Great Artists and Intellectuals Think Alike, Apparently

A really bizarre interview with Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis. If he sounds like some of the lunatic left of the United States, this is no surprise, since he was both a communist and a fascist at different times of his life:

Question: Mr. Theodorakis, on November 4, 2003 you said in this house the words that shocked Jews and non-Jews across the world. You said that the Jewish people are at the root of evil. What did you mean?

Answer: "For me the root of evil today is the policy of President Bush. It is a fascist policy. I cannot understand how is it that the Jewish people, who have been the victims of Nazism, can support such a fascist policy. No other people in the world support those policies but Israel! This situation saddens me. I am a friend of Israel. I am a friend of the Jewish people. But the policy of Sharon and the support for the policy of Bush darkens the image of Israel. I am afraid that Sharon is going to lead the Jews - just as Hitler led the Germans - to the root of evil."

...

Let me explain to you the context for this reaction. Many Jews have a renewed fear of Europe. We are afraid that there is a new kind of anti-Semitism in Europe. So when you said what you said there was a feeling of thou too, Brutus. There was a feeling that even our old friend Theodorakis turned against us.

"I don't believe there is anti-Semitism in Europe. There is a reaction against the policy of Sharon and Bush. I think it's artificial to think there is a new anti-Semitism. It's an excuse. It's a way to avoid self-criticism. Rather than ask themselves what is wrong with the policy of Israel, Jews say the Europeans are against us because of the new anti-Semitism. Because they don't love us. And even Theodorakis says we are at the root of evil. This is a sick reaction."

Why? In what way is it a sick reaction?

"Because this kind of reaction is relevant to the psychopathology of the Jewish people. They want to feel victims. They want to have this comforting feeling. We are in the right, we are again victims. Let's create another ghetto. It's a masochistic reaction." The Jews are masochists?

"There is psychological masochism in the Jewish tradition."

Is there sadism as well?

"I'm certain that when Diaspora Jews talk among themselves, they feel satisfied. They feel that now, when we are so close to the greatest power in the world, no one can do anything to us. We can do whatever we like. This is why the claim of new anti-Semitism is not only a sick reaction, it's a sly reaction as well."

In what way is it sly?

"Because it really allows the Jews to do whatever they want. Not only psychologically, but also politically, it gives the Jews an excuse. The sense of victimhood. It gives them a license to hide the truth. There is no Jewish problem in Europe today. There is no anti-Semitism."

...

"In 1932 I was in Ioannina. There was a very big Jewish community there. I played with the Jewish boys all the time. My grandmother was very religious. She had a room full of icons. She sang psalms. Much of my music was influenced by her religious singing. And I remember that in springtime she said to me: Now that it's Easter, don't go to the Jewish quarter. Because during Easter the Jews put Christian boys in a barrel with knives inside. Afterward they drink their blood."

Was this story imprinted in your young mind?

"It was a very powerful image. Years later, before I became a communist, I was a member of a fascist youth movement. It was a state-sponsored movement during the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas. We walked up and down the streets in uniform and heiled all the time. It was a bit like the Hitler Youth but comical. One day they gave me an assignment: to talk the next day about communism. I went home and asked my mother what is communism. She said she didn't know but she thinks it's something evil. What kind of evil, I asked. Evil like the Jews, she said. So I asked her if the communists also put little boys in barrels with knives and drink their blood.

"What do I want to say by telling you all this? These things exist. I wasn't aware of it before, but now, through your questions, I realize it is there."

...

Do you think the Jews are fanatic?

"Something that is very negative can also be positive. If the Jews didn't have fanaticism, they wouldn't have existed. There is no evil without good. The Jews need this fanaticism. What one might call Jewish fanaticism has more to do with self-defense. It was through their religion that Jews were interconnected and kept together."

You seem to be fascinated by the Jews. Why?

"To be a community that disregards all dangers and remains true to its origins - that's a mystery. Look at France, for example. There is a huge community of Jews in France where there is a great civilization. But do the Jews become French? No. They speak the French language perfectly. They succeed in their work. But they are not French. They always think of going back to Jerusalem."

...

The Jews have international finance in their hands?

"They control a great deal of the world's finances."

So today's globalized capitalism is controlled very much by the Jews?

"Since we speak frankly, I will tell you something else. The Jewish people control most of the big symphonic orchestras in the world. When I wrote the Palestinian national anthem, the Boston Symphony was planning a production of my work. It is controlled by Jewish people. They didn't allow the concert to go on. Since then I cannot work with any great orchestra. They refuse me."

You ran into this problem with other orchestras too?

"Wherever there are Jews. Wherever there are orchestras controlled by Jewish people, they boycott my work."

You really feel Jews control much of the music world?

"Yes."

And the same applies to world finance?

"In America the Jewish community is very strong. It controls much of the economy. Certainly the mass media.

"Let me make myself clear: When the State of Israel was established, we were on the side of Israel. There was great sympathy toward Zionism because of what they suffered in the war. This is one side of the Jews. But the international Jewish community is also a negative phenomena. The Jewish people now appear to control the big banks. And often the governments. So whatever bad or evil comes from the governments, it's natural for ordinary people to associate that with the Jewish people."

You yourself think that the Jews, the international Jewish community, have control of the banks, Wall Street, the mass media?

"Yes."

And you say that now, through its influence on Bush, it has control of world affairs?

"Yes."

My mind just boggles.

Will She Ever Overcome The Shame?



The actress Anne Hathaway muses on her shocking past:

Hathaway, who shot to stardom with the original "Princess Diaries," embraces the girl-power films that made her a star, but as she moves into adulthood she said she's ready to distance herself from the saccharine roles she's known for.



"I'm a 21-year-old in a G-rated movie. This isn't exactly the kind of artistic choices that I want to be making right now, but at the same time, I'm grateful to be able to make them," she said.

It rather reminds of the joke about the little kid who, when the teacher asks the students what their fathers do for a living says, "He plays piano in a whorehouse." The teacher is so shocked that she abruptly sends everyone to recess, and questions the kid in private. "I'm sorry, but I was afraid of what people would think if I told them he was a lawyer."



Look, The Princess Diaries wasn't a great film, but it was entertaining. I laughed, I enjoyed Ms. Hathaway's performance in it--she definitely has a nice comic twist for physical humor, and she did the ugly duckling changes into a swan very convincingly. (It helps that she really is a swan in a wholesome, girl next door sort of way.) Is it really necessary for her to look down on a film that everyone can enjoy?

Humor



This is strictly rude humor--it doesn't even rise to the level of waggish political commentary. A neighbor tells me that he recently saw a bumper sticker that said:

The Democratic Party is so full of [excremental expletive deleted] it has to have two Johns.

Political Humor



A friend forwarded this to me, supposedly written by:

John E. Stoos



Chief Consultant for Senator Tom McClintock



Subject: Freedom of the press



Two boys in Boston were playing basketball when one of them was attacked by a rabid Rottweiler. Thinking quickly, the other boy ripped a board off a nearby fence, whacked the dog over the head and saved his friend.



A newspaper reporter from the Boston Herald witnessed the incident and

rushed over to interview the boy. The reporter began entering data into his

laptop, beginning with the headline: "Brave Young Celtics Fan Saves Friend From Jaws Of Vicious Animal."



"But I'm not a Celtics fan," the little hero interjected. "Sorry," replied

the reporter. "But since we're in Boston, Mass, I just assumed you were."

Hitting the delete key, the reporter began "John Kerry Fan rescues Friend

From Horrific Dog Attack."



"But I'm not a Kerry fan either," the boy responds. The reporter says, "I assumed everybody in this state was either for the Celtics or Kerry or Kennedy." "What team or person do you like?"



"I'm a Houston Rockets fan and I really like George W. Bush," the boy says. Hitting the delete key, the reporter begins again, "Arrogant Conservative Brat Kills Beloved Family Pet."

Hospital Humor



Some of these sound like legitimate typos when transcribing from hospital charts, some sound like a word was left out. Still pretty funny:

Hospital chart snippets



1. The patient refused autopsy.



2. The patient has no previous history of suicides.



3. Patient has left white blood cells at another hospital.



4. Patient's medical history has been remarkably insignificant with only a

40-pound weight gain in the past three days.



5. She has no rigors or shaking chills, but her husband states she was very hot in bed last night.



6. Patient has chest pain if she lies on her left side for over a year.



7. On the second day, the knee was better, and on the third day it disappeared.



8. The patient is tearful and crying constantly. She also appears to be depressed.



9. The patient has been depressed since she began seeing me in 1993.



10. Discharge status: Alive, but without my permission.



11. Healthy appearing, decrepit 69-year old male, mentally alert but forgetful.



12. Patient had waffles for breakfast and anorexia for lunch.



13. She is numb from her toes down.



14. While in ER, she was examined, x-rated and sent home.



15. The skin was moist and dry.



16. Occasional, constant infrequent headaches.



17. Patient was alert and unresponsive.



18. Rectal examination revealed a normal size thyroid.



19. She stated that she had been constipated for most of her life, until she got a divorce.



20. I saw your patient today, who is still under our car for physical therapy.



21. Both breasts are equal and reactive to light and accommodation.



22. Examination of genitalia reveals that he is circus sized.



23. The lab test indicated abnormal lover function.



24. Skin: somewhat pale but present.



25. The pelvic exam will be done later on the floor.



26. Large brown stool ambulating in the hall.



27. Patient has two teenage children, but no other abnormalities.

My Father's Birthday



My father, Edwin Frederick Cramer (usually just "Fred") was born today in 1910, in Port Townsend, Washington. A friend's father died recently. It's a day for taking stock, I suppose, and considering one's losses.



My father was one of those people who, had he been born in 1940, would have gone to college, and become a mechanical engineer. Had he been born in 1950, perhaps an aerospace engineer. He wasn't brilliant, but he was clever, funny, occasionally witty, with an excellent, near photographic memory, very determined--and very gentle. Perhaps had his parents not separated when he was young, he would have gone to college.



Unfortunately, his father was a cad--clever, in a shark-like way, but unfaithful to my grandmother--and I suspect that his mother discovered his infidelity the way that many women of that generation did, because my father's father was a frequenter of brothels. My father's fraternal twin Glenn finished eighth grade, and went off to sea; my father finished high school, and became a bookkeeper. At the start of World War II, welding was paying about three times as much as accounting, and he went to work building the ships that helped win the war. After the war, my father sold encyclopedias door-to-door, worked as welder, sometimes in remote places like Alaska.



As I was growing up, it seemed that he could build almost anything out of scrap parts. We didn't have a lot of money growing up, but when I wanted a telescope, he did some pretty amazing things to make do. C&H Sales in Pasadena, a surplus optics dealer, had a Coulter 8" f/7 parabolic mirror, new, but marked down to $50. Over the next few weeks, we went all over the Los Angeles basin, buying concrete forms for the tube, cutting old pots and pans into dust covers, and building a crude but useful telescope mount out of pipe fittings and a wheeled tripod we found in a scrap store in Venice. And when we were done, it looked like hippie artillery (due to the psychedlic paint job on the tube), but it showed the rings of Saturn, the satellites and cloud bands of Jupiter--and I learned what a craftsman my father was, and how far he was prepared to go for his kids.



I have lots of painful memories of car repair projects. He wasn't a hot rodder. We generally had older cars, because that's what we could afford. I think the 1964 Chevrolet Malibu station wagon was the first new car my parents had ever owned--the 1960s were a prosperous time, at least for my family. But there were always repairs that needed to be done, and he had the tools, the knowledge, and the time to do them. That meant that I had to help.



I wasn't happy about it, partly because I would rather have been reading, and I did the minimum I needed to keep him happy. In retrospect, I wish that I had recognized the opportunity to absorb decades of knowledge about the use of tools. At one point we rebuilt the transmission of my sister Marilyn's beat up Triumph. It was one of those reminders of why there used to be a bumper sticker that said, "The parts falling off of this car are of the finest British manufacture."



My father was a tinkerer, and mechanic, but also a really well-read man. He didn't go to college, but he read a variety of serious books about history, world affairs, philosophy, and animal behavior. He was an early opponent of U.S. involvement in Vietnam--although like many of his generation, he was very, very taken aback by the countercultural behavior that accreted onto the antiwar movement.



Education was important to both of my parents, and when we moved to the Los Angeles basin in the early 1960s, they picked Santa Monica because of the quality of its schools. This was, for me, the single best decision that they ever made. I am still astonished at the quality of education that I received there.



I was never entirely sure what his politics were. Like much of his generation who had grown up during the Depression, he seemed skeptical of highly ideological views of economics. I can remember a lot of conversations with him as I was growing up in which he would ask me questions that left me short of an comfortable answer.



When I was about 13 or 14, I think, I expressed the opinion that welfare recipients shouldn't have the vote, since they weren't paying taxes. I wasn't sufficiently knowledgeable at the time to understand exactly what welfare was, or why people ended up on it, or that even poor people pay all sorts of taxes other than income taxes, but I knew that my parents worked very, very hard, and had little to show for it. It didn't seem fair that others received money for doing nothing. My father's response was a simple question, "Does that mean that rich people should get more votes, because they pay more taxes?" He had a fairly strong respect for Ayn Rand and her ideas, although his general skepticism of strong ideologies tended to keep him back at a safe distance from them, I think.



I think in the entire time that I was growing up, I saw my father lose his temper once. He would swear under his breath while working in the garage on building stuff, but I never saw him throw a tool, pound his fist on a table, or yell at anyone (including me, when I often deserved), except once in a Sears store where a series of miscommunications had reached epidemic proportions on a car repair. He was a very even-tempered guy, confronting some terribly difficult times in which to to raise kids. I don't think I ever gave him any great struggles, but I know that some of my siblings more than made up for it!



My parents had moved to Barstow after my first year of college at USC, and bought a condemned house for $5000, and then brought it back up to code. It wasn't their first choice, and I regret that my reluctance to move off to college immediately after high school may have prevented them from going where they first planned, on the Oregon coast.



My father died in 1976 in Barstow, probably as a result of incompetence by the staff. He was diabetic, and had already had three heart attacks in previous years. They withheld some of his medication, and this may have contributed to his death. There wasn't really enough to pursue any sort of wrongful death claim--but I recall the hospital was shut down eventually (at least for a while) for failure to meet state standards.



A neat guy, held by a stack of problems not of his making.







I think this was taken when we lived on Berkeley Street in Santa Monica.







With my mother when we lived on Berkeley Street in Santa Monica.



UPDATE: Writing something like this stirs up memories. In my father's case, good memories. We needed a finderscope for the "hippie cannon." In a surplus store, my father found a right angle telescope that had originally come off of a tank. (As you might expect, it was also "built like a tank.") The reticle in the eyepiece had a series of horizontal lines, so my father disassembled the eyepiece, and used a diamond tipped tool to scratch another very precisely perpendicular to the horizontal lines. Now we had a crosshair eyepiece! Then he drilled a hole into the edge of the eyepiece housing. By putting a small red flashlight to the edge, we had an illuminated reticle as well.



My father introduced me to all sorts of amazing places in Los Angeles, a town that he had grown up in the 1920s. One example is the Angels Flight funicular railroad near downtown, disassembled in the 1960s, and now restored. Another was Acres of Books, which is still there in Long Beach, and claims to be "California's largest second-hand bookstore." I doubt that there is room for a larger one! When I needed a particular Russian grammar book, my father figured that they would have it--and they did!



There's a saying among historians that, "Every time a old man dies, a library burns down." It's true. My father was full of events that he had seen--a small town in Montana where the winter was so bitterly cold that a boy had leaned against a metal tank--and frozen his ear to the metal. They had go get coffee to free him.



Coffee grounds reused so many times during the Depression that the grounds were white. (You can imagine the quality of coffee it made.)



He worked on builing the Wheeler Ridge pumping station as part of the California aqueduct. One weekend we walked through these enormous, twelve foot pipes that run many miles up the north side of the Tehachapis.



One night we tried to take the "hippie cannon" up to our favorite dark sky site in Pacific Palisades--and a California Highway Patrolman told us we couldn't go up there. "The governor's home tonight." (Yes, we picked the hillside by Ronald Reagan's house.)



Like the character in Blade Runner says: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams ... glitter in the dark near Tanhauser Gate. All those ... moments will be lost ... in time, like tears ... in rain. Time ... to die."

It Pains Me That There Is A Blog Devoted Just To This...

ABUSE TRACKER

A digest of links to media coverage of clergy abuse.

I generally stay away from this issue, but the blog includes a number of reviews of a new documentary that looks at the question of clerical celibacy, and I think it is something about which Catholics need to think long and hard. If you want to defend it as a matter of tradition, remember that for roughly half the life of the Catholic Church, there was no requirement for clerical celibacy. Priests were allowed to marry--and many did. As one of my textbooks from High Middle Ages class (Christopher Brooke, Europe in the Central Middle Ages, 962-1154 2nd ed., pp. 123-4) pointed out:

It is very likely that a high proportion of the clergy in the tenth and eleventh centuries were hereditary clergymen. Once again, our ignorance is very great; but wherever we go in Europe, we find traces of what seems to have been a widespread and quite accepted practice before the papal reform and the insistence on celibacy. Iceland, with its hereditary bishopric, was exceptional. But in no part of Europe was it wholly exceptional for an eleventh-century bishop to have children. Most of these were born, no doubt, before the fathers obtained high office. But there are plenty of instances of priests living openly with their wives.... List survive from a group of churches on the Welsh border in the mid and late eleventh century; most passed by hereditary succession. List survive of the canons of St Paul's from the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries onwards. At least a quarter of the first generation were married, and several passed on their canonries to their children. The founder of Tiron, preaching celibacy in Normandy about 1100, was nearly lynched by the clergy's wives, as had been the archbishop of Rouen, no less, when promulgating a decree against them in 1072. Sir Richard Southern has made famous the extraordinary story of how the twelve great-great-grandchildren of a tenth-century priest divided a substantial part of the income of Arezzo cathedral among themselves in the late eleventh century.

Now, there was some arguments for celibacy at the time. As I understand it, the substantial power that clergymen at all levels exerted on economic affairs might cause him to unfairly benefit his children. This is pretty clearly no longer the case.



There are some men (and women) for whom celibacy really is a gift. Throughout the first millenium of Christianity, there were large numbers of clergymen who were celibate, even without a rule requiring it. I know a Southern Baptist missionary, currently in Russia, but previously in South Africa and Thailand, who has no need or desire for a husband. However: this is unusual. Sex and romantic love are pretty much the norm for human beings, and you can get some pretty weird results if you refuse to deal with those desires.



I don't think the clergy sex abuse scandal is just about celibacy, however. There have been a lot of homosexuals who have pretended that these priests are abusing boys because that's what is most available to them. I don't believe it. There are cases like this coming out:

MANKATO, Minn. (AP) -- A woman who was abused by a Catholic nun 50 years ago at a boarding school will receive about $120,000 in a settlement, as well as an apology from the nun.



Sister Ramona Schweich, now 81, admitted she had sexual relations with Betty Davis when Davis was a 16-year-old student at a boarding school in the early 1950s. The Colton, Wash., school was operated by Schweich's order, Mankato-based School Sisters of Notre Dame.



...



Schweich admitted in sworn depositions that she had sexual contact with Davis on a couple of occasions but asserted that it wasn't abuse because Davis didn't resist her advances.



...



Last year, School Sisters of Notre Dame reached a settlement with another former student who had accused Schweich of sexual misconduct.



Katherine Beebe received $30,000 after reporting that she and Schweich had a sexual relationship during her senior year, one year before Davis was involved with Schweich. Schweich denied any improper conduct with Beebe.

I've argued for some time that there is some pretty good reason to at least suspect a connection between child sexual abuse and adult homosexuality. (This does not preclude the possibility of other causes of adult homosexuality.)



UPDATE: A reader writes that if he were a celibate Catholic priest, he wouldn't be chasing after altar boys, but wearing a disguise and looking for commercial sex elsewhere. Doubtless true. I am pretty sure that the celibacy alone isn't the issue. From what I have read, fixated pedophiles were usually victims themselves. I suspect that some went into the clergy because it provided a method for getting at more kids; others may have gone in because they knew that they were homosexual, and hoped that this might be a way of directing their energies into something productive.



There's a funny thing that happens when you crush down desires and pretend that they aren't there--they pop up in really odd ways. Look at what happens to the person who tries to stop smoking--and starts eating instead. Pretending the desires aren't there isn't healthy. Giving into them may not be healthy either. Confronting the problems is healthy.



I know someone who is a family counselor out in California. He tells me that growing up, his mother broke just about every bone in his body. He has confronted what happened, and tried to work past it. Now he tries to help others confront their pain.



I know someone else out in Califonia. He was molested by a Scoutmaster. His father was an alcoholic. His mother would bring complete strangers home for sex on the couch while the father was home, in the bedroom--I guess trying to get some sort of confrontation going. This guy has not confronted what happened to him, and the damage that he spread around because of it is unbelievable.