Informant38

I just finished a marathon catch-up on "The Wire", watching the first four seasons on DVD in the space of less than a month. Over and above the most brilliant writing and acting I've ever seen on a TV show, the series is centered in a vision that's driven by a fully engaged compassion for everyone it touches. It's subtle and heroic and impeccably cool, warmly funny, common in the best sense, and the production values are magnificent, but it's that compassionate engagement that marks it as superior art.
David Simon, whose baby it is, is not only Jewish, he's the son of a B'nai Brith official - he's way Jewish, at least in his upbringing and background. But David Simon didn't fool the American public into backing the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He didn't scam the financial system for his own benefit at the expense of less clever folks, he got out there in front of God and everybody and said "Hey, look at this, what the fuck is this shit?"
This is redemptive and healing television, what it should have been all along and has been only far too rarely.
So there's that.
This post from January 2004 is about a friend of mine, mostly a better friend to me than I ever was to him, someone who was brave and generous, crazy smart, and actively rejecting of bullshit and selfish scammers. He was a man with a big heart. Also a Jew. He died trying to save someone's life, in a way that's inarguably, heroically selfless. Read the link.
So there's that, as well.
I've been smacked in the face numerous times, shunned, insulted, surveilled upon - though admittedly not just for having these ideas - subtly intimidated in creepy ways, for saying what I genuinely thought was really happening, what was being lied about and hidden, things that mattered, or seemed to, greatly. Ridiculed on such fortresses of liberal thought as Making Light and Crooked Timber and elsewhere online, for speaking to what I saw between the simplistic lines of received wisdom.
There's a bunch of things I haven't said, here or anywhere, that are weirder, darker, and worse for the digestion even than the Iraq war being a Jewish/Israeli set-up from out the gate, aided and abetted by Jewish-run media; things that had I said them in those erstwhile open forums would have had me banned, or tarred and feathered if that were an available option. For instance:
It's pretty clear that the wholesale international drug trade is run by a consortium of hard-to-pinpoint men who share Jewish ancestry, an American/Russian/Israeli shadow cabal with tentacles everywhere, that that overlaps intimately with the international arms trade, that pretty much the most damaging organizations functioning right now are headed by men who are Jews.
Haiti figures in that, Ghana, Columbia, El Salvador, Afghanistan, Mexico. A lot of poor folks with dark brown skin have been suffering and dying for a long time because of how these men do business.
The material and political power that the majority of fundamentalist Christians have delivered to the Zionist enterprise is no accident, it looks like an intentional result of manipulation that has its roots deep in the past. One of the first scorns anti-anti-Semitic defenders put forward is the so-called canard that "the Jews killed Jesus". Gibsonian delusional belligerence.
Yet like the drug trade, like the Iraq invasion, this is both true and not true at the same time. From what I can get out of two millenia's worth of historic obscurity and obfuscation Jesus showed up, rocked the boat with a message of mercy and compassion, and through the strength of his love for everyone including especially those at the bottom end of society, turned everything upside down. And was arrested and executed for exactly that reason. "The Jews" didn't do that, the Jewish power elite of that time did.
David Simon didn't do it, my friend Scott didn't do it, and Bob Dylan didn't do it either, as nor did Joseph Brodsky or Allen Ginsberg. Anything that suggests complicity there is so inaccurate as to be actively complicit itself. A hard thing to get to the bottom of, and a most effective strategy because of that.
Hannah Mermelstein makes the distinction between Jew, Israeli, and Zionist very clear. A religion, a nationality, an ideology. Those are the only functional terms available to describe what's there within the murk and haze, but they don't pin the villainy accurately enough. And using them inaccurately endangers innocent people, some of whom are on the front lines of resistance, already at risk.
Always it's easier just to let it be, leave it alone, walk away in disgust and helplessness. But once you get out here that's not really an option anymore. And it matters. So there's this.