שתהיי לי הסכין

Today I finished listening to the audiobook of שתהיי לי הסכין (Be My Knife) by David Grossman. I do not know what to sayyyyy.

It is an extremely unique book, definitely worth reading, and I really really loved most of it; as always with his books I'm not sure about the ending (although I actually think it works better than the endings of some of his other novels).

For most of the book I strongly identified with Yair (unfortunately for me 😛); on the other hand, there are some things about him that are really non-OK, and it bothers me that the book is like one ginormous "woman performs emotional labor for man"-fest. I know it's a little more complicated than that but I think that's in there too, and I'm not sure whether the book itself is critical of that or not (although I guess it basically is). I mean I guess also, relationships are complicated and problematic and people can get a lot out of them and be strongly sucked into them even when the participants are seriously flawed -- and also, it's OK and important for stories to also show the ugly parts of being human. But in some sense, I feel like this is one of the least optimistic of his books that I've read (and the gender aspect is probably the most disturbing aspect).

I guess to some extent I'm also trying to think about what I personally can or want to learn from the book, considering how strongly I identified with one of the main characters... I guess I'm just hoping that I am on the way to becoming not-Yair (or, maybe, grownup-and-new-and-improved-Yair at least).

Trump is not Hitler

I was concerned about this before the election and my friend just pointed it out again too, and I still agree. Guys, Trump is not Hitler. ICE raids are not SS raids. I'm not saying this because I think the Holocaust was exceptional and has to be held up as the greatest genocide of all time, and I'm also not saying this because I don't think that what's happening now is bad (or because I'm not aware that part of what's happening now is a rise in anti-Semitism). I'm saying this because, until six months ago (apparently), there was a widespread awareness/principle that every social justice issue is different and analogies need to be used sparingly and with caution. Usually, the concern is about not appropriating other people's struggles, because bad things are already bad without being named as being "bad in the same way as some other bad thing." In this case, I think the issue is that white people need to be able to care about the fate of people of color without getting there via an analogy to a genocide directed against white people (people who in the American context can, in general, pass as / are considered to be white today). Trump is bad. ICE raids are bad. Can we just look at their inherent badness without trying to rev up our capacity for empathy by talking incessantly about the Holocaust?

Bonus:  A passage from דער בלוטיקער שפּאַס (by Sholem-Aleichem) in which he describes pre-revolutionary Russia's equivalent of an ICE raid (unfortunately I forgot to make a note of the page number):

On Knowledge, or the Lack Thereof, and Making History

Something I've been pondering: I switched from organizer-esque work to academia because I wanted to be sure (or at least a little more hopeful) that I know what the heck I'm talking about when I make claims about history. However, Trump is such a good reminder that history is all too often made by people who don't know anything about history. So, all you organizers out there, keep doing the right thing without worrying about if it's perfectly right, because there are plenty of people with plenty of power who are doing the very wrongest thing without caring at all about what rightness is.

Random thoughts based on writing and reading feelingsmail

1. Why in American culture are there two simultaneous yet opposite tropes:

On one hand, there's such a strong trope (at least for affluent white people) that relationships between parents and adult children are fraught and no one wants to go home for the holidays (e.g.). On the other hand, there's such a strong assumption that everyone's close to their family and gets homesick. These things are totally opposite but also both totally operating in pop culture and small talk all the time. What's up with that?

2. This whole thing about how women are supposed to be assertive and negotiate (and not engage in verbal hedges or upspeak), otherwise it's their fault that they don't advance (even if that's not always spelled out, that's the message).

But in a lot of contexts, both personal and professional, women are literally punished every single time they are assertive or negotiate or don't soften comments that could be perceived as confrontational. And then they also don't advance. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Could we find a way to talk about assertiveness and negotiation for women, while also being real about the consequences for doing that in the vast majority of cases? We shouldn't be talking in a way that saddles individual women with the burden of "unilaterally fixing a broken culture by acting as if people should treat them with respect," when doing so often results in the opposite, in terms of the consequences in individual women's lives. I understand that long experience sometimes makes women feel like they can't be assertive when actually they can, and it's important to learn how to notice and take those opportunities, and that does help to create an overall shift in the culture, but in all cases, this should be on the basis of calculated risk-taking with eyes wide open about potential backlash, and I don't usually see that acknowledged when people write or talk about this.

3. A dear trilingual message about love sent to me piece by piece by three dear hearts:

האהבה היא רגש טוב ומעצים ומגוון מאוד בהופעותיו ובצורותיו. היא יכולה גם להשתלט ולכבוש ולכאוב ולגרום להרס. לא תמיד אפשר לנווט אותה או לרסן אותה או להבין אותה או לגדול אתה. אהבה טובה באמת היא כזאת שגם המימוש שלה הוא טוב, כזאת שהיא הדדית ומתפתחת מתוך התרומה ההדדית לקשר שנבנה מציפיות משותפות. אני בטוחה שבסוף תעשי גם מה שצריך -- וואָס ס'איז באַשערט, איז באַווערט. Вы должны попробовать и быть терпеливой. И ждать своей любви! Всему своё время – так говорят!

Yom Kippur and Teshuvah

I was inspired by this post on Ritual Well. It’s not a new thought or a new practice for me – especially for the past two years, Yom Kippur has served as a day for me to take stock of the status of my eating disorder and set an intention to continue to recover, starting by feeding myself well on the day itself. Very thankfully, this year I can say for the first time that I’m well enough that recovering further is no longer at the very top of my teshuvah list, and I’m more in “maintenance” mode. I’m still not ready to try fasting again yet (and I actually chose to spend the day alone today partly so that I wouldn’t have to interact with people who were fasting or talk about my choices), but it was pretty amazing to be like, “I know how to feed myself. Look at me feeding myself. I can just take care of this (and enjoy it) and then go on about my business and do other things today as well.” In particular, feeling like I could spend many hours in a row writing in my journal without being distracted by my body being sad about not having the food it needs, and even without being disturbed too much by chronic pain issues that have been making it difficult for me to write by hand for several years, is HUGE progress for me and I feel so grateful. (I’m also grateful to have been able to implement the decision to spend the day alone! I’ve been realizing that I’ve been doing a lot of “saying yes when I want to say no” about social interaction, especially with housemates over the past couple of years.)

Trump Thoughts, Part 2

OK, here's part two of my post from last night.

Regarding the comparisons of Trump to Hitler: I'm glad that people are taking the threat posed by Trump seriously, but I don't like this rhetorical move.

I don't like it for the reason that making analogies between two atrocious situations is always a risky business (because it runs the risk of trivializing one or the other situation, because it's generally an exploitative move, etc.).

I don't like it because it ignores vast differences between 1930s Germany and contemporary America (Germany had just lost a major war and was in serious economic straits, it was the Great Depression, and Germany was a young nation-state with consolidated ethnic nationalism as its raison d'etre; whereas the US is currently the world superpower and doing relatively fine from an economic perspective and, however convincing it may or may not sound, is founded in explicit rhetoric about ethic diversity).

I don't like it because it is a kind of fear-mongering that seems inauthentic: if Trump is so scary, then he's scary enough by virtue of being Trump -- he doesn't also need to be Hitler.

I don't like it because dramatic tactics are by their nature short-term -- the focus here is on this person and this moment, not on the massive lead-up that got us here (like, if he loses, then everyone will be like "Yay, defeated Hitler/Voldemort! Now back to business as usual," which I don't think is the right reaction).

And I don't like it because it's a kind of avoidance of contemporary reality -- it's a kind of "othering" Trump to be part of another, "not us" era. But he is us. And it's harder to look at that than to call him Hitler.

Sorry to say it, but I think Trump's gonna win

I'm not sure exactly why I feel the need to post this, but here it is:

I am expecting Trump to win in November.

It is very unlikely that after 8 years of a Democratic president, another Democrat will be elected. For that reason alone I expect Trump to win. Beyond that, I think that if he has been able to get this far, he is likely to get further. If there were going to be significant popular opposition to his election, we would have seen evidence of it already. I think that "Progressives" have a tendency to be a little bit naive about this type of thing, like "Oh, that couldn't POSSIBLY happen, it would be too terrible, America has its problems but we're not totally a lost cause."

Well, not wanting to imagine something undesirable doesn't make it impossible or even unlikely. Candidates that seem to many of us like buffoons have won before, in recent memory, and for some reason they generally seem to do well in elections. (Also, regardless of what I might personally think or wish about Clinton, I don't think she has the charisma or show(wo)manship to compete with a figure like Trump, apart from any of a zillion other considerations.) I think it's also important to keep in mind that the last few elections have been EXTREMELY close, and the person who won did not win because of having the support of a significant majority of the country, but because of a very minor tip in the scale. So to the degree that when Obama replaced Bush, many of us felt some sense of relief, "Oh, this country's finally beginning to see sense" -- no! It was not far from a fluke that he won and didn't reflect a real shift in public opinion in comparison with the previous two elections.

I think that these are all things that most of us are in denial about, and if and when Trump wins in the fall, there will be a lot of pearl clutching and "How could this have possibly happened?" It can and probably will happen because it's where we're quite clearly headed! I think that anything else is basically denial. I'm not saying don't fight it -- by all means fight it! But fight it knowing that it's a real possibility, it's a likely outcome, that reflects a giant percentage of American public opinion -- it's not an outlier or a fringe deviation.

I also have various thoughts about how Trump is being framed and feared as a particular type of threat in ways that seem to me to miss some basic points about how racism and xenophobia work in the US and how US imperialism works in the world, but I think I'll leave that for another time...