Bid(en)ing His Time

Kamala gives good theatre. There's a reason nobody makes movies about lawyers like me, who sit by themselves writing briefs all day. 

With a carefully rehearsed and impeccably delivered surgical strike, Kamala pretty much broke the applause meter with her take down of Joe. Her voice was quivering but strong, and her eyes, though on the verge of tears, were laser focused on her target, and if the pundits are to be believed, she won the battle. But can she win the war, where the only thing Joe Biden has in common with the real enemy is his old, white, maleness? 

I thought the debate format was stupid, pitting so many relatively smart and qualified people against each other with little time available to any of them do to much to advance anybody's cause but their own? Kamala -- and many of the others -- were representing a constituency of one. And Kamala, the masterful prosecutor, was damn good. Damn good. 

Does anybody really think that Joe Biden would not be a champion of civil rights? Does anybody really think that his vote, 45 years ago, on bussing, is indicative of how he would represent us? Does anybody really think that working across the aisle with segregationists, long ago, means that Joe Biden endorsed their positions? Did anybody notice that Joe got a little shot in, drowned out by the food fight, reminding Kamala that he had been a defense attorney, not a prosecutor? I would imagine Joe is biding his time, as much as it killed him not to get drawn into the food fight. 

Bussing is complicated, by the way. I remember watching the buses arrive in my Brooklyn school yard in the sixties. I remember playing with the white kids on one end, struggling to master a single jump rope while we watched the black girls do double-dutch on the other end. Hardly an across the board cure for segregation, from my perspective. 

Experience and long records are certainly double-edged swords. But I have no reason to believe, going forward, that theatrical prosecuting and flashy stagecraft and taking full advantage of identity politics will help us to win the war. 

In the middle of the night, unable to sleep, I turned on the television to see Donald Trump "making history," crossing the demarcation line into North Korea. I suppose that is making history, in the sense that we have never had a president ring up a murderous dictator to tell him hey I'm in the neighborhood, let's take a short walk and grab a spot of tea. And pose for a few pics. Maybe just a quick hello, maybe even a hug? Talk about stagecraft. We've already lost our collective soul; have we now lost our minds? 

I hope the next debates will really be debates. Not just pronouncements about all that is obviously bad and promises that cannot be kept and strategic take downs that have nothing to do with where we are headed. 

The Hole in the Book Fair

It felt right, finally, navigating through the crowds with my dog, thumbing through books, accepting treats (for him, not me), wandering among the tents. The city life I had envisioned -- a convergence of all sorts of folks from all sorts of places, with all manner of stories to tell. The Printer's Row Book Fair. A magnet for the enlightened. 

I was drawn, at first, to the women who sat, smiling, behind modest displays of the books they had written. The woman who, in the ten years since she retired, has published a slew of crime novels, weaving in the biography of a fictional female detective with the history of places, local and far-flung. I asked her which book was her favorite; her publisher, standing next to her, told me that was like asking somebody to pick a favorite child. Touché. I lingered awhile, thinking the fact of having written a book would somehow osmote to me. I bought the one that takes place in Paris; not only would I become a great writer, but I would be doing it in a cafe, on the Rive Gauche. 

Then there was the memoir lady. Forget crime novels, forget Paris, I would be writing my memoir. Unbecoming, I'd call it, since Becoming has been taken. I lingered again. If I was going to buy this lady's book, I was going to extract as much advice out of her as I could. She worked hard at it, she told me. Read lots of memoirs. Took lots of classes. And worked even harder. Oh, and yes, she appeared to even have a story to tell. Damn. I bought her book, still banking on the osmosis idea. 

I returned in the afternoon. Though the crowd had by then doubled, I arrived, quite suddenly, at a clearing, a parting in the sea of humanity. I glanced over at the large tent in the midst of this gaping hole. There was a handful of young men within the circle of tables, which were lined with beautifully bound books. I looked up at the sign: Muslim. It didn't just say "Muslim" of course, but I can't remember the rest -- booksellers, publishers, literary group, maybe. From the looks of things, it said "terrorists." Some irrepressible force of nature had repelled the crowd, parted the sea of humanity, of the enlightened. I even hesitated before I approached the table, thinking if biblical forces were at play, a lightning bolt could be next. 

As I flipped through the pages of a Quran, a thick hardcover volume, purple, in Arabic with English translations, I caught familiar names on every page: Moses, Adam, David. One of the young men approached, explained to me what the differences were among all the editions -- the languages, the translations, the commentary. I told him I was Jewish, and he asked me if I had been "there." There. I am not an Israeli, but I knew what he meant, and I said yes, a long time ago. We talked about the Old Testament and the New Testament and where the Quran fit in, or where it was supposed to fit in. Well, mostly he talked and I listened. Still, nobody else came near the table. 

I asked him, Fawaad, from New Jersey, if it had been like this all day, this pronounced clearing. He told me they had gotten some traffic, but, when he thought more about it, he told me that yes, it's been pretty empty, but that's just how it is. There is a stigma, he told me, and he has always lived with it, and he accepts that he has to until, well, he doesn't. Just as Jews once did. I told him I had never experienced discrimination as a Jew, but why would I, having grown up in Brooklyn in the sixties. In a Jewish bubble, where nobody could have imagined the kind of hatred that would continue to bubble up from beneath the surface, well into the twenty-first century. Here, among the enlightened, my optimistic new friend had grown so accustomed to being a "them" in a sea of "us" he appeared unfazed by the knee jerk suspicion and hatred that had somehow overtaken even the jerkiest of knee jerkers who populate book fairs. 

As I finish this post, I am gathering together some cash and returning to Fawaad's table, as I had promised, to buy my Quran, with the indecipherable Arabic on one side and the English on the other and the footnoted commentary below. I will read it, the way I sometimes used to read the Bible while sitting through endless Bar and Bat Mitzvot, so many years ago. And I will understand, even less, why nobody had visited this table. 

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