Yes, I’m Ready

(sing it)

*********************

(Haredi? Yes, haredi. Haredi? Yes, haredi.)

 I don't even know how to fight for the rights
That the law allows me to
But I'm ready (ready), to learn (to learn), yes I'm ready (ready),
To learn (to learn) - to show some guts
To show some guts, to show some guts, for myself
 

I don't want my daughters to be ignorant too
The way the rabbis want me to
So I'm ready (ready), to learn (to learn)
Yes I'm ready (ready) to learn (to learn)
To hold their hands, make them understand, take a stand 
right now 

 I don't even know how to stop taking shit
(Stop taking shit) from a husband like this
But I'm going to learn how to do
All the things I need to do
 Are you ready (yes I'm ready), are you ready 
(yes I'm ready),
To show some guts, to show some guts, to show some guts, 
right now
Are you ready (yes I'm ready), are you ready 
(yes I'm ready),
To be free (yes I'm ready),
To be free (kiss you, love you, hug you, babes...) 

… you really should consider seeing UD‘s nephew Daniel Fleming in Northwestern University’s Die Fledermaus, starting tomorrow. He’s the lead. In this picture he’s kicking up his heels and making an ass of himself.

His parents are both veteran actors; he’s got acting and singing in his blood. I love his warm, self-deprecating personality; plus he laughs – with seeming sincerity – at UD‘s jokes around the seder table. I think he’s probably a comic genius, and you can catch him in his early years at UD‘s own NU (she was an undergrad English/journalism student there) on Friday February 28, and Sunday, March 1.

Weh Weh Weh Weh Wait. Greed and bad parenting? C’est entendu. It’s not a good look for the New York Times – paper of the privileged – to explicitly fail to say why people who cheat so their rich dumb kids get into better schools than they qualify for (and thereby block smarter, more hardworking, children of non-oligarchs from the education they deserve) are being publicly shamed. If greed and being a bad parent were sufficient cause for public shaming, we’d have nationwide public shaming fatigue syndrome.

Most countries have an utterly corrupt, utterly entitled, utterly immune oligarchy buzzing above sordid cities in private helicopters on their way back from Gstaad, and there’s no sense protesting that cuz it has always been true and always will be true. A teeny number of countries (The Nordics… Canada?…. États–Unis?) seem to have a less baked-in ownership class, and it therefore feels worthwhile to see if the courts will be willing to punish them when they, say, destroy the economy (answer on that one here in the States: no), or, more modestly, destroy the intellectual functioning of our universities through the relentless metastasis of morons into them.

(UD of course has no way of knowing whether these hapless spawn of moral degenerates really are desperately dim; they can thank their parents for allowing us all to proceed on the assumption that they are. We certainly know that some of the kiddies cooperated with the scheme, so their self-appraisal is pretty clear.)

Americans haven’t yet had to settle into the paralyzing, corrosive, bitterness/nihilism that comes from witnessing a class of belligerently destructive people whose essential horror is that they know they act with absolute impunity. Maybe that nihilism is in our future. Maybe that’s why Bernie Sanders is winning – we’re seeking to avoid it. Maybe that’s why it’s only a matter of time before one of the campaigns tells us all about this. The Varsity Blues parents, by the most random, unlikely turn of events, got caught; they got caught and now carry on their shoulders the burden of our knowledge that rich degenerates are destroying our institutions. The important thing is to cut them down to size by laughing at them and, of course, by putting them in jail.

 

The win of one would-be commander
Looks dim when he too-left meanders
His answer on Castro
Will put him in last row
Unless someone sits down with Sanders 

… and somehow human image from Bulgaria.

... court.

On February 5, when AIPAC’s “Combating BDS” bill passed the Senate, 22 Democrats voted against it. That is a decent number, but the real sign that AIPAC’s power is on the wane is that every Democratic senator who is a candidate for president (except Amy Klobuchar) voted No. They voted No because they are seeking to win support from the Democratic grassroots, which, naturally enough, skews younger and younger, more and more progressive, and less and less white, leading naturally enough to more sympathy for Palestinians and less for Netanyahu’s Israel. That wouldn’t have happened before 2016, when Bernie Sanders embraced Palestinians and their cause as part of his coalition and not only did not lose support because of it but gained it. By 2020, it will be close to impossible for any Democrat to claim the progressive mantle while aligning with AIPAC.

That was this time last year. Now everyone’s all Lawdy Me! because Sanders (and Warren) won’t attend AIPAC’s 2020 convention. He’s been very consistent that AIPAC represents and underwrites a reactionary form of Zionism. His is a plausible and principled position. AIPAC can huff and puff, but there’s no real news story here. In fact, it’s quite old news, as AIPAC well knows.

A renegade group of Israel’s haredi women is complaining about breast cancer!

We care deeply about women’s health. The Health Ministry showed that breast cancer mortality is highest among Haredi women, and we tried to understand why. We saw that there were no public service announcements about the need for constant checkups. Women get tested too late. In our society, they don’t even call it breast cancer, but ‘the female affliction.’ … They use a hazy term because they are considered unchaste words. Haredi women have a unique lifestyle: They marry early, they get pregnant young and have many children, which has health effects, good and bad, but no one talks about this issue or allocates funds to address it. In 2014, we convened the Knesset committee for women’s equality to discuss the issue of ultra-Orthodox women’s health, and the Haredi lawmakers were a no-show, even though it concerned their mothers and their grandmothers.

What next? Political representation?

Our problems are the result of living in a democratic state without getting our democratic rights. The state must intervene… The law should be changed so that every party will have to include a certain number of women on its Knesset list… We were at the Knesset the day that Shas and United Torah Judaism submitted their lists. The election committee got two lists of 120 men, and no one batted an eye. What if some party said that they’re anti-Ethiopian? It’s undemocratic. I won’t agree to have my right of representation taken away. Right now, there’s no one representing 51 percent of the Haredi population… At the first stage, they should say: ‘You want a male-only list? No problem, but you’ll get only 50 percent of your election budget.’

And there’s that old chestnut: We do all the work, our husbands are fucking layabouts, and we are silent, invisible, and disenfranchised.

The ultra-Orthodox economy is on our shoulders, but our voices aren’t heard – not in the media, not in politics, not in the religious council or the local council. In other societies, your economic status gives you a certain social status as well, but not in a society whose values revolve around Torah study.

UD is beginning to worry about the viability of ultraorthodox Judaism. If it cannot continue to make its women glory in poverty, overwork, and social contempt, its future is in doubt.

They’re burning up the thesaurus over at Deutsche Welle, yet one feels they still have miles to go before they sleep.

… takes the one UD calls the bug-eyed paranoid to the Washington Monument.

... Darwin Award.

… Committee.

A reminder, from a New York Times review of Alice Birch’s “clear-eyed and comfortless” new play, of the value of art that goes against the grain.

… Die Fledermaus at Northwestern University. His favorite song: the Watch Duet.

Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, currently enjoying his three minutes of fame onaccounta this concentration camp witticism, offers Alan Dershowitz serious competition in the Most Fucked Up Harvard Law Professor contest.

Since converting to Catholicism, Vermeule is now an advocate of integralism, a Roman Catholic political doctrine which calls for the abolition of the division between church and state, in order that the resulting state – which integralists deny would be a theocracy – can promote a religiously-determined “Highest Good” in place of the personal autonomy of a liberal democracy. Their ideal is to create this new confessional Catholic regime through “strategic raillement,” or transformation from within institutions and bureaucracies, rather than by winning elections. The groundwork for a full integralist regime would then be in place when liberal democracy dies. The new state would “exercise coercion over baptized citizens in a manner different from non-baptized citizens.” To achieve this end, Vermeule advocates giving confirmed Catholics priority in immigration, allowing them to “jump immediately to the head of the queue.” Vermeule describes this as being essential to “the eventual formation of the Empire of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and ultimately the world government required by natural law.”

Gloriosky.