“We have met the enemy, and it is us”

There are numerous Confederate memorials scattered throughout the old South, many of which are in the form of a Confederate soldier statue mounted on top of a tall column, invariably facing the North. In fact, it is the practice of such war memorials to always face the enemy. Those monuments commemorating the Spanish-American war, for example, always face South.

In the town of Louisburg, NC, in the middle of the local college (which dates back to 1787) there is such a monument. However, for reasons unknown, Johnny Reb is facing South, gazing upon the Confederacy. Was this intentional? An artist’s error? A prank by local students? This may merit further investigation.

Studium interruptum

My fellow students who attended Arazim Elementary School in Tel Aviv during the Seventies, would often experience the following scenario:

While sitting in class, during any given subject (Geography, Bible, Hebrew, Science, all fair game) the door would suddenly burst open, and our esteemed principal, Mr. Mordechai Wasserstroum, would bound into the room. We would all rise (which is what you did in those respectful days in the august presence of a principal who, unlike the old English teacher’s spelling mnemonic, was never your “pal”). He would motion for us to sit, after which he would start stating integers and operators: “Six, plus seventeen, minus one, times four, plus six, divided by two, to the power of two…” this would continue for a couple of minutes until the last integer was proclaimed. Those of us who were actually able to follow the thread would raise our hands, upon which he would step forward and have each and every one of us whisper our solution in his enormous ears. After he was done walking up and down the aisles he would return to the teacher’s podium and announce: “Zamir, Levi, and Feinstein are correct” and leave, without providing the final answer, and our class would resume from where it was interrupted. Years later I had learned that Mr. Wasserstroum, prior to becoming our principal, was a Certified Public Accountant.

Over the years I had shared this story with numerous people and have never come across anybody outside of our neighborhood school who’s experienced anything similar. The only time in my life that this exercise was proven to have any benefit whatsoever was in my twenties, when working as a bartender, I was able to remember long drink orders in sequence.

V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N (In the Summer sun)

I’ve resurrected the title of the old Connie Francis song to point out an alarming trend I’ve recently noticed: more and more American employers, particularly those in high-tech industries, are flaunting a new “Unlimited Vacation” policy, which typically describes their company as a utopian environment where people simply leave for vacation at the drop of a hat, no questions asked, for any duration they may choose, as long as “their work is not affected”. What seems on the face of it to be a novel, exciting, dignified benefit, is actually a dangerous proposition, another step on the slippery slope of workers’ rights erosion.

When a person accepts a position with an employing entity of any type, there usually is a standard amount of vacation time allotted to the employee, which often grows with seniority and job level, particularly in the private sector. This allotted time is an accrued benefit, which may or may not be rolled-over to future years, but in a majority of states the law requires complete reimbursement of all unused time in the form of pay at point of separation, as it had been lawfully earned by an employee. Many companies require vacation time to be actually taken, both as a method of preventing significant back-pay accrual and to encourage the employee to take some time off and decompress. The importance of this is something both psychologists and unions understood a long time ago.

In the new “unlimited” model there is no such accrual; one simply takes vacation as one desires, on the implied condition that it not affect work output. This may become incredibly problematic, in a variety of ways: In small businesses employees typically wear many hats, and any vacation time, is, by definition, disruptive. Other companies may be in a perpetual “high-gear” mode (“we’re in the middle of the merger”, or “we need all hands on deck to get the new release out”) creating a culture where excessive devotion to work, to the exclusion of any real personal life, becomes the norm. And what if you have a workaholic boss, who also happens to own a chunk of the company? How comfortable would you be to suddenly take three weeks off to explore Machu-Picchu? This seems to be but another step in relegating employees to a contractor’s status, where ultimately the combined salary and benefits are entirely output related. And what of the loyal, conscientious, hardworking employee who never takes any time off, whose position is suddenly eliminated? He gets shown to the door with no vacation-time accrual whatsoever. All this somehow reminds me of the old Dennis Miller line “By paying minimum wage your employer is saying that if he could legally pay you any less, he would.”

So caveat laborer, and if the deal sounds to good to be true, it probably is.

Racism, here & now

My first personal interaction with North Carolina’s history was after we moved here and my son advised me that his Fourth-grade teacher’s family had been in the state for over two hundred and sixty years. Wow. Coming from Florida, a state where most residents had arrived about three weeks prior, it was quite fascinating. Later on I learned that another teacher used to attend the same elementary school they were in, except that in those days it used to be the local segregated high-school for African-American students. After a while I found out that while my kids’ high school in Raleigh was the city’s first integrated one, it was named for a person who fought bitterly against integrating the city’s bus system.

What was absolutely astonishing to me was that all these things were going on during my childhood, and that local events which I heard about vaguely in history classes or from reading books (Greensboro sit-ins, “Wilmington Ten” trial) were actually experienced by many in our community who are still here with us.

As a child of the Sixties, born in California and raised in Israel, I was familiar with the cultural touchstones of the segregated South: “Gone with the Wind”, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, Dr. King’s speeches and so on. But they always seemed to exist for me in some abstract ancient history, and not in the here-and-now, along with Abraham Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address. Only after my children started to attend “Magnet” schools in downtown Raleigh did I develop an appreciation for the immediacy and significance of race relations in North Carolina. It is, undoubtedly, the single most compelling issue facing our state, and one that is the root cause of so many other societal ills, including poverty, public health issues, prison overcrowding, and low education achievements, to name a few. As an unabashed Liberal, I do not advocate for a “nanny state”, but rather for a society in which we help others when they falter, and assist them to get back on track. Sometimes that means financial assistance, sometimes educational advantages compensating for past errors, other times fair sentencing, and at all times, compassion.

I travel throughout our beautiful state and I see the poverty, the health issues, the unemployment, the politically-segregative actions of a fearful, uncompassionate General Assembly and State Senate, the incarceration rates, and chills run down my spine. Naturally, there is much that African-Americans can do to address these issues from within, but it doesn’t change the fact that at the end of the day we have replaced the terrible Plessy v. Ferguson “Separate but equal” doctrine with an equally bad “Joined but inequitable” fait accompli. And I speak of any and all actions of racism and bigotry: The schoolteachers who simply do not provide the same level and intensity of assistance to black students as they do to the white ones, the jurists who convict and the judges who sentence with distinct race favoritism, the continuous futzing around with voting laws in order to disenfranchise minorities, the list goes on and on and on.

As a human being, I find this inequality shameful, as a citizen, I find it unconstitutional, and as a Jew, I find it entirely immoral. And now we may add to the list the tinge of racism which surrounds the recent emergence of a handful of Ebola cases in the US, and, certainly, not least of all, the hatred and virulent hostility towards president Obama, much of which is derived from racism, pure and simple.

We tend to avoid dealing with this: we use phrases like “promoting diversity” to mask racism by taking meaningless pseudo-integrative actions which are an ersatz solution for what is the real matter at hand: the hatred, mistrust, fear, condescension, and social segregation of African-Americans by whites, still ever so prevalent in North Carolina.

As we contemplate how we may end the scourge of both personal and institutional racism in North Carolina, we should heed these immortal words from President Lincoln’s second inaugural address: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Our work, friends, is not yet done.

Telephone

The other day I went to get a haircut and the lady at the counter asked me if I’ve been there before. I said “I think so” so she asked me for my telephone number. We then commenced a three-ring circus of trying our entire family’s list of mobile phone numbers, looking for my elusive styling record, when I suddenly I realized how much we’ve lost with the demise of the classic “Home Phone Number”, which so many families (such as ours) have long abandoned.

In those ancient, pre-cellular days, the home phone was both a family’s central communications hub and its core ID. Back at the height of Ma Bell’s empire you couldn’t even own a phone; they were typically the property of AT&T and the monthly bill included a “rental charge”. Most homes had a couple of phones at the most, with always, without exception, a long-corded one in the kitchen, where virtually all incoming calls took place. Parents knew who their kids’ friends were, children knew all of the grownups, and everybody pretty much experienced a variation of the loud yell, “Ahha-deee, teh-leh-phoooone…” Ah, those wonderful hard-wired house phone days: You could take it “off the hook” forcing a “busy” signal (a concept completely eradicated by voice mail; our urge to leave a message is now satisfied 24/7), ask “Who’s calling, please?” (destroyed by caller-ID; the element of surprise removed), or inform the caller “They’re not home right now, may I take a message?” (we are permanently tethered to our mobile phones, and are essentially perpetually reachable). No longer may we use those nice white lies, such as “My dad never gave me the message” or “I couldn’t call you ’cause mom was on the phone with grandma all morning”. And since there was no way of finding-out if you were awake, calls were limited to reasonable hours (growing up in Israel, where the afternoon nap-time was strictly enforced, you’d be taking your life into your own hands if you dared call a friend between 2-4 PM). Your phone number was the family’s identifier, given freely to anyone that asked (in any event, we were “in the book” AKA “The White Pages”). As a society, since the early cell phone calls were so expensive, with high airtime costs borne by the receiver of the call, we simply stopped handing out our number regularly, effectively limiting access only to those whom we already knew. I think that as a result we lost a certain aspect of our community life.

I’m no loom-shattering Luddite. I love technology and all the conveniences cellular communications bring us. But as more and more families ditch their home phone, yet another vestige of what kept us together is gone for good. At least the nomenclature remains: our mobile phones still ring (even though there are no bells), we still dial a number (although there’s no dial, dial tone, or, for that matter, any real buttons anymore), and when it comes to telemarketers, we still happily hang up on them…

On My Mind

Many years ago, while we still lived in Florida, our family started a peculiar tradition: Whenever one (or more) of us cross the Georgia state line by car, we always play Ray Charles’ signature song, “Georgia On My Mind”. I am uncertain as to why exactly we started this practice, but often times we seemed to enter The Peach State either at dusk or at night, providing a poetic vision of “moonlight through the pines”, as so eloquently stated in Stuart Gorrell’s lyrics, sung to Hoagy Carmichael’s timeless tune. Over time, when one of us would enter Georgia on their own, we would invariably call other family members to share the experience.

A few comments about the song: Written in 1930, it only became a major hit after Brother Ray recorded it in 1960, instantly making his version the definitive cover. Long considered part of the Great American Songbook, Charles famously performed it in 1979 in front of the Georgia State Legislature, who adopted it as the Official State Song. On most Interstate highways one may find a welcome sign declaring “We’re glad you’ve got Georgia on your mind”. (Interestingly enough, and probably for the sake of economy, the current governor’s name is affixed on a smaller sign below, facilitating rapid updating…)

We have absolutely no particular ties to the state, have never resided or studied there, and certainly have no fond memories of Atlanta’s daytime traffic. And yet, the practice continues. Perhaps, just like the semi-annual reminder from local authorities to change the battery in the smoke detectors whenever Daylight Savings Time comes or goes, this habit will be an occasional Proustian stream-of-consciousness trigger, reminding my children of their family, and the thousands of hours spent in our many minivans, and how the road ever leads back to you, Georgia.

The Third Man

One of the greatest all-time movies is Carol Reed’s “The Third Man” from 1949, with screenplay by English novelist Graham Greene (who, incidentally, is quite possibly the biggest snub in the history of the Nobel literature awards). The setting is post-war, Allied-controlled Vienna, and centers around an American ( Holly Martins, played by Joseph Cotton), who arrives in town looking for his old friend Harry Lime, superbly acted by the incomparable Orson Welles. I will not disclose the plot here, to avoid any spoilers for the uninitiated. Suffice it to say that Harry Lime is a most unsavory character.

The first time I saw the movie, on Israeli television, I must have been no more than twelve or thirteen. I immediately fell in love with a line from it, which instantly became my all-time favorite movie quote. Imagine my satisfaction when I later found out that it was also Harry Golden’s (patron saint of the “Carolina Israelite”) most beloved movie quote. Not as snarky as Rhett Butler’s “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn”, or crowd-pleasing as Rick Blaine’s “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”, the Third Man quote is actually entirely non-contextual to the plot itself, thus standing independently on its own two legs. Delivered at the end of a climactic scene in the movie, aboard Vienna’s famous Riesenrad Ferris wheel, the director realized that there was a time gap at the end of the scene for which there was no dialog in the screenplay. Serendipitously, Orson Welles came up with the following line himself, delivered with both panache and perfect timing, and the rest is movie history:

“What the fella says: in Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!”

They just don’t make movies like that anymore, do they?