Comments on: still here, just bleary

By: james M

james M — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 11:33:00 +0000

Hi d.. it’s me, and while I’m sad and surprised to learn of your imminent yeridah, I’m so psyched for selfish reasons.. By the way - you’re doing Pesach in Greece? I did yom kippur in Crete in 2003. It was beautiful.. I’ll send details..

By: jordan

jordan — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 17:16:00 +0000

right, of course Beetle Bailey dates back to the days when pretty much all the young men HAD served in the military… I’m assuming it’s the loyalty of all those aging WWII’ers who keep that very unfunny strip in the papers.

that was certainly a different era in America. I think the WWII experience probably caused a lot of young men and women to grow up very fast, which might have been a good thing… on the other hand, it also instilled a certain amount of uncritical, knee-jerk patriotism in most members of the WWII generation. Anyway, Israel in 2005 is not the USA in 1945, so any potential analogy here has its limitations…

anyway, bye for now… I’ll try to keep commenting sporadically… oh, and mazeltov on the cheap-ass Talmud.

By: Danya

Danya — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 22:41:00 +0000

Hey, Jordan–

Welcome, and thanks for your excellent thoughts.

Yeah, totally. It’s funny, I was in this trendy waffle shop yesterday and they have all these American cartoons from the funny pages up in a collage, so overlapping and more decorative than anything, but very cute. And while I was waiting for my order, I was looking at them–there were a lot of Beetle Bailys. And it was interesing to think about how even something as silly as that reads differently here, where everybody serves, than there, where the army is not connected to the lives of most of the hipster kids. Definitely affects the jaded liberals, I think you’re exactly right about that. More jaded, anyway. Don’t know if I’m comfortable putting a judgement on how it affects them, but you’re dang right that it does…..

By: jordan

jordan — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 08:10:00 +0000

Well, OK, then — I’ll say hi. I tend to read Jewschool and a few other more personal blogs associated with it (yours and mobius’s) like I read the paper… just drop in when I have a free moment to see what’s new, laugh or be informed.

The whole commenting thing seems kinda silly. Every once in while I get sucked into an argument with a right-winger over at Jewschool, but I usually regret it. But I don’t want to be a “lurker”. So I’ll give you a bit of my time, since you’ve been sharing your life and thoughts with all of us for so long.

I haven’t quite had a chance to read all of the post on the west bank trip, but it looks very interesting. My favorite post ever (I’ve been reading this blog for a while) was the one about the Israeli hippies and your left-wing friend saying “you realize they all were in the army”. That one really stuck with me…

I was once on a beach in Israel camping/partying with a bunch of silly Rainbow Gathering-type hippies (during an extended stay there, when I was working as an illegal day-laborer in restaurant kitchens and on construction sites… afterwards I went on to Syria and Lebanon). Anyway, I had some of the same thoughts, especially when politics came up.

It was very interesting comparing them to their naive American counterparts… I’m not saying one is better than the other (hippies everywhere are a little silly), but just different… a certain jaded, cynical, sad quality underneath the starry-eyed universalism. Setting aside the question of what it’s like to be a Palestinian dealing with the army, it definitely let me see how being an Israeli IN the army, in unpleasant and ambiguous situations, affects a liberal young person for better and (mostly) for worse. But hell, I’ve never fired a gun… what do I know?