danceblogger Uncategorized

La Peste — au sens Camusian du mot — c’est Le Pen

(English-language readers: Click the Google translation button at the right.)

Avec remerciements au Ralph Saski et au Myra Kopf. — Paul Ben-Itzak

“Il est aussi raisonnable de représenter une espèce d’emprisonnement par une autre que de représenter n’importe quelle chose qui existe réellement par quelque chose qui n’existe pas.”

— Daniel de Foe, cité par Albert Camus dans “La Peste,” copyright 1947 Gallimard

“Ecoutant, en effet, les cris d’allégresse qui montaient de la ville, Rieux se souvenait que cette allégresse était toujours menacée. Car il savait ce que cette foule en joie ignorait, et qu’on peut lire dans les livres, que le bacille de la peste ne meurt ni ne disparait jamais, qu’il peut rester pendant des dizaines d’années endormi dans les meubles et le linge, qu’il attend patiemment dans les chambres, les caves, les malles, les mouchoirs et les paperasses, et que, peut-être, le jour viendrait ou, par le malheur et l’enseignement des hommes, la peste réveillerait ses rats et les enverrait mourir dans une cite heureuse.”

— Albert Camus, “La Peste.”

“Vote party.”*

— Eileen Darby

*Voter parti.

danceblogger Ukraine, Uncategorized

(updated, 11 mars/march) The Chevalier de la Barre: Different Strokes: Are Ukrainian refugees being treated differently because they’re White? And other questions of identification

by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2022 Paul Ben-Itzak

“I had a great life, and I’m ready to finish.”

–Anastasia, 28, a singer patrolling Kiev, Kalashnikov in hand, interviewed earlier this week by Radio France chain France Inter.

SAINT-CYPRIEN, France (Dordogne) — For a quarter of a century, the criterium of this column for venturing beyond the cultural realm has always been whether the attention being paid to a particular subject in the general media seems to be scanty or non-existent. This time these questions revolve around race, principally whether White, largely Christian, European refugees are being treated differently today than Black and Brown refugees have been treated for the past eight years. (For the case at hand, by and in Europe, but the question could easily be extended to the United States, where Haitian migrants were recently corralled like cattle in a Fort Worth quarter-horse competition by horse-bound Texan border guards and Brown-skinned migrants have been habitually separated from their children.) First, though, I think it’s relevant to describe some of the atrocities the Russian army has been perpetrating on a civilian population for two weeks now, as this is the principal engine which has driven more than 2 million Ukrainians to flee their homeland, a figure which doesn’t take into account millions more internally displaced persons. An additional ten million are either too old or too handicapped to flee.

On Wednesday, Russian forces bombed a children’s hospital in the besieged port city of Mariupol, killing three people, including a young girl, and injuring 17 others, according to the World Health Organization the 19th health organization they have attacked. Because of attacks on the power grid, most of the country’s hospitals are unable to treat people anymore.

Also yesterday, the power reportedly went off for a short period in the disabled Chernobyl nuclear plant (they switched to generators) where managers are now working at the point of Russian guns.

Most of the following incidents and interviews have been recorded by the courageous reporters of Radio France, as audited over its France Inter chain. (Reporting from Russia has diminished since the government decreed any reporting not to its liking — my term — might get you 15 years in prison, and closed down the remaining independent television chains. At least 4600 Russians have been arrested for protesting the invasion.)

On Tuesday, Russian soldiers killed at least 21 civilians, including at least two babies. Another child died of thirst while stuck in a destroyed building. (The mayor of Mariupol claims 1200 civilians have been killed.)

The Russians have also repeatedly bombed civilian safe conduct or exit corridors to which they’d previously agreed, according, notably, to Mariupol’s mayor, who said Wednesday that of the 200,000 civilians endangered, he is only able to get out 6,000 daily.

After Russian president Vladimir Putin earlier offered supposed safe conduct corridors which would allow civilians to flee … to Russia or its vassal Belorussia, French president Emmanuel Macron — who during this crisis has exemplified the justly vaunted French tradition of diplomacy, always willing to talk to Putin — rightly denounced the Russian president’s “moral and political cynicism. I don’t know many Ukrainians who have the desire to take refuge in Russia; it’s a hypocrisy.”

“Everyone here is ready to die,” Elena, an English professor patrolling the streets of Kiev with her Kalashnikov, told Radio France earlier this week.

“I had a great life, and I’m ready to finish,” Anastasia, a singer also patrolling Kiev, declared. Anastasia is 28.

At the beginning of the week, the Russians bombed an industrial boulangerie, killing 13 civilians.

On Thursday in Odessa, a young mother of 19 was killed by the Russians while running across a street to retrieve her 6-month old baby in their home.

As more and more pharmacies in Kiev have closed or run out of supplies — as of this morning, Russian troops were 15 kilometers from the Ukrainian capitol — insulin is difficult to find. A woman named Titania was out Tuesday looking for heart medicine for her 85-year-old mother, who has had three heart attacks. When one person in line outside a drugstore said he was looking for “calmants to be able to sleep” among the rocket fire, another suggested, “If you have trouble sleeping, try reading Marx’s ‘Das Kapital.'”

A resident of Kharkov named Olga told France Inter: “They fire on women, children, residential buildings, houses, hospitals, lines of people waiting for water… It’s an attack on a civilian population. The Russians who have been captured say they came here to kill people.”

(Some of the most poignantly telling witnessing — and radio producing — has come from Ukrainians in Kiev, on the road in flight from Kiev, and elsewhere, whom France Inter producer Caroline Gillet asked to record their daily lives on their cell phones, with, importantly, no intervention by a reporter. This kind of raw, unfiltered and unedited testimony — Gillet does not just select the most dramatic soundbytes, nor does she edit out background sounds like babies chattering in the back of a fleeing car, the effect being that these sound like friends making us homespun tape-recordings — is not frequent in French public radio journalism, which sometimes sounds like a pastiche of soundbytes, the reporter seemingly more interested in hearing his own voice than exposing his listener to the voice of the news source. (It may be the same on American mainstream radio, but this is what I listen to.))

(There was also this inspiring interlude yesterday morning, reported last night by Inter: The Kiev Classical Orchestra organizing a 15-minute concert on the Place Maidon, playing the “Hymn to Joy,” its director explaining the importance of maintaining culture and that “Music stops war.”)

This is the war Putin practiced for in Chechnya.

It’s the war he perpetrated on Syria. (Interviewed on France Inter Wednesday morning, former president Francois Holland blamed Barack Obama for drawing a line in Syria in 2014… and then moving it back.)

Justement, Syria.

The author (right) and his brother with their great grand-mother, Sarah Nemovitch Winer, born in Kiev in 1886, in Miami, Florida, in July 1964.

Yesterday I Facebook chatted with an American relative. I was trying to get the low-down on the origins of my grandma on my mother’s side Shirley Wise, specifically to confirm that she was born in Odessa, Ukraine, about 115 years ago. (Which could make me 50 percent Ukrainian, depending on whether one considers that the Ukrainian capital was Ukrainian or Russian when my great-grandmother Sarah, on my Dad’s side — that’s her in the photograph with my brother and me — was born there in 1886. The best my French encyclopedias can come up with is that both are true: Kiev has been the capital of Ukraine for about 1200 years, but Ukraine has been the property of Russia for most of that time, including when my great-grandmother Sarah Nemovitch was born and up to the end of the second World War, when a Ukrainian independence movement, lead by the anarchist Nestor Makhno and others, broke out against the tsarist, white, and red Russian armies.) He was able to confirm that Shirley’s parents Isaac and Eva (my mom’s name), my great-grandparents, were born in this most cosmopolitan (and Russophone, to further complicate things) of Ukrainian cities. As a principal seaport, Odessa may be — according to Ukrainian president Zelensky– the Russians’ next target. My relative (I’m not using his name because this was a private discussion) in turn had two questions for me:

** What about Putin’s claim that he wants to ‘deNazify’ Ukraine (my relative didn’t put it exactly this way)? And which supposition seems to contradict President Zelensky’s being Jewish. (Or as a France Inter news anchor put it Wednesday morning, “of Jewish origin (race)” — bizarre for a French journalist, given that the general rule here since 74,000 Jews were deported from France during the Occupation, regardless of whether they were practicing Jews, for being Jewish, including the Kiev-born novelist Irene Nemirovsky, is to avoid describing being Jewish as a race.)

** What about reports that (legal) Black (or African) Ukrainian residents seeking refuge are not being treated the same as white Ukrainians (by either Ukrainian or Polish officials)?

For the first question, before Wednesday morning I would have said that French media having pooh-pooh’d Putin’s claims as so ludicrous they’re not worth investigating, what I know I know from the American news program Democracy Now, which has noted the existence of extreme right-wing paramilitary groups in Ukraine with Nazi leanings. But on Wednesday, for an extraordinary (if, helas, all-too-brief) segment on France Inter about the current Jewish population of Odessa (30,000 to 50,000), half of whom are fleeing, the courageous correspondent interviewed a rabbi at one of the city’s four remaining synagogues who claimed that the city’s recently elected governor had fought with right-wing militias in the Donbas region in 2014 (against what has been described as “Russian separatists,” supported by Putin), and that these groups were associated with neo-Nazi elements.

This does not mean, however, that Putin has any credibility when it comes to calling out supposed Nazis. Last week, his forces bombed the memorial in Baba Yar, where 30,000 Jews were killed in September 1941, prompting President Zelensky to point out that anyone who pretends to know Ukraine’s history — and be concerned about Nazis — would not have done this.

** Answering the race, or potential racism question, particularly when it comes to comparing the reception in Europe for refugees from various wars and economic travails from countries across the Middle East and Africa since 2015 and that accorded to the Ukrainians is, as the French like to say, “complicated.” (For the immediate question posed by my relative — whether legal residents in Ukraine from African countries or of any non-white color fleeing Ukraine are being treated differently than white Ukrainian refugees — I suggest listening to this eye-witness testimony broadcast on Democracy Now. )

On Wednesday, Robert Menard, the mayor of the Southwestern French city of Beziers, a frequent alley of the extreme right wing National Front (officially re-dubbed the “Front for National Assembling” several years ago), and the former director of Reporters Without Borders, delivered an extraordinary mea culpa (or maybe not so extraordinary, when one recalls that Menard once protested the welcoming of a Chinese premiere in Paris by climbing up the Eiffel Tower and hoisting a protest banner where it was sure to be seen along the welcoming parade route).

“I plead guilty,” Menard said on France Inter. “I said, wrote, and published a certain number of things during the time of the combats in Syria and Iraq and the arrival of refugees (from those countries) that I regret. It was a fault. Because there are not two sorts of refugees, European Christians on the one side and refugees from the Middle-East on the other. I was wrong. We need to protect both.” (On the French ‘excuse’ scale, ‘fault’ is as strong as it gets.)

On the other hand, in the Channel port city of Calais, where thousands of refugees have set up impromptu camps for years in the hopes of crossing to Britain, the contrast was jarring: Where, as one French militant claimed, some of these camps have been razed 21 times in recent years by the authorities — and French associations are even prohibited by law, she said, from distributing food and water at the points where these migrants from Afghanistan and elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East congregate — Ukrainian refugees who have been turned back from the UK in recent days because (!) they didn’t have visas are being put up in hotels while their cases are sorted out. (In fairness, here it needs to be highlighted that these African and Middle-Eastern migrants are not seeking refuge or political asylum in France — which theoretically would enable them to enter that process — despite French government encouragement to do so, but want to go to the U.K., which doesn’t want them. So a) France has been saddled with a problem that is the U.K.’s responsibility, and b) the government really doesn’t have the option of sending them to refugee centers to be processed, because this offer, and even housing, is usually refused, the refugees finding their way back to Calais.)

Last year, after the bodies of 27 migrants attempting to make an illegal crossing were found in the Channel waters, a survivor claimed that their telephoned pleas to both French and British coast-guards had gone unheeded, both essentially telling them they were in the other’s waters.

And Poland, which has admitted one million Ukrainian refugees so far, last year reacted to Belorussia’s trying to unload (‘unload’ because in Belorussia’s eyes they were a weapon) 5,000 Black and Brown refugees on the country by turning their hoses on the migrants and building a wall in record time to rival Trump’s. (Some local Poles living in the border region did Yeoman’s work to welcome and hide the migrants.)

And at least three of the 12 candidates in France’s upcoming presidential election have been fear-mongering around Muslims and/or what the least extreme of these candidates calls “out of control immigration.”

On Tuesday, there was even the irony of the (otherwise admirable and commendable, particularly on his outstanding handling of the Covid crisis) French prime minister choosing the Porte de la Chapelle in Northern Paris to welcome Ukrainian refugees (some 7,000 of whom have so far fled to France) — the same Porte de la Chapelle were migrant camps have been repeatedly raised in recent years (albeit for sound, health and safety reasons, with the State doing its best to relocate them to housing or indoor migrant centers). The same Porte de la Chapelle where local residents have pleaded for years with authorities to do something about the camps of crack addicts besides moving them to neighboring towns.

All this said, it needs to be pointed out — to ‘demine’ the question, as it were — that, whatever the prejudices of some East European countries and some fear-mongering politicians may be against migrants of color, the comparatively enthusiastic welcome Ukrainian refugees have received (often being offered work papers right away) is not because they’re white and Christian.

It’s because — and unlike the vast majority of the refugees who have sought sanctuary or better economic opportunities in Europe since 2014 — they are European.

Vlad the Impaler’s attack on Ukraine is an attack on Europe, and on the model of Democracy it treasures.

The rare unanimity of the European Union’s 27 member states over economic sanctions and Defense measures to aid Ukraine makes this sentiment clear.

The overwhelming generosity — not because the refugees are white or Christian but because they are European — of the material and sentimental response from ordinary citizens here in France and across Europe makes this clear.

I feel this identification viscerally myself.

I have spent the better part of the past 21 years in France.

I love French literature.

I love French art.

I love certain epochs of French cinema.

I love the variety of political perspectives and choice we are exposed to here, even on the mainstream media. (Those 12 presidential candidates — who run the gamut from what’s described here as the extreme right to the extreme left, the latter including three Communist-oriented parties — are guaranteed by French law equal access to the media. In the U.S., by contrast, all but the Republican and Democratic candidates are blocked out, with even Democratic senators and cabinet officials, usually of color, excluded from some of the 2020 primary debates because they hadn’t raised enough money.)

I am a predominantly French cook.

I usually have an easy initial rapport, and chemistry, with French women.

I share the French sense of humor. (Even if they often don’t get irony.) (Kidding!)

As a translator, I have put myself in the head, thought, feelings, politics, poetic sentiments, perspectives, life stories and trajectories, and allegiances of French writers and thinkers, female and male.

And yet I have never felt particularly “French.”

Like many French (more than half of whom voted against an amendment to the E.U. constitution in 2005), prior to this crisis I had my issues with the E.U. bureaucracy (or “Brussels” as it’s often referred to by its detractors). If in theory Robert Schumann’s dream of a united Europe was fueled by the desire to prevent another European war, in practice it has often seemed more to be a means to allow European capitalists to better compete with American capitalists.

An over-abundance of E.U. regulations has made it hard for many, particularly farmers, to eke out a living. (There have even been those, over-burdened by environmental regulations expensive to apply, who have committed suicide.)

And yet this crisis, which has finally united Europe over the issue of Defense — as uncomfortable as it might be for a pacifist weaned on the anti-War marches of San Francisco in the Sixties to admit this — has made me finally feel like I am a European.

While it also incited me to investigate my own Ukrainian roots, these roots aren’t why I feel European; it’s more like I feel I need them to demonstrate to others (not that they’ve demanded this) that I have standing, or street cred., on this question. (A passing sentiment that it might seem absurd for a Jew whose ancestors were hounded out
of Ukraine by pogroms to feel a specific fidelity to that country was somewhat reassured by reading Isaac Babel’s stories of an Odessa Jew with at that point Bolshevik allegiances — Babel — joining a Cossack regiment invading Poland and in which the narrator’s stereotypical descriptions of some of the Jews he comes across in the occupied Polish villages, except the rabbis, sometimes rival Maupassant’s.)

danceblogger Uncategorized

Can art save our souls?: “BombIng” by Saul Steinberg

Overnight the Russians bombed another residential area in Ukraine and killed, according to Ukrainian authorities, 47 civilians…. The previous night they hit the administration building of the largest nuclear reactor in Europe, and kept firemen from putting out the flames for an hour. Today a civilian in a suburb outside Kiev told French public radio about shrapnel from a bomb hitting a neighbor’s apartment and killing his child — not the first child they have killed. Putin and his forces have been bombing schools and — just as they or their proxies did in Syria — hospitals. They have bombed the site of the worse massacre of Ukrainian Jews during World War II. Art won’t save these civilians — ne soyez pas dupe — but it is all I can think of to salve my soul in the face of this feudal resurgence of national nihilism. Art by Saul Steinberg from the Arts Voyager Archives and the Art Institute of Chicago exhibition. — PB-I

danceblogger Uncategorized

Danger zones: Art and poetry by Gregory Corso

Manuscript of poetry by Gregory Corso. From the Arts Voyager Archive and the 2016 Beat Generation exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Bomb

by Gregory Corso
Copyright Gregory Corso

Bomb,
You are as cruel as man makes you
and you’re no crueler than cancer.
All man hates you.
They’d rather die by
car crash
lightning
drowning
falling off a roof
electric chair
heart attack
old age
old age.
Oh bomb,
they’d rather die by anything but you.
Death’s finger is freelance;
not up to man whether you boom or not.
Death has long since distributed
its categorical blue.


danceblogger Uncategorized

Légendes de lA Makhnovtchina: Ou comment un anarchiste Ukrainien peut sert comme modèle pour la Resistance Ukrainien d’aujourd’hui / Legends of the Makhnovtchina: Or how a Ukrainian anarchist provides a model for the Ukrainian resistance of today (English translation follows original French version of Michel Ragon’s text.)

Texte par / by Michel Ragon et copyright Albin Michel 2008
Translation and introduction by Paul Ben-Itzak

Si on a décidé de partager aujourd’hui cette extrait de la “Dictionnaire de l’Anarchie” de Michel Ragon (Copyright Editions Albin Michel, Paris, 2008), ce n’est pas car en aucun sens on adhère ni aux idées anti-Etatiste ou, surtout, les méthodes ou tactiques violentes de Nestor Makhno (ceci dit sans aucun constate sur ses idées et pratiques; on n’est pas experte au sujet de Nestor Makhno) — ni l’un ni l’autre est le cas. C’est plutôt car dans son histoire, comme raconté par feu Michel Ragon — qui a aussi écrit sur Nestor Makhno dans son roman historique “La Mémoire des vaincus” — surtout son face à face avec (à la fois!) l’armée Blanche et l’armée Rouge de Trotski — il y’a en a de quoi inspirer une nouvelle génération des Ukrainiens et qui, encore une fois, sont en train de lutter pour leur propre existence face a un surpuissant pouvoir Russe. Et car le fait même qu’il s’est battu pour l’Independence d’Ukraine il y déjà plus de 100 ans de ca contrarié le mensonge de Vladimir Putin que l’Ukraine été une invention des Bolchevicks; au contraire! — Paul Ben-Itzak

Makhno, Nestor

Fils de paysans ukrainiens misêrables, il est d’abord apprenti dans une fonderie, puis aide d’un marchand de vins. Dès 1906, il prend contact avec un groupe d’anarchistes-communistes paysans à Goulaiaïa-Polié. L’année suivante, à dix-huit ans, il commence une vie de clandestinité terroriste. Arrêtê, torturé, il est condamné à mort en 1910, peine commuée en travaux forcés à perpétuité. Transféré à la célèbre prison Boutirky, à Moscou, il y rencontre Archinov, qui lui fera découvrir la littérature illégale introduite frauduleusement. C’est en prison que Makhno fera son éducation politique. Il retient de Bakounine : «La passion de la destruction est une passion créatrice.»

En 1917, la révolution le libéré après six années de réclusion. De retour en Ukraine, il récuse le mouvement autonomiste. Contrairement aux accusations bolchevistes, qui considéraient la paysannerie comme incurablement réactionnaire et petite-bourgeoise, Makhno ne croit qu’en l’insurrection des paysans attachés à leur commune et à un mouvement révolutionnaire autonome de la paysannerie.

À peine revenu de prison, il fonde l’Association paysanne de Goulaiaïa-Polié, préconise l’abolition de l’État et de tous les partis politiques. Il exproprie les grandes propriétés terriennes, chasse les patrons de leurs usines et fonde des communes agricoles.

Son pouvoir est très vite contesté par Petrograd, hostile au séparatisme ukrainien. Archinov, qui est venu le rejoindre, lui conseille de rendre visite à Kropotkine, revenu en Russie. Mais celui-ci ne lui fixe aucun programme. Il décide alors de discuter avec Lénine, qui le reçoit au Kremlin pendant une heure et cherche à le dissuader de suivre la voie libertaire. «Les anarchistes, lui dit-il, sont pleins d’abnégation, ils sont prêts à tous les sacrifices, mais, fanatiques et aveugles, ils ignorent le présent pour ne penser qu’au lointain avenir […]. Je vous considère, camarade, comme un homme ayant le sens des réalités et des nécessités de notre époque. S’il y avait en Russie ne fût-ce qu’un tiers d’anarchistes tels que vous, nous, communistes, serions prêts à marcher avec eux.» Makhno proteste : «Vos bolcheviks n’existent pour ainsi dire pas dans nos campagnes. Presque toutes les communes ou associations paysannes en Ukraine ont été formées à l’instigation des anarchistes-communistes.»

Au printemps 1918, Makhno déclenche la révolte paysanne d’Ukraine. Il attaque les postes militaires des occupants allemands et austro-hongrois, les grandes propriétés agricoles, les fermes des koulaks. Ses cavaliers créent la surprise par leur rapidité, dans la tradition des cosaques.

En octobre 1918, Goulaiaïa-Polié est libéré. Les officiers autrichiens faits prisonniers sont exécutés, les soldats épargnés se joignent aux troupes de Makhno, mais, le 6 février 1919, l’Armée rouge entre à Kiev. Makhno, avec ses drapeaux noirs, se retire dans le sud.

À l’automne 1918, le journal activiste “Nabat” (Le Tocsin), considérant que la révolution en Ukraine peut rapidement devenir anarchiste, établit ses centres à Odessa. Archinov, Aaron Baron, et Voline, éminents théoriciens anarchistes, rejoignent Makhno en se chargeant de la propagande et de l’éducation. Toute fois, et quelle que fût l’amitié que lui portèrent Voline et Archinov jusqu’à la fin de sa vie, dans l’exil, Makhno éprouvera toujours de la méfiance, voire de la jalousie, pour les intellectuels anarchistes.

Au printemps 1919, celui que les paysans insurgées appellent “Batko” (Petit Père) a réuni une troupe de vingt mille combattants. Mais l’armée insurgée d’Ukraine doit combattre à la fois les troupes tsaristes de Denikine et l’Armée rouge de Trotski. Devant le danger que représente Denikine, Trotski signe un pacte d’action militaire commune entre son armée et celle de Makhno.

Le courage inouï de Makhno, qui se charge de toutes les actions dangereuses, a été souligné par tous les historiens. «Il semblait, écrira plus tard Archinov, que cet homme de petite stature fût bâti d’éléments particulièrement tenaces. Il ne reculait jamais devant aucun obstacle […]. Son calme tenait du prodige. Il ne faisait aucune attention ni aux milliers de projectiles qui décimaient les troupes des insurgées, ni au danger imminent d’être écrasé à chaque instant par les lourdes armées rouges.» Sa technique : la vitesse et la surprise. L’infanterie sur chariot suit la cavalerie.

Après la victoire commune des troupes bolcheviques et anarchistes contre l’armée blanche anéantie, Vorochilov ordonne à Makhno de porter désormais son offensive contre la Pologne. Makhno comprendre la piège, qui consiste à faire sortir les insurgées ukrainiens de leur repaire. Il refuse. Il n’a d’ailleurs pas d’ordre à recevoir d’un général bolchevique.

En janvier 1920, le parti communiste déclare Makhno et ses partisans hors-de-loi. Suivront huit mois de batailles acharnées entre rouges et noirs. Le 25 novembre, Trotski invite les principaux chefs makhnovistes à une réunion de conciliation en Crimée. C’est un piège. Tous sont arrêtés et fusillés, et la cavalerie de Crimée est anéantie.

Ordre est donné a toutes les unités de la Makhnovtchina d’intégrer l’Armée rouge. Makhno se retrouve avec deux cents cavaliers à Goulaiaïa-Polié. Il évite l’encerclement de l’Armée rouge et, pendant huit mois, traqué, dans l’hiver rigoureux, abandonne peu à peu son artillerie, ses chariots et ses réserves de vivres. Grièvement blessé, il est transporté par ses troupes dans une carriole. Le 13 avril, avec les cent cavaliers qui ont survécu, il passe le Dniester et se refuge en Bessarabie.

Dans l’exile, la vie de Makhno sera désormais celle d’un vaincu, d’un malade, affaibli par nombre des blessures. Au printemps de 1922, il s’échappe de Roumanie et entre en Pologne. Le gouvernement soviétique, qui a condamné a mort Makhno par contumace, demande son extradition. Les organisations anarchistes internationales lui obtiennent un visa pour Berlin, où il retrouve Voline. En 1924, Voline, qui a émigré en France, y prépare le transfert de Makhno.

Les anarchistes françaises l’accueillent avec enthousiasme. Mais tout le monde est surpris par sa déchéance physique. Parmi les réfugiés russes dans la capitale, Makhno est par ailleurs un maudit. Maudit par les réfugiés russes blancs qui l’accusent de tous les forfaits. Maudit par le parti communiste et ses nombreux sympathisants. Face au succès de la révolution bolchevique, il apparait comme un contre-révolutionnaire.

Avec sa femme Galina et leur fille Lucia, il habite une seule pièce d’un appartement situé rue Diderot, où Archinov et sa famille sont également installés. Archinov et lui gagnent péniblement leur vie à fabriquer les chaussures. Puis il devient manœuvre aux usines Renault, à Billancourt.

Un roman de Kessel, “Makhno et sa juive,” lui redonne à Paris célébrité sulfureuse. Le livre accuse notamment Makhno d’antisémitisme. Dans L’Humanité, Henri Barbusse écrit: «Ce livre relate les hauts faits sanglants du chef de bande Makhno, voleur et assassin de paisibles populations, qui commit avec un sadisme fou les plus abominables attentats et qui, parait-il, se prélase en ce moment chez nous, après avoir eu la chance d’échapper à l’Armée rouge.»

«Se prélasse»… Alors que Makhno vit un exil atroce, solitaire, désespéré, parlant mal le français, abandonné par sa femme. Sa légende effraie nombre de libertaires, heurtés par la violence de sa révolte. Toutefois, bien que pacifiste intégral, Louis Lecoin intervient auprès du préfet de police pour éviter l’expulsion de Makhno.

Devenu à la fois un mythe et un clochard, Makhno jalouse Voline qui s’est fait l’historien de la Makhnovtchina. Il ne réussit à survivre que par le comité fondé par “Le Libertaire” afin de lui assurer quelques ressources. Le 15 juin 1931, salle Lancry, les anarchistes français organisent une «grande fête de solidarité» pour Makhno.

Le 16 mars 1934, handicapé par ses blessures de guerre, il entre comme indigent à l’hôpital Tenon et y meurt tuberculeux.

En 1926, Makhno avait publié sa biographie en feuilleton dans “Le Libertaire.” En 1984, Alexandre Skirda traduisit et réunit des écrits de Makhno, de 1925 à 1932 : “La Lutte contre l’État et autres écrits.”

La première biographie de Makhno a été publié par Malcolm Menzies: “Makhno, une épopée” (1972). L’ouvrage capital sur la Makhnovitchina est “La Révolution inconnue” de Voline (1969 et 1986). Alexandra Skirda (né en 1942) est certainement le meilleure spécialiste et traducteur de l’épopée de Makhno. Sa biographie, “Nestor Makhno, le cosaque libertaire” (1982 et 1999) fait autorité.

English translation of Michel Ragon’s text from “The Dictionary of Anarchism” (copyright 2008 Albin Michel, Paris) by Paul Ben-Itzak, preceded by translator’s introduction:

If we’ve decided today to publish this excerpt from Michel Ragon‘s “Dictionnaire de l’Anarchie” (copyright Editions Albin Michel, Paris, 2008), this should not be construed in any manner as an endorsement of Nestor Makhno’s anti-State ideas or violent methods and tactics. (On which subject we have no expertise from which to evaluate their existence.) In either instance this is not the case. Rather, it’s because in Nestor Makhno’s story, as recounted by the late Michel Ragon — who also writes about Makhno in his historical novel “The Book of the Vanquished” — above all his simultaneously facing down both the White Army and Trotsky’s Red Army! — there’s inspiration aplenty for a new generation of Ukrainians fighting for their very existence against an invading Russian super-power. And because the very fact that he was fighting for Ukraine’s independence more than 100 years ago puts the lie to Vladimir Putin’s statement that Ukraine is a Bolshevik invention; au contraire! — Paul Ben-Itzak

The son of impoverished Ukrainians, Nestor Makhno started working as an apprentice in a foundry, then as an assistant wine merchant. In 1906, he joined up with a group of anarchist-communist peasants in Goulaiaïa-Polié. The following year, at the age of 18, he began a life of terrorist clandestinity. Arrested and tortured, he was condemned to death in 1910, a sentence commuted to forced labor in perpetuity. Transferred to the infamous Boutirky prison in Moscow, Makhno met Archinov, who introduced him to surreptitiously published illegal literature. It was in prison that Makhno received his political education. From Bakunin he retained this: “The passion for destruction is a creative passion.”

After six years of reclusion, Makhno was liberated in 1917 by the revolution. Returning to Ukraine, he rejected the autonomist movement. Contrary to the accusations of the Bolshevicks, who looked upon the peasantry as incurably reactionary and petite-bourgeoisie, Makhno believed only in the insurrection of the peasants, attached to their villages, and an autonomous revolutionary movement of the peasants.

Fresh out of prison, he founded the Peasant Association of Goulaiaïa-Polié, calling for the abolition of the State and of all political parties. He expropriated the large land holdings, drove the bosses out of their factories and founded agricultural communes.

His authority was rapidly contested by Petrograd, hostile to Ukrainian separatism. Archinov, who came to join him, advised him to visit Kropotkin, who had returned to Russia. But this last had no program. So Makhno decided to meet with Lenin, who received him in the Kremlin for an hour and tried to dissuade him from pursuing the Libertarian* path. “The anarchists,” Lenin told him, “are full of self-abnegation, they’re prepared for any sacrifice, but, fanatic and blind, they ignore the present to concentrate on a far-off future…. I consider you, comrade, to be a man possessing a sense of the realities and necessities of our epoch. If Russia had but a third of anarchists like you, we, the Communists, would be ready to work with them.” Makhno protested: “You Socialists don’t exist, so to speak, at all in our rural areas. Practically all the communes or peasant associations in Ukraine have been formed at the instigation of anarchist-communists.”

In the spring of 1918, Makhno set off the Ukrainian peasant revolt. He attacked the military posts of the German and Austro-Hungarian occupants, the large agricultural proprieties, and the Kulak farms. His cavalry created the surprise effect with their rapidity, in the grand tradition of the Cossacks.

In October 1918, Goulaiaïa-Polié was liberated. The Austrian officers taken prisoner were executed, the spared soldiers joined Makhno’s troops, but on February 6, the Red Army entered Kiev. Makhno, with his black** flags, retreated to the South.

In the fall of 1918, the activist newspaper “Nabat” (The Alarm), adopting the perspective that the Ukrainian revolution could rapidly become anarchist, set up its centers in Odessa. Archinov, Aaron Baron, and Voline, eminent anarchist theorists, joined Makhno, taking charge of propaganda and education. However, and despite the friendship Voline and Archinov bore him until the end of his life, in exile, Makhno always nurtured a suspicion, even jealousy, towards anarchist intellectuals.

In the spring of 1919, the man the insurgent peasants affectionately referred to as “Batko” (Little Father) assembled an army of 20,000 fighters. But the insurgent army of Ukraine had to simultaneously fight off Denikin’s Tsarist troops and Trotsky’s Red Army. Confronted with the danger represented by Denikin, Trotsky signed a pact of joint military action between his army and Makhno’s.

The extraordinary courage of Makhno, who personally took charge of the most dangerous operations, has been underscored by all historians. “It seemed,” Archinov would later write, “that this man of diminutive stature was made up of particularly tenacious components. He did not recede before any obstacle…. His calm was prodigious. He seemed oblivious to the thousands of projectiles raining down on the insurgent troops and the imminent danger of being wiped out at any moment by the heavily armed Russian troops.” His method: speed and surprise. Infantry wagons followed the cavalry.

After the shared victory of the Bolshevick troops and the anarchists against the annihilated White Army, Voroshilov ordered Makhno to redirect his offensive against Poland. Makhno recognized the trap, which consisted of getting the Ukrainian insurgents to emerge from their hide-out. He refused. Besides, he didn’t have any orders to take from a Bolshevick general.

In January 1920, the Communist party declared Makhno and his partisans outlaws. Eight months of fierce battles pitting Reds against Blacks** followed. On November 25, Trotsky invited the main Makhnovista commanders to a meeting of reconciliation in the Crimee. It was a trap. They were all arrested and executed, the Cavalry of the Crimee eviscerated.

The remaining units of the Makhnovitchina were ordered to integrate the Red army. Makhno found himself with 200 cavaliers in Goulaiaïa-Polié. He avoided being surrounded by the Red Army and, for eight months, tracked like an animal, in the harsh winter, abandoned little by little his artillery, his wagons, and his stock of provisions. Seriously injured, he was transported by his troops in a sleigh. On April 13, accompanied by 100 surviving cavaliers, he crossed the Dniester and took refuge in Bessarabia.

In exile, Makhno’s life henceforth would be that of a vanquished, of an invalid, weakened by numerous wounds. In the spring of 1922, he escaped Romania and entered Poland. The Soviet government, which had sentenced Makhno to death in absentia, requested his extradition. The international anarchist organizations got him a visa for Berlin, where he was reunited with Voline. In 1924, Voline, who had emigrated to France, prepared Makhno’s transfer.

French anarchists welcomed him with enthusiasm. But they were startled by his physical deterioration. Moreover, among the Russian refugees in Paris, Makhno was regarded as the devil. The devil for the White Russian refugees, who accused him of every crime under the Sun. The devil for the Communist Party and its numerous sympathizers. In the face of the success of the Bolshevick revolution, he was considered a counter-revolutionary.

With his wife Galina and their daughter Lucia, Makhno inhabited a one-room apartment on the rue Diderot, where Archinov and his family were also installed. He and Archinov barely eked out a living as shoemakers. Then he became a day laborer in the Renault factories in Billancourt, outside Paris.

A novel by Joseph Kessel, “Makhno and his Jewess,” leant him a new, sulfurous celebrity in Paris. In the Communist newspaper “L’Humanité,” Henri Barbusse wrote: “This book relates the bloody deeds of the leader of the Makhno gang, a thief and killer of peaceful populations, who committed with a crazy sadism the most abominable attacks and who, it seems, is now basking in the Sun chez nous, after having had the luck to escape the Red Army.”

“Basking….” At a time when Makhno was living an atrocious, lonely, desperate exile, speaking French with difficulty, abandoned by his wife. His legend frightened a number of Libertarians*, struck by the violence of his rebellion. Even so, and despite being a complete pacifist, Louis Lecoin interceded with the Prefect of Police to head off Makhno’s expulsion from France.

Become simultaneously a legend and a member of the down-and-out, Makhno was jealous of Voline, who had made himself the historian of the Makhnovitchina. He managed to survive only grace of the committee founded by “Le Libertaire*” newspaper to provide him with some personal resources. On June 15, 1931, in the Lancry Hall near the Canal Saint-Martin, French anarchists organized a “grande fête of solidarity” for Makhno.

On March 16, 1934, handicapped by his war wounds, Nestor Makhno entered the indigent ward of the hospital Tenon and died, stricken by tuberculosis.

In 1926, Makhno had published his biography in serial form in “Le Libertaire.” In 1984, Alexandre Skirda translated and assembled Makhno’s writings from 1925 through 1932: “The struggle against the State and other writings.”

The first biography of Makhno was published by Malcolm Menzies: “Makhno, an Epic” (1972). The most important work on the Makhnovitchina is Voline’s “The Unknown Revolution” (1969 and 1986). Alexandre Skirda (born in 1942) is certainly the leading specialist and translator of the Makhno epic. His biography, “Nestor Makhno, the Libertarian* Cossack” (1982 and 1999) is authoritative.

*The French sense of the term Libertarian (Libertaire) is not the same as the American; it is practically synonymous with anarchism, in its non-violent forms.

**Anarchists, with whom the black flag is typically associated.

danceblogger Uncategorized

The Chevalier de la Barre, 2-25: War comes to europe — Damn you, Putin

by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2022 Paul Ben-Itzak

“Stop de War
’cause certain death is near, not far.”
— Benjamin Zephaniya

“Yes, there was duplicity, yes, there was a deliberate choice by President Putin to launch the war when it was still possible to negotiate the peace…. He would bring us back to the age of empires and confrontations….. Today, it is civilians who are being killed. “

— French president Emmanuel Macron, current chair of the European Union Council, after a brief conversation Thursday evening with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

“The Atlantic Alliance is also a nuclear alliance.”

— French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, responding to veiled threats by Mr. Putin, who had previously invoked Russia’s nuclear arsenal, of serious repercussions for anyone who tries to aid Ukraine after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbor early Thursday morning, with the stated intentions including to topple the country’s Democratically elected government.

“That the Russians have taken control of Chernobyl sends chills up my spine.”

— Jean-Yves, a listener to France Inter, phoning in to the public radio station’s morning program.

SAINT-CYPRIEN (Dordogne), France — We let him get away with Chechnya.

We let him get away with Alep.

We let him get away with the Crimee.

We let him get away with the Donbas in Eastern Ukraine.

And even as he prepared for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign, Democratic country in the heart of Europe, bordered by four European Union member states, some of us made excuses for him.

The first four postulates above, it’s not me but Raphael Glucksman, the French Socialist member of the European parliament, who was indignantly pronouncing them (I’ve paraphrased) to France Inter public radio during last night’s impromptu demonstration to support Ukraine at the fabled Place de la Republique in Paris. The one that stands out for me is Alep, because there it involved a supposedly civilized nation, Russia, bombing, or bombing through its Syrian proxy, an ancient cradle of civilization, rich in its monumental architecture.

The ‘we’ in the last postulate, mine, includes people like me who, schooled by earnest, thoughtful and reflective scholar-activists like the late Stephen F. Cohen — whose ability to and tenacity at analyzing the Russian or Soviet point of view, an admirable determination to understand the other side carried on by Cohen’s widow Katrina van den Heuvel, publisher of the Nation (and my onetime classmate in her husband’s Soviet Politics course), in assessing the current crisis and presenting a refreshing alternative to the drums to war the mainstream media has been beating — have persisted in trying to understand the Russian point of view, to distinguish the domestic tyrant who has systematically assassinated, poisoned, imprisoned, ostracized, outlawed, or otherwise eliminated his political and journalistic opponents (an opposition whose current imprisoned leader, Alexander Navalny, somehow managed to smuggle out, from the Moscow prison courtroom where he was appearing in a show trial Wednesday, a firm statement opposing Putin’s invasion of his neighbor) from legitimate national security fears driven not just by despotic paranoia but informed by real fears inherited from previous invasions by European countries.

One of van den Heuvel’s (reasonable) arguments, or points, was that Putin didn’t just spontaneously decide to amass troupes around Ukraine, but that with our incorporation of former Soviet states into NATO and/or the European Union, as well as U.S. bases in those countries and recent troop build-up, we’ve given him reason to feel concerned. (On a subsequent program of Democracy Now, which is where van den Heuvel was also appearing, Jack Matloff, the United States’s penultimate ambassador to the Soviet Union and a veteran of the Cuban Missile crisis who had translated Nikita Khrushchev’s communications to President Kennedy negotiating a resolution to that crisis, recalled how after the break-up of the U.S.S.R. he had argued against incorporating former Soviet satellite states into NATO for precisely this reason, that Russia would feel itself encircled.)

One of my own arguments — prior to Wednesday’s duplicitous and brutal invasion (at presstime, according to Ukranian authorities, 137 civilians had already been killed by Russian troops, and Kiev had been bombed) arose from a recent viewing of King Vidor’s 1954 film of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” with its vivid recreation of Napoleonic France’s invasion of Russia. After Henry Fonda’s bespectacled, heretofore Pacifist Russian dandy (“Pierre”) carries an artillery soldier wounded by advancing French forces to a retreat post outside Moscow only to have the commander tell him after examining his burden, “You did it for nothing, he’s dead,” Fonda looks out across the bloodied valley and declares, “Damn you, Napoleon!” (Audrey Hepburn’s Natasha also helps create sympathy for the Russians.)

And yet it took Dominique de Villepin, the former French foreign minister who, on behalf of Jacques Chirac, another French leader who in a way was the antithesis of Napoleon, continually taking responsibility for the historical occasions where, in his view, his nation had not lived up to its noble ideals (notably concerning the deportation of 74,000 Jews by a Vichy government acting in the name of France), would stand up to latter-day Napoleon (for the blood on his hands) George Bush Junior, in opposing the latter’s 2003 invasion of Iraq before the United Nations, to teach me yesterday that I had misread the movie/novel and reversed the roles in drawing my contemporary analogy. Speaking on France Inter’s morning program Wednesday, de Villepin pointed out that it was Putin who had failed to learn the lessons of Napoleon’s invasion of his country: That even if Russia wins the military war, it cannot outlast a determined civilian resistance, a clever Russian general having ordered the retreat and burning of Russian cities to isolate Napoleon and starve out the invader. (Indeed, in the present invasion, Putin in both his paranoid comportment and duplicity bears more resemblance to Herbert Lom’s clownish Corsican in the movie than Oscar Homulka’s calm, patient, and distinguished Russian general, waiting for his moment to descend on the depleted and retreating Napoleonic troops.)

And this would not be the only historic analogy that Putin would interpret in the wrong sense, the Russian autocrat, incredibly, trying to justify his savage act by saying his goal was to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, when it is Putin who is trying to do to Ukraine what Hitler did to Poland, Ukraine’s neighbor.

Another Putin rationale — that Ukraine didn’t exist until the Bolsheviks invented it (the Russian dictator doesn’t want to be another commissaire, he wants to be another tsar) — is equally specious, if not as outrageous.

I decided to use the occasion of the Russian invasion of the land of my ancestors to try to figure out if I’m one-quarter Russian or one-quarter Ukrainian. I already knew that my great-grandmother, Sarah Nimovitch, was born in Kiev, circa 1886. While I’m not sure where my great-grandfather, Edward Vinek, was born, I see (from the document my own late father Edward saved and copied for me in the scrapbook he made for my 40th birthday) that my grandfather Moses’s 1908 birth certificate in the county of Detroit lists both his parents as being born in Russia, but this doesn’t mean much, given the civil servants’ penchant for simplifying. (At Ellis Island, an immigration clerk even changed Edward’s name from “Vinek” to “Winer.”) Both of them were presumably chased out of Eastern Europe by the pogroms.

Another Jew who was born in Kiev, in 1903, 17 years after my great-grandmother, and who immigrated to France as a child after being chased out of Ukraine by the cossacks, the acclaimed novelist Irene Nemirovsky, refers to what is presumably that city at that epoch (in her 1940 novel “The dogs and the wolves,” published just two years before she would be arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Auschwitz to be gassed), as “the Ukranian city.”

Nemirovsky’s last unfinished opus, “Suite Francaise,” written as the real Nazis were nipping at her heels as she fled across France and published in 2004 after the manuscript was discovered by her daughters in a valise, focuses not on her plight as an immigrant Jew (she had long converted to Christianity) but on the flight of tens of thousands of Parisians to the south in the wake of the German invasion. Listening to the initial radio reports yesterday and this morning, Nemirovsky might have been describing the flight of latter-day Ukrainians jammed in bottle-necking traffic to flee the Russian invasion towards the countryside or the neighboring countries of Poland, Hungary, and Romania. (Except that the Russians are not yet firing on the civilian convoys.) Who exactly, Mr. Putin, is mirroring the Nazis invasional comportment? (At this point I should share that nearly a thousand Russians were arrested yesterday after demonstrating against the invasion in Moscow’s Pushkin Square, bearing a plaquard being punished by Putin law with 15 days in jail.)

On Saturday, as a kind of augur of Wednesday’s tragic events, I ran into my neighbor Claude in the parking lot of the super-market. A couple of years ago Claude had told me about the death of his brother in 1944. The Germans were in retreat. They had even decided to by-pass Saint-Cyprien. But the local maquis (resistant cells) ‘went to their encounter’ on the road above Saint-Cyprien, not far from where I’m writing these words. Claude and his 14-year-old brother were standing outside one day when his brother noticed a bird’s nest and they went to check it out. As he stood by Claude’s side, his brother was gunned down by a sniper bullet fired from more than a kilometer away.

Damn you, Vladimir Putin, for bringing this barbary back to Europe.

danceblogger Uncategorized

(Updated, february 17) The Chevalier de la Barre, 2-16: “Amélie” enters the French presidential campaign, and France Inter’s journalists miss an opportunity to call a ‘spade’-hater a ‘spade’-hater (Et non Monsieur Robert, la racisme ‘adouci’ n’existe pas)

by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2022 Paul Ben-Itzak

“Aller vous balader a St. Denis, aller vous balader a Trappes, aller vous balader a Roubaix, et vous voir bien qu’on n’est pas en Amélie Poulain.”

— Jordan Bardella, president, “Rassemblement Nationale,” Wednesday, February 16, France Inter public radio

If there was any doubt that despite a name change which promises the inverse, the political DNA of the National Front party of French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen is still oriented by a fundamental, distorted, racialist optic based on the mythical idea that being really French means being white, and which seems to see anyone who isn’t white as a threat to “replace” the population that is (a false construct which has its echoes in the United States; I am not trying to throw stones here), it was dispelled this morning when National Front — er, excuses-moi, “Rassemblement Nationale” — president Jordan Bardella, pressed to say if he subscribed to the ‘grand replacement’ theory advanced by Right-Wing rival Eric Zemmour and even mainstream Republican candidate Valerie Pecresse told his interlocutors on middle-brow Radio France chain France Inter: “Go take a stroll in St.-Denis, go take a stroll in Trappes, go take a stroll in Roubaix, and it’s obvious that you’re not in the land of Amelie Poulain.”

Oh, que si!

The above was not the rebuke of morning hosts Nicholas Demorand and Leah Salame, who once again let stand, without challenge, the false war-of-civilization, flood-of-immigrants premises of an extreme right-wing party, failing to meet the minimum standards of responsible journalism. Of course I know it’s too much to expect of these radio personalities to offer a refutation which demands a bit of statistical research and authority (or simply sitting in at or downloading College de France professor Francois Heran’s free February 28, 2020 course on the subject), e.g. the false idea that France is being submerged by a tidal wave of immigrants. But in the case of Bardella’s cinematic-allusionary attempt at white-washing, anyone who’s seen “The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain” — and everyone in France has seen Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 film at least twice (mezigue, four) — would recognize that the analogy does not hold up. Right off the top, without even re-viewing the movie (known in the U.S. as simply “Amélie”) I can think of at least two principal and two supporting characters who, by the evidence (because the director doesn’t separate the characters out by their race; to him they are all eminently Parisian), are of Maghrebian or otherwise non-white origins: The Montmartre grocery store owner, his slow but earnest assistant (Jamel Debbouze), the middle-aged man moved to tears and reconciliation with his son after the heroine discovers his childhood treasure box behind a wall in her Montmartre apartment, and Ticky Holdago’s photo-booth character whose photograph comes to life in quadruple at Amélie’s bedside as she debates her own resistance to breaking out of her protective shell and not simply rescuing others from their malheurs. All of these characters — and I’m probably forgetting some — are integral to the story, to the heroine’s trajectory and ultimate victory over her own fears.

And if we add another part of the construct that’s often included by the “Grand Replacement” conspiracy theorists (because, to be fair, Bardella did not make this precision) — that the implicitly threatened population isn’t just whites but the European Christian heritage, voire civilization — we’d have to include Audrey Tatou’s Jewish co-star Mathieu Kassovitz. (Whose 1995 “La Haine,” centered around three Black, Maghrebian, and probably Jewish young male protagonists in a St.-Denis-like Parisian suburb — all eminently French — is an apt response to the kind of Xenophobia represented by Zemmour and the National Front.)

As with Zemmour, my problem isn’t so much with the politician himself — who, whether I like it or not, represents a significant train of thought in French (as American) society, and the views of a population it would be unfair to globally condemn as ‘racist’ or even ‘xenophobic’ — as with the presumed journalists, who by once again not challenging the premises of these racialist constructs meant to win votes by catering to the lowest fears of a population suffering legitimate pains by scape-goating the Other lends them (even invests them with) a veneer of social respectability, allowing and enabling their enunciators not only to pass racialist ideologies, but to erect the false construct of society (and threats to society) which makes it possible for those voters to believe them — and socially respectable to vote for them.

And of course, beyond questioning his erroneous allusion to the film’s racial make-up the racialist premise underlying Bardella’s observation should also have been challenged, as follows (for example):

“You mean because the populations of those cities isn’t white?”

Followed by:

“What’s wrong with that?”

And:

“So, do you have a problem with French Blacks and Arabs?”

Journalists are here for this, to cut through the dissimulations — to probe for the roots behind vague insinuations.

To confront powerful people with what they’re actually saying, and make them define the meaning of their words — and the intentions behind them.

The consequences of their failure to do so are not anodyne.

If Salame and Demorand had forced the president of a national party which polls predict will get 46 percent of the vote in the April election — an election which will help determine the future for 67 million French citizens if its candidate faces president Emmanuel Macron in a final run-off — to reveal the racialist base and false ‘civilizational’ equations underlying that party’s professed sentiments (or if you prefer, arguments) on immigration, a healthy percentage of good,* honest*, and hardworking people who are poised to vote for this party *not because they are racists* but because they are hurting or feel threatened in their identity (or are simply, and justly, proud of traditional French values and the country’s history and national identity) would have been forced to face the fact that they would be voting for, and in a way endorsing, a certain form of racism, of white supremacy.

There’s a lot of bandying about of citations from Camus these days; he’s just about replaced the fables of Lafontaine (or the proverbs on which Amélie’s co-worker tests Kassovitz before giving him Amélie’s address), dictum- and pearls of wisdom-wise. M. Demorand and Mme Salame would have done well to recall the late playwright, novelist, philosopher, and journalist‘s one about the danger of not naming things.

PS, February 17: Apparently, France Inter’s ‘confreres’ on its pseudo-highbrow sister chain, France Culture, don’t listen to the former that much. On Thursday’s FC morning program — according to the host of which Israel can do no wrong and its abuse and killings of innocent Palestinians is invisible, en passant — political analyst Stephane Robert postulated the myth of a Front National ‘adouci,’ i.e. ‘softened,’ the idea presumably being that the racist discourse is gone. But tell me, Mr. Robert, how do you tell the difference between the ‘kebab-eaters’ that Eric Zemmour would have one believe dominate the HLM moderate housing units of France, and the St.-Denis, Trappes, and Roubaix cities which, according to the FN’s Jordan Bardella, “are not the France of Amelie Poulain”?

danceblogger Uncategorized

The Chevalier de la Barre: As Camus spins in his grave or, Why is France Inter public radio helping to banalize racialist reductions in the French presidential race?

by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2022 Paul Ben-Itzak

“Have we learned nothing?”

— I.F. Stone

I really wanted to listen to French presidential candidate Eric Zemmour being interviewed on Radio France’s middle-brow chain France Inter’s morning program Monday. Not because I’m tempted by what has been reported as Zemmour’s venomous discourses — “reported” because the journalists of France Inter and its counterpart France Culture rarely quote these discourses directly, typically referring to them without a specific citation and expecting us to take their word for it — but because I have always been taught to keep an open mind, and because on at least one question Zemmour himself doesn’t fit the expected conservative mold, having expressed his openness to legalizing Marijuana. But I had to turn my radio off after five minutes. Not because of what Zemmour said — I believe it can be stimulating to listen to the arguments of people who don’t agree with you — but out of exasperation with the personalities who host program, Lea Salame and Nicholas Demorand, who never challenged Zemmour on his racialist (I prefer this term to ‘racist’ because it describes a kind of stereotyping based on racial prejudices, as opposed to labeling the person promulgating the stereotype, thus sticking to the act without demonizing the person, and I should add that I myself am regularly guilty of harboring racialist conceptions of the Other, particularly Blacks) premises, letting pass without follow-up his positing of a “war of civilizations” between Islam and Christianity (a trope whose historical resonances go as far back as the poet Alfred de Vigny justifying the invasion of Algeria by saying they’re all just a bunch of ‘throat-cutters’ anyway) as well as his description of HLM (moderate-priced housing) complexes as havens not only for “Islamists” but ‘kebab-eaters’ and ‘veil-wearers.’ (Seriously: “Kebab-eaters”? This doesn’t even rise to the level of rational argument but resembles more stadium name-calling or school-yard brawling, akin to the Brits calling the French “frog-eaters” or the French calling the Brits “roast-beefers.” I’m not sure what Zemmour would make of mezigue, like him a Jew and a devotee of Lebanese ‘schwarma’ kebabs who admires the exquisite method of the most expert purveyors of this delicacy to slice the lamb slivers from the spit with the precision of a moyle practicing a circumcision during the bris.) Had the population in question been Jewish and Zemmour reduced them to “knish-knoshers,” we all know that the interview would have ended right then and there. But as the only ones being denigrated were Muslims (or, implicitly, French Arabs) — in both the ‘kebab-eaters’ reduction and the tired ‘war of civilizations’ postulate — not only did it continue, but Zemmour’s racialisms were left to stand, unchallenged and mundane-isized. As had been his statement in a previous interview conducted by the same personalities held in December, just before vacation (thus allowing it to squeeze in before a strict equal media time rule for presidential candidates took effect in January; and this doesn’t count the disproportionate attention the French public radio media has been according to Zemmour for years, alarmingly similar to the free publicity the American mainstream media gave to Donald Trump prior to the 2016 presidential election, in both cases in a way promoting right-wing extremist points of view, because even when the media dismisses it, it is still exposed to and nourishes a certain public) that a Zemmour presidency would include no new naturalizations. Never mind that the interview took place just two weeks after the Franco-American entertainer, Rainbow Tribe mother, and decorated Hero of the Resistance Josephine Baker’s entry in the French Pantheon; Zemmour’s interlocuteurs failed to give the obvious response: “Et Josephine Baker?”

When the premises that support its proposed policies — that confirm its distorted vision of the world and society — are not challenged, racialism becomes banalized. (Resuming the interview later Monday, Inter reporter Elodie Forrest even characterized Zemmour’s discourse as ‘softened.’) This is precisely the type of irresponsible journalism that Albert Camus inveighed against in one of his first signed editorials when his newspaper Combat emerged from clandestinity just days after the Liberation of Paris, because Camus (who got his start as a journalist in his native Algeria) realized — with hope and idealism — the fundamental role journalism can and must play in constructing a free and democratic society. The immediate impetus for Camus’s concern was the deadly and rotten role the Vichy press had played in not just the collaboration globally, but specifically the demonization of the Jews that in turn enabled the deportation of 74,000 of them to the death camps, including 11,000 children, from which only 3,000 total returned. One of Zemmour’s claims which has been repeated — but never directly quoted — by the media here is that Vichy leader Rafael Petain saved the lives of French Jews. Apparently Zemmour has never heard of Max Jacob, the leading Surrealist poet, collaborator of Apollinaire and friend of Picasso and Cocteau, who, despite his conversion to Christianity 30 years earlier and fervent Christian proselytizing (Jacob’s last letter, to his priest, smuggled out from the train thanks to a complacent gendarme, referred to having several conversions in progress), was arrested in his native Bretagne in February 1944 by the Gestapo after being turned in by a neighbor, succumbing to pneumonia at the Drancy way-station outside Paris before he could be deported — and to his grand chagrin, confessed. (And presumably another Christian convert, the novelist Irene Nemirovsky, doesn’t count for Zemmour at all because she was born in Ukraine; never mind that Nemirovsky’s last novel, “Suite Francaise,” retrieved in a valise after she was deported and killed by the Nazis, is concerned not with her own plight and the looming peril on her own life but the perilous flight of Frenchmen and woman from assieged Paris. The pleas of Nemirovsky’s husband to the Nazi commandant of Paris after she was arrested to spare his wife because of the supposed critiques of Jews and Communists in her writings — in letters sent before he himself was arrested and deported to his death — are both pathetic and tragic.) If the brand of journalism practiced Monday morning at France Inter does not pro-actively caricature Muslims, in a way it is more nefarious because in not challenging these stereotypes when they are vehicled by presidential candidates, it lets them pass as facts, as givens: Muslims are kebab-eaters and veil-wearers, the Islamic and Christian concepts of ‘civilization’ are diametrically opposed (never mind that in a news program on a public radio station in a lay state, religious contructs of morality should be off the table, but this idea went out the window on France Inter earlier this year when Salame asked the Green Party candidate, Yannick Jadot, “Do you believe in God?” I’ll share Jadot’s answer here because it underlines that my criticism is not of France nor of French society nor even French politicians but of a sometimes deficient public radio standard which does justice to neither: He answered “No,” a response which would seal the end of any presidential candidate in another country that vaunts the separation of church and state, the United States but that here may have the opposite effect, so highly are lay values vaunted by ordinary citizens. And while we’re on Jadot — and just to demonstrate that I’m not particularly picking on the Right — equally abhorrent to Zemmour’s propositions was the Green candidate’s nauseating likening of Republican candidate Valerie Pecresse’s resurrecting president Nicolas Sarkozy’s idea to pass a Karcher wind-blower in the Paris suburbs, implicitly to deal with the real public safety threats that Pecresse, as the Paris region’s president, understands a lot better than Jadot, to “ethnic cleansing,” which also went unchallenged on France Inter. Jadot’s proposal to resolve the problem of pedestrians accidentally killed by hunters — banning hunting on week-ends and school vacations, which would effectively eliminate a centuries-old French tradition — if not as offensive was equally inane. If he’d just talked to my neighbor, he would have discovered an easier solution: Ban the use of long-distance carabines, which can reach as far as 1.5 kilometers, and confine hunting to shot-guns, which can only go 150 meters, thus permitting the user to actual see what he’s shooting at.)

Camus once envisioned (as A.J. Liebling reported in his classic “The Press”) keeping a file on all journalists in which their biases would be enumerated — a sort of “truth index,” as Liebling characterized it, which would allow the reader to evaluate the verity of the journalist’s reporting based on his or her record and established biases.

But now the problem is much more grave, much more deep-rooted, because it is not one of journalistic bias but of journalistic inadequacy (because journalists are not just ciphers, they should be interlocuteurs) and — given the stakes — complete irresponsibility. And abdication. An abdication which, to the extent that it could allow an Eric Zemmour to be elected president because it banalizes his constates (for a U.S. equivalent, imagine if Ku Klux Klan “wizard” and one-time presidential candidate David Duke was given the same media attention as Zemmour, his racialist constructs banalized and left unchallenged. Oops, already happened, in 2016.)

I want to repeat that the problem here is not so much the candidate, or even his inclusion in the mainstream debate, but the failure of (public radio) journalists to show up and do their job. In fact, the French system itself is FAR superior to the U.S. system for choosing a president; whereas in the U.S. the Democratic and Republican parties, with the mainstream media’s connivance, have succeeded in locking any other party and candidate out (and even some candidates from their own parties, worthy nominees Cory Booker and Julien Castro being excluded from some Democratic presidential debates in 2020 not because the New Jersey senator and former Obama housing secretary lacked the credentials, but because they hadn’t raised enough money), the spectrum of candidates for the two-round April French presidential election by law receiving equal media attention includes eight men and women, ranging from Zemmour on the extreme Right to the Communist party’s nomination on what’s described here as the extreme Left. So the failure here is not the State’s, but the Fifth Estate’s.

PS: Speaking of exactly the type of journalistic abdication which horrified Camus and which he was warning against in his Combat editorial — and just so you know I’m not just picking on the journalists of France Inter — of course the biggest horror which horrified Camus and his post-war generation was war. Ahead of France Inter’s banalization of the brand of racialist tropes vehicled by Eric Zemmour, its colleagues at sister chain France Culture were banalizing a classic war-mongering trope last week-end, with morning news anchor Camille Merigo characterizing new German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s hesitation to jump on the latest Russia paranoia express war bandwagon as “complacency.” If I say the characterization was hers — that of a news reader putatively supposed to be neutral — it’s because both occasions in which she employed this term lacked a subject, Merigo referring to the German leader’s “suspected complacency” towards the Kremlin… without specifying who exactly was the suspector, leaving us to assume that Scholz’s alleged complacency is universally suspected, and thus a given.

Here — in anti-Russian war-mongering — French journalists are unfortunately not alone, with (as Democracy Now reported last month) some of the American reporters questioning President Biden at his first White House news conference this year, the New York Times correspondent leading the charge, by practically goading him to war, repeating their performance ahead of the first Gulf War. (And during the second, NBC host Brian Williams went rhapsodic over the beauty of the rockets’ bright glare.)

danceblogger Uncategorized

Songs to aging children — I am one* (Updated, 2-7-2022)

The author (far right) and his father and brothers near their home in rural – coastal Northern California circa Halloween 1969 (the scarlet strips are artisanal devils’ stripes). Photo: Eva Winer (now Wise).

by Paul Ivan Winer Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2022 Paul Ivan Winer Ben-Itzak

For “Stacy.”

My intrinsic belief in the virtue of vulnerability as the greatest gift one can offer another was seeded in a cluster of tall redwood trees nestled in the singed grass above Timber Cove, four years after the Great Northern California coastal fire of 1965. Stacy and I must have been eight years old.

“You mean you pick your nose too?”

I can’t remember whether it was Stacy (not her real name, simply because I haven’t asked her permission) or me who confessed first; what’s important is that we’d shared a secret habit that I at least was ashamed of. (And a penchant that seems to come back later in life; several years ago I noticed a Transatlantic tendency among acquaintances in their ’50s and ’60s to practice a form of public nose-picking where they seem to go into a trance while they’re talking to you, oblivious that they’re foraging in front of witnesses, and to the involuntarily diabolic looks that sometimes accompany the tic.) That with this confidence we’d suddenly become more intimate, removing a layer of protection. The confirmation/affirmation that we each had at least one person in our lives from whom we hid nothing and before whom we could (figuratively speaking) be naked and unguarded.

It was no surprise that this exchange of confidences came with Stacy; we’d been born in the same hospital, Marin General, at around the same time, under the same Taurean star (in the only year which reads the same if you turn the numerals upside down). If you can’t bare your soul with someone who’s already seen you in your original birthday suit on your actual birth day, there’s not much hope for you. (This is not to say that eight-year-old me was immune to complexes; 1969 also saw my first sexual hang-up and the first time I allowed fear to get in the way of pleasure: I refused to return to our Little Red Schoolhouse in Fort Ross after accidentally catching a glimpse of my teacher Mrs. Klein’s slip, and to bicycle through the valley that separated our house from my best friend George Bohan’s because it meant braving a meadow of wasps. I can’t remember if I was ever actually stung by a wasp, but I do recall, vividly and viscerally, being bit by a tic in a very pliant and private place while climbing on the rocks above the ocean the year before.)

By the time we shared our secret I’d already proposed to Stacy, when we were six, with a gold-painted plastic ring from Mr. Mopp’s in Berkeley. (I can’t remember her answer, though I do remember slipping it onto her finger.)

From our childhood, the handful of friezes of Stacy that have lingered include those captured in three photographic images:

** A Kodak shot with the colors fading of my mom in mod purple ’60s hip-hugging slacks and pink blouse arbitrating between us on the back of which my Mom has written (the photo was among a batch she sent my Miami Beach grandparents which my cousin Mindy retrieved after my grandmother’s death): “Paul and Stacy not talking to each other… again.” Stacy, turned away from me, is pouting under her short blonde hair; my expression under my Beatles mop-top is stoic and determined, trying to contain my upset behind a fixed upper lip, a facial position I still employ. We look to be about three or four.

** Two Edward Bigelow pictures from a book, “Come with me to nursery school,” published in 1970 by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston and whose photos had been taken in 1965 at the Mission Co-Op Nursery School on Potrero & 25th Street, run by a white-haired lady named Clara our first year, succeeded by Effie Schwartschild (whose adult son David would later disappear somewhere in the Australian Bush; we’d kept in touch, and her face would always bear this unresolved tragedy). In the first, Stacy is fighting off two schoolyard ruffians (one Black, one White) attempting to usurp her swing, kicking at them with all her might. Edith Thatcher Hurd’s caption reads: “At nursery school, we like to ride on the swing. Can you tell whose turn it is now?” In the second, Stacy and Jennifer (another of my ‘girlfriends,’ this one brown-haired), in potato-painting (we used the halved spuds as stamps) smocks, are cuddling a rabbit. (In another photo featured in the book, I am the highest among a group of boys climbing a tree, visioning the top with a determined if grim expression, another visage I would retain, even if I was destined to tumble from that tree numerous times over the next 50 years; Weebles Wobble but they don’t fall down.)

(Speaking of trees, among the books Stacy’s father Bill would give me as a child, always accompanied by inspiring, hopeful inscriptions, was Shel Silverstein‘s “The Giving Tree.”)

The next to last time I saw Stacy was also my first formal date, at age 14, to which I’d asked Stacy after running into her at an ice cream parlor in Rockridge where I was celebrating my birthday with current friends Maia Schneider and Chip Williams (who was supposed to die of a brain tumor by age 20; I have not heard from him since high school). Stacy, by then a svelte champion swimmer with sun-browned skin and long blonde hair, had grown up to be the kind of girl the Beach Boys wrote songs about. I was hopelessly smitten.

The date — one of our parents, Stacy’s mom Patty I think, dropped us off and the other picked us up — was at a Berkeley movie theater which was showing a double-feature of “Tommy” and “Alice’s Restaurant.” Some six years after our soul-baring nose-picking confessions, a layer of archetypal teenage boy-girl subterfuge had been acquired, taking form in my classic boy date maneuver of stretching my arms oh-so-nonchalantly as if I were yawning and letting the left arm settle behind her seat, and Stacy’s classic girl defense tactic of just as subtly leaning forward.

The other memory of Stacy I retain from this period seems out of place, chronology-wise, because it involves an argument degenerating into grabbing and scratching, even if the image I have of us is as being between the ages of 12 and 15. It’s confounded with a memory of Stacy making an appearance at my 15th birthday party, and seeming somewhat out of place among my other guests, all current classmates, because she didn’t know them and I was trying to combine two universes. But perhaps the murkiness around these souvenirs is normal as they both took place in that psycho-familial netherworld of the family basement, here of our Edwardian home on 25th Street (the front re-painted in psychedelic patterns by my father, as had Stacy’s on the opposite hill of 25th Street been by hers; this was the age of the Godseye) in Noe Valley, burial ground of George Washington Carver, my black-and-white pet rat, last seen scurrying behind the non-functioning fireplace mantle of the living room just above the basement, and of myriad ping-pong balls abandoned between the crevices which surrounded the concrete floor. (The ping-pong table had been the arena in which I’d proved my devotion to Christine LaMar, a sixth-grade crush at Rooftop School with whom I used to engage in stare-out contests on the 24 Divisadero bus until the day she boarded at Castro & Market wearing dark glasses after a cornea operation and I couldn’t tell if I was winning or losing. I dedicated my first novel, “The Problem Cops,” about an inter-racial police team who solved racial problems — Christine was what we described then as ‘mulatto’ — to Christine. At the ping-pong table, I used to exasperate my brother A. and my best friend Eric by insisting on this ritual pronouncement before each game: “This game is dedicated to Christine LaMar. If I win I will be __ and___ . If I lose I will be ___ and ___.” Christine was actually the first girl I called up, after looking up her number in the phone book and working up my courage by reciting it repeatedly before I was able to pick up the receiver. ((587-81__, and nearly 50 years later, I didn’t have to look it up.)) By the time Christine broke my heart by transferring to another school mid-way through the year, and after futilely trying to drown my sorrows with a buttermilk donut from the Castro Bakery before we transferred to the 35 Eureka, I was able to declare, through the salty tears, “If I win I will be 187 and 9,” which I did and was. Not that all that dedication was in vain ((to reference a song by Carly Simon, my other big crush that year; We have No Secrets, Reader, including that I still don’t know what ‘gavotte’ means)); that year I made it to the city-wide finals for the 9-12 age group before being demolished by a puny nine-year-old from Chinatown whose spin balls I could neither see nor touch.)

But to get back to Stacy and what must have been the last time I saw her, my 15th birthday, celebrated in the orange-shag-carpeted room my parents had carved out for me in the basement next to the ping-pong table (kind of like Greg Brady getting his own apartment in the attic during the last season — except for the tiny hole in the ceiling through which one could see the room from the kitchen — and just about the only way we matched the Bradys): In a way Stacy (at that point a cross between Marcia and Jan) handed me off — or relayed me — to the next girlfriend, Lisa Applebottom (not her real last name), another California blonde, who was among my James Lick Junior High friends assembled at the same party, with whom my first intimate exchange that same night marked a degrading of the male-female trust quotient that had made a breakthrough with Stacy in that cluster of trees.

After a round of Truth or Dare in which I’d answered the question “Who in this room do you like the most?” (Stacy had already left) with “Lisa” (although I may have already been ‘settling,’ which would establish itself as a disturbing pattern through at least 2019 in Paris, convinced that my real heart-throb, Felicia French — that is her real name, trop beau to disguise — was an impossible dream. Especially since the day she and Linda Mull had presented me with a baby-blue tee-shirt inscribed in black felt letters “Monster Boy,” the soubriquet they’d given me and even serenaded me with whenever they saw me coming down the hallway, to the tune of “Soldier Boy.” ((If Santana’d still been there — he’d graduated from James Lick ten years earlier — he could have accompanied the ballad on his guitar.)) Because Lisa was teased by the other girls ((and boys)) as being “flat-chested,” I thought I might have a better chance with her — not because she was flat-chested or not pretty ((she was)) but because she was the underdog and thus theoretically more attainable than Felicia.) and after Lisa (we’re back at my 15th birthday party) had taken me aside to whisper: “Remember what you said? It’s the same for me,” we found ourselves sequestered in the miniscule, low-ceilinged dark coat closet under the living room stairs above the basement. Unzipping my moche red and white striped ’70s track-suit jacket in the pitch dark, I’d felt the need to reassure Lisa (more sex hang-ups): “It’s my jacket.”

Lisa was at the origin of my ardor for the female tummy, the farthest we got, after a dare at another party, in Linda’s tree-house on Caselli Street, and during a rendez-vous in the woods of Glen Park Canyon, where I don’t remember if it was her scruples, my cumbersome black-and-white Oshkosh-be-gosh overall straps, or the thought that her gun-toting father might have me in his sights from their house on the rim of the canyon above that kept us from going any farther. (It had been in the nearby Glen Park club-house that I had first met, and fallen in love with, Felicia, when we were both 13.) If our relationship did not last out the summer after junior high graduation — our telephone conversations, usually initiated by me, quickly degenerated into Lisa’s bored “What else?”‘s, and she refused to play tennis with me anymore in the courts of cavernous concrete McAteer High School because “you’re bringing my game down” (she was a city champion) — I still have the proof that I was loved, in an autograph scrawled around her head-shot in the James Lick 1976 yearbook: “As Fi says, you are the love of my life. I will never forget you.”

“Fi” was Felicia, and what I remember most about our relationship — what I relished — is our three-hour telephone conversations (during which I often took refuge in the hall coat closet, whose darkness augmented their intimacy), including one in which she told me about a dream she’d had of me involving a bubble bath (or it may have been that while we were talking she told me that she was taking a bubble-bath, more in a spirit of comfortable trust than titilation) and an and interaction between us that was both intimate and somber. (I am being oblique because if I got more specific, I’d be violating the intimacy of our closet confidences… which I must include in this story because they signal a last youthful gift and boy-girl exchange of vulnerabilty and trust, Felicia’s confidence that she could guilelessly reveal dreaming of an intimate interaction between us with no fear that I would exploit or misinterpret it, transforming an imaginary oneric physical intimacy into a real-life intimacy of our young souls.)

Felicia also starred in my first grown-up play, the Tennessee Williams one-act “This Property is Condemned,” in which my “Boy” was the foil to her “Girl,” my big line being “The BONE Orchard?!,” uttered after the Girl, balancing on the rusted tracks of an abandoned train line while she relates the sad saga of her older sister Alma, announces where Alma is now (the Bone Orchard), a tale intertwined with a capella singing (I can hear Felicia still):

“Wish me a Rainbow
And wish me a Star
A wish you can give me
Wherever you are
With stars for my pillow
And dreams for my eyes
And a make-believe ball where
Our love wins first prize.”

Williams allowed the play to be made into a movie in which Alma was brought to life by Nathalie Wood, whose big and bright-eyed beauty was mirrored by Felicia. I won the two-person contest for best supporting actor, only one other junior high having shown up for the competition our one-act was created for, my opponent being the ill-fated Chip. Felicia also played the lead in the drama club’s production for that year, Maxwell Anderson’s “The Bad Seed,” about a sweet little girl who goes around killing people she doesn’t like. (Two years later, “This Property is Condemned” would be the first play I would direct, as a student at Lewis Campbell’s Center for Theater Training, a FAME-like city-wide program based at Mission High, with another Stacy ((her real name)) whom I’d known since 1972 when we acted together in the Lone Mountain College summer program’s production of “Mutiny in Space,” taking Felicia’s place until I cruelly replaced her for missing a rehearsal or two, exhibiting absolutely no compassion for her complicated life. And my hurtful, fear-based treatment did not stop there: Later I would exclude Stacy (the one for whom this is the real name) from my unchaperoned cast party because of the havoc my square mind imagined her older punk-rocker boyfriend “Bangs” might wreak on the house.)

In an echo of Christine LaMar’s transfer, I was devastated when I learned over the summer after junior high graduation — in a postcard sent to me at Camp Tawonga in the High Sierras, where I was busy having other romantic adventures I won’t go into here to spare you another long parenthetical digression — that Felicia would not be joining me at “Smack,” as we called the concrete prison-like, asbestos-drenched, sunken complex that was McAteer, but would be going to Lowell, the school for smarties.

The last time I saw Felicia must have been in the early ’90s, because it was when I was back renting an apartment my dad and step-mom had carved out of our childhood home in a former drugstore-soda fountain on Guerrero Street (the same one I’d excluded Stacy-it’s-her-real-name and her boyfriend Bangs from, where Dad and Lulu had set up house after he and Mom separated), and I ran into her hanging out up top the 24th Street BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station. If I didn’t ask for a number, it was probably because of the lackadaisical fashion in which Felicia’d greeted me, as if we’d only just seen each other yesterday (or as if I was not as significant for her as she had been to me).

Recent searches for “Felicia French” and for Lisa on Facebook have proved fruitless.

I have, however, been able to retrieve “Stacy” the-one-I-was-born-with (and, through her, her father Bill; Patty unfortunately passed away, Stacy learned me, in 2020, a year after my father), and the other Stacy (the one who’s real name it is) is now the friend I’ve stayed in touch with the longest, since our “Mutiny in Space.” Besides of course the “Stacy” I was born next to.

“Stacy” who, it seems, has been able to retain her precious (I don’t use the adjective sarcastically) gift of vulnerability.

“Stacy” who, I hope, will understand that if I have shared our childhood sharing (and scuffling) now it is because I am tired of writing these tributes — for a tribute is what this is — after the person is already gone and it is too late. (Aging children, I am one.)

For my part, and despite numerous subsequent relationships in recent years where (in my jaundiced view) the girl has taken advantage of the gift of vulnerability I offered and (however unintentionally) (another thing I remember about Camp Tawonga is how a counselor told me, as we were hiking through Yosemite, that I was a “real diplomat”) cruelly twisted it in my heart like a dagger, and despite well-meaning warnings that I need to “protect myself” better from getting wounds far more pernicious than any scratch-marks “Stacy” and I might have inflicted on each other, I am still determined not to lose that vulnerability and to bear it like the gift it is — beating, like Gatsby, against the tide.

*The title is taken from the song title and lyric by Joni Mitchell, from the young man’s funeral scene in “Alice’s Restaurant,” and which you can find online. Joni Mitchell who, with Neil Young — another aging child still teaching after all these years — recently made headlines by withdrawing her songs from the online streaming website Spotify when it wouldn’t stop broadcasting lethal anti-vaccine propaganda.