I'm Not Giving Thanks For...

I routinely have a lot to give thanks for on Thanksgiving, and this year is certainly no exception. Last year, Thanksgiving fell on the day after my 35th and last radiation treatment—perfect timing I thought… until I sat at our Thanksgiving Day table unexpectedly unable to eat anything from the beautifully-arrayed plate of food before me. In the months to follow, I felt as if I was the roasted turkey. This year, thanks to family and friends and love, and the loving care of doctors and nurses, I will feast.

Ungracious as it may sound, today I find myself thinking contrarily of what I won’t give thanks for. Many will take that as a definitive sign that I’m feeling better. Wanting to share my skewed perspective with you tells me I am. But before I do, I want to touch on a few of the high points of Thanksgivings past.

For 37 years, we lived in an apartment with a large-as-life, premium view of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Families, the children the guests of honor, crowded at our oversized windows as float after float and balloon after balloon floated by, so close you felt you could almost reach out and touch something or someone in the parade. One year, I did something almost as unlikely as that. The revival of “Brigadoon” was a Broadway hit and its star, Martin Vidnovic, was perched atop one of the floats. I called to Marty, only once, from my window. And through the din, he heard me, looked up and saw me, grinned and waved. “Been too long,” I called, “let’s have lunch.” “Name it,” he said. “Russian Tea Room, next Wednesday. 12:30,” I responded. “We’re on,” he shouted. Neither of us bothered to confirm and both of us showed up as planned.

In April of 1984, I brought a sizeable sampling of Thanksgiving from Manhattan to Tel Aviv via “the balloon man” and four of his towering Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons, leading to one of the most comically bizarre episodes of my life. You can read it on this blog, but then please come back for what “I’m Not Giving Thanks For….”

As a rule, I don’t write when I have nothing to say. Too much has already been written, and, for that matter, said and sung, and if I don’t have anything new to say, or can’t think of a new way to say what may already have been said, I don’t. Having something new to say calls for passion, or something akin to it, as well as insight.

I haven’t been passionate about anything the past month except two Broadway dramas, the exceptional “Other Desert Cities” and the mercurial “Seminar.” I haven’t been angry about anything (not even anything Republican!), nor offended or indignant. In truth, the GOP has given me great pleasure this month thanks to the presidential candidates debates. I’m giving profuse thanks for them Thursday—and every day from now until election day 2012.

I’m not giving thanks for—or to—the 12 hopeless members of the failed special Congressional committee on deficit reduction. Nor, for that matter, do I have any thanks for anyone in the United States Congress. I think they should all go home for Thanksgiving and stay there.

I have no thanks in me for Texas, all of it, nor Arizona—not for the grief they’ve given us (as in U.S.). Ditto, the calcified and dividedly doctrinal Supreme Court, at least 5/9ths of it. In the larger picture, I’m not giving thanks, this year or any foreseeable year to the U.N. for what it’s become: the United Nations of Hypocrisy.

I’m not giving thanks for a living person anywhere in the world who has, in any way, betrayed the trust of children. Or for those who robotically repeat the euphemisms of journalists, jurists and sermonizers, hollow terms like endangerment, exploitation, trafficking, abuse. A child doesn’t have to be moved from one place to another for the offense to be child trafficking. Leaving a child with no choice is slavery, plain and simple.

I have not a shred of appreciation or compassion for any entity or organization that power has corrupted… or greed has infested and infected. “Corrupted” chiefly includes nightstick and pepper-spray wielding police, but doesn’t exclude unreasonably unruly mobs; autocrats, but also arrogant caucuses and sociopaths. The latter, “greed,” encompasses peddlers of gilt-edged schemes they wouldn’t sell to their mothers—in most cases. And other sociopaths.

I’m withholding thanks to professional sports organizations and outrageously-overpaid athletes until they get their Ps and Qs—profits and salary quotes—in order. Not so long ago, the Minnesota Timberwolves offered and basketball player Latrell Sprewell rejected a $21 million offer to extend his contract for three years as insufficient, because, said Sprewell, "I got a family to feed."

I’m not giving thanks to an Arab Spring that is metamorphosing into a bitter-cold Arab winter, contagious with unrest and pandemic in potential.

No thanks to or for Jon Corzine, Bernard Madoff, Mel Gibson (self-destructing is not enough), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, talk radio hosts, or anyone named Newt.

Last, but not least: thanks but no thanks to the nation of sheep the U.S. has hastened to become. Either Erasmus, Anouilh or an English proverb (I’m not giving thanks for the lack of reliable attribution.) says, “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Beware the Cyclops who emerges to lead the bleating masses.

And this is me not being angry, offended or indignant. Happy Thanksgiving.

Up In The Air

A novel I thought I would write many years ago culminated with a human wave of Arabs coming at Israel, shoulder to shoulder, row upon row, trance-like and unstoppable. It was fiction.

Last Sunday, thousands of Arab protesters, chiefly Palestinians, marched on Israel's borders from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the Egypt-Gaza line and the West Bank. We can bank on their doing it again. The Arabs have learned from Madison Avenue.

Lesson One: if you can’t sell the product, change the label. Case in point: Mad Ave legend has it that Procter & Gamble, intending to capitalize on its success with “Drene,” a shampoo, and “Dreft,” a detergent, was about to mass-market a product called “Dreck” when they discovered the word was a Yiddish vulgarism for excrement. So they changed the product’s name to “Breck.” A worldly colleague, wise in the ways of both western marketing and eastern geopolitics, contends the Arabs, unable to sell despotism or monarchy to the free world, changed the labels to “freedom” and “democracy” to bask in the media-coined “Arab Spring.” Similarly, Mad-Ave-savvy Palestinians have come to recognize that “Intifada” works better for them than “terrorist attack” and “freedom fighter” beats “suicide bomber.” By a lot.

The masses in the fictional human wave I envisioned were stoic and silent, not the mob with nary a vision for tomorrow that we behold today. For all the media hero-hailing of those who brought down Egypt’s Hosni Mubarek, I’ll remind you there are swarms of others committing un-freedom-loving acts like forcibly detaining, beating and sexually assaulting an American journalist, CBS correspondent Lara Logan; freeing criminals by facilitating jail-breaks, blatantly and crudely, while Egyptian police forces cower on the sidelines in fear of them; looting, vandalizing, downing and stripping telephone lines for copper. At what price, democracy? Freedom to what? you might ask.

I was in the Soviet Union when its head of state, Mikhail Gorbachev, gave his people a gift—two gifts!—they couldn’t dream of receiving in their lifetime: glasnost and perestroika, both of which added up to newfound freedom. And what did they do with the precious “freedom” bestowed on them? Spewed venom, blamed others for their failures, did everything but endeavor to build better lives for themselves. I observed that the gift they seized hungrily without a thank you in return was the “freedom to hate,” which gifted me with the title of the documentary I was making about them.

What I see in the “Arab Spring” is the unleashing of unrestricted forces of seething resentment and long-nurtured hatred. What I don’t see—anymore—is the spontaneity that initially had us rooting for the youthful demonstrators without judgment. I fear that those braving the blows for liberation are being cynically manipulated.

Lesson Two: apply the crafty rules of game theory, in which one individual or group does better at another's expense, conscience be damned. Brush up your Machiavelli. He who flexes the most power wins.

So, let’s see, a dictator wins until the mob displaces him. The mob thinks its winning until a mob boss emerges from the mob and takes control, leaving the mob in the dirt. It’s only a matter of time until the mob boss is replaced by another boss or emerging authoritarian. It’s a round-robin game where power unvaryingly corrupts and nobody ultimately wins. The Iranian revolutionaries overthrew the Shah and got Khomeini and the rule of the Ayatollahs. We have no idea what’s in store for Egypt, but what’s far more alarming, no one in Egypt appears to know what’s in store for Egypt. What’s in store for the region, the Middle East, the rest of the world?

Lesson three: false advertising. Since there is no oversight and no accountability, lie.

The chairman of the PLO/ president of the Palestine National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, who gradually managed to gain the respect of outsiders, some Israelis included, just lost mine. Several weeks ago, Abbas, who convincingly professed to be a man of peace, committed himself and his political party, Fatah, to joining forces with his arch-rival, Hamas, a self-described “armed resistance” faction sworn to destroy Israel. The unimaginable reconciliation was mediated by the headless leadership of Egypt! Then, only several days ago, Abbas published an op-ed piece in the New York Times that was pure—or more accurately, impure—fiction: stating his claim for the Palestinian people, he blatantly made up his own history for them. Maybe he should be writing a novel.

If leaders deceive their people; if they manipulate them; if they calculatingly play to win at any expense, the cheap cost of lives—others lives, of course—being the winning point; if they lie without impunity; then what is to prevent them from driving their followers, like sheep, into a ravine, or wall, or fence?

Last Sunday, the occasion for thousands of Arabs to storm Israel’s borders from five sides was the “nakba,” Arabic for "catastrophe." “Nakba” is the term they use to describe the founding of the State of Israel, or their defeat in the war on Israel, launched by five Arab nations, that immediately followed Israel's founding, or their displacement in the war—or merely the continuing existence of Israel. The Huffington Post reported, “…activists were bused in from Palestinian refugee camps throughout Syria. Many of them held European passports and told interrogators they had been flown in from abroad for the march.” And, “Many came from the 12 crowded refugee camps in Lebanon where some 400,000 Palestinian refugees live.” Clearly, the spontaneous demonstration was well organized.

What happens if “the spontaneous demonstration” is organized to become a human wave? How many lives on both sides will it take? What Abbas had to say about the Palestinian side was, "Their precious blood will not be wasted. It was spilled for the sake of our nation's freedom." That word again, freedom, used so freely it threatens to become meaningless.

As for the novel I didn’t write? I intended to leave the ending—with its relentlessly-advancing human wave—up in the air. That’s the indisputably awesome point I fear we are at in the Middle East with, but in no way limited to, the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate. Up in the air.