JEW JEUDI

Jeudi is French for Thursday

I'm a Christian.  I married a Jew.  My kids, at least by the state of Israel, are considered fully Jewish.  Anyway, I'd been talking with this French girl at least I thought she was French, off and on, kind of flirting, and it turns out she's Muslim.  OK, no problem for me.  I tell her my kids are Jewish, and she goes cold.  Then she tells me her parents moved her back to Algeria to get her away from all that Francophonic Tétoir, to be grammatically correct, what I would call Francophonicism, but I just coined the word, so it's not really correct, anyway, French head-space.  Meaning, I guess, democracy.  Or thinking we can all get along.  Or some such.  Or meaning guys like me who don't care if their kids are Jewish or Christian (although I'm sorry they missed the music) and I don't, I mean I really don't, see barriers between relationships, if we, one, you, us, get along.  Tell stories.  Tell really good stories because we have divergent cultures.  Our problem, Our American Problem, is that the kids from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, don't know shit about the rest of the world.  Between Brothers who love and the Angels, everyone is suspicious and stupid.  People here don't believe they have a story.  They believe they are "normal".  They don't believe their language has an accent, they don't know that Christian Bale and Gary Oldman worked for years learning to replicate not only their idiotic speech, but all the attitudes of their idiotic , middle-American, ideology (and in saying that I am in no way putting down Christianity - Americans so often confuse their culture with Jesus, absurd to the rest of the world as that is).

 Every American child should be made to spend one, probably two, years in Europe, The Far East, Russia, Israel, anywhere but here.  Get the bigot out of them.  Make them understand that the rest of the western world is Socialist - socialist-democrat. They are.  You didn't know England is socialist?  You didn't know, at core, Margaret Thatcher, even though she and Ronald Reagan were bosom buddies, was a Commie?  That India is Socialist?  Canada?  Mexico?  Japan?  Everyone on every side of us?  You didn't know Germany, and its new union with East Germany, is socialist?  That they all have "Obamacare" (actually they don't: they have something much better that actually works).  How the $#&king hell are we not teaching this in our schools?

Makes me tired.  I'm going to bed.  Jew Jeudi.  God bless us all.  God Bless my boys.  They're a lot smarter than me.

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P.S.  Jews really support each other, have each other's backs.  A lot of ethnic cultures do, have each other's backs.  Not us WASPs.  What happened to giving the sourdough starter to your neighbor, helping them plow the field?  None of us ever got to where we are by ourselves.  We threw the tea into the bay.  WE did.  A bunch of us.  That was a community effort.  It was not individualism made manifest.  I wish people would read.

P.P.S.  Blogger allows the writer to follow statistics, how many people have read a certain post, etc. Actually, I can read your IP addresses, which is kind of creepy, and even know, not exactly, but more or less, what neighborhood you live in.  That's a topic for a Meditation all its own.  However, this, for whatever weird reason, has been my most popular post, and

NO ONE HAS COMMENTED, OR EVEN GIVEN A FUNNY OR WELL WRITTEN CHECK.

It's a bit discouraging, I do work fairly hard on these posts.  A little comment would be welcome, you know, a bit of friendly advice, a little constructive criticism.  I know a lot of what I write is not the happiest stuff, but help me make it better.  A cliche, but a little bit goes a long way.

WASP WEDNESDAY

A cartoon by my friend Jeff.  Somehow it seems relevant.

I know I mentioned on Facebook that today, yesterday now, was going to be WASP Wednesday, but I'm afraid WASP Wednesday will have to wait 'til next week.  WASPs like myself, raised by Berkeley liberals, really have little but shame about who we are: I suspect my parents couldn't wait to see the end of our ethnic group.  We, and our Church, to whom we generously tithed, gave money to various African nations, Israel (I believe there are several trees there planted in my name), sent our nuns and monks (I am Episcopalian, but we do in fact have nuns and monks) to South America, gave relief funds to poor black neighborhoods in the US, money to Native Americans.  Meanwhile, my Uncle Dixon, an alcoholic and out of work, had one of his children starve to death in Cheyenne Wyoming.  I don't believe we ever sent him any money.  To do my parents credit, I'm not sure they knew how badly off he was, but they knew he wasn't well.  I remember answering the phone one night when I was eight or nine years old - this was when long distance calls were a rarity, and some old man said, "Is Dee there?"  Dee is what people called my Dad.  "No, he's at the office," I said.  "Who is this?"
     "Who's this?" the man asked.
     "Doug."
     "Doug, this's your Uncle Dixon.  How are ya Buddy?"
     "I'm alright, Dixon, how come we never see you?"
     "Well, ya know.  So how ya doin'?"
     "OK I guess.  Where are you?"
     "I'm In Wyoming."
     "Really?  Wow.  I'd sure like to go to Wyoming.  I've never even been out of California."
     "Well, I'd love ta see ya Buddy.  So when's your Dad gonna be back?"
     "Oh, I dunno.  Hour.  Maybe."
     "Well you tell him your Uncle Dixon called, OK Champ?"
     "Gosh, yeah!  I've sure heard a lot about you.  I sure wish you were here."
     "Yeah Buddy.  Listen, just tell him I called.  Write down my number."
     I wrote it down.  He hung up.  I don't know if Dad ever called him back or not.  He probably didn't.  Ten years later I heard about his child, I think one year old, dying of starvation.  But we were good liberals.

Maybe this IS WASP Wednesday.  Melding into Thursday, but oh well.  I was going to say something about art, but remembering this story has made me forget what I was going to say.  I remember my (very missed) friend Jeff MacNelly, Chicago Tribune Political Cartoonist extraordinaire, saying, "Yeah, I see my mother twice a year, whether I need to or not."  I know Jeff missed his mom when she died.  I miss mine.  But perish the thought.  So that we might perish.  And maybe we deserve to.

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