Guest Post: Thoughts on the Tree of Life Synagogue Massacre

Another guest post this week. My friend Ari posted the thoughts below on Saturday, 27 October 2018, in the wake of yet another mass shooting, this one an anti-Semitic attack on a synagogue during services. He allowed me to share it here, as I was moved by his response, his unwillingness to give in to this darkness. It's presented here in full:

The anti-Semitic attack today doesn't take place in a vacuum. Days ago, a white supremacist, unable to complete an attack on a black church, killed two black people before being arrested in Kentucky. Obviously, the echoes of the Charleston attack ring loud -- Dylann Roof, like the Tree of Life shooter, was obsessed with stopping this fictional "white genocide". Killing people at their most vulnerable -- at a house of worship -- is a pattern of depravity the white supremacist shows fully.

It can't be stressed enough that the shooter chose Tree of Life synagogue not just because the shooter hated Jews but because the congregation was active in refugee resettlement, and he was particularly afraid of Muslims coming into the country. Anti-Islam and anti-Semitism go hand in hand.

Just a week ago, we heard news that the Trump administration was ready to redefine gender to essentially erase more than 1 million transgendered Americans. This is shocking not just because of the robbery of rights that would take place immediately, but because it echoed so clearly how the Nazi Holocaust unfolded, as the attack on sexual minorities was one of the party's first shows of force. Once the cleansing of "deviants" was accepted, everything else followed.

At the same time, the president is dispatching troops to the border with Mexico to face off a "caravan" of migrants -- men, women and children. The one-sided standoff has the potential to be catastrophic, the latest horror in American immigration policy just after the crisis of migrant family separations.

I think a lot of Jews get frustrated when they don't think that anti-Semitism is not appreciated or taken as seriously by the left as other forms of bigotry. What I think is becoming evident is all of these acts of terrorism -- whether by the state or by individuals -- are united in hatred of us who are not "normal" or "mainstream", whether we are sexual minorities, immigrants, racial minorities, religious minorities or political dissidents.

Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti-blackness, anti-LGBTIA, and so on, are all different heads of the same beast. This is not to lessen the urgency of any of these struggles, but to identify a common enemy, and to underscore that our fight must be united -- we remain fragmented at our own risk. In a sense, the old labor saying becomes all the more real: an injury to one is an injury to all.

Ecclesiastes 3:8 says there is a "time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace". I disagree. We will at once love and support each other as we face and unite against fascism. Our families will live in peace, we will laugh, rejoice, have children, drink and be merry. But we will not be passive when our existence is questioned. We've beaten fascism before. And we will again.

Good night, comrades. And good luck.

Joshua Tree: Francis Goes Camping

Funny thing, memory - I was so caught up in writing last week's post that I didn't realize I had something else to write about, until I was halfway through my post. I finished the goth one, and promised myself that I'd talk about the other idea, my recent trip to Joshua Tree, this week. So here we are:

My spot, with my car parked conveniently nearby

This trip has been a long time coming. A friend of mine organizes it every year, and he's been inviting me every year, but I've always had conflicts - usually I'm out of town for work, or there's just something else going on that I can't miss, or something like that.

And, to be honest, I'm not really a camping person. Which isn't to say that it didn't appeal - it was different, and a little scary (because I'm not a camping person), and I actually thought that it sounded like a neat idea. But I never managed to have time to go.

This year was different, for the reasons I've been enumerating on this blog since last December. Not being employed by my old company meant I didn't have any events to go to, and so no conflicts. But more importantly, I thought it would be good to make time for it. So when the invitation came, sometime in July or August, I accepted and promptly started to panic about the preparations.

As I say, not really a camping person. The last time I slept in a tent was probably when I was in high school if not middle school. Or to put it another way, I hadn't gone camping since the Twentieth Century. This was the result of a highly successful campaign of terrorizing my parents whenever they took me camping as a child - I'd start with getting carsick on the interminable drives to Yosemite or wherever we'd go, and then bitch about the bugs or food or toilets or lack of TV or whatever until it was time to go home, at which point I'd get carsick again (just to underline how ill-suited I was to this whole business).

So what changed between then and now?

Part of it is that I've come to appreciate a bunch of the outdoorsy stuff my parents were into back then (my dad especially, as he used to go climbing all the time). And I think the reason for that is that I moved to Britain, where people go camping, but I never really came to appreciate the wild outdoors like we have here.

The dreaded cholla cactus, which I just wanted to touch. Would have been a terrible idea.

The first inkling that camping might be a thing people did for fun, without being dragged by their parents, came all the way back in 2002 or 2003, when a friend said he was spending the weekend camping with his girlfriend (now wife). At the same time I was reading Paul Theroux's and Bill Bryson's books, which all featured some amount of camping, or talk thereof. For some reason it sounded a little more appealing, but space and cost remained limiting factors, and so I didn't try to do it.

Of course, this camping gear of my dad's came in handy for my own trip. I've always known we had outdoor gear in the garage, because it was the crap I had to move out of the way to get to our skis or to my boxes of comics that live down there. But once I'd signed up to actually go camping myself, I had to do an inventory, and realized that I was actually fairly well-equipped.

We had a tent, which I think I vaguely remember having slept in. I didn't bring it this time, because it was huge, ostensibly for five people, and consisted of a rolled-up bag containing the tent and a box of stakes, poles and other stuff to make the damn thing stand up. I ended up borrowing a smaller tent from my boss.

There was also a sleeping bag, which I definitely remember from my childhood, and a pair of air mattresses that are probably more recent. I also found a number of odds and ends, like lanterns and camp chairs and so forth, which proved useful. All I ended up buying was a headlamp and some other bits and bobs, mainly for food preservation. In that final week before leaving I must have spent about $200 on food, beer and last-minute equipment. Bill Bryson's Walk in the Woods, where he camps along the Appalachian Trail, and is left quietly aghast at the cost and complexity of camping gear, loomed large in my memory during these trips to REI.

In any case, it turned out well. I think I was amply well-provisioned for shelter, and food (there was some stuff provided, which also helped). I was also in good company, and able to go off and do my own thing whenever my introvert tendencies came up.

I managed a few hikes and scenic drives, and some night-time bouldering, aided by my trusty headlamp and some Costco-brand bourbon that was surprisingly good. And I got the immense pleasure of a few road trips, allowing me to draw down my large backlog of podcasts as I crossed pretty much half of California to get there and back. One of these was the Amateur Traveler, in an episode where he talked to a former Joshua Tree National Park ranger, published fortuitously the week before I left.

An actual Joshua Tree

As far as what there is to see, well, loads of open space, for one thing. I didn't venture on any of the longer hikes, because I didn't fancy walking in that much sunlight for so long and because with cell reception nonexistent in the park, I thought it best to be near well-trafficked areas in case something happened. But there were still some impressive spots to walk around in, or drive through, and mainly I found myself marveling at it all as I drove or hiked from one spot to another.

And of course, there was also the night sky to admire. It's easy to forget, with all our light pollution, just how spectacular the night sky can get. At our house in the country in Italy, we used to get better skies at night during the summer, but development in our area has washed out a lot of it. Not here in Joshua Tree, though: I think this was the first time I properly saw the Milky Way in ages.

Every night, whenever I'd be trudging to the bathroom from the communal fire pit or from my tent, I'd take a moment to switch off my headlamp and look up, drinking it all in. And the final night we got a thunderstorm, luckily quite far off, but still spectacular, especially when seen from up on top of an escarpment of rock.

Not my tent

It was fairly nice to get back to civilization, especially because I broke that trip up with a stop at my mom's house in Orange County, where I took advantage of the shower and comfy guest bed to rest up for a night before driving home. But I found myself sad to be leaving Southern California for the second time this year, and absurdly proud of myself for having managed camping for three nights without my dad to do everything for me.

I'm even considering doing it again! Not just in Joshua Tree, but perhaps in other parts of California, preferably with more trees and more access to shower facilities (although I'm aware that campsites with more water also have more mosquitoes and bears, so I'm thinking this one through). And with the idea of doing it again comes the idea of getting better gear - more comfortable sleeping pads, for one thing, cooking gear, and so on.

It might be a pipe dream, or not, but at the very least it feels nice to have done something completely out of my comfort zone. And having seen how the rubber hits the road, it's no longer inconceivable that I should do it again.

Goth Synesthesia: Dancing Among the Tombstones

Because it's October and I'm a sucker for long-term challenges, I've set myself the task of learning about gothic rock this month. I've been listening to a different band's back catalogue each day, guided in part by this Wikipedia article and by Pitchfork's list from last year of 33 notable goth songs. Some of it's been stuff that I knew a bit, like the Cure's gothic trilogy of Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography. Other things were new to me, like the Birthday Party, Nick Cave's band before he started the Bad Seeds.

It's stretched my understanding of "goth" in new directions, which is a nice way of saying that I thought there'd be more talk of vampires and gravestones. Of course, it's still early in the month, and I've mostly been hearing bands from the early part of the movement.

But it's also true that the most satisfying listen so far has been Bauhaus's back catalogue. For one thing, nothing expresses the idea better than their epic song, "Bela Lugosi's Dead", the bassline of which has quietly been twanging at the back of my mind more or less continuously for the last 20-odd years. And while the rest of their work doesn't necessarily hold up to that moment (for me), it does fit in with the imagery that "Bela Lugosi's Dead" brings into my head.



It may sound weird, but I respond to music that creates certain associations and images in my mind. That can be reminders of times or places or movies, or it can be imagery, almost a physical environment that I think about when I hear the music.

When I think about some of my favorite bands, I imagine a landscape. It can be an urban landscape, like when I listen to the Smiths or Joy Division, or it can be related images, like when I hear the Magnetic Fields (particularly 69 Love Songs). When I hear Bauhaus, I'm imagining graveyards at night. Not all the bands I like have this effect, and seeing it written out like that feels a little reductive, but it's probably close enough to how I respond to most music I like.

Sometimes, a band's music reminds me of other art that I like. Simon and Garfunkel, for instance, are associated indelibly in my mind with 1960s New York City, which carries with it associations of Spider-Man (who, like them, is also from Queens). Listening to Bauhaus this month has reminded me of Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

The look of Morpheus is apparently based on Bauhaus's Peter Murphy, so the connection's not as random as it seems at first. And so much of that comic drew on goth imagery, while also in its turn influencing the goths I knew in high school.

This connection to the Sandman brings this discussion around to my other big preoccupation of the last couple of years, namely re-examining all the things I liked back in high school and college. I've mentioned already how I'm rereading my old comics - well, checking out old music I liked back then, and supplementing that by exploring similar acts I didn't know about, falls squarely into that trend.

I'm not really sure why I'm dredging all that stuff up, other than the fact that I'm getting older and yet I still feel (or would like to feel) a connection to who I was back then. At the same time I'm re-evaluating music, movies, comics, books, whatever through the lens of the experiences I've had since high school.

Looking back has always been a key component of goth culture, and while it is, charitably, a stretch to call myself a "goth", I can see the appeal, especially these days. And more than that, it's exciting to be delving into a new sub-genre, which has always escaped me but has been just around the corner from what I usually listen to.