Nobel Prize Antics
Circa 2011, I took a playwriting class taught by a then-famous playwright. There were two young students in the class, one a senior at Juilliard I think, who wrote musicals, the other a young actress of talent developing a solo show about her colorful childhood growing up as a half-Jewish person in redneck country. A few years later, he won an arts Pulitzer, and she co-won a best picture Oscar. I was happy for them, and very jealous of course.
This got me thinking about New York Jewish ontologies. There were only two acceptable professions, doctor and lawyer, but university professors were tolerated, admired and even coddled like brilliant special needs children (they made much less money). We had a naive adoration of academia, particularly the Ivy League. Anyone who won a Nobel prize seemed Godlike to us.
Over the years, we have seen instances of Nobel laureates going mad (John Nash), becoming racist (James Watson) or going on to promote asinine theories (Kary Mullis). There is apparently even a name for this, "Nobel disease".
Venezuelan opposition figure Maria Machado, who accepted her Nobel just a short time ago at great personal risk, is illustrating a new kind of low, sucking up to Donald Trump and giving him her medal. Trump thinks she doesn't have the stones to replace dictator Maduro, whom he just kidnapped, and she is sycophantically trying to flatter him into placing her in power. Of course, a winner of the Nobel peace price supporting the military abduction of her adversary, is, (to convert Trump's own phrase), "just sad".
Trump himself inanely maunders on and on about how he deserves the Peace Prize--even while renaming DOD the "Department of War" (he's not nuanced or literary enough to think of "Ministry of Peace").
There are at least two take-aways, which I will mention in ascending order of importance.
It is noteworthy how Trump cheapens absolutely everyone and everything he comes into contact with, as he brings out the weak, sycophantic and compliant side of individuals and institutions. Ha: Trump as alethiometer (the truth-determining device in Philip Pullman's "Dark Materials" series).
However-- it took me to age 71 to see this, but the Nobel prize (and the Pulitzer, and and and) should not exist. (I never thought the Oscars should; witness the number of bad and forgettable movies they have honored.) It is a mere popularity contest, and often awards money to people already worth millions. Let's spend money funding science, not giving glittery medals and dollars to people we think are pretty cool at the moment, but may then prove they are not.
The New York Times, First World Observer
Much of my life, I was a sucker for Times human interest articles about the people of other countries: Pacific cargo cults, Zulu warriors finding wives, uncontacted Latin American tribes staring up at planes bearing photographers, the funny things Asian people eat (shark fins, birds' nests). Yesterday, I had an epiphany about an article which described how, now that China has banned coal, people in rural areas can no longer afford to heat their homes. Though more environmental/respectful than some 1960's articles about barebreasted native women and men with plates in their lips, I suddenly saw the self-congratulatory subtext: How quaint!!! One could write any number of articles about ourselves in the very same tone, not as New Yorker style whimsy (which only people with leisure time and money find funny anyway) but: how fuckin' strange we are. But, I should correct my tag line, The Times does not observe the First World, so much as it observes from it (I am having fun with italics today).
Israeli soccer fans
An English police chief was just forced to resign, on accusations of antisemitism, because he banned supporters of the Israeli team, Maccabi, from a match. This was after they had rioted and viciously beaten and threatened Palestinian people on the streets of Amsterdam in late 2024.
I read Bill Buford's Among the Thugs a few years ago, so I am aware of the ultra-violence of soccer fans in general. In 1985, the Heysel Stadium fight in Brussels led to the banning of all British clubs on the Continent until 1990.
Because of the anti-Palestinian bias which is so pervasive everywhere today that most people don't even perceive they themselves bear it, it is instructive to take a closer look than I ordinarily would at the Wikipedia article describing the Amsterdam riot. I love and honor Wikipedia-- I spent a year of my life when I had nothing else to do, obsessively editing it. I learned then (it was 2010, I think) that the most difficult articles to maintain were any that mentioned Israel and Palestine, where the usual goal of neutrality gave way to alternating sentences or paragraphs contradicting or attacking each other, which did not belong together in the same article. The article on the November riots presents it both as an antisemitic and anti-Palestinian event. However, a careful examination indicates that the Maccabi fans started the violence: "A group of Maccabi Fanatics chased two men, beating one with a belt as he tried to escape in a taxi. After the police arrived, the group ran away, joining other Maccabi ultras, nearly all of whom wore black clothing instead of team colours, walking towards Rokin. This group of around 50 Maccabi supporters gathered in front of Villa Mokum, a squat where several Palestinian flags were displayed. Residents of the squat barricaded themselves inside while one of the ultras ripped the flags off. Maccabi fans reportedly kicked the doors and tried to enter the house, threatening to kill the residents. Video footage showed a police car passing without stopping, leading to criticism on social media. A group of supporters vandalised a nearby taxi, including hitting the window with an object and trying to force the windows and doors open, while the driver was inside." Note the cop passing by without intervening. "Around 1.20am, the police saw online calls urging taxi drivers to mobilize. A large proportion of the taxi drivers had an Arab background and were pro-Palestinian. They gathered in various locations to find Maccabi fans".
In Brussels, the authorities concluded that the way to avoid violence was to separate two groups from one another. There was no ontological overlay which required them to privilege either group over the other. This is consistent, by the way, with a line of American First Amendment cases that say it does not violate anyone's First Amendment rights to separate groups-- they can chant and wave signs a distance from each other. Before Trump was elected and America lost its mind, it was the law that homophobic groups do not have a right to charge into a Pride parade, to bully, threaten or assault gay people. Anti-abortion protesters were kept a reasonable distance away from the doors of clinics where they would harass patients and staff.
Beginning a short time after October 7, 2023, I have been explaining to universities, to no avail, that their public safety departments have a duty to keep Zionist counterprotesters a few hundred feet away from pro-Palestinian demonstrators. The following is an incident of which I have direct knowledge, as it involved clients of mine. Several Columbia students were suspended or expelled for forming a peaceful human chain to exclude three aggressive students, who were insisting on their right to enter the encampment to bully and threaten protesters, shove phones in their faces, and dox them on Canary Mission. At least two of the three were previously known to pro-Palestinian activists, and one was very drunk. The pro-Palestinian students, including trained de-escalators, had spent twenty minutes trying to get them to agree not to film or bully anyone; the human chain was a last resort. All of this was filmed, and anyone watching the video can see the truth, but Columbia didn't care. The official narrative became that the pro-Palestinian side had gratuitously prevented Jewish people from going someplace they had a right to be.
If it is appropriate to protect the public safety by banning supporters of Manchester United from an event, why not the Maccabis? The difference is that whenever you take action against Israeli toxic nationalists anywhere who have committed violence or fraud, they begin screaming antisemitism, much the way the American extreme right yells about discrimination against white people. But in the case of the antisemitism accusation, the words hang in the air with some kind of immense magical power, and ordinarily brave or at least sensible people run away. I am dealing with hundreds of similar instances in my pro bono law practice. Jews who do not support Israel are routinely also punished for antisemitism (I can also witness to this because many of them are my clients).
I object as a proud Jewish person to this fraudulent usage, which cheapens and in fact hollows out language, and also associates all Jewish people with the hatred and violence of a few, who claim to speak for all of us.
"Getting" Maduro
One official narrative is that capturing the serving leader of Venezuela within the boundaries of his own country was merely an arrest of a wanted suspect, as if the FBI pursuant to warrant had seized a dangerous drug dealer at his home in Idaho. But there is simultaneously a different narrative being emitted by other people in the administration, of pride in carrying out a difficult military operation-- and these are bragging that we killed as many as seventy Cuban and Venezuelan soldiers to get to Maduro, without suffering a single casualty! Let's re-examine and reformulate the Idaho narrative: we captured a very dangerous armed criminal without loss and-- ahem-- we only had to kill seventy corrupt cops who were protecting him. One might even add, consistent with the murderous racism of this administration: "But they were only Latino cops"....
The Debasement of Language
Donald Trump, discussing Somali immigrants at a Cabinet meeting: ""We could go one way or the other, and we're going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country".
Arthur Cohen, The Tremendum: "The debasement of language, the stripping of its shading and moral intensity began in the West long before Hitler and continues after he is gone. It will help us to explain a kind of cauterization of conscience by the use of metaphor and euphemism; to understand that in official Nazi language the extermination of Jews was precisely that-- the disinfectant of lice, the burning of garbage, the incineration of trash, and hence language never had to say exactly what acts its words commanded: kill, burn, murder that old Jew, that middle-aged Jew, that child Jew."