‘Francisco Goya, ‘Disasters of War’ ‘What good is a cup?’
Naivety can be rectified by experience. Yet stupid, and its attendant willful and belligerent ignorance, is a hazard to all near it. Trump careens down his death-besotted path as the Democrats simply step out of his way.
Democrats, smugly muttering, “I told you so,” will not suffice. Antiduopolists could retort, we warned you against rigging the apparatus of the Democratic Party in an attempt to enthrone Hillary, then, because stupid tends to double down on fuckwit, rigging the process for Biden.
The arming of genocidal Zionists didn’t help you either with citizens who take their conscience into consideration when deciding whether to vote or not.
MAGA will continue to act on behalf of the insatiable greed of oligarchs, and will continue feeding the bloodlust of spiteful soreheads. Yet Democrats will only regret the loss of a status quo that serves no one but their own donors.
Francisco Goya, Proud Monsters
As noted above, stupid cannot be rectified. The only redemption possible is: a movement toward novelty. Two party despotism took us to this dismal spot. Time to chart a new course appropriating a compass constructed of the sublime material of one’s own heart, mind and soul.
At present, the needle of the heart’s compass points towards Palestine.
Impersonal Catastrophes…that feel so damn personal: Tragedy in Palestine, that could well be one’s own: Speaking as the son of a mother who escaped Nazi, Germany on Kindertransport, then delivered into the homes of strangers in the UK, as her father, had been arrested by the Gestapo and was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp: I ask — I implore you:
Israel, do you not realize that you have broken your house?
The news of the cosmos arrives as blood, bone, and other urgent dreams of flesh, soil and breath — thus: Do dispatches from history cause you to recall wild thunderstorms shaking mid-August afternoons? Then silence returns. And what of the ghostly lamentation of empires, risen like sunflowers, teeming in the summer air, then withering and falling within an interlocking eternity of arrivals and departures? Comes a vision risen on the horizon of the World’s Mind: a towering, crimson nimbus laden with the blood of Palestinian children.
Francisco Goya, Enterrar y callar Bury them and keep quiet
At Passover Seder, my family, among our traditional reading of tribal mythos, chanted liturgy and song; we joined voices in the declaration, “L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim” i.e., “Next year in Jerusalem”.
Thus, turning eastward in the direction of my mythical home: a catastrophe shakes my heart; a decimation of the soul.
Witness/Rebuke — the sneering pride of those in possession of minds made of bullets, of those seething in their death cult wherein rifles, missiles and bombs seemed to be held as liturgical accoutrements.
Mortified/Enraged — compelled to insist the killers and their dissembling apologists answer the following:
How did it come to be that you are driven to attempt to murder all beauty by stabbing at the heart of the world with a knife you have placed on the violated altar of our God — who you have transfigured into a god of death?
I ask you again: Israel, do you not realize that you have broken your house?
You cannot walk through your house without wading through blood.
Angry ghosts shuffle upon your rooftops. The ceilings of your homes stare down at you in rebuke.
We, the living, bestowed, albeit in reluctance, to be the eyes of Heaven and Hell, continue to witness the unfolding abomination.
We could not forgive ourselves — we would loath the very air agitated by our own words — if we were to turn away.
Francisco Goya, Tristes presentimientos de lo que ha de acontecer (Sad forebodings of what must come to pass)
Once again we must remind ourselves to consult the heart’s compass: Palestine must be at the present heart of all things…
In places —veiled, everywhere — from sight:
the past refuses to depart,
the dead do not rest,
the unspoken sings in endless stanzas of verse,
musical notes rise as mountains,
and spirits grief and renewal envelop all things in concentric rings.
At this moment, this place is Palestine,
Besieged Palestine, located in the indomitable heart,
Here, now, we are induced to dismantle despair’s ad hoc architecture and begin building living monuments to the grace bequeathed in every breath — the quality known to us humble human beings as compassion.
Blood of the blameless will continue to pool the streets. Bombs will bounce Levant rubble. Lies, thick as Old Testament locust, swarm the air.
Israel, I have stared into your face until I disappeared. I have inhabited the shadow of your mendacity. To this day, I stumble through the landscape of my heart amid ruins left by your campaign of genocide-justifying lies.
I drown everyday in the rising of your blood-tide, unloosed by means of your god-ordained guns and hate-garrisoned pride.
Your children, from birth, fed on lie-rancid milk, have grown rifles for hands; their hearts are now predator drones; their breath meets the world as bombs.
Francisco de Goya, Well-Known Folly
In childhood, I was instructed to plant trees to provide cooling shade for a desert homeland, according to the lore of my people, now regained due to the death agonies inflicted on six million of our tribe.
Trees, you told me, that would serve as living tributes in memory of my murdered kinsfolk in the death mills of Europe. But you watered those trees with the blood of the innocent.
The desert air speaks: The history that made you has become a harvest of shame. The scent of those flowering trees cannot conceal the reek of tens of thousands of corpses.
No matter how innumerable in number — the fragrance of a billion flowering trees will never conceal the reek of genocide.
Go to the dead, those you left in Europe and you have killed in Palestine, and let their ghosts do to you what they will.
Francisco Goya, No hay quien los socorra There is no one to help them
Often, when the crimes of Israel are enumerated, Zionist apologists bandy the assertion, “the history of the Middle East is too complex for such over-simplified critiques.”
The assertion amounts to a noxious and death-besotted display of casuistry. What is complex about starving and slaughtering men, women, and children with agendas of ethnic cleansing?
My maternal DNA relates the history of my Ashkenazi Jewish origins. In brief, out of the Levant, we came, delivered as slaves into southern Italy then, when freed, into the north of Italy then settling into the German Rhineland.
Not a single Palestinian acted in the manner of the various oppressors whose crimes against my ancestors’ humanity drove us ever northeastward across Europe. Not a single Palestinian harmed my ancestors during the anti-Jewish rampages of 1096 across the Rhine river region of Germany, nor shattered glass on Kristallnacht, nor held positions in the Frankfurt-based IG Farben corporation where Zyklon B had been manufactured to be used as an agent of mass extermination against Jews in death camps across the face of Europe.
Yet the Palestinians lost their homeland and are forced to live on their knees in a perpetual state of submission and contrition for the crimes of Germany. Why doesn’t the Zionist state stand in the Rhineland? In this light, Germany’s unwavering support of Israel seems convenient and self-serving, at best.
German and other European leaders’ blinkered reaction ensures the ethnic cleansing inherent to Zionism continues without consequence. Can you imagine any other nation, other than the United States, actions being defended, much less enabled, as they committed crimes against humanity to the degree of the Zionist state?
Goya, Francisco, There is no remedy
My mother, who, as I noted above, escaped Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport, in the final years of her life came to question her Zionist affiliations. I’m certain viewing the overkill, to say the least, a constant in the response of Zionists towards Palestinian acts of resistance, she would express a deep sense of shame, as do I, for the lack of humanity displayed by our troubled tribe in the present day Levant.
My Ashkenazi DNA, carrying my ancestor’s memory of oppression, cries out, from my blood and bones, to stand for and with the people of Palestine.
I possess dual US/German citizenship, because the Nazis stripped my mother’s family of their citizenship — which I have since reclaimed. My ancestral homeland, on the maternal side, at least, is Germany.
The Zionist “right of return” is based on a number of noxious fallacies e.g., 1) the White Man’s Burden-type, racist mindset of European colonialist settlers — who believed that they possessed the “manifest destiny” to dispossess “less civilized” inhabitants of their native lands, in order to, as the Zionist propaganda trope goes, “to make the desert bloom”; 2) The ancient, tribal myths of the Old Testament/Torah.
If you listened to the rebuke of the dead, you would be compelled to do the same. If only such a thing could come to be.
Francisco Goya, They escape among the flames’
As for myself, I have heard an earful. I must affix my attention upon the composition of these words of poetry — or else I might go sobbing into the streets, reeling in lamentation.
On Genocide and Indomitable Feathers
In periodic dreams, all manner of things had wings: Tortoises. Ukuleles. Rocks. Rhinoceros on rooftops. Coffins — migrating flocks of them cast long shadows under the afternoon sun.
Then a crushing tyranny — The Keepers Of The Separation Wall And Perpetual Shackle — stormed the land and seized power. Wings were clipped and confiscated. The earth withered into wasteland.
Phalanxes of police descended on university campuses; once, sanctums where the young were instructed in the art of flight.
Abandoned dreams were converted into slave ships then launched to cross dark, storm-tossed skyways.
The ships docked at islands of imperium in the sky. Therein, forsaken dreams served at the caprice of a brutal regime sustained by the life-force of usurped lives.
The overseers were squads of monsters known as: The Sum of All Fears.
Yet, across the earth, in hidden places, in dreams within dreams within dreams, in sanctuaries of the heart, refuges unreachable to the usurpers, banished imagination brooded, molted feathers, then took flight across internal skies.
Shortly thereafter, great birds of impossible beauty winged westward towards vast reservoirs of the collective soul and in their beaks bore back water to quench the thirst of those stranded in parched lands and restore the memory of flight.
Flights of the indomitable heart such as these are winging, at this moment, to the spaces of the heart where young and old, our wings restored, will continue wage a campaign of conscience to put an end to genocide.
Another thing I know, birds of the restorative heart will not make their nests in the absent heart of either of the present political system’s war parties.
Francisco Goya, Contra el bien general Against the common good