The most conservative President?

I am a socialist. I have never belonged to a socialist party, but I have considered myself a socialist since my teens, some 60 years now. Of the nonrevolutionary, social democrat persuasion, but a socialist nonetheless. And so, when I hear politicians and pundits of the American right wing refer to Barack Obama or his policies as “socialist,” I can only smile inwardly and say to myself, “I wish.”

Even when they call him a “radical,” the designation is pathetically absurd. To me, Obama is the most conservative American President in my memory, and probably since Herbert Hoover.

Don’t get me wrong. To the extent that, in American politics, “conservative” (in contrast to “liberal”) is a catchword (whether as an adjective or a noun)  for right-wing policies and their adherents, then Obama is a “liberal.” But in the common, nonpolitical sense of the word — meaning ‘cautious, averse to deviating from established norms’ — Obama is truly conservative. George W. Bush, by contrast, was quite radical.

In medicine, a conservative treatment is one that does not involve surgery or intervention.  And that describes rather precisely Obama’s attitude to curing the many societal ills that afflict his nation. Do nothing drastic; just keep Wall Street going by giving the banks money; keep gays in their military closets and don’t let them marry; keep healthcare in the hands of private insurers; keep the Bush wars going along with government secrecy and indefinite detention of suspects. To the extent that Bush policies — many of them radical departures from tradition — are merely cosmetic pimples, like allowing roadbuilding in the wilderness, then it’s okay to excise them. But deep incisions? No, at least not for now.

When it comes to dealing with other countries, including “enemies” like Iran or North Korea, I rather like Obama’s cautious approach, a welcome relief from the Bush-era swagger. But in matters of war and security, he shows undue deference to military professionals rather than listen to the wise old adage that war is too important to be left to the generals. In this respect he, a man with no military experience, resembles Lyndon Johnson, who despite his Silver Star saw virtually no action in World War II. (By contrast Harry Truman, a combat veteran of World War I, was not afraid to fire MacArthur when the situation called for it.)

Sometimes Obama sounds as if he wished that the situation he is in would allow him to pursue a bolder course. But he seems to have a visceral fear upsetting the applecart, even if it’s going the wrong way, lest his impeccably conservative attire be spattered by the applesauce made by the fallen fruit.

Leslie Hope

The other night I watched a TV movie titled Jesse Stone: Thin Ice, starring Tom Selleck, in which his love sex interest was played by Leslie Hope, a very attractive actress who seemed vaguely familiar to me, as did her name. I wondered if she might be a granddaughter of Bob Hope (whose original name was Leslie Townes Hope), but then I remembered: she played Terri Bauer in the first season of 24, when I watched the series and enjoyed it for a mistaken reason.

I noticed early on that most of the actors who played Non-Hispanic White (to use the official designation) Americans were Canadian: Kiefer Sutherland, Mia Kirschner, Elisha Cuthbert and the same Leslie Hope. As a result, I came to the naive belief that the series was a Canadian satire of American paranoia. It was something that I felt was desperately needed in the wake of 9/11.

It was only as the season ended that I realized that the series’ creators were serious. It was then that I lost hope. It was also when Leslie Hope’s character was killed.

Elms and pears

An AP news story issued today begins like this:

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama issued a withering critique Thursday of Wall Street corporate behavior, calling it “the height of irresponsibility” for Wall Street employees to be paid more than $18 billion in bonuses last year while their financial sector was crumbling.

“It is shameful,” Obama said from the Oval Office. “And part of what we’re going to need is for the folks on Wall Street who are asking for help to show some restraint, and show some discipline, and show some sense of responsibility.”

I beg your pardon, Mr. President? These are Wall Street types you’re talking about, not software moguls or aircraft makers. I can readily see a computer-science nerd with a great love for his subject making it big in Silicon Valley, or a kid with a love of flying going into the aviation industry and somehow soaring to the top. But finance? What reason other than greed would anyone have for going to work for a Wall Street firm? Spiritual fulfillment? What responsibility should they have, other than for filling their own wallets? (I was going to write “their own and their friends’,” but then I thought of Bernie Madoff.)

No, Mr. President, asking “the folks on Wall Street… to show some restraint, and show some discipline, and show some sense of responsibility” is, as they say in Spanish, asking an elm for pears (pedirle peras al olmo).

Our leaders

OK, Tim Geithner has been confirmed.  So now we have a Treasury Secretary who doesn’t pay his taxes (until he’s caught) and a Chief Justice who doesn’t know the Constitution. What next?

Vowels and consonants

The rumor that Andrew Cuomo is likely to become the next junior Senator from New York reminds me of the time, probably in 1991, when his father, Mario Cuomo, was considering a run for the Presidency. I remember someone saying that he had no chance — that Americans would not elect a President with more vowels than consonants in his name.

Of course, when Americans talk about vowels and consonants, they usually mean letters, not sounds. In fact, phonemically Cuomo is /kwomo/ and consequently has three consonants and two (identical) vowels (which are most often realized as diphthongs of some sort). But in common parlance “vowel” means one of the letters AEIOU and “consonant” means any other letter. And except for Monroe and Hoover, whose names have three of each (but in each case two of the vowel letters form a digraph), all other Presidents of the United States had surnames with more consonant letters than vowel letters.

At last, the pattern is broken. In Obama the vowels win, both phonemically and orthographically.

Update. The latest news is that the new Senator from New York will be Kirsten Gillibrand. The consonants win again!

Ignorance of history?

I have heard and read President Obama’s inaugural speech. And I am troubled.

Don’t get me wrong.  It was an inspiring and exciting speech.

What troubles me is that we now have a highly educated President of the United States who, seemingly, doesn’t know American history.

A minor quibble: Early in the speech, the President said, “Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath.” Well, yes, if you count Grover Cleveland twice. But Cleveland, though he held the presidency twice, was, as far as is known to history, one American, not two.

Barack Obama first made his mark as a writer. Writers, as a rule, like to get credit for the words they write, unless they are presidential speechwriters, whose job it is to write words that will be attributed to their boss.

Near the end of his speech Obama quoted the famous lines from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense beginning “Let it be told to the world…” Only the President did not attribute the text to Paine; he only said that “the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people.” It would seem to me that the words were inserted by a speechwriter to whom Paine’s authorship didn’t matter as much as Washington’s use of them. Did Obama assume that his listeners would know that the words are Paine’s? Hardly likely. In fact, Neal Conan began his Talk of the Nation broadcast on NPR by saying that Obama had “quoted Washington.”

It’s more likely that Obama doesn’t know that Paine wrote the words. And that’s troubling.

In the paragraph preceding the quotation, the speech sets the scene: “In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river.” Obviously the reference is to the Battle of Trenton, beside the frozen Delaware. And then: “The capital was abandoned.”

What capital? Washington? It didn’t exist in 1776! Was the President confusing the Revolutionary War with the War of 1812?

Or did he mean Trenton? Well, Trenton was briefly the federal capital in 1784, but in 1776 it wasn’t even the capital of New Jersey yet. In any case, would someone making a speech heard around the world mean Trenton when they said “the capital”?

Maybe I’m wrong to be troubled. Maybe ignorance of history isn’t all that bad. Only history will tell.

More tilde overkill

In a post of mine of a few months ago, dealing with the Spanish names for the inhabitants of cities, I noted the following.

An inhabitant of Havana (La Habana) is habanero, which is also the name of a variety of chili pepper (the strange American habit of calling it “habañero” — tilde overkill! –  notwithstanding).

A few days ago I came across another example of this overkill. At the New Year’s Eve concert of the New York Philharmonic — which was televised on PBS — Susan Graham sang, among other numbers, the Havanaise or Habanera from Bizet’s Carmen. But both the legend onscreen andthe announcer’s voice had it as “Habañera”.

I’ll be looking for more examples.

Oy vey, another hoax!

So, yet another “Holocaust memoir” has been exposed as a hoax. This time it’s the “love story” of Herman Rosenblat (who, it so happened, was sent from the ghetto of Piotrków to Buchenwald, as I was) and his wife Roma. For over a decade the fairy-tale story of the boy who was given apples through a concentration-camp fence by a girl whom he later met on a blind date and married, as implausible as it was, circulated in the American media, including appearances on Oprah Winfrey’s show. Finally Herman Rosenblat has admitted that the tale was a fabrication.

Allow me to quote from an essay of mine, written in March 2005:

I have a rule of thumb that I have followed for sixty years: any Polish Jew’s account of his or her experiences during World War II must be taken with a grain of salt. So it is, for example, that the posthumous unraveling of the fraud that was Jerzy Kosinski’s autobiography only confirmed what I had already suspected. And when I saw the film Europa Europa I could only laugh at the subtitle “A True Story” that its poster bore; the filmmaker, intentionally or not, sabotages the film’s veracity with an epilogue in which the man whose tale is told is shown on a Tel Aviv beach, singing a Hebrew song and displaying a nose that was worthy of a caricature in Der Stürmer and would certainly make his passing as an Aryan less than plausible.

If any  literary agent, publisher, editor or screenwriter were to seek my advice, it would be this: if any purported Holocaust memoir from a Polish Jew sounds like fiction, it probably is.

On being “Polish”

In my last post I speculated that the fact that I pronounce H as /h/ and CH as /x/ when I speak Polish, contrary to everything written about Polish phonetics, may be due to my being raised in a Jewish environment where Polish was spoken alongside Yiddish, and that the phonetic distinction may be a carryover from Yiddish.

My recent trip to Poland brought up two more reasons why I, like most Polish Jews, cannot consider myself a Pole.

The national dish of Poland is bigos; I got to taste several versions of it. And while recipes for bigos vary greatly, ham, bacon and kielbasa (usually made with pork) are almost always present.

Obviously, bigos would not be a typical part of Polish Jewish cuisine. I often heard my mother use the word, but what she meant by it was “a delicacy” or “a delicious dish”; she had no idea that it was actually the name of a specific dish, even if not a uniform one. When I told her about it, she was surprised.

On a visit to the Warsaw Historical Museum I saw an original copy of the Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791, widely hailed as the first modern constitution in Europe (though the Corsican Constitution of 1755 antedates it considerably). And I read the first article (I’m taking the translation from polishconstitution.org):

The dominant national religion is and shall be the sacred Roman Catholic faith with all its laws. Passage from the dominant religion to any other confession is forbidden under penalties of apostasy.

And things don’t seem to have changed very much. The identification of Polish nationality with Catholicism continues to be strong; references to the Virgin Mary as the Queen of Poland or to Pope John Paul II as a Polish national hero abound.

No wonder, then, that the Jewish and Catholic populations of Poland have traditionally been referred to as “Jews” and “Poles,” respectively.

I will give only one example, from a book that I’m currently reading. It’s about Chaim Rumkowski, the head of the Judenrat of the Łódź ghetto (which the Poles prefer to call by its German name, Getto Litzmannstadt) during World War II, and is based on the memoirs of  Estera (Etka) Daum, who as a young woman worked as a secretary in Rumkowski’s administration. The title is Byłam sekretarką Rumkowskiego (”I was Rumkowski’s secretary”) and the subtitle is Dzienniki Etki Daum (”The diaries of Etka Daum”). The author, a journalist named Elżbieta Cherezińska, in fact rewrote the memoirs in the form of the diary that Etka supposedly kept during the war but which was lost.

The introduction is by Szewach (Shevah) Weiss,  a Polish-born Israeli political scientist, politician and diplomant (he was the Israeli ambassador in Poland from 2001 to 2003).  On on the first page, Weiss writes (my translation): “… this is not a story about Poles and Jews. The age-old Polish-Jewish questions never exist in it. This is a story about Jews and Jews.”

And so it is. Difficult as it may be to explain to Americans and other Westerners, though I was born in Poland and Polish is my native language, I am not and have never been a Pole. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.

My H problem

I haven’t posted since August. I spent most of September traveling, and since coming home I’ve been busy with other things.

A part of my travels was in Poland, the land of my birth. My previous visit there was in 1997, and before that I hadn’t been back in over fifty years — since 1944, when I left at the age of nine.

After six years in Germany, my parents and I ended up in Los Angeles in 1950, and soon thereafter they asked me to speak English with them. I already knew the language, and they wanted to learn it. As Polish Jews who survived World War II, we had no great attachment to Poland or the Polish language, and so the change came easy. (I continued occasionally to speak Yiddish with my father.)

On my first return trip to Poland I was surprised at how quickly my fluency in Polish came back. Polish grammar is notoriously difficult, but even without knowing the rules very well I somehow managed to navigate its treacherous waters. Since then I’ve tried to speak a little Polish on occasion, and to learn it a little better by consulting textbooks, teaching aids and books about the language. On my last trip I spoke it well enough to be taken for a Pole.

But in the process of reading about Polish I discovered something strange: according to all the authorities, in Polish the letter H and the digraph CH are pronounced alike, as the voiceless velar fricative /x/ (more or less the way most continental Hispano-Americans — Argentines, Mexicans, Peruvians — pronounce J).

This is not at all how I remember learning the language. In my speech (and my mother’s — she still speaks Polish, and I often overhear her), the sound of H is what it is in English (as in hotel), and that of CH what it is in German in such words as Loch or lachen. Actually, I modeled my pronunciation in these languages (and in others, such as Hebrew and Spanish), as I learned them, on the way I used the sounds in Polish.

When I have listened to Polish-speakers, it has always seemed to be that, with some striking exceptions, their pronunciation of H and CH has been the same as mine. I am now wondering if making the distinction between H and CH is a peculiarity of Polish-speaking Jews, and perhaps a holdover from Yiddish.

Thinking about this problem led me to reflecting about the many roles that the letter H, by itself and in digraphs, plays in the various Roman alphabets, and I turned the reflections into an essay.