Political Irony

This is a true story about Joe Biden (who is devout Catholic), told by Rabbi Michael Beals of Delaware:

It was about 16 years ago, and I was a young rabbi, brand-new to Delaware, on my way to lead a shiva minyan — a worship service following a death of a Jewish person. I was from California. Back then, I didn’t know Claymont, Delaware from Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Quick bit of background: When someone passes away in the Jewish faith, we observe seven days of mourning, called shiva. We gather a group of ten Jewish adults together to say the Mourners’ Kaddish. It usually happens in a person’s home — somewhere intimate.

In this case, the deceased individual — her name was Mrs. Greenhouse, of blessed memory — had not been a person of means. She had lived in rent-controlled senior housing in a tall high-rise building off of Namaans Road. Her apartment was too small to fit everyone into, so we conducted our worship service in the building’s communal laundry room, in the basement of the high-rise.

We assembled the 10 elders together, and it was in this most humble of places that I began to lead kaddish.

Toward the end of the service, a door at the back of the laundry room opened; who walks in but Sen. Joe Biden, head lowered, all by himself.

I nearly dropped my prayer book in shock.

Senator Biden stood quietly in the back of the room for the duration of the service. At the close of the kaddish, I walked over to him and asked the same question that must have been on everyone else’s mind: “Sen. Biden — what are you doing here?”

He said to me: “Back in 1972, when I first ran for Senate, Mrs. Greenhouse gave $18 to my first campaign. Because that’s what she could afford. And every six years, when I’d run for reelection, she’d give another $18. She did it her whole life. I’m here to show my respect and gratitude.”

Now, the number 18 is significant in the Jewish faith — its numbers spell out the Hebrew word chai, as in “to life, to life, l’chayim!” But it’s also a humble amount. Joe Biden knew that. And he respected that.

There were no news outlets at our service that day — no Jewish reporters or important dignitaries. Just a few elderly mourners in a basement laundry room. Joe Biden didn’t come to that service for political gain. He came to that service because he has character.

I’m really glad to see Jon Stewart put into words something that I’ve always felt about Joe Biden, but didn’t know how to express.

Donald Trump’s rally in Tulsa was a complete disaster, but that didn’t stop him from having another rally yesterday in Phoenix AZ. This wasn’t actually a rally, as it was not organized by the Trump campaign, which probably gave it a better chance of success. Plus it was held in a church with a much smaller capacity, so it was able to be filled with 3,000 people. That’s less than half the number of people who showed up in Tulsa, but the optics were better. So Trump was all over twitter, bragging “A GREAT DAY IN ARIZONA!”

However, I suspect that this second rally could be just as damaging to Trump’s campaign as the first one. The hall was packed, with no social distancing (which was at least possible in Oklahoma where 2/3 of the seats were empty). And there were virtually no masks in sight, despite a local ordinance requiring them and a direct plea from the mayor. Arizona is in the middle of a COVID-19 spike, and the attendees of this event were all local students, so it should be easier to watch how many of them will end up stricken by the coronavirus.

Most of all, unlike Oklahoma, Arizona has become a swing state, and it has a large population of senior citizens. As more of them get sick due to Trump’s incompetence and lack of leadership, the bluer Arizona will become.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. Trump appears to be incapable of learning this lesson (or any other lesson, for that matter).

The police are a reflection of a society. They’re not a rogue alien organization that came down to torment the black community. They’re enforcing segregation. Segregation is legally over, but it never ended. The police are, in some respects, a border patrol, and they patrol the border between the two Americas. We have that so that the rest of us don’t have to deal with it. Then that situation erupts, and we express our shock and indignation. But if we don’t address the anguish of a people, the pain of being a people who built this country through forced labor — people say, ‘I’m tired of everything being about race.’ Well, imagine how [expletive] exhausting it is to live that.

– Jon Stewart, from an extensive interview in the NY Times. Also quoted in Rolling Stone (if you can’t get through the Times paywall). But read the Times article if you can.

This isn’t just true for black people. America largely equates “rich” with “good”. And conversely, poor people are frequently blamed for their misfortune, because in America, anyone can succeed if they try hard enough (so, logically, if you are poor, it must be your fault). Winning is everything, so greed rules.

Some of you may know that Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show was one of the main things that inspired me to start this blog. I couldn’t find a political blog that combined humor in the ways that Stewart did on a TV show, and I wondered if it could be done. Of course, the blog that really put me to shame at doing that was Margaret and Helen.

Friday, I just finished watching the Steven Spielberg series from the Discovery Channel “Why We Hate“, which looks both at hate, how it can fester and grow into genocide and destruction, but also at how we can work against hate to keep it from spreading. The series examines infamous examples of genocide or mass ethnic violence (Rwanda, South Africa, Cambodia, Nazi Germany, Colombia, lynchings, and others).

Saturday, just out of curiosity I watched Trump’s rally in Tulsa and it felt like I was listening to the same words from the instigators of past genocide and violence. The common themes are:

• Dehumanizing the victims by calling them thugs, killers, rapists, animals or vermin (in Rwanda, it was calling the ethnic Tutsi “cockroaches”),
• Stoking fear by claiming that the victims are out to destroy you, your family, and your way of life (taking away your guns, your jobs, and killing babies),
• Most importantly, an authority figure or leader telling the people that they have to use violence against the victims (telling them to not be gentle or to “rough them up”).

But the important message is that we cannot stop hate with more hate. Hate must be fought with understanding. There was so much good information and ideas in this show, coming from amazing experts who have spent their lives fighting and successfully overcoming hate. I hope we learn how to stop what is going on before it is too late for us.

UPDATE: this post made it into Electoral-Vote!