Uncle Rupert

Of all my Dad’s friends, I liked ‘Uncle Rupert’ most of all.

Unlike my Dad, Uncle Rupert was short, and had almost no neck. He had an infectious laugh, and a great sense of humour. He loved to smoke, drink, and to play golf very poorly.

However, Uncle Rupert was absolutely brilliant. ‘So Nupping, why are you on the same page of your homework for twenty minutes’, asked Uncle Rupert as I sat at the dining table doing homework while my Dad and Uncle Rupert smoked and had a drink in the adjacent living room’. ‘I’m doing an unseen in Latin’,  I complained. Uncle Rupert got up, stood behind my back, and translated every word that I had marked. Many years late, Uncle Rupert asked me, ‘Nupping, is it still 26-9-48?’ He had helped me set my combination lock a decade before-and still remembered.

There is one memory that sticks out in my mind more than any other. Dad, Uncle Rupert and I had flown to Northern Quebec to fish, and we were driving the last 200 miles to Wapoo-Sibi fishing camp. I was still a young boy, and I was lying in the back seat, exhausted from the day’s travel. Uncle Rupert heard my stomach gurgle and said to my Dad, ‘pull over at the next restaurant, Phil; Nupping is hungry’.

Sitting in our back yard in 1967, Uncle Rupert asked me what are my thoughts on the Greek military coup. I gave a dumb answer, and for over an hour, Uncle Rupert gave me an overview of the history of military coups, Greek history, and how radical changes in government ‘screw the little guy’.

Dad often told me that Uncle Rupert can talk about almost every subject in great depth. ‘The man has a great mind’, was Dad’s one liner on Rupert. My Dad had one-liners for a lot of his friends.

When I started to talk, nupping was the way I pronounced nothing, and Uncle Rupert never ever called me anything but that.

When Uncle Rupert passed away, I had returned to Israel. The news devastated me and I wrote to his wife, Auntie Selma, who was a head taller than Uncle Rupert. I received a very touching answer from Auntie Selma, who was an artist.

Montreal is a city with so much to remember: bitter winters, skiing at Tremblant and Mt Gabriel, rue de la Montagne where my Dad lived, the Main, the French ambience, my summer working at Expo 67, Schwartz’s Deli, McGill, Orange Julep,  Place des Arts, McGill, 7 graves of family members, my remaining cronies from childhood, and memories of Uncle Rupert.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Free at last

On Tuesday, I will be 95-98% immune to Corona.

However, were I a better listener, I would not believe this to be the case. My friends have warned me not to take down my guard “because we can never be sure if  this vaccine works.” And it does not matter if I am watching France 24, BBC, Israel TV 11 or Germany’s English language broadcasts, there is always someone warning me that the new mutations may slip by the new vaccine. 

If you ask me, there is a reason for concern, but not about corona. The concern is about the lingering fear that still hangs over our heads albeit the reason for this fear is soon to be gone. The thing we need to fear most is fear itself, and the whole system that has been built up to feed our fear, enhance it and at times cripple our judgement.

Eisenhower was the first to warn us of the military/industrial complex, whose overlapping interests are continuing the conflicts needed to ensure power and profitability.

Once enough people get the vaccine which will probably happen by the summer, the plague will be over.  However, there are interest groups that will try to convince us that “extreme vigilance should last for another few years” or that the “English or Brazilian or South African mutation” will penetrate the layer of protection provided by the vaccine.

This is not to say that we may be unlucky. At age 55, I had flown to Asia, Australia and the US 40 times in one year and  I caught a  very bad case of  pneumonia. I recovered, got a pneumonia shot, yet once again caught pneumonia. The doctor said, “Shevat, it happens. Rare but it happens. Get on with life”.

I have recently read about how 1945 was such a wretched year.  Rebuilding was far more daunting than war. The war was over, the maimed returned home, no one had a pot to piss in, there were no jobs and the hype was gone.

The real issue on the table now is picking up the pieces, making sense of what has happened, and mitigating the fear that has taken over our decimated lives.

Here is how I am going to start. On Tuesday, I am going to hug my daughter and grandchildren for the first time in 10 months.  And plan a few trips to Vienna, Florence, Jordan and the UAR. That’s just the beginning.

Free at last.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Why are Israelis so willing to vaccinate-a glimpse into Israeli culture

More than six million Israelis have been vaccinated; by March the economy will fully reopen (already happened) , with nearly universal vaccination for populations-in-danger, and anyone else who wants to put an end to the hellish existence of the past year.

In this post,  I will underline the cultural underpinnings which explain the willingness of our population to roll up their sleeve and take the jab. True, the government and our superb public health system did procure and provide logistic support for this endeavour, but that alone does not explain the willingness of the population to get jabbed. I trust that this short post add another layer of explanation

  1. Israelis are risk tolerant.  It starts with our history. The ingathering of the exiles from the Diaspora into Turkish and then British-mandated Palestine, into what is now the State of Israel, was always a high risk endeavour (which most Jews opposed until the Holocaust).  Against all odds, from the late 1800s until today, almost every single achievement has been achieved by risk taking. Many risks paid off; many others fail. But bottom line, we owe our existence to our risk tolerance.
  2. Israelis have a proclivity for action. Israel was a pioneer society, with something of a wild mid-west mentality. There still remains  an anti-intellectual streak which values doing over thinking. In Chinese, there is an expression “should I push at the door or should I knock at the door?”, which is used to describe dithering and dawdling. We do not have that in our culture-we do. Often with poor results, but usually with huge success.
  3. Fast and dirty. We bypass process, then mop up. Process takes the back seat to speed. Speed is strategy. Software is released quickly, then we clean up, We build apartments, then roads. We take the vaccine, and mitigate the fear of side-effects.
  4. Life is hard, and then you die, so cheer up. Life here means inevitable hardship-wars, terrorist attacks, threats, endless security checks when we travel, high taxes, shitty government and a religious minority trying to shove religious observance  up our asses. So cheer up and enjoy life while you can. Israel is a place with lots of fun and action. We do anything we can do to enjoy life. Drink, party, liberal sexual mores, great comedy, lively bohemian scene, great food, music and innovation. Get vaccinated, then be merry… until shit hits the fan, which it inevitably will.

Hope that sheds light on what’s happening. And on Jan 19th, I get the second vaccine. (Happened-no side effects)

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Letter from Tel Aviv-Saturday Morning Rantings during 3rd Shutdown

On January 19th, I get my second Corona vaccine; two weeks later I am out of the woods. The phenomenal success of mass vaccination has made me proud again of how some things are done in this country.

I add to this list the Mossad, the high-tech sector, the resilience of the people to maintain a good life under impossible conditions, and that pretty much exhausts my patriotism.

The country is now in its third lockdown, and enforcement is feeble, and that is an understatement. On my daily 9 km walk, I tell the first 20 or so people to put on their mask, and then desist because at 71, I realize I will not change the circumstances surrounding me. Which is the very same reason that in our upcoming election, I do not plan to vote either.

Am I withdrawing from society? Hardly-I just cannot find anyone who represents my views: hawkish on defense, social justice, anti-settlement expansion, anti annexation, anti Palestinian state at this point in  time, and totally secular. Each and every party in some way deviates from what I believe it, generally by caving into the religious rhetoric, kissing some senile rabbi’s ass (ring to be exact), or too much flag waving.

Zionism, which simply means support the existence  of a  nation state for the Jews , was basically a rejection of the Jewish way of life in exile by negating the predominance of faith as a core pillar of Jewish existence. The present political landscape in Israel is anti-Zionist because it force feeds faith and tradition into what was a rebellious, revolutionary movement. That is the only reason I will abstain- and no other. And I do hope that my family members who have lived in Palestine since Turkish rule from 1917 and are buried a few kilometers from my home, would support me. I know they would.

Trump has been banished by Twitter. Good news. There are polluted rivers that need to be cleaned, polluted air that needs to be treated and polluted ways of communication that transmit poison which need to be policed. What about freedom of speech? There is a time and a place for everything. A time to free up and a time to repress. And yes, Marcuse had and has an effect on me.

Those who follow my blogs know that I am a history buff. So I was thinking about how Trump will be remembered. My guess is that his foreign policy achievements will get him high marks a hundred or so years from now, and everything else will severely “drag down” his average making him a less than average but certainly not the worst US president. He will join Kennedy, Truman, Nixon and Bush (dad)  as presidents whose ratings change drastically as decades go by. Kennedy’s do-nothing for civil rights; Truman’s decisiveness in Berlin and Korea; Nixon’s China policy and Papa Bush’s sanity and pragmatism have all become more salient as years go by.

To wrap up my ranting, I think that I have been lucky enough to witness several earth shattering events in my lifetime: the polio vaccine, the Cuban missile crisis where we learned to dive under our desks,  the six-day war, 9/11; the fall of the USSR, the assassination of Kennedy and Rabin, the irrelevance of truth and factuality ,  and now, the beginning of the end of the corona virus by dint of scientific excellence.

These are the best of times, and the worst of times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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