Letter #134: a thank you letter to President Obama

"Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake."

                                                                         -- Saint Matthew; Chapter 5; Verse 11

"The future rewards those who press on. I don't have time to feel sorry for myself. I don't have time to complain. I'm going to press on."

-- President Barack Obama

The Honorable Barack H. Obama

President

The United States of America

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.

Washington, D.C. 20500

Friday, January 20, 2017

Dear President Obama,

Today, I write you as an American who is deeply ambivalent about some of the policies you have pursued and still who gives you a well-merited ‘two-thumbs-up’ rating. Why? The answer is simple, I am now old enough and have been around long enough to know that the majority of those ideas I deem innovative today will either be refuted in the short-to-medium term or change over the longer term.

Elements of your troubling foreign policy – in Syria and Ukraine --provide apt examples of why my ambivalence has not faded. For years, Mr President, I have come to fear that your behavior appears to be one of appeasement in the face of direct assaults on democracies – whether in place now or inchoate – in Ukraine and Eastern Europe as well as one of turning a blind eye toward appalling carnages, such as those in in Syria and México. 

Mr President, I truly do not believe you are weak or prone to appeasement when I remember to recall the following factors. 

1. The interventionist ideas I support, as opposed to yours, are really nothing more than best-case scenarios. 
2. Mr President, I supported the invasion of Iraq, a war of aggression that failed to follow its evident best-case script; you tried another path for obvious reasons.
3. You probably did not favor interceding in Libya but deferred to your Secretary of State and your top National Security Council expert on multi-lateral initiatives.
4. When the Libya initiative collapsed under the weight of mission creep, you harboured an understandable skepticism of the policy prima donnas and chose to follow your less hawkish instincts. 
5. Though tearing up the Buda Pest memorandum and failing to intervene decisively and early in Ukraine appears to be an act similar to the Munich accord of 1938, the American people clearly did not support risking war over Crimea.

In Syria, the intervention many of us viewed as worth the risk may well have landed us in another military quagmire through mission creep with thousands of sorties and boots on the ground to push it along. Nonetheless, Mr President you have taken action – a fact that many of your gainsayers (e.g., me) fail to note -- in Iraq and Syria, while simultaneously ejecting a Shi´ite strongman in Baghdad.

Additionally, Mr President, you have also displayed the diplomacy, founded on humility, to defer to Russia’s leadership in removing the chemical weapon stockpiles of President Assad, the dictator of Syria. There are other policies that I could criticize, Mr President. That is not the point of this letter. My mission here is to tell you why I give you two-thumbs-up. Policy has little to do with my assessment as admitted earlier.

The fine example you set each day, Mr President, has made you an incontestably decent leader, one that makes me proud of my country. And, for that, Sir, I thank you. Mr President, I sincerely hope your successor understands this reality of modern leadership by example. There are so many trait-based actions of yours that I admire so deeply that I can merely cite a few with enthusiasm:

• the first significant attempt at reform of a dysfunctional health-care distribution and provisioning system;
• your humility in calling on the rest of us not to rush to reaction on instances of police violence or shootings of police and children;
• working in soup kitchens and veterans’ homes on holidays;
• your compassion in pardoning Bradley / Chelsea Manning, a young person driven almost to suicide by twenty-three months of solitary confinement before facing a military tribunal for charges already confessed;
• engaging us in meaningful discourse on the trade-off between liberty and security, thus implicitly showing us respect as citizens;
• providing a consistently conciliatory and reasoned view amid bitter partisan debate;
• your gracious demeanor toward President George W. and Mrs Bush;
• taking decisive, if measured, steps toward helping those who are most vulnerable such as LGBTs, Muslims, undocumented Mexican immigrants who came to the U.S. as children, etc.; as well as,
• so very much more, Mr President.

While your record is mixed, I fear that you will never be fully appreciated as a great man, which you most assurèdly are. History tends to hang the greatness of Presidents on their performance during crises – often wars or economic cataclysms. As far as I can see, you have not displayed such high-profile leadership. What matters here is why you haven’t.

Mr President, many reasonable people will point toward your work to revive the American economy as proof-positive of your leadership in a crisis management mode. Unfortunately, I can not agree with that assessment. Again, I do not want to pursue that thread. Far more important, my political party, the Republican Party, dominated Congress throughout much of your tenure.

lnstead of answering your repeated and conciliatory overtures for compromise, these Republicans did everything they could to undermine your opportunity for greatness. Mr President, I do not understand how these political rivals can put their private – often Tea Party – interests so far ahead of the public good that they conspire to deprive you of your opportunity to lead us – all of us – forward toward a brighter day.

What my thoughts really boil down to, Mr President, is my awe in your teaching us how to behave with civility and restraint in the face of vituperation, much of it racist or implicitly anti-Muslim (based on your name sounding like a Muslim name). Frankly, Sir, your greatness lies in what you did not do:

• abuse your powers to harass Republican politicians, particularly those of the Tea Party;
• lash out at the increasingly palpable racism directed at you – and other minority officials in your Administration;
• throw Mexicans and LGBTs under the proverbial bus; as well as,
• compromise your integrity at the expense of the FBI Director during the campaign.

All that is to say, Mr President: you provided 318 million people with adult supervision. My fondest hope remains that future historians will detect these subtleties of your greatness. In closing, Sir, I salute your service to our country as well as that of the elegant and lovely First Lady.

Thank you and best regards,

Ned
Edward J. McDonnell III, CFA PMP
Birmingham, Alabama.

Letter #133: How do you handle a problem like Judea?

"And if a man from another country is living in your land with you, do not make life hard for him; let him be to you as one of your countrymen and have love for him as for yourself; for you were living in a strange land, in the land of Egypt...." -- Leviticus 19 : 33 & 34

B.L.U.F. (bottom-line, up-front). Like other elements of the political left, the two-state solution has proven to be an intellectual hoax; now toward a one-state future.

lNTRODUCTION: why the two-state solution is history. The New York Times headline (https://lnkd.in/eHmJkJx) says it all: “Is Israël Abandoning the Two-State Solution?” Of course she is and, equally of course, she is not. Publicly, any Israeli support for the two-state solution is dead, at least for now. On the other hand, Israël is not abandoning this carefully orchestrated charade because she never supported it in the first place. To do so would jeopardize the Jewish state and also consign Palestine to a waterless rump of desert.

Why Settlements Do Not Work. Historically, settlements – or forced re-settlements – have rarely worked as a policy instrument over the long-term. For millennia, such intermingling of populations remained a favoured tool of colonialism, and a more palatable alternative to genocide, to keep the subjects close and detection of their revolutionary impulses closer. In more recent totalitarian states, forced re-settlements sought more than control; they also strove to defuse the historically volatile ethno-sectarian tensions that had previously precipitated many bloody wars. 

The last quarter of the twentieth century witnessed a spectacular end to these practices of subjugation and control. The most visible vestiges of colonialism fell away with the collapse of Apartheid in South Africa and the ‘Unilateral Declaration of Independence’ in Rhodesia. The sinking of parts of the erstwhile Soviet Empire and Yugoslavia into brutal conflicts proved that an iron fist had never been suitable for holding the olive branch. Even now, we see the 135 year old policies of Abdur Rahman Khan to re-settle Afghanistan into Pashtunistan as unravelling. 

So why does Israël insist on pursuing these same failed policies in the West Bank and Gaza (i.e., the occupied territories)? There are three basic reasons, at least as I perceive them. 

• First, and being brutally honest, Israël views the West Bank and Gaza as conquered territories and, therefore, under her sovereignty.
• Second, and focussing on military security, the pre-1967 borders would be impossible to defend over time with the thin middle strip, especially in view of ongoing terror attacks against the democracy by murderous Palestinean Islamists.
• Third, and existentially, Israël seeks to preserve her status as a post-Holocaust haven for international Jewry (https://lnkd.in/dQq8_5b). 

Such reasons make the settlement policy compelling, at least in the short-to-medium term. Over time, however, the consequent oppression will likely be impossible to sustain. The policy retardant to any policy change remains, from the Muslim view, the three strikes against Israël as:

• a Jewish state refusing to recognize a legitimate right of return;
• a European and, therefore, largely secular democracy; as well as,
• an Israeli culture, like those of her Arab cousins, imbued with an anti-assimilationist attitude.

Looking Beyond Apartheid. Fortunately, in view of the small amount of territory enclosed among Israël and the West Bank and Gaza, together with a strong dose of European pluralism and rule-of-law, such repressive and bellicose policies toward a conquered people is ultimately unnecessary. Unlike Afghanistan, Israël is not seeking to govern a vast domain. Additionally, if the largely Ashkenazi Jews can work together with their similarly hard-working Palestinean brethren, the economy of fourteen million people would vastly out-perform the aggregated economies of the three constituent territories (https://lnkd.in/dBNjV4t).

In truth, greater Israël would not only be a beacon of democracy and economic growth to the region but also the harbinger of harmony between Shi´ites and Sunnis, Arabs and Persians, as well as other ethno-sectarian cleavages cutting across the Muslim population. This desirable end-state appeals to moderates on both sides but will be, initially at least, scorned by Jewish and Muslim extremists alike. Many U.S.-sponsored initiatives have been tried and only one – President Carter’s Camp David accord – has succeeded. For evident reasons, the United States lacks credibility as an honest broker among the Arabs. 

The mote in the Muslim eye remains as obvious to most neutrals as it likely is undetectable among Muslims: the unrelenting violence. The Jewish state has been encircled for decades by adversaries apparently united by a desire to drive Israël into the sea, now dissipating slowly with familiarity over time and emerging tribalism and other divisions among Arabs. Arguably, one should be impressed by the region’s lone democracy standing steadfastly by the principles of a robust and representative government (including for Arab Israelis). 

Perhaps the most insidious consequence of the outgoing Administration’s refusal publicly to identify ‘IslaMaoism’ as Radical or Militant Islam that enables a continually growing worldwide bias against Israël. The recent U.N. resolution condemning Israël’s morally questionable settlements policy becomes ludicrous in the face of an appalling carnage in Syria, public depredations in the Sudan and Darfur, as well as growing death tolls in Iraq and Yemen. So, Israël must continue to chart her historically lonely path and the United States should stand shoulder-to-shoulder with her. 

Stride toward Freedom; Struggle toward Unity. Israël must progress beyond a settlement policy that negates the fairness of the right-of-return. The Jewish state will have to make policy choices that assume risks and require courage. (Truthfully, what follows is the same old thesis that I have been advocating for fifteen years. If you have been dubiously blessed with these views in the past, you can end right here to avoid a repeat of the ordeal of reading it.) 

The road-map from Point-A of the status quo to Point-B of a peaceful pluralistic democracy entails twelve steps which, together, resemble giant stride toward freedom.

1. Israël sets up an even number provisional provinces across the country proper and the occupied territories.
2. Israël announces a policy of the right of return, either through direct return or, more likely, compensation based on current market values for up to one trillion U.S. dollars (or three times the current G.D.P. of Israël proper and the occupied territories, together ‘Greater Israël’).
3. Said compensation would not be directed toward individuals; the total would be set aside in a trust to promote infrastructure, education, etc. in the Palestinean provinces.
4. The United States, drowning in liquidity from Quantitative Easing, redeems 30% of the circular certificates to pull dormant greenbacks created out of thin air out the money supply, and places them in a collateral account to back Israël’s commitment (https://lnkd.in/bnhKMDT). 
5. Israël announces the immediate annexation of the occupied territories together with an amended Federalist Constitution that splits the provisional provinces evenly among those with Islam as the provincial religion and those with Judaism as the provincial faith.
6. There is a division between church and state at the national level.
7. A united Jerusalem becomes the neutral capital territory under the stewardship of a Christian patriarchate.
8. Jewish provinces can allocate funds for cultural activities and education of Jewish minorities in the Islamic provinces while the Muslim provinces can do the same for Islamic minorities in Jewish provinces.
9. The Christian Patriarch has the tie-breaking vote voting in the Parliament and among provinces as well as being the chief Justice of Supreme Tribunal over an equal number of Justices from the other two faiths.
10. Any tie-breaking vote by the patriarch applies only to questions split along non-sectarian lines in Parliamentary voting, or substantial 'bi-partisan' voting on each side of a deadlocked question; otherwise, the motion is defeated.
11. If voting on questions is recorded by provinces casting one ballot each, the tie-breaking vote applies only when at least one Palestinean province votes with a Jewish majority on one side of the question and one Jewish province votes with a Palestinean majority on the other side.
12. The Israeli Defense and Police Forces continue as they have in the past but integrate their Palestinean counterparts through direct hiring and training of new recruits.

While such a road-map is radical, with audacity and perseverance, the moderates of all sides can make it work. This arrangement should be able to hold together for two generations; enough, for the culture to change and stamp out belligerent militancy on both sides. Such violence is more frequent and less restrained among Muslims than among Israelis.

CONCLUSION: Bravery or Blood? The largest measure of courage will be whether moderate Muslims will repudiate their violent co-religionists and endure the murders by these extremists sure to follow. Islamic jihadists are, like most gangsters, interested less in their stated beneficiaries than the power over, and wealth from, those same supposed constituents. As for the elements (i.e., provincial boundaries, provincial but not national religions*, etc.) contemporary arrangements and history provide precedents indicating that fulfillment of these policies is not only achievable but also desirable – right here, right now.

* The idea for a separation of Church and State on the national level, together with provincial religions, draws upon the persistence of U.S. state religions among many individual states for up to fifty years (e.g., the Episcopal Church as the state church of the Commonwealth of Virginia) following the split between Church and State on the national level under the 1787 Constitution.

Letter 132: Why the 19th of December will be interesting but likely insignificant

“The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of Votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately chuse by Ballot one of them for President; and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President. But in chusing the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote; A quorum for this Purpose shall consist of a Member or Members from two thirds of the States, and a Majority of all the States shall be necessary to a Choice. In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal Votes, the Senate shall chuse from them by Ballot the Vice President.”

--Constitution of the United States of America:
Article II (Executive), Section 1, Parapgraph 3;

as ratified on the 21st of June 1788, as amended the 15th of June 1805 
and the 23rd of January 1933.

   

BLUF: The Electoral College vote to be taken at the State Capitols on Monday the 19th of December will almost certainly ratify Mr Trump’s election. It would be difficult to justify overturning the constitutional machinery, particularly in favor of Senator / Secretary Clinton.

Scenarios. There are three manners by which this situation will unfold:

• ratification of Messrs Trump and Pence as President and Vice President;
• switch-out to Mrs Clinton to inaugurate a Clinton-Pence Administration; or,
• switch-out to another Republican for President and, perhaps, Vice President by moving that determination into the House of Representatives voting state-by-state and, if necessary for selecting the Vice President, into the Senate.

The most likely outcome is that a sufficient number of Electors will vote for the candidate for whom they are pledged to ratify Mr Trump’s election. On a subjective basis only, I would assign a ninety-five per cent (95%) probability for this eventuality, which I deem as the worst case for reasons I have stated ad nauseam and need not be repeated in this essay. In all three scenarios, Governor Pence is assumed to have no problems in being ratified for Vice President and, in one case, President.

Also falling under this scenario would be the case where at least thirty-seven (37) ‘Trump’ Electors abstained and no one else received an Electoral vote. In this theoretical latter case, the final vote would go into the House of Representatives to be balloted state-by-state. Nevertheless, with a decisive thirty to twenty margin of those states with the majority of the Congressional delegation being Republican, Mr Trump would almost certainly still win the the White House. 

The second most likely scenario is that a sufficient number of Electors in states where Mr Trump won switch their votes to make the Senator / Secretary the President. Though with only a four (4%) per cent subjective likelihood, this would be the scenario I would view as the base case. The highly unlikely event of the Senator / Secretary being awarded the Presidency would not change the post-election reality too much since Governor Pence would be confirmed in the Electoral College as the Vice President. It would make continuing grid-lock more likely with a Clinton-Pence Administration.

The final, best case scenario remains the least likely at a one per cent (1%) probability, subjectively assigned. That would be enough Electors switching away from Mr Trump to other candidates for the House of Representatives to vote state-by-state to pick from the top five. This scenario would require ample coördination to solidify a Republican alternate to Mr Trump and his Democratic rival who would be able to carry a majority of the states. While my preference – and that of many Republicans – of that alternative would be Governor Bush or Kasich, the House would be under some moral obligation to select a change-minded Republican, probably Governor Pence.

If Governor Pence ascended to the Presidency, the Senate Republican majority would be under pressure also to select another change-oriented Republican (e.g., Governor Walker or Mrs Fiorina) for Vice President. If a Republican other than Governor Pence were selected for the Presidency, the Electoral College ratification of Governor Pence as Vice President would proceed. As I stated, this selection of a change-committed Republican would be a ‘soft’ moral obligation since the American electorate repudiated the establishment candidate, Mrs Clinton, by a margin of four million votes on November 8th.

Conclusion. Mr Trump will be our next President. The positive value of all of this protesting, bickering and, more recently, calling for the Electoral College to exercise the discretion constitutionally vested in it – as well as separate calls for audits to clear Mr Trump of conflicts of interest, particularly with Russia – is to lay the cornerstone of accountability. Call it prudent protest.

The incoming Administration is now on notice that America has the constitutional machinery in place to prevent a usurpation of power or traitorous collusion with a foreign power. Should that machinery break down, we Americans have the natural right to overthrow tyranny. Personally, I believe that Mr Trump will act in good faith; this fear and caution, while understandable and necessary, will prove to be unfounded in subsequent acts or events.

Letter 131: Remembering Pearl Harbour -- what it was and what it was not

"Yesterday, December 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan." 

--President Franklin D. Roosevelt; 8th December 1941

"I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people -- and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!"

--President George W. Bush; 14th September 2001

On September 10th of 2001, I spent time in Detroit, Michigan getting ready to bury my Uncle Henry. My cousin, Nancy, a successful investment banker on Wall Street, made a fateful remark as she reflected on the fact that a decorated war hero of Okinawa in 1945, her father, would be laid to rest on September 11th. She noted that we were facing the end of an era.  

The next day, of course, the United States suffered the worst foreign attack on her soil since the sneak-attack of the Japanese on Pearl Harbor, nearly sixty years before. The horrific events of that morning overshadowed my uncle’s funeral that coincided with them. My cousin, Peter, summed it up well by counselling a respectful good-bye since his warrior-father would want us to kick some ass.

With the funeral complete, I drove my sister back to her daughters in Annapolis post-haste since my brother-in-law was stuck in Montreal. Then, shedding the Avis, I Amtracked it back to New York, wondering where the usual land-mark of the city was. There was a factory, somewhere beyond view, belching smoke; something I had not noticed previously. But no twin towers. Then, I remembered. Oh, my God.

After a forever ride under Lincoln Tunnel – one never knew where these suicidal sociopaths would strike next – I found that the fastest way from Penn Station through the newly minted Pottersville to my apartment was simply to walk. After a run and vain offer of blood, I settled in my desk at the bank. As the Global Industry Credit Manager for Insurance at the world’s largest bank and overseeing a $35 billion portfolio, I knew I would have my work cut out for me.

What I did not expect, however, was the touch of international diplomacy that I would have to bring to the maelstrom of work, speculation and contingency planning. My rapidly calculated estimate of losses insurers would have to indemnify, from the ground up would eventually prove to be one of the best across Wall Street (within 5% of industry losses after five or six years). 

Luck of the Irish, I suppose – actually, I know.  On that estimate and analysis of expected impacts of the sneak terror attack, I had to append a cover-memo to twenty managers around the world reporting to me providing guidance for the days to follow.

The Ghost of Pearl Harbour. Along the way, the Japanese credit manager e-mailed me that he was very hurt by the comparisons between 9-11 and the sneak attack on Pearl Harbour of December 7th of 1941. My heart went out to him since the two attacks seemed different, at least intuitively. Having spent some time in Australia as a kid, I also figured the Aussies were flakking him mercilessly.

That evening, days after 9-11, I stayed in very late researching Pearl Harbour and what we knew about the mass murders in New York for that cover-memo. As I released my coincidentally accurate estimate, I decided to be very firm with these managers. With British, German, American, Australian and Canadian managers among others receiving my guidance, I had to be sensitive to all sides.

Consequently, I concluded that 9-11 was not Pearl Harbour; it was worse, far worse. While Pearl Harbour was certainly an act of war, for which the Japanese paid mightily, to equate the two attacks was to dishonour the Japanese. Why? Because 99%+ of the people killed on December 7, 1941 were U.S. military personnel, primarily sailors and grunts.

Most of the few civilians not affiliated with military facilities who had died were hit by falling anti-aircraft flak. In New York, suicidal sociopaths using religion as a rationale for murder had slaughtered thousands of innocents; thankfully we would find out that the death toll was 20-30% of what we had feared initially. Nevertheless, that massacre had been deliberate and that planning had made it a monstrous evil. 

The Japanese, however, had limited their attack to military targets sixty years before. In that memorandum, I made it clear that to compare the two attacks would be to dishonour the Japanese airmen by equating the opening gambit of war with wantonly killing civilians. I closed with a warning that said, in effect, “Such prejudice is utterly unacceptable and I will not hear it as we proceed through the difficult days ahead.”

Letter 130: Fiddling with Fidel; Kidding with a Communist

“What this country really needs is a good five-cent cigar…”

-- Vice President T.R. Marshall, 1915

“A revolution is not a trail of roses.… A revolution is a fight to the death between the future and the past.”

-- Fidel Castro, 1961.

No Castor Oil Treatment for Castro. For those of us who either have no connections to fame or have simply burned too many bridges, this perspective will sound familiar in its innocence and insignificance. Before we start with an anecdote, it is important to point out that Castro was a strong-man and his régime often brutal. Nevertheless, it was nothing like the most brutal days of communist states of the U.S.S.R., Cambodia and China.

Second, Fidel Castro emerged from the educated upper-middle class, an upbringing that left its imprimatur on the victorious revolutionary. Thus, the communist firebrand transcended the same circles as many Cubans in Miami, who have been whining since 1959 for the revolutionaries doing to them what they had been doing to many of the poor, especially those trapped ‘en el campo’ for centuries.

Third, though Cuba never really took flight as a workers’ paradise, the strongman elevated literacy to nearly 100% -- up by two-thirds – within five years; expanded university education and provided a universal healthcare worth noting. Those accomplishments tell a lot about a man under tremendous pressure by surrounding power(s) trying to subvert the experiment  he was leading (https://academicexchange.wordpress.com/2015/01/08/15-facts-on-cuba-and-its-education-system/).

The embargo by the United States prevented any chance of reconciliation between the Cubans in the U.S., and elsewhere, along with what capital they might have had, and the mother-country, much like we have seen develop, slowly, between Formosa and Red China. Had the embargo been lifted, when it was evident that Castro was not going anywhere (e.g., after the Bay of Pigs) – ahhh, what might have been.

Summer 1971. My only 'blood-brother' in life, Robbie Rosenbaum, and I decided to make a phoney-call of international proportions. With Robbie listening in, I got the Ma-Bell operator and requested a long-distance call to Cuba, “Please make a collect-call to Havana…” This at the height of the passenger jets being hijacked to Cuba.

“Oh, Havana?”

“Yes, I want to speak with my uncle…”

“Your uncle?”

“Yes, my Uncle Fidel!” My voice cracked under the strain of stress and wanting to crack up laughing.

“Oh, please wait a minute while...” The line went dead, ominously. Of course, Rob and I, the faint-hearted and bland pranksters we were, quickly bailed. Soon, the phone rang. I got on the listen-only extension this time – a microphone on the phone channeled through stereo head-speakers – while Rob took the call with his deeper voice.

“Hello?” Robbie used his most stentorian tone.

“Sir, are you aware that someone from this line just tried to call Fidel Castro?”

“Oh,” Rob said, deepening his voice even more. “That must be my spoiled son…” I was biting on my index finger to contain myself from laughing – still have the teeth marks to prove it!

“I would assume so, Mister Rosenbaum?”

“That’s me,” answered Rosey authoritatively. “That boy is trouble, a regular juvenile delinquent…” My will-power against showing emotion was ebbing fast when disaster struck. (Robbie was always the tougher of the two of us.)

“Hello?” Oh my God. Stanley Rosenbaum, a truly patrician elder with roots back to the earliest Jewish settlement in New Amsterdam, had an equally commanding voice, though a notch above Robbie’s affected tone.

“That’s alright, Stanley.” Rosey was winging it, now. “Ma’am, that’s my other son…”

“Stanley? Son??” Mr Rosenbaum was later deemed my ‘Uncle Stanley’, after Rosey departed at far too young an age my first December away at school. “Robbie? What is this? Why is your voice so deep?” The operator was confused.

“Oh, my sons – they can be such trouble…Now, Stanley, get off the phone, please.” The operator was wising up to Rosey, now.

“Sir, may I speak with you?” Both Robbie and Uncle Stan said yes. Uncle Stanley was not quite angry, but he was stern.

“Rob, get off the phone so I may speak with this lady.”

“Ah, operator, Stanley likes to imitate me…” Uncle Stanley was not quite furious but he was annoyed.

“Robert, get off the phone.”

“No, dad, you get off the phone.” I thought I could hear the operator giggling discreetly. In any case we were done for. Rob nodded at me and hung up. Then I disconnected the ‘bug’ from the phone, took off Rosey’s headphones and sat in a chair to look calm and innocent for the inevitable.

We waited hours (five-to-ten minutes, puberty standard time) until Mr Rosenbaum finally appeared at Robbie’s door.

“Neddy, I have spoken with your mother.” Thank God; he had not spoken with dad. I would have been in so much trouble that I might have had to hijack a flight to Havana for self-preservation. “She asked me to handle this with you, too.” Was this discipline or a mission of mercy?

Rob tried to smooth things over in the manner only a big-boy could do. (Rosey was year older at fifteen.) “Well, sorry dad.”

“Rob, I have told your mother that I would speak with you about this.” Uncle Stanley looked down briefly, shaking his head. Whew! My dad and his Mom were out of the picture! No rack and pillory for us. Uncle Stanley continued patiently, “Now, Rob and Neddy, this was not just a practical joke.” He composed himself, I assumed, to contain his violated sense of blue-blooded patriotism and consequent rage.

“You were about to be switched over to the F-B-I.” Robbie and I look exchanged worried glances, evincing the age-old ‘sacred scheiße’ look. Again, Mr Rosenbaum composed himself. He had never been this flummoxed; ordinarily so calm a gentleman.

“I’m so sorry, Mr Rosenbaum!” Okay, so I was a teen-age mutant cringing quisling.

Finally, Uncle Stanley could contain himself no longer as his giggle quickly cascaded into a laugh.

May 1975. After defending the greatness of the U.S. to some nasally effete French teacher who wanted to crush ‘Yanquisme’ (American imperial fascism or some such hackneyed whimpicism), I decided to prove my point that the U.S. had done far more good than bad in Viêt Nam compared to the sickly French colonialists. I researched the French Indo-Chinese War for a presentation in class.

Much to my surprise, we had not done better; in fact, we had done worse, much worse and should have known better. The U.S. had made all the same mistakes as France with ten times the TNT tonnage and two-to-three times the casualties on all sides. For the first time, after a troubling ambivalence since 1969, I turned against the war. At least those motley French had sacrificed more troops than we to hold the stupid colony in the first place. 

For what? 

My God, the war had not been noble, not a trace of nobility to it, at all. Ho Chi Minh had fashioned his declaration of independence after our own. He had pleaded with President Wilson for a homeland; President Truman had over-ridden President Roosevelt’s implicit anti-colonialism. President Truman’s shift from F.D.R.’s perspective seeing all sides to one of pure self-interest had virtually guaranteed the Cuban embargo thirteen years later.

In a state of near agitation over a wrenching bout of cognitive dissonance, one evening I joined a housemaster and a couple of other students as we talked about the recent fall of Saigon, Phnom Penh and Vientiane. The housemaster encouraged me to speak up since I was obviously troubled. So I wondered aloud if communism might be the better way to go, at least at first, for a newly freed colonial country to get her people fed, read and healthy.

May 1976. My best friend in boarding school and I were chatting one night with some under-classmen when we got into a debate about the Cold War. One of the tykes – now a Wall Street millionaire – had a father highly placed in the Cold War apparatus of Containment. He relished the fact that Cuba’s experiment in communism had manifestly failed. People were poorer than ever. The U.S. had won!

My best friend – a very good man even then – took issue with that assertion pointing out that the embargo had impoverished Cuba over the previous seventeen years. The under-wingie countered that the U.S. faced a global threat and that the embargo had to stop communist expansionism. Besides, the U.S. had succeeded. The argument sounded tired, tinny and trite.

Silently, I wondered if that victory hadn’t been hollowed out by mass misery at our hand. Ever since, I have come progressively to view that sanctions – the polite name now used for embargoes – are not only ineffective but also somehow rotten. The dictators targeted already have the money and the supplies; they are unaffected. Yet the common man suffers mightily. 

For what?

Letter 129: Reflections of a Renegade Jew

“First, the disciples were in a unique position to know whether the Resurrection happened, and they went to their deaths proclaiming it was true. Nobody knowingly and willingly dies for a lie…there’s no good reason why skeptics like [Saints] Paul and James would have been converted and would have died [painfully] for their faith.”

-- Lee Strobel, 1998.

“In the first place, philosophy did not develop in an unbiased way from an open and unprejudiced origin. It had its task cut out for it from the start. It had a mission to perform, and it was sworn in advance to that mission. It had to extract the essential moral kernel out of the threatened traditional beliefs of the past.”

-- John Dewey, 1920.

“This work…seeks to explain certain obscure figures which occur in the Prophets [and their messages transcribed in the Tanakh, or the Jewish Bible]…Even well informed persons are bewildered if they understand these passages in their literal signification, but they are entirely relieved of their perplexity when we…merely suggest that the terms [of the Prophets and of the narrative of the Tanakh] are figurative. For this reason I have called this book Guide for the Perplexed.”

-- Moses Maimonides, 1190.

NOTE; Thanksgiving Day 2016. 

You are in luck! Here is the blessed text for free: 

http://www.teachittome.com/seforim2/seforim/the_guide_for_the_perplexed.pdf. 

I myself had to have the paper copy so I could leave my teeth-marks in it and study it as I study any bucket-list non-fiction book…ANALytically.

BLUF (Bottom-line, up front): The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel provides a convincing argument in favor of the authenticity and accuracy of the New Testament. In a few sentences, Guide for the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides refutes that notion devastatingly.

Introduction. The dilemma? In one book, one has to choose Christianity or overtly turn away from it; lazy agnosticism is no longer an option. Using less refined argumentation than C.S. Lewis, Strobel strengthens his argument through its accessibility. The other book explains why Christianity simply does not work and why it was condemned as a heresy of Judaism from the beginning. 

Certain books can change the world. Certain statements in certain books can change one’s life. The underlying religious texts are full of nuggets for people in all times:

1. "Praise be to G-d, Lord of the Universe, the compassionate, the Merciful, Sovereign of the Day of Judgment! You alone we worship, and to You alone we turn for help."
2. "Simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures."
3. "Blessèd are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God."
4. "Now my natural qualities are besieged by weakness and apprehension and my thinking bewildered regarding righteousness."
5. "Solomon answered G-d, 'You have shown great loving-kindness to my father David and now You have made me king in his place. Now, AdonaiELOHIM...give me wisdom and knowledge that I may go out and come in before this people. For who can govern this great people of Yours?'"

Specific books, and passages within them, however, suit a particular individual’s temperament and direction through life. For me, two of those books have been Reconstruction in Philosophy by John Dewey and Guide for the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides. This essay focusses on the irreconcilable super-ordination of Judaism over Christianity executed so elegantly by Maimonides that I have nowhere else to go but home.

Collision of the Wraiths of Faith. For many years, I have come to believe that Saint Paul – half Jew and a Roman citizen – was the first international marketing M.B.A. He saw the vacuity of Roman decadence, the twilight of the Graeco-Roman pantheon in favor of the orientalist man-god in the flesh of the Emperor. While he saw that black hole of the Roman soul, Saint Paul was also a pragmatist.

Saint Paul knew, from his physician friend, Saint Luke, that adult men would never consent to circumcision with mortality rates likely to run 25% or more. So believers – fellow Romans starved for meaning and inward renewal – need only believe in the man-god of J.C.; merely circumcise their hearts; and, simply write the law unto their hearts rather than have all those rules upend their lives.

My blithe conception of Christianity being Judaism-over-easy no longer holds. Barely mentioning Jesus or Catholicism, Maimonides consigns Christianity to being a Jewish heresy. Christians take the words of the New Testament – and the parts of Tanakh (the Jewish Bible, or the Old Testament) used to justify the Gospels – at their face value.

Maimonides discusses at length why the scriptures were never intended to be taken literally. They were analogies and metaphors useful in guiding believers toward (inward) virtue being its own reward. Virtue being its own reward sounds a lot like Grace. Except that the Jewish conception of Grace is a more active notion than a simple and largely passive ‘conversion’; it requires living a certain way to elevate mind and body together toward an accessibility to G-d's guidance.

The relief from perplexity, as prescribed by Maimonides, is aligning metaphysics with behavior, a commitment which entails something other than understanding the why-behind-the-why intellectually. One must apprehend it through attempting, and often falling short of, an obedience to the commandments and to the concrete message behind the mystery of the prophecies. People grow toward Grace, not simply let it in via conversion. 

In The Case for Christ, ex-crime investigative reporter, Lee Strobel, nobly argues a case for the ‘fact’ that Jesus Christ not only existed, but that his biography is accurately narrated and substantially corroborated in the Gospels. He adduces convincing evidence. While not proven completely -- as no historical chronicle ever is -- if Strobel were writing about another, less-laden topic, his pain-staking argument would persuade me as being highly probable in its veracity.

That would suffice for me to accept Jesus Christ as a historical figure; to hand my life over to his guidance; and, to get on with my life of Grace. Except that Moses Maimonides under-cuts the legitimacy of Strobel’s argument by clearly, simply and incontrovertibly pointing out the source of Christianity being a heresy: the literal interpretation of the prophecies and other scriptures.

Being literalists, the early Christians aligned the facts, as recorded, of Christ’s life with the prophecies of Isaiah et al. in proclaiming an eventual Messiah. That reversal of Christian logic by Maimonides does not mean that I think Christians are somehow fraudulent in their often extraordinary loving-kindness. What it does mean is that Christianity, for all her splendor and wisdom, is not a simple emulation of G-d begotten as man but of G-d as spoken through the Prophets. 

No, my old notion of Christianity being Judaism-over-easy – reflecting a life-long habit of splitting the difference to appease everyone and, therefore, to please no one – is not a separate package of belief and doctrine. It is Judaism, pure and heretically simple. Many other confounding questions (some new and some old) fall into place after a life-time of cognitive dissonance thanks to this brilliant and modest man from so long ago:

• why there is a close resemblance of the structures of Catholicism and Judaism (i.e., tabernacles for the body of wisdom, the Torah, and the body of Christ as well as five layers of hierarchy between man and G-d, per the counsel of Jethro, history's first ever management consultant);
• why so many Christian sects exist, many being cults of (often dangerous) personalities;
• why Islam and Judaism resemble one another far more than either resembles Christianity;
• why so many Christians – Orthodox and Western – have been so profoundly Anti-Semitic for so long;
• how a repeated mix of Christianity and politics keeps yielding distinctly un-Christlike behavior and rhetoric in our own day through conflation of literalism with political ideology or voting preference;
• why everyone is truly created as a finite image of an infinite G-d;
• how fighting over shelf-space has instigated repeated pogroms, even genocide, against the believers of a vulnerable religion, often with the tacit complicity of host-nation Christian churches;
• why the Trinity, according to Maimonides (ironically, without mentioning it), really makes no sense, except in a context of error in which figurative language is interpreted literally;
• how to revere and emulate Jesus since he is more than a rabbi and less than a prophet; as well as,
• why Maimonides’s exerts a pervasively persuasive influence on many great Christian theologians and philosophers, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to William of Ockham to Blaise Pascal to Bishop George Berkeley to Søren Kierkegaard to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and even to (the Jewish) Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The medieval rabbi came to my attention during my time interning with the U.S. Senate a long time ago. Two years before, a fellow W.&L. Zeeb and a W.&L. professor, neither of whom ever avoided dinging me, instructed me to pursue the-why-behind-the-why through their example of curiosity, notwithstanding grades. 

Thank G-d, because high marks were not exactly in my repertoire back then! Among many books beyond my limited intellectual reach that I read was A Guide for the Perplexed by E.F. Schumacher, in 1982. Having recently been enchanted, permanently, by his earlier masterpiece, Small Is Beautiful, I was disappointed by Schumacher's stab at metaphysics due to its difficulty. 

Like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, read the previous year, I sorely lacked the patience to slow down enough really to read that book. In his 'Guide', Schumacher kept referring to Guide for the Perplexed by Maimonides. What I managed to extract from Schumacher and his invisible mentor has shaped my basic beliefs to this day. 

Consequently and inevitably, Maimonides's work became a bucket-list book, not to be read for another thirty-four years (i.e., true to my slack form, if more sacral substance). But what a rich, if deferred, lode of gold this eight-hundred, twenty-five year old book has proven to be! Reading it is like eating fresh Sushi: only then do I realize how famished I have been for real nourishment.

Conclusion: why the above-cited quotes above mean so much.  Early in their respective books, Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish theologian and metaphysics philosopher, as well as Dewey, the great twentieth century pragmatic philosopher, made simple and transparent declarations that instantly changed the way I looked at things then; their imprint will remain indelible until the day I depart.

John Dewey’s plain-spoken argument, which I read thirty-five years ago, shattered my nascent romance with metaphysics by explaining that Aristotle and Plato fancifully supported the status quo of their time. Metaphysics was not venal nor was it other-worldly. Like it or not, one had to play his hand as dealt. Only doing that with arretê (instrumental excellence) would increase virtue, provided one did not shed his humility along with his ignorance. 

Likewise, Moses Maimonides’s equally plain-spoken clarification argued that Jewish scripture – with the exception of the commandments dictated to Moses by God – was designed less to build knowledge than to excite the imagination, or the will (i.e., soul) toward virtue. That fact of the Tanakh basically relegated Christianity to a Judaic heresy since the early fathers had degraded the figurative scripture into the literal or, philosophically put, the metaphysical into the ephemeral. 

Grace is virtue; wisdom, its currency; and, rapture, its reward.