What "topsy-turvy" means

Holocaust teaching beyond the "The"

NIGHTINGALE KADDISH

As now as the next breath but one,
as everywhere as air:
Remember Us, Remember Us.
The Holocaust and milking it is hot hot hot.
The Mother of all Victims rules aloof
her jewelry of numbers blue
not earned by other victims too insignificantly nothing
to tattoo.

Enough already of Never Again.
If this sounds like a fart in shul
maybe I better bubble out again
until I fill the holy space of ark and torah scrolls with gas enough
to force a flight outdoors
and down the marble steps
into the arms of ghosts of dead
Armenians Cambodians Tutsis Balkans mixed
Ebos as remembered as a swarm of gnats long dead.
Lebanese abandoned. For their friendship with the Jews they'll disappear
but please don't concern yourself.
Of Diasporas, again there's only one.
Not Palestinians as freshly wronged as your last breath
by the helluva rousing echo of the Song of Lebensraum.

Who can talk?
We, who must.
Those of us who are
the tribe itself.
My great-grandfather rabbi stirs.
Sing, he says. For why is our might different than
any other's might when used so wrongly?

For We, he says,
are not the only ones pogrommed against,
the only Unwilling Wanderers,
the only holocaust worth a flame.
Holocausts aplenty simmer now.

Swiss banks weep now. Stolen artworks creak.
But of those who sole possession was: themselves,
not even individuals but groups of bugs exterminant
how do lawyers settle the worth of life?
They don't. Never a gain.

My great-grandfather's name was Soloveichik –
"Nightingale"
In his name I sing today
a short and many-noted Kaddish for all the Holocausts that were,
lit by tribal hate or maniacal despotism towards a people by their own.
And now, Enough Already for the dead, all equal in their tragedy of death.
With all the power of one little throat
I lift my voice for all the Holocausts to come.

_________________________________________

NOTE: I wrote this poem in 2000. It appeared in the November/December 2002 issue of Tikkun Magazine. I would have preferred to have it published first in a venue where I wasn't preaching to the choir, but "balanced" media wouldn't touch it. The tragedy, however, is that Nightingale Kaddish is now more relevant than ever.

READ:
The Myth of 'Never Again' by Kofi Annan in The Elders, (first published in the International Herald Tribune)

Kofi Annan's Holocaust Problem by Moshe Phillips in Intellectual Conservative (first published in American Thinker)

The widely reprinted piece by Moshe Phillips has so many problems that I recommend reading about the conference / initiative that Phillips trashes: “The Global Prevention of Genocide: Learning from the Holocaust” held at the Salzburg Global Seminar, in Austria, in cooperation with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The project has an advisory board whose members include:

* Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations (Honorary President)
* Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
* Francis Deng, Special Advisor to the UN Secretary-General on the Prevention of Genocide
* David Hamburg, President Emeritus, Carnegie Corporation of New York
* Yehudit Inbar, Director, Museums Division, Yad Vashem
* Klaus Müller, Representative for Europe, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
* Gregory Stanton, Founder and President, Genocide Watch

Why Salzburg?

"A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew's fingernail." — Dov Lior

The Salzburg Global Seminar is a unique institution (formed to be "the Marshall Plan of the Mind") that brings together leaders, teachers, policy makers and developers, students, the famous and the very unknown—to face, come to grips with, and attempt to devise solutions to the world's most difficult problems. Partisan thinking and posing has no place in this non-press-corps venue where public enemies and cultural strangers spend long hours, day after day with each other and eat literally elbow to elbow. Since the early days of the Cold War, the Seminar has enabled communication between public foes, on a level that exists nowhere else. Often participants learn that there are valid points of view and life experiences that they never before considered possible. I know. The place has opened my eyes to continents'-full of my own ignorance and undermined a lot of basic truths I knew that turned out to be merely a mess of assumptions. The people I have met have enriched my life immeasurably, coming from different places physically and mentally. Deep friendships have a way of forming where one least expects. I have only respect and awe for this organisation and the space it makes where the narrow-minded have no place, twisters of fact are not respected; and where bigots, no matter how powerful, aren't worth a fingernail.

Read Keith Brooke's "likeMe" in Nature

For anyone interested in the world's fastest-evolving species: friendship.

likeMe by Keith Brooke, the fiction feature this month in Nature.

Unstill life

Leech on a Blue Plate
(just before 'pass the salt')

Adorable Ganesh, or whatsisname

If you, like me, have an unfulfilled wish to sit on Ganesh's lap, you might find these homemades as adorable as I do, especially the play-doh Ganesha. See Indira's "Homemade Ganapati Bappa" on her superb Mahanandi blog (a great blog to get lost in, with some of the best recipes, reminiscences, and saliva stimulators anywhere).

But are you as confused as I (or me)?

Ganesh (or Ganesha) has four arms. Maha-Ganapati has ten.
—But just count these.
One left, one right, adds up to two. So gain a few, lose a few. What's the harm? Besides, he's got more names than arms.
—He's blinded you with charms!
That's 'charm', not charms.
—Don't get me started on English, pleeeze!

See also, for the joy of it, Indira's "Vinayaka Chaviti Celebrations"

Spring in the high heath

Bogs, granite, impenetrable bush and miniature forests, in the high heath of Mt Bushwalker, Morton National Park. And on this rare day, a sky as white as paper.

An intimate look at the Astroloma humifusum
'Ground Berry' or 'Cranberry Heath'
How many varieties are there? No one knows.

Cladia retipora 'Coral lichen' or 'Snow lichen'
While anyone looking at this would think 'coral', see Marilyn Harris' gorgeous portrait of the snowy white varieties that live in Tasmania.

Bog-standard lichen on granite
Each growth makes its own landscape.

What's in a name?

— They sure run fast.
— They're called 'oystercatchers'.
— That must be why.

"The Storm is Coming" speech template

"We will be the shelter for the world, because the storm is coming. It is not just an American storm, it is a human storm. It is a global storm."—Glenn Beck

"May this day be the change point. Look around you; you are not alone. You are Americans!"—Sarah Palin
(both at Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally at Washington DC on Martin Luther King Day, August 27th)

"No more politics as usual. The cause is restoring America."—Christine O'Donnell today, in her victory speech as the newest Tea Party candidate to win a primary

* * *

Ask not where great speeches and rally cries come from. They never die. Great speakers, opportunists and propagandists know that, as they plumb the depths of history for the best lines, the best hooks. And so it is today.

Many of the speeches of Tea Party candidates and Glenn Beck whose audience grows the more he follows it, could be written by one of the greatest speech writers of all time. There are so many similarities that here's the template, now handy for those future leaders who don't know the original speech. Around the world, people and parties that are essentially reactionary but call themselves "conservative" find these words inspiring.

A "Restoring Honor" template
The original "The storm is coming" speech, translated into English by Randall Bytwerk.

an excerpt:
" …The people rise up, the storm is coming! The day of freedom and prosperity is coming! The time of shame and disgrace is nearly over. The people have awakened! We have risen against oppression, have joined in an army of revenge. The good old days of party bigwigs are over. A new nation is coming …"

– as Glenn Beck said at the rally, "Something beyond imagination is happening."

What's the difference between poison and a demagogue?
Words.

Work from the Alisterus scapularis movement

Gwaash on board, unsigned

"Mr Moon, with the air of a man who has remembered something which he had overlooked, shoved a sock in his guest's mouth and resumed packing. He was what might be called an impressionist packer. His aim appeared to be speed rather than neatness."
— Indiscretions of Archie by P. G. Wodehouse, 1921

Orchid portrait

Spring has literally blown in. Today crews are cutting up smashed limbs and whole crashed trees all over the South Coast after a storm that howled all Saturday night.

The tiny terrestrial orchids with their slender stems are unperturbed by huffs and puffs, however strong. This withered Glossodia major — commonly known as the Wax Orchid, yet uncommonly seen — has seen its celebrated days, now that its brilliant yellow pollen package has been carried away and its petals have lost their plump extrovert expansiveness. Yet now when dew is a mockery, the harmony of hoariness is at its greatest height so this is when this orchid's attraction, like that of so many other flowers, is most fetching to me.

These aren't flowers for picking, though I did cut this one. It smelled like a Czech chocolate bonbon with a marasca cherry filling, and tasted of clove with a hit of camphor.