BAGHDADI PROPOSAL....6

Now, I was getting ready to see the Kennedy memorial in Amminidav, deliberating otherwise how to spend the day. Sure, I thought to myself with a big yawn while putting make up on my face near the window of Shabi’s formal living room, there was the unforgettable inauguration speech John F. Kennedy made….January 20, 1962? No, no…1961 it was. Oh, yes, that’s it. ’61…the mist of bitterly cold Washington air leaving a literal trail of this American president’s spoken words. Was he the first American president born in the 20th Century? I wasn’t born yet when he was assassinated. I was born June 19, 1964…..but, Jeesh….Oh, and before stepping to that podium to make the inauguration speech he wrote, the 43-year-old President reviewed Thomas Jefferson’s inaugural speech. “It’s better than mine,” he remarked….Oh! The Cuban Missile Crisis shortly into his term….If properly remembered….

Or so my thoughts rambled, strolled and meandered before getting out to visit the memorial which was within walking distance of Shabi’s home. I walked into the kitchen. Shabi was busy on the phone. He stubbed out a cigarette and swept his hand across the kitchen table to remove surface dust as he spoke articulately in Hebrew on the telephone. I stood in the doorway to the kitchen looking at him with my right hand on my hip, smiling.

His phone voice, the distinct style of his determined, amplified Hebrew wafting through the house. Funny how I never forgot the way he used his language, even if I did not recognize many of the words he was using. In some ways, I felt I’d been folded into the walls of his house when I heard his Hebrew, so familiar was its sound to my brain.

Shabi raised his striking Iraqi eyes to mine from the table as he listened to the caller. A rich sweep of his Iraqi hair lay over part of his forehead. I never complimented Shabi then, and still can’t say I ever have. But in my mind he’s one of the most naturally handsome men I’ve ever seen anywhere.

He noticed me standing there smiling at him, looking at him. He smiled at me as he listened to the voice on the phone. The caller said last words and disconnected.

“Do you think it’s alright to walk to the Kennedy Memorial today?”

“Yes, it’s okay,” he said, waving me off with a friendly tone.

He was busy this morning. I started walking the streets of Amminidav.

I returned to my all-American thoughts, which felt more like habits…. The Kennedy era was not all romance elsewhere in the world. To captives of the old Soviet Empire as it existed, he might have been the man who talked an eloquent game, but through their imprisoned eyes didn’t make an atom of difference for the East before his assassination – and atom is the appropriate term if you consider for a moment the typical news reports of those days. Those radio, television and newspaper reports were forming the thoughts of much of the world’s population….

It was a still, sunny day in Jerusalem. I began to walk down the main road toward the outskirts of the moshav. I got into a wooded, well-maintained portion and saw the memorial 150 yards before me.

I heard the engines of motorcycles approaching. They were coming closer to me.

They were riding quickly. I could make out two young men, and now I saw that they were armed. They stopped in front of me. I stood still, my arms at my sides loosely.

“Shalom,” said one, looking at me cautiously.

“Hello.”

“American, yes?”

“Yes. Walking to the Kennedy Memorial.”

They looked at each other. “You’re the only American we’ve seen around here,” said the man on my right. “We came because we were not sure who it was.”

“You shouldn’t be walking by yourself around this area,” said the other man, who lit a cigarette.

“Maybe it would be better to have someone with me, but I used to live here when I was a student. I used to walk here all the time,” I said. “The friend I am staying with trusts me to use some judgment.”

“You lived here? When was that?”

“Back in ’89 and ’90. I was at The Hebrew University for a year.”

The two men got off their motorcycles and took off their helmets. They were racy-looking guys, the kind you would see in downtown Tel Aviv on a Saturday afternoon flirting with girls in coffee shops. Well, should see, anyway. We made quick introductions.

“Why do you visit now?” asked the man on my right, the more humorous and talkative one. He smiled and set his weapon down on the seat of the bike.

“I had the ticket. Besides, the first Intifadah was going on the entire time I was here last time. I knew a little of what to expect. This time, it’s bitter though.”

Looking at them, I was a little fogged. I had the impression now, as I had four or five times since landing in Jerusalem, that the Israelis to whom I was speaking were behind glass and, like prisoners, kept putting their hands on a glass partition trying to get me to understand; always trying to get the outsider to see in.

“Yes, it’s more dangerous. We found the remains of a small campfire in the forest further back. Watch yourself, and don’t come around here to wander at night.”

“I sure won’t.”

The other guy, the enthusiastic one, smiled and leaned forward a little. “What do Americans think of us? You must think our lives are insane,” he said, laughing boyishly.

“There’s no sweeping answer. Different people say different things. Most Americans don’t perceive life here as normal, I can tell you that much. They sure wouldn’t picture two guys like you running around your neighborhood as you are with those weapons. But I guess most are sympathetic to your problems.”

“Really?” he said.

“Sure!” I said, trying to bring some cheer to the discussion. “But many are sympathetic to the Palestinians, too. Or only for the Palestinians. I should mention that. It’s a cause, you know? Like Apartheid once was, or Global Warming is for some now. They’re a bit distant from the sites of violence in most cases. Never been here.”

“We get those types,” he said, turning his head toward the length of the road.

“We’d better get going,” said the other man quietly to his partner. He stubbed out his cigarette. “Be safe. Shalom.”

“Shalom,” I said, watching them ride off.


I didn’t linger long at the Kennedy and Rubenstein memorials. I just wanted to look at them again, and sit there a while. Americans are never truly away from home because our influence for good or not is far and wide, even if in hostile regions.

I remember Israeli-Americans when I studied here who were always hunting around for a This Week with David Brinkley broadcast at the American Cultural Center, or an American snack they had growing up, like Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts. They had waves of homesickness.

I’d been questioned now a number of times about why I was here, and asked myself why I was the only one never asking myself that question, even now that I was here. I comically thought of how American car-rental agencies don't rent to people under 25, or unpredictable people like me if they can avoid it.

But I had a stranger image in those few moments I’ve never forgotten. It was an undaunted image.

It was an image of standing at the foot of a half-dressed bed to unfurl a clean, white sheet. I snapped it open and watched it slowly drift down like a wandering, October leaf to rest itself on a bottom sheet.

The only meaning an image like that could’ve had was, “You made your bed, hope you're fixing to sleep in it.”

I rambled back to Shabi’s house.


Israel is an obvious product of a lengthy and recorded Jewish history, as well as the more recent – and recorded – Oriental and European history.

The anguished themes of Western history, and its Jewish history in particular, hit me immediately in casual talks with Israelis.

But so do the threads of magnificence inherent in each history. They are weaved into Israel’s daily life; an appreciation of history – every history -- that I can’t understand exactly, given the constant hardships heaped upon Jewish populations on every continent, through every era.

Yes, success has come to Jews century after century, but some authority has nearly always come to take the prizes of hard work back, along with all the security they thought they’d finally earned. The Jewish guy who says, “Mom and dad lived a great life and died peacefully” is disturbingly uneven from region to region, era to era. That’s the chunky and potholed road of Jewish history to me – at least in my readings of it.

There are other readings, and other histories. I know. But I’m discussing Jews in this work, and it’s worth my effort. Israel still catches my attention.

Why? Maybe Israelis give me hope. In spite of the hate continuously hurled toward them from both the Palestinian territories and much of the outside world, they’re optimistic. This is even though I’ve heard Israelis often using hurt tones about the way they’re viewed elsewhere.

The exact angles of Jewish history form a geometry I can’t calculate, though. The values of the numbers involved change from decade to decade, region to region, even language to language. It’s over my head in terms of its complexity; Jews have been expected by others – especially their families -- to understand, argue, forgive, and keep their eyes on the roads ahead. That’s one of the reasons outsiders like me have something to learn here, and should take the trouble.


Similarly, however, I have often tried hard to understand the political position the Palestinians are trying to force upon themselves today. It’s never worked for them, not in the era of the Ottoman Empire, and not in late 2000. Why do they keep to this dead end road? Why are the Israelis the only obstacle they claim as their own?

The more we see of riots on Palestinian streets, the less we see. The distance between now and the day a settlement’s in sight is vast in terms of political diplomacy, accurate journalism and even -- I pause when writing this -- democracy.

Instead, mass terror is the diplomacy for the modern Arab, or so all the newspapers and cable broadcasts teach. Terror thugs use broadcast media of all kinds with an air of international legitimacy.

It’s nothing new, we sigh. The spirit of the Arab leader Saladin, who conquered Jerusalem in 1187, has supposedly returned to confront the difficulties of the Arab masses. At least that’s what it seems to the man on the decaying Arab street for a time. In reality, the headlines are telling him someone had his throat cut the night before and was left on the street with a note by an Islamic militant. The name of the victim is new, but it’s pretty much the same old note.

It might look revolutionary for a while, but it’s not. It’s a rank and aimless wind flowing through the streets of Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, and Tripoli…

The Arab world needs a leader who can call that wind what it is.

For instance, when it’s time to set up a modern municipal budget, the mythical Arab hero fails completely. Like people everywhere, Arabs live in cities. It doesn’t matter whose flag occupies the town square. When it’s time to take the garbage, you need a guy who can do the job, and an accountant to make sure he’s paid on time.

How do Arab states work? To explain it, we might we might even see the region through the lens of Salvador Dali for a few moments. How might he paint? Ahhh!! Now we arrive at a nightmare painting with a question!


The Press Conference

On this imaginary canvas, I see a room with a stage where a press conference is about to take place. There is a kind of design to it – a centrally located vanishing point and a 16th Century stage. But it’s a show created to satirize itself. The people who buy tickets for this are a breed in themselves.

There is a man in vivid yellow on the stage. He’s a stage hand. He is holding an empty suitcase with a Roulette Wheel on it. Another man, a cub reporter assuming the mind of an illiterate, innumerate child in his work, is being photographed by a third world journalist who thinks he’s the standard, and the journalist filming him is an over-made up woman who is overweight and is herself being tape recorded by a touch of old Hollywood; It’s Lon Chaney as The Wolfman! He’s dead, but he’s got his press pass, headphones, and microphone. People are walking past him like they do anyone because he’s got as much credibility as the rest of them.

The audience watching the news reporters work is the Arab world and only the Arab world. An embarrassing number of them are sleeping. The whole show is set up to impress them – that’s right, NOT us, but THEM -- because the play lacks a defining central event.

Crusaders are excusing themselves as they squeeze themselves into the empty chairs in the middle of the fifth row that are saved for them. The lines of perspective seem drawn already as if by Dali himself.

Yasser Arafat’s on the left side of the stage, toward the front, nailing his own hand to the cross while smirking out to the audience like a game show host. Catcalls and trills from the back; His head is backward, with his face seeming to be facing the same direction as his decaying ass.

The colors are unnatural. The walls are hung with posters featuring comedians with instant rice in one hand, and machine guns in the other which the star is pointing toward himself – none of them accountable for anything which makes this more opera buffa than political commentary.

The stage is slanted against the audience so they can only see portions of events from the very start, anyway – the libretto better be good! They can’t sensibly applaud and they can’t boo. Their judgment’s null by being in the theater at all.

The camera is ignoring the speaker who finally makes it on the stage, focusing instead on the Pilipino maintenance guy changing the light bulb.

Some red-haired spectator in a “Go Giants” t-shirt is standing near the fourth row. He’s holding a museum brochure with a big pre-Columbian statue on cover. The wrong….auditorium? He looks around the room.

“Jill?”

Nobody answers his call. The poor man’s not only in the wrong room, he’s in the wrong world.

Meanwhile, a United Nations Peacekeeper is serving alcohol on a tray, and the really cheap stuff – low-grade Russian vodka and cheap American beer with high alcohol content. Hitler is waiting at a corner on the right side of the room with a neon sign. He is ignored, though, like the old cigarette billboard he is for the world today.

He has his free ticket, though, so although he makes only senile, nonsense comments and is selling a product that was unmasked as poison long ago, he still shows up. He’s thin and stupid as a skeleton literally is. He’s rolling a cart with oxygen, using a cane. His Nazi salute -- if he can manage one -- is about as politically persuasive as a one-legged bull in Spain.




I am almost certain that there are traumatized populations the world over who can paint their own surrealistic picture, like this fantasy above, of the scene in Israel’s West Bank today.

It’s the same drumbeat over and over, day after day after day after year after year after year after century…it becomes a Dali. When anger and panic flood Jerusalem as they were in October of 2000, emotions turn illiterate, and art is the only medium that can read or be read. It has a kind of accuracy journalism can’t transmit.



People couldn’t get a reasonable feel for one another on the Jerusalem streets in times like those were. There were the usual neon signs, buildings of past centuries open to tourists, the big windows of modern architecture, yes, but too few people were walking through the aromas of fresh bread and steaming, spiced meats. All the fresh food but no lines of tourists like I was used to seeing in that part of town; it was like walking past a stack of yesterday’s newspapers.

What were they going to do with all the yummy food?

It was that way for at least the days I wandered through in early October of 2000. Riots again erupting all around. Depression. Confusion – especially that.

Yet, amid all the strife, how many lovelorn faces locked with mine? On the Jerusalem streets, too many.

I remember a guy my age, which was 36 at the time, who seemed in a massive rush in asking me to have coffee with him in a nearby café on the street. I started to order, then excused myself and left the café because even after twenty minutes of casual conversation he seemed in too much of a hurry for a romantic signature. I don’t think he was a normally pushy sort, but he had irrational ideas that day. I felt sorry for him, upon reflection.

How can I best explain it?; Hurry, sit down, order something, anything, let’s discuss anything anything anything right now and I hope you have the money to pay your own tab as we talk about our new friendship!! I never saw the man in my life and he was acting like we’d somewhere met. This was incredible behavior for a previously unknown man – a teacher -- and I did not want to struggle with his desperation. It’s what I saw in his face. I got up and left. He sat staring at me like I’d just slapped him.

He wasn’t the only one I met on the street who seemed off. Another young man approached me while I was viewing necklaces in a window. He asked why I was in Jerusalem at this odd time.

He started to joke about the last time Israel was threatened and suddenly found his memory out of his head. He stopped mid-sentence.

“When was it we were wearing gas masks,” he muttered, a blank look coming over his face. He was gazing into the middle street. He looked like a distressed child.

I stood looking at him for about one minute quietly. I was waiting for him to finish his words, but nothing came from his lips. His eyes moved down and right, as if he would find the information there.

“It was 1991 you were wearing masks, friend,” I finally said with a smile. I didn’t want to seem like I was teasing him about his difficulty. “I’ll be getting on now.”

Well, I told myself, these new riots flamed up just days ago. People are disoriented. They’ll regain their balance in a few days.

I attracted an unusually high number of pained eyes toward my face in those hours I wandered the streets of downtown Jerusalem. For those unforgettable passers-by in downtown Jerusalem, the guns mattered less when looking into other eyes – any other eyes.

I never saw a real attraction in those faces. It wasn’t possible. They were scared and confused. But even in that unbalanced state, a chance of love forces the riots back, however delusional it may be. Suddenly, the man in Jerusalem -- the defensive Israeli -- has a reason to stroll along his street that he doesn’t need to contemplate.

After all, he’s like the man in Paris or Rome or San Francisco. He sees a female and his eyes flare like a child’s. Who cares what’s going on in the papers! The 20th Century is gone!


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The Talon

I flew over southwest canyons. I ate inedible testaments. I wailed the plainchant quotes. Heroic and vainglorious rays of golden syrup approached my perfect black hair, flawlessly smooth and reflective like the Pharaoh’s cheek, then ran the other way, crying straight in sympathy to a translucent desert cloud, which laughs at light every day, every day, every day, bragging hot light.

I was a great and airborne bird, born opposed to the light, finding confrontations everywhere I flew. Delicate degradations of the rays that lent the life to all beneath me.

My legs walked on sand simply to watch the sand as it fled under my little feet. It was wet and dry, the perpetual earthquake under my talons. Down on the sand, but too close to the sun. I never understood it.

I had to condescend to the human black and massive canyons. It was there I ate.

I was a great and airborne bird, everywhere I flew….and everyone saw me!

It was an orange cracker.

There’s no such thing as florescent orange in a bird’s light. My friends flapped nearby in warning, “Don’t Do It! Don’t eat those human and unreal crumbs! They are not for us!”

But my beak is just a beak and when I was on the beach I was just a common crow. I was born, innocent as dirt, blindly ambitious and foolish like the pavement ant. I never knew that pull on my wing…

I wanted that florescent cracker, that evil, ruffian thing! It was a fraud; the black lion disguised as a billowing leaf…I JUST WANT TO BE A BIRD AGAIN…WHAT HAPPENED TO ME WHEN I LEFT MY AIR?

Shhhchhhshhhhchhhh…..

“Hello?” Ah! I’m on the freeway now. Yes, should be in Phoenix soon enough…well, yes, it’s a long, dry road, but I guess I’m okay. Funny, this feeling -- like I’m in an element. I feel like I was something else….the desert puts such a sense to my mind, then demands its bow. It happens to us all one day or another.”

Sigh…

All I can do is keep driving.”

-- END EPISODE EIGHT --