Today, people I know are talking about one thing. My mailbox is overflowing, the BBC devotes half its show to the flotilla raid, Amy Goodman has Amira Hass on, and my wife comes in from gardening every ten minutes to say, "Are you going to Gaza? Why not?"
Terry Gross of Fresh Air is one of the smartest people in journalism, and her show today is a tribute to Dennis Hopper, the whole hour. I love Dennis Hopper. The whole hour? This is pure evasion of something people of conscience need to be addressing.
I know what Gross’s pantheon is: American outsiders, blues players and rebels like Dennis Hopper and edgy artists. There is something Jewish in that; a cultural identification with other outsiders.
But nostalgia too. We’re not outsiders, we’re empowered; which is why Obama is silent. I imagine that if Terry Gross would talk about it honestly, she’d say that she believes in anti-Semitism as a real living force in American life and the life of the west. I sense that about her, in her outsider-identification. And I sense that this concern with anti-Semitism ordains the Jewish state in her mind and rationalizes a lot of its behavior. I don’t remember anything she has done about the crisis that Israel is in right now, a crisis brought about by its treatment of a minority.
But, it’s irresponsible. Great actors probably died just before Kent State too. Oh but that struggle was easy.
P.S. And does it matter that the first ad on WNYC when they took a break from Dennis Hopper was for public radio sponsor, the Jewish Museum in New York? Yes. That’s the base.
