Racial/Tribal Memory

1758tribe//01/2018

The Tribe

There is an ancient tribe living among us. Their language is the oldest continuously surviving western language, matched only in the East by Chinese.  Unlike other tribes which had religions focusing on idols and statues, the God this tribe worships is invisible and portable.

It had to be. If your god was a huge statue of the Buddha and you suddenly had to leave the country, you could not take your idol with you. Conquerors traditionally destroyed the resident idols and erected their own. This tribe, having no idols, could leave and retain their identity.

What they do have is their book. They are sometimes called “people of the book.” Their book is a strange collection of stories of dysfunctional families, brothers murdering brothers, adultery, incest, concubines and expulsions, indentured servitude and betrayal, all written in the ancient language filled with ambiguity and subject to endless interpretation. Yet in spite of that difficulty, that tribe’s book has been endlessly translated, cherry picked, and adopted even though the tribal members themselves are often shunned and persecuted.

The rules of ethics and behavior laid down in that tribal document are the foundation of western civilization.

Unlike tribes where the leaders demand absolute obedience without question, this argumentative tribe has always been taught to questions and challenge, in a word to think, to learn, and, since their book is so difficult to fully understand, to study. They seek knowledge.

It’s a winning discipline,

The tribe’s peculiar customs have kept them apart from their neighbors. For this they have been suspect. They have been persecuted for their beliefs and expelled, exiled, even murdered. In turn they have been expelled and enslaved by the Romans, the Spanish, the French, the Germans and the English. There was even a program to exterminate all of them.

Are they so different? So dangerous? They do not seek to conquer or to dominate. Their prayers are always for peace. When they are successful they are the subject of envy. People think these tribal members are smart.

There is nothing remarkable about that: they seek knowledge. By Darwinian survival of the fittest, the many expulsions have purged  the tribe of the weak and the slow-witted.

So who are these strange tribal members and what is their language and their book? The language is Hebrew. They call their book the Torah and they are Jews. Who would have thought?

Trauma

1756trauma/927 words

Aug. 3, 2018

Trauma

By

Harley L. Sachs

Most of us have heard of trauma centers, hospitals that deal with emergencies, people rescued from airplane crashes, horrible highway accidents. Those traumas are physical and no doubt may be followed up with fear of fires, fear of getting in the confines of an airplane. Flashbacks.

There are other traumas, traumas  not brought on by physical stress. While the body  can recover from physical injuries, psychological damage may be life long. Military commonly suffer PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. the effect of long term fear   and the shock of seeing your buddies blown to bits before your eyes.

Not everyone has to be in battle to suffer that kind of trauma. My wife has never gotten over the shock of her mother’s early death. She had not been kind to her mother, and has been plagued by guilt ever since.

Loni, a neighbor on our floor in this retirement building, is an ethnic German who was in an eastern bloc country at the end of World War II. Many people do not know that when the war ended and the German occupiers went home, the local populations of countries that were the victims of the war turned on the ethnic Germans, some who had been there for generations. The  Russians, new occupiers, gave the locals three days to do as they wished to the ethnic Germans. Anyone who spoke German was subject to abuse, rape, imprisonment in old concentration camps, and killed. Survivors were deported. At  the end of World War II about forty million people were displaced, many of them ethnic Germans no longer welcome.

Loni and her family fell into Russian hands. Her brother went to a Russian prison camp. She became a child laborer on a farm. The trauma of that experience as a displaced child has stuck with her ever since. She has never told her son about it and cannot go to a movie with anything about war. Loni is psychologically wounded much like many combat veterans. The shadow of that early trauma hangs over her.

I have not been in a car or plane crash and never served in combat. The idea of childhood trauma seemed foreign to me, until I remembered.

They say a child’s personality is set at the age of five and view of the world at age ten. Before age ten we are not aware of the world outside our family.  What, then, happened to me?

My father was from Poland and came to the United States during World War I. Most of his extended family remained in Poland. The Germans invaded in 1939 and we did not enter the war until December 1941, so I was nine or ten during that brief interlude, 1939 to 1941 when we were not in the war yet but mail could be delivered from Poland..

My father got a letter that was sent to his mother in Chicago. It was from a neighbor in Poland, probably a suburb of Warsaw. I don’t know if it was written in Polish or Yiddish, but I do remember my father cried for three days. His uncles, aunts and cousins were all dead.

I had never seen my father cry, which is upsetting enough. Then my mother told me what was in the letter. Twenty four of his family had been slaughtered, beaten to death on the street, their house set afire. A baby had been thrown into the burning house, was rescued by one of the boys but the baby was thrown in again. The boy, one of my father’s cousins, tried to save the baby again but was burned alive.  

At school my teacher, Miss Hill, was a Catholic and an anti-Semite. When we had a spell down and my turn came she went down the list of words and picked one I would not know: catechism.  She smirked. Defeated, I returned to my desk wondering what catechism was. A girl who sat next to me showed me her catechism book and I understood. One had to memorize the correct answers to theological questions.

When we had show and tell and it was my turn I told the class about the letter from Poland and cried. I knew that the Poles were Catholics but I did not know then why they hated Jews and would even kill them and burn their homes with the baby thrown into the flames.

That was my trauma.

It burned into my consciousness an awareness of anti-Semitism and Catholic dogma which to this day includes a prayer about “the perfidious Jews” in the Easter Latin mass.

The Catholic Inquisition of Spain that drove us out of the country in 1492 continued for five hundred years and did not officially end until 1956 when the Pope declared that today’s Jews were not personally responsible for the death of Jesus. I never thought I was, but found the pardon at least too long delayed.

That was my trauma. These scars don’t heal.

Now we have a new round of trauma against children. Over three thousand immigrant children have been forcibly taken from their parents and sent off to unknown foster homes while their parents are deported and may never return. This inhumane treatment of children, like the post World War II expulsion of ethnic Germans from previously occupied countries, will cause a lifetime of trauma. How many new Lonis has our government created?

This is not the kind of trauma that can be undone. When will we ever learn?

An image of God

1754god

July 2, 2018

God

By

Harley L. Sachs

The Bible says that God created man in his own image. I think it’s the other way around: man created god in his own image.  I once wrote a poem about a cod fish who decided that God was a cod. Why not?

As for our own mage, we have many. We are pictured in color, 3d, black and white, x-ray, and negative. Our shadows are also our images. A child might draw us as a stick figure. So which is true? Is any in God’s image?  Or are all of them? Or none?

Carl Sagan said we are the stuff the stars are made of. This is true. Every cell of our bodies contains our DNA, the blueprint for ourselves as a whole. But the DNA is made up of molecules and those are made of atoms. The laws of physics that determine those atoms are the same as those that constitute the universe. Our bodies are a manifestation of that formula. We are part of it.

 We are not constant. We are always changing. Every seven years our skin, the largest organ of our bodies, is replaced, flaking off as dander and renewed. Seen in rapid motion, our ephemeral nature would be obvious. Nothing lasts.

Physicists will point out that we are not even solid. There is space between the parts of the atoms. Cosmic rays pass right through.

Life began when molecules hooked up and reproduced, the beginning of evolution as we understand it. Eventually, here we are! The human form is a temporary coalescence of the universe’s atoms and molecules. We may die but nothing is destroyed; the atoms persist. We are truly what the stars are made of.

So where is God in all this?

God does not look like a man or a codfish. What we might call God is invisible, but it can be expressed, described not in the face of a human being or a fish, or a crucified Jew, but as a formula. Einstein broke it down into his unified field theory. E equals MC squared was an expression of energy.

The laws that Einstein expressed with chalk on a blackboard are an image of the forces that are the universe. Those forces of creation and evolution include us. We are part of it, so in that sense we are a part of God. It is the god in us.

Arthur Koestler saw this as the oceanic sense. He spoke of it in Copenhagen when I was a student there. He also wrote about it in his novel Darkness at Noon.

You can experience it yourself.

Aboard a boat at night when there is no human light pollution the stars feel so close you might reach out and touch them. When the motion of the boat defies gravity, you can feel like you are flying off into the universe. You sense that you are part of it, able spiritually to travel disemboried to distant stars.

If it must have a name that oceanic sense is the awareness of God. It is the awareness of being that transcends the body.

For me, that’s “God,” not a bearded sage or a fructicious goddess. Not a power that can be invoked through prayer to intervene in your sea of troubles. Compared with the powers of the universe, our pettiness has no consequence. With such an awareness, we can achieve serenity, the rapture.

That’s my personal path to “God.” Kabala is another. All have the same destination in mind, though for some who depend on human images, it looks like a crucified Jew. As the Shema states, “Hear o Israel, the Lord our God is one.” It is all one, even expressed in Einstein’s chalky symbols on a blackboard.

Are those blackboard scratchings an image of God? See them as a stick figure representation, like a child’s drawing of a person, but we recognize it. We can look at it and say “Yes!”

Jesse Bram and the Power of Myth

1754bram-myth

2018-06-24

Jesse Bram and Campbell’s Myth

By

Harley L. Sachs

Many of my stories begin with the question, “What if?” In The Mystery Club Solves a Murder, it’s “What if a body is found on the roof of the Rose Plaza?” In Stoprape.com it”s “What if the victim of a military rape gets revenge by putting up a web side with the perp’s picture and address? In White Slave, “What if Sutherland who fell off the yacht Miss Chief didn’t die?”Then there’s The Search for Jesse Bram. with the question “What if a space alien cadet is marooned on the planet URth?”

The Jesse Bram story has an ambiguous title. It is a search for the missing cadet and also Jesse’s search for his own identity. Inadvertently this science fiction saga fits into Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth. It is said there are only three plots for a story: boy meets girl (all love story variations), the Brave Little Tailor (a weakling slays the giant, dragon or whatever), and the man who learned better, as in Hamlet. Campbell defines them differently. Slaying the dragon is about conquering one’s self. The quest is the search for the Holy Grail. In the Jesse Bram story there are two parallel threads: find Jesse and Jesse finds out who he really is. There is also a love story, Jesse caught between his alien lover and the lovely URthling who helps him survive the atmosphere of a polluted URth.  Like many quests, cf Ulysses, Jesse encounters three temptations: the half breed caretaker of the life station and his voluptuous female, the crypto Christians who believe Jesse is Christ incarnate, and the crypto Jews who have the key to his identity. It all comes together in the climax when the searchers find him and he escapes the throng of cannibals who want to eat him to achieve salvation.

I named the main character Jesse, a variation of Jesus, and Bram. As in many of my books, Bram is a family name as I wish to keep the names of family alive if only in my books. 

In light of Campbell’s lecture on universal myths, I suspect that myth, like the life force in the earth, emerges in whatever soil it is found. Myth is a subconscious manifestation of forces that permeate our lives. It is in the nature of story telling itself. Myth is fundamental.

Bliss

1753bliss/

June 22, 2018-06-22

Bliss

By

Harley L. Sachs

When I taught at Michigan Technological University by the time the end of term came I was tired and ready for vacation. I didn’t care for attending Commencement with the tedious reading of the names of all the graduates, but on one occasion when I did go, something remarkable happened.

They were giving out the usual honorary degrees. One recipient was not scheduled to speak, but when asked if he had something to say, did. His story was an inspiration.

He had been an English foreign student, member of the fraternity down in Chassell. One of his fraternity brothers said when they graduated he was going back to Mexico to make a revolution. Would our speaker want to come along?

In those days graduates from wealthy families would make the Grand Tour, a chance for young men to see the world and sow some wild oats before returning to the firm or the estate and serious life. Our speaker wrote his father and asked if, instead of doing the Grand Tour, could he use the money to go to Mexico and make a revolution. Why not?

It’s now history. He and his two partners did make a revolution and took over Mexico. They were partners in a ranch, but when World War I intervened. he had to go back to England.

When the war ended and he returned to Mexico he discovered that his partners had been faithful. His third of their joint venture had made him rich.

He went on to success in business and philanthropy. It had all begun in Chassell, Michigan.

He had three bits of advice for our graduates: 1) Don’t worry about the money; it will come. 2) make other people happy, for their happiness comes back to you many times over. 3) follow your bliss.

Your bliss is what you really most want to do in life. It is what makes you happy and fulfilled.

For me, my bliss is to tell stories whether to a live audience or written down and published. Though I did bits and pieces of that while earning a living, I did not get to fulfill that bliss until I took early retirement. Since then I have published at least one book a year and I now read/perform my stories for live audiences.

Everyone’s bliss in what gives them joy, whether music, gardening, writing, or whatever. You must decide what your bliss is. Follow it. It is the key to your fulfillment and happiness.

Tits

1752tits/486 words

June 8, 2018

Tits

by

 Harley L. Sachs

A warning to the squeamish or faint of heart: this story may freak you out.

It’s a fact. As men grow older, besides developing a pot belly and watching your Adonis figure sag and your dingus droop, you are also going to discover that your prostate enlarges.  Nature has what appears to be a design flaw: the urethra passes through the prostate. As the prostate grows, it infringes on the urethra. Result? It may get difficult to pee. If you can’t pee at all, it time for an emergency cathartization and maybe a terp, which is a reaming out of that passage.

Side effects of a terp are bleeding, infection and incontinence. None of these sound like much fun.

An alternative is a medicine to shrink the prostate, a female hormone like estrogen. Finasteride is a powerful hormone pill so effective that a woman of child bearing age should not even touch one of those powerful little blue pills. Finasteride shrinks the prostate and takes the pressure off the urethra. You can pee again.

But it has, like all medicines, at least one side effect. Besides becoming impotent and sterile without the seminal fluid the prostate produces, the female hormone leads to what is modestly called false breasts. You grow tits.

When I first started taking that hormone I had a slight discharge from one of my nipples. For a moment I thought I’d get into the Guiness Book of Records as a male wet nurse. Didn’t happen. But I did develop some nice boobs that would be the envy of some flat chested girls.

I rationalized, I always liked boobs. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t nursed, just bottle fed as a baby. I missed out. Some man like bottoms, others, legs. I’m a boob guy.

Adolescent New York boys had the expression “to cop a feel.” I don’t have to be sneaky in a crowded subway to do that. Now I have my own!

It’s amazing.

This a side effect I can enjoy.

I mean, why risk getting slapped on the subway or charged with sexual mischief like Al Franken, Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein? I have my own boobs to cop.

It’s like a new age of discovery. The late Philip Roth built his literary career on masturbation, grossed me out. I wonder what he would have done with boobs. Maybe made a study of implants, nips and tucks like Dolly Pardon.

With me it’s not a silicone fake. My situation is not the first stage of a sex change. I’ve no impulse toward being trans or cross dressing, but it is an odd feeling, like maybe puberty, bewildering and even awesome. I never expected this benefit of old age. Sure beats incontinence. Shakespeare wrote about old age  sans teeth, sans hair. Who says growing old is always about losses.

Tits! A bonus! Remarkable.

Circumcision and the Blood Libel

1751bloodlibel /490  words

May 28, 2018

Circumcision and the Blood Libel

By

Harley L. Sachs

An open letter to all Icelanders:

There are often people who want to tell others how they should practice their religion. A case in point is the attempt in Iceland to ban circumcision, allegedly as a cruel and unnecessary operation. The real reason is likely Icelanders’ fear of Moslems taking over their country and polluting the well-regulated gene pool.

The claim is a baby has no ability to choose whether or not to be circumcised.  But neither has a baby a choice to be baptized in the Christian faith. The parents choose.

Circumcision is a widely practiced ritual performed not only by Jews and Moslems but by other cultures where it is a puberty rite. Besides serving religious and cultural traditions, circumcision is healthy, a preventive in the transmission of AIDS and other diseases.

When it comes to banning religious rituals, turnabout is fair play. Consider the Blood Libel. The earliest incidence I know is Hugh of Lincoln, mentioned in Chaucer’s The Prioress’s Tale. Hugh of Lincoln was a child found murdered and drained of blood. The claim was he was killed by Jews so they could use his blood in the making of matzos, the unleavened bread used in the Passover Seder. Presumably Chaucer did not know that the Jewish laws of Kashrut forbid the eating of blood. Kosher slaughter of animals  requires that no blood remains as “the blood is the life.” Jews do not eat blood pudding, blood sausage, or any food that includes blood. Who does?

The essence of Christianity is the human sacrifice of the Jew Jesus as the sole son of God who “died for your sins.” By partaking in the Eucharist, Christians  accept the Jew Jesus as their Christ Savior.

In the Eucharist participants drink “the blood of Christ” and eat “the body of Christ” a ritual reminiscent of what a tribal warrior might do when eating the heart or liver of a brave victim to acquire that person’s courage. It’s an act of cannibalism sublimated into a sip of wine and a wafer.

Bur what if, like those hysterical reactors to the Hugh of Lincoln story, Jews went berserk, rioted, and burned down churches because Christians were drinking Jewish blood and eating Jewish flesh to gain salvation? The priest solemnly offers the chalice with “the blood of Christ” and a wafer “the body of Christ.” I was there. I heard it.

It seems incredible that to drink the blood of a sacrificed Jew and eat his flesh is a way to Salvation but that is what Christians believe.

After all, how do we know it’s not just wine in that goblet but really the blood of some murdered Jew? Maybe this practice should be banned along with cannibalism.  It would prevent gullible, hysterical Jews from running amok.

We may be in the 21st Century, but atheists and agnostics notwithstanding,  ancient rituals like circumcision and symbolic cannibalism still persist.