Op-Ed

As I trek toward the Great Unknown, as life’s struggles seem to intensify, some odd questions keep recurring.

Art — what is it again? Why does it matter? How does it matter? What does it mean to be “good” at it?

That last question, in particular, can cut like barbed wire — especially if you’ve been swimming all your life in a sense of mediocrity, having learned that the Temple of Art is the home of the blessed elite. There’s Mona Lisa, then there are scribbles and doodles: baby stuff. End of discussion. Your grade is C-minus. Welcome to consumer culture.

So why do I care about art? Indeed, why now? As I grow older (by which I mean “old”), I refuse, refuse, refuse to retire: to quit writing, to quit believing I’m doing something that matters . . . to quit believing that humanity is collective and, at the deepest levels of our being, we all participate in this collective. This is what I call art, even though I don’t know what I mean by that. Or at least I don’t mean something that’s simple and certain, or even particularly serious — at least not in an academic sense. Serious can be fun.

Realizing that I’ve been taking something for granted — one grain of infinity — is never an abstraction. It generally happens by whack and wallop.

Oh yeah, the knee. The knee. It’s kind of important.

A crucial part of the realization process is acknowledgment. Maybe even learning something. So, pardon the details I’m about to reveal, but I’m trying to figure out what I may have just learned these past few days, even as I call out to the universe: “Enough!” I don’t want any more life lessons for a while. (Come on, I’m only 77.)

So what happened was, my long-time buddy, Malcolm — we’ve been best friends since 1967 — came to town for a visit last week. Wow, cool. Two long-time-ago hippies on their own in Chicago. The world felt wide open. And I was host. However, the day of his arrival — as I lay in bed that morning — my right knee woke me up with a piercing poke in my consciousness. No, not again!

At first, I admit, I was a bit flattered to learn that online entrepreneurs are selling study guides for my new book. I thought of CliffsNotes from long ago, helping fellow students who were short on time or interest to grasp the basics of notable works. Curiosity quickly won. I pulled out my credit card, paid $9.99 plus tax for one of the offerings, and awaited its arrival in the mail.

 The thin booklet got off to a reasonable enough start, explaining with its first sentence, “The U.S. media coverage that makes it easier to sell wars to the public, as well as the often-hidden cost of civilian casualties from errant U.S. attacks, are all harshly criticized by journalist Solomon.” That wasn’t a bad sum-up of my book.

 But the study guide’s second sentence was not nearly as good: “He guarantees that when Russia designated Ukrainian communities during the new attack, the U.S. media was everyone available and jumping into action with compassionate, piercing revealing.” Rereading that sentence a few times didn’t improve it, and I began to worry.

“The greatest danger to human civilization and the planet is the inability to believe that tomorrow can be different . . .”

So writes Derek Johnson of the Global Zero movement, an organization committed to a world free of nuclear weapons. Let’s put it this way: If we can cooperate in our own collective suicide — a.k.a., nuclear war — surely, surely we can cooperate in creating a world that transcends such a possibility. Or are cynicism, war and profit so thoroughly worked into the human social structure that I’m kidding myself? You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, people say, superstitiously (it seems) condemning themselves, or at least their children, to inevitable self-annihilation.

As the heatwave intensifies across the country, as workers exposed to the heat collapse on the job in increasing numbers — some of them die — Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has signed a law nullifying local ordinances in the state that require ten-minute heat and water breaks for those who work in the sun.

Water is life! Yeah, so what, says Abbott and those who support this law. Critics call it the Death Star Law. Texas Rep. Greg Casar, who recently staged a nine-hour thirst strike on the steps of the U.S. capital in protest of such laws — such indifference to the health and lives of so many American workers — said that Abbott, along with other GOP governors like Ron DeSantis, “are participating in the cruelty olympics, trying to outdo each other.”

Donald Trump is a man of many words. All of them no more than a few syllables. I know he speaks the English language, one word after another. But does he have to speak it so poorly? 

The blood that runs through my brains has a rich DNA past with tributaries in many European and far flung places. I dip my verbal oars into the wondrousness of words as I try to decipher exactly what Trump is trying to say, for better or for verse.  Just listen as he murders the spoken word and insidiously replaces it with sewer talk. Filling our brains with farce words, farce thoughts, farce gobbledegook.  Is he just trying to butcher our brains? Yes conclusively, can we blame the entire decline and fall of the American Empire on Donald Judas Trump.

[Along with other intellectuals, I was asked by a New Zealand solidarity group to share a few ideas on what meaningful solidarity with Palestine entails. This talk inspired the article below.]

 It is a new era in Palestine.

 This new era is taking shape before our very eyes, through the blood, tears and sacrifices of a brave generation that is fighting on two fronts - against the Israeli military occupation, on the one hand, and collaborating Palestinians masquerading as a ‘leadership’, on the other.

 But how do we, in Palestine solidarity communities around the world, respond to the changes underway, to the new language and to the actual unity – wihdat al-Sahat – which are reanimating the Palestinian body politic?

 First, I believe that we must insist on the centrality of the Palestinian voice to any solidarity action pertaining to Palestinian freedom anywhere.

This is the perfect opportunity for Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, to exit the stage. But he will not. 

Abbas’ brief visit to the devastated Jenin refugee camp in the northern occupied West Bank on July 12 demonstrated the absurdity and danger of the PA and its 87-year-old leader. 

As he walked, Abbas struggled to keep his balance, in what was promoted as a ‘solidarity’ visit to the camp.

I was reading about bumble bees recently — specifically, their looming demise, thanks to human greed and ignorance — and started thinking about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We should have eaten from it!

Well, we did, but then apparently upchucked everything we learned and, in the process, fooled ourselves into thinking that technology has allowed us to recreate the Garden of Eden from which we’d been banned. You might call it the Garden of Capitalism, in which humans can take what they want without consequences, forever and ever and ever. This seems to be the myth at the core of dominant global culture.

It’s something of an understatement to say that we are all awakening again today in uncharted territory. And, the rule of law prevails.

Despite his avalanche of trumped-up cries of innocence, and despite the wolf whistles on his BS, oops I mean TS channel, lets state with no equivocation there is absolutely no Divine Right of Presidents anywhere in the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, Classified or Top Secret documents, or even the Star Spangled Banner.  And no matter how mighty his mind thinks it is, he cannot declassify any of the above.

Trump who famously once called himself a “son of God” and who brags about his long distance conversations with the divine is actually a mere mortal, a stupid and sad sack of corpulent corpuscles who pinched his rallying cries for his MAGA masses from medieval Christian European kings who once believed they were answerable to no one except God, This  absurd notion of royal absolutism became known as the divine right of kings who expected and demanded total obedience from the people they ruled.