The other day I did a post on "Status, Radicalism & Happiness" that argued that many lefties who left the bourgeois track during the Vietnam era have had rich lives. I mentioned "my neighbor growing up in Baltimore. He got into the SDS at Harvard, and ended up dropping out and picking sugar cane for years in Cuba. Now he writes mysteries." Henry Norr in Berkeley knew who I meant. He sent the post along to Dick Cluster; and Dicky as I know him wrote to me that my facts were wobbly but my lesson isn't.
I agree what you and your wife say, and feel free to use me as example. But actually, just to not-give-myself-airs: I was in SDS at Harvard, definitely, but alas graduated from the place (best I can claim is that I was on probation for a Dow Chemical sit-in -- you can imagine my father Ray telling me on phone that he understood what we'd done but to try not to get kicked out in my last year because of the $$$ he'd invested), and spent only 2 months cutting cane in Cuba, in between stints working on "underground" newspaper Old Mole. Mysteries yes, though more recently Spanish-English translation, history, and also a couple of non-mystery novels without publishers. And teaching and advising half-time at UMass Boston, the commuter branch of UMass.
Who knows what it was I was on track to be if the movement hadn't intervened???? My sense is like yours, though: that most of us from elite colleges, Jews and non-Jews, who got off that track ended up being able to rejoin it, though more often on some slow-freight line rather than fast-track, and with better social/service/political goals. I did stay in touch with Cuba and in the early-mid '90s stumbled on a chance to go back there and work for (off-and-on) four years '92-'96, with Cuban teachers of English, and my kid to go to high school there 2 semesters, and my partner Nancy live and work there much of that time too; so now we have Cuban more-or-less extended family we go back and visit (and by a long and curious and very Cuban chain of events, one of those old mystery novels got published in Cuban translation a couple years ago).
Here's a link to a social history of Havana written w/ Cuban writer/editor friend. And here is link to something short that I wrote recently about the Venceremos Brigade etc (for the mag of the "David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies" at Harvard of all things -- which is edited by someone who was also on the VB). [Weiss excerpts:]
In the spring of 1961, as a 14-year-old in Baltimore, Maryland, interested in current events, I read in the New York Times about Cubans fighting for freedom at a place called the Bay of Pigs, against a dictatorship that had hijacked a popular revolution. When the forces of good failed to triumph at the Bay of Pigs, I was shocked. A classmate of mine—a precocious member of the Young Socialist Alliance— told me that the operation had been run by the CIA. I could not believe. Hadn’t Adlai Stevenson denied this at the United Nations? Hadn’t the New York Times and other media reported the invasion was a spontaneous action by freedom-loving Cubans?
... In the years between 1961 and 1969, the Viet Nam war had taught us that what the mainstream media and our government officials said about our country’s foreign policy might not only be mistaken, but might even be a cynical and conscious effort to mislead us in both senses of the word.
I went to live in communes in Oregon (not from a Harvard track). I went to Marlboro College in Vermont after the Oregon commune stint. I wrote a thesis at Marlboro on social progress, incorporating the work of Teilhard de Chardian, Abraham Maslow, Herman Daly and EF Schumacher, with many references to Marx, Hegel, others.
I got involved in the PROUT movement and wrote for a daily that they/we published in DC in 1980-81.
The alternative scene got very thin. I had some political and personal differences with the DC Prout community, and traveled to Portland, OR with my then girlfriend. we started an urban gardening business there, and I studied accounting. I was an unconventional accountant track, serving as PAC treasurer for a Multnomah County initiative proposing that the US cease funding El Salvadoran military, and inviting wind energy and Rajneesh financial advisors to the university accounting fraternity speakers bureau program.
I’ve been a green all my adult life, more on the community economic development and bio-regional side than the political.
My commitment to Israel is as a green, as the Jewish community as a social (not landed) traditional community. What it is now is not what I signed on for. But, what the far left habitually and opportunistically condemns about Israel is further from what I signed on for.
Hence, the suggestion to work for reform, not revolution.
A Chabadnik yearning for reform. Now that’s a first.
Your “surprisingly” confused about me, and “suprisingly” confused about Chabad.
“I’m not a member of chabad, or practitioner of Lubavitch Judaism. My son is, “
For the time being, anyway. And it’s just an amusing step on his way to a complete mental breakdown.
Mark my words: Any young person who receives such bad guidance over an issue of petty social anti-Semitism is screwed. But then again, he probably made a realistic assessment of how much help he could get from you.
Sure, Witty sure, I know. <I.His commitment is not a youthful overdramatization, no, it’s deep and real, just like all the born-again Christians I see around me.
Jeez, Witty, the kid ran into a little anti-semitism, and collapsed.
Oh, BTW, you did report the kid who did it, and get him severely censured, or even possibly suspended, right? I mean, you backed up your kid, and the fees you payed to the school, right?
Witty, the same exact thing happened to me, and I sent the kid to the hospital. (Holy shit did my parents freak! Thought we would be sued into poverty.) Did me a world of good, too. But of course, we know you don’t believe violence is ever appropriate.
Yeah, Witty, you need to be more of a macho man like Mooser. Tell your orthodox son to join the IDF. What have you got to lose, you’re not a NYT journalist. You could even get elected to a local office on that basis alone.
I’m hardly a macho man, Citizen, in fact my Aunt Agatha once called me “a spineless invertebrate” but I did learn to live with the petty social anti-semitism I was exposed to. Given what I have seen or heard about the treatment meted out to other perceived groups in America, I can’t say there was much to complain about. And it was pretty obvious, even to a non-achiever like me that the social anti-semitism, what there was of it, operated within a context of Jewish favoritism or even exclusivity in some very meaningful areas. And, of course, eight days Hannukah! It was easy to see (and I’m a real sensitive guy, and I get my feelings hurt easily) that a stick-figure hanging from a gallows and adorned with a Jewish star (that’s what I got for going out with a non-Jewish girl) or the epithet “Jew-canoe” for Cadillac (that’s what I put that poor kid in the hospital for, but he was fine, if somewhat chastened, damn it, Jews drive Mercedes!) didn’t hold a candle to castration and lynching or the social and economic discrimination darker skin gives rise to.
I would be, frankly, ashamed to look at it any other way.
I know, Citizen, that anti-Semitism will never hold a candle to the discrimination white men and fathers and Christians put up with, but try to understand.
Mooser, I love you.
Past three comments by Witty:
link to mondoweiss.net
“You misrepresent Judaism and you misrepresent Islam.”
link to mondoweiss.net
“Ahmed,
You should read about the treatment of Bahais by Muslims. Its not that pretty. ”
And here Witty says:
“Your “surprisingly” confused about me, and “suprisingly” confused about Chabad.”
Care to explain your abrupt, shallow statements, Witty?
“Shallow” statements.
I’m not a member of chabad, or practitioner of Lubavitch Judaism. My son is, and I have a few good friends in the movement. We frequently discuss politics and there is wide division of attitudes as to how Israel should relate to its neighbors. There definitely are some (too many for my taste) that only feel threatened and do adopt the “kill them before they kill me” theme, pretending to be self-defense. At one event visiting my son’s yeshiva for a weekend last year, a reactionary that visited the yeshiva started chanting something like “kill them” and some of the yeshiva bochers joined in. I confronted the chief rabbi at the yeshiva the next day and asked him if he sanctioned that attitude, if that was in conformity with Torah, including whether that was model of Shabbat, and why he allowed the chanting to continue even for a second.
His response was that it was not in conformity with Torah, but that legitimate self-defense was (which brings up the question, what is legitimate self-defense, even anticipatory). He didn’t address his acceptance of the chanting.
In conversation with other bochers (yeshiva students), the Russian and immigrant students were far more reactionary than the former hippie ones. I know I few of the students parents experienced severe suppression in both communist and post-communist Russia and even though they were brought up in the US mostly, they had collective memory of harrassment for being Jewish.
No excuse of course, but harrassment of minorities rarely breeds good feeling.
Witty, have you or your son read Postville: A Clash Of Cultures In America’s Heartland?
link to jewishtribalreview.org
Citizen, I’ve become a regular reader of FailedMessiah.com, thanks to your tip.
I love that site. Reading it reminds me of when I was a night stocking clerk in the local A&P, and found a defective case of Redi-Whip. They had charged the cans with nitrous oxide, but forgot the whipped-cream! Reading Failed Messiah always makes me feel the way those cans did.
Don’t believe me? Go read that blog, and tell me your head doesn’t spin!
Say, did you read schmendricks latest evolution of his religious beliefs? I know it’s hard to believe, but he no longer wants to be a Rabbi!
Mooser, did you know that the guy who created and keeps FailedMessiah in OP is a guy who was a classical former ritual orthodox Jew for 20 years? So, you think Postville IA is the way to go?
C’mon, you can’t help but get a lotta laughs out of a guy who joins a non-rationalist, charismatic, all-controlling religious cult, and then is disappointed when it doesn’t live up to it’s own billing.
But you never know, maybe somebody drew on his notebook!
I dunno; it seems pretty creepy to not say a neighborly hello to a stranger passing you by in the street because otherwise you wouldn’t be following G-D’s orders, not to mention being completely unaware that a mowed lawn and snow-shoveled sidewalk and drive are the devil’s sign. And let’s not forget that one always needs to drive the hardest bargain in monetary negotiations, especially if the other guy you are bargaining with is an honest farmer like from
Mayberry, USA.
“I’m not a member of chabad, or practitioner of Lubavitch Judaism. My son is,”
For now, anyway. It’s just a phase, I went through it myself after seeing “Yentil”. But my parents wouldn’t pay for a sex-change operation, or singing lessons.
Don’t worry, Richard, he’ll shrink out of it. Oh whoops, I meant “grow”, he’ll grow out of it.
But if it comes to a crisis, and you need him kidnapped and de-programmed, just give me a call. The sex-change operation should be covered under your medical insurance. What? You want him to be happy, don’t you?
“No excuse of course, but harrassment of minorities rarely breeds good feeling.”
Damn it Witty, of course you’re right, but the hell of it is, we’re Jews, and that’s our job! It’s up to us to bear the brunt of all the discrimination and brutality in the world, and be the scapegoats for the world’s sins! If we ever stop the world will end!
I mean you don’t want some body besides us Jews to have to put up with any of that brutality, right? And don’t you think this system, where nobody suffers except the Jews has worked out pretty well so far? Just think of the number of people we have saved from harm!
Witty, you are an insufferable hypocrite, and your pretenses to spirituality could be bottled and sold for an effective emetic.
Did you leave when they started chanting “kill them”, or did you stay and listen? Did you stand up and say something? Did any of the other Yeshiva bochurs? Surely fear didn’t stop you. After all, you are a member of the tribe and God has rules against you killing each other.
I have to admit, as a gentile, it gives me that same creepy feeling that Jews get when they heard Borat firing those drunks up to start singing “throw the Jew down the well”.
I get the same feeling that I get when I hear Muslims shouting the same stuff in their American “Islamic Centers”.
Surprising the bochurs talk so easily of killing us gentiles, however. Its seems pretty damn difficult to get them to join the IDF. Secular Jews in Israel are losing patience in a big way.
Maybe you ought to encourage them to make aliyah. I really think that kind of talk is better suited to Israelis than Americans. They are steeped in it.
“Who knows what I was on track to be…”
Unfortunately, the analogy of the train, and being “on track” is not to far off from reality, and as has been said before “you cannot be neutral on a moving train.” I refuse to board, do not try to give me a ticket. rather I am on the tracks trying to figure out how to derail this disaster both foreign and domestic.
Some words from you era that you might identify with – “cancel my subscription to the resurrection, send my credentials to the house of detention – I’ve got some friends inside…when the musics over, turn out the lights.” Jim Morrison
Examine your ticket
Better even than just the quote –
IT’S OVER
““Who knows what I was on track to be…”
Some people find the illusion that they are on a track, instead of adrift on an ocean, comforting. I never did, for whatever reason. The only thing we are on a straight track to is death, our universal destination.
Or maybe I’ll wake up tommorrow and join Chabad. Hey, it could happen! It just so happens I look really hot-hot-hot in one of those black caftans and a fedora.
Look, you never know in this life; I was being encouraged to spend high-school summers on an Israeli kibbutz when I was young. You want to know what stopped me? I heard they wore shorts and did folk dances in a circle! I resolved to avoid it at all costs, as well beyond the frozen limit.
And I have never regretted my decision for a moment. If there’s one thing you can count on in this unstable, uncertain world, it’s that any situation which requires wearing shorts and dancing in a circle should be given the entire miss-in-baulk! About that I am adamant! And when I say adamant, I mean, well, you know… adamant! ( If that’s the word I want.)
Well, of course, all of us are mortal except Witty, who learned to dis-assemble himself and reconstruct the component parts in a new place or time, a little skill he picked up at the ashram. In fact, his spiritual attainments are vast, including a complete control of his nerve system. He never needs to ask his dentist for pain pills either. He has mastered arcane arts and learned to transcend dental medication!
I practice “dental remedication”.