Colin Powell Speaks Yiddish???

Now this is bizarre. Did you know that Colin Powell speaks fluent Yiddish??

"In 1993 Mr. Powell visited the Holy Land. Upon meeting Yitzhak Shamir in Jerusalem, he greeted the Prime Minister with the words "Men kent reden Yiddish" (We can speak Yiddish). As Shamir, stunned, tried to pull himself together, Powell continued chatting in his second-favorite language. Colin Powell had never forgotten his early days in the Bronx."

Actually, he does look a little Jewish...

Extra bonus weirdness: Barack Obama speaks Indonesian.

The Medusa Gruel

Various attractions pulled me back to Oaxaca last week, where I revisited the Zapotec village of Teotitlán del Valle, which I'd written about here.

I hadn't said a proper goodbye to my saxophonist friend, Manuel, and had no contact info for him, and there were some jazz recordings I thought he should hear. So I journeyed to his sprawling village with a bunch of compact disks, wondering how on earth I'd find the guy, given that everyone there is named "Manuel".

But as I checked into my room, I heard a tuba player warming up in the distance. And then a trumpeter. Dashing down the hill toward the sound, I brazenly threw open a large metal door, and found the village band rehearsing in a courtyard full of billowing drying laundry. The guys remembered me, and thrust an old, barely-functional trombone into my hands, and, just like that, I was a part of the band (and even played a wedding with them the next day). Manuel wasn't there, but I was put in touch with him the next day, and headed over to his place to hand him my gift. He paid me the supreme honor by laying it down on his family alter, filled with flowers, photos, talismans, feathers, soda cans, and other seemingly random objects representing to him the divine nature of all things.

Then Manuel informed me that I was in luck, that it was the time of year for "atole de elote", and asked his wife to bring me a bowl of thick, steaming, grey-ish gruel. It was sweet, but only from lots and lots of fresh corn, grown in the family garden. As its sublime, all-embracing soulfulness penetrated every capillary, I became utterly lost within myself. The flavor simply would not fade. In waves, it permeated my internal universe, and I didn't realize I'd fallen into a stupor until Manuel came over and waved into my eyes and asked whether I was ok. It took effort to return to the conversation, as the afterglow still showed no signs of dimming, but I managed to wrench myself from its tendrils and resurface. Until, that is, my next sip, which again turned me to stone. I was eating very languidly, yet Manuel kept urging me, with a degree of urgent concern, to "¡Cálmate!", or calm down - which, even in my hazy state, struck me as an inapt instruction for someone who'd gone essentially catatonic.

The atole was served along with some ears of corn (the stubby kind, with great big starchy kernals) which, being merely delicious, seemed utterly vestigial. I asked Manuel how a dish consisting of absolutely nothing but corn could taste so much better than corn itself. He smiled, and explained that such was the magic of divinely inspired, loving human action. Manuel and I agreed that this is the very gist of what we humans do best when we're at our best. Like earthworms enriching soil, our love and care can invest with divinity all that we touch.

In terms of my system for rating things on a scale from one to ten, I'd gone, for the first time, beyond 10 ("absolute certainty that no one at this moment, anywhere on Earth, is eating anything more delicious than what you're currently consuming"), and encountered an 11 (something better than anything anyone anywhere has ever eaten).

A Muslim Writer's "Open Letter to Obama"

Read this (mostly) great "Open letter to Obama" by Aijaz Zaka Syed.

FYI, I've emailed his newspaper the following response:

I greatly enjoyed reading Aijaz Zaka Syed's beautifully stated open letter to President-Elect Obama. But one sentence disappointed me: "A Jewish chief of staff doesn’t necessarily mean you are anti-Arab or anti-Muslim."

The word "necessarily" implies that having Jewish chief of staff does at least increase the likelihood of infection with such sentiment. But it's just not so. How did we reach a point where it's assumed that merely having a Jewish person around stacks the deck against Arabs and Muslims?

I'm Jewish. And I have many Muslim friends, I love Arabic (and, for that matter, Berber, Pakistani, and Indonesian) music, I revere Kebir and Rumi, and, as a food writer, I deeply appreciate a great plate of foul madamas, baby camel, dum aloo or Palestinian kunefeh. The actions of crazy Israeli hawks anger and embarrass me, much as the actions of crazy Muslim hawks surely anger and embarrass the majority of your readers. After 9/11, I launched a campaign urging Americans to eat in Muslim-owned restaurants. Seeing the bigotry and discrimination ahead, it anguished me that these good people might lose their livelihoods as well as their feeling of being warmly at home in the American melting pot. We human beings never learn to react to extremism with enlightened moderation rather than with reciprocal extremism. It's our pivotal flaw as a species.

If the influence of Obama's chief of staff concerns Muslims, it may (or may not) be because Mr. Rahm happens to be avidly pro-Israel, but not because he's Jewish. Many non-Jews are avidly pro-Israel...and many Jews disapprove of Israeli actions. But in any case, to be Jewish is not to be anti-Muslim! And I certainly hope the reverse is true, too!

I'm reminded of another well-intentioned sentence uttered during our recent campaign. I cringed for days after someone in a crowd spat out the accusation that Obama is "a Muslim" and was corrected by McCain, who replied "No, ma'am, He's a decent, family man."

McCain's intention was conciliatory (and, in light of the roiling invective, conciliation was most welcome). And I doubt John McCain really believes Muslims can't be decent family men, just as I'm sure Mr. Syed didn't mean to imply that Jews can't respect Muslims. I appreciated the conciliatory intention behind his words, even if they conveyed an unfortunate and unintended assumption.

But please know that if 95% of Jews could blink their eyes and have every Muslim be deliriously happy, healthy, and prosperous, they wouldn't hesitate to do so. And many of us would be willing to work harder than just blinking!

As for the hateful 5%? Every group has a few of those. But we all know their tricks by now. And the good, tolerant majority of any group has more in common with the good, tolerant majority of other groups than they do with their own hateful 5%. Every kind-hearted Muslim is my brother or sister. And we're a huge and powerful family.


Jim Leff

Update: I've not heard back from either newspaper, so I guess my letter won't be published.

Eating By The Numbers

If you'll prep by reading my "Eating By The Numbers" article, I'll tell you in a couple days about something extraordinary I ate last week.

UPDATE: I fixed the URL...should be working right now.

George McGovern on Losing Big

Interesting quote from a fine McCain campaign postmortem by David Grann in this week's New Yorker:

"George McGovern, who lost to Richard Nixon in 1972, told me about the anguish he felt when he returned to the Senate—as McCain will soon do. “I thought everyone was either scorning me or pitying me,” McGovern recalled. In 1989, he said, he ran into Walter Mondale, who had lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan five years earlier. “He said, ‘George, how long does it take to get over it after you’ve lost?’ I said, ‘I’ll let you know when I get there.’ ”

Two other must-reads: 

A landmark, epic piece entitled "After the Imperial Presidency" wherein the NY Time's Jonathan Mahler charts the recent expansion of executive branch power.

and David Remnick's "Race and the campaign of Barack Obama" (also in the New Yorker)

A Poor Start, Alas....

The right is right (see good quotes in this USA Today piece): Obama's selection of Rahm Emanuel for his chief of staff is troublesome. I said in a previous entry that the hyperpartisan atmosphere in Washington was perfected by Bush/Cheney/Rove, but really started with Clinton. And Emanuel was well known as the guy most forcefully pushing Clinton in that direction.

If, as Obama says, he was offered the job strictly because of his ability to get things done, and if, as Emanuel says, he's turned over a new leaf, that all needed to have been made much more explicit right up front. The way this was handled - in addition to leading with all Clinton-era appointments - was all kinds of bad. And the application of band-aids later (e.g. a token centrist appointment, some back-stepping re: Emanuel's partisan past, etc) will be scant consolation to those hoping for a centrist, conciliatory break from the past.

Control Freaks

Why is it that control freaks are so rarely worthy of the control they demand?

The strategy for coping with a control freak is, of course, exactly the same as for surviving bear attacks: one must go completely limp and hope for the best. Those who have no choice but to enter a control freak's sphere of influence quickly find that their best bet is to shut their mouths, slump their shoulders, keep preferences and opinions firmly to themselves and learn to go along. The drill's quickly learned by observing the desexed, saintly, broken spouses of control freaks. Learn to yield...or risk Setting Her/Him Off.

It needn't be entirely ugly, however. Lemonade can be produced by duly submitting to the firm and relentless squeezing of one's lemons. There is, first of all, a certain pleasure in yielding one's autonomy. Infantilization, as cruise ship devotees will attest, has its attractions. And the ascetic discipline of detaching from personal preference is something people pay good money to learn at Zen retreats and such.

The fatal flaw, unfortunately, is that control freaks always seem to be about four notches less competent than they believe themselves to be. 

Why the Rich and Powerful Might Get Substandard Medical Care

Slate just ran a great article written by two distinguished emergency physicians who make the case that extra vigilant medical care may not simply fail to improve health, but may actually harm it. The piece is well-written, and strewn with some very insightful points. 

I'm no hypochondriac, but my doctor has always brushed off most complaints I present to her. She rarely even orders tests. A few years ago, just when I was about to deem her callous, she said something interesting. In response to whatever hazy symptom I was reporting, she told me "Look, I could test you to see whether you have a brain tumor, but what will probably happen is they'll find no tumor but something else will be noticed that will call for lots more tests, and, inevitably, procedures. I try to keep my patients the hell out of the machine so it doesn't kill them." Such bluntness doesn't play well with many patients, but I appreciated the bracing slap of reality. 

"Modern" medicine is, in many ways, barely less primitive than the good old days of leeches and humors. It's an imprecise art where tests, much less treatments, are not without risk, and even the most benign procedures carry a small possibility of doing grievous harm. And once the machine swallows you and starts finding the slightest indication of problems - any problems (which, of course, it will), no doctor will ever pull you back out again. Imagine the lawsuit if you did turn out to have a brain tumor...and some test result nebulously hinted in that direction?

Of course, when you need doctors, you need doctors. And in those times, say the authors of this article (though not in these words), it's best to shoot straight through the center of the machine, following as closely as you can the tire tracks of the vast majority of patients who've been through before you. 

The Noose Only Tightens

Ok, fuel prices have fallen drastically. Crisis is over. So why are airlines still imposing luggage surcharges? 

In fact, last week American Airlines announced a tightening measure to add to their already grievously tightened frequent flier program: they'll no longer be awarding 500 miles minimum per flight. Short hops will accrue awards points based on actual distance.

It's one of the hallmarks of big business capitalism: as with labor concessions granted during hard times, anything given up by customers for temporary crises always winds up permanent. Whether as worker or as consumer, we the peons live within a massive, inescapable ratchet wrench.

"How To..."

Wired Magazine's "How-To Wiki,"a compendium of tutorials drawing from both the magazine's writers and editors and web site users, may not be phenomenally over-stocked with articles, but what's there is interesting. 

I particularly enjoyed "How to Do Donuts" (i.e. whirl tight circles with your - or, preferably, someone else's - car), and the brief but amusing "How to Crash a Party".