=jplt15 Letters-to-the-Editor etc., from 19 May '04 In these =jplt*.* docs I often try to exegesis-ize as applied philosophy conceptual muddles that characterize popular political thought. Stylistic-ly, I try to do so in a tolerably popular mode. ------------------------------------------------------------------- (Sent, JP) REMEMBER COCONUT GROVE* Large crowds should not be permitted on Kotel Plaza, particularly on Jerusalem Day and Shavuot. Emergency exits seem inadequate, due to the security gates installed in recent years. Only the self-discipline and mutual respect of attendees has so far forestalled a disaster. In the event of any sort of terrorist incident, a crush at the exits would cause extensive casualties, maybe even if the Dung Gate vehicle entrance were promptly unlocked. On Jerusalem Day, incoming crowds tended to block the exit to the Jewish Quarter. As an immediate first step, guards must be posted to control crowd flow from the Jewish Quarter Square. ----------- * The Coconut Grove Nightclub fire in Boston, in the 1930's if I recall, had numerous deaths due to a crush and delay at inadequate emergency exits. ------------------------------------------------------------------ RETAKE OF THE FIRST LETTER I EVER WROTE TO, AND HAD PRINTED IN, THE JP (early 1986) A wishfully young woman dressed in a hopefully enhanced version of her birthday suit barely desecrates a sacred space (eg Kotel Plaza). (Our species has so far been preserved by persons commonly dressed in less.) But camera-clacking tourists, snapping shots of what they take for quaint elderly anachronisms, reduce an infinite Buber/Sartrian 'I_THOU/pour_Soi' relationship to an incidental 'Me_it/pours_autres' distraction. [It was printed under the heading 'Disturbance at the Wall'. I faulted 'camera-clacking tourists', but chickened out at side_swiping pious misogynism. Buber's notion of 'I-Thou' does not make the distinction that a movement toward self-actualization is to some extent projected by persons of religious caste upon an idealized infinite Other. And Satre's pietistic atheism becomes simplistic phenomenology by ignoring the dimension of Infinitude. ------------------------------------------------------------------- ROLLING THUNDER COMES HOME TO ROOST: On Jerusalem Day Kotel Plaza, already dangerously overcrowded, was auditorily and spiritually pre-empted by Mega-amplified ostensibly 'religous music' that had only negative relationships to music and to religion. ------------------------------------------------------------------- LET THEM SCREAM FOR THE BEATTLES: The national/religious camp ought not mobilize its adolescent girls to simulate an electoral uprising. ------------------------------------------------------------------ (Sent, JP) Re: IBA English radio news, 07:00 20 May '04: Of course it is regretable that 8 Palestinian civilians were killed and others wounded during the IDF military operation to disrupt the smuggling of arms through Egypt into Gaza. But such things (and far worse, by other armies) do happen during a war situation; Israel remains exceptional in its efforts to minimize civilian casualities during military operations; and it appears that the 'incident' is being exploited by international and domestic political opponents of Israel's rule over territory taken in its counter-offensive of the 1967 War. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Recently the Jerusalem Post Letters column, which serves largely as a safety valve for comic relief, has been filled with well- intentioned if inarticulate discussion ("Moore doing philosophy is like an elephant trying to dance," said Wittgenstein) about the travails of a lady who sat down on Kotel Plaza in a tank-top, and eventually attracted a bit of verbal abuse. (And Justin Case once said: 'There has never been a fight at New Buffalo, so don't be the first one to get hit.') The problematic area of 'offending religious sensibilities' -- or more generally, 'offending sensibilities' -- is a subtle one, that might more usefully be dealt with, not by attempting to formulate general principles, but on a case-by-case basis, using common sense and common sensibility ("derekh eretz"). Fitting general principles can be helpful, as long as one notes that, in blocking out the conceptual landscape, they are merely (crudely) descriptive of common sense and sensibility, not prescriptive upon it. So here are a few sketches for general principles: -- It is unkind to flaunt one's sexuality before those to whom it not even possibly available even as sublimated vicarious visual nostalgia. (Eg, displaying one's navel before the misogynistically religious old men of all ages on Kotel Plaza.) -- In general, one cannot claim a right too not be unintentionally offended in a non-physical way. (Eg, ultra-orthodox who would refuse passage through their neighborhoods to women in summer dress.) But the definition of 'non-physical' is ambiguous. Visual offense is in general not included. The exceptions here are public nudity. Obviously one cannot intentionally flaunt one's presumably private parts in front of an unwilling spectator; that is 'flashing'. But if one had no intention of being observed, but is observed, no fault is usually imputed. (Though I was once almost busted for nudity at a Be-In on the beach at Big Sur. The police observed us through binoculars (if not telescopes) from the top of a road about 1/2 mile distant -- they were so far away that I could barely discern the figures. So clearly they were assuming that it was a crime to be naked on the beach (and no doubt it was; the residents of Big Sur were rich California reactionaries who preferred to not share their vista with hippies), regardless of whether there was any passer-by to be offended. Anyhow, I ran down the beach with a few others, while my ladyfriend ran after me with a pair of (slightly, if crucially, ripped) bluejeans she had begged from a spectator, and a fellow graduate student ran along, with his wife, and pointedly engaged me in discussion of an upcoming philosophy seminar. But I digress.) Well, so much for trying to formulate general principles. Let's now go over onto the other tack (which is the tack of ordinary- lanaauge analysis -- meaning, not the analysis of ordinary language, but conceptual exegesis by means of instantiation of language-use in ordinary situations) -- -- an exceptionally apt metaphor, that, for it is with these two complementary tacks -- generalization and instantiation -- that philosophic analysis beats toward that infinite limit or ultimal thule of conceptual clarity, as it were. Auditory imposition is sometimes, though not usually, taken as offense. In general, it is termed 'noise pollution' and regarded as a sort of unavoidable societal fact of nature. In general, the noise must be above the threshold of demonstrated physical danger, to be sanctionable, and must occur during what are regarded in a given society as times of rest. So in Germany, a couple playing tennis during mid-day Sunday may encounter police remonstrance. ("You know -- that plop, plop -- some apparently find it disturbing.") While in Harlem, if not on the Golan shores of the Kineret, any music louder than a thousand lovelorn elephants is not permitted in "the wee small hours of the morning". The one exception is public expessions of obscenity and scatology (although not, nowadays, of blasphemy). Olfactory imposition is only rarely considered an offense -- usually only if the vile odour is unhealthful, as with extreme cases of industrial air pollution. However, passing wind in public is deemed socially inept. Tactile imposition is usually deemed an offense; since Bill Clinton found himself with an independent wife it even has a name, 'groping'. The lightest touch upon a retrospectively unwilling lady may be deemed an indictable alleged crime of 'sexual harassment'. More subtly, one is in general not deemed obliged to refrain from offending those who are offended simply by one's propinquity, if not existence. Although for a hundred years after the USA illegalized slavery, the descendents of African slaves in the southern states deferred in this regard to their Caucasian neighbors, and "ate Jim Crow". And nowadays the world media, and its ostensibly progressive Israeli emulators, takes it for granted that Jews who settled on previously unused land taken in the 1967 counter-offensive from Jordan and Egyptian occupation, should pack up and leave, simply because the Palestinians, or their self-selected "sole legitimate representative"'s, profess that their sensibilities are offended by having to live in the same land as unservile Jews. Well, that's about as far as I can take this for now. ================================================================= sa, Mevo Modi'in, 24 May '04, 4 Sivan, yesod sh'b' MALKUT ================================================================= BOURBON WITH BILGEWATER: Re: JP 19 May '04 ("Mark Steyn") For a self_reportedly elegantly-dressed gentleman of the neo_conservative persuasion, it was not frightfully nice of your senior contributing editor to refer to Lyndie England as "some freaky West Virginia slut", even though she is pregnant, divorced, and so poor that she joined the National Guard in an attempt to make enough money to go to college, in quest of her dream of becoming a meteorologist. Even reactionary class-ism should have some bounds. ================================================================= 23 May '04 Re: English News 07:00; Sharon to present disengagement plan to Cabinet, but not again to Likud Sharon is acdting like a little child, who is told 'No' by Daddy (the Likud), and then runs to Mommy (the Cabinet, whose members he can fire at will) to get a 'Yes'. ============================================================== The USA has blown it in Iraq. It needs to get out, and hope that the UN can salvage something from a very dangerous debacle. =============================================================== I risk missing the Post's sense of humour, which is consistently a bit worse than one could have imagined, but: 'Is this the face that launched a thousand ships' is said, not of Achilles, but of Helen, by Goethe's Faust, ================================================================= Again: It is a cliche of Israeli journalism that Israel must cede territory because it is facing is 'demographic crisis' in which Palestinians will soon out-number Jews. There is no 'demographic crisis'; merely a need to fine-tune criteria for enfranchisement in national elections. (And anyhow, all those 18-year-olds are likely to join forces, pierce rings into their belly-buttons, and vote for Britney Spears.) (The USA Founding Fathers faced a perceived similar problem, and, for better and/or worse, devised various 'work-around''s. It denied slaves and Indians the right to vote; and considered restricting it to landowners. It further insulated government from the populace with a bicameral legislature, an electoral college to select the Chief Executive, and a tenured Supreme Court. ) Israel is a state of last resort -- the only one -- for the Jewish people, who are automatically entitled to citizenship in it. Israel was founded after 6 million Jews were killed, largely because no nation in the world would let them live in it. It is not unreasonable to restrict the right to vote in national elections to Jews, and to those who non-Jews who presumably share an acceptance of if not allegiance to that national purpose. 'The world', or rather its self-annointed representatives in the mass media and the government officials responsive to it, may criticize; but the world criticizes Israel on almost any pretext. Apparently lots of distinguished people don't like (and/or don't know) Jews, maybe because we don't have any oil wells. Israel acts to curtail weapons smuggling and to protect its border patrols, and the world condemns us for putting at risk the animals in a petting zoo. ================================================================= To: comments@iht.com Comments on the IHT: The IHT seems to have less substantive articles and comment than it did a few years ago. The IHT is mildly anti-Israel (and in that sense, pragmatically anti-Jewish), but no more so than most major news media (eg TIME, Newsweek) and less so than many. There are only a few good writers in the IHT (notably Maureen Dowd) and a few bad ones (eg Dave Barry). The Letters column is not above gratuitiously editting letters to fit its own sense or irony. Almost almost the "comics" are unreadable. The exception is "Doonesbury", which is often great political cartooning, comparable to Bill Mauldin, HerBlock, and "Dry Bones". "Calvin and Hobbes" is pleasantly whimsical; "Peanuts" feels dated and was never as good as "Pogo". "Garfield" is a one-joke dog; "Dilbert" is merely unpleasant. Dave McReynolds once, in the early '60's, said of The New York Times: 'You have to read between the lines, but at least there are lines to read between.' Something similar holds of the IHT, but maybe now to a lesser extent. Briefly: I think subscriptions to the IHT in Israel would increase if the IHT were not published jointly with HaAretz/English. Most people whom I've spoken to hold HaAretz/English in contempt. Several, myself included, have discontinued subscriptions to the IHT because it includes HaAretz/English. I'd guess that you would find that subscriptions to the IHT are substantially lower than subscriptions to the Jerusalem Post. A reader survey might suggest reasons for that. Note that, within an Israeli context, HaAretz defines itself as anti-religious, and strongly opposed to Israeli settlement in the post-1967 territories. Even under Histadrut management, the Post never defined itself as anti-religious. It's also temperate in tone and in style; HaAretz ain't. I think you would find that the percentage of native-English-- speakers who describe themselves as 'religious' is surprisingly high. I think that most Israeli's who describe themselves as 'religious' are strongly sympathetic to Jewish settlement in Judea-Samaria; since that, and not the (Philistine) seacoast is the region in which most biblical events occur. =================================================================