Big show coming soon ... er, eventually

Christine Goerke

   Yes, I have read Dante's The Divine Comedy. All 14,233 lines. And War and Peace. Twice. Three volumes of James Boswell's Life of Johnson. The Iliad, Odyssey — also twice— and The Aeneid. And Moby-Dick, Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest which, combined, are nearly as long as Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, which I also read, but only the first 1,100 pages. I quit, not quite half way through — I just got tired of carrying the thing — to my eternal regret, because I actually really liked it.  Proust's childhood was a whole lot more interesting than mine.
      So I am a fan, obviously, of massive works of art, and you don't need a master's degree in psychology to understand why. Two reasons come to mind. Big books immerse you in a world, and worlds are by definition big, or should be, and take a long time to assemble. A blog post just won't do it.    
    And yes, to be honest, massive works are a challenge, the way Mount Everest is a challenge to those physically inclined. I would never strap on oxygen tanks, grab my ice axe and head off up the mountain. To me, those people are tossing their lives away. I suppose many people view those of us who read thick books as tossing our lives away too, slowly but more certainly. Maybe so. 
     But like a mountain, a massive work calls to you. Not by its pure massivity, mind you. There are plenty of works that are long, multi-part 19th century romance novels and such, that have fallen into deserved obscurity. 
     But certain long works endure into our Twittery time, not because they're big, but because they're also good. Very good, wonderful, something that becomes clear when you gird your loins and finally sit down and read them. If they weren't, they'd be forgotten. People don't hold onto these things because they should, but because they have to. War and Peace is the template for every Barbara Cartland novel that followed. It isn't tedious -- well, much of it isn't -- but filled with love and conversation, with blood and battle, with war and, umm, peace. It's a great book. That sounds obvious, but so many years of it being a "great book" sometimes obscure that. Tolstoy knew his stuff.
     Thus when the Lyric Opera held its press conference last week to annouce that it will be staging the Richard Wagner's entire The Ring of the Nibelung, I was there.  If they made big foam horned helmets, the way they make big wedges of cheese, I'd be wearing mine, and I've never even seen Wagner's four-part epic cycle; when the Lyric last performed it, 10 years ago, I hadn't quite sunk into my present opera addiction. I considered going, back then, but didn't. 
    This time, of course I will, and it is a sign of how much I have yet to learn that, while I knew they wouldn't be announcing that it was going to be present next year — too soon, obviously —I hoped maybe it would be coming by 2015/16. Guess again. The first opera in the cycle, "Das Rheingold," will be staged in the 2016/17 season, with the other three, "Die Walkure," "Siegried" and "Gotterdammerung" performed in each subsequent season, with the whole megillah, as Wagner definitely would not say, being performed — three complete Ring Cycles — in April, 2020.
     Mark your calendars.
     At the press conference, General director Anthony Freud cut to the chase.
    "Wagner's Ring is one of the most iconic and fascinating music and stage works ever created," he said. "It represents the high water mark of our art form. It's unique in its scale and complexity, its fascination and, indeed, its ability to hook an audience."
     I appreciated the "hook an audience" part, a little whiff of P.T. Barnum in all this high culture. The Lyric, locked in the same life-or-death struggle that every arts organization faces in this age of Angry Birds, has to think of that too. You need to put the slop where the pigs can get at it. It can rationalize scooping up the groundlings with "The Sound of Music" later this season (a progression, or, if you prefer, decline, from "Porgy & Bess" to "Showboat" to "Oklahoma" to the von Trapps, which, for me, crosses an aesthetic Rubicon on the slide toward "Miss Saigon." But that's another post). Yet at the same time it can charge itself with the task of conquering this massive edifice of Teutonic bombast and excess—think 500 costumes—certain that that the I-Survived-the-Ring-Cycle crowd will break the doors down to get in. Of course we will.
     Why? Just to do it? To prove they can endure? In part, yes. But nobody sits through 15 hours of opera just to do it. Traffic school is also a time consuming ordeal, and you don't see people lining up to pay for the privilege, at least not voluntarily. For me, the first and last consideration in any opera is the music, and Wagner is off in another realm of power and weirdness. Sir Andrew Davis, who will conduct, nailed it with his opening remarks.
     "Wagner takes the Nordic sagas and makes them extremely modern," he said. 
     That is the key word: "modern." The Ring was composed in the 1850s and 1860s, a time when, in American, popular music consisted of barbershop quartets and banjos and "Oh! Susanna." Meanwhile, Wagner starts his masterpiece with this incredible sound, that Henry W. Simon calls "136 bars of rising sequence in an undulating 6/8 rhythm based entirely on the E-flat tonic chord," a low, vibrating hum that's like the whole blood-soaked, mechanized Frankenstein's monster of the 20th century about to be born, fluttering one red eye, stirring to life and straining against its restrains.  To me, you'd go to hear that sound alone, the first minute or two, and the fact that you have to sit through the next two and half more hours — "Rheingold" is the shortest of the four—well, nothing's perfect. 
    Of course, there is more—flying maidens, giants, a gold-mad dwarf. Alberich, the gnarled villain, who gets the cold shoulder from the Rheinmaidens, so steals their gold, renouncing love for power (a path the Germans as a whole would be skipping down soon enough). 
     To me, a novice, there's a joy in seeing the archetypical moment of an art form. In ballet, it's "Swan Lake," with those four white swans, arms interlocked, bobbing up and down en pointe. In jazz, it's Dizzy Gillespie, in a beret and heavy glasses and his soul patch, head tilted back, eyes closed, blowing his horn. And in opera it's the lady with the braids and the spear and the horned helmet—remember, "the opera ain't over until the fat lady sings?" That fat lady is Brunnhilde, to be sung in the upcoming Ring by soprano Christine Goerke, who was at the press conference and answered the opera press's  questions — mostly about scheduling, sadly. Listening to her speak in a normal New York accent, well, it was a bit of let down, like hearing David Copperfield discuss what kind of mirror he uses to make the elephant disappear. 
    I knew better than to ask any questions. I almost said, "You're going to wear the horned helmet, right?" But that might have been stupid and, besides, if they don't, I'd rather find out during the show — no doubt when she emerges from a cloud of dry ice, madly pedaling a unicycle and wearing a bicycle helmet, or whatever godawful odd twist they come up with — than know ahead of time, and spend the next five years brooding about it. 
     The thing with these longer works is, you have to adjust yourself to their pace. For the first 100 pages of Infinite Jest, I thought it was an artless Thomas Pynchon rip off. Then the magic kicked in and I thought it was genius. Ditto for Moby-Dick, where, the first 50 pages, there's a lot of sighing, on the part of the reader, and thinking, "yes, yes, whales." But then it draws you in to its unique realm. Maybe that's what sets these epic works apart. There is nothing like them. You wouldn't say, "that's the novel that's sort of like Remembrance of Things Past"  because there's nothing like it. There's nothing remotely like The Divine Comedy. And there's nothing like Wagner's Ring (thank God, because it's hard enough to cope with the one). To return to the great great Henry W. Simon, my go-to guy on opera:. "The Ring of the Nibelung is the greatest work of art ever produced by a single man, or the most colossal bore, or the work of a supreme megalomaniac," he writes. "It has been called all three repeatedly—and the epithets are by no means mutually exclusive."
     That sounds about right. To those who find the time demanded by the Ring unimaginable, a question: what would you do instead? I probably spent 20 hours this month playing on-line Scrabble, and never once had to contemplate the role of myth and man, power and ambition. I bet there are 15 hour of Bulls games on TV this week; nobody marvels at the discipline needed to watch that.
      No point in belaboring this; we've got three years to wait. But even if you never consider going, and most readers won't, you should take pleasure that it's being done at all, since we worry about the culture of the old fading in light of all this technology. While an army of technicians no doubt are working at this very moment to, oh, perfect a GPS suppository so your refrigerator always knows where you are and what you just ate, there is a small team of people in Chicago — highly-paid, supremely-talented people who dedicate their lives to this stuff—who are pouring their energies for the next five years into putting on a 145-year-old show, sung in German over 15 hours, a performance that not one Chicagoan in a hundred would dream of seeing. That's dedication to art. Yes, I've gone on too long about the Ring but, given the subject matter, I suppose that's only fitting. 

"Where was the word of God in those men?"

     The Roman Catholic Church is not above the law.
     It was above the law for many years — for centuries, in Europe, it was the law. And here it certainly acted as if it were a law unto itself. For many, many years.

     But not anymore.

     The church, as the 6,000 documents released Tuesday by the Archdiocese of Chicago make abundantly clear, felt that laws about rape, about child abuse and molestation, somehow did not apply to priests. That the police did not have to be notified when children were raped. That men whom it knew were a danger to children could be moved from one spot to another. Put in one position of trust and then, when that position was betrayed, slid easily into another. And another. And another.

     The Chicago church did so — we have to believe, we have no reason not to believe — not out of any inherent evil so much as from a blindness to where its true moral duty lay. Church leaders were trying to protect their church, to protect themselves. And by protecting their criminal priests, and themselves, what they ended up doing was hurting the church to an extent they couldn’t imagine, damaging its reputation and sapping it of hundreds of millions of dollars through lawsuits. Hurting it far more than it would have been hurt had the allegations simply come out when they were made. There is an almost biblical irony to that.
     The documents show how this happened under the leadership of three Chicago cardinals: John Cody, Joseph Bernardin and Francis George. Cody's tenure was already under a cloud due to financial malfeasance. George's has been marred by his pugnacious personality. But Joseph Bernardin was beloved, respected, far above the others, and it is painful to realize that he is culpable too. When he was accused of sexual abuse, he handled it in a forthright, pious way. But not all such accusations were so handled. And the sin, hidden for years, festered.
     If you're looking for bright spots, none of the accusations is after 1996, when the scope of the problem began to be abundantly clear. Perhaps that means there aren't more. Perhaps those are coming. You might point out that society in decades past did not fully grasp the magnitude of the damage caused by child sexual abuse, that it, generally, had difficulty dealing with such matters with force and candor, and that the church, being part of that society, also shared its flaws. That doesn't excuse what the church did, but it may help explain it, a little.
     Just a little. The church is a moral organization, or pretends to be, and yet it did not act morally. It put the interests of priests who betrayed their faith and their flock above the children of parishioners. That is a horrendous sin. Not only is it bad ethically, but it's bad policy, and the church has suffered, is suffering and will suffer for it, though not, it always must be remembered, anywhere near as much as the lonely, frightened, violated victims of these priests suffered. They are the true victims, and since the church at first tried to ignore them, attention should be paid to them now.
    Pope Francis has called sex abuse "the shame of the church." Just last week, according to Vatican radio, he said:
     "But are we ashamed? So many scandals that I do not want to mention individually, but all of us know. . . . We know where they are! Scandals. . . . The shame of the church!
     "But are we all ashamed of those scandals, of those failings of priests, bishops, laity? Where was the Word of God in those scandals; where was the Word of God in those men and in those women? They did not have a relationship with God! They had a position in the church, a position of power, even of comfort. But the Word of God, no!"
     Those who would rush automatically to defend the church, again, should remember that automatic defense of the institutional church, no matter the crime, no matter the facts, is what created this ceaseless nightmare in the first place. Catholic doctrine speaks of sin, and that the expiation of sin is through confession and repentance. These documents coming out can be considered a kind of public confession - forced, yes, but there nonetheless, now, the dark crimes being brought into the light. The penance is to redress these wrongs where they can be redressed, and to see that they do not occur again and - the hardest part - to understand the failings that led to them, because these failings still too often guide church actions. These abusive priests not only hurt the children in their care, they hurt the church that they supposedly served. Each of us must chose whom to support now: the rapists or the victims. There is no third choice.

Who knew it would get cold in January?

     Metra has been apologizing a lot lately, explaining that last week's severe weather caught them off guard and, umm, left them reeling, apparently. The air was too cold. The snow was too fine. Which the loyal Metra customer might be tempted to shrug off — generally the trains run on time — except that the railroad does lots of things in a cack- handed way. This is only the latest example. 

     The Union Station tracks are hellacious. The ceiling leaks -- not drops, but dribbles, showers of God-knows-what-liquid right in the middle of the dark, dank, crumbling platforms. Every time it rains -- not an extreme rain, just a rain rain. 

    The platforms are loud. They're smokey -- Metra can't seem to ventilate the place. Nor can they get the people out. The station doesn't seem designed for disembarking passengers from trains, and thus they must crowd together and wait in enormous lines, shuffling up the stairs and toward the light and air. It's dreary, and dangerous, and after some panic causes a stampede and kills 17 people, remember that Metra had been warned explicitly about the deathtrap — right here, on Jan. 21, 2014 — and did nothing. 

     It goes on. There is no signage that tells you, when you get off the train, which way is the Madison Street exit and which way the station -- or, rather, there is a sign, but it's so poorly designed, high up and out of sight, that nobody notices it. Metra generally has not mastered the entire art of communicating words to people. That's slightly understandable on the platform, where the deafening din, which would be illegal to inflict upon unprotected workers in factories,  drowns out any attempt to communication. But it's that way in the station too, where I noticed this gentleman, during the cold snap earlier this month, using a bullhorn attempt to inform the milling, confused crowd about the bolloxed  schedule. You'd think they'd get the whole "speaker" technology down by now.

    It's perhaps too easy to connect Metra's present woes with the mess over the summer related to the expensive firing of former CEO, Alex Clifford. But listening to the Metra counsel rhapsodize about Michael Madigan's 1st Amendment rights to bully government workers into giving raises for his chosen pets, and attending a farcical hearing of the House Mass Transit Committee, you came away with the sense that none of these people were lying awake at night trying to figure out how to keep the switches from freezing up come  January. They were padding their pockets and plotting their escapes. 

    Metra offered Clifford $718,000 to go away quietly. I bet that would defrost a lot of door mechanisms. Me, I'd have let him air his, as it turns out, completely legitimate complaints, and hired a few more clean-up crews. 
     In Metra's defense, they have a lot of hard-working, decent, friendly conductors (and a few pompous, theatrical, crusty old jerks, but they're tolerable). They generally do a good job. But not always, not consistently, and not lately. 

     The temperature supposed to hover around zero again today. 

It's hard to believe what the Right will believe

     The devil makes work for idle hands, as the Puritan fathers used to say, praising the protective power of hard work and keeping busy. Nowadays, they’d say the devil makes copy for idle eyes.

Such as late Friday, when, weary with tilling the reasonable world, I wandered over to the Drudge Report to see what was doing in that fun house Hall of Mirrors, and noticed this headline: “REPORT: 41k Canadians flee country over health care system ...”

     Which caused me to think — perhaps the first thought applied to that particular item — Canadians flee ... to where? Where are those Canadians fleeing? Surely not here.

     Intrigued, I clicked on the link, and was brought to The Daily Caller, a “24-hour news publication providing its audience with original reporting, in-depth investigations, thought-provoking commentary and breaking news.” Nine million visitors a month. 

     The story begins: “Every year thousands of Canadians have no choice but to seek medical care outside of the country’s single-payer health care system,” then cites a report from the “free-market Fraser Institute.” How many Canadians do this? Exactly 41,838 became “medical tourists” in 2013, it says, who “sought care outside of their hockey-loving country.” That is the extent of The Daily Caller’s in-depth investigation. The rest of the article speculates about the reasons Canadians would leave: “concerns about quality, seeking out more advanced health care facilities, higher tech medicine or better outcomes.” 

     In case the meaning of this is lost on The Daily Caller readers, it quotes the director of health policy studies at Fraser, who spells it out: “That a considerable number of Canadians traveled and paid to escape the well-known failings of the Canadian health care system speaks volumes about how well the system is working for them.”

    “A considerable number.” Now that’s an interesting phrase. Kinda vague, compared to a specific figure like “41,838.” So let us ask one of those probing, in-depth questions that The Daily Caller suggests it likes to ask: Just how considerable is that number?  

     Are 41,838 Canadians a lot? 
      How could we determine that? Well, we could compare it to another country. Are there any other countries nearby? Yes. The United States. The United States is directly south of Canada. The two share a border. (And if I seem to have clicked into simplistic language, remember, right-wingers will be reading this. I want them to follow along).

     And do medical tourists also leave the U.S. looking for health care in other countries? Yes, they do. Is that a knowable number? Yes, it is.

     The Centers for Disease Control estimated about 750,000 Americans travel abroad to seek medical care, primarily because it is far cheaper.

     But wait, you might ask. While 750,000 is far more than 41,838, is not the U.S. a far more populous nation than Canada? Yes, it is. The population of the United States is 311 million, while the population of Canada is 35 million. Which means, there is one medical tourist for every 414 people in the U.S., while in Canada, there is one for every 836 people.

     Meaning, if medical tourism is a sign of poor health care — as The Daily Caller claims with its insultingly simple bit of agitprop and the Drudge Report brainlessly echoes and trumpets — the problem is twice as bad in the free-market United States as in socialized-medicine Canada.

     And this doesn’t even factor in that the numbers come from the Fraser Institute, a group dedicated to boosting corporations and running down government, research paid for by Exxon and the Koch Brothers.

     None of this matters to the Right, of course. They form their conclusions first — government bad, Obama bad, immigrants bad, gays bad, women bad — then venture out into the world in their junkie scramble to find something they can twist into proof.

     The sad thing about the whole health care debate is there was none. President Obama tried, and to a degree succeeded, to bring the nation into line with every other industrialized nation on earth by offering health care for people who need it. And the Republicans fought like dogs to stop him and now, having failed, are trying to roll it back. I wouldn’t have believed there would be a dozen people in the country gullible enough to be against American citizens having health care, wouldn’t believe adults would cling to our broken, expensive, erratic system just because their corporate overlords told them to. But they do just that, embracing any idiocy that scratches their itch. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.

   

Talk about justice delayed...

     A surprising number of murder victims are killed by their own family members — 25 percent in 2011, according to FBI statistics.

     That’s nothing new. Go back to ancient Greece. If you look at the family of Agamemnon, King of Argos, not only did he murder his daughter, then was killed in revenge by his wife, Clytemnestra, but she in turn was killed by their son, Orestes, in retribution.

     Was Orestes right to kill his mom? Justified or no, some wanted his head. His defense: Apollo told him to do it.

     If that situation intrigues you, you are in good company. Some of Chicago’s most respected legal minds will argue that case Jan. 29 to benefit the National Hellenic Museum, which pairs Dan Webb, of Winston & Strawn, and noted personal injury lawyer Robert Clifford for the defense, facing the prosecutorial might of former U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and Patrick Collins, of Perkins, Cole, in a trial overseen by Judge Richard Posner, of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, joined by two other judges.

     It is the same A-list group that tried Socrates last year to benefit the museum, an event that attracted a thousand people and reverberated across the country.
     "The trial of Socrates really captured the attention of a lot of people nationwide," Clifford said. "We're reproducing the program for the American College of Trial Lawyers." I was a juror on the Socrates trial, voting — to my vast surprise — to condemn the philosopher, based on Fitzgerald's ironclad case against him. I'm sitting on the Orestes jury, too, though so is everyone else in the room.
      "This story is really the first time that Greek democracy evolved to where there was judgment by the community, by the people, and the right to trial by jury," said Clifford. "Up to this time, it was a bloody society based on revenge and family."
     A bloody society, which, I must point out, many gun fanatics dream of returning to. I'm not sure why the Second Amendment should trump the Seventh Amendment, which gives us trial by jury, but while vigilante justice is celebrated in some quarters, actual deliberative justice gets second-guessed and ridiculed. I'm not expecting the trial of Orestes to change that, but it is a timely reminder that we should respect jury trials more than we do.
     All of this high-priced legal talent is volunteering their time, a reminder that, like jury trials, lawyers get a bad rap sometimes.
     "First and foremost, this is intended to benefit a worthy cause, the Hellenic Museum," Clifford said.
     Having seen it last year, there is nothing jokey or ad hoc about the proceedings. These guys come prepared, and the event is fascinating to watch and participate in.
     "For the lawyers, it helps us raise awareness of principles; it's a real privilege to be involved in something like this," Clifford said. "It keeps you engaged, on your best scholarship. All four lawyers will spend time reading things different than modern-day briefs. It enriches you as a person, helps your set of trial skills. It's not the same thing as a real trial, but your juices are flowing and it helps you maintain your edge when you do go into the courtroom."
     The trial will take place from 6 to 9 p.m. Jan. 29 at the UIC Forum. Go to nationalhellenicmuseum.org to buy the $100 tickets without hefty service fees that don't go to the museum. The $50 student tickets must be purchased in person at the museum gift shop with a student ID.
     "Duty, honor, revenge, justice," Clifford said. "All these concepts are in play here."

Buy my poster

     I love posters. They catch your attention. They freeze a moment — an event, a time, an era. They are art, or can be. They convey useful information. Posters are the predecessor of newspapers, which began as handbills stuck on walls, and — encouraging to those of us who linger in the inky professions — they not only remain, but thrive in the electronic age. 

Atlas Stationers, 227 W. Lake St., Chicago, a cool, family-owned store,
crammed with office supplies and neat stuff.

     When Eli's Cheesecake advertised on my blog in November and December, I decided to take the money Marc Schulman paid for the ads and roll it back into my blog, in the form of marketing. And the very first idea I came up with — perhaps damningly—was to make a poster. Something hand-typeset. There was a pleasing symmetry to that: the old supporting the new. I phoned a few letterpress shops in Chicago, but never heard back from them.
      Undaunted, I contacted the mothership of poster printing: Hatch Show Print, of Nashville, Tennessee, a busy and growing letterpress shop that has been turning out posters, for circuses and country music acts and, now, a blog, continuously since 1879. They have an unrivaled collection of wooden type, some characters six feet tall.  In November, I wrote this post about them, and commissioned Hatch to make my poster — after I endured the customary two-month waiting period, that is.
     I sketched out the poster, and Hatch's Laura B. produced the poster at right from my design, printed on heavy stock paper. Working with her was pleasant beyond words. I'm biased, of course, but I find the result very handsome. Only 100 were made, and I've signed and numbered them, 1 through 100. Most I'm either giving to friends and supporters of the blog, or putting up around town, in simpatico places of business around Chicago, in the windows of friendly stores. Not only is it lovely art, I tell the at first skeptical proprietors, but if they put one up, I will photograph the poster and post the picture on the blog, where they will enjoy a blaze of publicity, and people will consider them hip. I'm thinking through the ethical/legal aspects of also plastering the posters in public spaces—that'll be a separate entry. What's the point of a poster if you don't cook up some wheat paste and slap it up on a brick wall, somewhere? The question is where. And I suppose "if" too. One must act morally. 
     When I announced my intentions last November, several readers signed up to buy the poster sight unseen —I have a list of their names, and will contact them individually. But I'm also offering a few for sale to the public for the quite reasonable price of $15, plus $6 shipping and handling (aka, postage and a sturdy mailing tube). I'm planning to sell 40 and then stop. 
    If you would like one, send a $21 check to me, Neil Steinberg, at 2000 Center Ave., Northbrook, IL, 60062. If you're in a different country, send an international money order and add and extra $5 — $26 total — for the international postage. Make sure to include your name and address. While I would never suggest that the poster's scarcity will make it valuable someday, well, stranger things have happened. When I'm dead and the things are selling on eBay for a thousand dollars a pop, you'll wish you had bought one now. And if they're never worth more than $15, or two bucks, or a dime—my hunch—it'll be something you'll enjoy looking at for quite some time, and remind you which blog you should consult on a daily basis.

What happens next?

 

     There is a schism when it comes to the American Jewish support for Israel, between the old-school, United Jewish Appeal, whatever-Israel-does-is-right line of thinking, and an emerging, newer, J-Street, get-your-act-together attitude that tends to attract younger, more progressive Jews. I find myself straddling the two, though shifting toward the latter. If something you care about is hurtling toward ruin, cheering them as they sail over the cliff is not my idea of "support." And the Israeli government doesn't help its case by a black-or-white, for-us-or-against-us mentality that tends to ignore the idea of a middle perspective.

     What happens next? 

     A child’s question, really, something naive, blurted out when the tale goes on too long. Cut to the chase, Daddy. How does the story end?

     The last time I bothered talking to Israeli leaders in Chicago — more than two years ago — I sat down with the then consul general and trotted that question out, my device for cutting through the endless seesawing of blame. Forget blame, forget history — that’s done, the rope both sides use to play tug-of-war as the years roll by and nothing happens. Stipulate history as having occurred; what about now? You’ve got these 4 million Palestinians living under your control, in Gaza and the West Bank, for approaching 50 years. What is going to happen to them?

     At which point there was a lot of talk about settlers and land and the two-state solution and how there is no Palestinian leadership with which to make peace.

All very true; none of it an answer. 

The Palestinian leadership, or, rather, “leaderships” since there are several, can’t come up with an answer either. They issue a wail of grievance, some legitimate, some not, one heard again last week when former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon died, years after suffering a stroke. They brand him a mass murderer for allowing Christian militia to slaughter Palestinians in Lebanon in 1983.

     Yes, yes, all true. But what do the Palestinians want now? You would think, as oppressed as they supposedly are, they would be hot to push some immediate practical solution. But they're not. Their vision involves the Jews magically vanishing and the country returning to them in its 1947 condition; not that it was theirs in 1947 either, mind you. If there's a Palestinian plan besides the Israelis handing the whole country over to them on a platter, I haven't heard it.
     No wonder I've barely mentioned Israel since ... November 2011, because nothing has changed, and stasis is, well, "boring" is the wrong word. How about "tragic." This situation is the definition of a tragedy — those involved squirm against their natures but do nothing definitive as fate bears them toward their doom. This is a situation penned by Arthur Miller.
     For Israel, pulling out unilaterally just gives the terrorist minority freedom to lob rockets into Israel, again. To stay continues the civic nightmare that ebbs and flares.
     So where does that leave us? Israel could keep going in this fashion. The world scowls, but luckily for Israel, its existence is not a referendum. The world doesn't have to love Jews in order for them to survive. My filter for viewing the situation can be summed up in four words: "They hated us before." Before Israel was created, a good number of otherwise civilized countries viewed the Jews who had lived there for centuries as a foreign presence who could be guiltlessly killed. Kind of how the Palestinians generally view Jews to this day. That is the key that unlocks the mystery of a world that yawns off centuries of atrocity in most places but sits up, takes notice, and waves Israeli misdeeds as proof of ineligibility to exist. And the Palestinians? They're lucky in that, unlike, oh, the Kurds, their jailer is the Israelis, who the world, for reasons mentioned above, keeps on a short leash. Otherwise they might languish in limbo forever, like Turkish Kurds and, guess what? They still might.
     Shall we end on an optimistic note, false though it may be? As a Jew, I have a dog in this race: I liked to think that Judaism means something, that it isn't just the brand of people in power in a particular sliver of land in the Middle East. Judaism isn't just matzo balls, but an attitude toward justice, in theory, so that if grinning history places 4 million unhappy people under your authority, you don't just shrug their lives away and push them into increasingly small, impoverished and desperate corners of a land they don't own. You figure it out, eventually. Israel has tried — that old devil history, creeping in — and it hasn't worked. But guess what? Israel has to keep trying. It has to figure it out, using that vaunted Israeli strategic thinking that once got it out of pickles like this. What happens next? The fence was smart — define a border, keep the bombers out. Now they have to take the next step, move from this problem to the next set of problems, whatever it will be.
     Never leaving is not a forever strategy. The Palestinians have an advantage over the Kurds or other recipients of the short end of history's stick in that a swath of the world is happy to make them the poster children for the Further Crimes of the Jews. But they shouldn't mistake that dubious honor for actual concern about their lives and future. That, they must come up with themselves. It would be a good start. What happens next?