Pennsylvania

“Sh*t happens in Galveston, Texas,” reads the inscription on my souvenir shot glass, in red letters designed to look like dripping blood after a gunfight. In fact not much seems to happen there: a hurricane over a century ago devastated the Gulf of Mexico port, but the God of Psalm 29— which is the boisterous paraphrase of a much older hymn to the Ugaritic storm god— doesn’t need bullets. I was in the Houston area as one of the speakers at a Zoroastrian youth jamboree, and suggested we go on an outing to the beach. That’s how we went to Galveston and I bought my little glass. The happy kids and their parents soon got hungry so we scouted around and found a family restaurant of Texas proportions: it was the size of a few football fields and pickup trucks adorned a parking lot the size of several more. After a caloric, toothsome feast of chicken-fried steak and pecan pie, the waitress asked pleasantly, “Where you all from?” “Iran, mostly,” I replied. “Well, you all come back now, you hear?” she said with a big smile. You think of Texas, if you’re a narrow-minded New York Jew like me, as six guns and, well, sh*t happening. The few times I’ve been there, it’s been quiet and nice and welcoming.

Now, take Pennsylvania, on the other hand. Yankee territory. Philly is the fifth-biggest city in these United States. Its full Greek name, Philadelphia, means “(city) of brotherly love”, and William Penn meant it to be just that, unlike its Classical namesake, which now goes  by the moniker Amman, capital of what a disgusted pupil of mine once called the Hashemite Kingdom of Boring. She was taking a summer course in Arabic there and compared to Tel Aviv, where she had just been, there was not much to do in the parched Jordanian metropolis.

Philadelphia. Philly. My Dad, of blessed memory, had a kid sister, also of blessed memory, living in Rosemont, PA, which is in the fancy Main Line suburbs of Philly, and we used to go to their big old house for Thanksgiving. A famed botanist had lived there once, and very rare trees towered over the back yard. I forget the genera. Aunt Elsa and Uncle Phil had four boys, all handsome, all athletic, and all more or less unaware of their Jewish heritage. They were raised as secular, left-leaning, red-blooded, healthy heterosexual Americans. They played football in the yard. When it snowed once, we kids were issued shovels. When I came in wet and freezing, uncle Phil gave me a shot of whisky. It tasted terrible, but it kept a cold at bay. Now, at seventy, I like a dram of Finlaggan any old time.

Pennsylvania was a trip back in time. My cousins had a squat Franklin stove in the living room. It was so called because none other than Benjamin Franklin invented it. The steep wooden stairs to the second floor scared the living daylights out of me: I was absolutely certain the house was haunted. In the fall there was a tang of wood smoke in the cold night air and the horizon was gaunt tree tops, not the familiar urban skyline of Manhattan. I imagined: this was what America was like a century ago.

America: an idea as much as a country. We went into downtown Philly once and visited Independence Hall and looked at the Liberty Bell. One evening, Elsa and Phil played the new long-playing vinyl record, “All The News That’s Fit To Sing”, by a young singer-songwriter named Phil Ochs: protest songs about the struggle for Black civil rights down south (sh*t was happening big time in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi), about nuclear weapons and Cuba, about state repression. Ochs set to music Edgar Allan Poe’s last and, I think, finest poem, “The Bells”. I still listen to it, and sometimes play it (badly) on the guitar. It is a wonderful song, all bound up with childhood memories, and it is a perfect expression of the experience of language at the boundary of music, where you cannot exactly tell where one stops and the other starts.

So I always thought of Pennsylvania as the old, good, gentle place where the best of the American project began. Although there was long-lasting friction between our two families over Judaism and Israel, although one has not been close in later life to one’s cousins— the griefs of a long lifetime, hinc illae lacrimae— Pennsylvania was the peaceful, earnest, maybe a little whimsical place of Michael Chabon’s novel and movie, “Wonder Boys”, which is set in Pittsburgh. Chabon, a brilliant writer and very left-wing, is a Jew. He now lives in Berkeley. Phil Ochs also brilliant and left-wing, was also a Jew. He killed himself in NYC at the age of 36, nearly half a century ago.

Pennsylvania. The name Squirrel Hill conjures up mossy rocks and ancient oaks, and bright-eyed, quizzical, bushy-tailed little creatures darting here and there bearing acorns in their tiny paws. There is a synagogue in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh. The day I turned sixty-five was Shabbat, and a gunman broke into the Tree of Life during services and massacred the congregation. Yesterday, also on Shabbat, President Trump was addressing a rally in Butler, PA, a town just north of Pittsburgh. Despite ostensible security measures by the FBI, a gunman was able to position himself comfortably on the flat rooftop of a shed adjoining the very site of the rally. He picked off multiple shots, grazing the President’s right ear. A local man was killed, shielding his family with his body. Two other attendees were seriously wounded.

The mainstream press is doing everything it possibly can to downplay the fact that the bullet passed a millimeter from Donald Trump’s skull: it was a sure head shot, a kill shot that missed by a hairbreadth. One hears a whole lot of deserved sympathy for the man who was killed— but suspiciously little for the man who almost was.

When Trump was in office, his political enemies manufactured the mendacious accusation that he had colluded with Russia. He was impeached not once, but twice, over this— and neither time could his accusers or their well-paid inquisitors produce a shred of evidence. He was acquitted. In 2020, during the Covid pandemic, the general elections were held and there were many accusations of tampering with mail-in ballots. But Joe Biden was elected.

Then, in January 2021, a crowd Trump’s supporters marched on the Capitol. Some broke in. Most did not. They milled around outside. Of those who broke in, most wandered in a kind of holiday daze through the august halls of the building. The only person killed was a young woman, an Air Force Veteran, who was far from the building and was holding an American flag.

Just before the march, Trump warned his supporters to protest vehemently but to behave lawfully and peaceably. Most did but some, deplorably, did not. The press had absurdly and mendaciously characterized the carefully planned and premeditated murder, mayhem, and arson by the rent-a-mob crowds of the nationwide BLM/Antifa riots a year or two earlier as “mostly peaceful demonstrations”. This barefaced lie is like calling the Titanic after it hit the iceberg a mostly floating ship.

But the events at the Capitol became an occasion for manufactured hysteria: the press called the events of 6 January 2021 an “insurrection”, the biggest act of internal subversion since the Reichstag fire that catapulted Hitler to power. In one respect, and only one respect, the two events were similar: both served as the pretext for the perversion of the law and the arbitrary exercise of state violence. Men and women who had exercised their Constitutional right of free assembly were summarily fired from their jobs for having been present at the Capitol on January 6th, half a mile from the Capitol building. Hundreds more were arrested and imprisoned without trial.

Trump decided to run again. This time, his enemies in high places engineered three criminal cases against him, inflating misdemeanor charges into felonies. When the Supreme Court stepped in to limit this travesty, the media of course accused it of shredding the Constitution.

Meanwhile, the country is governed by a corrupt, senile President who most recently described himself as a Black woman, introduced the Ukrainian leader Zelensky as Russian President Vladimir Putin, and reminded us of why he had chosen Trump as his Vice President. Two major foreign wars are raging, inflation has made a nonsense of our currency, and millions of illegal aliens have flooded across our poorly-protected southern border.

President Biden is a very infirm man. My mother, of blessed memory, had early-onset dementia, too. But she was a retired professor of Chemistry residing quietly in the apartment in upper Manhattan where our family had lived since two months before the murder of President John F. Kennedy. She was not in the White House with her finger on the button that starts Armageddon. And yet President Biden is still President. It is an unenviable situation. Kamala Harris, the Vice President, is ludicrously incompetent. Were Biden to be required to step down, she would become President: from the frying pan into the fire! We must somehow maintain steadfast allegiance to lawful authority, to the duly constituted government of this Republic. It could very easily fall apart if we do not.

November 1963. My memory takes me back to that day sixty years ago when sh*t happened in Texas: “Three shots rang out in Dallas,” Walter Cronkite informed the shocked American people on 22 November 1963. It was a bright, chilly afternoon in NYC. Walden School called our folks and dismissed classes early. Mom, who was then a sharp-minded, vivacious young woman, picked me up at school. As we waited for the uptown A express at Columbus Circle, she whispered in my ear, “It was a fascist plot.”

It was, undoubtedly, then a fascist plot. The Warren Report about a lone gunman was pure fiction. It may be a conspiracy now, not the actions of a lone nut. Time will tell. I published a piece here in the Times of Israel a short while ago about the danger of another civil war here in America. I’ve been having to read up on the Civil War of 1861-1865, because I really didn’t know much about it. Right now I’m reading a novel by Michael Shaara, “The Killer Angels”, about the battle that decided the war: it was fought at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which is 207 miles due east and a little south of Butler, where President Trump narrowly escaped death from an assassin’s bullet yesterday. The bullet was a breath away from his brain; after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania yesterday we may be a heartbeat away, God forbid, from a new civil war. We must do everything in our power as citizens to see that does not happen.

News reports are already fudging the story of the attack in Butler. When it comes to President Trump, there seems to be no shame, no bottom to the lying and calumny of his detractors. But despite the best efforts of the establishment and the strident tripe of its media shills, we Americans will find out the truth sooner or later. And the truth, as a certain Jewish itinerant teacher two millennia ago said, will make us free. America must not fail. It cannot be allowed to fail. It must not descend into armed conflict. We must rise above this somehow and protect the integrity of the law. I hope we will elect Trump this November, and then set our house in order, strenuously but fairly, and with malice towards none. That is the lesson President Abraham Lincoln took away from the battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It is thanks to his farsighted faith in national reconciliation that we have a nation.

The Founding Fathers gathered in Congress and signed the declaration of our Independence, our liberty, in the heart of William Penn’s City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I pray their wisdom, justice, courage, fortitude, and charity be with us now.