Many Israelis — and many Americans for that matter — are not aware of the degree to which they have been co-opted. I would call the majority of them not jingoists at all, but decent people who want peace with their Palestinian neighbors. The present leadership has abrogated negotiations¹ and told its citizenry that they must “preempt” the Palestinian threat. This does not assuage the other side² . They, too, have addicts to never-ending war among them though they are weaker. The arms merchants are happy, some feel safer, but children die.

Right now, our aim must be to stop this invasion and resume the peace process that has lain in suspension for eight years.

The military industrial complex which feeds off these tensions has extended its tendrils into places like the U.S. Congress where it waves the flag and invents powerful enemies to keep itself in business. We are stuck with it in our lives and there’s no clear way for us to disentangle ourselves. But we must try.

1. The Bush Administration has put no pressure on them to do otherwise and it has blocked Security Council resolutions to end the fighting.
2. Supporters of the Palestinian cause have increased their rhetoric against the very existence of the nation of Israel. This invasion lessens the security of Israel. What has anyone done to pursue other means of resolving the conflict? The United States has cheered on the warring and done nothing to check the expansion into the West Bank. It has the power to ameliorate the threat against Israel by diplomatic means, but it laughs at these.

When these things come out of the blue, you never know if it is something real or based on the teller’s¹ personal situation. My wife, my real life friends, see no such thing. As the video says, what I have been hearing about is “letting it out more, not being so withdrawn, so safe”. So I’ve experimented with Twitter, 12 Seconds, etc. Sought my niche. And as I do, I get told “Oh, you’re going manic.”

But stop, an inner voice says. You spent the evening with several people who knew what mania was. In a group where people are accustomed to pulling one another aside and warning them, no one said a thing. That’s a bit of evidence you should be taking into account. Your wife has not given you pained eyes or asked you when your next psychiatric appointment is. One person said “Hey, I think you are losing it.” How well do they know you, really? Can you really know anyone over fiber-optic cables?

So I decide to be watchful, but not concerned. When I am manic, I tend to see mania in everyone else and blame my moods on them. I am not doing this. There are people in mania (by their report) and they are not annoying me as they would when the high spirits overtake me. The majority of people I see are fine. Some are a little lonely.

The next thing I watch for is orderliness of thoughts. I’m not jumping around from idea to idea except when answering more than one person at a time.

Third, how do I respond to arguments? Can I let them go? Yes. I have stepped away from a couple in the past two weeks. I remember them only because they are on my checklist of things to watch for. I’m not still fighting them in my head.

More of this might be settled in a walk. For a few minutes, I went out to listen to the cars passing on Santiago Canyon Road, out of my sight. Were they speeding as they passed? I hadn’t the slightest.

1. Is accuser a better word?

Tonight I caught myself engaging in a similar observance using a pile of napkins. Lynn will attest that when we go to the local soup and salad bar, I like to take a bunch of napkins. As I eat, I wipe my mouth after every bite. That’s right, I take a bite, wipe, and take another bite. It’s automatic with me and I have learned to prep myself for it properly by ensuring that I have enough napkins for the task.

Aware as I am of the habit, I choose not to break it. I have never pressed the issue, but I suspect that if I did, I would feel very uncomfortable. I avoid the company of doctrinaire environmentalists and my mother for this reason. There’s no sense in putting myself between the anxieties.

As of this writing, there is no wet Christmas. The 80% chance of rain is not materializing as the storm waits at the coast deciding whether it wants to come ashore.

Happy Holidays to All except Bill O’Really who won’t appreciate the gesture because he’s a sour old apple.

More of my videos here.

In late October, 1989, I worked in one of those places that you don’t want to remember. It was a filthy place with equipment that should have been shot and buried in the mid-seventies. At the end of this one day, I got into my car and drove through the streets of East Palo Alto as quickly as I could.

I’ve never feared East Palo Alto like others have. So when the steering wheel on my car began to fight me, I sighed and pulled over to the side. Someone had sprinkled nails on the road, I reasoned. I had a flat tire, that was all. Just a flat tire.

The wobble worsened as I parked, so I concluded that two or three blowouts afflicted me. So I stopped the car at the curb and got out to inspect the damage.

The lengths to which I denied what was happening beneath my feet surprise me now. Three school-age children stood on the sidewalk, bawling. Oh dear, I thought. They think I’m a child molester come to kidnap them.

“I only have a flat tire,” I told them. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Then I heard a truck horn honking. I looked over to see a man with Salvadoran colors on his pickup waving at me and calling to me in Spanish.”

Following his gestures, I looked up. The telephone poles were bending back and forth. For the first time, I noticed that the ground was vibrating something fierce.

Good God! It was an earthquake! For a moment in my life, I acted the part of a parent. I herded the children into the middle of the church parking lot where the guy in the pickup was. The shaking stopped in a few seconds. Everyone looked around. Then I told the kids that they needed to get home to tell their parents that they were all right.

“That does it,” one little boy vowed. “I’m never going over to see my friend again!”

I got in the car and drove straight home. All the traffic lights were either out or blinking red red red. When I got to the apartment complex, the entire courtyard was wet and the pool was half-empty. The landlady told me that as the earthquake hit, she’d instinctlvely run outside to check on her kids. All the water in the pool sloshed out, catching her in a four-foot tall wave.

Lynn came home with her own story which consisted of her being sitting in a bathroom stall — someone, she thought, had to get in.

We took a walk past the stores along Middlefield Road. Cans, boxes, and other product such as books littered the floors. One store sold candles and batteries at the door, but no one was letting anyone in. Strangely, while most of Silicon Valley was without power, our complex was part of a six block island of light. It took until the next morning for word to reach us about the intensity of the quake and the extent of the damage — it had registered 6.9 on the Richter scale.

The next day I returned to work. After the quake, several employees tried to refuse to return into the plant until there was a complete inspection, but were told that they would be fired if they did not immediately resume operations. No one spoke about the cracks in the wall and management thought it was perfectly fine not to check the structual integrity of the building.

The event never faded from our minds. When we traveled outside of California, we could always stop conversation in a room by the mere mention of our experiences.

To this day, I am amazed at the intensity of the tremblor. I had felt it while driving and the telephone poles had bent over. Repeating that helps me get a fix on what I had lived through.

I believe the voices of my youth all meant to encourage me to pay more attention to my arithmetic and my algebra. But they only managed to douse my fire, to spray it with a chaotic mist of untruth.

That cane has served me well in recent weeks as my feet troubled me with swellings of the gout, a sprained ankle, and a deep cut from walking two miles in flip-flops. But what I have wanted most to do with a cane is to tap, to make a sound with it, to knock on doors, and to break glass. I fancy myself among the Luddites who made their points using sledgehammers — except I would do no damage.

There’s a story about the Emperor Norton. When he saw a cartoon of himself ingloriously dining at a saloon buffet accompanied by two mutts reputed to be his dogs pasted on a bistro’s window, he pulled out his walking stick and rapped at the glass until it cracked. “This will not do!” he asserted. His protestation went unheard, however, and the legend that he and the two dogs were of a unit persisted after his death¹ . His collection of walking sticks, twisted or carved into fantastic shapes, vanished.

An online friend says that the consciousness of things endures whether we keep them or not. I disagree. The sense and the fact of loss would be ruinous if this artifact disappeared. My wife would not have it when her knees gave out or when we went on hikes. My eyes will not be able to linger upon it in remembrance of the short forests and winding roads of central Crete. What will I use to signal my rage, my wanting, or my disgust when a stroke has taken away my voice? For this reason, I do not lean hard on this treasure. I must have it there in my final moments when in dementia I decide that I, too, am an emperor rather than a shepherd.

1. For the facts of Norton’s relationship with Bummer and Lazarus, visit http://www.notfrisco.com/colmatales/norton/norton2.html

1. She has dark, middle-length hair

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