Homegoing & Tom DeMott’s Hidden Obit

I gave the following talk and reading from my brother Tom’s prose at his Memorial after we screened Thanksgiving—our sister Joel’s movie (unsynched but fully in the flow) of a DeMott family celebration ca. 1970. I jumped off from the rapturous sequence in the movie where Jo used a great Motown track “Truly Yours” to soundtrack images of little sister Megan dancing and Tom listening/looking like a rock dream—saved (barely) from male model fineness by his broken nose…

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Gilets Jaunes: The Turning Point

PARIS—As I write this, Emmanuel Macron is about to make a major speech addressing the protests that have disrupted his nation. He’s expected to show a new side of himself, more consultative than when he took office in 2017 and the press dubbed him President Jupiter. Now he’s more like a black hole, invisible yet immensely powerful, since his deputies control the Assembly. What will he say? Will he raise the minimum wage, as the protesters have demanded? (Unlikely.) Will he speak of dialogue with his “co-citizens?” (Very likely.) Will he stick to the reforms that have widened the gap between the rich and rest of France, or will he give just enough to satisfy a center that has yet to make its intentions felt? Stay tuned. But don’t expect the American media to convey the full significance of what has happened here over the past month. Our image of the French reflects an ancient Anglo-Saxon bias: They’re chic, but dangerous when they take to the streets. In fact, for all its uncertain and unsettling aspects, the uprising of the Gilets Jaunes offers a model of participatory democracy that we can learn from.

brigitte bardon en marche

  Brigitte Bardot En Marche

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The Case for Macron (& Merkel)

H/t to Bruce Jackson for steering your editor to this Vox photo of our nasty, goofy President smiling at Putin while Macron and Merkel look harder.

Jackson November

 

An Untired Peacemaker’s Last Stretch (Uri Avnery R.I.P.)

Uri Avnery, “grandfather” of Israel’s peace movement (who once fought for the Irgun) died on August 20th. Avnery’s angle on Middle East conflicts began to change after he served valiantly (and sustained a serious wound) in the 1948 war. Back in that day, “I and my friends raised for the first time the principle that there is a Palestinian people with whom we have to make peace,” as he told an Israeli interviewer a few years ago, adding: “I don’t think there were 10 people in the world that believed in this. Today it is a world consensus.”

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iLied

I spent my middle school years without a phone. I had an iPod. There’s not much  difference but back then a phone and iPod seemed a world apart. (An iPod cannot use cellular data, so you can’t use it without wifi. iPods also can’t make phone calls.) I remember the biggest (most shaming) difference was that on the back of the iPod, iPod was engraved in large letters. Whenever I used my iPod around people I used my fingers to cover that humiliating logo.

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What Just Happened? (Kiarostami in Tokyo & Obama in Johannesburg)

The late Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Falling in Love (2012) was originally titled “The End,” which would’ve underscored the final scene’s go-to-smash upending of viewers’ presumptions. The film, set in Japan, works like a gently penetrative Ozu-y character study until it’s transformed utterly by a sudden act of violence in the last second(s).

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Mexico’s Election & Cherán

The authors of The Nation‘s account of the Mexican election, Margaret Cerullo and JoAnn Wypijewski, tried to keep triumphalism in check. But their call and response still managed to seem a bit beamish. Their claim the election meant Mexicans had become “heroes of their own story” reminded your editor of this story about a place in the country where everyday people have been acting like heroes for years. I hope it doesn’t seem churlish to point out citizens of Cherán chose to abstain from the recent election…

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A Fascist Fashion Statement?

Historical analyses of FLOTUS’s fashion statement, such as one below, are being shared on social media… 

Face Book Melania

 

This sort of analysis prompted Ty Geltmaker–a student (and ex-Professor) of modern Italian History–to dig into his own archives. Geltmaker comments below…

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“Pour Out Your Wrath”

The author posted this piece at the Gush Shalom site on the eve of Passover with the following short intro: “I was about to write an article about Pesach eve when I remembered that I wrote exactly the same article six years ago… – I just have nothing to add.” Seems like he got it all…

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Game Theory

Berlin 1936: Sixteen Days in August, by Oliver Hilmer (Other Press. 2018. Trans. from the German by Jefferson Chase) begins on the first day of that summer’s Olympics and ends on their closing. But the Olympics were a smokescreen, a puppet show, a diversion of less significance than the fireworks which concluded Joseph Goebbels $800,000 last-night party, bloodying the sky red.

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Son of Bibi: Or Three Men in a Car

Uri Avnery covers the latest news of the Netanyahu family’s trumpery. 

NO, I don’t want to write about the affair of Ya’ir Netanyahu. I refuse adamantly. No force in the world will compel me to do so.

Yet here I am, writing about Ya’ir, damn it. Can’t resist.

And perhaps it is really more than a matter of gossip. Perhaps it is something that we cannot ignore.

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