Category: Essay

I’ve been having a lot of fun with cooking and baking lately. It’s the first time in almost a year that I’ve had a real kitchen to work with, and the first time I’ve felt like I was building, instead of caretaking the destruction of a community of friends (long story, not relevant here). I’ve made soup bowl breads, spelt and oat breads, bean dishes, chilis and enough dishes for my first independent Thanksgiving to make me wonder at how much food one can create from less than $100 in ingredients. (That it’s still feeding me is yet more wonder.)

This afternoon and evening I’ve been cooking for a friend who is new to the whole “heat stuff and turn it into food” concept. It’s fun for both of us: a stretch for me to be informative and consistent in my cooking, and fun for her to learn new things. Tonight’s menu: pasta and sauce. Homemade sauce from scratch and homemade pasta. There’s little “scratch” in pasta; it’s only got three ingredients: flour, eggs and salt. Homemade sauce means blanching tomatoes, reducing them, simmering in the flavors while frying up the onions, garlic and shallots. Then jockeying it all together and finally the fine (apparently lost) art of simmering a vat ‘o stuff without burning any of it.

Complex tomato sauce from scratch, with amazing flavor and ingredients: check. Pasta from three ingredients: FAIL!

Okay, maybe I was too optimistic. I mean, with three ingredients, what can go wrong? A lot, apparently.

• 5 – 1/3C flour — I used organic, unbleached whole flour
• 4 eggs — I used organic, from a farm eggs instead of the thin watery kind in use
• “a generous pinch” of salt — I used a tsp. of low-sodium salt analog

Taken one at a time, these are innocent substitutions. But did you note that I substituted 100% of the ingredients? (Well, except for the egg, but it’s the spirit I know I messed with.)

The problem with out microwave, cell phone, ADHD culture (which I am, apparently, a late member thereof) is this insane idea that doing something approximately right is like doing it right.

Note to self: almost right is like almost on target: And that only works, as I’ve been told, with horseshoes, hand grenades, and H-Bombs. None of which were ingredients.

Rubber bands. Entirely flaccid, entirely non-tasty rubber bands. A little dusty something in the middle. Elastic like gummy bears© in the sun.

They said roll it as thin as a dime. Dime thin dough turned into about two Sacajawea’s thickness worth of… well, gummy bears.

The sauce? To die for. It’s a freaking fantastic, from the hip, absolutely head on dish. Which my friend took, after I bagged, home. Sigh.

And I guess I’ll need to work on the whole pasta thing some more.

I’ll post the tomato sauce recipe, as ill-qualified as I am to speak Italian sauce recipes, when I get a chance.

In the American business world time is money. In Iraq, time is blood. In Israel, time is, among other things, honor.

The sand is running out of the upper chamber, honor-wise. Unlike the primitive, craven tribal activities of Middle Eastern tribes’ idea of honor (which usually involves women being killed by stupid men), I’m speaking of the honor that gives Israeli statesman and stateswomen the ability to walk with their heads high while conducting State business.

Israeli taxpayer funds are used to shore up extremist religious schools. They’re being used to subsidize the kind of ‘pork’ American politicians would well understand. They’re being used for military idiocies instead of focusing on the things that will ensure that there is a next generation of Israelis: environment, education, medical care and investment in Israel’s brain trust.

This might be the generation cursed to see Israel’s water supply poisoned, it’s land corrupted by pollution to the point of no return, and its children’s education reduced to a shadow of its former self. Already the smart Israelis are making homes for themselves in Europe and the United States. Already the ‘dumb’ Israeli is the altruistic Israeli. Already the value of ‘giving as one can, and receiving as one needs’ has been diminished to almost zero.

This is the curse of Bal’am. Our economy is great: for the top 1%. Our military strength is great — for increasingly limited effectiveness, and increasingly not involving the former 1%. Our (former) president, our prime minister, our ministers, our members of parliament are coming under question, indictment and conviction. The taint of easy living, easy decisions and easy consequences is taking its toll, and the Jewish, the Israeli people, are beginning to live the consequences.

I hope my children, with their optimism, energy and the view imbued by their parents, can effect change against the inertia of corruption, pollution and institutional arrogance.

The Lebanese Cabinet seems to be giving the Lebanese Army carte blanche to get rid of the Islamic extremists. As someone whose government has been on the receiving end of these pronouncements, I suggest that Lebanese generals move cautiously.

Sure, the Fatah al-Islam folks are causing a problem for the Lebanese. But don’t expect that if the Lebanese army takes American ammo that they’ll do the cleanup the Americans expect. The relationship between the Palestinians in exile and “native” Lebanese is complex and frangible (to say nothing of malleable). The US helping Lebanon may bring as much excoriation as if the US was helping the Palestinian (Al Queda) forces. Or the corrupt Lebanese against the innocent Palestinians (despite Abbas’ stance).

The cancer of the “Pan Islamic Republic” has burst from the theoretical shell of the Wahhabi extremism to the blunt reality of the here and now. Pointing irrelevant fingers as Palestinian gripes about 60+ year old expulsions is as important in 2007 as the American Idol winner. A good photo opp, but functionally irrelevant.

The Knesset voted today to divert NIS 250 million (about $100M) of funds it doesnt have to help fund ‘private’ schools. That means Haredi ones. All the slippery politicians voted for it. It marks a victory for the morally bankrupt Shas party, whose hero has been indicted multiple times for diverting funds, and whose party has bargained for years for this agreement. You can bet that the private Druze schools up on the Golan Heights aren’t going to see an agora of that money. Nor any Muslim schools in Northern Israel.

Israel has many serious problems, each worthy of discussion, votes and funding. Spending time on propping up religious private schools — schools that it does not regulate, supervise or have any control over whatsoever — is a clear violation of the social contract the government is supposed to have with all its residents.

The American push for vouchers pales in its impropriety in the face of this egregious theft of public funds. Israel, a land that used to pride itself on high academic standards, has been steadily slipping. Funding these navel-gazing, self-interested schools does not further any of Israel’s national interests. For shame!

After Marshal Tito’s death, Yugoslavia ceased to exist, and the horrors involving Serbs, Croats, and Albanians befell the area. Geography (and a lack of extensive natural resources) conspired to eventually constrain the conflict, and today an uneasy, but existing, peace rules the region. Residents know they have much to lose, and little to gain, in continuing their ‘ethnic cleansing’ and mutual discriminations. They see, from up close, how their neighbors just a few hundred kilometers away can live, and prosper.

Iraq’s Tito was removed, and the tensions extant in that community, instead of merely unravelling, exploded like a firestorm. Unlike the Balkans, there is great wealth to be had by the ruling power, and consequently it’s not just about ethnic cleansing and clan independence, but instead about domination of the country. The virulence of the response has been infectious, and areas with the lowest immunity have been reacting in magnified ways as proof of an insurgency’s “success” continues.

This week has witnessed how potentially volatile the rest of the region is: Gaza squabbles have descended into clan/religious/party infightng with AK-47s firing level, instead of up in the air. Lebanon suffers from an almost identical mix of religious, political and clan conflicts, and they’ve flared up in Tripoli (once a PLO stronghold until Israel’s invasion, and their leaders’ exodus, in 1982). In both these cases there is an army (three, counting the IDF, in Gaza); in both these cases the army is not the solution.

In the past I’ve recommended partition for Iraq. That recommendation stands even more strongly now. The only caveat will be in how oil revenues are shared among the member states. And what each faction stands to gain by cutting its own nose off to spite its face. I suspect, from today’s point of view, that the “Arab street” is much more focused on the art of revenge than the labor of learning to live together.

A straight-A high school student was arrested for turning in a disturbing creative writing assignment, which included visions of mass killings with a pistol and necrophilia.

School: Danger! Virginia Tech! Alternative learning center, criminal charges, brou hah hah!
Student: Just being creative! Lookit the assignment! (Check out his hometown paper article on the subject and his comments on it.)

They’re both right, and the issue lies with the technical vs. temporally cultural definition of “free speech.” (I’m gonna get in trouble with this one: I’ve got a bro-in-law who’s a constitutional law professor).

I’d argue that if this student had written this in 1999, before Columbine1 and before VT, it would have come off as weird, sick, and perhaps resulted (if the teacher really cared) in a referral to the school shrink.

Now, after seeing what high capacity magazines and sick twisted minds can do, that same piece is a giant red flag for possibly aberrant behavior. And this kid should “suffer” the consequences of stupidity, the same as a person who yells “fire” in a crowded movie theater.

No, there’s no implied threat from the student. But there doesn’t need to be one for someone to see the writing as a warning sign that a person is capable of homicidal fury. After all, when a child is found to engage in animal cruelty, especially serial animal killings, it’s a sign this person may grow up to be a serial killer. It’s a known, established track. And if the writer happens to be a high school or college student, caveat emptor: find something equally creative but less disturbing to write about.

In each generation we learn more about the ‘tells‘ that indicate what a person might do. Twenty years ago was the animal thing. After Columbine, we learned that a young person’s writings had weight in terms of their future actions. That Virginia Tech outstripped Columbine in sheer numbers of martyred students was only due to some mistakes on the part of the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre2.

At this point, we can’t take that chance with our youth. The Illinois student deserves not just reprobation, but punishment. And counseling, for in every fantasy there is the grain of truth.

Having said that, it would be great if Americans could see past their own borders to the magnitude of tragedy overseas. What I’m about to say has nothing to do with my opinion of the President’s Iraq policy. We read on a daily basis about the tragedies that befall the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan. There have been two incidents involving students in schools in the last month. The total murmur on this in the general media has been body count and then moving on. To the children maimed or traumatized by being bombed, to the parents of those children, these events will change their lives forever. Helping them overcome or heal from those wounds is every bit as important as helping the survivors of the Virginia Tech or Columbine shootings. For all the money we’re pouring into Iraq in terms of bribes, generator and food handouts, and other ‘calming actions,’ helping these kids and their families is a greater and more powerful way for us to minimize the chance that they, some day, do not turn into hatred-fueled perpetrators of massacres of their own.

1. I’m including Pearl River and all other school shootings throughout the world when I say “Columbine”
   




2. Kliebold and associate had over 40 bombs set up in lockers and in two cars, placed so they would cause maximum casualties to police and ambulance responders — but they didn’t realize the alarm clocks they’d used had plastic instead of metal minute hands, which meant the circuits (thankfully) did not connect. The bombs were found and diffused after the last bullets had been fired. More on that here.
   

Switzerland has started down the slippery slope of allowing people with death wishes to kill themselves. One of the countries that evaded the deNazification trials after WW II by claiming “neutrality.” Eugenics continue where not positively abated.

In a country where President Clinton went out of his way to apologize for the Tuskegee Airmen, where States abandoned their forced sterilization of “mental incompetents” in the 1980’s, reading about a first-world country moving towards helping sick people kill themselves is tragic.

Depression, bi-polar disorders and other mental illnesses can take a rational person and make them think suicide is a real option. They’re right — from a purely animal basis. But the damage they do to family really negates their selfish, tactical, short-sighted attempts to escape their pain. Medicine works. Therapy works. Suicide, as the MASH movie quote went, might be ‘painless,’ but the ‘changes’ it brings on affect the parents and families and co-workers (or fellow students) are far from that.

It’s easy to toss away those in society who waver. It takes a strong society, a just society to stick up for members who are not capable of sticking up for themselves.

Switzerland is showing it’s Nazi roots. The world should look at this, and then look at Darfur, the Gaza Strip and Iraq to see how it can avoid the curse of the blind eye in treating world citizens as they should be treated.

A small-time player claimed this week to have been involved in an Israeli-Syrian peace initiative. I say that because peace initiatives in the Middle East have involved “small time players” in the past, but most have foundered for one reason or another. Professor Suleiman, a Maryland resident, blamed, among other things, Olmert’s weakness as a reason for the talks failure.

He’s right. Katzav, Olmert, entire rafts of failed generals, and an atmosphere of corruption and failure of the government to uphold the public trust contravene any possible peace initiative.

That’s like saying “he didn’t win the Boston marathon because he had brain cancer.”

Israel’s continuing pandemic of morally and fiscally bankrupt leadership deprives the Israeli as well as Palestinian peoples of a partner in prosperity as well as a prospective partner for peace.

Don’t get me wrong: the hamas/PLO ‘love fest’ is a clear indicator that there’s no one home on the other side. But Israel in the past has at least had solid leaders with vision, power and the ethical standards necessary to at least stand at the altar of peace, even if stood up.

Now there’s no one, and the only benefactors are the extremists in Iran and the cunning in Syria. A sad state of affairs.

Here’s the link to an article about the 1914 Christmas Truce and its relevance today to the “war on terror.”