History is so boring

[stilltrucking]

his story her story a sad story
tv preacher bragging about his contacts in the Israeli government
confides to us that he was told that Israel has a strong end game

button button who has the button

the world is so much safer now

so many less nukes than the sixties

oh yes but where did they go

shake hands with the devil in Rwanda

Have you ever met anyone, a total stranger who wanted you dead. A normal looking person with a Polish accent? I don’t know if anyone hated the Jews more than the Poles. Just talking to a couple of guys on a dock in California, and as we are chatting I realize that they are slowing moving closer and I back away, nothing hostile, just kind of a spatial awareness, like keeping my distance feeling uncomfortable like they are invading my space,me talking about my Polish Jewish grandmother and they kind of nodding and all of a sudden I realize I am right up against the edge of the dock ready to fall off. I kind of eased around them and backed off. Their faces were blank but we all knew what almost happened. Not sure if anyone here can understand what I mean. History is so boring. I don’t want to study war no more. How can one nation that borders another use a nuclear weapon on its neighbor. It would be suicidal don’t you think?

Ironically, the little information we have about the final hours of Masada comes from a man whom the Jews there considered a traitor and happily would have killed: Flavius Josephus.
...Besides, Josephus, who seems to have tricked thirtynine fellow soldiers at the fall of Jotapata into killing one another while he cunningly preserved his own life, might have had reason to repair his damaged public image by fabricating a large-scale suicide pact at Masada in which See her articles in the Jewish Spectator, "Masada, Josephus, and Yadin" (October 1967) and "Masada Re- visited" (December 1969...
...Kedar begins by characterizing Masada as an Israeli "myth, obsession [in the Hebrew, dybbuk], complex," and he goes on to propose that the symbol of Masada has had such a powerful claim on Israeli consciousness especially because of the Holocaust...


Israeli soldiers take an oath there: "Masada shall not fall again." Next to Jerusalem, it is the most popular destination of Jewish tourists visiting Israel. As a rabbi, I have even had occasion to conduct five Bar and Bat Mitzvah services there. It is strange that a place known only because 960 Jews committed suicide there in the first century C.E. should become a modern symbol of Jewish survival.

What is even stranger is that the Masada episode is not mentioned in the Talmud. Why did the rabbis choose to ignore the courageous stance and tragic fate of the last fighters in the Jewish rebellion against Rome?

Click here to read the full text of this article in the COMMENTARY Digital Archive
The Masada Complex
Alter, Robert
IT MAY seem surprising that an archaeological site should provide the focus of debate on basic issues of national policy, but given the peculiarity of Israel's location in history and...
...Torchlit military ceremonies on the top of Masada are, I fear, a literal and dubious translation into public life of a literary metaphor, and a Prime Minister's subsuming Holocaust, pogroms, and Israel's present state of siege under the rubric of Masada might be the kind of hangover from poetry that could befuddle thinking on urgent political issues...
...It was to a large extent the creative selectivity and linguisticTHE MASADA COMPLEX/23 resourcefulness of writers like Mapu, Tchernichovsky, Shlonsky, Alterman, Lamdan, Uri Zvi Greenberg, that produced a usable past, in J. H. Plumb's sense, for the renascent Jewish state...
...Besides, Josephus, who seems to have tricked thirtynine fellow soldiers at the fall of Jotapata into killing one another while he cunningly preserved his own life, might have had reason to repair his damaged public image by fabricating a large-scale suicide pact at Masada in which See her articles in the Jewish Spectator, "Masada, Josephus, and Yadin" (October 1967) and "Masada Re- visited" (December 1969...
...Kedar begins by characterizing Masada as an Israeli "myth, obsession [in the Hebrew, dybbuk], complex," and he goes on to propose that the symbol of Masada has had such a powerful claim on Israeli consciousness especially because of the Holocaust...
Vol. 56 • July 1973 • No. 1

I don't know nothing except we can sit here and talk about how history repeats itself, but not really. And the book says there is nothing new under the sun, but there is
and every time that wheel goes round
we bound to cover a little more ground
mankind can only advance by the shedding of blood
each war to end all wars a little bloodier than the one before
we ain't seen nothing yet
I do believe we will survive
I am almost gone
but there will be one child left
to carry on

this don't mean a got dam thing just typing through my tears

[Lightning Rod]

And When I Die
Written by - Laura Nyro
From - Blood, Sweat & Tears
Peaked at #2 - 11/69

I'm not scared of dying
And I, don't really care
If it' s peace you find in dying
Well then, let the time be near

If it's peace you find in dying
Well then dying time is near
Just bundle up my coffin
'Cause it's
Cold way down there
I hear that it's
Cold way down there, yeah
Crazy cold, way down there

And when I die, and when I'm gone
There'll be, one child born
In this world
To carry on, to carry on

Now troubles are many
There as
Deep as a well
I can swear there ain't no Heaven
But I pray there ain't no hell
Swear there ain't no Heaven
And I'll pray there ain't no hell
But I'll never know by livin'
Only my dyin' will tell, yes only my
Dyin' will tell, oh yeah
Only my dyin' will tell

And when I die, and when I'm gone
There'll be, one child born, in this world
To carry on, to carry on
Yeah yeah

Give me my freedom
For as long as I be
All I ask of livin'
Is to have no chains on me
All I ask of livin'
Is to have no chains on me
And all I ask of dyin' is to
Go naturally, only wanna
Go naturally
Here I go!
Hey hey
Here come the devil
Right behind
Look out children, here he come
Here he come, hey

Don't wanna go by the devil
Don't wanna go by the demon
Don't wanna go by satan
Don't wanna die uneasy
Just let me go
Naturally

And when I die, and when I'm dead
Dead and gone
There'll be
One child born, in our world
To carry on, to carry on

[gypsyjoker]

I love you man, now loan me twenty bucks till payday
I suppose if there are any similarities between Viet Nam and Iraq it might only be that there was a Texan in the white house. But only one was really a Texan, Jesus W Bush is still a got dam yankee. I wrote this for hester, I hope she can get over it you all know what a grouchy old man I aml This thing with Israel and the bombs, I don't know how many or if any of those soviet bombs got sold on the black market. Until the Palestinians and the Israelis can work it out there won't be any resolution to Iraq. We can haul ass and leave a hell of a mess. Vietnam was a poor third world country of no strategic value. Iraq is of great strategic value. Until those two face Islamic priests recognize Israel's right to exist it could get crazy in a heart beat. I am usualy wrong about everything, so I am probably wrong about all this too. Just woke up from a hell of a dream. I love dreams they are like cheap entertainment. The unconscious mind as artist freud used to say.

__________________________--dream time starts here

Sylvia somebody speaks in my dreams.
When I was a kid radio was king
How many nights I fell asleep listening to the those old shows,
I suppose that is how I got in the habit of listening to books on tape when I go to bed. a lot of Raymond Chandler. But tonight it is a tape I have listened to about a thousand times. In my dreams the bear and me are having a hell of an argument. In real life the last argument we had was about Iraq. But this time it is about music. in the dream Jitterbug and some friends are jamming and the bear won’t shut up. It is an angry dream and as I start coming up out of it I hear her voice droning in the background reading her poetry. As I reach consciousness my thoughts immediately turn to LBJ and Viet Nam. The Gulf of Tonkin where something happened but nobody knew what. Shots fired in the dark, the Maddox and The Turner joy. Friendly fire, enemy fire? Oh my god someone has dared attack us. I was so gung ho back in those days. Talk about believing, oh yes I believed in the government and John Wayne. The difference is that there was some intelligence, LBJ was going on what his military leaders were telling him. The pictures of him holding his head in anguish, or collapsed on his desk in despair. The difference is Jesus W Bush and the civilians were lying to the military. The generals that were telling him no don’t do it, they were purged. I have not seen one picture of Bush that looks like in any way he is sincerely troubled by the war. He still looks pretty cocky in his cowboy boots and clean underwear.

There are so many squiggly lines in this. Microsoft is telling me I have sentence fragments. Going to fix them latter if I live long enough

Sorry Hester don’t shut up please. It is me that needs to shut up. I don’t know why I get upset at intellectual arguments about war.

[mnaz]

"Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat its mistakes".... a fairly worthless statement. Those who do know history repeat its mistakes at least as often as those who don't. They take past lessons out of context and mis-apply them to new situations, in which they conjure up various convincing atmospheres of paranoia, due to either poor scholarship or political and economic self-interest or both. I'm with you. Fuck history. A little goes a long way at this point. Let's try a little citizenship and basic integrity, for a change.

[stilltrucking]

the is history and then there is History. Like LR said it is a great story. I don't read it to learn, I just like to time travel.