Author: jacobbacharach

Horror Values

Culture, Justice, Media, War and Politics

Although a large portion of the American media—including “liberal” outlets like NPR—continues to abjure the word torture, the release of the Senate’s summary (the report, of course, is classified) seems broadly to have cemented in the public mind that the United States, in the immortal words of one particular winner of the Alfred Nobel Guilty Conscience Dynamite Prize for Achieving a Certain Notoriety in Global Affairs, “tortured some folks.” In fact, it appears that we tortured, raped, and murdered them, but what is the saying? You can’t make an omelet without breaking into a grocery store in the middle of the night and smashing the dairy case with a golf club? It’s something like that, anyway.

This is all pretty straightforward, but America is a post-moral society, and therefore no obvious evil can be condemned without the palliating piping-in of Drs. Efficacy and Outcome. The principle pushers-back are those ineradicable voices pestering our relativist consciences with the crackpot and insistent doubt: what if it worked? And a great deal of the Senate summary addresses precisely this point, dissecting the claims that there is a direct, operative line between shoving a tube into a shackled prisoner’s asshole and pumping saline into his guts while threatening to rape his children to death and whatever money-hungry ex-Navy SEAL claims to have shot Osama bin Laden on a given weekday. Message: it didn’t work.

Well, that’s good to know, but my relief quails at the yawning moral chasm at which our almost-civilization has come screeching to a Wile E. Coyote halt, legs churning air, and the edge, in fact, behind us. Meep meep: what if it did? What if the Senate’s debunking is incomplete? What if, because this is just how the American media and the popular discourse operate, some doubt, some question, some uncertainty remains? Do we then temper our condemnation based on the possibility, however faint, of a desired result?

You can imagine the dark hole that kind of moral accountancy leads into. I mean, by the numbers, the Final Solution was effective. Not a 100% success, obviously, but within the reasonable tolerances for such a large industrial . . . If you can’t, as a society, find it in your metaphorical soul to proclaim—even halfheartedly and just for the cameras—that it is wrong under any circumstances to beat a man near to death, drive him slowly crazy, then chain him to a wall in a dungeon to let him freeze to death, then perhaps it’s time to reevaluate those core values you’ve got tacked to the wall in the break room. If your “Just Hang In There” poster features not just a kitten, but a noose, then perhaps you’re not quite that inspiration after all.

The Law

Culture, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion, War and Politics

As a general rule I’m not the sort of man
who thinks our world’s best served by putting other
men into jail. This one Jewish brother
who got famous later on, he said, I stand
with the least of you, the whores and lepers and
the murderers and thieves. Of course, his mother
knew who he hung out with. She discovered
that’s what mattered when the Roman cops ran
into the garden and hauled him out and strung
him up; shouldn’t one of them, at least,
have spent at least one night on a concrete floor?
The question outlived her son’s name on her tongue.
Did he deserve to die like some dumb beast?
Even the beasts—even then—got more.

The Elect

Uncategorized

Every several years, about one third
of the people go into the temple and
exsanguinate a bull upon the sand,
release an auguring flock of city birds,
divine the numerology of words,
each predetermined cry of pleasure planned
to simulate a state of utter aband-
on; past the city gates the shepherds herd
their flocks; they are as young as the gods appear,
as beautiful, and like the gods they do
not care for the rites; they’d rather truly fuck,
drink, breath, walk, live, sleep, and hear
their own singing voices than what should be true
according to the augurs. They believe in luck.

The Cathedral

Culture, Economy, Media, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind

Last at the altar, first to the door, the pale
young priest asks his congregants which they’ll embrace:
salvation by good twerks or Nancy Grace?
Their googling eyes flick through wikis; fail-
ing to find a clear consensus, they derail
the sermon: what does father think about race-
derived intelligence, or the reptilian face
beneath the POTUS’ hack-job human veil?
Oh gods, make us less chaste, make us less poor,
and do it now; the undeserving have
converted their unworthiness to cash
unbacked except by unearned faith, no more
than gold—though not gold standard—golden calves;
we’ll skip the sackcloth but accept the ash.

A Red Line

Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, War and Politics

“Obviously I think that’s a red line for everybody here: no boots on the ground,” Mr. Kerry said.

War’s past and bootworn decades wore them out.
The Romans, though, wore socks and sandals and
conquered most of Europe, snow to sand
and sea to alp. Roads and footwear rout
inferior engineering. When a trout
flashes in a stream, you pick a lure and stand
braced against the cold water, right hand
to cast, left at your hip-waders; you sprout
like a sapling when the rain has swelled the creek.
“Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in
return.” History is a fish going to spawn
against the current, then it dies, weak
with reproduction, but new fish begin
where the last died for the bears. And on and on.

No, Angel

Books and Literature, Culture, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion

Not six-wingèd, nor a fiery wheel,
not four-bodied, though a living being,
human but for other human’s seeing
only what they a priori feel
to be true. Did he say fuck? Did he steal?
Was he sometimes prone to disagreeing?
Black? A teen? All but guaranteeing
some journalistic posthumous appeal
to see the nuance, meaning the bad sides.
No life is a story, and no story has
two sides: it is a universe, expanding,
not some taxonomic Alcatraz.
Here is the truth your subtlety elides:
there is no peace surpassing understanding.

If Obedience Is a Condition of Existence, Then We Must Resist by Disappearing

Culture, Economy, Justice, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Things that Actually Happen, War and Politics

Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me.

A cop writes that he has the right to shoot
a man for walking too aggressively,
shoot if he delays or if he flees,
shoot if he fails to kowtow or salute,
shoot if he gets too smart or thinks he’s cute.
The predicate of law is immunity
for lawmen; ours is a cop timocracy,
the badge the only property, the boot
the only vote. The price of life is death,
therefore, if you don’t wish to buy it, you
must make an effort never to be born.
Not far away from here, borne on the breath
of a heat-bleeding highway, a hawk or two
rise in spirals over the mice-filled corn.

A Love Poem Awkwardly Inspired By a Stupid Video Feature at Slate.Com

Art, Books and Literature, Culture, Media, Poetry, Things that Actually Happen

Do the rights and freedoms we currently enjoy mean that now is the best time in history to be gay?

When was the best time ever to be gay?
It was when we met. Before that we
were accidents of sex taxonomy;
now we’re texts and winks throughout the day.
Were we to travel back through history,
find ourselves in Death in Venice’s day,
or lounging like ancient Greeks carved in clay
as charms against queer specificity,
I’d still measure the good from when I first
swiveled a barstool so our knees would touch
and laughed too loud and hard and talked too much
and covered my nerves with beer and was the worst.
You still came home with me, and stayed, and here
we are regardless of the marked and measured year.

A Prophet of HaShem Whose Name Was Oded

Culture, Justice, Media, Religion, War and Politics

One character in my current novel-in-progress remarks at a point that God’s non-existence is a joke that proves He is a Jew, a sentiment that’s guided my own non-relationship with the Old Man since around the time the act curtain dropped on my bar mitzvah and we all retired to the Uniontown Country Club for bad chicken. I became a bar mitzvah in a Conservative synagogue—it was the slightly more stable of the two aging congregations in Uniontown—but I was really raised Reform. I am still moved by the High Holy Day liturgies, and I retain a great fondness for the Friday Night Shabbat service. But.

Somewhere along the way, someone smuggled in the Prayer for the State of Israel, a scandalous little piece of political agitprop that’s always made me cringe. Depending, I think, on the congregation and the prayer book, it either joined or supplanted the silly but less objectionable prayer for political leaders, a sort of broad wish-to-the-wind that our rulers comport themselves decently and conduct themselves with sage restraint—you can understand why a diasporic community would consider that a reasonable hedged bet, a proper blessing for the Czar, so to speak.

The Prayer for the State of Israel, on the other hand, has the Cold War stink of a kindergarten classroom being drummed to its feet to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Written in 1948, the year of the Nakba, it further affirms in the minds and hearts of so many American Jews an indelible link between spiritual Judaism and political Zionism. I always wonder that it doesn’t seem out of place in a Temple full of Americans, but then, I see some Miami Beach shonda babbling excuses for atrocity on the cable news programs, and I think, Oh. Oy.

American Jews have been bought off with Birthright beach vacations in Tel Aviv and campfire temple trips and a pack of lies about an empty desert waiting to be planted with those trees we bought in Sunday School with the leftovers of our Tzedakah money. The next time you see some terrible white man wondering where are the Muslim moderates who will condemn whatever dictator or terrorist or cartoon-villainously acronym’d insurgency the great minds behind CNN et al. are on about in a given week, ask yourself, where are the American Jews who will speak against the Israeli pogrom in Gaza? They are out there, of course, but too quiet, and too few.

The terrible truth is that Israel was infected from the moment of its birth with the European evils whose virulent, 20th-centurty apotheoses necessitated, in the minds of so many, the creation of Israel in the first place, and we Jews, through Israel, have become a sick reflection of our own historic persecutors. I am not even speaking of the still unique evil of Nazism, although in the more extreme eructations of Israeli hard-liners, you do hear the debased language of racial purity and superiority. I am thinking of the old, durable, seemingly ineradicable traditions of pogrom, persecution, expropriation, and colonization. The Israelis possess the imperial arsenal of a modern Western nation-state, which camouflages the essentially primitive, pre-modern nature of their policy toward the Palestinians. The state of Israel is behaving like a village mob. Palestinian tunnels are the poisoned well. The Israelis are killing and lighting fires. “We will drive them out!” Where will they go? How will they escape? “They will have to figure it out, the devils!” But you forced them into the ghetto in the first place. “Yes, and they should be happy for what they have!” The US stands by like a distant monarch, its silence and occasional provision of more kindling a kind of majestic assent.

It would be comforting to say simply: I wash my hands of all of you. But we have accepted a state made of our religion, and that state is behaving abominably, unforgivably. It is a shame that we will not erase in a hundred years.

Simulacra and Simian

Art, Movies

Ape . . . not . . . kill . . . ape . . . unless . . . situational . . . ethical . . . concerns . . . dictate . . . a . . . temporary . . . revision . . . of . . . practical . . . application . . . of . . . apes’ . . . moral . . . code. I suppose it lacks the declarative grandeur of the more abbreviated thou-shalt-not, but it has the more singular advantage of being accurate. That Whatever of the Planet of the Apes finds itself praised as a great movie, a great scifi movie, or even just a pretty good summer action flick for what it’s worth is testimony mostly to just what a lot of lousy crap Hollywood puts out these days. At least the Marvel flicks are buoyed—most of them—by a degree of humor and insouciant pleasure at bringing a grab-bag of oddball superpowers to life; Planet of the Apes is dour, rain-soaked, and cod-epic: grim, overlong, humorless, and suffused with an utter weariness that comes to life only when it butts up against an even more boring stuffing of cliché.

What was it that Chekov said? If in the first act there’s a moral precept on the wall, then in the second or third act there’d better be a father vowing crazy revenge? I dunno. A global pandemic of MacGuffins has rendered humanity nearly extinct and apes, or at least, a cadre of apes, super smart. I am quite convinced that our childrens’ generations will regard our belief that laboratory viruses will perform such dubious miracles with the same amused contempt we reserve for the giant atomic insects of the 1950s. The apes have decamped from San Francisco to Muir Woods, and despite the fact that there are hundreds or thousands of apes and hundreds or thousands of surviving humans not twenty miles apart, they’ve gone ten years without noticing one another. Then they happen upon each other. Violence ensues. The Leninite apes overthrow the Trotskyite apes in a manufactured coup that image-checks the Reichstag fire. I shit you not. The whole thing would be a glorious hash if it managed a single joke over its geologic running time. The preceding are not jokes, by the way. They’re carried off with the gravity of a Bayreuth production of Parsifal.

Briefly—and I suppose these are spoilers, if you’re an idiot—the movie takes as its central principle that in acquiring human intelligence, so too have the apes acquired our human flaws. Their society is destined to recapitulate our own. Four legs good, two legs bad, but some animals are more . . . oh, fuck it. The apes, in living memory the captive medical test subjects of we vicious, baldy simians, don’t trust us and have an interest in self-preservation. There are good guys on both sides whose efforts to broker a peace are doomed to fail because of the plot of the movie. “If . . . no . . . inevitable . . . conflict . . . then . . . no . . . third-act . . . CGI . . . battle . . . scene,” the apes’ soon-to-be-deposed leader grunts at one moment. I thought it was a little weird that they included that line in the script, but hey, you know. What do the kids say these days? That’s so meta? Personally, I thought it was pretty ratchet.

By the way, the bad evil ape is a scarred victim of torture. Needless to say, he is an Insane Psycho Killer, as are all victims of torture, as well as all disfigured people. One of the glories of cinematic science fiction is that it permits us to recreate the phenotypological shorthand for moral character content that out-of-control political correctness ruined in art and literature, sometime between Dickens and the Civil Rights Movement, if my facts are correct. The noble appear noble, the evil are orcs, and you can’t trust a man in glasses.

The movie is supposed to be a new revolution in CGI, but in fact is back in Jurrasic Park territory, ape feet that don’t quite seem to touch the ground and fur that doesn’t quite move in the wind or rain. An early stampede of elk–these, too, are computer-generated–is especially appalling. The big orangutan’s face manages to fool you most of the time, but only because the architecture of an orangutan face is alien enough that the human eye has a hard time detecting its fakeness; the more human-standard chimps and gorillas look ridiculous. As hokey as the prostheses in prior runs around this particular fictive property now appear to us, this is worse. Small inconsistencies are often worse than big ones. An overabundant realism makes it impossible to suspend your disbelief.

Anyway, this movie is bad, but it’s so emblematic of a prototypical American cultural attitude toward conflict. “Poor Africa.” “The situation in the middle east.” “President Obama needs to be tougher on Putin.” It imagines war as fundamentally gestural, a signifier rather than a graveyard. Oh, if only two leaders could learn to trust each other, then the underlying questions of land and resources could all be banged out. Alas, evil monkey and Gary Oldman can’t get along. Yeah, yeah. Meanwhile, the apes launch a frontal infantry-and-cavalry assault on a fortified position, which would be crazy were it not for the fact that apparently the humans left the armory undefended? Boy, apparently the Simian Bird Flu also genocided common sense. As it hauls itself out of its climactic battle, the movie leaves one deep philosophical question unanswered. Could a chimpanzee really survive an uncontrolled vertical fall of greater than fifty feet onto a platform of steel rebar and remain effectively unharmed? Reader, the answer to that question is also the answer to the question of whether or not you should see this movie.