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Being Jewish

First of all, being Jewish means recognizing your differences from the non-Jews, the goyim. For me this didn’t really happen until high school, as reported in my memoir:

Once, walking home from high school I got in a fist-fight with an Irish kid who called me all kinds of rich-Jew-bastard names and happened to be a good lightweight boxer from the other side of town. It was totally humiliating. I had no idea of how to duke it out, none, and he kept popping me until finally I just walked away in disgrace, blood from my nose dripping on the snow. After this incident, the kid would go out of his way to say friendly hellos to me at school. I wanted to take his life.

Jews like me were brought up to be non-confrontational. In some ways we thought of ourselves as more like the gentiles than our co-religionists. And, it should be said, most of us didn’t have any real sense of religion, the stark, grim old-testament stuff that fueled our more conservative and orthodox brethren.

Reform Jews like me and my parents were practiced hypocrites about religion. My parents rarely went to temple (never to be called “schul,” of course). But they wanted me to be grounded in the faith so I went to what was called Sunday School starting in, I think, the sixth grade.

Finally, I found it just boring and unenlightening, and I told my mother I wanted to quit. She said that first I should talk with the rabbi, an amiable man named Dick Hertz, whose name made him the butt of many jokes. But I stood my ground and the elders gave way. To this day, I have nothing to do with the religion, though I love Jewish culture, its myths and memes and street wisdom.

In my teens I laughed at the funny pseudo-Yiddish jazz that Slim Gaillard recorded, tunes like “Drei Six Cents” and “Dunkin’ Bagel.” People like Slim and Cab Calloway weren’t mocking the language; they were having fun with it. Slim seemed to look at Judaism the way I did, as an amusing cultural artifact. Mickey Katz was funny, man. After them came Sid Caesar and a wave of Jewish comedians like Lenny Bruce. Mel Brooks was my hero later on.

Jewish humor finally permitted folks to dwell on the horrors of World War II after it was over. Earlier, my parents and grandfather Sam did not discuss these things, though Sam sent money early on to save some of the family in Germany. All of it was too grim to confront and, like many, they were living a life of ease.

The 1950s were a time of conformity, as we know. Life had been good for a lot of Americans during the war, and now it was time for some Jews to relax a bit and assimilate culturally. My family was part of this. They made a big deal out of food and sumptuous meals, with fare like matzoh ball soup and latkes (referred to as “German potato pancakes”).

In my later years I strove to recover the truths of what cultural Judaism had become since my family had glossed over it. I finally could take pride in my culture and its ability to survive not only Hitler but a whole history of antisemitism. As I grew older my nose, formerly straight, began to droop. You can’t read too much into that.

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Aging Is Confronting Change

Dogs, also, bark at what they do not know.

“There is nothing permanent except change,” said the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who lived around 2500 years ago. And, the sage added, “No one ever steps in the same river twice.” His lesson for us today is that the world is always becoming, something older folks know even if they don’t act on it.

Confronting change and the need to change is hard for us oldsters, though not always. Let me use myself as an instance both of resisting change and accommodating to it.

At my age (now 89), you think more about death—how it may arrive, uselessly planning for it, thinking how your ultimate departure will affect others. The Great Unknown lurks ahead, its very nature impossible to comprehend. Will we become a caterpillar or a butterfly?

But change in one’s daily life is what we should be concerned about. The key to a full later life is dealing with the changes that inevitably occur. I’ve written before about the urge to withdraw—from friends, society, the things that used to give us pleasure. To the extent you permit these withdrawals to take over your life, that life will be diminished.

The changes you want to accommodate to are the important ones. Music for me has always played a prominent part in my life. I studied it, played it (for a while), wrote about it, collected it, and for a time fancied myself as an authority and critic. Now my music has become part of my aging routine—i.e., mostly just listening—and it has blended into a background of a habitually reduced active and full life. You could call it a kind of withdrawal, and accepting that has been hard. I’ve also had to accept that my musical tastes have changed over time. I loved ‘70s rock ‘n’ roll; now much of it sounds like jejune ramblings.

I think I’m still growing and learning to understand the world, but today it ain’t easy. My personal and political judgments have changed in part because I now understand history better. Yet it’s easier to remember the good old days than to deal with the ever-changing and confusing present. When I see IRA I think Irish Republican Army, not Inflation Reduction Act.

All of us have daily reminders of how physical needs and changes control us. Old people can get lazy. They like their afternoon naps. They sleep more—and wake up more during the night. They want and need routines, which make us feel in control. What do you eat for breakfast? Every day?

Technology especially tests our ability to change. What do you really know about crypto? Or AI? It’s hard enough for an old guy to master all the changes that have come in software and computing. As I said here, “my old brain is not equipped for this.” And then there are the vagaries and aggravations of the so-called smartphone.

To end on this note would be wrong. One good thing about getting old is that you learn (or some of us learn) what it means to confront change. A good strategy is simply to accept it, not necessarily for what it is but for how you can reframe it to fit your new life patterns. Think of change not as threat but as thinking outside the box.

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My Partner, Mi Compañera

This woman chose, of her own free will, to live with me almost two years ago. She has changed my life altogether, in sickness and in health, and we’ve developed a unique kind of mutual love and respect. Tinka and I have known each other a long time, each coming to Oaxaca about fifteen years ago as determined expats.

Lately we both got tired of living solo lives. I had a little house in Reforma; eight years ago she built herself a lovely place in Puerto Escondido. But things have changed there and she wanted to spend more time in Oaxaca City. So she proposed we join forces and she would split her time. I would visit her at the beach periodically. Friends going back to the states bequeathed to us their Oaxaca apartment which we remodeled, thanks to her contributions and some stuff from me.

We both grew up as privileged kids but in different ways. Tinka’s father was an IBM exec whose job was to set up offices in the Far East. She spent her youth in Bombay and the Philippines, later in suburban New York, learning about the world if not much about America. I grew up in a well off Chicago shoe business family, later to live and work in many places including New York, DC, Virginia and New England. See bio here.

We’ve both been married twice—each learning what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Tinka loves to travel; I’m getting too old and crotchety for that. Our tastes in food usually coincide, sometimes not, and we adjust. We may like different kinds of people and are mostly tolerant of the other’s taste. My long-term interest in music? Well, there we live on different planets, but so be it.

As some of you know, I spent many years in politics. Now Trump has brought us together, and we outdo each other in vitriolic comments, though she gets further into the weeds about the latest outrage than I do.

Most of our life together just works because we try to attend to each other’s needs. To illustrate: I’ve been sick for about two months with a miserable UTI infection, and you know how much fun it is to be around sick people. Tinka asks what she can do for me, shops for me, does most of the cooking, drives me to the doc, and tries in many ways to make things better. And she’s not cloying about it. I’ve never had treatment like that.

Our home has a roof terrace that she has totally transformed with plants into a horticultural welcoming spot. It makes the place beautiful and unique. And it keeps her busy because she is the kind of person who always must keep engaged with something.

So I’m thrilled that she keeps engaged with me, and I with her. Sometimes in old age things really do get better.

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Accepting the Symptoms of Aging

One good thing about getting older is that you begin to disregard all those things that used to irk you. It’s like putting them forever in Spam. About two years ago I wrote a piece called “Retreat of the Elders” which listed some of the symptoms of a growing solitude as we age:

a penchant for eating at home; fewer visits with friends; a preference for books over TV; souring on politics and current affairs; pique with the common culture; not suffering fools gladly; and so on.

Lately I’ve discovered a few more things that aging permits us to dispense with. It’s not so much a withdrawal from the common culture as it is preserving one’s own equanimity. Here are a few big ones.

    • Leaving your house for social/cultural affairs. Your old motivations to party or attend an event don’t pull you out anymore. Home is comfort and convenience; parties are typically boring; and you could fall down on the way to a concert.
    • Driving. God, I used to love cars. Now they are an occasional convenience, nothing more. See “Old People Driving” for a full report. “Oldsters are naturally jealous about keeping their driving privileges, and they can get very testy about it.”
    • Drinking and eating. One’s appetite for both declines with age. Booze no longer has the effect it once had, and going out to eat is expensive and often disappointing.
    • Arguing with idiots. Actor Keanu Reeves “gave an interview about growing older and said he protects his peace by refusing to argue with anyone about anything. He said, ‘2+2 is 5? You are correct. Have a nice day.’” As we age our tendency is to avoid all bullshit if possible. Your drama is not my drama.

Now, the real test is to avoid being caught up emotionally with all the current Trump melodrama. The media constantly assaults us with the gravity of what’s at stake, the indictments, their historical relevance, the intransigence of MAGA, the folly of T’s clownish advisors—none of which we can do anything about.

Trump fatigue affects everybody, right and left. We’re stuck watching the same bad B-movie over and over with no end in sight. Or, pick your metaphor, you’re slogging through the desert with no water, cast adrift at sea, feasting on the sugar high of anger, etc.

We’re all confounded by Trump. But we don’t have to let him take over our lives. Older people have the luxury of memories, not just to escape the present chaos but to give us context for what we’re now living through. Better to be old these days than young.

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The Devolution of Bad Taste

Bad taste is a complicated subject. I know this because I’ve been exploring it as a subject for a book. If you think about it, we are living in a world dominated by bad taste, however you want to define the term.

It used to be that bad taste could be shuffled off by the elites as just something the kinky and unenlightened produce. Elites like Susan Sontag (On Camp, 1964) treated bad taste (here, camp and kitsch) to lengthy academic analysis, a superior form of lighthearted putdown.

I have a book called The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste (1991) in which Jane and Michael Stern roast and ridicule everything from nose jobs and Polynesian food to Lawrence Welk. It used to be a class identifier that we could snicker and laugh at these things. But no more.

I recently looked over my blog posts and saw a host of grim subjects that I sometimes tried to lighten up with personal humor. I hope that was not like the impulse that moved the Sterns to make fun of lower-class culture. But recent polls by Pew show that Americans are grim and very pessimistic about the future, not to mention the present.

And why shouldn’t they be? About some bad taste there’s really no disputing, the latest example being Marjorie Greene’s recent display of Hunter Biden’s naked sex pix in Congress. She should have been expelled for that but was not because even extreme bad taste is now tolerated and accepted—in Congress yet.

When we were growing up, a fart in church was funny bad taste, according to George Carlin. How far we’ve come from those days. A 2022 survey of pop culture is totally depressing, in part because I can’t recognize most of the people and events referred to. “A little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika,” said Dorothy Parker. Too much is like a dose of habanero.

Last year Time Magazine said in pop-eyed language:

The 20-year nostalgia cycle, climate-change nihilism, information saturation, streaming-era content overload, and our collective Long COVID of the soul have converged in a tidal wave of tackiness. . . . Yet what’s remarkable about this particular pendulum swing is that after centuries of wrestling with hierarchies of taste, the cultural stigma that has always come with indulging in bad taste has disappeared.

So far there seems to be no backlash to the flurry of bad taste. I mean why haven’t the Democrats produced compromising pictures of M.T. Greene in flagrante and shown them in Congress? The younger culture seems at times to be pursuing a sense of doom, maybe nihilism. If culture is enlightenment, the new bad taste glorifies most any excess and flouts the most accepted of values. Are the Barbarians at the gates?

In a way, bad taste has always done this but often with a sense of humor, as in camp and kitsch. Humor is not fashionable now, but as I tried to say in a piece about Oscar Wilde it is part of survival. Now whatever we define as good taste must subsume everything bad taste is not. Without bad taste, how could good taste thrive?

P.S. The game is not over. Hearing yesterday about Tony Bennett’s passing made me realize that good taste still exists; it’s just hibernating. Tony was a wonderful man who made a career out of good taste—in music and in his life. That life and his talent, all 96 years of it, represented the kindest and best of American culture. He made good taste popular.

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What Keeps Climate Deniers in Their Fog?

Chicago storm clouds

It’s not easy to imagine the mental state of climate deniers these days. The magnitude of recent fires, floods, storms, ocean warming, melting ice, intolerable heat, collapsing ecosystems (what have I forgotten?) has affected almost everyone on this globe. The deniers can no longer address these events as natural or normal.

How people bear with and try to process climate change is the subject of a recent article by Jia Tolentino. I recommend it to you. As conditions have become so unmistakably and dramatically appalling, the deniers have not pulled their heads from the sand. Tolentino says, “And the worse things get, the less we seem to talk about it: in 2016, almost seventy per cent of one survey’s respondents told researchers that they rarely or never discuss climate change with friends or family, an increase from around sixty per cent in 2008.”

The media plays up our climate disasters without apparently changing many minds. Warnings, threats and the pressing timetable of climate change are all over the news, but there isn’t any easy answer to the question of “when the alarms will finally be loud enough to make people wake up.” Simple reporting on climate disasters won’t change people’s minds. What will?

Wikipedia offers a lengthy, informative piece on climate denial here—it’s complicated, of course, and with a long history. There have been tremendous institutional efforts over time to deny climate change. You know how the tobacco industry covered up its poisons and worked its wiles for years to keep people smoking. Some of its same operatives are now doing the devil’s work for climate.

I think of it as a kind of conspiracy theory to keep fossil fuels alive. The vaccine deniers use similar nutty anti-science arguments to allay their followers’ fears. But if you believe Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., you do so at your own peril. One vast conspiracy after another makes up the world of the deniers. And there are lay deniers, scientific deniers, and political deniers.

There are also active deniers and passive deniers. Most Republicans, as you are no doubt aware, actively oppose climate remedies: “In the 2016 United States election cycle, every Republican presidential candidate questioned or denied climate change, and opposed U.S. government steps to address climate change as has the Republican leader in the U.S. Senate.”

Climate change must be addressed globally and politically. That’s obvious. Bill McKibben has pursued this subject for years. Recently he cited Canada’s continuing backwater on climate change, but he noted also Biden’s commitment to offshore drilling leases and his “giant oil and a giant L.N.G. project, in Alaska.” Obama also opened new sites to drilling, caving to the vast economic pressures of the oil industry. Even climate concerned presidents can’t resist creating that kind of cognitive dissonance.

Is climate denial another form of lying? Or is it just another way to ward off the pressure of reality, an uncomfortably obvious dodge? In the political arena, it seems like deliberate lying, just as Trump’s popularity owes itself to a mountain of lies. Time Magazine and Jeff VanderMeer, to their credit, recently castigated Ron DeSantis and the Republicans for their appalling record of environmental failures in Florida. An interesting note: “More than 90% of papers that are skeptical on climate change originate from right-wing think tanks.”

Such articles are not just a warning for Florida, a state that’s been environmentally abused forever. They are a warning about the disease of denialism, with “environmental decisions based on pay-to-play, punishing perceived enemies, climate denialism, a reliance on fossil fuels, and a fundamental misunderstanding of core issues and their effect on the future.”

One more thought: I don’t read David Brooks in the New York Times very often. But he wrote a reflective piece on his growing fears about AI. He is on the fence about whether AI will violate “the essence of being human.” I thought, if humans can’t begin to deal with climate change, how are they going to deal with all the unknowns facing us with AI? Will we be entering a stage of total denial?

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Grim Humor Behind the Bleak Headlines

My premise here is that we’re entering a new age of gallows humor in our dreadful politics. When you start thinking about it, you find it everywhere. Does discovering this alleviate our political nausea? Probably not, but writing about it makes me feel better.

I mean, who could have scripted these people?

The media jumped all over the Cocaine-at-the-White-House story. They seem to have taken it either as an important security breach or an occasion for bad jokes. Naturally the Republicans were quick to finger Hunter Biden and his former drug problem. The administration responded with its usual earnest gravity, their typically humorless response to everything. Maybe Biden’s numbers would improve if he and his people would just lighten up.

In Iowa Pence said he said he was a supporter of Ronald Reagan’s doctrine that “if you’re willing to fight the enemies of the United States on your soil, we’ll give you the means to fight them there so our men and women in uniform don’t have to fight them.”

Nobody has pointed out that this was the same as endorsing what Prigozhin and his mercenaries do: getting paid by others to fight on their behalf. The irony here seems to have eluded everybody—and maybe that’s not so funny.

Outside the realm of politics is the story about the British tourist who carved his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum and later said he had no idea the site was so ancient. The only thing funny about this is why he thought anyone would believe him.

In a similar vein we read that New York mayor Eric Adams, in another act of pomposity, courted controversy after claiming a recently doctored photo was an original he kept always with him. The mayor keeps cementing his reputation as creepy and incompetent.

And then there’s Robert Kennedy, Jr., the new king of conspiracy theories who also courts controversy. Is it possible to laugh at a person who takes himself so seriously? The incongruity of his relationship to his famous family is pathetic rather than funny.

And now we’re hearing still more about the December 2020 meeting of the lunatics, when Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn and others spent hours proposing mad theories of how to salvage the election Trump had just lost. Here we have truly entered the world of farce.

Yet farce is something you can laugh at and laugh with. The examples I’ve cited more likely involve laughing to keep from crying. Laughter, we know, is supposed to open one’s mind and heart. That’s what Jimmy Kimmel and the other late-night comedians hope to offer. But life’s getting too grim even for them.

Where are the great clowns I grew up with—like Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and George Carlin? Maybe our current politics and culture would be too much, even for them. Humor is ritual cleansing, and our politics is in great need of that.

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The Fantasy of Finding Different Worlds

I mean the persistent lure of travel—even in the face of all those airport horror stories, outrageous costs, cancellations, crowds and cattle-car accommodations. One ex-traveler put it this way: “Prices everywhere you go are absurd, and still, crowds are everywhere. Places are understaffed, expensive, the service is atrocious, and the quality of the food is all but gone.”

Why do people willingly endure these indignities, and what do they gain from the experience? They think that travel will somehow transform them, make them better, more cultured people, give them more notches in their conversational belts, and so on. Travel, they think, broadens the mind, a notion I had some fun with a couple of years ago. And how many of you have dozed off listening to a returned traveler’s stories?

Tourism (and who wants to be labeled a tourist?) has grown exponentially—and so have all its environmental impacts—as those with leisure, money and opportunity have proliferated.

In 1950 there were 25 million international tourist arrivals, in 1970 the number was 166 million, and by 1990 it had grown to 435 million. From 1990 to 2018 numbers more than tripled reaching 1.442 billion. By 2030, 1.8 billion tourist arrivals are projected.

A recent New Yorker story brought to mind some of the reasons why I no longer will undertake any long-distance travel. I guess money is one reason. But an older person would have to be some kind of masochist to go through the indignities I mentioned earlier.

Some of my best friends are travelers, and I excuse their behavior on the grounds that they are bored. All travelers feel the need to expose themselves to something different, to feel something different, to expand their stale lives. But in the end travel makes you a spectator, not a participant, in another culture.

Travel may in some sense be fun, but it also dehumanizes. It makes us into zoo-goers with cameras. It can produce a false sense of empathy or a pseudo-compassion. We can happily identify with, say, the lifestyle of the Danes and show pained sympathy for the poverty in Lesotho. Travel always, I think, gives one a false sense of empowerment.

Celebrity travel to the most dangerous environments is just such a search for new sensations permitted by money and access. At bottom this is not science but one-upmanship on the fools who fly coach. Yet, as recent events have shown, you can’t fly too near the sun without your wings melting.

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New Lessons in Hubris

The submersible Titan’s loss was no Greek tragedy. We had no hero with a tragic flaw; there was no grand discovery or revelation; we had, however, plenty of reversal of fortune (peripeteia). What we saw in the last week was a tragedy of spectacle, which humans always enjoy and which the media willingly provide.

At the same time, we and the media are guilty of giving short shrift to the thousands of desperate migrants now being lost at sea. A boat off Greece capsizes and hundreds die in the water. Viewers happily cut back to the more uncertain fortunes of the Titan. Its ending, predicted by some, was the anticlimax of a week-long deathwatch that drew millions of viewers. Few, I’m sure, wanted to think that the human drama was already over. Fewer still wanted to contemplate those hundreds dead in the Greek waters.

The four lost Titan passengers each paid $250,000 to die a quick, unsolicited death. An enormous air-sea search costing millions—as we will no doubt learn—was really a wasted effort since the sub imploded near the Titanic just an hour and 45 minutes after launch. Where was the effort to rescue the Greek immigrants?

Stockton Rush, the idiot savant who led OceanGate and piloted the dive, pitched the unimportance of safety and preferred innovation over proper testing and certification. The company will now be facing perhaps years of lawsuits. Rush already had a couple before his last and fatal dive.

I was immediately struck by the happy hubris of this guy in interviews. Well, how could sane people believe in someone who used off-the-shelf video controllers and RadioShack parts in vessels like this? An uncertified carbon fiber hull? Is the urge for perilous adventures so strong as to confound rational thinking? Two of the five passengers on board were experienced, smart, capable Titanic divers. They still bought in to this ride.

James Cameron, the seasoned ocean explorer (and “Titanic” filmmaker) was one of the few who spoke out about the disaster. He has made more than thirty successful dives to the Titanic. “OceanGate,” he said, “didn’t go through certification. It wasn’t peer-reviewed by other engineering entities, by any of these what they call classing bureaus that do certification for vessels and submersibles and things like that. That was a critical failure.”

I watched his interview on CNN. Toward the end he remarked on the supreme irony that both the Titanic and the Titan disaster were caused by hubris, that arrogant pursuit of power that goes against nature, the gods and human reason. So far, he’s the only commenter I’ve heard to use that word with regard to what happened in 1912 and what happened last week.

Titanic fascinates us because it seems like such a colossal failure of some kind of system back then, and 1,500 people paid the price for it. . . . The warnings were not heeded. They were warned about the ice, they had radio, Marconigrams, the Titanic captain was handed multiple warnings of ice ahead [yet] he steamed full ahead into a known ice field on a pitch dark night with no moon. If that isn’t a recipe for disaster, I don’t know what is.

It took just over a hundred years to prove once again that when the fates align, humans are their mindless victims.

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Reflections on Father’s Day

“Honor thy father and mother,” says the Bible. Why do we need two commercial holidays to do that? I honor both my parents every day with memories, good and bad, of when they were alive and when we were together as a family long ago.

My father was often a pain in the ass, but so are many. And yet he was very attached to me, helped me out financially, gave me usually unwanted but needed advice. For all our arguments, he influenced my life and behavior in ways it took me years to recognize and ultimately appreciate. I have to honor him for that.

Married twice, I had three sons and now have three grandsons. I can’t evaluate what kind of father I’ve been, though I remember a lot of mistakes I made. Being a father is like holding public office: others will judge your competence.

Mother’s Day seems to be more popular, but still about 100 million Father’s Day cards are sent out each year. More than $22 billion is projected to be spent on celebrating dad this year. Incredible, isn’t it?

The industry is promoted by articles like: “All the Best Father’s Day Gift Ideas” in NYMag. Here are a few things they noted that your dad may be happy to regift.

People who buy this stuff know nothing about fathers. Give them a bottle of good rum and they’ll be happy.