Belloc’s Humane Defense of Personhood and Property

I saw a doctor.My temperature was 100 deg F
Hotter than  the hot day here
I only had to wait 5 minutes.
Now I am “resting”

My face is pale,my hair is white as snow
In my eyes is an unearthly glow

I ate some salt beef  and some bread today
I tried to write a poem very gay

The Government attracted scorn and  blows
The wind is in the willows with Jon Snow

Israel is  getting on my mind
The deaf can’t see.  and  all rest are  blind

Come to Gaza, on the beach we play
Some children just got shot, ought we to pray?

On mountains where the prophets   heard the Lord
The  vultures  now await the battle scarred.

The United Nations cannot  speak  the Word
Apartheid   makes me wonder who is scared.

Jesus was a man   so we are told
God sent him here, the Vatican is gold

Would you like  Guernica again?
Say the word, we’ll kill for pay.Amen

In the desert of the human heart
Are there wells where water can be bought?

From whom come our so called  Human Rights?
And by the way, what of the children’s plight?

Would you  take a break on the West Bank?
We have a Bedouin Tent,and many tanks

Jerusalem is holy,  what a shock!
You can eat ice cream right on the Rock

Women cannot wail on  that great Wall
They have no  height, they need to grow more tall

Golden is the dome and bright the sun
Catch an “Arab” out and have some fun

If  we did not believe there is a God
He’d go away and leave us  just his rod

I hate her wooden coat hangers all cracked
Give me wire  and let me be abstract

I found some shoes but they have dropped apart
Think of how that   hurtt my  Bakewell tarts

The Sacred Whore, the  Holy Demon’s plight
The Holy   Ghost  is not inclined to fight

I have a table here on which I paint
I look so pale, will I be forced to faint?

In the bitter depths of winter night
Boil the kettle, lose your human rights

If you feel depressed then eat our bread
It will remove the  skull from off your head

Are you feeling lonesome in the crowd?
Buy our lipstick  then men will be cowed

Did you think ceramic hobs were best?
Come  to us and have your IQ blessed

I want a pan for halogen hot plates
I’d ask the cat but it’s out  on a date

Does Confession really help the damned?
God have mercy as the Devil can’t

https://alchetron.com/Richard-Zimler#Our-love-for-the-life-we-survive-richard-zimler

Extract

Richard Zimler received the 2009 Alberto Benveniste literary prize in France for his novel Guardian of the Dawn. The prize is given to novels that have to do with Sephardic Jewish culture or history. It was awarded to him at a ceremony at the Sorbonne in January 2009.

Five of Zimler’s novels – Hunting Midnight (2005), The Search for Sana (2007), The Seventh Gate (2009), The Warsaw Anagrams (2013) and The Night Watchman (2016) – have been nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the richest prize in the English-Speaking world.

Zimler has also edited an anthology of short stories for which all the author’s royalties go to Save the Children, the largest children’s rights organization in the world. The anthology is entitled The Children’s Hours. Participating authors include Margaret Atwood, Nadine Gordimer, André Brink, Markus Zusak, David Almond, Katherine Vaz, Alberto Manguel, Eva Hoffman, Junot Díaz, Uri Orlev and Ali Smith.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/12/brexiteers-poetry-epic-quest-eliot-tennyson-yeats-brexit

Extract

. The Brexiteers incanted a mixture of the first and second world wars to generate a mythical Britain in which to be British was to be heroic, ethical, and enlightened. The reactivation of this ancient spirit, they suggested, could unify an increasingly incoherent land torn apart by the same European enemy that it had once defeated.

Just like the aged narrators of the poems contemplating their own fate, the Brexiteers positioned Britain as an ancient, declining force poised on the brink of a glorious eternity. In spite of Britain’s post-imperial belatedness, that sense of already being too late, they contended that this ancient spirit could make the jaded land young again. Placing themselves against the shattering experience that was the loss of Britain’s global sway, they promised a world in which a simpler, more glorious past was to be restored.

Against the already ambivalent content of a quest vision of this sort, even darker resonances emerge. It was precisely this sort of fantastical history, in which to renew was to return to a purer past, that provided the tenacious narrative underpinnings of fascism. Tennyson’s aged sovereign Ulysses is a nationalist strongman before such a term existed, who “mete[s] and dole[s] / Unequal laws unto a savage race”, while Yeats and Eliot’s flirtations with autocracy are infamous. The quest narrative of national renewal is dangerous precisely to the extent that it promises to redeem: Make America Great Againand all that.

Brexit is and always has been a political theology. By keying into this elemental narrative, leavers could lend weight and meaning to their campaign through an intuitive, if often unconscious, historical plot. For those progressives who wish to fight Brexit, the urgent issue becomes whether they too can find a similarly deep story to tell about the UK’s relationship with the world about it.

A comment

https://reformjudaism.org/learning/torah-study/korach/how-leaders-can-use-guilt-control-people?utm_source=TMT-Monday&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20190701&utm_campaign=TMT

Extract

Dr. Ruhama Weiss, Ph.D. is the director of the Blaustein Center for Pastoral Counseling at HUC-JIRin Jerusalem.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/07/angry-remain-voter-working-class-division-britain

“I’m now even more convinced that if we don’t find a democratic way to close the fissures in our society, this country will be torn apart.

Of all the fissures, it is class that requires the most urgent attention. Remain tried to offer the status quo to millions of people for whom the status quo hasn’t been working for decades. The response to the result has served only to underline the problem. The barrage of hatred and intolerance unleashed by sections of the remain vote against the working class has been horrifying. I’ve seen this personally in the tweets and emails I’ve had to delete in the past few days.

What is particularly galling is that many of those who have vented their fury on the poor and marginalised profess sympathy for them in other circumstances. As the Guardian columnist Paul Mason told a remain audience at an event last week that if they were feeling angry and disaffected after the referendum, they now had an inkling of what it feels like to be working class.

Now, after the shock of the result, those who don’t want to live in a bitterly divided society need to think urgently about how it can be changed. Some people, of course, have been doing this for years.

In 2014 the Tory MP Rory Stewart made a startling claim in a Guardian interview: “We pretend we’re run by people. We’re not run by anybody. The secret of modern Britain is there is no power anywhere.” He went on to suggest that politicians, journalists and bankers know they don’t have any power but think that others do.

If he’s right, the referendum was less “a nation decides” and more a runaway train crashing into the buffers at high speed. Stewart’s solution was a radical localism. It’s more of that kind of thinking we need now.”

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When words no longer work

wonder

wish

want

When words won’t come

compensate

contrive

When my voice breaks

snaps

sunders

strains

When I want to talk

touch

tenderly

towards

But you are not able

about

abandoned

absent

You are no longer

listening

live

longing

When I need to find a meaning

In the shape

form

structure

But I ‘m stranded

Stuck

Sucked under

Swallowed

Then I reach out to you

I want your touch

tenderness

tranquillity

temerity

Sometimes words don’t seem enough

endless

empty

emotive

ejaculatory

Yet words can console

conjure

quilt

charm

captivate

cover.

Stretch out your hand

across the emptiness

and touch me with your fingers

friendship

faithfulness

forgiveness

frailty

fever

touch my heart with words

and I will hope

expect

await

be grateful

grave

garbed in joy

When words don’t feel enough

When all we want is touch

Or to see

sigh

sob

sing

Words can be shaped

changed

contorted

controlled

challenged

Words are all we have

To make us love

To make us live

To make us alive

To make us sing

To make us stand up

To console,words may be

Almost

Just

Enough

https://reformjudaism.org/jewish-life/arts-culture/literature/last-kabbalist-lisbon-richard-zimler

Beginning:

The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon is a compelling murder mystery and historical novel that uses the catastrophic events that overtook Spanish and Portuguese Jewry in the fifteenth century. These events mark an important period in Jewish history that is often overlooked. The book is a “crash course” in the nuances and details of the persecution, forced conversion, clandestine worship, expulsion, flight and renewal that marked the Sephardi passage. The period is often referred to as the “Inquisition,” though this name is somewhat misleading. Many of us do not realize the magnitude of these events which, for its time, was as devastating and earth-shattering to the Jewish world as the Holocaust would be some five hundred years later.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jun/29/jewish-novelist-uk-talks-cancelled

Extract

A bestselling novelist says he has been dropped from two literary events in the UK in recent weeks because he is Jewish.

Richard Zimler, author of the celebrated 1996 novel The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, said two cultural event coordinators had terminated negotiations on publicising his new novel because they feared a backlash from anti-Israel campaigners. Zimler has no connections with or family in Israel.

The author’s personal publicist, who asked not to be named, confirmed that two organisations had pulled out of initially enthusiastic discussions about events with Zimler, whose latest book The Gospel According to Lazarus was published in April. They feared his Jewishness would alienate Palestinian sympathisers among their clientele and could result in protests, the publicist  said