

Let me tell you, it isn't. Ramming civilians through the military courts to achieve a swift, outrage-lubricated victory is a f***ing profanation. It is ghastly. It is a staggering violation of the explicit norms of legal procedure and philosophy in our country. Do you not understand what this is?

This is not about taking Bin Laden (who may be shot while resisting arrest, for all I care) and making sure that no pansy muddle-headed jury lets his sorry ass out on technicalities.

This is about being able to detain foreign nationals indefinitely and exercising coercion over them through an executive bureaucratic-administrative apparatus that is restricted by no outside independent oversight. Secret evidence in front of military tribunals, in secret. The time-unbounded detention of aliens that the INS is justly condemned for at present occurs *after* a open civilian criminal trial and term of service. This is arbitrary judicial terror. War criminals have more safeguards on their persons.

If they did it for foreigners for convenience, they will try to justify it for Americans. It is a profanation.

The present proceedings on Yasir Esam Hamdi confirm my prediction.

I originally wrote a nice little self-deprecatory note about texts exuding tinfoil hats and slobber-soaked paranoia; I self-referenced a putative unwillingness to Cassandrically expand a deleted phatic condemnation of current political, social, and intellectual trends towards uncritical subordination to the law-unbounded operation of an organic, instrumental State.

Giggle.

Haha.

pat, pat.

Retch.

To cringe by couching language in gentle shame -- shame that is no more that a fear of social reproof -- that would be lying. The organs of executive government are controlled now by liars, gangsters, thieves, and self-annointed aristocrats. That a lawyer for the Justice Department can barefacedly and unshamefacedly put forward the legal theory of the "enemy combatant" before a court of justice -- that is an assault and an affront to the world.

It is Staatstreich.

And eighteen days again

Little ol' Dovidl, looking for thing to make him go and post to his weblog, yep, dot's me. Yessirree. I say nothing about the situation in Israel, nor will I say anything about the current meltdown in the world's financial markets (except to say that the dollar bet that I had with my friend Howard from way back in the spring of '99 - looks I will be winning that bet - and the luscious dollar riding on it).

I'll talk about Chaim Potok's passing.

I never read any of his fiction, though The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev both sat on my parents' bookshelves. I've only read Wanderings, his literary history of the Jewish people. I read it so much when I was nine that my dad's paperback copy fell apart in the spine along three seams. Chaim Potok became a foil for my genial goyische friend Andy to prove his benevolent judeophilia and tweak me when I got tired of his relentless Puritan moralizing in our late-night coffee fueled bull sessions.

Chaim Potok is one of the writers whom I have wanted to draw into myself. He was on my list of people with whom I wanted to have lunch and dinner - a list that every year grows longer through discovery, and then shorter again through mortality.

Now I read the rest of Potok.

Yeah, it's been a month

let me tide you over with a little story...

Dodgeball

Imagine an two-story octogonal school, laid out around a gymnasium/auditorium. Around the wall-height rim of octogonal gym, a balconied walkway rings the inside of the second story. Off this walkway are the doors to twelve classrooms and two bathrooms. At ground level, the asbestos-tiled concrete pavement is bounded by khaki-painted cinderblock walls intermittently cut by doors to storage room, computer lab, the niche with the milk-fridge and the hamotzie hand-washing sinks, curtained stage, the portico to the front lobby, the door to the dairy kitchen.

The long minute hand of the clock nears the quarter-hour. In class, sugar anticipation inspires fidgets and salivation in the spoiled children with Ding-Dongs in their lunchbags. The rest of us had celery, or pretzels (bleah).

Rabbi Preil is vainly explaining to Jason Gardner that the summary of the mishneh reading was due... yes, now! and why didn't he have it?

Amir raises his hand and asks if it's time for gym yet.

It is time. The combined class of fifth and sixth grade boys bolt for the door, the walkway, the stairs, for... the gym. Well, depends on how bolting is defined:

"David, put down the book and come downstairs!"

I slink past Rabbi Preil sullenly. Gym time is fear time.

Why?

Dodgeball.

Why?

For the purposes of this recollection, we will call him Mungo, or Shit Head, or.... because I have forgotten his given name. I remember drawing a caracature of him as a donkey pissing on a buried head, on a page in my ruled mishneh notebook. I remember that I labeled this caracature, for future references' sake, presumably. I remember that I wrote some epithet that contained the word "fuck". I remember all these things, because I saw the lovingly preserved notebook some months ago in my parents' house. But I do not remember Giant Retardo-Neanderthal's name.

He was near six feet tall. He had a mustache. He shot spit-balls. He was a merciless storm-trooper fascist bully, and he could fling a vinyl, textured-surface dodgeball very, very fast.

The game is not yet started. There are no teams. It is the war of all against all, strong against weak, hormone-supercharged super-annuated sixth grader against sylph-like petal-delicate fifth grader. Shimmie Weiner and Mungo Death-chucker are the tallest boys in the combined class: they jump for the ball in the center of the gym, in the center of the school, the geometrical minimal-energy point where all culture, all mercy, melt away like hot wax in a blowtorch's flame.

Kill-bot's mutant long arms grab the ball a full foot above Shimmie's reach - the hope of light and truth and justice is swiftly snuffed out. Mungo pegs Shimmie on the shoulder with the down-swing. Shimmie is out. The ball rolls away, to Jacob Kleinberger, who hucks it at Steve Fernandez, who catches it. Jacob is out. Steve throws the ball at David Marcovici. The ball catches Marcovici, hits him on his calf while he is extended in full stride, and Mungo scoops up the ricochet. He stands in the center of the gym. He is Hitler, holding his Wehrmacht, and we are little feeble Polands. The first victim is chosen.

"I'm gonna get you, Jackie!"

Yaakov Azoulay begins running along the outer rim of the gym. Mungo starts throwing the ball - hard! He misses, catches the rebound off the wall, lopes into another throw, misses, catches the rebound. Jackie is a fast runner, but Mungo likes to play with his food. He throws again and misses. The rebounds are too fast for anyone to catch except Mungo. He throws, misses, and abruptly bores of the cat-and-mouse. Splat! Jackie is hit in the face with the ball. He stops running, trips, falls. There is a little blood. The game goes on.

Amir Roth gets the face-bounced ball, tries to get Mungo. Mungo catches Amir's girly throw. Amir is out. I get hit in the back by somebody. I stand behind the curtain. Mungo hits Jason in the back of the head. Ross Jacobs is brought down by a gut-shot. Fat little Ari is hit in the ass. Uri Leibowitz catches the ball. And drops it, because Mungo tackles him on the gym floor, seizes the ball, and aims it at Uri's head. Steve Fernandes gets the bounce. He is the last. Mungo slaps the ball out of Steve's throwing hand, chuckles, and goes in for the kill.

Rabbi Preil is standing outside the front entrance of the school, smoking. Shit Head wins again, news at seven, eleven, and wedgie on the stairs back to class. And people wonder why I hate dodgeball.