Pushkin, The Black Slave Poet

My daughter and I spent a full day in the Southbank Center's Poetry Event. Colorful poets sung about their dreams, which were what they imagined the London cultured public would want them to dream: Universal Peace, Love, No Borders, etc. After all, they had to thank the Brits that invited them to London all expenses included. Not one original insight, not one arresting image.


There was also a panel of established poets discussing poetry. They were most Politically Correct, longing for a world without gender, race, class (Marxism is in fashion again), borders, Trump. One elderly Jewish poetess talked about underground poets of Russia, all of them White and none a penniless refugee... At some point she grasped the crowd's indifference/dislike, and changed the focus to Pushkin, who - she emphasized - was AN AFRICAN, descendant of an AFRICAN SLAVE, therefore glatt kosher for the Southbank communists present. How come that Pushkin (pic) was a Black Slave poet? His Grandfather had been born somewhere in Africa and became a general in the Czarist army, married into the Russian high aristocracy. She needed a PC poet and the nearest she found was Pushkin. BTW Pushkin owned lands with hundreds of slave mujiks.

Notwithstanding the reigning hypocrisy, Pushkin is a great poet and we enjoyed London very much.

London

Back from a weeklong London tour. On the professional side, I made acquaintance with the bold Tideway sewage project, a 25 km long 80 m deep tunnel under the Thames River. On the other side, explored English culture with my daughter in a Poetry Day in Southbank Center and went twice to Shakespeare's Globe.

The extreme politically correctness reigning in London is more oppressive than Stalin's dictatorship. Take the tour in the wonderful British Museum although the emphasis is on African achievements. For example, the guide stopped in front of this Nubian sphinx and explained it African features. I am biased but to me, the sphinx does not look particularly Black. She parroted the official creed that Egyptian civilization was Black.

"Much ado about nothing" was staged in revolutionary Mexico as a protest against President Trump's separation wall. Half of the actors were Africans and anorectic females assumed male soldier's roles. After the show there was a meeting with three actors, confused young colored things just out of actors school, who seemed most comfortable with the PC imbecilities they were performing. The girls loved wearing over the shoulder bandoleer belts, the boys the fake Spanish skirts. I was about to ask how they felt about the play's so unPC subject matter: marriage cancelled because of a false rumor that the girl had lost her virginity, then she (fake) killing herself. But then an American protested that in the final scene an American flag was trampled over, and the moderator hastened to close the session.  Anyway, Fritz Karinthy the Budapest wit, said that actors have no opinions of their own, they paint themselves and believe they are somebody else.

Femme Fatale

Merav Michaeli is an Israeli parliamentarian dedicated to female rights. In her opinion

...the traditional biological family is the least safe place for children. A man and a woman is a bad combination, generally abusive and harmful to children. Only State-licensed responsible persons should be in charge of children.

Michaeli is the only grand-daughter of Rudolf Kasztner, the head of the Hungarian Zionist Organization during WWII, the organizer of the one successful operation to get Jews out of Nazi area. She has a steady boyfriend but no children, therefore extinguishing her family line.

Laughing in the Yeshiva

How many donors are needed to change a light bulb in a Yeshiva? One, he puts the bulb in place and the world turns around him.

How many soldier-programmers of the Shachar Kachol (Blue Morning) ultra-Orthodox unit are needed to change a bulb? Bad question, they never touch material objects.

In the Breslev yeshive they don't change light bulbs because there are no bulbs like the first one.

In the Hemed yeshive they first investigate if the Chinese bulb manufacturer worked on Saturday.

In the Brisk yeshive the question never arises because they reject innovations like electricity.

Yeshive exam question: A Jew born with two heads, on which head he has to put on the  phylacteries? 

Motivating Men to Marry

Western governments are worried because people stopped marrying and procreating as before. Old people are entitled to pensions that somebody has to pay through taxes and that somebody seems to have disappeared. Importing young Africans is a poor solution as America is realizing.

The difficulty of getting men to marry was already well known in Greece of the Antiquity. Plutarch describes in The Life of Lycurgus the inducements he established:

"I mean the processions of nude girls, the competitions that young men watched, attracted not of an intellectual interest but a sexual one. In addition, Lycurgos placed civil disabilities on those who did not marry, for they were excluded from the Gymnopediae (*). In winter, they had to parade in circle in the agora and they had to sing a special song about themselves."

Even so, Spartans resisted marriage. Sparta, throughout its history, suffered from severe manpower difficulties. In the Battle of Leukra it could muster no more than a thousand soldiers against Boeotia, with its large and fertile population of subsistence farmers. That was its final show in history, after which Sparta retired to its starting point of four obscure hamlets in a remote valley.

(*)  Gymnopediae, the Naked Boys Festival, a closed competition/show staged by the boys of the agoge schools. May I presume that unmarried adult men were excluded because they were shamed as homosexuals? Greeks, like Brazilians, thought nothing of fucking boys, but hated old faggots.

How to survive a multipolar nuclear world

Any multipolar system is inherently unstable. The more independent players, the more unstable. Since I am not planning to live long in such system, I stopped worrying. 

Ghosts from the History Books Haunting Argentina

In the block I live there is a Latin American immigrants club, where one can take Spanish books and not return them. I took a high school history text that looked familiar - the same I used in the Colegio Nacional Mariano Moreno in Buenos Aires. It neatly describes the "Conquista del Desierto" - the conquest of the pampas in the eighteen sixties - that exterminated the natives and opened up the land. The tribes were ghosts, never existed except as obstacles to progress. I never heard or saw  living Indians in the Province of Buenos Aires.

But they have survived and multiplied and now are claiming the land. The map shows a number of organized Indian groups that are legally claiming lands in the Gran Buenos Aires, in densely populated urban areas of the Capital. Fortunately, no one seems to claim the Barrio Norte where we used to live, but the Tupi Guarani Cuarahji Vera want Ciudadela and the Yecthakay, a qom community, claim the wealthy suburb of Tigre where my cousins still live.

I know about the Tupi Guarani because they ate Solis (the Founder of Buenos Aires). Actually, they were Charrua, but my history book shows barefooted Guarani persecuting nandues, the native ostrich, with boleadores, in what later became the City of Buenos Aires. But who the hell are the qom? Where have been all this time? Are they real or invented? Even google has never heard of them.

I blame the Americans for all the trouble these resuscitated Indians are causing. They started recognizing the tribes as Nations, the legitimate owners of the land. The example is spreading like fire. Here the Hebronites want back the burial cave they sold to our Patriarch Abraham. If the Neanderthals are resuscitated from their DNA, may they have a case to the Carmel hills where they lived? Could they claim Europe?