This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
Sometimes diversion is the best antidote to the hypocrisy so I’ve decided to change the High Holidays today. In the anechoic chamber the expectation of silence is doused. It’s on to the next question. Same applies to High Holidays. If Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur aren’t times for communal reflection, what are they?
A few years ago I composed a poem for the High Holidays. I imagined the local synagogue re-decorated in a Weather Channel motif. The Ark of the Covenant was decorated with weather instruments. The Rabbi was the weather person. His main function was to check the congregation’s barometric readings. Inside the Ark was the week’s weather forecast. The door of the Ark was opened when the congregation’s devotion reached a certain “apathy” reading. The tipping point was measured by the “Devotional Metric.”
You’ll be glad to know the poem has gone missing.
So on our High Holidays misdirection why not check the latest sports news with a racial and political twist?
No doubt you’ve heard that Condoleezza Rice has become one of the two first women admitted as members at Augusta national Golf Club, home of the Masters’ golf championship. Until recently African Americans, male as well, were barred from membership in the club.
Condi’s breakthrough brought memories of my writing of some years ago. For three years I wrote daily commentaries on everything going on in the world. When I finished writing the words totaled almost two million. It remains a multi-volume unpublished Candide-like romp around the world.
My commentaries began the day after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. It continued through the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. This is where I picked up my Condi narrative.
Isaiah and I stopped at a rest stop for gas and food driving through Florida. Inside a television set was tuned to CNN. There was Condi, Bush’s gal Friday, making a dramatic announcement regarding a UN site in Lebanon that had been bombed by Israel. Many civilians were killed. Condi was doing her usual. “Horror of it all,” “This shouldn’t happen,” “We will commence an investigation,” “A just peace is essential” routine. It was the typical stuff from an imperial power broker with a Black face.
As I was watching Condi, Isaiah came up behind me. I asked him if he knew who she was, feeling this was a teachable moment. His response was immediate: “Yes, I know Dad-o, its Mahatma Condi.”
For the last months, Isaiah and I had been practicing baseball so he could equal his brother’s baseball prowess. During practice, we would chat about the commentaries I was writing. During one of our practice session, I shared my dream vision of burying Arafat and Sharon together. Isaiah loved my riffs on names and situations. With Mahatma Condi, he initiated his own.
I was off and running. I envisioned Mahatma Condi in Lebanon, dodging missiles fired by Israeli jets and scurrying for cover as the debris and bodies piled up around her. Then, I pictured her in civilian convoys with the fleeing Lebanese. On some nights, I had her sleeping outside in makeshift tents. Other times, she was taken in by Lebanese families. They found it strange to find a powerful African American woman, with perfect conked hair, wondering around the Lebanese hills.
During the time in Lebanon, Condi started a diary. She also broadcasted pleas to the international community. Her own imperial assumptions about Israel and the Arab world were being challenged. Her questioning turned to US foreign policy and then, like Martin Luther King, Jr., to America’s role in the world. She used phrases like “purveyors of violence,” “America’s global reach,” “Israeli expansionism.” Because she was on the run, Condi entered the slippery slope that her previous Washington life insulated her from.
Condi went rogue. She began to grow an Afro. Mahatma Gandhi became her idol.
Isaiah saw the contradiction in her, hence his ironic naming, Mahatma Condi. He intuited the “converted” Condi. If she ever unclenched her fist, she might become who she was called to be.
The riff is endless. Think of the recent Skinny-dipgate, the Republican Israel junket where a group frolicked in the Galilean waters, one of them without his shorts. Now imagine Mahatma Condi stripping down and saying the hell with it. Cannonball!
Now Jock Condi joins Augusta and her dream macho golf match. Mahatma Condi is far away in the pages of imagined history.
For one brief shining moment the Imperial Black face experienced the imperial power’s rage. She became disoriented, as any powerful person would.
I assume she’s accepted an invitation to a High Holiday service somewhere in the rarefied world of Constantinan Judaism. Which Condi will show up?
Thoughts of Constantinian Jews on the run in the hills of Lebanon. Living with Palestinians behind the Apartheid Wall. Trapped in Gaza with Star of David helicopter gunships firing rockets at will.
Imagine Constantinian Jews stripping down and the saying the hell with it.
Mahatma Condi…Priceless. Read your amazing post in quick time. So smooth like water flowing. So spot on. “It was the typical stuff from an imperial power broker with a black face”
Condi “mushroom cloud” Rice as bloody and guilty as all of the rest of the Bush administration liars who sold that Iraq war based on a “pack of lies”
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Marc,
I saw you speak about the suffering of Palestine in the 1990’s. You spoke well.
But your latest writing bothers me. By now, I hope you know that Palestinians are regular people, not exotic, but regular. I was hoping you undertand the same thing about Black people. They are regular people, not exotic, not a joke, but as regular as your own kids.
You write about Rice, Bush’s Secretary of State.
She is not some kind of physical fantasy for you to dangle in front of your readers.
She is just as uninteresting as Bush. One day, Bush and Rice, and their accomplices, will go on trial at the Hague, where they belong. Until then, there is not much to say about them.
Like her predecessors, and like her successor, Rice was apppointed to help the U.S. and Israel to slaughter Muslims and Arabs. Since the days of Albright, that seems to be the main job of U.S. Secretaries of State.
And yes, as a child Rice narrowly missed being slaughtered herself in the Birmingham church bombing of 1963. “Denise McNair was my little friend from kindergarten,” she said. “Addie Mae Collins was in my uncle’s homeroom in school”, she said. Here are photos of the four slaughtered girls, when they were fully alive: http://louisianajusticeinstitute.blogspot.com/2011/09/casualties-of-hate-remembering.html
So yes, Rice should understand that the white church bombers are like the Israeli government as it massacres Palestinians and Lebanese. She should understand, but she doesn’t. No surprise there, considering her life’s work. End of story.
Why can’t you end the story there?
Why is it necessary, Marc, for you to invite your readers to obsess over her blackness? At least since James Weldon Johnson, the U.S. government has included Black officials willing to kill. That is old news.
Even before Johnson, there were the Buffalo Soldiers, Black troops who were employed, in part, to kill Native Americans. That is even older news.
So again, Marc, why the fascination over Rice’s body, her first name, and her color?
You write about her “Black face”.
You write about her unusual first name, which you use as a kind of joke rhyme. You encourage your son, and your readers, to use her name as a joke rhyme.
You publish your fantasies about her as a “powerful African American woman, with perfect conked hair”.
Your fantasies about her body seem endless. You write: “Condi went rogue. She began to grow an Afro.”
You go further. You write, “Now imagine Mahatma Condi stripping down and saying the hell with it. Cannonball!”
You also call her “Jock Condi”.
I found your essay to be a teachable moment. It shows me two paths to freedom for Palestine:
1. Just march for total boycott against Israel. March to “cut all ties” to Israel, until that apartheid state is abolished. Simple.
2. Or you could spend an eternity navel-gazing and indulging in fantasies about people who don’t look like you. Before you know it, you could be 60 years old without ever having led a single march to boycott Israel.
Please try to focus on what Palestine needs now. It needs action.
Palestine needs every campus and city to contend with a loud movement to boycott Apartheid Israel until it’s abolished.
It does not need you to dangle racialized fantasies in front of your readership, which is already too far gone into ruminations and strategies that never see the light of day.
Your readers have enough weird ideas about Arabs and Jews being “special” (they are not). Now you want them to exoticize Black people too?