David A. Jedeikin

Tag: history

  • On Israelism, Antisemitism, Hamas, and Me

    Six months after October 7th, a long, winding journey through histories personal and political

    Old City, Jerusalem. 1971

    Start with a crazy thought: Born and raised Jewish, I’ve never once personally experienced antisemitism (also known as Judeophobia, a more accurate term for the phenomenon, and one I’m using from here on out).

    Maybe I was just lucky. Or maybe my parents and community did their part to shelter me from such cruelties. Or maybe, in spite of all my wanderings and travels, I’ve managed to remain in a bit of a bubble. Or maybe a little of all those things.

    Of course, I know about Judeophobia. My background made good and sure of that. I’ve studied it, like, a lot. I was made to watch Holocaust documentaries as a tween (whether that was altogether healthy, I’m not sure).

    And yet, one thing glares out at me though it all: though we all know what Judeophobia is, on a most profound know-it-when-I-see-it level, the question that is never answered is, well, why it is.

    Poster for the museum exhibition Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew). Germany, 1937. Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

    What is this thing called Judeophobia?

    Think about it for a second. Homophobia (hatred of another group I belong to, and yeah, I experienced it many times) has at its core a certain messed-up, twisted logic: since sex between men and women is for procreation, anything that’s not that is no bueno. Critics would be quick to jump out and claim homophobes somehow seem fine with hetero sex that’s not for making babies. True… except even that has been verboten in ages past (and present, sadly).

    Ditto racism. People look different than you, so that creates the perception of a threat. All sorts of junky, fallacious science was dreamed up to justify it over the centuries.

    Religious wars come closer to answering the question. After all, if Protestants can battle Catholics as in Northern Ireland—or, heck, if all Christendom can mount literal Crusades to retake Jerusalem from the Muslim saracens—well, doesn’t the hate for the Jews make sense on that level? More broadly, doesn’t it just seem that humans have this awful penchant to hate and fear the different, the unknown, within the species? Call it a most toxic flavor of Freud’s narcissism of small differences.

    For me, though, that answer never fully satisfies. For one thing, as a corollary to my theory that nearly all wars are resource wars, it can be seen that most, if not all, of these religious wars operated in tandem with the grit of statecraft. This country wanted that country’s land/resources/enslavable population/perception of glory. Think vast armies clashing on medieval meadows, captured with striking artistry by painters of the Renaissance.

    But the Jews are no such people. They possess no great resources; even studies of their wealth and influence—clichés notwithstanding—sees Jews in America doing roughly as well as some other groups. They’re one of recorded history’s most ancient extant faiths, but bearing a heavy mythos and elaborate traditions—plus an aversion to proselytizing—they’ve always been few in number. Even though punching above their weight in world influence in recent centuries, they’ve never taken center stage as the world’s pre-eminent peoples the way, say, Christians, Muslims, or Han Chinese have done. It almost makes all the hate seem bitterly comical: why devote so much headspace (looking at you, Kanye) to some 0.2 percent of the human population? It borders on conspiracy theory.

    The answer, I think, lies with Steve Jobs (not Jewish, but bear with me).

    Think Different

    Apple Computer advertisements. Late 1990s

    Remember those late-1990s Apple commercials? A paean for the misfits of the world—which, at the time, included steadfast Apple users like me. Interestingly, the first two figures in the original ad from that campaign, projected in glorious slow-motion black & white, are both Jewish (Albert Einstein and Bob Dylan).

    Platitudes about God’s Chosen People or deranged Zionist conspiracy theories aside, I think there’s no real magic here: just a laser focus on learning (a superpower in the age of knowledge and industry) and a position (sometimes advantageous, sometimes not) astride two of the largest faiths on Earth—ones that Jewish culture helped start. Actually, that’s likely part of the reason for all the hate, too: even at their most openminded, Christendom and Islam have always felt an Other-ness about that small group of monotheists who didn’t want to be their kind of monotheists. That narcissism of small differences again.

    Still, all those reasons don’t fully capture it for me. There’s more, something that I think lies beneath all these reasons. This brings me back to Steve Jobs and those commercials, and leads me to my boldest statement about my culture of origin.

    I believe the Jews to be the Think Different people of humanity.

    The nerds of our species, as it were. To indulge in cliché for a minute, it’s no coincidence that the dorky persona in popular culture is frequently portrayed as, dare I say it, a tad Jewish-y (big nose, glasses, messy hair, studious). Think Woody Allen, who alone has sufficient notoriety to practically personify what I’m talking about.

    Different also means noticed. Willful divergence from the mainstream of humankind may hold great potency, but also courts fatal attention.

    Consider the heyday of pagan polytheism, some four thousand years back. In come these ragged old patriarchs fulminating in the desert about a singular abstract, universal super-being (by the way, the term for such an entity in the sci-fi series Dune—the Kwisatz Haderach—stems from two Hebrew words). Or the notion that what we believe in deep within our hearts—orthodoxy—is more important than simply going through ritual religious motions—orthopraxy. This actually holds another clue, since it introduced the burden of a guilty conscience—and in the words of essayist Maurice Samuel, “no one likes an alarm clock.”

    It doesn’t stop there: how about the notion that workers, indeed all people, should have a day of rest. Or that we should avoid certain foods (the origin of which may have been dietary, but has since gone in a totally different direction). Or that we shouldn’t proselytise others. Or that the strategic land bridge between Africa and Eurasia—literally humankind’s first rest stop on the long march out of our ancestral cradle—would be a good place to call home. Or that we should focus, to the point of obsession, on the study of a few select texts, interpreted and reinterpreted to death. Or that all these things would spawn two of the world’s biggest religions—both of which the Think Different people would subsequently reject.

    People say Judeophobia has morphed and changed through the centuries. I’d argue part of the reason is that its target has done the same. The Think Different people are an ever-shifting innovation. Where once Jews practically invented patriarchy and homophobia (sorry), nowadays it’s Jewish reformers on the front lines of women’s liberation and LGBTQ+ freedom. Where in ancient time the Israelites were rural and agrarian (and before that, nomadic herders), nowadays most Jews live in polyglot big cities.

    And so Thinking Different invites ire. A lot of ire. Luminaries from Henry Ford to architect Philip Johnson to author Roald Dahl fell into its twisted thrall.

    But it went even beyond ire; it surprised me to learn the Nazis felt a profound sense of victimhood, a notion that their kind was under threat of annihilation at the hands of the Hebrew menace. Untrue and deranged though that sounds, it helps when grappling with the obscene absurdity of it all, how a nation-state considered by many to be the pinnacle of human sophistication and achievement could build city-sized factories for the mass extermination of a people whose only real crime was, well, Thinking Different.

    Auschwitz-Birkenau. Outside Krakow, Poland.

    This is why the Think Different paradigm feels to me like the only unified-field theory of Judeophobia I can conjure up. I’m not alone in thinking this way either. It’s a potent force, the factor that ties together 1930s National Socialism, contemporary postcolonial leftists, and Islamists together. They all seem to find some way to hate the Jews, or the state the Jews built.

    Story of my life

    Let’s come back to where we started: as keenly as I’m aware of its existence, Judeophobia has never felt immediate to me. For that, I sometimes hear the Kathy Bates line from Primary Colors ringing in my head: “what a privileged fucking life you’ve had.” Well, maybe on that one front. But there’s more to my story (and, I suspect, many others) than that. And it’s more than just homophobia.

    For one thing, my backstory was different than those around me—even set against fellow Think Differents.

    My mother’s family. Somewhere between Israel and Canada. Circa 1958

    On my Mom’s side, the family story started out Ellis Island, Canadian edition, with Eastern European Jewish families coming to the New World in the early years of the Twentieth century. But, sometime in the 1940s, their path took a hard left: my grandparents, members of the Greatest Generation, met while stationed domestically during wartime. Afterward, they gave up a life in burgeoning North America in 1947 to move to…a whole other war zone. They were part of a left-wing Zionist youth movement. Even though living on a kibbutz didn’t work out for them, they remained in Palestine, and lived its violent transformation into a Jewish state.

    My aunt (Dad’s sister) and grandmother. Japan. Circa 1938

    My Dad’s family, meanwhile, lived a life that was more Great Gatsby than Fiddler on the Roof or Exodus. Someone in the extended family found a way to make a fortune overseas, and it ended my grandparents up in luxury in colonial-era Shanghai.

    Then, World War II came calling. A lucky fluke kept them out of internment camps, but not totally out of the war: my Dad would tell of Allied bombings over Shanghai, counting the length of a bomb’s whistle to guess its deadly proximity. They made it out intact, and spent two years in more luxury in postwar Italy…only to be followed by decidedly less glamorous experiences once they reached these shores. As in: they somehow found a way to lose everything they’d made across the world.

    Talk about really Thinking Different.

    Maybe because of all this difference, my parents turned out, like, super-Jew-y. Borderline Born Again. On their first date—a blind fix-up in London where they were both on holiday in the Swinging Sixties—they pledged to raise their kids with the traditional Jewish background that they’d missed out on in their respective youths. My sisters and I attended Jewish day schools, from infancy through the end of high school. Our entire social circle—nay, my entire world—was pretty much all Jewish until I was eighteen years old.

    Bar Mitzvah. Montreal. May, 1983

    Do not be fooled, however: we were not treated as some sort of Jewish aristocrats, as I think my parents sometimes fancied themselves. For me, freak better fit the way I (didn’t) fit it. Part of it was economic: we found ourselves on the ragged edge of our tight-knit community’s upward mobility. More of it was geographic: I got teased because my (White) father was born in Japan, and his background didn’t follow the Ellis Island backstory of everybody else’s bubbe and zayde in my class.

    And—yes—the homophobia: my urban, liberal community in the 1980s was no better on that front than anywhere else in John Hughes America. It might as well have been John Hughes America, or any other bougie quasi-suburb, Jewish or otherwise. Blink, and it’s Skokie or Evanston, near Chicago; Squirrel Hill, near Pittsburgh; Shaker Heights, near Cleveland; or Scarsdale, near New York City. A place where, in spite of growing up among my kind, I felt wasn’t my place. I was, in short, one of writer Blake Flayton’s (a thoughtful young queer Jewish journalist with a similar background) Jewish summer camp victims. Not because of religion or dogma; more because sometimes even the Think Different people don’t always rise above humanity’s more ignoble impulses to ostracize and exclude.

    So what? It seems so insignificant next to the fact that, according to the FBI, some 60 percent of all religiously-motivated hate crimes are rooted in Judeophobia. How the heck can anyone complain about minor misbehavior of some community cohorts when, well, all that is going on?

    Different shades of different

    Campus Protests, UNC Chapel Hill. October, 2023. Source: CNN

    Here’s where those campus leftists come back into the picture, and where my experience partly intersects with those recent charges of Judeophobia in academe. Part of that charge is my belief that—in contrast to progressive politics’ support for visible minorities and LGBTQ+ folks—liberal academics seem to have a massive blind spot for the Think Different people. Sure, Jewish immigrants may have been the huddled masses of yesteryear, but in today’s world? Just more White folks. It’s an ironic reversal, some have noted, from when over a century ago race science demonized Jews for being not White.

    Meanwhile, my crowd mostly pursued more banal aspirations: score good grades in school; attend a top-ranked university; grow a business, or else build a killer career on Wall Street. Marry, reproduce, repeat. Little boxes on a hillside, all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same (BTW, writer of that ditty? Jewish; more on that below).

    It’s been a slow, tangled process for me to disconnect Jewish identity from all that narrow meritocracy. The Think Different crowd has embraced it so passionately that they’re hated for that, too: recall the psychotically hateful fulminators bearing Tiki torches and chanting Jews will not replace us.

    Troye Sivan. Three Months (2022 film). Source: IMDB

    It’s absurd, particularly in a country and society that celebrates succcess. But it’s also incorrect. Because the Think Different people are so much more than that. The character played by queer pop singer Troye Sivan (Jewish) delivers the most fitting line in Jared Frieder’s (also Jewish) film Three Months, “there’s like six types of Jewish people, and I wanna say…two are pretty fierce?”

    Here’s to the fierce ones

    They’re what keeps me coming back to my roots, those fierce types. Likely the reason I still Google every accomplished person who I think is a Member of the Tribe to confirm it. Because some Think Different-ers helped spawn a cosmology, an entire universe of better angels. In particular, a loose grouping of modern-day scientists, writers and philosophers who embody what I’m going to call Saganism. It’s the worldview potently articulated by (who else) Carl Sagan, as well as two of his forebears and contemporaries, Isaac Asimov and the above-mentioned Einstein. Add to this group some non-Jews, too: Arthur C. Clarke and Gene Roddenberry.

    The Pale Blue Dot. Earth from Voyager One. Photo credit: NASA

    Here’s what Sagan said, upon seeing the tiny pinprick of Earth, taken from the faraway Voyager I spacecraft in 1990:

    “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

    Right?

    I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve watched the many YouTube renditions of this soliloquy, and wept. If that’s what Thinking Different entails, it had me at hello.

    From the sublime to the tragic

    Gaza City, October 2023. Source: The Washington Post

    Sadly, current times lean far from Saganist aspirations—particularly for the Think Different people and their neighbors, fighting in the homeland both claim as theirs. It seems Sagan’s own people are trapped in the very nightmare he lays out later in that quote:

    “Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.”

    Separation barrier. Israel/Palestine. Source: Israelism (film website)

    Shortly before last fall’s cataclysmic events, a little-known film was touring the festival circuit, a documentary called Israelism. Produced by a couple of young Jewish Americans with a startlingly similar background to my own, it chronicles their questioning, and subsequent re-education, about the inaccuracies of their upbringing. Suffice it to say, it’s attracted no shortage of attention of late as the Israel-Gaza war rages on.

    I’ve read and researched this subject widely—as with the Israelism filmmakers, much more widely than my one-sided early education. What strikes me about this conflict is how much both sides seem to talk past one another. Both point to atrocities and misdeeds committed by the other as a means of undermining the other side’s credibility.

    What’s even more striking is how much attention the world is paying to all this when contrasted against other global flashpoints. Sometimes I wonder how Africans in the Sahel must feel, with their equally (or more) horrific conflicts largely ignored by the larger world, focused as it is on a few dozen square miles around the Mediterranean.

    I know what the Think Different response to this has been, one my upbringing so often reiterated: Judeophobia, pure and simple. Unease with Jewish power. Rabid hatred of infidels by radical Islamists. Lingering prejudice still rooted in the subconscious of many Christian-derived Westerners—ironically, these days, found more often on the social-justice left than on the Hobbesian right.

    Although I grew up with these notions, my later learnings added more nuance to my understanding of the conflict. Suffice it to say, while absolutely nothing justifies Hamas’ actions on October 7th, there’s a long history that offers insight into why this madness went down the way it did—and why the reaction was what it was.

    A (very) quick catch-up: Israel has a long history of both fierce fighting and hefty global criticism, having racked up an almost comical number of condemnatory UN resolutions, along with past pushes for rapid cease-fires in prior wars. I always felt there were explanations bigger than mere Judeophobia: in Cold War days, there was the inevitable superpower jockeying, with either side trying to gain an advantage without blowing up the world. Moreover, for over a century the region’s been known to be oil-rich, and the fragile geopolitics of safeguarding this valuable energy asset have played a role in every adjacent conflict. Finally, Israel/Palestine is arguably one of the few bona fide civilizational clashes of the Samuel Huntington variety, pitting a largely Western-derived nation against non-Western religion, people, and ideology.

    Claims and counter-truths

    Watching recent events, particularly in the context of the longer history, led me to another conclusion, a partial explanation for the talking past each other. It’s not just the once-misled kids from Israelism. Lots of people from all sides have limited or incomplete knowledge of this admittedly dense history. Here are some talking points that I think need to be addressed:

    Let’s start with from the river to the sea, that innocuous-seeming phrase, often suffixed with Palestine shall be free. Sounds laudable; who wouldn’t want to campaign for people’s freedom? It’s really more about what’s implied: that one people shall supplant another, or that the presence of one people is invalid and the other should occupy the entirety of the land. Leaving aside the logistical near-impossibility of relocating either party (each of which presently number around seven million), we need to ask ourselves if, in the modern age, this is really the right way to go. Maybe, for the sake of sanity, all parties agree to drop this slogan.

    Let’s move on to anti-Israel, or rejecting Israel’s right to exist. Atop charges of hate or hostility, can we all agree these are absurd, and—maybe, possibly—Judeophobic notions? If a nation is viable, functional, has an engaged polity…then disputing its right to exist makes absolutely no sense. Does anyone dispute France’s right to exist? Mongolia’s? Brazil’s? Sure, nation-states are all made-up constructs, and lots of them have ignominious pasts. But they serve as the basic organizing unit of humankind in our age. Wanting that they should evolve, holding them to address their shortcomings, fix their problems…all are laudable goals for all the world’s nations, Israel/Palestine included. But a push to utterly eradicate any nation? That has no place in any sane discourse.

    As a corollary to this, let’s take another notion: anti-Zionist. This is is usually taken to mean people who don’t support the notion of a Jewish state. Let’s unpack that. Zionism—like its constituent Think Different folk—has itself changed and morphed over the years. For right-wing religious Jews it may mean an exclusively Jewish homeland from the river to the sea. More moderate Israelis consider majority Jewish demographic numbers—which in a democracy is usually synonymous with access to the levers of power—an essential. I no longer count myself in either of those camps, but I don’t consider myself anti-Zionist. Quite the opposite.

    Let’s take another claim: the charge of colonialism. Comparisons have been made between Israel and, say, Algeria under French rule, or India under the British Raj. Indeed, some of Israel’s later historians took a look at the evidence (some of it more recently declassified), and surmised that, yes, there was more going on than once thought: purchases of land from absentee landowners in Damascus, followed by kicking peasants off the land they’d farmed for generations to make way for new Jewish settlers; to say nothing of the formation of new (Jewish) towns and settlements apart from their Arab neighbors.

    Not to be pedantic here, but this is sometimes described as settler colonialism — more like what was practiced in North America, Australia, or New Zealand. Even this charge is considered unacceptable, but I maintain that settler colonialism offers more of a platform to build a fairer society than the colonialism of the old-school kind. Countries built by people creating society afresh have, it seems, greater capacity to be held to ideals and eliminate past hypocrisies. Or at least try.

    And—yes—as with other settler societies, displacement of peoples was often in the picture. Heck, Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, fretted about it years before the State of Israel came into being. Historians on both sides seem to agree that Jewish settlement in the land provoked violent responses from longstanding locals. But how did it all start? In my quest to find who threw the proverbial first punch between the 1880s and 1948, I’ve come up with no easy answers. Some maintain that Judeophobia was behind it, with Arab locals viewing the Jewish new arrivals with much the same disdain as European Judeophobes. Whatever the origin story, the Think Different crowd prevailed, and formed a state in the aftermath.

    There’s another wrinkle to this colonialist charge: while Palestine hadn’t been under Jewish rule or control when those first settlers showed up in the 1880s, for millennia there had indeed been a vestigial Jewish population there. Not to mention a mythology that ran deep, and a richly-recorded ancient history.

    Not Gaza. Kowloon Walled City. Hong Kong, 1989. Source: Ian Lambot

    Let’s move on to Gaza, a place depicted hellishly, as a densely populated, open-air prison—I’ve even heard charges of concentration camp—possibly bringing to mind the no-longer extant Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong.

    Here’s what the numbers say: if taken as a standalone country, at almost 17,000 people per square mile, Gaza is indeed up there, standing between Gibraltar (12,000 per square mile) and metropolitan Hong Kong (over 17,000 per square mile). It’s about a third smaller than the city of Chicago, and has almost as many people (2.3 million vs Chicago city’s 2.7 million). So it’s something like a city-state, or a microstate. That said, living in confinement in such a space doesn’t sound like anybody’s idea of a thriving existence, prison or otherwise.

    More recently we’ve been hearing charges of genocide. Although more recently this has been a claim on the Palestinian side against Israel, after October 7th there was likewise the charge that those attacks were a newfangled variant of the late Russian Empire-era Judeophobic riots known as pogroms. While there’s no doubt that the suffering on both sides has been horrific, I don’t think either charge quite fits the circumstances. Going by the UN definition, a genocide incorporates willful intent to eliminate another group. While the Israeli military campaign has been heavily criticized for its excesses, it still seems at its core a military operation. Gaza hasn’t been nuked, nor has a significant percentage of its population (currently over two million) been wiped out. Although some of Israel’s more extreme politicians have made some truly deplorable remarks, they haven’t gone nearly as far as what we’ve seen in the historical record. Likewise, however messed up October 7th was, I think we can agree it’s nothing like the potency of the Russian Empire unleashing its citizenry on largely defenseless Jewish peasants.

    Another misused word: Apartheid. There are resonances, but to me it doesn’t accurately describe the Israel/Palestine situation. For one thing, the conflict here isn’t racial; plenty of Jewish Israelis look like plenty of Arab Palestinians. I’d say that some measure of ethnocentrism has seeped into some parts of the discourse on both sides. But the major consideration for Israeli-Palestinian segregation has been geopolitical—relating to trust, security, rights, and resources. Israel’s policies could be termed Apartheid influenced. But they come from a very different place than the South Africa of old.

    There must be some kind of way out of here

    Gethsemane, Jerusalem. 2018

    So how do we get out of this quagmire when we have two sides that can’t even agree on each other’s reality? Although I’ve read a lot, there’s always more to unearth and reveal. So I started with the granddaddy of latter-day Judeophobia, the 1903 pamphlet The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Nowadays, it’s said to be popular again, this time in—you guessed it— the contemporary Middle East.

    Well…good grief. It’s hard to believe this deranged, fulminating, ludicrous fabrication—said to be minutes of a secret meeting of the great Jewish conspiracy—can be read as anything other than a cruel Python-esque parody. Then again, it’s in good company: look at some of the more extreme media in our fractured age.

    Next I watched two almost identically-named stories on Netflix that could not be more different: Farha, an international co-production indy film from 2021 about the Palestinian displacement of 1948; and Fauda, a contemporary Israeli TV series that’s been running for several years and is surprisingly popular in some unlikely places.

    Fauda’s terrific—a well-crafted thriller that manages to sensitively portray nuance on all sides. Even the critiques I did find of it made mention of the odd inaccuracy in accents or settings, but otherwise it does a good job of conveying the chaos of the conflict. Heck, its title literally means chaos.

    Farha, on the other hand, came in for considerable controversy when it came out, and it’s hard not to see why: although the initial half of the film—depicting a young Palestinian girl hidden in a storehouse in a Palestinian village under evacuation—is harrowing enough, it’s the event the eponymous girl witnesses through cracks and peepholes of the storehouse that’s truly horrifying. Jewish soldiers enter the village, and basically treat any Palestinian they find—including an abducted informant—about as horrifically as some Nazis had done to their kin, just scant years before. Sadism, child murder, summary execution. Yikes.

    Now, I know about stories of Arab villages depopulated by Jews during the 1947-1948 period, known to Palestinians as the Nakba. Some less-than-savory behavior was practiced by both sides, shitty things done in the name of war and conquest. But that’s not what Farha’s depicting. For one thing, only one side’s committing atrocities. Then again, in scouring protest videos of this film, I have yet to find someone who definitively debunked that things like this took place. Meanwhile, the Jordanian/Palestinian maker of Farha has has been a bit cagey on the details.

    Jewish folks are particularly sensitive to all this because of another old lie, the infamous blood libel. Simply put, it was the nonsensical idea that Jews made Passover matzah—basically a thin overgrown water cracker—out of the blood of Christian babies. As a die-hard carb junkie, I’ve eaten plenty of matzah in my time, and can attest it’s decidedly unsanguinary.

    Although the actual blood libel was clearly bullshit, I see the resonance, and how it relates to the terms discussed above. It’s fair and healthy for the Think Different people to be criticized for conduct unbecoming. But it’s unhelpful at the least, and potentially Judeophobic at the worst, to make accusations that verge on the extreme.

    To that end, I read and looked further…and the results weren’t encouraging. I read Rashid Khalidi’s book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, and gleaned one interesting data point: the (non-Jewish) locals in Palestine were always opposed to a Jewish state. Pretty much from Day One. They’ve always viewed it as a colonial project—even when tens of thousands of European refugees fleeing a genocidal regime turned up on their shores in the 1930s. Ironically, Palestinian hostility toward Jewish immigration back then evokes some of the backlash we’ve seen over the past decade in Europe against refugees from another Middle Eastern tinder-pot. I can understand a people’s uncertainty and unease with rapid change, or migration of a different kind of people into your lands. But the sheer ferocity of these reactions is, frankly, a bit chilling.

    Sadly, this attitude persists into the present day. I’ve been following some of the anti-Zionist coverage in recent weeks, and the accusations are again incredible. I’m reposting these, unsure of their accuracy or veracity. I get that this is a war, attitudes are strained, and people are angry. But these don’t strike me as thoughtful, or even properly fact-checked.

    A different kind of response

    Given that, I think something needs to happen, believe the Think Different nation might benefit from a course correction. The old-school globocop routine—and concomitant hardass day-to-day attitudes and behaviors—worked fine when fighting nation states in the 1960s, but it hasn’t been effective at winning the most important battle of all: the one for the hearts and mind of the global community.

    First things first: I’m not sanctioning trying to reason with with the likes of Hamas (or Hezbollah, or their daddy state Iran’s leadership). I give Rashid Khalidi’s book credit for at least acknowledging that a large part of Palestinian suffering has been their own failed leadership (though nary a mention of the expulsion of Jews from Arab lands), combined with unfailing intransigence from their Arab brethren. Heck it goes on even now: just ask how many Gazans have been allowed into Egypt in the last six months. These days, at least, sovereign Middle East nations have abandoned their deranged notions from the 1960s. Meanwhile, the Hamas charter reads like a Unabomber manifesto. I can only hope that supporters of personal choice, progressive values, and Palestinian liberation (looking at you, campus leftists) to look with better eyes, and renounce support or sympathy for this kind of leadership. However problematic or dickish you may think the Think Different nation has acted, Hamas isn’t the answer. They no more represent decolonization than the ultra-rich Osama Bin Laden stood for global justice and equality.

    As for the Think Different crowd, many of whom have given up on trying to appease the world, I recommend Thinking Different a little more: confront and address accusations instead of ignoring them. Take every blood-libel allegation seriously. Do everything possible to seize the moral high ground. If a military raid leads to civilian casualties, get in front of the story before Hamas’ Health Ministry does. In my view, every global protest against Israel is a failure of its own administration to effectively make its case on the global stage.

    As to how much military force is best? I lack the expertise to answer that question. Others have tried. My only thought is that it seems to me the Israeli response is based on a fatal misconception Western countries have held since World War Two: that it’s possible to wage total, lethal, overwhelming war on an enemy combatant in a quest for unconditional surrender. But we can’t fight World War Two again, not in an age or atomic weapons and the internet. The war must also be fought on other fronts. Just ask Ho Chi Minh.

    In the long term, in the aftermath, we all know what must happen is not what the extremes on either sides want: a permanent Jewish majority in all the land for all time; or, a re-housing of every Palestinian in the exact home they once occupied eighty years ago on another. And why should either of those even be desirable? As commentator Bill Maher put it in a recent closing bit on his show, things change. The world only spins forward. But it can spin forward into something better, something where the injustices of the past are met with real answers instead of more injustice.

    The Think Different people have at least made a start, with a demoralized yet still-extant crowd of New Historians like Benny Morris, Tom Segev and Amos Elon, along with present-day commentators like Peter Beinart and historian Yuval Noah Harari. It’s the Palestinian camp that has a lot of work to do. The way Palestinian leadership has confronted the Jewish state through history has been an unyielding pageant of missed opportunities. However you feel about what’s gone down over the past century or so, it’s far better to build from what we have than to expend all our effort into trying to destroy it all. To wit: Hamas has built more tunnels for its combatants over the past years than exist on the New York City Subway.

    View from the Western Wall, Jerusalem. 2018

    Obviously, none of us can say what the exact form of a now-fantastical final settlement to this conflict will be. But if we really want to Think Different, we must not give up on imagining it. Maybe the State of Israel can remain a Jewish state—constitutionally-enshrined Law of Return to boot—without necessarily having a Jewish majority; maybe, if the Palestinians can give up on their generational hostility to such a state, they can slowly become a part of it, make it an ever richer variant of what it already is. A national homeland for the Jews, and a continuation of the homeland that always was for the myriad inhabitants who’ve been there for centuries. Like their more moderate—and prosperous—Sunni Gulf state neighbors of late, the Palestinian polity has a golden opportunity to be constructively associated with one of the world’s most prosperous, dynamic nation-states.

    It seems nuts—but then, so, too was the notion of a united Europe when Einstein proposed it in the 1930s. For those who think this is not only utopian but logistically impossible, I offer up a place right under everyone’s nose where such a model, huddled masses and all, has actually worked quite well—and, guess what? It’s Israel itself.

    Yes, really. Under the big tent of ancient Abrahamic culture, the State of Israel gathered in scores of emigrés and refugees from immensely diverse places. From Hoboken to Hamburg to the Horn of Africa, they have come. Heck, my own family even did a stint there when I was a child, and my dim early memories were of a place far more diverse than the community I grew up around in North America. I retain extended family in the region, and, though I’ve been far from this conflict for so much of my life, I want only the best, safest outcome for all of them. And that’s indeed why I don’t consider any of this anti-Zionist at all.

    Road tripping around Israel in the family Volvo. Circa 1975

    You may say I’m a dreamer. That we tried it with Oslo in the 1990s, and failed. That the turbulent world of now makes all this fantasizing as plausible as Vulcans and warp drive. Maybe so. But maybe, too, it takes a onetime summer camp victim of the Think Different tribe to encourage us not to give up, and that it doesn’t pay us to lean in to the less-desirable aspects of narrow meritocracy or hardcore militarism.

    Basically, I dare us to do better. Because—once again paraphrasing those Apple commercials—only the ones crazy enough to change the world are the ones who do.

    Further reading

    A lot has been published on this subject; here are a few of my selections (not necessarily in any order):

    The Israelis: Founders and Sons. One of the first historical self-examinations of Israel that cast a more critical eye

    A History of Israel. A comprehensive, lays-out-the-facts explainer. Lengthy and detailed

    Orientalism. Not directly about the conflict, but written by renowned Palestinian professor Edward Said on the deep roots of the West’s fascination with the East

    Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict. Another self-examination of the conflict’s past

    The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust. How the Holocaust and the State of Israel are interrelated

    My Promised Land. Another incisive reading of the region’s history from a more personal standpoint

    The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. What appears to be an authoritative snapshot of present-day Palestinian thinking on the conflict

  • How everything changed the year I was born

    Photo from metv.com

    “I had always felt that the Devon School came into existence the day I entered… was vibrantly real while I was a student there, and then blinked out like a candle the day I left.”

    – John Knowles, A Separate Peace (1959 novel)

    How many of us think that not just about school, but about the world itself? Probably every human that has ever lived imagines the year of their birth is the most important in all the years that ever were.

    That said, some lay better claim than others. Call it my corollary to the quote ascribed to Lenin about weeks when decades happen. I’m betting Germans born around 1989 think so about their year, as do Americans birthed in 2001. Or, for that matter, most anyone born most anywhere in 1945.

    To that end, I’d like to submit 1970 into the roster.

    Qualification One: I’m talking more about the small cluster of years around it, the late-nineteen-sixties and early seventies. Qualification Two: I’m largely focusing on the United States and Canada, though there’s sizable relevance to other Western countries, and, by extension, the rest of the world.

    The overall bigness of 1970

    Not just that it’s a round number — always convenient for counting birthdays. Though a part of me wonders if, given our base-ten numbering system and our generations lasting about twenty years, we tend to subconsciously bring about cadences, ebbs and flows in time that match our notions of major markers. Whatever the reason, it’s been widely noted that after 1970, things just… shifted.

    The decade before it offers clues. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, few deny the impact of the Sixties. The decade when the Betty Crocker post-World War II family order began breaking down. The promise of that order worked out great for straight, white, cis guys… but for practically nobody else. Agitators for change made it out there in the 1960s, but it wasn’t until the coming decade that change became reality.

    That’s evident in two big trends: the ending of the draft in 1973 and the shift in women admitted to college since then (interestingly, the charts for this trend all seem to start in 1970).

    Queer(er) Nation

    From article in nytimes.com

    1967 may have been the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, but 1970 was the era of Stonewall. Not initially considered a big deal by mainstream society—and by no means the only LGBTQ+ uprising to have happened back then, it nonetheless stands out. A for-real uprising against the police — a police, of the time, enforcing purposeless, horrifically persecutory laws. Laws that criminalized certain groups right to meet one another, to find connection, experience love. One year after the riots, the earliest marches of what we now know as the Pride movement started. Both happened within months of my arrival on this world. You could say I was literally born with Gay Liberation (though it took me awhile to figure it out).

    Actually, that’s another disclaimer: big change sometimes takes time, and only looking back do we trace its spark. Even though I’d grown up mostly after being LGBTQ+ had been removed from psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as a mental affliction, I personally can speak to that notion having persisted for way too long in society. Don’t believe me? Watch any John Hughes 1980s high school movie. The Stonewall spark built very slowly to the roaring blaze it is now.

    But it got lit around 1970.

    Sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll

    “They are not your friends… and they will ruin rock and roll and strangle everything we love about it.”

    – Cameron Crowe, Almost Famous (2000 film)

    Photo by Documerica on Unsplash

    Music’s probably the first thing people think about when they talk about the 1970 barrier. The violence at the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway in December 1969 is where many analyses start. It led to greater professionalization of the industry, those big arena rock shows of the seventies.

    Then, in 1970, the Beatles broke up. Come to think of it, the arc of their career traces the big social changes that brought us to 1970. A decade before, guys took ladies on a date to a supper club for some ballroom dancing, as they had for generations. Ten year later, it was nightclubs, LSD, and the hippie-hippie shake amid a newly-free college generation. Don’t believe me? Watch Mad Men through its entire run. Or read about the demise of in loco parentis.

    From noble causes to Pentagon Papers and Watergate

    “You had Kennedy. I didn’t. I’ve never heard a president say ‘destiny’ and ‘sacrifice’ without thinking, ‘bullshit.’ Okay, maybe it was bullshit with Kennedy, too. But people believed it.”

    – Mike Nichols, Primary Colors (1998 film)

    Photo by Documerica on Unsplash

    The Sixties bore the curse of interesting times. For all the idealism, things were far from idyllic; heck, the world nearly ended before the decade was even halfway out. But a certain broader idealism feels like it was lost. When Ron Kovic goes off to war in Born of the Fourth of July (not my favorite movie, but bear with me here) sometime in the Sixties, his town is all golden and gauzy; when he returns, the Seventies have dawned, and the place is dirty and run-down.

    It’s a malaise that had tangible turning points: in June, 1971 the Pentagon Papers came out, detailing what America’s government was really up to in Vietnam. Looking back, it seems almost unfathomable—in our age of smartphones, nonstop news, and five decades of jadedness about military misconduct—to really picture how long stuff like this took to disseminate, and how earth-shattering it was when it did.

    But when it finally all came out, it shifted the paradigm: a government and military that, a mere quarter-century before, had led the Greatest Generation to heroic victory in the Second World War was now up to no good, destabilizing the very world people thought they were saving. Even the military-industrial complex’s most sacred offshoot, the space program, saw its mighty, decade-long initiative come to fruition in the summer of sixty-nine. Think of space exploration what you will, we’re still struggling to exceed what was all over and done with by the time the New Years bell rang on 1970.

    With Apollo-era heroics closing, a darker door was opening. A gate, actually. Or, rather, a building named for one: Watergate. So central has it been to the notion of government scandal, crime, and cover-up, that the suffix -gate is now applied to nearly every scandal since.

    The tipping point of economic inequality

    From Robert Reich to Thomas Piketty, economists and thinkers are nearly unanimous in declaring 1970 the rough threshold where economic inequality in Western countries — America most especially — began to rise.

    My take on why is actually related to the above: after they failed to snag a lock on Betty Crocker conservatism in the Sixties, the crowd so inclined to such ideas went in another direction. They even had a perfect pretext, thanks to another series of events that happened around 1970. Back then, and still now, humankind’s most vital ingredient to make the modern world happen. A three-letter word: oil.

    Photo by Documerica on Unsplash

    Specifically, the OPEC embargo of 1973. To an even greater degree than the whipsawing economy of the past few years, the 1970s oil shocks roiled America. It all happened care of another peak: America transitioning from a net oil exporter to oil importer (something that’s only been partly reversed in our time of fracking).

    These were the real causes of 1970s stagflation, an economic reality that was the very opposite of the go-go decade before. Adding to it were America’s once-defeated, now-rebuilding economic rivals starting to mount a challenge to U.S. manufacturing. With everything feeling like it was going downhill, it’s no surprise that challengers to the liberal economic consensus came out of the woodwork.

    We all know what happened next: the Reagan era, Morning in America, the complexities and contradictions of the 1980s. They accelerated and reinforced a self-fulfilling prophecy, one where it’s believed the only way toward “progress” is through a greater risk/reward mechanism, one that leads, seemingly inevitably, toward ever more unequal outcomes. Whether or not you agree that this is inevitable (I sure don’t) the fact is, the movements that pinioned around 1970 were the forces that shaped our times.

    The New Hollywood

    Photo by Matt Popovich on Unsplash

    We already went through music. But there’s another cultural touchstone that got a major rethink around 1970. Old Hollywood had been on the decline for years — by which I mean the system of studio bosses, vertical integration of production and distribution, capped off with Production Code-mandated soft censorship that forced movies to be redemptive and wholesome. By 1970, the Production Code was repealed, and as film critic Michael Medved once remarked, the winning Oscar for Best Picture went from movies like The Sound of Music, in 1965, to Midnight Cowboy in—you guessed it—1970.

    But that wasn’t the end of the story. As with the rise of political neoconservatism, movies saw a classical return to form around a decade later — with the very movies that shaped the generation of kids born around 1970. Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Superman; these cultural classics remain relevant to us today.

    But, as with political neoconservatism, the movies of the New Hollywood still pulled in elements of the 1970 pivot: characters drank, swore, weren’t always good. Even the trademark happy ending of Old Hollywood days wasn’t safe. Both E.T. and Titanic, two of the biggest New Hollywood movies of the last four decades, don’t end in happily-ever-afters.

    The New New Hollywood: Silicon Valley

    Tech has so permeated our lives and our media that it probably seems almost bizarre to compare it to its SoCal counterpart. And tech had been big for awhile: histories of Silicon Valley cite the more general “electronics” industry as a player in U.S. economic activity even back in the 1960s (though much of it was corporate, military or academic back then). But it didn’t have the It status it does now, and again we find a pivot around our target year: the invention of the microprocessor, in 1971, by a wobbly, but still-major player of today: Intel.

    We all think of the microprocessor as enabling something called “miniaturization,” but I’ve always found that word to be paradoxical, since it’s describing how absolutely frikken huge this innovation really was.

    It wasn’t just that pre-microprocessor-age computers were bigger; they often required massive amounts of manual labor to assemble, and a significant amount of on-site maintenance when active. Then, in one stroke, the microprocessor took all that away. Picture the slow, painstaking steps we’ve taken toward nuclear fusion happening in weeks instead of decades. Or if we, one day, somebody just rolled out a car that travelled a thousand miles per hour, all while using virtually no energy and totally safe. It basically made one of sci-fi’s holy grails — thinking machines — entering the realm of the everyday in just a couple of generations. Imagine if we cracked warp drive that quickly.

    Maybe the computer chip is the biggest paradigm breaker from around 1970 — though, as we’ve seen, it’s not necessarily the path to salvation we may have thought. Actually, that’s a trope: all the things we’ve brought up have led some economic historians to consider the period after 1970 one of decline in American growth. In everything, that is, except computer technology, and its applications. Tech may indeed aid our salvation in the end — or may be the catalyst toward ever-greater doom. Either way, the big boost came right around 1970.

    On that note, One More Thing: January 1, 1970 is also Epoch Time Zero for all things UNIX-based. Here’s looking at you, iPhone, Android, and Mac.

    The end of optimism?

    Photo by Documerica on Unsplash

    With all these transitions and upsets, it’s tempting to look at 1970 as the border-line to dystopia. All the above implies a rise in cynicism, a trait most closely associated with the generation bisected at its midpoint by that year. I’m talking about my generation, Gen X. A popular teen movie from 1989 dubbed us the “why bother” generation, in contrast to the (however maligned) idealistic optimism of the Baby Boomers. We may have grown up under Morning in America, but that deceptively positive message was really targeted at Boomers. Lots of us Xers saw it for what Primary Colors called it: bullshit. It’s impossible to watch movies like The Breakfast Club or Heathers and not think how irredeemably hopeless everything feels. Sure, the world has sucked before, but I doubt anyone’s been quite so aware of it, under circumstances so existential, as the generation that grew up in the shadow of both economic decline and the atomic age.

    But still, I move that all is not lost. The generations that came after the one cleaved by 1970 hold a different outlook. Millennials were the first to voice full-throated hope again, and took many of the progressive ideals of the 1960s to the next level. Cynics may call it performative or politically correct, but I maintain the conversation moved forward on their watch. And emerging Gen Z, largely the kids of Xers, has again made agitating for social change great again. There, too, 1970 offers an echo: the very first Earth Day was held that year.

    Photo by Documerica on Unsplash

    Hopefully it makes change-agitators the true inheritors of 1970, the ones best poised to take on the mantle of fixing the world. It’s become clear over the past decade that, in spite of progress in many places, things seem ever more precarious on Planet Earth than they have in a while.

    A while, I maintain, of about half a century.

    Think you have a birth year with similar significance? I’d be interested to hear about it in the comments below.

  • I went on a trip around the world over a decade ago, and most of my observations were wrong.

    Dawn over Namibia. October, 2008

    “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust

    I still remember that late-summer evening when I boarded British Airways flight 94. My first flight across the Atlantic in over two decades.

    I had seven months planned out. Every continent on Earth save Antarctica. Though I was always big into travel, I hadn’t set foot outside North America since adolescence. I’d lived and visited all over my home continent. But even as the son of two first(ish)-generation immigrants, I had no adult exposure to what it was like Over There.

    When asked, I had the usual American-style excuses ready: not enough time, not enough money. They’re powerful reasons when they’re true, and they’re true for many. Fewer than a fifth of the human race has any kind of regular access to air travel. While I’ve been grateful enough to be a part of that fifth, I used the opportunity to stay in my home continent for many years.

    Why? Like so many in this country, I fell a bit for the notion that my home continent was kind-of enough, at least for the time being. I never wanted to be a struggling newbie in foreign lands, some awkward guidebook-toting tourist trying to figure out how to ask for the bathroom.

    Kyoto, Japan. January, 2009

    But then, things shifted. My 1990s-era optimism about America was starting to fade — after 9/11, two wars, a misbegotten Presidency, and, ultimately, a real-estate crash. I wasn’t sure if travel would answer life’s big questions, I wrote in my journal, but at least it forces us to look at them from someplace else. In 2008, many someplace elses were needed.

    The global rainbow

    First off, yes, it happened: I had my mind blown. But not in the ways you’d expect.

    Machu Picchu. March, 2009

    First big surprise: all those places cynics had written off as touristy or tired or predictable. OK, some of them were… but many, many, many more were just plain awesome. Not just places, but people. I met a kaleidoscope of them, and all those clichés about fellow travelers and citizens of the world made sense on a truly visceral level. It’s cliché for a reason, I mused, but we all really do have a lot more in common than we realize.

    Also: traveling the world was so much easier than expected, or feared. Granted, I was pretty organized, planning some things out while leaving a lot of other things to chance. As for those horror stories about lost luggage and food poisoning and getting robbed? Both happened to me back home—before the trip—but not on the trip itself. Trains and planes (mostly) left and arrived on time. I never got anything worse than a throat infection—and that in a country where I happen to have a doctor relative; a buck-fifty’s worth of antibiotics and I was on my way. Heck, even the weather was great most everywhere I went… except for that minus-twenty week in Beijing. Silver lining: I had the Great Wall almost to myself.

    Great Wall, Badaling, People’s Republic of China. January, 2009

    Timing played a role. 2008 marked something of a sweet spot in world navigability: just enough Internet out there to make connecting easier, but not so much as when filter bubbles closed us off. Even with the financial crash hitting big back home, overseas—at least where I went—the party was still going on.

    Meanwhile, I rid myself of many preconceptions. I used to think of the Old World as, well, old. Dirty. Used up. Fractured by ancient hatreds. Instead, I saw a gleaming new Europe, one continent like never before, stitched together by amazing high-speed trains. Berlin had just finished putting itself back together. London looked nothing like the fusty old place I remembered from when I visited as a teen. This world was slick, modern, and—in the right places—party central.

    Brandenburg Gate, Berlin. November, 2008

    That was true for me on another level: I found thriving LGBTQ life in Tokyo, Cape Town, Singapore, Lima, and (yes) Moscow—on top of well-known standbys like Amsterdam, Bangkok, and Buenos Aires. I encountered friendly locals in Jordan, Cambodia, and Peru. Bathed in 2008 Olympics afterglow, I marveled at China’s recent rise—that remarkable stadium complex in Beijing; the elegantly restored historic neighborhoods of Shanghai; those incredible airports; those young professionals sipping lattes at Starbucks whose parents, I mused, might have endured life in labor camps.

    The Bund. Shanghai, China. January, 2009

    I also encountered fellow Americans, and while some impressed me, others, well… let’s just say that, with the Yankee laser-focus on career ambition, few Americans with wherewithal to travel were doing it “just be” style like young (or not-so-young) Europeans, Australians, or South Africans on their Gap Years. Heck, that was practically the point of the bestseller of the time, Eat, Pray, Love.

    with American college students. Macchu Pichu. March, 2009

    Maybe that’s what made me celebrate the world I encountered, and contributed to my attitude that, while we in America were relapsing into partisan bickering and economic mismanagement, the rest of the globe was figuring it out. Waking up from history.

    An Atlanticist’s Kool-Aid sugar crash

    Coming home in mid-2009, I held on, wanting to believe the great stuff I’d experienced could translate into lessons learned back home. Our new leadership had to get it, understand the lessons of the world and move America into the leadership role it always professed to hold. Especially then, since that leadership was headed by a man who embodied the connected world: a Middle American Mom, an East African Dad, and a birthplace smack in the middle of Earth’s biggest ocean. I watched his election late into the night from a sports bar in Prague, audaciously hoping that this would put us back on track, back to the hopeful 1990s and those dreams of a New World Order.

    You can guess how I’ve been feeling over the past weeks, or for that matter, the last half-decade.

    I used to repeat the mantra “war in Europe is no longer possible” so many times that it must by now be etched into my skull. I bought Thomas Friedman’s Golden Arches theorem in a big way, enjoying that company’s offerings in once-unthinkable places, though more for the symbolism than for the Big Macs.

    McDonald’s. Moscow, November, 2008.

    I think there’s a kind of perverse naïveté among Gen Xers like me— a generation who otherwise rank as history’s greatest group of cynics. We learned in school about the scary first two-thirds of the Twentieth century: two World Wars, the Bomb, the Iron Curtain, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire speech.

    But it’s what came after school that marked us: watching that same Wall come down, peacefully no less; the Evil Empire disintegrating not long after; South Africa freeing, then electing, Nelson Mandela; Northern Ireland forming a lasting peace; the Middle East coming within sight of doing the same. And all that before Y2K ended up a giant party. Apocalypse? Pshaw. I mean, what other generation became adults just as a book literally named The End of History came out?

    Zen and the art of being wrong

    Predicting the future is dicey business, but you get a pass for failing as a fortune-teller. What’s more embarrassing is to realize you got it wrong about the present. What was right before my eyes. Being out there, in the moment, in the world, and not really taking in what’s before you. Granted, I was hardly the first person to get out there and see what I wanted to see; I doubt I’ll be the last.

    What did I miss? My intellectuals and party friends (sometimes the same people) in London were grand… but didn’t help me understand, or even uncover, the side of Britain that voted the way they did six years later. Leave that marvel of post-World War II unity? Insanity. Looking over the lights of Cairo, I dreamed of a city ready for a glorious revolution… sure, it came, a scant three years later, but didn’t change much of anything in the end. Nowadays it’s hard to say Egypt’s any better off than it was fourteen years ago. I met up with gays in Moscow, oblivious not only to Putin’s recent war in Georgia, but also his incipient homophobia at home. I didn’t make it to Ukraine, but in years since worked with offshore tech teams from there. I always thought of their country as a part of the connected world I experienced, those talking heads on Zoom calls an echo of places I did visit, like Czechia or Germany. I wonder how those former colleagues are holding up these days.

    We may feel far from it, here in North America, but it’s no less heartbreaking, reading headlines that seem torn out of history books. Clearly, some of us held on to the heady optimism of the 1990s too long, felt we’d transcended the ancient cruelties we as a species have visited upon each other for eons. We reached the brink of Armageddon, went the notion, sometime around the Cuban Missile Crisis, and have since been on a decades-long process of climbing out of it.

    Except, history isn’t always a smooth climb upward. For many of us, coming to terms with that is a feature—a limitation, perhaps—of a whole life philosophy. I’ve long been critical of pessimists who believe in an intractable “human nature,” the inalienable human feature conservatives so often cite as the reason things will never really get better. Maybe I thought otherwise, that human nature’s push for self-preservation finally saw the light after the nuclear age, realized there was no way out of the stalemate but to become better to each other.

    Hope and (more) travel

    Utopian? Maybe. Or maybe just too soon. H.G. Wells—and Star Trek, Wells’ biggest modern-day standard bearer—posited that we can grow up as a species, sure, but only after enduring great cataclysm and existential shift from the outside (I’m looking at you, Vulcans). Simply proclaiming the Cold War over and nuclear war unthinkable wasn’t enough. And no matter how much of the world one sees when traveling, the picture you bring back is always going to be incomplete.

    Over California. June, 2021

    Don’t get me wrong: I still very much believe in going Over There, believe it’s a key lynchpin for breaking barriers, widening horizons, and trying to build a more complete picture for us and for generations to come. It’s something I aim to pass on to our young son, now taking his first steps in new places.

    Maybe it’s partly for his sake I haven’t fully let go of big-picture hope. With everything going on these days, it seems improbable to imagine that we collectively will figure things out one day without great cataclysm and destruction. But then, everything’s improbable—which is maybe both the lessons of one’s younger travels, and a reminder to all idealistic liberal internationalists. The future is always murky, and even given the darkness and pessimism of the past years and weeks, nothing in history is ever over. Or guaranteed.

  • The conscience of an ex-conservative

    Photo by Isai Ramos on Unsplash

    For you loyal readers, you may recognize the journey-based subheading: it’s almost the same one I used on a post four years back—a lifetime ago, seems like, in the lead up to the last Presidential election. There I told about my immigration path in America. But there’s a life journey that goes back even further.

    The way I was (and wasn’t)

    It’s hard to believe—least of all to me these days—that I once called myself conservative.

    OK, I wasn’t really, not by the standards in America today, or even those back then. I wasn’t even living in the U.S. at the time. In my case, I was really just copying (some) family and (some) community, folks who were more in the neoconservative mold like Marty Peretz or Paul Wolfowitz.

    I was also an obedient, closeted nerd, and in my life back then, the liberals/libertines seemed to be my biggest tormentors. I was just a kid, not some celebrity journalist, but my journey was a lot like David Brock’s, whose book I read many years later and could deeply relate. Between that and (yes) a high-school reading of The Fountainhead, the worldview seemed set: progressive ideas are nice in theory, but in practice are always co-opted by mean, selfish or lazy people, and therefore have no chance of working. Only competition and the free market can channel human ugliness to its highest and best use.

    I was never a social conservative per se, but as with a lot of fiscal and geopolitical neocons, some ideas seeped in. Since the party kids were such assholes, it made sense for me to live a life of abstinence. But that was as far as I went. I never disbelieved evolution, always believed recreational drugs should be legalized (going so far as to write a tenth-grade essay about it), and absolutely supported a woman’s right to choose.

    As for the rest of those right-wing ideas, one part of my youth offered an escape.

    A sci-fi view of life

    Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash

    I had my religion back then, and it was science-fiction. Even when others scoffed, I had my idols to guide me: Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan, even good old Albert Einstein. And in movie-land, Lucas and Spielberg, among others, were having their heyday. The authors I read put forward a vision of the world that could be better if only we were better. Actually, there’s another sci-fi franchise that borrowed from many earlier writers (such as H.G. Wells) and really perfected that paradigm: Star Trek. To this day, I’m still waiting for those Vulcans to land on Earth, and have us collectively grow the heck up.

    It’s always been hard to fit science (and science-fiction) into the political spectrum. In America, commercialization of scientific discoveries has practically been the nation’s founding mantra—and the reason so many of us, including me, ended up here. From drilling for oil to electric light to the airplane, the discovery of DNA, and the microprocessor, science and industry have gone together. The military has funded many scientific endeavors, from the Manhattan Project to the Internet. Looking at the suit-and-tie-wearing IBM professional from the nineteen-sixties and you might be more inclined to associate science and technology folks with the conservative crowd instead of the wacky-doodle notions of Trekdom.

    Harsh realities, new realizations

    Maybe that’s why I never really thought much about how my big-picture world view collided with my onetime conservatism. Even discovering I was gay didn’t move the needle much from my straitlaced self—at least not at first. It did force me to confront how much my disdain for the partying life was really hidden jealousy—which I think animates lots of conservatives today still. Cue all those jokes about Mike Pence and Lindsey Graham.

    But there was one book in particular that helped push me over the fence: Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On. Learning how Reagan-era conservatism basically left people to die because their disease at first disproportionately affected gays was a game-changer. Screw the virtues of the free market, or being tough on Soviet Communism. This facet of the Reagan Revolution was just plain wrong.

    I think, back then, you probably could have called me a libertarian—that crowd that proudly calls itself “socially liberal yet fiscally conservative.” To be fair, the social/fiscal dichotomy of today’s conservatism has always been a weird marriage. But it took me a few more years of career and life tribulations to realize that there’s a reason so many well-off, often white folks are fiscal conservatives: hailing from elite career and/or socio-economic backgrounds, they cling to a narrative about the virtue of hard work, a hatred of inefficiency and waste, and a pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality that’s ingrained in the American psyche.

    A lot more years of wandering, reading and exploring led me to question this notion as well—to say nothing of working with actual die-hard conservatives in the American Midwest. Some takeaways: for one thing, it’s not like conservatives have a monopoly on hard work; early left-wing labor movements celebrated it too. Likewise, the notion that we all start from the same place in life—so-called equal opportunity—has long since been debunked. If there’s one thing this pandemic has made clear, it’s that plenty of disregarded, poorly-paid workers not only work hard, they’re in fact essential to our economy functioning. Although most of us don’t truly support everyone getting the exact same wage, can the difference between an Amazon delivery driver and Jeff Bezos really be justified in anyone’s view of the world?

    My conversion completes

    What finally clinched my ideological journey, however, came when I did those typical grown-up things a smidge later in life: marrying, co-owning a fixer-upper single-family home, and having a child. There were a couple of dimensions to this evolution: for one thing, same-sex marriage was a right we had to fight for, one that didn’t exist yet in this country when I met my spouse. In addition to the obvious side of the political spectrum that put me, there’s another wrinkle I seldom realized for many years: even though I’d been out and proud for decades, like so many LGBTs who’d come of age before it became so normalized, there was always a notion of existing on the margins, on the periphery. An apartment-dwelling single fellow treads with a lighter footprint than a family. Boy, did that become clear while embarking on a massive renovation in one of the most difficult housing markets on Earth. I started to see the side of human experience I sheltered from myself for so long: the bare-knuckled scramble for resources that sadly defines too much of our time in this world.

    I suppose for some that would make them double down on conservatism. It’s a movement that appeals broadly to the whole night is dark and full of terrors outlook on the world. But I couldn’t go back there, not having seen the very clear elements of randomness and inequality of opportunity all round me. There’s too much of a luck factor involved for me to ever take the conservative view of the world seriously, or believe it manages our dealing with the world’s chaos and unfairness most effectively. Consider the obvious advantages of upper-middle-class peers who work in elite financial or tech firms after having a fully-paid ride from Mom and Dad to attend an Ivy League college. Also consider the behavioral changes our unequal world elicits—which I believe explains the nasty, cruel streak that can accompany high performers in the workplace. If this is the best the free market can do, then no question we need to do better.

    The final nail in my conservative coffin, however, was the aftermath of the Occupy movement of almost a decade ago. It may have ended up a mess, but it was the first modern-day movement that actually kickstarted the conversation around inequality, drawing attention to its stunning rise over the past decades—years that almost exactly match the life trajectories of Gen Xers like myself.

    But what, then, of all those familiar critiques, those made on Fox News every night? I can summarize: the poor are (mostly) lazy; the rich earned what they have fair and square; government taxation and spending never works; socialism—indeed any social welfare programs—only lead to lazy people gaming the system. When the MAGA crowd yammers on about the radical left agenda, it’s usually these talking points that stand out.

    Thing is, these are mostly bullshit, oversimplifications or gross exaggerations. Nobody’s shilling for the hyper-statist lunacy of Cold War-era Communism; even Elizabeth Warren said of successful businessfolk: “keep a big hunk of it.” Meanwhile, Reagan’s welfare queens and crack babies barely existed at all, much less to the scary degree he represented. And, as mentioned, examples of the rich not deserving their lot are too numerous to mention—way, way more numerous, it seems to me, than there ever have been welfare queens or crack babies combined. While cheating and gaming the system are always a problem, that cuts both ways—the amount of tax evasion among wealthy individuals and corporations is off the charts these days.

    It’s in the question of taxes and government where I still think conservatives have a shred of a point—but just a shred, not the diseased extreme of Grover Norquist’s wacky-doodle tax pledge. The point is this: large, unaccountable entities are often lousy at getting stuff done efficiently. This is true of bureaucratic corporations and government agencies alike—plenty of large firms are shielded from market competition by the unassailable position they already hold. How to make organizations and institutions better, or reimagine them entirely, is a totally valid conversation to have—but in all the rage and hyperbole, I really don’t hear conservatives making it. “Fiscal conservatism” is often just code for allowing businesses to behave unaccountably—precisely the opposite of what it claims.

    The (hopeful) path forward

    In the end, though, I look back at my past and end up with my old scientists and sci-fi writers—and a line from the Broadway play-cum-HBO mini-series Angels in America: “You believe the world is perfectible and so you find it always unsatisfying.” It’s something the closeted Mormon character, who’s working for Roy Cohn in the story, says to the liberal Jewish gay guy he’s secretly dating.

    That’s where I realized I’d always been progressive even if I didn’t know it. People like me may be less happy with the world as it is than those who think it can’t be changed—or those who don’t give a fuck. But that what motivates us to want to make it better, and never shakes our belief that it’s possible to do so. It’s not so much a rebellious rejection of the status quo as it is an unceasing quest to make things better.

    Way I see it, the political side that’s moving in that direction will always get my vote.

  • Ending Inequality As We Know It

    The biggest progressive goal ever for a time gone insane.

    c/o Wikimedia Commons

    “My Daddy makes four thousand dollars a week!”

    There it was. My earliest introduction to income inequality, sitting on the dock of a bay at summer camp with a group of fellow ten-year-old boys, back in the heart of the Reagan era.

    Never mind the appropriateness of a kid that age being privy to that knowledge (yet another wrinkle of that crazy time). While we can all imagine — resent? admire? — the lifestyle of that kid’s family on that income in that era, this was, perhaps, the first time Young Me began to innocently ask the $107 trillion question (the total GDP of the world, by one reckoning):

    Why does economic inequality exist?

    Such a childlike question, huh? I think, whenever I asked it, the more conservative dads of the time fulminated about the perils of Communism — this was the Cold War era, after all — and economic redistribution and such (if you’re wondering why this offended them so much, this might be the answer). Which got me thinking about the basic societal notion we’ve all bought into: you know, the one that says certain people are entitled to greater rewards in exchange for greater contributions to society.

    Trouble is, the degree of “greater rewards” and “greater contribution” remains contested…and has been, on and off, throughout human history. These days, talk of inequality has fueled many movements, from the Tea Party to Occupy to would-be populists the world over. Meanwhile, all that economic talk about consensual market activities and willing participants and rational choice has begun to feel wrong to many of us.

    It wasn’t always that way. I think, for a time, many of us held out hope — heck, I did, naively, in the early dot-com era, where, in America, inequality was briefly shrinking in the 1990s even as tech companies were handing out stock options like candy. Hope that this would all work itself out, you know, like the way the Great Compression did for the white middle class in the 1950s and 1960s, except maybe for everybody this time.

    Only it didn’t happen.

    Where it all went wrong

    “Today, the top one per cent of incomes in the United States accounts for one fifth of US earnings. The top one per cent of fortunes holds two-fifths of the total wealth. Just one rich family, the six heirs of the brothers Sam and James Walton, founders of Walmart, are worth more than the bottom 40 per cent of the American population combined ($115 billion in 2012).” Peter Turchin, University of Connecticut

    The nineties and beyond instead continued the trend of the decade or two prior, leading us, in America and the West, to the most unequal age in over a century.

    But let’s look deeper than just the last fifty or a hundred years. Let’s go back to where inequality started. And I mean way back, to before history itself.

    We have, in our minds, this notion of basically egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies… then flash-forward a few millennia and humans are building pyramids to the dead bodies of the Pharaohs. But where do we get that idea?

    Turns out we’re largely beholden to philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who back in the 1700s literally wrote the book on the idea of an egalitarian prehistory. Closer to our time, UCLA professor Jared Diamond went so far as to call the development of agriculture the worst mistake humans have ever made — and by that, channelling Rousseau, he meant it spelled the end of equality — and fairness — for humankind.

    Some evolutionary biologists take a different view: you know, all that stuff about survival of the fittest and warring tribes of chimps. But guess what? Lots of that was actually pseudo-science. Darwin himself never said the words “survival of the fittest.” Capitalists of the time popularized it. Science is great, but it’s easy to misrepresent or oversimplify; just ask any climate-change-denier on a cold day.

    Breaking the wheel

    So where does this leave us, those who aren’t happy with the way things are? Most neoclassical economic consensus concludes that capitalism, the free market, and any inequalities therein are logical manifestations of the productive capacity of some humans over others. Going back to a slightly Younger Me again, one fellow at a Chicago finance company I worked at a decade or so back laid it out this way: you’re paid based on how much value you add to a company’s bottom line. Period.

    I’m going to take the position of many of my fellow progressives and call bullshit on this whole scheme. Fiat money, indeed the entire financial system, consensual or otherwise, are ideas we humans made up. Most of us went along with these with little understanding of how they worked, or how they greatly privilege some over others. And sure, reforms and revolutions past didn’t always work out as intended (though often not for reasons we think— see Western intervention in the Russian Civil War as one example). But if there’s anything the crazy events of the past year have taught us, it’s that now’s not the time to give up or stop trying.

    So what all do we do? For a start, keep on exposing elites. I give early credit to filmmaker Jamie Johnson, whose HBO documentaries in the mid-2000s were among the first to shine a light on the doings of the One Percent. We also need to continue to foreground the real will of the people: most Americans, particularly younger Americans, are actually unhappy with the socio-economic status quo. Comedian Chris Rock, himself no slouch in the success department, put it best: “If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots.”

    Conservatives usually point to socialism’s failures as a stern warning of what happens when you try to fix things. But let’s face it: socialism was something of a 1.0 product, a 19th century solution filled with pitfalls and bugs. Yes, Bernie did a killer job rehabilitating the brand, and some northern European countries get many things right. But the time has passed for mealy-mouthed third-way triangulation. It’s time for progressives to swing for the fences again. To think big, in 21st century fashion, about where we want our world to go so, and start working to get it there.

    How big a change are we talking? I’ve seen this articulated more and less in various spots, so let me lay it on the line:

    To feed, clothe and medically care for every human being on the planet to at least a present-day Western middle-income standard of living, and do so in an environmentally sustainable fashion.

    Crazy, right? How the heck are we going to do that?

    A utopian shopping list

    Believe it or not, there’s a growing consensus that we’re getting to the point where this is now feasible — if only we allocated the efforts and resources of our civilization more wisely. As author William Gibson put it, the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

    Some proposals to get there are bold — like transitioning our entire financial system to post-scarcity economics; in this scenario, nobody gives anything up, but the old rules of money and demand are, over time, engineered away (you’ve actually seen this before on TV, and it’s awesome).

    Less radical, but still pretty ambitious, is the call to replace the various forms of social welfare with a flat basic minimum income paid to everyone. Thomas Piketty’s notion of a global wealth tax has also been called out as a means to diminish yawning chasms of inequality, and help with things like infrastructure and basic services. Overall, tidying up our consumer culture of throwaway obsolescence and fixing climate change with carbon-neutral forms of energy production would also need to come about.

    Awesome! Where do I sign up?

    Unfortunately, there’s one critical, final step that needs to happen before any of this can start. In olden times they called it noblesse oblige, the whole Spider-Man great-power/great-responsibility idea, that the rich and the powerful owe a certain degree of generosity and nobility to the rest of us. I think we’ll take that in the form of a few score more Bill Gates and Warren Buffetts, thank you very much. More than just money, I think visionary leaders need to stand up, and get enough of us to get onboard.

    I know conservatives and establishmentarians of all stripes will try and fight this. Their worldview of tax cuts and government-can’t-do-anything-right and efficient markets and wealth creation leads many of them to believe inequality is part of a just-world hypothesis — even though there’s plenty of evidence that many at the top haven’t necessarily earned the right to be there.

    By Eugène Delacroix — Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives via artsy.net, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27539198

    There’s also the dark shadow of history, which reminds us how past ages of inequality got settled: wars, plagues, revolutions. It’s scary. By that reckoning, Brexit, Trump and Le Pen could be heralds of what’s to come, as people’s rage is diverted into reactionary politics and xenophobia. If for no other reason, this is the best one of all to do something big. Because while we all recognize that some extra reward for extra initiative is fair, the world’s economic system as constituted isn’t. And it’s only a matter of time before enough of us get fed up and flip over the chessboard altogether. So why not make the game fair again instead?

    That’s something that makes sense to everyone, from the innumerable people suffering greatly the world over…all the way to future incarnations of Young Me, wondering why the petty unequal-ness they see all around them is the way it is.

  • Separate and Unequal

    With the seemingly unending debate about the debt ceiling raging, I wanted to highlight a side issue that’s been burbling up in the United States over the past several decades: that of income inequality.

    If we follow this way, way back, the widely-accepted story is this: before the agricultural revolution took hold, bands of foragers had little to differentiate each other. There was no concept of “income,” and while no doubt certain leaders may have commanded respect, provisions were divided more or less equally.

    We see the rise of inequality with the dawn of agricultural civilizations, where food surpluses enabled delineation and differentiation between people (interestingly enough, it’s also now considered to be the time when what we consider traditional mores — marriage, monogamy, sexual conservatism — took root). With tribal chiefs commanding armies and other forces of social coercion, it was only a matter of time before rulers became monarchs and descendants of great military heroes became kings and nobility. This was the Faustian bargain we humans created for ourselves at the dawn of civilization: in exchange for predictable patterns of settlement and food production, most of us would enjoy fairly meager fruits of the society’s benefits; most of the reward would go to the rulership. In its most extreme form, the lowest elements of society — or those captured from other societies in massive wars — would become property themselves, forced to work with no reward at all. We call this concept slavery.

    The division between rulers and commercial interests also began early; while kings and emperors may have held sovereign political power, there still needed to be a fungible medium of exchange by which services and goods could be traded. We have a name for this concept: money. While there had long been merchants and trader classes, it was really only in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when Europe, emerging from centuries of stagnation and capitalizing on advances from other places, took the lead and began (for better or worse) to explore and colonize the world. This was, in a sense, the first widespread philosophical uprising against concepts such as the divine right of kings, and held that the mercantile class was entitled to share in societies riches as well. With industrialization hyper-accelerating the ability for capital to be deployed and engaged (whereas before much was tied to land and agriculture, which were held largely by monarchs and the nobility), we entered the modern age with a new term: Capitalism.

    Born in the Enlightenment, capitalism’s tenets seem on the surface to be quite noble: the de-emphasis of peerage and inherited titles as a delineator of wealth and influence; the notion of “careers open to talent,” where one’s ability determined one’s standing. When the West’s newest nation in the late-1700s, founded largely by former subjects of one of Europe’s most mercantile-friendly powers, outlined their raison d’etre in the country’s founding document, they more or less distilled these notions into a single, catchy phrase:

    “All men are created equal.”

    I’m sure that was heady stuff for 1776. So heady, in fact, that its underlying meme of “equality” caught fire around the world. The delineation was eventually expanded to include women, provide redress for the persecution of minorities, and birth entire philosophical concepts regarding the equality of peoples. But what its underlying “free market” system didn’t do is make the world less unequal. Where once we had emperors, now we had captains of industry; where once kings ruled nations, now robber barons commanded corporate trusts. Beginning in the early-to-mid 1800s in Britain, and culminating with the Gilded Age in ascendent America at the turn of the 20th century, writers and social activists from Dickens to Twain to (yes) Marx and Engels pointed out the alarming trend: under classical economics, a small number of smart, greedy, fortunate folks ended up in much the same place as kings of old… with the remaining populace forced to forage for the remaining scraps. Not literally, of course, but in a more figurative, modern sense: working with a system that was rigged against them, workers endured horrific conditions and low pay with little redress or recourse. The legal system was bought and paid for by the rich. A new aristocracy was born.

    Of course, the huddled masses fought back, and over the middle decades of the twentieth century, until well into the 1970s, unprecedented new rights and benefits emerged. Between labor unions, old-age pension plans such as Social Security, grants and loans to attend college, and (in America) the prosperity of being the sole Western nation standing after World War Two and a net petroleum producer, the 1950s and 1960s were, in a sense, a Golden Age of socio-economic equality. As I wrote in my last piece, right-wing nostalgia for the 1950s obscures the fact that this was the most “socialist” era in the nation’s history. The income divide was the narrowest it had ever been, and tax rates on the wealthy were much, much higher than today.

    Then, of course, everything changed. The reasons for this are many, but from what I’ve been able to piece together, a lot of it rests with Ronald Reagan. Although earlier in his movie career he was actually something of a liberal — head of the Screen Actors Guild, he was pro-union — his work as spokesperson for General Electric and its cadre of old-line pro-business conservative executives slowly changed his mind. He spent his years riding trains across the country and honing his speech on the evils of government regulation… so much so that the breakthrough speech he gave at the 1964 Republican National Convention was a near-clone of that which he’d given during his years at GE. This galvanized a movement and utterly changed the trajectory of young activism: whereas sixties radicals promoted free love and equality, by the 1980s the vanguard of the young politico was arguably fictional character Alex P. Keaton on the sitcom Family Ties (played, ironically, by a rather liberal Canadian, Michael J. Fox). I came of age in that era and between the cultural zeitgeist, a life lived in a corrupt, overtaxed and inefficient Canadian province; and some decidedly neo-conservative parents, I’d come to accept that the old liberal warhorses of unionization and social welfare were bunk. The future lay in the past.

    What I think none of us could have anticipated (though in retrospect we should have) is the unintended consequences of that shift. With deindustrialization, de-unionization, rising health-care costs, and the build-up of the financial industry, the income divide in America is now the greatest it’s been since the Gilded Age of a century ago — and it’s as great in America as it is in Third World nations such as Ghana and Uganda.

    But the nagging question this begs is: so what? Is there anything inherently “wrong” with a great income divide, if that’s the way the market works things out? In the free-market fundamentalism espoused by the conservative set, this is just the way of things. Some go even further, as a fellow I knew used to state, by claiming that “poor people create their own drama.” Another claimed “there will always be this divide; there’s nothing we can do about it” — a worldview I’d seen echoed by commentators such as George Will. These people point — rightly sometimes — to the hypocrisy, inefficiency and corruption of government programs, and claim this is the best we can do. To the poor, to paraphrase that New York Daily News article about a then-bankrupt New York, these people say: drop dead.

    I’ve long rejected that worldview, which I guess in the American sphere tars me as a “liberal.” For one thing, I simply refuse to accept that what we’ve got is “as good as it gets,” and any attempts to improve our collective lot are doomed to failure. For another, there’s a deep-seated emotional notion I have about inequality that has long guided me — and many others, I suspect, in their life philosophies.

    I keenly remember, as a boy growing up in a competitive, nouveau-riche suburb, the materialist one-upsmanship that marked my community. One school I went to imposed a uniform dress code — not out of some vague notions of Dead Poets Society tradition but rather to prevent a materialistic fashion show from transpiring among pre-teens. Sitting on a lakeside dock one summer with four other boys, all of us age ten, I was treated to each kid bragging unashamedly about their fathers’ weekly earnings.

    But is that all that disdain of income inequality is — childhood jealousy? I would argue that it’s the very roots of this jealousy and resentment that are worth examining. While misapplied resentment can lead to a host of ills, the feeling probably has root in an adaptive mechanism to regulate how we treat each other. While many primate societies possess hierarchical structures — baboons are the prime example — there are others that do not, such as bonobos. “Might makes right” is not an absolute, and I feel that these deep-seated feelings of disapproval and resentment at great wealth have their roots in our deep-seated desire for a world more like the one we’ve long abandoned — the forager world of bands of equals.

    While I’m not suggesting we return to the African savannah, I believe that our post-industrial civilization offers the opportunity to reclaim what the past millennia have denied us: a more equal world. The income divide is an arbitrary measure we have chosen to impose upon ourselves, and while I fully support rewarding those who work harder and take the incentive, I feel our reward mechanism has, in America at least, gotten seriously out of kilter. It’s for that reason that the battle between liberal and conservative in America has gotten so pitched — it’s really a fundamental fight between two very different philosophies. It’s difficult, I admit, in a country founded on raw capitalism, for the progressives to be heard as much as they should. But in my view, this is a fight worth having. I know which side I’m on.