Dispatch From The Cuckoo's Nest

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

I’ve been posting cranky rants on my Facebook page, which tells me I need to get offline for a few days. As much as I love to write about good things on Fridays, I don’t think I’ll be able to put out a column tomorrow. My daughter is coming home from college mid-morning, for the first time in many weeks, and I just want to spend the day with her before Shavuot services at our shul. But I do have good things to share and I’ll try to write them up on Sunday.

In the meantime, I feel myself fraying at the edges. Sometimes I find myself overwhelmed with pure stupefaction at the way both sides of our political aisle are imploding in ways that are in perfect symmetrical counterpoint: each is the direct inverse of the other, but both are self-destructing in spectacular fashion.

MAGA is so obsessed with power that they will sacrifice every single shred of human virtue to get it and keep it.

Meanwhile the left is so obsessed with virtue that they’ll sacrifice every single shred of power to claim it and flaunt it.

The irony is that MAGA has no real power and the left has no real virtue.

Let’s look first at the Trump cult. The GOP in Congress know that crossing Mafia Don will be their demise, and they want to stay in power, so most of them have voluntarily parted with their own spines.

When I picture Trump flunkies, I think of that Far Side Cartoon captioned Boneless Chicken Ranch, featuring chickens lying limp on the ground or draped over rails.

Is that power? Seriously?

Yes, your ass is in a congressional seat. Are you in power when you can’t represent your own constituents’ well-being, can’t acknowledge what you know to be true, can’t take the evidence of your own eyes and ears into account? When you’re reduced to ousting your own colleague because he wants transparency around the president’s role in a child trafficking ring, and compelled to support an insurrectionist, murderer and pedophile? When you’re a physician who feels forced to confirm the appointment of a health czar who's anti-science and an anti-vaxxer? When you can’t even choose your own shoes, or wear them in your own size?

What kind of power is that?

Meanwhile the left is so rotten with fake virtue that they’ll sacrifice every modicum of pragmatism and strategy for the sake of awarding themselves merit badge after merit badge.

I’ve devoted the better part of each work week during the past two years to the effort to keep Jews on the left side of the aisle, because — for all its faults — it is still the side of climate protection, democracy, reproductive rights for women, LGBTQ+ rights and safety and dignity, science-based healthcare, taxing the wealthy, and countless other issues I care about.

But if the left actually shares my interest in getting Trump the fuck out of the White House, I can’t find any sign of it at this point.

I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again for the people in the back: Trump made astonishing inroads with virtually every minority group in this country during the last election with the sole exception of two die-hard demographics: Black women and Jewish women.

I would even go so far as to say there are no sectors of the Democratic base more historically loyal and true blue than Blacks and Jews.

Every morning these days I open my eyes with a sense of failure and lie there staring at the ceiling for a long time before I get up. Because as I’ve said before, Jews are leaving the Democratic party in droves.

And the left not only does not appear to care, it’s as if they can’t push us out the door fast enough.

Let me be clear: I’m not talking even about the left hating Israel, or Netanyahu, or Ben Gvir, or the current Israeli government, or deploring all the carnage of the war against Hamas.

I’m talking about hearing much, much more passion around “freeing Palestine” from Israel than I do around freeing America from Trump.

I’m talking about Democratic groups where a post about Jewish American Heritage Month drives literally ten times as much engagement (almost all of it hateful) than posts about virtually anything else.

I’m talking about ignoring candidates’ policies, aspirations, and accomplishments and focusing solely and obsessively on whether they’ve taken AIPAC donations — and letting that be the sole determinant of support.

I’m talking about totally ignoring the hundreds of thousands of children America has killed by withdrawing USAID on a dime and crying only for children in Gaza.

I’m talking about alienating and ostracizing a group of people who have almost uniformly voted blue for generations and been on the forefront of every civil rights movement this country has ever seen — and not caring how many innocent Americans that will hurt.

When you piss all over your most loyal and passionately committed voting base and thin your ranks even further, you don’t help a single Palestinian, but you do hurt your chances of winning.

And when you are willing to sacrifice political victory for what you see as your own perfect moral purity, you do hurt the trans kid who will commit suicide over losing gender-affirming care.

You do hurt the teenage girl in the deep south who was raped by her father and who will be bleeding out on the table during a botched back alley abortion.

You do hurt the millions of Americans who will be refugees of climate collapse; you do hurt the law-abiding immigrants who are building this country and trying to protect their families from oppression; you do hurt our scientific and medical viability, you do hurt our national parks, your do hurt every single thing that makes our country worth living in and you give every advantage to the oligarchs raping the earth and everyone on it.

Is that virtue? And if so, what kind of virtue is it?

It feels to me as if everyone in the country has given up on making anything better. On doing the hard and honest work it takes to effect change and protect what’s left of the American experiment. Like Germany after World War I, the whole country is demoralized by the madman at the helm who is openly looting the treasury, rewarding people who killed Capitol policemen, covering his and his friends’ part in a pedophile ring, gerrymandering and eroding voting rights out of existence, destroying whatever well-being this country had which took decades, even centuries to put in place. A human wrecking ball smashing everything in sight, who seemingly can’t be stopped.

Of course we — as a collective — could stop him if we genuinely committed to doing so.

But it’s too hard for people to face their own lassitude, their own grandiosity, their own complicity, so they do what people have done in every place and age throughout time immemorial and turn on the Jews: make the Jews the reason that everything sucks, and decide that ridding the world of Jews is the only ticket to human redemption.

A Jewish friend just wrote to me and said she wants to get into NYC for the Israeli Day Parade but she isn’t sure she will because “I’ve been so fatigued lately. I don’t know what’s going on.”

I wrote back: “It’s living in America. Spending all your waking hours in an insane asylum is exhausting. Ask me how I know.”

In any event, fam. I know we’re all worn down beyond words. Let me wish you, in advance, a Shabbat and Shavuot away from the noise.

I will be back with you in a few days and I hope to be less ragged at the edges when I resurface.

Much love in the meantime.

Am Yisrael Chai.