#this is fun I wrote a final for a class on the rise of anti heroes in media

[fxreflyes]

ahhh thank you so much for the tag Nico!! @dieonysian 🫶🏻🫶🏻

are you the main character or the side character?

oh I how adore a quiz!!

no pressure tags: @cosmmicdancer @kaaaaaaarf @polaroidcats @shipsnsails @ethercain @sunattacksthemoon @appreciatedmoron @sugarsnappeases @moongays @fatemy-friend @wanderingdonut and anyone else who might like to do this I love seeing everyone’s quiz results!!

[goodlucksnez]

All//might & Ai//zawa snz fic

So after reading the latest manga chapter where all//might is standing in the rain for a long time I was like “ummm what if he got sick” so I wrote this

also poni really wanted to read this so i would have written more but its okay maybe another time

WARNING FUCKING ANGST BUT ALSO CUTE

Enjoy 2100 words of y//agi//ai//zawa

“Shouta I’m back.” The lanky former symbol of piece said as he entered the small apartment of the underground hero. As he looked around at the dimly lit interior, he could not help but shudder as the cool air chilled his wet clothes from the rainstorm, he just found himself in. Now that he was retired, he had many hours on his hands and he had spent that time doing all he could in the war against the villains.

This last journey, he found himself back to the site of the battle of his successor and class 1A intending to check on the anti-hero supporters who refused to evacuate. It was raining, and the blonde was slowly getting drenched. However, the cold and numbness that normally came with the rain didn’t seem to bother him anymore, as if all of the feeling had drained from his body and he was left a void. As he looked around at the broken buildings and cobblestone of the street laid before him where the previous battle was held, he couldn’t help but see his statue. He remembered that statue…his signature phrase “I am here” engraved on the bottom in granite stone. He remembered meeting with the sculptor and posing for what seemed like hours.

‘Such a long time ago’ he thought to himself.

The smile that was carved into the stone was so perfect, however as he looked at the wide grin, he felt like he was looking in a fun house mirror. The man he saw portrayed in this stone wasn’t him. He vowed to make the world a better place but now that he reached his end, he saw he failed. The world has turned out even more broken after his retirement and he was unable to protect the one student he promised he would. He felt that he’s gone further away than heroism than anyone else. As tears slowly started to cloud his vision he blinked and saw a cardboard sign held up by a thin piece of rope around the statues neck written on it in red spray paint was “I am not here”. As a shudder passed through his body he was brought back to the current reality. He stepped inside leaving a trail of waterlogged foot prints as he made his way to the kitchen. On the cool stonework countertops, he found a yellow sticky note as he began to read the note, scribbled in messy handwriting, he heard the familiar click of the lock as he turned to face the entryway. He saw the familiar black hair of his partner. As he watched Shouta shook out the umbrella that he had in his hand he spoke up.

“I was just about to read your note.”

The underground hero jumped at the sudden noise and as his piercing eyes fixated on the source of the sound he quickly relaxed when he saw the gentle smile of the former Pro. As he stepped inside and put his key in the bowl, it echoed in the quiet hallway. Shouta then motioned to the multiple bags he was holding.

“Don’t think we want to eat Ramen for the rest of our lives do we? Might be a good idea to get some real food.” he said as he continues to carry them into the kitchen and put them down on the counter.

As he put the bags down, he looked over at the wisp of the man standing before him. His diminished stature had taken a toll on his health. Tired eyes sat in sunken-in-sockets. His normally vibrant school bus yellow hair had turned to a grayish yellow mustard color and even though he would never admit it, he saw the clump of hair in the trashcan every morning. He was dying. It was an unspoken truth in their relationship but the underground hero would do anything to make sure he was happy and healthy in the final years of his life. He deserved that after all didn’t, he?

As he began emptying the bags onto the counter, he couldn’t help but notice the puddle of water that seem to be growing larger under the thin man, however Yagi continue to shiver and shake too preoccupied reading a can of tuna. As Shouta reached for the can, he met the eyes and said in a gravelly voice.

“You should change out of those clothes don’t want you catching a cold now do we?”

The former pro simply smiled although it was hard to fully sell it as he turned his head and coughed violently into his soaking arm sleeve. Immediately Shouta furrowed his brow and when he met the gaze of him again, he was quickly put in his place.

“Shouta how many times do I have to tell you, my health isn’t a concern of mine…it’s an undeniable fact, besides you don’t actually get sick from the rain.”

Shouta quickly interjected. “No but you could get hypothermia,” he began to plead “come on will you change out of those clothes…for me.”

As the older man sighed there was a clear rasp in his voice before he nodded quietly and turned to leave, his shoes squeaking on the tile floor as he left the kitchen.

After all the food was put away Shouta turned on the tea kettle to warm some water knowing full well that even with the warmest clothes Yagi could never be warm. As he walked slowly down the hall passing the bathroom and the study, he found himself at the door of their bedroom. He could hear fabric rustling but before he could enter another sound echoed throughout the house.

“hih'TSS-heh!”

A harsh sneeze echoed in the still apartment. ‘Even in his weakened state his sneeze is powerful’ Shouta thought to himself as he pushed on the door letting it slowly swing open. The image before him would startle anyone who knew All Might in his prime. The man had an oversized baggy red wool sweater in his hands. His silhouette illuminated by the ceiling light above seemed sickly and weak. The scar near his appendix which had a spider like web pattern that spread through his torso, as if venom was slowly poisoning his body was in full view. Yagi was bent at the waist and as he brought his other hand up to wipe that his nose Shouta could see small irritation tears had sprung to his eyes.

Shouta took a few steps forward and whispered a quiet bless you, a phrase his dear friend Mic had told him before his departure from this world.

Yagi quickly regained his posture and a slight blush crept into his sickly skin. He muttered a quick thank you before bunching up the wool sweater in a vain attempt to put it on. Shouta reached out his hands and slowly grasped the fabric and as the blonde bent forward, he quickly but diligently guided his his head through the hole in the sweater followed by both his arms.

Once the sweater was on the frail man’s body, he went to the nightstand which was stacked high with different medicines as well as vitamins and other health supplies and grabbed a travel pack size of tissues, before handing one to his partner.

In a voice gravelly but still soft and concerned he asked. “Did you catch a cold?”

All Might sighed his breathe with a distant wheeze could be heard, simply shook his head in agreement before sitting down on the chest at the end of the bed. He then put his head in his hands. ‘Why am I like this, he thought to himself ‘I have someone who generally cares about me and yet I hide, I know I failed as a hero but I have a failed him as a partner as well?’ He quickly turned his head to the side as a fearsome tickle demanded his attention.

ESH!... AhhhttTZZschhuw!...iyy-ih-ESH!"

The sneezes rack through his body leaving him panting slightly. As his lung struggled to breathe, he sniffed at the thick congestion and wiped his nose on the tissue that Shouta and handed him minutes before. As he looked up, he was surprised to find the room in front of him was oddly empty he called out in the voice louder than he intended.

“Sho where have you gone?”

A reply quickly followed “I’m making your favorite soup lay down in the bed will you…also bless you.”

He followed the order he was given and as he climbed into the black satin bed, he couldn’t help but shiver as his body demanded more heat. He found that he was always cold these days, no matter how much he bundled up. It was as if no heat could be retained in this frail body that he now called home. Within minutes Shouta entered the room but to his surprise with an assortment of things. He had a tray, one you would see in an old movie where the wife would dot on his husband, it was decorated in a sheer white tablecloth decorated with pink flowers. It had a bowl of a steaming liquid as well as two mugs and a vase full of sunflowers. As there are sickly sweet smell drifted in the room and Yagi couldn’t help but smile.

“You remembered, my favorite flowers.” He said with a voice thick with congestion. As Shouta sat the tray down over Yagi’s lap and climbed onto the bed, he smiled a slight blush sprung to his cheeks before he spoke.

“You told me a long time ago that you admired sunflowers for their optimism. You said it’s a form of gratitude because it honors the gift of life, always growing towards that bright sun,” his voice cracked as he spoke again “you told me that it turns its head to face the rising sun in the east and it follows the path across the sky throughout the day…. it’s that determination that you admired and that’s what I admire about you…even when you are being stupid.”

The two sat in silence for a few moments before the dull blonde turned to the side and harshly sneezed a triple.

“H-hhdihtt! Hhdddtschhhuww!!...hUDD’tschhuuuw!!”

 Shouta quickly handed him a tissue and began spooning the hot liquid onto the spoon he had brought.

“Open up Sunlight.” The blonde chuckled. “I’m not a child Sho I can feed myself.”

He replied “I know but I promised to take care of you, so just let me do this.”

“Very well” Yagi said as Shouta began to spoon feed the hot liquid into his mouth. The soup was warm and comforting, a hint chicken as well as carrots and other vegetables immediately filled the blonde’s mouth. It was delicious and he quickly swallowed as Shouta filled the spoon once more. But as he drew the steaming liquid closer to the blondes face the steam irritated his nose and he found himself pinching forward.

Hhdddtschhhuww!

As he sneezed, he hit his head on the spoon causing the spoon to fall and land in the soup creating a splash and slightly scolding the skin of both of the pros. Yagi would’ve laughed himself if he wasn’t preoccupied continuing to sneeze.

“N’doe…hHHT! hhnnkkKSCCHHhhuw!! ESHHHUHhhh!! Can hhtt-hhHHh! Hiitt’usszhhuh!! Sto hh-h stop hHHh! Hiitt’usszhhuh!! ESHHHUHhhh!!

Shouta quickly slid the tray to the side table and gently straddled the former symbol of peace. As the blonde continue to sneeze Shouta commanded for him to lift his head. As Yagi did, Shouta pressed hard against the cupid bow of his upper lip and almost immediately then sensation of needing to sneeze dissipated and Yagi breathed a sigh of relief. As he sniffed, he opened his watery eyes to look at a Shouta whose face was determined.

He asked while sniffling back congestion “snf snff ugh what are you doing?”

Shouta smirked before replying “I’ve learned a few things in my day, such as there are certain pressure points in the face that aid in congestion for example.” As he moved his hands to the sunken in cheekbones of the thin man and Yagi, he could feel his sinuses drain and his sighed in relief again.

“Thank you” Yagi basically moaned as the underground hero retracted his hands.

“I’m afraid it won’t last, but for the moment you will stop sneezing which is an improvement on your health…also bless you like 15 times I think.” Shouta said with chuckle “Now how about we both lay down and head to bed.”

Yagi smiled and replied “I love that idea as much as I love you.”

FIN

[jpegjade]

Physical Therapy - Ch. 1 (Spencer)

WELCOME TO PHYSICAL THERAPY!! in honor of this bish starting physical therapy in real life (and missing it bc i can’t drive and my mom and i’s schedules not being synched on google calendar all the time) i’ve decided to write a fic about it. it will be a little series with a goal (yes, an end game) and it’ll be cute. some of it is based on actual things that happen and some is literally just the story. ENJOY.

gender: neutral

tw: nothing that i can think of

genre: fluff | angst

Description: After getting shot in the leg, spencer goes through physical therapy before he can get back in the field completely. What happens when he starts to fall for his physical therapy assistant? 

__________________

Two honks at 6am meant that it was time for Spencer to get going. Derek was downstairs, in the car, waiting on boy wonder to crutch his way out of the apartment complex. Derek wasn’t sure how to feel about this trip considering he missed his early morning run for this but he knew how nervous Spencer was for his evaluation today so he didn’t mind as much as he could have minded. 

Spencer was patiently waiting in a pair of very short shorts, mismatched socks, and running shoes. He threw on a t-shirt and looked in the mirror, noting how tired he looked. He hadn’t been sleeping well lately for some reason but he couldn’t be sure why. He combed out his hair one more time before he and his crutches headed to the elevators. 

“Ready, kid?” Derek said, opening the front door for Spencer like a world class chauffeur would if Spencer was a celebrity. 

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Spencer mumbled.

In truth, Spencer was more than ready to get started on his physical therapy journey. He wanted to get back in the field full time, adrenaline pumping, connecting with victims, walking again. He didn’t mind the assisted mobility but it was hard for him to know that the best he could do sometimes was stay back in the office or hang out in Garcia’s batcave. 

The car ride was filled with a comfortable silence between the two men. Derek was thinking about how he could make up his missed morning run by doing another type of high cardio workout while Spencer was just trying to figure out why it had to be him. He wouldn’t wish the frustration of his recovery process on anyone else on the team but the frustration of the recovery process just got to him on some days. Today was one of those days. 

Derek pulled up to the physical therapy clinic sooner than Spencer hoped. Part of that was because Derek was a very fast driver while the other part was because Spencer wasn’t paying attention for most of the drive. 

“You owe me one.” Derek said, completely joking. Well… Partially. That morning run was what kept him awake during the day, energizing him for work. 

“Do you want to come in?” Spencer said, looking down at his hands in his lap. 

Spencer’s hands were tapping his leg as he awaited Derek’s answer. He was nothing short of a nervous wreck on the inside. All he could think about was how much pain he would be in once the evaluation was over and the physical therapist had finished poking and prodding at his knee. He hated to think that it would be worse than everything else going on. Plus he still had to go to work today. 

“Sure, kid.” Derek said. 

Derek wasn’t going to sit in the car and do nothing the whole time so he might as well support his friend. 

Climbing out of the car, the boys slowly made it to the sliding glass doors of the physical therapy clinic. Much to Spencer’s surprise, it was nothing like he originally imagined it to be. Some part of him thought it would somewhat resemble the clinic where his mother resided but it was completely different. There were floor to ceiling walls for over half of the first floor building. High tech equipment was stationed everywhere from anti gravity treadmills to hand bike motors, medicine balls and so much more. Spencer stood in the doorway, leaning on his crutches, while he took everything in. There was so much light in the air, it was almost like the feeling of recovery was airy and not meant to bog him down. This was a strange feeling for him to comprehend...

“You coming, pretty boy?” Derek called, taking a break from chatting with the pretty receptionist. 

Spencer and his crutches walked over to the front desk and grabbed the paperwork that covered how much pain he was in today. He filled it out quickly, hoping to get everything over with sooner than later. He was already here so he might as well just finish everything quickly so he could get out of the place. 

When he finished writing everything down, he returned the paperwork to the receptionist who slipped him a piece of paper and pointed to Derek. Spencer already knew it was the receptionist’s personal phone number and he didn’t even need to look at the paper. Sitting down, Spencer handed Derek to a very confused Derek before it hit him what it was. Derek winked at the receptionist, who blushed before answering the phone. 

“Spencer?” A voice called his name shortly after he sat down. 

It was nice to know that here, he didn’t have to be a doctor. He was just another person healing. He didn’t have to be smart, he could just exist. 

“Good luck.” Derek said, noticing that Spencer’s hand was shaking in the slightest bit. 

“My name is Nora and I will be your lead physical therapist.” The woman said, walking Spencer to a vacant padded table. It reminded Spencer of the types of tables you lay on when you get a massage. 

He only got a massage once when Garcia got stood up on a couples’ massage date. He spent half of his part of the massage giving the masseuse facts about how their job could actually give them an infection from the amount of germs in the air and on the table. His delivery of facts caused the room to be incredibly uncomfortable and bleach the table very thoroughly. By the time he and the masseuse finished, only 5 minutes were left in the massage and Garcia was left horrified and amused at the same time. 

“Don’t worry. We bleach the tables every time someone finishes a session.” Nora said, noticing the look on Spencer’s face. Spencer visibly relaxed and sat on the table. 

“So, Spencer, tell me a little bit about yourself.” Nora followed up, pulling up a backless roller chair. 

“Well, I was on a case and the unsub, unknown subject, shot at a dad but it ended up hitting me in the leg instead and…” Spencer paused, looking at Nora’s amused face. 

“No, I mean tell me about you. Your hobbies, what you do for fun, things like that. I need to do a complete profile for you so I know how your quality of life has been affected and which exercises you can do at home so we aren’t pushing too fast.” Nora smiled at Spencer. 

“I work.” Spencer said in a matter-of-fact tone. He didn’t really have anything else to say. 

“Okay. So you’re a workaholic.” Nora wrote. She was about to ask a new question when you came quickly walking to Nora. 

Spencer was left dumbfounded. There seemed to be a halo of light radiating around you, making you glow. He knew it was the sun finally rising but his brain short circuited as he continued to gaze at you. 

“Hey Nora?” You said, looking down at your boss. “Mrs. Gillespi wants to know why you haven’t come back to check her form. She doesn’t trust me because, her words here, I ‘look like a child who doesn’t know their left foot from the color orange.’” 

“Sure. Here, you can take over Spencer’s evaluation.” She handed you her clipboard.

You looked at the detailed notes on the paper and then up at Spencer, who looked like one of the youngest people here. 

“It’s not often we get cute guys in this place. Other than Kyle. But Kyle’s an asshole who could almost be my dad.” You blurted, not realizing you said it outloud as soon as Nora left. 

You noticed that he started blushing and looking at his converse and you realized that you said something. You usually spoke your thoughts out loud but the people you worked with were used to it so no one bothered to say anything.

“What?” You asked, confused. 

“You called me cute.” Spencer said. “Which is fine. I don’t understand the appeal but I do believe that your blurting of what you perceive as a fact is a coping mechanism. It can also be tied to ADHD, which is a common mental disorder that causes your brain to impulsively say things.” Spencer paused, looking at your face. 

“What?” You asked, again, confused. 

“I’m not saying you have ADHD. I’m a doctor but not that kind of doctor. Although I could get another Ph. D. Prove my father wrong. And…” Spencer realized he was rambling. 

“Cute and a talker.” You said, writing that down. 

You wrote something down on the paper that Spencer couldn’t see but he was curious about. 

“Let’s check out that leg.” You said, pulling out an instrument that looked like a compass. 

You asked Spencer to move his knee certain ways and it wasn’t as bad as Spencer thought. You were gentle, soft even. Your hands were delicate and you ended the session massaging his leg and smiling at him. 

“You were a good patient today, doctor Spencer.” You said, smiling at him. 

Spencer blushed, unable to meet your eyes. 

“You… I mean… I enjoyed our session.” Spencer said. “Which I don’t normally enjoy. Not that I’ve been shot before. Or had physical therapy. Or been here. Or even worked out really.”

“You’re funny, doc.” You smiled. “Your next appointment is Tuesday of next week according to the schedule so I guess I’ll see you then. I can’t wait.” 

Spencer stared at you as he wondered why you were so excited. 

“Why?” Spencer asked. 

“It’s not every day I get the case for a cute guy who is smart and awkward. It’s almost like the heavens have answered my hopes and prayers.” You joked, looking up at the ceiling and putting your hand on your heart. 

“I believe in science.” Spencer stated, grabbing his crutches. 

“A man of science. Does it get any better? What’s your star sign?” You joked. 

“Scorpio.” Spencer stated. 

“Oop. All the scorpios I know have been some hoes. You better not be a hoe, doc.” 

“I’m definitely not a gardening tool, if that’s what you’re referring to. Otherwise, I’d like to thing my lack of dating skills doesn’t qualify as being a… hoe? Although, I don’t believe in the use of the word to describe someone who enjoys spending time with multiple people. I’d like to think the use of the word is meant in jest and fun for a term of endearment.” Spencer stood up, balancing on his crutches. 

“I’ll be the judge of that.” You said, walking slowly with Spencer to the front desk. 

“What’s your name?” Spencer asked, turning to you. He realized that he never got your name.

“Y/n.” You smiled. 

The clouds must have parted again because as soon as you turned to walk away from him, towards Nora, you were covered in another halo. And just like that, you were gone again.

_____________________

Future tag list: 

@ellvswriting @sageandberries-png @l0ve-0f-my-life @rexorangecouny @kennedywxlsh

Want to be added? Tell me!

[dangermousie]

Mousie’s New and Improved Top 20 Cdramas List

Because why not. These are ordered in terms of being my favorite as opposed to pure quality - if I was trying to be objective, it would probably be rearranged, but I like being petty and subjective.

You will notice that literally every drama on this list is a period drama. Much as I adore period cdramas, contemporary ones rarely work for me.  

20. Princess Agents (tie)

MV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll6x8zf2CnQ

Our heroine is a slave in a brutal society who becomes a feared general, fighting for freedom and love of a Yan prince. But her heart might actually lie with a seemingly cold adversary who is madly in love with her (I shipped them so hard!) I was one of five people who loved the infamous cliffhanger ending because it made a brutal kind of sense (You can read the novel if you want a different resolution.)

20. Tribes and Empires (tie)

MV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyRsPAGUz-Q

This one has a hell of an open ending, but it’s so gorgeous and epic, I don’t even care. Set in a fantasy empire, it follows three men - a half-human prince, a cursed son of a general, and an orphaned leader of a barbarian tribe. A feast for the eyes.

19. Ice Fantasy

MV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C05lhfrWgQg

A visually stunning high fantasy with elves, quests, a shockingly wonderful hero, brotherly love, toughest lady general ever as OTP and basically everything I like.

18. The General and I

MV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XDR17kwXYM

The lengthy OTP separation brings its place in this list down, but otherwise a gorgeous romance between two enemies - a general and a female strategist, is a total swoon and so intense. 

17. Three Kingdoms 2010

MV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3RVpdYDpYA

This one is a magnum opus of 100 episodes, with a tour de force performance by Chen Jian Bin as Cao Cao. Battles, politics, and even though it’s very secondary, one of my favorite love stories in cdramas. This one is if you want to use your brain as well as your heart.

16. Colourful Bone 

MV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4O5yb3VBh4

It probably doesn’t deserve to be this high on the list but it hits all my narrative and shippy kinks with a common-sense heroine taking in an abused and mistreated death machine and teaching him to be human. Mmmm.

15. Young Warriors 

MV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO83qvKaoSM

What do you get when you have seven awesome heroic brothers, a star-studded cast, tragic stories about heroism and love and just amazingness? You get this drama. 

14. Strange Hero Yi Zi Mei

MV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFVDAuFOyWE

Band of misfits fight corruption and uncover mysteries. This one is the most underrated drama on my list. Also, Wallace Huo has never been hotter in his life and that is saying something.

13. The Battle of Changsha 

MV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbgFMaUfpnE

By the same people who wrote Minglan, this follows a family in 1930s China and is a quiet, devastating masterpiece.

12. Prince of Lan Ling

MV (warning - spoilery): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jUVGP0HETo

He’s the consummate battle god. She is a mystical shaman. He is fated to be with someone else per prophecy but he doesn’t care and chooses her. True love, politics, battles, jealousy, amazingness, tragedy. I love them so. 

11. Gong/Jade Palace Lock Heart

MV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVFPVkHaweo

This is Boys over Flowers goes Qing (where Domyoji’s behavior finally makes sense since he’s a literal prince and Rui likes to kill people.) This is such a amazing good fun, about a modern woman time traveling to the time of the fight for the throne between Kangxi’s sons. She thinks she likes the seemingly gentle Four but ends up with hot-blooded, awesome Eight. She herself is tough as all get out and this is pure deliciousness from beginning to end. Yang Mi and Feng Shao Feng had such amazing chemistry, people RPShipped them for years. 

10. Return of the Condor Heroes 2006

MV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzXsBqVYp0I

My first cdrama ever, and what a gorgeous one it was. That’s what got me into cdramas. The childhood eps are pretty awful but after that, it’s pure shippy perfection with an incredible OTP. If you want to be in a constant romantic swoon, in that story of female master and her male disciple and their forbidden love, this one is for you.

9. Eternal Love/Three Lives Three Worlds Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms

MV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9-ry-W4Crg

Fated immortal lovers, reincarnations, the whole enchilada. Yang Mi and Mark Chao have insane chemistry that burns up the screen. The first few eps are slow, but it makes up for it afterwards.

8. Legend of Fuyao

MV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkMX1d0v7t0

A twisty epic romance with a super-powered heroine who is plain awesome and may destroy the world, and a smart, ruthless prince who’s only soft for her. I love it so much!

7. Legend of Condor Heroes 2008

MV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2fea109_qM

Plot twists, good guy hero with a mega smart OTP, tragic anti-hero who becomes a villain for a while with an amazing OTP, bromance, fights, everything. I just adore this one. 

6. Bu Bu Jing Xin/Startling By Each Step

MV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9B3Rddrqt0

The one that started the time-travel craze (well, that and Gong), about a modern woman who time travels to the time of Emperor Kangxi’s sons’ fight for the throne, this is a gorgeously filmed tragic love story, with one of the most perfectly brutal endings out there. I adore it.

5. Nirvana in Fire

MV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4wps7SK9xo

This is a smart story about politics and revenge, where a survivor of a wrongly destroyed family comes to get justice. Seemingly laid back until it explodes. Not much romance but it doesn’t even need it. 

4. Rise of the Phoenixes 

MV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0BUvMKSj4E

Like the dramas to destroy you? Come right in. A story about a disfavored prince and a lost daughter of a previous dynasty, this is smart, gorgeous, and is going to wreck you.

3. Ever Night (s1)

MV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x99seU5qJuc

I have talked enough about it recently so I won’t say much more, but if you want epic, movie-like quality, characters you will love, amazing battles and cinematography, complicated world-building and an OTP to die for, come right in.

2. The Myth 

MV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rfyfKM_Ww0

For the longest time, this was my favorite cdrama, to be replaced only by Minglan. It starts out funny and ends up tearing out your heart. This is the only time in my drama watching experience I cried so hard I threw up. The story is about two accidental time-travelers - a photographer and a cook - who end up in Qin Dynasty China. And from then on it’s about how that cruel, horrifying world takes two perfectly normal men and by wracking their very souls turns one into a hero and the other into a monster. To me, this is Hu Ge’s best performance and as you see his protagonist desperately try to hold on to his humanity and his love in a world that is doing its best to destroy it, I dare you not to cry like a baby. His character is my ultimate cdrama crush.   

1. The Story of Minglan

MV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FA7m2QktiUk

Aaaaaand, my n1. cdrama is the amazing, too short at 73 eps, The Story of Minglan. It is very hard to describe the plot of this - a sort of Elizabeth Gaskell meets period China. It follows three interconnected upper-class families, but more specifically, it is about Shen Minglan, a concubine-born daughter of a minister and Gu Tingye, the oldest, legitimate, and hated by his family son of a Marquess. Their narratives run largely parallel for the first half of the story and such is the genius of this drama that I, the ultimate romance junkie, did not mind that. Minglan is a rarity in dramaworld - she is fiercely smart, very collected and emotionally detached. Life in the troubled Shen household taught her to survive and to hide her feelings and talents. Tingye is a big cdrama love. Abused and reviled by his household where he can do no right (the Marquess hated having to marry his merchant mother for money and has displaced that hate on her son), Tingye manages to keep his warm heart but acquires the ability to go his own way. Both of the protagonists are wonderful and smart and magnetic and rootable for separately, but when they get together, the sparks go off the charts and they become my n1 cdrama OTP of all time. A lot of the story is about family battles, women’s world dilemmas and relationship (of all sorts) interactions. There is also politics and battles, but the true charm of this drama are the mundane details of the world and the fully-fleshed out people who inhabit it. If you watch only one cdrama in your life, make it this one.     

[ruminativerabbi]

Pittsburgh

Like many of you, I’m sure, I took biology in tenth grade. It was a long time ago. I barely remember high school, and specific classes even less than the general experience, but I do remember one specific incident in biology class that made a huge impression on me then and remains with me still. I’m sure it’s no longer allowed, as well it shouldn’t be, but the experiment itself was simple enough. A frog was set into a petri dish filled with cool water. The frog looked happy enough, having no concept of what was soon to come…and also not able to extend its neck far enough out to see that the petri dish itself was being held aloft by a black metal frame that also housed a Bunsen burner positioned just beneath the dish in which the frog was seated. (Do frogs even have necks?) The frog could have hopped out at any moment. But why would he have? He was content, he was (he thought) among friends. It was the fall following the summer of love. I have the vague sense—although this can’t possibly be true—that “Strawberry Fields” was playing softly in the background.

And then our teacher, whose name I’ve long since forgotten, lit the Bunsen burner and the fun began. The flame was low enough so that the water would only heat very slowly, incrementally, almost unnoticed by us…but also not by the frog in the dish. The point of the experiment was simple enough: to demonstrate that, if the water were only heated up slowly enough, the frog would actually be paralyzed by the heat and thus unable to avoid the sorry end that appeared to await him and which in fact actually did await him even though he could easily have escaped his fate earlier on had he understood things more clearly. Or she could have. It really was a long time ago.

The world is full of frogs in petri dishes.

Facebook started out as a pleasant way for friends to stay in touch and then grew into something that would surely have been unrecognizable to the people dreaming it up in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room. And, somewhere along the way in that amazing growth from 1 million users in 2004 to 2.2 billion active users at present, a line was crossed that cannot be crossed back over, and which thus obliges Facebook to deal somehow with the unexpected and surely unwanted ability it somehow possesses to be manipulated by its own users to influence elections and to invade people’s privacy in a way that many savvy users still can’t entirely fathom in all of its complexity.

The whole concept of on-line DNA analysis started out as a clever way for people to learn more about their families’ histories and about their own genetic heritage. But as the data banks at ancestry.com, 23andme.com, and other analogous sites grow larger and larger on a daily basis, a line has been crossed there too that cannot be uncrossed and which will now oblige us all to deal with the ability of scientists, including (presumably) those who work for the government, to invade the privacy of people wholly unrelated to the enterprise and who themselves haven’t ever signed up or sent in a sample of their DNA for analysis. (To revisit what I wrote about this truly shocking phenomenon a few weeks ago, click here.)

Kristallnacht, the eightieth anniversary of which falls next week, was another such frog-in-a-petri-dish line. Things were dismal for the Jews of Germany and Austria long before 1938, but Kristallnacht—in the course of which single evening almost 2000 synagogues were destroyed, 2550 Jewish citizens died, 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps, and tens of thousands of Jewish businesses were plundered—made it kristall clear that whatever Jewish souls fell under Nazi rule were on their own and that that line into a dark, almost unimaginable future was one that simply could not be crossed back over. Indeed, the worst part of Kristallnacht was not the pogrom itself, as horrific as it was, but its implications for the future and the unavoidable conclusion to be drawn from the events of that gruesome night that there apparently was no level of anti-Semitic violence that the world could not somehow learn to tolerate. Kristallnacht, of course, did not come out of nowhere. Nazi anti-Semitism was hardly a secret. By 1938, the Jews of the Reich had been subjected to ever-increasing levels of degradation, humiliation, and discrimination for years. Obviously, they all noticed it, just as the frog in my classroom must surely have noticed the water warming as well. What the frog failed to grasp was that there was going to be a specific moment at which his ability to hop out of the dish was going to be gone and that he would have no choice but to meet his fate in that place. And that is what the Jews who had bravely decided to weather the storm in place also failed to seize until it finally was too late to do otherwise and their fates were sealed, their doom all but assured.

Is Pittsburgh that line in the sand that we will all eventually see clearly for what it was? Or was it just a terrible thing that an awful person with some powerful guns managed to accomplish before he was finally subdued by the police? The answer to those questions lies behind the answers to others, however. Was Pittsburgh more about the rise of the so-called alt-right than about anti-Semitism per se? (The Anti-Defamation League noted that there was almost a 60% rise in hate crimes directed against Jews or Jewish targets from 2016, the year of the presidential election, to 2017, the year of Charlottesville. No one doubts that the statistics for 2018 will be higher still.) Or is this more about guns than Jews?  We have become almost used to gun violence in our country—we actually name the incidents (Columbine, Orlando, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Fort Hood, San Bernardino, etc.) because it would otherwise be impossible to keep track of them all—so it feels possible to explain Pittsburgh (or rather, to explain it away) as just one more notch on that belt rather than as a decisive moment in American Jewish history. But is that reasonable? Or is Pittsburgh less about Jews or guns, and more about the way that houses of worship seem specifically to enrage a certain kind of American bigot, the kind who can spend an hour studying Bible with gentle, harmless church folk and then take out a gun and methodically attempt to kill all the others in the class?

Or is this something else entirely? That’s the question I found churning and roiling within as I contemplate the events of last Saturday in Pittsburgh and try to make some sense out of it all.

It’s interesting how the most accessible studies of anti-Semitism—Léon Poliakov’s The History of Anti-Semitism, Edward Flannery’s The Anguish of the Jews, David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, Bernard Lazare’s Antisemitism, Its History and Causes, Rosemary Ruether’s Faith and Fratricide, and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s The Devil that Never Dies, just to name the books I personally have found the most rewarding and informative over the years—it’s interesting how little read or discussed these books are, including specifically by the very Jewish people who should constitute their most enthusiastic audience. Is that just because they are incredibly upsetting? Or is there a deeper kind of denial at work here, one rooted in a need to feel secure so intense that it simply overwhelms anything that might disturb people who live in its almost irresistible thrall?

I was a senior in college when I first read André Schwarz-Bart’s, The Last of the Just. It is one of the few works of fiction I’ve read many times, both in French and English, and is surely among the most important works of fiction I’ve read in terms of the effect it had on me personally in terms of shaping my worldview. (It also led, albeit circuitously, to my choice of a career in the rabbinate.) The book, in which are depicted episodes from the life of one single Jewish family from 1190 (the year of a horrific pogrom in York, England) to 1943 (when the family’s last living scion is murdered at Auschwitz), is upsetting. But it is also ennobling and, in a dark way that even I can’t explain entirely clearly (including not to myself), as inspiring as it is disconcerting. It was once a famous book—the first Shoah-based book to be an international bestseller and the winner of the very prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1959—but has fallen off the reading list of most today: how many young people have even heard of it, let alone have actually read it? I suppose people still read Anne Frank’s diary and Elie Wiesel’s Night, the two most prominent books about the Shoah of all…but both books are tied to their author’s specific stories and neither is “about” anti-Semitism itself in the way Schwarz-Bart’s book is. In my opinion, that’s why they have remained popular—because they’re basically about terrible things that happened to other people—and The Last of the Just hasn’t.

What should we do in the wake of the Pittsburgh massacre? Clearly, we need to find the courage to speak out and to say vocally and very strongly to our elected officials that we cannot and will never accept that this kind of thing simply cannot be prevented in a society that guarantees its citizens the right to bear arms. And, just as clearly, we need to make it clear to the world that this kind of aggression, far from weakening us, actually strengthens us and helps us find the courage to assume our rightful place in the American mosaic. But we also need to lose our inhibitions about learning about our own history. Pittsburgh was about the recrudescence of the kind of anti-Semitic violence many of us thought to be well in the past. To understand the deeper implications of Jews at prayer being murdered in their own synagogue, we don’t need to read any of the million statements issued by public officials, Jewish and non-Jewish organizations, and countless individuals over the last few days. What we do need to read is Schwarz-Bart and Ruether, Nirenberg and Flannery, and to internalize the lessons presented there. And we need take the temperature of the water in our petri dish and only then to negotiate the future from a position of informed strength characterized by a clear-eyed understanding of what it means to be a Jew in the actual world in which we live.

[uomo-accattivante]

(NOTE: If you want an accurate idea of the real-life spy that Oscar Isaac will be portraying in his next film, “Operation Finale,” read this. What a story! 😱)

***

For a long time, when I was growing up in the building I still live in on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, I knew one neighbor only as Peter. Tall, bronzed and muscled, Peter lived on the 13th floor. If I was riding the elevator alone with him, he always said, “Hello, how’s your mother?” in an Israeli accent after (sometimes) removing a cigarette from his mouth. When I’d see him talking with my 4-foot-10-inch mother in the lobby, her tiny hands gripping shopping bags from Gimbels, they were so different in size that they looked absurd. Mom knew Peter was an amateur artist; she had once been in his apartment to admire his work. She was an amateur artist, too, and my father teased her that she had a crush since that time she went with him to Pearl Paint on Canal Street to buy more oils.

Then in 1986, everyone in my building found out that Peter was not only an artist; he was also a Nazi hunter. It was the 25th anniversary of the trial and hanging of Adolf Eichmann, and a wave of newspaper articles accompanied a special exhibit at the Jewish Museum. Peter the elevator charmer was none other than Peter Malkin, the former Israeli spy who snatched Eichmann off an Argentine street in 1960. Eichmann, of course, was at that time the most wanted Nazi at large — an ardent believer in the Nationalist Socialist agenda, and a former architect of the Final Solution as the SS Obersturmbannführer in charge of Jewish affairs.

After the excitement those articles caused, he got a book deal. “Eichmann in My Hands” (Warner, 1990), co-written with Harry Stein, shed more light on his role in the capture of Eichmann. Here he claimed that he had been a Mossad agent for 28 years but never killed anyone. Mom wondered if I, too, wanted to read the book, but I was just post-college having fun, and the Holocaust was far off my radar. That sentiment annoyed her greatly.

I recently thought of Malkin again while writing other Lower East Side stories. I tried to find his old book on my bookshelf, but then remembered it was one of the books my husband made me give away after insisting I was a book hoarder and promising I would never miss it. I walked to Strand to see if the store had it. It did, one copy. Signed by Malkin.

I sat in a Broadway cafe with a friend who was amused by my excitement at Malkin’s scratchy signature: “Who? Should I know of him?” Now I was determined to really get to know my elevator companion whom my mother so admired. If I hadn’t appreciated him before, I would do so now.

Peter Zvi Malkin was born in 1927, in a village in Eastern Poland that had roughly 1,400 Jews before the Holocaust, nearly 70% of its population. He had a few persistent memories of that time, including a one-door, one-window heder, a tiny school.

Then, in 1933, when he was almost 5, his family moved him to Haifa, to escape rising anti-Semitism. His parents also took his brothers, Jacob, 6, and Yechiel, 17, leaving behind their eldest child, 23-year-old Fruma, a blue-eyed blonde who lived next door and was a second mother to Peter. She and her husband had three children, but her son Takele was closest to his age; the child was his daily playmate, and his best friend.

Poland in these uneasy times had an exit visa shortage, and cutting through red tape required money the family did not have. Fruma pleaded with her parents to save funds, and she promised they would reunite in the Holy Land shortly. Her parents acquiesced. In his memoir, Malkin recalled boarding a ship, and in British Mandate Palestine he entered a strange new world of foreign sounds and tastes, like oranges, dates and prickly pears. His father and his elder brother found work making bricks in Haifa — and by 1938, with news in the papers worsening, Malkin’s mother was making desperate trips to the local government department to, once and for all, get her daughter and grandchildren out.

Young Peter was a risk-taking kid, often exploring where he should not. People noticed, people talked, and soon someone at Haganah, the pre-state underground militia, heard about his exploits.

In 1941 he was selected at the tender age of 14 to join its secret ranks. Here, he got intensive training in explosives. After the final year of British rule, the group became the core of the new Israel Defense Forces — and with Malkin’s proven knack for detonating bombs, he was a sapper during the Israeli-Arab war of 1948.

A year after Israeli independence in 1948, Malkin joined the Mossad, Israel’s new Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations. Concurrently, he joined the Department of Internal Security, known as Shin Bet. He artlessly wrote on his application “I like adventure” as his main reason for applying, and despite eyebrows lifted at that answer, they offered him the job, starting at $40 a month. Safecracking and explosives were his fortes, and he trained in many more specialized skills. His cover was as an artist who traveled for inspiration, but he actually took art very seriously, having started painting at 16.

While spying, Malkin often drew stained-glass windows in churches. “I spent a lot of time in churches,” he said in one interview. “If you go to a synagogue, someone is always asking if you’re alone, if you’re married. In a church, in a hundred years no one would ask.”

At the start of 1960, Malkin was debriefed on his latest assignment, which shocked even him. He was to capture Adolf Eichmann. The new mission was called Operation Attila, and Attila was Eichmann’s code name. That May, Malkin and six other Israeli men flew to Buenos Aires, where the Mossad believed it had pinpointed Eichmann’s whereabouts. Mossad’s headquarters in Tel Aviv decided that Malkin would lead the capture, but then another agent would take over interrogation.

How had Eichmann gotten here?

After the collapse of the Third Reich, he was briefly caught, but in 1946 he had escaped from captivity in the United States and spent years hiding in Germany. In 1950, Eichmann went to Italy under the assumed name of Ricardo Klement, but only after a monk got him a Vatican refugee Red Cross passport. On July 14, 1950, he disembarked in Argentina, and for 10 years he worked in a variety of jobs in Buenos Aires. Eichmann was briefly a gaucho.

In August of 1952 he was joined by his wife, Vera Lieble, and his sons, Klaus, Horst and Dieter: The sons were instructed to refer to him as Uncle Ricardo. The Eichmanns had a fourth son while living in Argentina, Ricardo, who reminded Malkin of his lost blond playmate, his sister’s son Takele.

Lothar Hermann was almost blind, and became the unlikely source who had put the Mossad onto Eichmann. A former dissident and a Dachau camp survivor who, after Kristallnacht, left Germany for Argentina, Hermann had lost his sight, the result of severe beatings from the Gestapo. The family lived as non-Jewish Germans, and his daughter, Silvia, knew Eichmann’s eldest son, Klaus, who still used the family name Eichmann at his father’s insistence, even though Eichmann himself went under Ricardo Klement. One day, in an outdoor restaurant, Hermann and his daughter sat down at the table next to Eichmann and Klaus, and Silvia Hermann decided to make introductions. Her father may have been blind, but he had seen Eichmann when imprisoned and had heard his voice. He immediately contacted both German and Israeli authorities about this suspicious “uncle” and they sent someone to investigate in January 1958. After a quick inspection of the unimpressive middle-class Olivos neighborhood where the suspect was dwelling, the Mossad discounted the intelligence; it seemed impossible for a once lofty Nazi to be living there.

In 1960, a new Mossad team found that the man was still living in Buenos Aries, and still under the alias Ricardo Klement, but now renting an even more unimpressive suburban home on Garibaldi Street in the dreary suburb of Villa San Fernando. Hiding near a creek, the team spied on Attila, a thin man in thick black-rimmed glasses. The weather was not kind and they were often cold, as none of these crackerjack minds had realized that May was the start of winter in the Southern Hemisphere.

Through his field glasses, an agent observed a celebratory family dinner March 21 and did the math: The Klements’ anniversary celebration corresponded to what would have been the Eichmanns’ 25th, “silver” anniversary. Attila unfailingly returned home by the same bus each evening from his administrative job at a Mercedes-Benz factory; the bus arrived at his stop at around 7:20. The snoops were increasingly sure that Atilla was Eichmann, and that getting him when he was near the bus stop was the best plan of action. They decided on May 11 as the day it would all go down.

On this cold, rainy day, the green-and-yellow commuter bus pulled up on Eichmann’s stop along Route 202. Atilla did not get off. But minutes later, a little past 7:30 a.m., the next bus arrived.

Malkin wore fur-lined leather gloves so as not to have to touch the man during the scuffle. He wrote, “The thought of placing my bare hand over the mouth that had ordered the death of millions, of feeling the hot breath and saliva on my skin, filled me with an overwhelming sense of revulsion.” “Un momentito, Señor,” Malkin said, using the Spanish phrase he had practiced for this moment.

Unarmed, he grabbed Atilla’s right hand, spun the man around by the shoulders and pinned his arms behind his back. The man’s scream was piercing. Malkin pressed his hand over his mouth. Atilla’s false teeth dislodged. The leather gloves were quickly “soaked through with his spittle.” He took him on his shoulders, and spirited his target into a waiting black Mercedes-Benz. A fellow spy drove them both to a “safe house” in a rented villa 90 minutes south, in a more upscale neighborhood in the Florencio Varela district, where there was a garden with Moorish arches, a plush carpet and a stone wall to keep out nosy neighbors. In the safe house, Atilla denied he was Eichmann even as the doctor quickly examined his mouth lest he had poison hidden on him. Then Atilla was checked for a scar of 3 centimeters beneath the left brow, two gold bridges in the upper jaw, a rib scar of one centimeter, a Secret Service tattoo, his shoe size and other markings.

“You have SS number 45526?’ Mossad interrogator Hans asked Atilla.

“No! 45326.”

The men were startled.

“Was ist deine name?” another agent named Zvi Aharoni demanded.

“Ich bin Adolf Eichmann.”

In a small bedroom, a blanket concealing the only window, Eichmann was blindfolded and manacled by his ankle, in striped pajamas. Hans worked on him to see if he knew where other prominent Nazis were hiding, including Josef Mengele.

At night the spies stayed inside in the villa. As the team whiled away the hours with chess and cigarettes, a female agent arrived to cook and clean. In the pre-PC era when he got his book deal, Malkin wrote that the men had hoped for a sexy woman to arrive and change the atmosphere. But instead they had been sent Rosa, a chunky Orthodox Jewish spy whom he knew back from Tel Aviv. Oh well, at least now they had a cook. Eichmann ate only kosher food during his 10-day stay in the safe house.

Malkin was assigned to feed and shave the prisoner, and to make sure he moved his bowels. He also oversaw his deep knee bends — Eichmann had to stay in shape to survive the trial. While Malkin sat in the room on his shift, he began to secretly draw him, using the sketch pencils, acrylic paints and makeup he carried in his disguise kit. All he had in his possession was a South American travel guide he had purchased for the trip. He used its map-covered pages for a canvas.

He had plenty of time alone with Eichmann over 10 days, and he surreptitiously began with a black-and-gray portrait overlaying a map of Argentina. On the next page, he imagined him in SS regalia. “I continued drawing in a kind of frenzy. Now I had him watching a railroad train, counting the cars; now in abstract, lying prone atop a flatcar, bearing a machine gun; now, on facing pages, appeared Hitler and Mussolini; now my parents and, in muted pastels, her eyes immense and brooding, my sister,” he wrote. The Mossad wanted Eichmann to sign a form saying he was traveling to Israel on his own accord. He would not sign for Hans, who had spoken to him so harshly. Malkin decided to give it a try, never admitting he chatted regularly with Eichmann, partly to understand the mentality that had sent millions, including 150 of his relatives, to their deaths. They spoke in broken German and a half-Yiddish that Eichmann understood well. The man who had a master file he labeled “The Final Solution” maddeningly claimed he was no anti-Semite, that he even studied Hebrew with a rabbi in Berlin. To study how to kill them better, Malkin suggested.

“I have nothing against the Jews,” Eichmann insisted. This did not sway his guard, who had lost so many relatives. “On the contrary, I love Jews.” To add insult to injury, Eichmann went on to recite the Shema: “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One…” He asked to be tried in Germany. “You must be tried in Israel,” Malkin told him. He told him that if he signed, his wife and little ones could come to the trial. (This actually happened in Ramale Prison on April 30, 1962, and Vera Eichmann’s visit was revealed only recently.)

Eichmann called Malkin by his agent code name, Maxim: “Do you dance, Maxim? Do you like music? I hope you like Viennese waltzes.”

“We found ourselves co-conspirators of a sort,” Malkin wrote. “He knew as well as I did to fall silent at the sound of approaching footsteps.”

Malkin served him a good red wine that a fellow operative had been saving for the Sabbath, and played flamenco music on an old record player in the villa. Music cheered the Nazi. Malkin toasted him. He sneaked him a Kent. More relaxed, Eichmann confided to Malkin that he had lived in fear. “For 15 years I expected what has happened to me — and it has happened.” He also admitted that he had spoken to a fortuneteller in Argentina, who told him he would not live past 57; he believed her.

Eventually, Malkin got the signature.

With so many spies in one house, Rosa and Malkin now shared the room that had two single beds. One night, he whispered to her that he was talking to their prisoner against orders. Sympathy was an uncrossable line, and Rosa was horrified, but she listened to what they had discussed. Afterward, she scolded him: “You act like you’re in love with him!” Eventually so many emotions were brought up by the capture that Malkin joined Rosa in her bed one night, and he held the woman, clothed, in his arms, crying.

The operation to commandeer Eichmann was timed close to festivities celebrating 150 years of Argentine independence from Spain, which made it possible for the Mossad to fly the first El Al plane to land in Argentina without suspicion, even though there were no scheduled flights between the two countries. The delegation was in fact an operational cover, and included Mossad and Shin Bet security service people. Operation Atilla was so top secret that the delegation leader Abba Eban, then minister of education and culture, may not have even known about Eichmann’s capture. When Eban disembarked, he gave a speech in astonishingly perfect Spanish, after strains of “Hatikvah” played. Malkin and his spy pals were at the airport to watch. They waited for word on what day the plane was leaving, which turned out to be less than 48 hours later, on May 20. When told all was a go, Malkin quickly used his makeup kit to change Eichmann’s appearance on the flight to Argentina, dressing him in an El Al uniform as a steward. Eichmann loved being in uniform again, and straightened his posture. It was not lost on Malkin that Eichmann was leaving the country with a Jewish star on his hat. “Recognize that star?” he asked him pointedly.

As they headed to the airport, Malkin’s teammate, Dr. Klein, rolled up Eichmann’s sleeve to give him an injection. Were they killing him? No, Malkin assured him, this was the day he was going to go to Jerusalem, and they needed him as mellow as possible. Eichmann was ushered on board the El Al aircraft with the forged passport for Israeli agent Zeev Zichron. Malkin had made up Eichmann up to look like the passport photo of Zichron.

Mossad agents decided it was best to tell the other passengers on board, since it was a lightly populated flight and many of those delegates who had come for the Independence Day festivities were not allowed back on and had to fend for themselves to get home. The passengers were understandably flabbergasted that they had to book alternate commercial flights. One of the men on board, however, was El Al’s chief mechanic, who fell to pieces, having lost his 6-year-old brother in the camps. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion announced to the Knesset that Adolf Eichmann had been captured on May 23, 1960. You can imagine the hullabaloo in Israel. But there were no medals or interviews for the agents. Rather, there was absolute authority of safety rules — they were instructed to tell no one of their involvement.

In 1961, starting on April 11, Eichmann was put on a trial that would last for more than four months.

Every word of the trial was filmed to document evil that much of the world was denying. Eichmann, however, did not view himself as evil, saying famously, “Nothing is ever as bad as it appears, or one could put it another way, nothing is ever as hot as when it is cooking.” Malkin went just once to the courthouse, walked near Eichmann’s glass isolation booth, locked eyes with Eichmann and nodded. He never went back. He said he didn’t want to hear the trial.

On August 14, Eichmann was sentenced to death and found guilty on all crimes against humanity and the Jewish people.” He was hanged June 1, 1962 and his last words (in German) were: “Long live Germany. Long live Argentina. Long live Austria.” Eichmann was cremated at a secret location, and his ashes were disseminated into the Mediterranean Sea, beyond the limits of Israel’s official waters. No country would endure his grave, nor would his grave ever be a site of pilgrimage.

Malkin stayed mum on his involvement, but broke the rule once, in the spring of 1967, when his mother fell ill and he got permission to abandon an assignment in Athens. His beloved ima was dying in a Haifa hospital, 12 years after Eichmann’s ashes had been scattered. “Mama, I captured Eichmann. Fruma is avenged,” he told her. She did not answer. He repeated his claim. Gradually her eyes opened. Her hand squeezed his. “I understand,” she managed to say.

Well, there was one other time he let out the truth, the day he hailed a cab in New York City with a Mossad friend in the back seat. Malkin recognized a Polish accent. It turned out the cabbie was from the same town Malkin had fled as a young boy. He knew how Fruma was killed, and how all the others in town met their deaths. In 1941, he said, the Jews in town were rounded up near the fountain, then taken to a camp outside Lublin. The driver had survived as a slave laborer and escaped, but not before the man had witnessed Eichmann making rounds. His seatmate poked him and whispered, “Are you going to tell him?” No, he could not. He left the cab and turned back to see his friend talking to the driver, who was now looking his way, wonderstruck. The driver called out, “Is this true?” Finally, Malkin called back, “Yes!” The driver gave Malkin’s Mossad friend back the cab fare. He could not take any money — his passenger had already repaid all Jews a thousandfold. By most accounts, by this time he was already the most successful agent in Israel’s history, the Jewish James Bond. After he caught Eichmann he also nabbed Israel Baer, the Soviet mole whom the Russians had sent to Israel. Baer had claimed to be born to Austrian Jews. Malkin was rightfully proud that he clandestinely acquired a list of ex-Nazi nuclear scientists collaborating with the Egyptians. He once eavesdropped on a meeting of Arab officials by hiding under their conference table. He eventually rose to become chief of operations in the Mossad.

But he did not work for Israel only. On Malkin’s passing in 2005, Robert Morgenthau, now a renowned former Manhattan district attorney, said of my neighbor, “I think he was the outstanding intelligence agent of the 20th century.” Starting in the late 1970s, Malkin assisted Morgenthau on several investigations, including one involving CIA agents suspected of selling weapons and explosives to Africa. In addition to consultant fees, Morgenthau repaid Malkin by expediting his green card.

Not all Peter Malkin anecdotes are so heavy: I chuckled reading how he once used his expert disguise gifts on his mother before a mission; he arrived at her Sabbath dinner in Haifa, pretending he was a foreign student who showed up at her door at the request of her son. Via an unspecified spy apparatus, he changed the sound of his voice and the appearance of his mouth. For several minutes he had her convinced, but then she realized who was really sharing challah with her. “You are going to kill me!” she cried. However, further in the meal his mother guessed that he was going away on a top-secret mission. “Even a secret agent,” he said, “can’t lie to a Jewish mother.”

In the spring of 2005 I first found out that my own mother had stage IV ovarian cancer, a disease she would battle for the next two years. At the time of the diagnosis I was working on a book with her, a funny novel about the members of her retirement club, the Happiness Club, who were always complaining about their children not coming for a visit. She had taken notes on several Happiness Club members, including a Holocaust survivor named Irene Zisblatt, whom she recorded in the late 1990s for the Century Village retirement newspaper she edited, the Hawthorne Herald. She asked my brother and me to turn the newspaper article into a documentary. We were insulted that she was suggesting our next film together. Spielberg saw value where we did not, and Zisblatt’s story was included in the documentary he produced, “The Last Days,” which won an Oscar in 1998. The second it won, the phone rang — “Told you so,” my mom said.

I laughed again about that call so many years later. My mother was right about bothering to get to know your neighbors, and your duty to the future if you are a storyteller.

The other day, while my daughter did her eighth-grade homework, I rode the elevator to Malkin’s old floor and rang his doorbell. A middle-aged woman whom I have seen in the laundry room but had never spoken to answered.

I explained what I was writing. “Oh I recognize you,” she said. “You have a young daughter, right? A teen. An Australian husband?” She introduced herself for the first time: Irena Nuic-Werber. She was in real estate. She briefly asked me to wait, as she wanted permission to participate in my article by name, for normally she and her husband are very private people. Yes, her husband Daniel was quite honored. He felt it was important to help celebrate Malkin.

“When we bought [the apartment,] there was his art up to the ceiling — vibrant colors, red, yellow, orange. Many of his artworks were painted on maps. It was breathtaking,” Nuic-Werber told me. “We did not meet him, obviously, but we bought from an attorney who knew him well, who had stories. We were very touched to live here, as much of my husband’s family perished in the Holocaust.” Tears welled in her eyes. “We think of his apartment as a sacred place,” she said, “In Israel, you know, he is very famous. I wish he was more well-known in America.”

###

[keywestlou]

WINDOW TAX

Some of today’s topics unusually interesting.

The first involves Great Britain, the United Kingdom, England, or whatever it was called at a particular time in history.

The Brits were always taxing people and things. They cared not what nor for those being taxed. Only to collect money for the royal coffers.

That is why there was a Boston Tea Party, a need for a Robin Hood, and more.

Today’s subject the Window Tax. The Brits were known as the United Kingdom at the time. A Window Tax was imposed in 1699 and remained in place till 1851.

The Window Tax also referred to as a “bandl tax.”

Windows on a house were taxed. The more windows, the higher the tax paid by the owner.

Necessity became the mother of invention. Everyone wants to pay as little in taxes as possible. Tax avoidance came into play big time.

Homes were built with fewer windows. Older homes had some windows bricked over. The poorer homes covered all the windows.

“Dark and gloomy” became the order of the day. The more blocked windows, the less the light entering from the outside.

As the years progressed, poor and rich alike clamored for a repeal of the tax. It was considered a “tax on health” and a “tax on light and air.” The tax encouraged disease and ill health.

It took 152 years, but the people finally won out when in 1851 the Window Tax was withdrawn.

This past thursday, Trump bare naked his intelligence level. His thought process convoluted.

Trump was speaking at Owens and Minor, a medical supply distributor, in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He said, “When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.”

Brilliant!

Dr. Joseph Fair is known to most of us. He appears frequently on NBC and MSNBC. He is one of their medical consultants.

Dr. Fair is a virologist and epidemiologist which makes him an expert in the study of the coronavirus problem.

He flew to New Orleans last week. The plane was crowded. “Packed” as he described it. The thought occurred to him to get off. However, he did not.

He wore a face mask, gloves, and wiped his area with disinfectant.

Turns out he should have worn googles. So Dr. Fair thinks today.

Three days after the trip, he started feeling lousy. Remained home. Over the course of a few days, breathing became difficult. He could only get 25 percent of his breath into his lungs.

He was off to the hospital. They gave him 4 coronavirus tests. All negative. It took #5 to come up with a positive finding. He was definitely sick.

Dr. Fair believes the virus got into his body through his eyes. Recent studies indicate mere talking can generate droplets that can linger up to 14 minutes.

Goggles would have prevented his coming down with the virus.

Dr. Fair claims he was not at high risk for the problem. Forty years old and in good health. Runs every day. Has no underlying maladies. He said he was in the best condition he has ever been.

Which brought to his mind he probably would have died were he older and not in such good condition.

Dr. Fair remains in the hospital, no longer in critical condition.

Certain prostitutes earn big money.

Some governments tax a prostitute’s earnings. Germany has been doing so for more than 10 years. Germany legalized prostitution so it could tax the ladies.

Other European nations tax prostitutes also. Great Britain is one.

Linda St. Clair began working the streets as a teenager. At a point later in life, she became one of Britain’s leading ladies of the night. Her professional name Miss Whiplash. She was both a prostitute and dominatrix.

Linda owned and operated one of the largest whore houses in London. High class. Some 250 members of Parliament among her customers.

She drove a Rolls Royce.

The British government decided to tax her. She refused to pay. She said if she were to pay, the government would be living off “immoral earnings.” Such was her legal position.

The government said morality had nothing to do with it. The government considered her earnings derived from a “trade.”

Linda fought the tax collector successfully for 15 years. The government never gave up, however. When she saw she would not be able to win, she sold everything. Took her monies and went on a world cruise. Excuse the vernacular, she “pissed” her money away in all the fun spots of the world.

When the government finally got her and had a huge judgment against her, she was judgment proof. Penniless.

Some Trump.

One of the commentors to my blog recently wrote Trump was no “warrior” as he was claiming. He pointed out Trump dodged the draft and mocked a prisoner of war.

The gulf between Trump and scientists regarding coronavirus grows. Trump even finding fault with Fauci.

What did Trump think would happen when his thoughts and those of the scientists were at opposite ends of the spectrum. He obviously expected dedicated professionals to lie.

Trump is learning there are some honest people in the world. Not all are cut from the same bolt of cloth as he.

Coronavirus data as of 5/14 interesting. Actually, surprising.

The data shows trends are significantly rising in the U.S. if the numbers for 3 cities are pulled. New York, New Orleans, and Detroit.

Not a good sign. Indicates things getting worse, not better.

A 6.4 earthquake hit Nevada during the night. Several large aftershocks followed. The quake line near the California border.

Someday again California may experience another of its drastic earthquakes. I recall my good friend Bob Marks being involved in one. So strong, it took down a major bridge in San Francisco. Bob could not get home for 3 days because the bridge was gone.

Some Key West happenings.

Publix cut back on open hours because of the virus. Publix announced that as of tomorrow, it is returning to normal shopping hours. The stores will be open from 7 am to 9 pm.

The virus opened many eyes in Key West as to the pollution the cruise ships were causing. Key West waters have become clear since the cruise lines were shut down.

The cruise ships will return. Many do not want them. I for one do not.

Key West is at the bottom of the list re payments from the cruise lines being permitted to dock here. The cheaper cruise lines bring passengers to Key West. Not the affluent who spend money. Passengers in recent years spend a day walking around and having a drink or 2 at a bar. They skip back to the ship for lunch. Do not spend money on food or anything of value.

And of course the ships themselves pollute our waters and reef big time.

They are not worth it.

The Key West Committee For Safer Cleaner Ships has been formed by some locals. They have opened an office on Caroline street.

They are anti-cruise ships.

The issue is being put to referendum in August. The actual wording not yet formulated. It will either be to limit the number or eliminate cruise ship visits in their entirety.

John Simonton was the first American to own the Island of Key West as it was then known. Simonton died this day in 1854 in Washington, D.C.

The news is the Cow Key Channel Bridge reconstruction is on schedule. I have not seen it. I live one island off Key West. The bridge the only way in and out of Key West. I crossed it twice daily.

Since I am in my 65th day of self-quarantine, I have not seen any of the reconstruction work being done.

I wish they were ahead of schedule. With the virus impacting us, there was substantially less traffic and the contractor should be ahead of schedule. The virus would have turned out to be a benefit in disguise. Unfortunately, the State of Florida does not think that way.

The stone crab business has been taking a beating the past several years. The State now wants to add to the stone crab fishermen’s plight.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has issued a draft to be voted on in July. It proposes to close the stone crab season by 5 months. It also proposes to reduce the minimum size of stone crabs that can be caught.

The 5 months I cannot understand. The reduction in size I can. Only 1/8th of an inch.

Enjoy your day!

  WINDOW TAX was originally published on Key West Lou

[the-record-columns]

Oct. 9, 2019: Columns

The Judge…

Judge Julius A. Rousseau

By KEN WELBORN

Record Publisher

Judge Julius A. Rousseau, retired Senior Superior Court Judge for the 23d Judicial District, formerly of Wilkesboro, husband of Gary Rousseau, died on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2019. A Celebration of Life Service will be held at the North Wilkesboro First United Methodist Church on Sixth Street in North Wilkesboro at noon, Saturday, Oct. 12.

                                                           ***

While I didn't have any what you would call any "business end" dealings with Judge Rousseau, i.e., a defendant on trial, our paths did cross a time of two and then fairly often after he retired.  A man who most anyone who ever met him would call him at a minimum a serious person, did have a bit of a sense of humor, tinged with a bit of irony.

Many years ago, when I was working for Paul Cashion at WWWC Radio in advertising, I seemed to get called for jury duty every term.  Really, six or eight times. First, know that I almost never got to serve on a jury, but had to be there nonetheless. One week I was in court being held by Judge Rousseau and I saw his sternness on display as well as a sense of humor. 

There was an attorney from Charlotte representing someone during the term I was on jury duty with The Judge, and, in the course of the proceedings, you got the feeling this particular guy felt as though he was somewhat above the rest of us gathered that day.  As things progressed, this attorney made what Judge Rousseau perceived at one smart crack too many and The Judge stood up and motioned for the attorney to come forward.

Which he did.

Then, in a "whisper" the entire courtroom could hear, Judge Rousseau said, "Sir, if I hear that tone one more time today, I am going to land on you like a hawk on a mouse.  Do you understand me?" 

After a simple "Yes, sir," the chastised attorney returned to his table and behaved the rest of the day.  I loved that line, and have borrowed it often, "...like a hawk on a mouse."

One other time I was on jury duty in Judge Rousseau's court, I was sitting bored on the front row passing the time eating from a pack of old Lifesavers I found in my jacket pocket. Unwilling to just suck the candy, I decided to make a little whistle out of it by holding it in my lips and breathing through the hole. 

You know where this is going.

The candy got thinner and in one fateful breath, it was sucked onto my windpipe and I thought I was going to choke to death.  I did everything I could not to make a noise, but finally had to try to cough and clear the obstruction.  It was not fun.  And it was loud.  And embarrassing.

After what seemed like forever, I heard the gavel hit and Judge Rousseau says, "Well, let's see if Mr. Welborn lives or dies before we proceed."

And he smiled.

But my favorite story comes from Monroe.

 I had occasion to hire an attorney there named John Painter.  I knew I had picked a good one when I had to stand in his office which was lined wall-to wall with clients when I came to town for court. 

Mr. Painter called the roll like a school teacher with folks saying "here" or "present" like they were in class as well.  When he came to my name, well down on the list what with that "W" start, Mr. Painter paused and asked me to raise my hand. "Says here you are from North Wilkesboro, do you by any chance know a judge named Julius Rousseau?"

"I see him every week." I replied.  He walked back to me and asked, "Why would you see him that often?" 

I went on to tell him that since Judge Rousseau had retired, he had an office space right across from my office on Main Street in Billy McElwee's law offices.  We often nodded hello on the street and he sometimes would come into my office to look at the old things on display everywhere.

Mr. Painter went on  to ask me to tell The Judge the next time I had a chance to speak with him, that, "...the epidemic is over."  

Of course I inquired about that and he went on to tell me that the epidemic was known in Union County as "The Rousseau Flu," a malady that afflicted lawyers who would see the new docket come out, see Judge Rousseau's name, and say, "Oh, I am going to have the flu the first week of February," or whenever.

   The next time I happened upon Judge Rousseau he was at dinner with his wife, Gary, and Jim and Theda Moore at the Elk's Lodge.  I took a moment of their time and went over Mr. Painters message that the epidemic of "The Rousseau Flu" was now over.

   He smiled again.

Breaking the Stigma

By HEATHER DEAN

Record Reporter

September was National Recovery month, which is a national observance to increase awareness and educate Americans about substance and mental health disorders in an effort for us to understand the journey of those on the path to recovery and what we can do to help.  

The Wilkes County Public Library currently has an exhibit featuring images of people and their recovery stories by artist Doug Lail. On Saturday, Oct. 26, at 2 p.m., he is the featured speaker of "Hello, My Name Is…"

We may think that we are doing better as a society, in addressing these issues, but the reality is, substance abuse in Wilkes County is still a severe problem. I recently wrote a story that Surry has overtaken Wilkes for the #1 spot, but we are still in the top ten on the list of “worst counties in N.C.”  

That being said: How do we begin to break the stigma of addiction, when we start towing cars that belong to people attending a local downtown AA meeting? People that are fighting an addiction, many on their own and this group is the only support they have, yet their cars start being towed because they are in a meeting the same time as the Apple Festival?

That’s exactly what I saw as I was out taking pictures of the festival. Now, the tow guy was just doing what he had been told to do by the powers that be, and obviously there had been major communication, however…those meetings have been held there for over 8 months.

Sure, the Apple Festival is a big deal for us, but it’s only one day a year.

Recovery is every day, every day for the rest of your life. If someone is upset because they don’t get to park closer to the festival and have to walk further, may I suggest they walk in the shoes of someone in recovery for a day?

If you or someone you know needs help, call Wilkes Recovery Revolution at 336.818.1909 or AA at 336.927.5593, at 307 Forester Avenue, located off D Street and the CBD loop.

The rising tide of hatred

By AMBASSADOR EARL COX and KATHLEEN COX

Special to The Record

Around the globe, hatred for Jews is at an all-time high.

While we are familiar with the synagogue shootings which have taken place here in the United States and the desecration of Jewish cemeteries, as heinous as these acts have been, the situation for Jews is far worse in the UK, Germany, New Zealand, Ireland and elsewhere. 

Beginning is 1984, an entity called the Community Security Trust, a nonprofit watchdog charity registered in Scotland, Wales and England, began compiling data on anti-Semitic incidents in the UK (United Kingdom). According to their figures, there were 1,382 anti-Semitic incidents recorded nationwide in 2017 and this figure takes into account only those incidences which were officially reported.  Culturally, Jews refuse to be painted as victims. Consequently, many acts of anti-Semitism go unreported.  In the past three years, the number of hate crimes against Jews has continued to climb. On average, the Jewish community in the UK is targeted at a rate of nearly four times a day. 

Research indicates that there is no obvious single cause behind the upward trend in violent crimes against Jews.  These acts are not triggered in response to any identifiable event but rather are purely evil acts of baseless hatred.  It’s becoming common in the UK, Germany, France and elsewhere for Jewish people to be subjected to verbal abuse in public for no other reason than being Jewish.  This was the atmosphere just prior to World War II and the rise of Hitler’s Germany.  This same atmosphere is again manifesting in today’s Germany. 

Hatred is rising and Jewish people are suffering. This should concern everybody. Anger and division are a threat to all of society.  

Laws have been passed but prosecutions need to be more visible.  Perpetrators need to be identified and held accountable for their malicious, criminal behavior and actions. Jews are being singled out disproportionately and with increasing violence due to the spread of anti-Semitic conspiracy myths originating from Islamists, the far left and the far right, left-leaning academics and the liberal media.  This should serve as a wake-up call for us all.  

No where in the civilized world should hatred against any particular people group be tolerated.  Those who proclaim “death to Israel and death to America” must be held accountable.  If we turn a blind eye and convince ourselves that another Holocaust is impossible, then we are delusional.  

In the famous words of Edmund Burke, an Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.”  

What will you do?

Apple Pie is a family thing

By CARL WHITE

Life in the Carolina

I have come to understand that Apple Pie is far more than dessert.

It’s true that our beloved tasty treat takes on many forms and flavors. That’s part of what makes it the perfect end to a nice meal.

At other times we just like to enjoy our pie with a cup of coffee, a glass of milk or for some a glass of sweet tea, because it can never be too sweet. A good pie is best enjoyed one slow bite at a time. No need to rush something so wonderful.

Freshly pealed and sliced tart apples, like the Granny Smith variety, make fine pies as they hold up better unless you prefer a mushy pie. Some people do and that’s also wonderful. Apples are always accommodating.

We have recently been working on a broadcast special that will focus on some of the Carolinas’ most tasty apple treats. On our schedule we visited a few Apple Festivals in the Carolinas.

We were happy with our visit to the 42nd Annual Brushy Mountain Apple Festival. We have covered the event in the past; however, this time the total focus was on Apple Pies, Apple Butter and to our surprise a delightful Apple Donut made by the Duck Donut Folks.  

The first visit of the day was with Ma’s Apple Pies, which were made on location. The dough was portioned prior to the festival; however, it was hand rolled, filled with spiced dried apples, folded and deep-fried right there for everyone to see. They were so good that no one seemed to mind the wait.

Ma, also known as Vicky Tilley, shared her story with us. The only place you can get one of Ma’s freshly made fried Apple Pies is at the Brushy Mountain Apple Festival.

It’s also a family tradition. Very early on Apple Festival morning, Ma’s family comes together at their location, which has been beside the Wells Fargo stage for around 16 years.

As soon as the booth is set up, they start making pies. Local folks who are in the know arrive early and get in line even before the festival opens.

Family members shared that while it makes for a long day of nonstop pie making, it’s wonderful family time together and seeing people respond in such a positive way makes the whole family proud.

Our next visit was with members of the Brushy Mountain Fire Department, who were at the corner of Main Street and 9th. They have had the same spot for 42 years. They bring in WWI-era wood burning ovens to bake their traditional spiced apple pies. They always have a line and normally sell out by noon. It’s a fantastic nostalgic journey. As I am writing this now, I can vividly recall the smell of the smoke, the crackling of the burning wood and the flames from the fire being stoked.

When the pies came out of the oven one of the firemen rang a cow bell and yelled, “Fresh Hot Apple Pies Come and get ‘em.” And They did.

All 4,000 of them.  

The profits from the Fire Department’s annual efforts help pay for their clothing and other needed items. The brotherhood, or family, of firefighters pulls together to make it all happen.

We visited with the folks who make delicious Apple Butter on location. We learned about how it’s made and why. It was and is a great way to use the apples during and at the end of the season so they do not spoil.

One more tasty stop was with the folks at Duck Donuts, who featured two delightful apple-infused donuts that are made to order. The line was long and once again no one seemed to care.

We are all part of a family tree and apples grow on trees. Maybe that’s why we love them so much.

 Carl White is the Executive Producer and Host of the award-winning syndicated TV show Carl White’s Life In The Carolinas. The weekly show is now in its 10th year of syndication and can be seen in the Charlotte market on WJZY Fox 46 Saturday’s at noon and My 12. The show also streams on Amazon Prime. For more information visit www.lifeinthecarolinas.com. You can email Carl at Carl@lifeinthecarolinas.com

[limejuicer1862]

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

I am honoured and privileged that the following poets, local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger. The usual ground is covered about motivation, daily routines and work ethic, but some surprises too. Some of these poets you may know, others may be new to you. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do.

Matt Duggan

Matt was born in 1971 and lives in Bristol in the U.K. with his partner Kelly his poems have appeared in many journals across the world such as Osiris Poetry Journal, Ink, Sweat, and Tears, The Blue Nib, Into the Void, The Journal, The Dawntreader, Midnight Lane Boutique, Anti—Heroin Chic Journal, The High Window, A Restricted View from Under the Hedge, Ghost City Review, Laldy Literary Journal, L’ Ephemere Review, Carillion, Lakeview International Literary Journal, Levure Litteraire, erbacce journal, The Stray Branch, Prole, Black Light Engine Room, Militant Thistles, Matt won the Erbacce Prize for Poetry in 2015 with his first full collection of poems Dystopia 38.10 and became one of five core members at Erbacce-Press. In 2017 Matt won the Into the Void Poetry Prize with his poem Elegy for Magdalene, and read his work across the east – coast of the U.S.A. with readings at the prestigious Cambridge Public Library Poetry Series in Boston, a guest poet appearance at The Parkside Lounge and Sip This in New York, and also read at his first U.S. book launch in Philadelphia. Matt has two new chapbooks available One Million Tiny Cuts (Clare Song Birds Publishing House) and A Season in Another World (Thirty West Publishing House) plus a small limited edition booklet The Feeding ( Rum Do Press) Venice and London. He has also read his work at Poetry on the Lake Festival in Orta, Italy, the Poetry Café in London, in Paxos in Greece, and at various venues across the U.K. he runs and hosts his own poetry events and was highly commended in the Road to Clevedon Pier Poetry Anthology Competition, his second full collection Woodworm (Hedgehog Poetry Press) is due in Spring 2019.

The Interview

1. What were the circumstances under which you began to write poetry?

I started writing poetry and prose when I was a young boy, the first poem I wrote won the best poem in my class at the age of twelve, I also remembered the time that we’d have to read a play in class and I’d end up reading four or five of the main characters from the play. I suppose the first real poems were written for the affections of young girls, from then it just progressed, almost like an obsession that I had to keep writing. I then started becoming political and writing about Thatcherism  and neo-politics and I never really wanted to be put myself into a category as a political poet that solely writes about protest and politics, but I think today and what surrounds us it’s necessary.

2. Who introduced you to poetry?

Who introduced me, well, that would be a good teacher at my local school called Mr Ford who used different ways to teach us about poetry, I became fascinated with the world of poetry and poets and he would tell us stories about Dylan Thomas, Thomas Chatterton, Verlaine, and many others, he brought the poems and the poet’s life into his teachings and had most classes absolutely transfixed, I just wish I could go back and thank him. It was around this time that I started writing a lot of material and sending them out to journals, of which 80% were rejected, but I do remember getting my first hand written acceptance in 94 / 96 from a lovely editor by the name of Jenne Conne who edited a magazine called ‘Connections’ based in London.  I still have that very letter which I do look at from time to time, she inspired me to continue writing and I just wish I could of thanked her.

3. How aware were you of the dominating presence of older poets?

Very aware, over the years I devoured large collections of  Ted Hughes, Shelley, Auden, Keats, Homer, Coleridge, Ashberry, Ginsberg, but I never really involved myself in the local scene at that time it was much later when I felt that I gained enough confidence to read in front of an audience, and sometimes, I do wish I took the plunge earlier.

4. What is your daily writing routine?

I don’t really have one but I have stuck to a few rules that I can’t break. I only write with a pencil and notepad and I never use any mobile devices apart from writing up the final drafts of poems onto a computer. I always write from the hours 3am to 6am and have around five notepads full of lines, themes, and half written poems that I work through when I have the time.

5. What motivates you to write?

Lots of reasons what motivates me from highlighting certain aspects of life that people generally don’t know about, such as media, history, politics, right wing propaganda, for me it’s about telling the truth about experience to the more day to day mundane. I also write to overcome feelings, and to face truths.  I try to operate on an open canvas and I suppose most things that I encounter on a daily basis can motivate me in some way to write, it could be a snippet from a conversation, a scene in a street, or a more imaginative image to conjure with, for me, poetry is everywhere.

6. What is your work ethic?

I have a very strong work ethic that I need to be constantly busy from reading submissions, reading competition entries, doing interviews for the erbacce journal, organising events to support and promote other poets in my hometown of Bristol, and my own writing which I’m concentrating more on these days. I do try to immerse myself in too much work which feeds me even more, it’s a little like getting rejections from journals I seem to feed on this, and hit back with something that they will in the end accept, I enjoy this a bit too much at times to be honest.

7. How do the writers you read when you were young influence you today?

The writers that I read when I was growing up were writing about social equality, rise of fascism, corporate takeovers, so I suppose it never really never went away and in that way they have influenced me to keep at it, to keep telling the truth, to challenge and to be honest with yourself , so I would say they have had a huge influence on my progress into the poetry world, there were also several writers who just didn’t do it for me and I remember reading all the Liverpool poets as I’d always liked Brian Patten work it just spoke to me as an adolescent, yet others in that same group did nothing for me then, and they still don’t.

8. Who of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?

This is a hard one as I read a lot of collections and it can change from month to month, but I would say Tony Harrison especially for his poem V and A Cold Coming I remember watching V on Channel 4 which had such a huge effect on me as a young boy, this was someone who was saying what I was thinking, and it was on T.V. plus a favourite of mine of his is The Gaze of the Gorgon I still pick up that collection and can never put it down,  I suppose because of the truth behind the poems, poetry for me is about telling the truth and being honest, a poem should make you think and should make you re – read the poem. The last Harrison book I picked up was Laureate’s Block and the title poem is simply sublime, I’d advise anyone thinking of entering into the poetry world to read this collection, other writers I admire are Andre Naffis- Sahely his debut collection The Promised Land for its themes on travel, displacement and disposable cities, his control of a poem is a delight to read as is Maria Castra Dominguez collection A Face in the Crowd, which is such a magical and beautiful experience. I’d also say Thomas McColl, Penny Rimbaud’s collection America, and How! (1973-2012) which I read while travelling across the U.S. recently I loved the poems and the bio which states ‘ He did not study at Oxford, he does not have a dog, a wife, a flat in North London or a house in Buckinghamshire. He has been a writer throughout his life.’ Brilliant! Also Simon Darragh,  and I’ve also just started re-reading John Tottenham’s The Inertia Variations it’s the best collection of poems written on the themes of sloth, inertia, and laziness, you’ll ever likely to find.

9. Why do you write?

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t write I suppose there are many reasons why I write sometimes it’s just for a little fun with silly puns and quirky poems of which I’ll never read out or would add to any collection, also, when I feel emotionally charged about a certain theme or subject it almost takes over my life, mind, and body, and becomes like an addiction until its finally finished, and then I get grumpy and very moody when I’m not writing.

10. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?”

Firstly I’d advise them to live life and maybe travel the world, live on a mountain, swim with dolphins, take notes, live with different cultures and experience as much of life as possible before putting pen to paper and especially read as many poetry collections as possible before finding a voice and then submit, submit, submit, and don’t be put off by bullies and editors who think that they know best, always be firm and believe in what you write and don’t take any shit from anyone.

11. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.

I’ve just finished two articles about my recent readings in the U.S.A which will be published in A Restricted View from Under the Hedge, and The Journal. I had two new chapbooks published  this year One Million Tiny Cuts

http://www.claresongbirdspub.com/shop/poetry/

and A Season in Another World

http://www.thirtywestph.com/shop/aseasoninanotherworld

also  involved with the upcoming 70th NHS anthology for erbacce-press. I’m also working on two new commissions with publishers, and  editing the final draft of ‘Brexit and Bandages’ journal, also, my second full collection of poems Woodworm (Hedgehog Poetry Press) which I’m so excited about will be published in Spring 2019. And I’ve also been asked to judge a new poetry competition called Songs of Lenin and McCarthy, based on protest poems in the form of songs by Lennon and McCartney.

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: Matt Duggan Wombwell Rainbow Interviews I am honoured and privileged that the following poets, local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me.

[clubofinfo]

Expert: Since the FBI never inspected the DNC’s computers first-hand, the only evidence comes from an Irvine, California, cyber-security firm known as CrowdStrike whose chief technical officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, a well-known Putin-phobe, is a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank that is also vehemently anti-Russian as well as a close Hillary Clinton ally. — Daniel Lazare, Consortium News The masses did not mistakenly choose fascism. Rather, there is a more fundamental nonidentity between class consciousness and mass movements. Fascism was not a Falschkauf (mistaken purchase) followed by buyer’s remorse. The people fought for it, fiercely and stubbornly—though this desire for fascism is also a desire for suppression, a “fight for servitude,” if you will, or an “escape from freedom,” as Erich Fromm put it in the title of his 1941 book. — Ana Teixeira Pinto, E-Flux This week an angry dead end kid named Nikolas Cruz took his legally purchased AR 15 and walked into a school and opened fire. The FBI knew about Cruz because he had been reported to them. Cruz had been reported to the school, too. But nobody followed up. Cruz himself is one of those unpleasant looking young men that are visibly angry, and who exhibit, even in photographs, a quality of emotional disturbance. But nobody followed up. The FBI is too busy writing narrative fiction about Russia. The FBI is more concerned with constructing terrorist threats and then busting various patsies and making a big show of their success. This same week the US has continued to bomb Yemen alongside Saudi Arabia. This same week Mike Pence stomped around the site of the Winter Olympics and managed to insult most every foreign leader in attendance, but most acutely the hosts of this event. But then Pence is a vulgar rube from the hinterlands of Indiana. A fundamentalist Christian whose knowledge of the world is even smaller than his boss, the President. The Hill reported….“Approval of the FBI has increased among Democrats and decreased among Republicans since President Trump took office, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll.” So, uh, Dems and liberals are fawning over the FBI because, presumably, Mueller is after Satan-in-Chief The Donald, while Republicans are pouting because, presumably, the FBI isn’t dropping the fictitious investigation of Russian collusion. Meanwhile, the FBI, famed for various cluster fucks like Waco and Ruby Ridge, not to mention COINTELPRO and countless undercover surveillances on journalists and dissidents of all kinds, is being embraced by liberal America. (COINTELPRO, as a reminder, attacked the Black Panther party, and among its victims were Fred Hampton, Geronimo Pratt, and Mumia Abu Jamal. And it was J.Edgar Hoover who wrote letters that described Hampton as the ‘new black messiah’ — one that needed to be dealt with). That is your virtuous FBI. Now part of this is just the desire among liberals for the status quo. At all costs. It is liberals far more than Republicans who want a Norman Rockwell America. The arch conservative wants something closer to gated communities of whiteness and armed privatized security roaming the streets keeping their property safe. It is the liberal Democratic voter who WANTS TO BELIEVE in the goodness of America. Who wants to believe in all that progress in civil rights and gender equality. But both will in the end default to authoritarian political control. They always have. Joseph Kishore over at WSWS wrote back in 2016 already: … the Times’ article set the tone for a wave of war-mongering commentary in the American media. Lipton was interviewed on the cable news channels and the Public Broadcasting System’s evening news program. Democratic Senator Ben Cardin declared on MSNBC that the US had been “attacked by Russia.” He called for an independent commission, citing the bipartisan panel set up after 9/11. CNN commentator Jake Tapper referred to Russia as the “enemy” and openly wondered, in the course of interviewing former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden, whether President-elect Trump was “siding with the enemy. But most Democrats believe in Russian evil doing. They believe Putin is a tyrant. They WANT TO BELIEVE. Now, the logic of Crowdstrike and all those US security experts on cyber warfare is that only the most sophisticated hackers could have penetrated the protections of the U.S. government, while at the same time only the most unsophisticated cyber hackers, revealing their amateurish clumsiness by leaving a variety of Russian language clues in the meta data, could have done such a thing. It is the same logic that posits Taliban or ISIS commanders, cunning…evil geniuses..who plot the overthrow of western civilization..but who are also simultaneously primitives living in caves. The Russians are also evil geniuses but also primitives. On one level the U.S. loves the uneducated. America has never trusted intelligence or education. But they have to at the same time be the best. The best at everything. The best killers. The most violent soldiers. Etc. But not the most educated. Trump’s approval ratings climb as he cuts funding to libraries and the arts. Such actions have always been an electoral winner in the USA. Edward Luce had a cogent piece at Financial Times of all places. He wrote America’s elites have stored more wealth than they can consume. This creates three problems for everyone else. First, elites invest their surpluses in replicating their advantages. Kids raised in poorer neighbourhoods with mediocre schools stand little chance. Their parents cannot match the social capital of their wealthier peers. The drawbridge is rising. The gap between the self image of meritocratic openness and reality is wide. Psychologists call this “self-discrepancy”. Economists call it barriers to entry. This is an important observation. He also added: …Social capital is about knowing what to say to whom and when, which is a sophisticated skill. Technical learning is for others. Children of the elites are learning how to raise money for philanthropic causes. Economists define this as a positional good. Sociologists call it virtue signalling. Mr Trump calls it political correctness. And finally, Luce points out that the new bourgeoisie (not his word) are suffering from a loss of even the appearance of a meritocracy. Too few jobs for what are now the over-educated (well, over degreed). And Luce concludes with a particularly astute insight. The bourgeoisie are finding they need Trump. Without him there is no distraction. And then he poses the question for these aspiring classes; do they really love the highly educated as they claim? Do they deserve admiration because of their degrees? And here we touch upon the core issues at work socially in the Trump phenomenon. Trump is easy and even enjoyable to make fun of. He IS a distraction. But Trump also serves a very clear purpose for the 1%. Those who reign above the haute bourgeoisie. For Trump is still implementing the same policies that Hillary Clinton would have. The same wars, by and large. The same military build up. All the right people are still making money. The difference is in Trump’s less important appointments. The difference is Jeff Sessions for one. And the various minor cabinet hacks and flunkies he has installed in positions of limited but not insignificant power. He is normalizing in a way unprecedented, the weaponized ignorance of the Christian right. And this includes, of course, the open racism and xenophobia on display and perhaps crystalized in Mike Pence’s boorish crassness at the Olympics. Pence suffers no doubts. The new Christians of televangilism never do. These are creationists and believers in the rapture. That they are barking mad has been known for a while now, but never before have they entered the corridors of power. The 1% carry on as before. So does the Pentagon and CIA — though the infilitration of the Christian extremists in the Air Force is well documented. Remember, all Presidents must have prayer breakfasts for fuck sake. They must go to Church. They get a dog, and they put on leather bomber jackets for photo ops. And they have a spiritual advisor. There is a whole laundry list of must do’s. What is different now is that stupidity is being not just normalized but accepted as, perhaps, a virtue. Beevis and Butthead go to Washington. Bill & Ted’s excellent adventure on Capital Hill. How different, really, was George W. Bush? (the newly rehabilitated GWB, in a curious charm make over…but I digress…). So, no, the aspiring haute bourgeoisie do not REALLY love education. The hard work of studying is for proles. For Asian kids and social climbers and those quota scholarship kids. The idea of learning having some inherent value is now fully gone from the public imagination. Socrates who? He played *soccer* for Brazil, no? Literally nobody reads. I mean book stores are closing en mass. The Gutenberg era is over. I wrote recently on my blog about Hugh Kenner. I used to sneak into his lectures at UCSB in the early 70s. There are no Hugh Kenners anymore. Erudition is to become an obsolete word. The state of Minnesota is taking Huckleberry Finn off high school reading lists. Harper Lee is being taken off, too. No doubt others will follow. Hurtful. Twain’s epic novel is, apparently, “hurtful”. I am coming, I have to admit, to just not care about who has hurt feelings. All those social correctives that looked to rid the culture of racist images and language are now appropriated for other purposes. For narcissistic vehicles for anger. For America is as angry a society as the world may have ever seen. All that I see now, the new McCarthyism, the Russophobic propaganda that is swallowed wholesale, and not just swallowed but used as a kind of narcotic — is carried along and draws energy from a deep reservoir of rage. The old Puritan consciousness that wants nothing more than to chastise and shun is alive in the U.S. today. All these hurt feelings are expressions of the narcissistic desire to believe in our own uniqueness and specialness. And such subjective manufacture helps distract from the increasing sadism of American society overall. The real violence of a system based on inequality is buried. It is obscured. The violence of capital, of wage slavery is mystified. All relations under capitalism are coercive. And when the early Capitalist class collaborated with the Church to burn a few hundred thousand women as witches in the early 1700s, across Europe, they were setting a structural dynamic in motion. The Inquisition and witch burning were not the result of magic, but of the need for scapegoats and for ridding the system of autonomous women and small craftspeople. It set up a class war, essentially, one mediated in that case by a deep hatred of women. And fear. The destruction of various celebrities (mostly) for sexual *misconduct* has already been appropriated by NATO and CAA and even Paul Kagame got in the act (see Emma Watson and the Rwandian war criminal share a dais…all to *help* women in war torn areas, or something. I mean who knows. But its mind numbing how quickly such things are activated). Angelina Jolie, who never saw a country she didn’t want to bomb or quarantine (see marriage and honeymoon in Namibia) is also is out stumping for NATO aggressions under cover of protecting women in war zones. No mention of stopping war zones from being created, of course. MeToo became, as quick as you can write hashtag, a vehicle for the exact opposite of that for which it began. And this was predictable. Today the system has other scapegoats and other needs than it did during the witch trials in Europe. But the violence of capital is alive throughout the carceral system, alive in black communities where cops operate as anti insurgency soldiers bent on pacification. Fallujah or Baltimore, there is not a lot of difference. And the violence of Nikolas Cruz will cause great oceans of tears and hand wringing. Get rid of guns. Okay, how about those in the hands of cops — or those in the army or marine corps? Those are OK, because they don’t shoot up schools. Well, not *our* schools, anyway. There is a sort of pattern recognition in the public now. Shoot up a school is a certain class of irrational violence. People will posit notions about anti depressants or whatever. And it might have some truth to it. Maybe a lot, but I can guarantee that few will read anything about the beliefs of these *sick* shooters. That they all, like Anders Breivik, adhere to classic fascistic values and ideology. They do not fall out of the sky. They are the product of a vast number of forces, but they also kill not just because they suffer humiliation and are frustrated and emotionally disfigured. Or, rather, that emotional disfigurement creates the fascist sensibility. They do not think it is wrong, what they do. Cruz had a history of aggressive behaviour toward women. He was a member of ROTC and posted constantly on social media with various guns and weapons. Those who knew him said he was obsessed with guns. The chilling photos of cops in SWAT attire arresting a kid who wanted to be just like them. There is a strange closed loop of morbid mimetic activity on display. The U.S. today creates enemies. It often seems the primary activity of America, the manufacturing of global enemies and threats. Of late it is Putin and Kim Jong Il. But they are only the latest in a long line. U.S. police departments, heavily militarized, and increasingly trained in Israel for counter insurgency, are no longer in the policing business but rather in the soldiering business. They are militia, not peace officers. The dysfunctional extreme for what this produces is Nikolas Cruz. But how far is Cruz from the Florida cop who murdered a begging man, on his knees, on video? How far from George Zimmerman? One suspects those three might enjoy a beer together and share many of the same values. I am always struck when reading about these alleged lone wolf shooters how NOT alone they are. Klaus Thewelit’s seminal work Male Fantasies should be required reading. But if male-female relations of production under patriarchy are relations of oppression, it is appropriate to understand the sexuality created by, and active within, those relations as a sexuality of the oppressor and the oppressed. If the social nature of such “gender-distinctions” isn’t expressly emphasized, it seems grievously wrong to distinguish these sexualities according to the categories “male” and “female.” The sexuality of the patriarch is less “male” than it is deadly, just as that of the subjected women is not so much “female” as suppressed, devivified. — Klaus Thewelit Theweleit didn’t see genocide as the thwarted expression of inhibited sexual energies. His point was rather that the production of gender and sexuality are intimately tied to the content of anti-Semitism and overt racism—both before, during, and after the fall of the Weimar Republic. Fascist sexuality is not so much repressed as it is ideological: it idealizes virility and fertility as political imperatives. — Ana Teixeira Pinto The cultural post-modernism of today, at least in the U.S., is technologically sophisticated and socially hyper conservative. The neoliberal system might marginalize white nationalists but they cultivate their symbolism and much of their rhetoric. A Nikolas Cruz desired completion as the captain of capitalist manhood. His failures, his lack of productive labor, his relative poverty, escalated his hatred of those he saw as responsible — and at the head of that list one would guess would be women. But the indoctrination of men like Cruz, or boys, begins earlier. As Theweleit writes: “No man is forced to turn political fascist for reasons of economic devaluation or degradation. His fascism develops much earlier, from his feelings; he is a fascist from the inside.” The violence of the U.S. military, globally, inflicted on the most defenseless nations and people cannot be separated from cops in Chicago or Baltimore or Los Angeles, nor from Fallujuh and Libya and Syria. I mean, the U.S. has occupied Afghanistan for sixteen years. The U.S. military metaphorically rapes these countries. And it is a kind of re-colonializing. Sylvia Federici called the World Bank and IMF “the new Conquistadors”. Nor can it be separated, finally, from Harvey Weinstein or James Toback. Nor from the lynch mob hysteria that has coopted the entire #metoo* phenomenon. Nikolas Cruz sensed he was broken, and his longing for restoration was reflected back at him by those men who would later capture him. Kevlar and weaponry, helmeted faceless phallic superbodies. He could only merge with his fantasy through mimetic approximation. Cruz may be seen as insane, but he was not *only* insane. The anti-Russian propaganda that is spewed out daily by mainstream media is an insidious and destructive force that also cannot really be separated from the tidal swell of violence on the streets and in the institutions of U.S. society. Manufacturing contempt for North Korea or Yemen or Libya is not *only* propaganda. It has consequences to the psyches of the people that must absorb that inculcating assault. (Go back and read Ben Judah’s bizarre and lurid anti Putin piece at Newsweek,July 2014 — the one with Putin in shades on the cover, his eyes reflecting a burning …we presume…America. Read it now and just try to digest that this is what passes for *real* news as opposed to fake news). In March of last year Brian Cloughly began an article on this massive anti Russian propaganda this way… On January 30 NBC News reported that “On a snowy Polish plain dominated by Russian forces for decades, American tanks and troops sent a message to Moscow and demonstrated the firepower of the NATO alliance. Amid concerns that President Donald Trump’s commitment to NATO is wavering, the tanks fired salvos that declared the 28-nation alliance a vital deterrent in a dangerous new world. One intriguing aspect of this slanted account are the phrases “dominated by Russian forces for decades” and “vital deterrent” which are used by NBC to imply that Russia yearns, for some unspecified reason, to invade Poland. As is common in the Western media there is no justification or evidence to substantiate the suggestion that Russia is hell-bent on domination, and the fact that US troops are far from home, operating along the Russian border, is regarded as normal behaviour on the part of the world’s “indispensable nation”. This is just one example of out of literally hundreds and hundreds. One could find the same against Maduro and Venezuela and against the DPRK. It hardly needs pointing out that Hollywood produces endless paeans of love for militarism and male destructiveness. Capitalism produces economic inequality and as such cannot exist without political and social oppression. The contradictions of Hollywood’s endless fascist product and its equally endless hand wringing over sexual harassment or gun control should be obvious. The sexual harassment in Hollywood goes back to Shirley Temple. It is built into a system in which all parties are there to monetize themselves. It is also true that men with power must punish those beneath them. They cannot exist without subordinates. What Theweleit wrote of the *soldier male* (his term for the prototype ur fascist) that the most urgent task facing him…“is to pursue, to dam in, and to subdue any force that threatens to transform him back into the horribly disorganized jumble of flesh, hair, skin, bones, intestines, and feelings that calls itself human.” Hollywood produces narratives that make the non human heroic. The first Terminator was a watershed moment in that respect. A film whose message was that an android…no, a ‘killer’ android…made a better parent that the human version. Propaganda that creates phantom enemies is justified because Trump is now the perfect villain. And as such, is a tool of the ruling class. He is the justification for the abandonment of all notions of integrity and honesty, compassion or honour. One case of harassment I know of included a woman who had signed a non disclosure agreement and took payment of tens of thousands of dollars. She disclosed anyway and was applauded as heroic. It is not heroic to break your word. To take a payoff and then snitch anyway. But punishment is its own justification. Trump’s vulgarity is a kind of pride in ignorance trope. He intentionally chooses to be crude, because that is what his base desires. They may not admit it, those suburban small businessmen and managerial white class — but they do. A sense of shunning the soft and sensitive. Stories about escorts and golden showers only adds to his appeal. Those guys wish they could afford escorts. Trump is the grandson of a whore house owner, after all. He never sold himself as Adlai Stevenson. So, Mark Twain is hurtful. Libraries are being shuttered across the country. Book stores are closing. The U.S. poverty levels have exceeded those of many developing countries. The compulsive hatred of Putin by many who have almost zero idea about Putin or Russian history is disproportionate to any rational analysis, but not surprising. Trump and Putin are like weird doppelgangers in the liberal imagination. For the propagandists of the exceptional and indispensable nation the by-product of their creative activities is Nikolas Cruz. Trump shares with the far right parties growing across Europe the open disdain for democracy and free speech. Cruz was wearing a Trump cap in one of his Instagram photos. He wasn’t wearing a Che t-shirt. He wanted to kill antifa. He was not an isolated mentally disturbed killer. He was a fascist killer. He wanted to be made whole and inviolate. The way all fascists want to be whole, but cannot. http://clubof.info/

[clubofinfo]

Expert: Orientation What does it mean to be a political agitator in the 21st century? Until about a year ago, political agitation for me was inseparable from face-to-face interaction in one-on-one group settings or in making or listening to a public speech. This was the foundation for building and sustaining political solidarity. But is there a place for agitation on Facebook? After all, in political Facebook groups there is discussion about what is going on in the political economy but how much do these discussions contribute, if anything, to building socialism. Is it “just talk” which doesn’t lead anywhere, or does Facebook discussion move people to then take action in face-to-face settings? Is participating in Facebook political discussions an incipient form for political activity or is it a distraction from it? While face-to-face agitation is clearly superior in terms of getting anyone to commit to anything, face-to-face is limited in its reach. The Facebook group Jill Stein Dank Meme has about 50,000 members. The reach of Facebook is overwhelmingly superior to face-to-face. My other question has to do with whether intergenerational solidarity can be built better through face-to-face encounters or on Facebook. In face-to-face interaction, status indicators of class, race, gender and age are present. You can find out where the person lives, what kind of work they do, and who their friends are. Knowing these things both can provide the deepening of political relationships as well as boxing them in. But on Facebook this kind of information can be somewhat suppressed. In terms of building political relationships does relative anonymity work for or against building an intergenerational political community? I do not have answers to these questions, but I do want to share my experiences in with both settings and then draw some tentative conclusions. In the first section I want to show the power of face-to-face intergenerational influence by telling a story of the impact of three encounters I had with the anarchist Murray Bookchin in the early 1970’s. In the last section I will discuss my own fledgling influence over young socialists on Facebook over the past few months. In order to show the power of face-to-face interaction, I need to talk about the class and political implications of my first 22 years before meeting Murray as a testament of how powerful face-to-face can be. From grease ball to proto-hippie I am no red diaper baby. I was born to a conservative Italian Catholic family in 1948 in Brooklyn. My mother’s father was a shoemaker in a tiny store on Bushwick Avenue. He had no employees. My father’s side of the family was very poor (“on the dole”, as they used to say). His own father deserted them and his single mother, along with six other siblings, raised him. My father’s side of the family resembled some of the old James Cagney movies: his brothers were all petty criminals — numbers runners, betting on the horses, loan sharks – and the women joined the convent to pray for the men. My father had drawing talent, which he cultivated despite his family making fun of him. When he was 17 he took his pen-and-ink sketches into Manhattan and some of the commercial artists took him under their wing. He was the only one on his side of the family to “make good”. My parents understood that while economically they were middle class they really were not culturally middle class. They hoped to bridge the gap by sending me to Catholic schools—grammar school, high school and college. When we moved from Brooklyn to Jamaica, Queens they did not know which neighborhoods had Catholic schools that were middle class. The grammar school they sent me to, Saint Nicholas of Tolentine, was in a working class neighborhood. Most of the kids I went to school with were Irish or Italian and their parents were butchers, firemen or cops. Class conflicts arose between how my parents wanted to raise me against the expectations from these kids. I had the same situation when I played baseball in the sandlots. In both cases I got my first taste of what Erik Olin Wright called “contradictory class locations.” In both cases working class kids won. You either learned to fight or you were ostracized, shunned or tormented as only children can do. Like most people of my generation, I can testify that Catholic grammar school was hell on Earth. Holy Cross High School wasn’t much better. For twelve years I received about 30 hours a week of authoritarian propaganda along with another two hours on the weekend. By my junior year the cracks were starting to show. Thanks to “Murray the K” of WINS radio station, I got exposure to rhythm and blues music, which besides baseball, was an island of sanity. I used to go to the Brooklyn Fox Theater which was predominantly working class. Then I stumbled across three rhythm and blues stations—WWRL, WLIB in New York and WKJR, in Newark. I used to go by myself to the Apollo Theatre in Manhattan to catch some of the acts. When my parents enrolled me in a Catholic community college it was the last straw. I dropped out of college, moved away from home and back to Brooklyn. I went to work in music stores in Manhattan, including the famous Colony Records, for a couple of years. By this time it was 1968, the Attica riots, the Anti-war and Civil Rights movements were coming to a head. Thanks to a few of the political “freaks” in the music store I finally made the transition from “Flatland” to “Spaceland”, as mathematician Edwin Abbot called it. After about a year I applied to VISTA to avoid the draft for the Vietnam War. Then I received a letter from VISTA inviting me to their training program in Atlanta. I “decided” to go (as much as a 20 year old “decides” anything). I lasted a week. There was one of the VISTA orientation leaders who I really liked. On about the fifth day of training, our group was on a bus with him heading for some workshop. I cornered him on the bus and asked him some very pointed questions. He admitted to me he was a Communist and this was all reformist crap. That was all the reassurance I needed. By force of circumstances that would require more space than I have, I spent the next two years hitchhiking around the country with a six-month stint in Denver Colorado. Once I began hitchhiking, I started to develop an interest in reading. I didn’t have a mentor to teach me the order in which to read things. So when I settled in Denver, I developed my own six month reading program in which I read about 6-8 hours a day five days a week, in addition to holding down a part-time job as a library page in the Denver Public Library. I read about the history of socialism, the elite theory of Mosca and Pareto, McNeill’s Rise of the West, Mumford and Wilhelm Reich – who was white-hot at the time. Despite being enthralled with my new self-education, I was lonely. I attended some of the demonstrations in the city, but they all were about single issues. I wanted to find a socialist group which could frame these issues, but I didn’t know where to look. All the books I read were about anarchism as a historical movement. Woodcock’s history of anarchism claimed that anarchism had its day. I didn’t quite believe that. Weren’t there contemporary anarchists? I made friends with people who had a radical bookstore in Denver. There was some anarchist literature in the bookstore, but it seemed like there was a current anarchist organization that was writing about contemporary issues. One guy, Tuggie, was very friendly to me. He told me about their collective, but I really did not know what the next step was. I felt that there was some secret code I had to decipher to “join the movement”, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I was too embarrassed to ask. In any event, Tuggie showed me a book called Post-Scarcity Anarchism by Murray Bookchin. I tore through that book in three days. “This guy must be alive!” I thought. No more dead anarchists for me! I found out Murray lived in New York. I packed my stuff and moved back to New York and stayed with my parents till I could find a place to live. First Encounter with Murray Some time in January of 1972, feeling very lonely, I decided to see if I could find Murray in the phone book. Part of me thought “If you were a famous anarchist, would you have your phone number in a phone book?” Hell no! But desperately I poured through the Manhattan phone book anyway. I couldn’t believe it! There was his name in the book. What the fuck! Now for the real test. Do I have the nerve to call him up? There was something about the way Murray wrote that book that made him seem approachable. After about an hour of pacing around in the kitchen, I picked up the phone and called. Of course, I hoped no one would answer to let me off the hook. But someone did answer. It was some kid about my age. “Can I speak with Murray?” I said, my heart racing. The kid said “sure”. After a few seconds of talking behind the scene, Murray came on the phone. “Murray, you don’t know me,” I blurt out, “but I read your Post Scarcity Anarchism book and I want to be part of this. I’m pretty isolated now. Can you give me some direction?” He asked me if I wanted to come over. What the fuck! “Yeah! Where are you?” He gave me his address. It was something like 2nd Avenue and East 6th street. I told him I lived in Jamaica, Queens and I would be there in about 45 minutes. I left the house and probably ran the entire five long blocks to reach the subway. I reached his address. It was kind of a beat-up apartment building, but nothing was going to stop me. A young kid answered the door. I think his name was Joel Whitehouse. Very friendly, he said “are you Bruce?” I nod nervously. He directs me to the kitchen where Murray must have been holding court. There must have been about three kids my age. Murray asked me some questions about myself. I was able to convey to everyone that I was serious about anarchism, that I had some experiences that qualified me, including some LSD trips which I’m sure met with approval from the other kids, if not Murray. The whole time I was there all of them made me feel that I was welcome and that I was part of something larger. Most of the time was spent with them telling me places I could go to get plugged in. That was the best 90 minutes of therapy I ever had! I don’t remember if I hugged Murray or not. Being Italian it wasn’t far-fetched, but I think I was too much in awe of him to do that. Romance among the anarchists Within the next day or so I started to volunteer at the War Resisters’ League. I did phone calling, leafleting and general office work. People were very nice to me but I could see that there were tensions between some of the volunteers. What came as a shock to me (and which I’ve never gotten over) was how miserable leftists treat each other over the slightest theoretical differences. I thought leftists would embody the new world we wanted to create in how they lived and treated each other. I guess I was too much of a psychologist or process junkie to understand that a lot people join the movement for reasons other than to just build socialism, as Eric Hoffer argued. At one of the War Resisters League meetings I noticed a woman named Susan. I first worked with her one-on-one as a volunteer. She was very kind in explaining to me how things worked. Now at the meeting I saw her power to articulate things at a higher level in a group meeting. I become even more attracted to her. We continued to build a relationship. Finally after a couple of months, I asked her if she had a boyfriend. “Yes”. I was disappointed, but not surprised. Then she said “are you asking me out?” “Well I was going to” I said, “but you are taken”. “My boyfriend and I do not have a monogamous agreement”, she responded. This confuses me. “You mean you want to go out with me even though you have a boyfriend?” “Yes”, she replied. Now I am really turned on and petrified all at the same time. We fooled around. A week or two later she told me her boyfriend, Jack, who lives in the West Village, is looking for a roommate. “Would you be interested?” she asks me. Whaaaatttttt?? “Yeah,” she said, “I told him about you and he’d like to meet you.” So this is what Emma Goldman went through, I thought to myself. “OK, I’ll meet him”. I meet Jack and like him very much. Nothing between Susan and me is mentioned. I say I need to think about being his roommate. I have to figure out whether I want to go on as a threesome and jeopardize my potential living situation with Jack or do I want to be safe, stop seeing Susan and just work on building a stable home-life with Jack. In one of the few sane decisions of my 20’s, I decided on the second course. Susan seemed to take everything in stride when I explained that I am in over my head. I continued to volunteer with War Resisters League, go to demonstrations with Jack and Susan and others and work for United Parcel Service at night unloading trucks. Second Encounter with Murray At UPS I worked a graveyard shift: 11 at night till 3 in the morning. I took the train home from the Long Island City plant back to the village, got to sleep about 4:30 AM and was up by about noon. One day in the late morning I was on 6th Avenue in the West Village around 8th Street where the great basketball games go on, and had just come out of a supermarket. I saw an older guy walking toward me. It looked like Murray. “Could it be? I haven’t seen him since I met him a couple of months ago at his place. It is him!”. I didn’t expect him to remember me because I figured I was just one of hundreds of lost hippies looking to him for direction. But I was also happy to see him because I was in a much better place psychologically, and wanted to show him I turned out okay and was no longer a basket case. “Murray, remember me? You invited me to your house a couple of months ago?” He looked at me hard, and then said “yes” after pointing his finger at me a couple of times. “How are you doing now?” I rolled my eyes and said “I am in such a better place now. I volunteer at the War Resisters League and I live in the West Village with another anarchist roommate. I work at UPS at night unloading trucks.” After a pause, I looked him straight in the eye and said “you really helped me Murray”. “Well, good” he said. That was the last time I ever spoke with him directly. In retrospect, I wish I could have said “I’ll never forget you”, but I had no way of knowing it would be the last time. Third Encounter with Murray – One of the benefits of working with the War Resisters League was that I also found out about radical events around Manhattan. One event was a book club meeting, which I think was sponsored once a month on a Thursday night by the Libertarian League. I had never heard of this, but one of my comrades told me about it. When he told me Murray Bookchin was going to speak, I was ecstatic. Two weeks later I came upon this sturdy one or two story red brick building. I got there 30 minutes early to look around. There were these wonderful old people, but they were not like the old people I was used to: cranky, complaining about their children. These people were warm, offering me cookies. They were like my Italian grandparents, but they were radicals. Around me I could hear others arguing about the Spanish and Russian Revolutions. I remember someone telling someone else he knew Lenin was full of it even before the Bolsheviks took power. However, I began to feel uncomfortable when the number of old people in the room kept growing. I began to feel out of place. Then Murray came in and immediately started talking with the old-timers. Slowly, close to 7:00 some people my age began to drift in. Murray ambled to the lectern at about ten minutes after seven and began speaking. Within about 10 minutes the place was packed. People were standing around the perimeters. There were now many people my age, naturally late. I was riveted by what Murray had to say, but I was also able to take a step back and notice what was before me. This was a truly intergenerational event that I had never seen before. Well, of course, I did: when I was in church as a child with my parents. But this was no church like I had ever seen! It was better than any church. My eyes moved around the room. I saw old people listening, young people listening and the room was electric. Imagine this intergenerational gathering as a gathering of trees. On the periphery were the old grandfather trees on their way out, yet soaking it all in, many, perhaps, feeling more confident that with Murray at the helm, the next generation couldn’t go too far off. At the core were us seedling trees, green and immature. At the center, at the heart, stood Murray Bookchin, spanning the generations, in his prime. That is one of my fondest radical moments ever. Many people may disagree with all of Murray’s politics or some of it, as I do now. But few would deny that despite being 50 years old he had a way with people in their twenties, at the very time when Jerry Rubin or Abbie Hoffman were saying to never trust anyone over 30. When I tell my story about my encounters with Murray to older anarchists they shake their heads and say that was typical of him. It was all in the setting of political organizing. He did not get this following because these people were his students. He was drawing people to him for 10 years before he was eventually given a professorship. Murray knew how to build intergenerational solidarity like no one I had ever seen. I’ve been a college teacher for 27 years and I certainly have influenced students. I have learned to get along with people 40 years younger than I am, but this is not political organizing. Most of my students have to take my classes for reasons that have nothing to do with my political views or me. Murray drew people to him without having anything to hold over them like a grade. From Face-to-Face to Facebook At this time last year I had no Facebook page and was completely cynical about the whole operation. But last spring my partner and I hired a social media movement consultant, Susan, to help us with our political website, and she insisted we have a Facebook Page. Since my partner manages our website and already had her own Facebook account, I figured I’d leave it to her. It was only a casual comment by Susan that helped me change my mind about Facebook. She talked about people who went on Hillary’s page in order to “start up trouble”. Since she was no doubt a supporter of Clinton, I had to be delicate. I asked about what you had to do to make comments. When I found out how easy it was, my mind began racing. At the time I was very excited about the followers of Bernie Sanders as possible converts to socialism, but wasn’t sure how to reach them. Then I thought about Facebook. I searched for the most left-wing group of the Democratic Party, which seemed to be “Bernie or Bust” Facebook group. Posting on my partner’s Facebook account, I then began agitating for the Sandernistas to get out of the Democratic Party. As my posts were controversial and constantly generated responses, my partner began to insist that I get my own account. After a couple of weeks of arguments, I agreed. I lasted on Bernie or Bust until primary night when I was kicked off. I did this for two months until the primary was over. Then I switched to the Jill Stein Dank Meme group and tried to move people to make a more explicit commitment to socialism. Before any of you think I have become obsessed with Facebook and spend all my time there, I actually treat it as a job. I spend an hour every morning on it. This is part of my political commitment to agitate every day. Is Intergenerational Solidarity Possible on Facebook? Is it Desirable? I am very fussy about who my Facebook friends are. I examine their posts, look at their profile, and peruse the groups they belong to before deciding to accept their friend requests. As I said earlier, the status markers like class, race, gender, age, occupation and where they live are less easy to determine. What is even more interesting is that I don’t seem to care, since no one asks me about the kind of work I do or where I live, maybe it doesn’t matter to them much either. Still, one thing does stand out. Most of the “friend requests” I receive include their tiny profile pictures. They are not large enough to see clearly unless I go to their page. But when I look at their pictures occasionally I am astounded by how young they seem. Some of my Facebook friends look like they are still in high school, and I’d say most are in their twenties. I am old enough to be their grandfather, yet here we are pecking away. There is a group called “Baby Communist Support Group” which specifically helps young comrades to get their bearings. I have sometimes used my training as a psychologist to help people in this group with depression and anxiety in the similar ways that Murray helped me in my first encounter with him. What’s cool is that they don’t ask me for my credentials, nor do I volunteer them. Is there such a thing as electronic intergenerational solidarity? The cynic in me says no. You have built nothing with these people. They know nothing about you and there is no continuity developing. It is true that when I have tried on occasion to take the next step: to send an email or have a phone conversation, it has not worked very well. Other than my partner – and 4 or 5 other friends that I know personally as well as through Facebook, I have not yet met a single one of my Facebook friends. If I never actually meet any of my Facebook friends, is that a sign the whole project is a failure? If we never talk on the phone or exchange emails, does this mean I am deluding myself? Most of all, if the fruit of all these electronic interactions does not result in the formation of joint political in-person actions, like founding a party and engaging in a strike does that mean I am not doing any “real agitation”? Granted Murray Bookchin influenced many people, not just because of building face-to-face political relationships, but because he wrote books, made public speeches and attended conferences. Still he could not reach potentially thousands of people every day. I am no Murray Bookchin, but I have thousands of young people I can influence every day by investing at least an hour or longer if I choose. Am I co-creating intergenerational solidarity? Am I wasting my time? My conclusion is that Facebook is good for spreading seeds far and wide and talking people through the clarification and support stages of being political radicals. Face-to-Face work is for nailing down the time, place and circumstances and for building a political practice. However, all the political practice that develops can in turn return to Facebook for consolidating and spreading more seeds. Since my story is experiential and I claim no expertise, I welcome your feedback either in direct emails or by sending me articles pertaining to the subject. http://clubof.info/