You don’t want serious pathogens breaking out among tightly packed pre-scientific populations, some of whose leaders and followers refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of state authorities.
It’s really that simple – here in the States, or over there.
Both countries, having failed to deal firmly with the problem in its early stages, are now forced to try more extreme measures as covid flares up.
Measles, hepatitis, herpes – Ultraorthodox Jewish communities have been in the news for outbreaks of these recently also. Vaccination is like … what? Who needs it. And if you stop our mohels from sucking our infants’ penises we’ll sue.
Many of New York’s ultraorthodox true believers can hardly wait to leave this world of sin. But for them there’s an extra verse to the gospel standard:
And I won’t be alone
When I fly to that throne
I’ll sneeze and spread disease.
Let’s leave this world of sin
Where we have too long been
And to heaven have the keys!
Trump’s most solid voter bloc (a huge majority of America’s ultraorthodox will ultra-enthusiastically vote for Trump) has “embraced” his “views on masks and the pandemic.” “No major Hasidic rabbis in New York City have been seen wearing masks.”
To some, the disregard for masks is evidence of an outlook in which everything in life is up to God. “I don’t sense a lot of fear,” an administrator at a network of clinics in Williamsburg said. “I think there is a fatalistic attitude, like if it’s meant to be, I’ll get sick.”
The obvious results have multiple haredim dying of covid in NY hospitals in a short time-span – and not all of them are elderly. Deaths are growing. Fast.
“There’s rampant COVID denialism and misinformation … in the community,” one person familiar with the situation said. “People are not getting tested and are refusing care even when sick. This is deeply distressing.”
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[I]f the outbreak spreads further in the Orthodox community, it could begin to take hold elsewhere, with even more serious consequences. If the city’s overall positivity rate hits 3 percent, that would trigger a new [citywide] lockdown, including the closing of public schools.
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“In the absence of our doing the right thing, we will need to be in a lockdown type situation, as occurred in Israel because they haven’t been able to control the spread of the virus.”
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“It took them seeing deaths – and unfortunately that community saw many deaths – it took that to change,” he said of the decision to close schools and synagogues in March and April. “When it gets to that point, it’s already too late.”
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The fanatics among the haredim of Israel and New York are ignorant, sadistic, and suicidal. Add to that, now, homicidal. The sane among this sect have never been able to control the insane, and governments fear looking bigoted. So take a deep breath, New York.
Or wait. Don’t.
For Shamsia Alizada’s own safety, Harvard should offer her a massive scholarship to study here. Med school here too. Maybe by the time of her graduation, Afghanistan will have gotten to the point where they don’t try to kill intelligent, high-profile women.
It’s time. Violence-fomenting aspiring fascists who refuse peaceful transfer of power: We’re back in the Second World War; and it’s time to dust off its songs, alter them a bit, and SING.
When the lights go on again all over this land
And we have our victory all over this land
Then we will work together to rebuild the polity we almost killed
The sadist’s going home — we couldn’t be more thrilled
When the lights go on again all over this land
And we ship our fascist pols far far from this land
Then our democracy will find its wings and free hearts will sing
When the lights go on again all over this land
LOLOLOL. And the university is San Diego State! Feast your eyes! For years, it has consistently been one of the shittiest, drugs-guns-frats-and-jocks-choked scandals in America.
One of the more notorious drug raids in this country took place at SDSU’s well-armed Theta Chi fraternity. One of UD‘s colleagues left her university to last barely six years as SDSU’s president, his unflagging personal greed an insult to students, faculty, alumni, and of course the state legislature.
It’s such a bad school. UD‘s so not surprised it hired people to add segregation to its stupidities and misdeeds.
The original Genius of the Carpathians came to know that crowds can turn against you.
Now it’s the turn of America’s Genius of the Carpathians.
Stick to NASCAR rallies in Alabam’, lad. Washington DC + the halls of justice is not a good look for you. Though you might have some work to do in Alabam’ too — what’s with that unmanly mask?
***************
… a place where her family has roots starting in 1911. Like Myrtle Beach, OC has allowed itself (for stupid short-sighted commercial reasons) to be taken over by anarchic and/or criminal elements; and now that it’s a guns/booze/street fights/muscle car wasteland, there’s not much it can do about it. It’s hard to walk back the destruction of civic life.
The mayor, for instance, outlawed a major car rally for this year, after it spent last year trashing the city and “terrorizing” residents. But the rally guys said fuck you we’re coming anyway. They’re in OC right now, and will stay for a few more days.
In the language of a desperate, last-minute law the city got through the General Assembly, these are the actions that can trigger a $1,000 fine and/or sixty days in jail.
- Excessive or abrupt acceleration or deceleration.
- Skidding, squealing, burning or smoking tires.
- Swerving or swaying a vehicle.
- Producing an unreasonably loud engine noise.
- Grinding gears.
- Wheels losing contact with the ground.
- Transporting a passenger on the hood or roof.
Weren’t you smart to buy a condo in Ocean City?
… one of this blog’s categories, and it’s always easy to find oodles of news stories about our nihilation (def.: “to encase in a shell of nonbeing“). Israel’s ultraorthodox always provide comic relief on this front (though their significant responsibility for spreading catastrophic coronavirus throughout Israel is no joke – maybe the Israeli government should force a little education on the germ theory of disease onto this appalling population): Their latest is the refusal to allow women’s names on streets named after women… But when the streets are not entirely haredi-owned, some compromise is unavoidable… So okay they’ll let the women’s last names appear…
More significantly, hard-line Muslims in Malaysia are harassing social reformers who want to make veiling truly optional (the law says it is, but…) for women. Predictably, the powerful shariah courts are going after dissenters because – like the writers at Charlie Hebdo – they “insult Islam.”
“Malaysian Muslims are unfortunately subjected to arbitrary rules like this due to our dual legal system,” [the author of a book critical of veiling] said, adding that Muslims should be allowed to opt-out of the Shariah legal system.
Yeah duh. Why does Malaysia have two legal systems? Why do some idiots want England to have shariah courts?
The history of the twenty-first century American university will be told by the lummox children of billionaires.
Maybe. But on that roster you’d have to put Thomas Pynchon.
UD returned to her Garrett Park garden from a week at the beach to discover, on a long curved strand of one of her grasses, the white husk left by a dethroned monarch. A facsimile is on the far right of this image; and
She found a very good poem with the word chrysalis in it; in the first line! It’s by John Unterecker. Title: …Within, Into, Inside, Under, Within…
UD will interrupt each of its five parts (each word of its five-word title corresponds to a form of movement in each part) to comment in brackets.
I
Beginnings: a chrysalis improvisation
in the wings, roles
taking on flesh before a role begins…
as light begins in the elm,
pushing the long elm branches into night,
a ghost light pressing sky…
or actors, swollen with strange selves,
distended to the edges of tight skin,
a brightness under moth-wing fingertips.
White arms stretch out toward truth.
The stage is full of light.
Your brightness gloves my skin.
[Soooo – Here you have a poet considering the mysterious elasticity of identity — in particular, the way an actor can become, can embody, an entirely other identity from her own. A bizarre human metamorphosis, getting inside another skin, goes on, and no one, including the actor, has much of an idea how it’s accomplished. She waits in the wing (wonderful pun!), improvising this new role before she even steps on the stage to perform it. And it’s like – how does the tree become rooted and become a tree and grow into a full-bodied elm under the influence of the sun? How does that start, that ghost light casting existence on something that’s still nothing? … Grappling here, in other words, with nothing less than the mystery of creation as well as the mystery of multiple identities — the question of why and how there’s something rather than nothing, how a ghost takes from the light in some way and stops being a ghost and assumes not merely existence, but several forms and attributes of existence.
How? Haven’t a ghost of an idea. As in a more famous formulation of this problem —
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
(Unterecker wrote a guide to Yeats.)
But – yes – we do have a ghost of an idea, which somehow in Unterecker’s poem successfully becomes a fully formed idea. This poem has an idea. An idea which, as the poem proceeds, branches out like an enormous elm.
In embodying that new role, that new identity, the actor conveys to the audience the mystery and excitement and illumination of being and becoming: Your brightness gloves my skin.]
II
Alice, grown huge, swollen to fit of the tunnels,
tiny, unable to reach a gold key,
knew what gardens were for—
yet never knelt in tunnels of rough sunlight
to will flamboyance from green buds.
The swollen poppy twists within its cap,
a pink invention wrestling light.
How often I think of tunneling roots,
curtains of roots, white ropes
that stroked our hair when we entered tunnels.
Here, we are rubbed on gold.
This wedge of pink beginnings troubles gardens.
[Well, he would think of Alice, wouldn’t he? Her surreal metamorphoses in wonderland amplify in vivid dream the dreams of all of us — to be human is to sleep and watch oneself in dream contort to the dimensions of various spectral tunnels and rooms and lakes and caves and bridges. A reassuring exercise, perhaps, in the business of possibility, enterprise, strategy, reincarnation, foxiness. Alice understands that gardens stage the impossible overabundance of being, and she floats around in them throughout the adventures; the poet, however, is a material, sublunary sort who gets his knees dirty as he plants pink poppy seeds in a mood of desperate hope that these lowly tiny dark nothings will somehow morph into flamboyant color, insanely infused being. Let’s make this happen, people!
And now a tendril of Roethke appears as the poet goes deeper, recalling the creepy/delightful feel of dangling roots against your skin in the dark, in tunnels (UD, a snorkeler, thinks of the skin-crawling/fantastic feel of seagrass) — all that dark life suddenly welling up out of the dark and fingering you.]
III
A robin listens to darkness.
I think of worms, grubs, moles,
the slow ballet of rootlets twisting down,
of cave fish, blacksnakes,
and, asleep at Nieux, the great black bulls
that thunder on dark walls.
When we wear another self,
do our souls darken? On a bright stage,
do we enter darkest places?
[Robins feed by listening for worms underground; UD watches them do this every day. So an expansion of the poet’s theme – life lurks, crawls, twists, unaccountably begins, in darkness, and we listen for it. A beautiful line occurs in this part of the poem:
the slow ballet of rootlets twisting down
All those L‘s – their gentle insinuating liquidity – somehow enact the strange grace (ballet) of organic processes… Yet the poet is after not merely passive, natural, coming to life; the reference to ballet reminds us that he’s keeping going at the same time a meditation on art as the active, deliberate, human instance of this earthy alchemy. Think of the palaeolithic caves at Niaux (the poet has incorrectly rendered the town Nieux). You can burrow down there and think you’re simply getting deeper into the earth; but we’ve taken our animating and transformative energies even there, and made of dead walls immortal, thundering art.
So is the actor who assumes new being in fact consorting with – listening like the robin to – these deeply rooted, mysterious, even insidious places? The question, for those who think about the incomparable, enigmatic, transformative power of art, welling up from our depths, answers itself.]
IV
There is darkness clinging to the undersides of leaves.
For we are entering darkness. It skuffs along cave walls,
stumbling and skuffing fingertips.
At Mycenae, it is a heavy must,
a musty heavy breath in the hundred-step cistern.
They wait, dark passageways in old houses, their worn
silence frayed under a blur
of footsteps. Our stretched-out hands
manipulate evasive cellar shadows.
Within the garden, silence darkens windblown leaves.
[The eggs of the butterfly cling to the undersides of leaves. We can’t see them, they rest in darkness, but they live a vivid life in that shade. So too the long-resting-in-darkness ruins at Mycenae, whose deep cistern the poet visits, thinking as he moves along its walls of all the life – the generations of human breath – hidden in it. See here, also, this poem; and this one.]
V
Oh I think of Alice gone down, down
under groundcover dreams,
a man’s tunneled night.
Who are these actors? On dream stages, I forget
lines. My tongue-tied
silence foundering… Stage props
mumble rigidities. The audience…
I think of silences at Nieux,
at Mycenae, the tourists
gone, guides returned
to wives, houses….
And those silences of capricious light.
The calex splits, an abrupt pink flame.
Orpheus’ torch descends and still descends through
arias of reddest blossom.
[And how does the poet conclude? He brings all his images and allusions together (Alice, dream, theater, ancient caves with paintings of bulls in them, the Mycenae cistern, the poppy) and gets personal, takes us into his own not at all Carrollian dreamlife, where his all-too-human, pre-aesthetic reality is just a blurry mess: Who are these people I’m seeing in this dream? What was I supposed to say in this dream? Why are the objects around me silent and dead rather than expressive and figurative?
Hopeless. Niaux and Mycenae, left to themselves alone, are also silent…
Yet even abandoned by tourists and guides, they breathe the bright aura of all those artists and audiences along the walls; the dark poppy’s calyx suddenly falls off and out flashes bright pink… And yes, art is the torch that takes us down there, Orpheus in the underworld scoping out amid the dreadful chaos high-builded arias.]
Here’s an article about his design work; and here’s a picture of a Soltan relative sitting on one of the benches in Warsaw.
Update: UD thanks a reader for this link to an English-language article about Jerzy Soltan’s benches.