Graduating from the Play World
In recent times, arguably only two performers, President Reagan and Gov. Schwarzenegger, successfully have navigated from their play world to the more realistic universe of politics where here is a spot of accountability. Curiously, for the rest of the modern performance industry, politics is as strong of a magnet as drugs and booze. Since the American culture celebrates celebrities more than cerebrators, opinions of performers and their chroniclers are anointed with more gravitas than those of serious persons who have devoted their lives to the analysis of core issues. Like children leaving home for the first time, performers gurgle into each other’s necks that they don’t have to be religious, they don’t have to go home faithfully to their spouses every evening because their peers in the industry don’t. Politics, they come to believe, is a slightly more grown-up version of their play world. They are the moth and politics is the flame. Therapists would brand the practitioners of both art forms enablers. Politicians go to Hollywood to win media attention. Actors travel to Washington for the identical reason. Boys and girls alike, the performers and their chroniclers frolic like giddy children as they romp on the beaches of fantasy politics. I give you Brad Pitt. I give you Angelina Jolie. I give you the regrettably Jewish Steven Spielberg, who last year fine-tuned the Munich Olympics massacre to suit his political beliefs. You can do that in Hollywood. The natives don’t know better. Entertainers who segue into political roles prefer to blur the distinctions, providing an escape route when pressed. They are fueled by the same uninhibited passions that another brand of little-boy men, those who reside in the cerebral desert of athletics, bring to fantasy baseball and fantasy football games. Our challenge this morning is to unravel Mr. Sisa’s 1350-word tightly intertwined weave of fictionalized history, shaky premises and faulty conclusions.
A Confidence Booster
Mr. Sisa opens on a self-congratulatory note, a handy device that assures the reader that between them there is at least one convicted person. Mr. Sisa says he abhors war and loves peace. This places him in league with almost all earthlings except the terrorists in the Middle East, whom Mr. Sisa does not appear — at his peril — to take soberly. Just boys being boys, he concludes. Worse than some, not as bad as others. Throughout both essays, Mr. Sisa attempts to manipulate the minds of skeptics by convincing them that inaction actually is a legitimate activity for a seeker of peace. One who works to accomplish peace, he intimates, “fights” as hard as a soldier on the battlefield. But, ooh, stinky-poo, there is no immoral blood messing up the life of a peace seeker. To theory-enamored armchair observers, making a judgment is equivalent to cultivating a disease. Deciding between or among vague theories, boys and girls, does not count as decision-making. Good and evil, right and wrong needlessly clutter their play world view of all people as one massive mass of egalitarian humanity, some a little better, some a little worse, but no one out of the bell curve.
Let Us Not Judge
Extending his neck to its maximum, Mr. Sisa repeats an earlier argument that gray rather than right or wrong is the dominant mode of the contemporary world. This allows him to avoid executing a judgment. With gray, everything is a little good, a little bad. Clearly, Mr. Sisa is neither a casual observer nor a student of Middle Eastern history. Were he, he would not have gotten so many facts wrong. By simplistically lumping together Jews and Muslims into “a cauldron of tribes,” Mr. Sisa ignores and/or misunderstands the critical distinctions. They are as different from each other as men are from women (except in Hollywood). Mr. Sisa also displays a dismaying lack of comprehension about the history of the world as well, how it works, how it has worked. How, praytell, does he think the land on which he is standing was acquired, at the varnished tables where diplomats sit? How does he think any land has been acquired — by actors making nicey-pooh? Sorry, that version is reserved for PBS, NPR and their allies in what Mr. Sisa derisively calls “the corporate media,” a doctrinal phrase at radio KPFK-FM (90.7).
A Splash of Critical History
Mr. Sisa appears to be unaware of the fact that Jews came to Canaan, known throughout much of history as Palestine, a little more than 3300 years ago. Jews have been a continuous, uninterrupted presence in the country since. He indicates that Middle Eastern history actually started in the 1880s when those darned, pesky Jews began migrating to Palestine, disrupting the vanilla tranquility of the indigenous lower blue collar Arab population. Sorry, the Jews were already there. Fired by the newly formulated notion of Zionism at the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th, European and North African Jews converted the soil of the formerly barren land, making the desert bloom for the first time since God created the world. Mr. Sisa skips over the Balfour Declaration, the British-enabled Arab rioting against the Jews in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s. Mr. Sisa skips over the United Nations partitioning in November 1947 when Arabs were accorded the overwhelmingly larger portions of Palestine. On the first day of statehood in May 1948, five Arab armies attacked the Jews, seizing gashes of land including East Jerusalem, in the middle of the state. Mr. Sisa also ignored all that followed. Arabs have warred against Israel every day since May 14, 1948, every day friends, 58 years, or 22,260 consecutive days — no time-outs permitted. Over this, Mr. Sisa skips. After 1948, the “peace-loving” Arabs started four more wars, which they also lost, and two intifadas, plus this summer’s skirmishing at the expense of their collaborators in Lebanon.
Postscript
Liberals hate context. It muddies their otherwise pristine arguments. Out darned facts, as Mr. Shakespeare almost said. In Part 2 of his essay, Mr. Sisa concentrates on gravely misrepresenting the past 40 years of Arab terrorism against Israel. Egalitarianism, equivalency — those are the newest enclaves of a rascal who resists the normal human temptation to render mature, studied judgment. Jew-haters are subtle, which is why liberals usually overlook them. Subtle not their strength. I give you the daily apparently staged, Muslim-sympathetic daily photos of Carolyn Cole in the Los Angeles Times. I guess you this week’s Reuters flap over fake photographs the British news service has been distributing throughout the war. Who had ever heard of “occupied territory” until the Jews of Israel won land in war? Until last month, who had heard of “disproportionate” war until the Jews of Israel responded to two attacks, two kidnappings that liberal journalists soften by calling “captures”? “Disproportionate?” I am sure the man who gave birth to th use of that term is as astonished as I am that it was immediately accepted. Astounding, isn’t it, how the carefully manufactured language of Jew-haters dribbles into the Western media, instantly becoming the norm. The tone of Mr. Sisa’s scold language is that of a safely-removed armchair observer. Perched well above the fray, he is the Dutch uncle abstractly tut-tutting the children during his obligatory annual arm’s length visit. I invite Mr. Sisa to participate in a re-joust once he has gained a clearer view of merely the 20th century history of Arab-Jewish conflict. But not before.