Theater: Anihu

We went to the Kameri Theater in Tel Aviv: Anihu, a so called romantic comedy by Ronny Sinay and Etgar Keret. Story is childish: a girl turns into a man after dark. The spell is broken when the whole cast travels to Romania to find the old (already dead) witch. If it makes no sense, well, this is a comedy without any redeeming message. Very well played, the actors represent their characters, they sing and jump full of energy, there is constant action on the stage. Speak normal (not "high", literary) Hebrew, their diction is clear, easy to follow. Light entertainment, it succeeds in evaporating one's worries for two hours. 

The  public was an improvement on the habitual Tel Aviv gerontocratic theater-goers. Dozens of high school boys and girls, maybe a drama school, beautiful Tel Aviv youth that I have not seen for ages. We are dying off but have not disappeared yet.  

The Reaction: To Where?

The Reaction is organizing and strengthening all over Europe. The causes are the extreme left wing ideology of the European Union, and the sudden presence of lots of foreigners. Say the reaction, the right wing, acquires votes and influence, what will they do? They will bring to judgment the journalists and liberal politicians of today for their "crimes", such as excesive leniency and even lack of patriotism. Secondly, they will persecute the foreigners and minorities such as the Roma, hardening the judicial punishments even leading to expelling them to their country of origin. Dark skinned Europeans will become very quiet and polite, like AfroAmericans in pre-WWII South.  As always, the focus of their hate is the Jews, but European Jews should long have made aliyah. They are few and they are powerless, you cannot organize a pogrom if you have no actual Jews. Only the Hungarians can.   

Thirdly, patriotic and xenophobic sentiments will become central in the public media, and long forgotten grievances will resuscitate. For example, Hungarians have centuries old hates against all their neighbors, against Romania for occupying and romanizing Transylvania, and against the brutal treatment of ethnic Magyar populations in the other side of the borders. I am not well versed in other national demands, say Croats against Serbs and so. The rebirth of nationalism, that the EU intends to prevent, will surely lead to the failure of the EU and to wars. The Brexit is, in a way, a return to the Nation-State that the creation of the EU tried to prevent. Seen from this angle, the EU has given Europe an exceptional long period of peace and prosperity, which is a very good thing. The right wing nationalism, which was dormant, is now awake in Europe and may destroy the EU and lead to war.  

On the other hand, the left-wing is also changing, the EU's official propaganda is unreal and transparently false like the Pravda of yesterday. It idealizes blind equality, promotes tolerance to an excess, elevates perversity and reduces Mozart to jungle tom-tom. It is disgusting.   

The Chancellor recognized and seized the Opportunity

It was the right-wing blogger community that sounded the alarm that birthrates are falling precipitously and Western populations were contracting and disappearing. They pointed out that the girls were mating with exotic imports, which they did not like, but were unable to understand that they acted so forced by demography - local boys had almost disappeared and no one was competing for their favors. The left-wing and official position was that it was very racist to notice the phenomenon. However, in retrospective, it is probable that the catastrophe was in the minds of everybody, and they just pretended that there was no population crisis and there was nothing to worry about. Pondering what Western leadership actually did vs what it said, it is clear that they were worried - even panicked - and that they took action.

The leaders of France - where the disease started - had opened their frontiers to millions of returning pied noirs and North Africans with French passports. Later they stopped expelling illegal immigrants and tried to assimilate them. In the fifties, the Germans were filling up factory vacancies with Turkish and Middle Eastern temporaries, that unavoidably, became German nationals. Nothing helped to maintain Western numbers, so when Middle Eastrn chaos uprooted millions, Chancellor Angela Merkel seized the opportunity to take in on million Syrians already on the move. European leaders understood that their peoples were dying off and their old people would be left pensionless and freezing unattended in the parks, so they recognized the fact that there were millions of uprooted persons was, against the feeling of their electorate, an opportunity. 

This may be the last opportunity to strengthen Western nations with assimilable human capital. Former sources of immigrants, like Italy, Poland, Bulgaria, had dried up. Other countries were becoming rich thank to the long period of peace we are experiencing, and they too were aging. In another generation, only Africans will be available and the West will have no recourse but import them by the millions. 

Diversity, when a large segment of the population is different, foreign, semi-hostile, is not nice to watch. But the perpective of having no one to change the diapers of the parents in old-age homes, smells even worse. And small countries with few military age menfolk are indefensible. War is the natural state of mankind, depopulated empires always fall.  

Post-Hagim blues

This is just to put down (or put up in the cloud) how difficult it is to restart working after almost a month of national holidays. We all know this feeling. In Israel we have this succession of religious "hagim" (celebrations?) around the Jewish New Year when the whole country stops and public offices close for a month. This time of the year even the tax office stops collecting taxes and the regulators stop driving my clients into alcoholism. But now the "Hagim" are behind us and I have to restart working, and it is difficult. After a vacation, one should be full of energy and anxious to re-enter the exciting stream of affairs, but the opposite is happening. Too bad. 

A society of lies

Since I am a retired but working man, I wake up very early and stay in bed thinking. The Friday edition of the fishwrap HaAretz we read is a totally untrue paper. For example, there are large pictures of black women in domineering positions, while in truth, in Israel we have very few Africans (about 1%) and most are small-bodied Ethiopians sweeping the streets. Simply, HaAretz reflects (1) American media, and (2) the untruth of that media. Another thinking point: Pliah Kotner. We lived in the same apartments house for twenty years and she went to school with my daughter. I used to meet her grandma, an Auschwitz survivor, and am friends with her parents. She married but vowed to have no children, you know, to save the environment. She turned to left-wing municipal politics and has been promoted to be in charge of Animal Rights. The right of street cats to be neutered humanely. A wasted life.  Another example: Israel is about to abolish exams. We do not want to hurt the feelings of those who fail so we lie and say that exams measure nothing. In our lying competitions, every one arrives first place. So we have lying doctors who know no anatomy, we are graduating lying civil engineers who cannot calculate.

The cause of this society of lies we are living in is Compassion. We are not able to tell African women that they are unattractive and ignorant. And they smell (in Brazil are more honest, and call it caatinga). We are unable to tell Philippine maids that we do not want them to stay in Israel and to have babies here, that we are Jews and they are not. They are human beings, sure, and possess human rights, but I do not want them in my synagogue. Sorry, we made a contract and it does not include that you will become an Israeli, however nice you are. We are different and want to stay so. But it is never said that in their face, on the contrary, we lie and lie and give them the impression that we want them. Our Western society's ideal is to be compassionate and never to insult anyone, we protect everybody's precious sentiments. This is a feminine thing, women are built like that, but you cannot live a life of lies for ever, at some point truth emerges. You know but you don't want to be there when it does.

I am not different and frequently, I too lack the courage to tell the truth and am humane and compassionate. We are only too aware that tomorrow we shall need compassion and help. I too sincerely feel compassion and do not want to insult and hurt good people. But as a society, we have moved too far and it will explode in our faces and we shall need to confront our hypocrisy. Good intentions, and we have them, will not be believed.  

I hoped that the constant Arab aggression and wars would protect us from this situation. But we had a few years of relative quiet, and the result is that women are taking over the universities, the bureaucracy, the army. We are compassionate and we are lying, the HaAretz lies about inexistent Israeli African beauty models, about imaginary Papuan genius scientists sending rockets to the moon. Children believe that it is real. 

End of an Era

America is sick and tired of the Middle East with its unceasing confused warfare, and wants out. President Trump abandoned the Kurds, after leading them to semi-independence, and looked to side when Iran destroyed the Saudi refinery. Living under American hegemony meant no-wars for us for a generation. With America out, and Europe impotent (because of its large Arab minority), the region from the Mediterranean to India is wide open for taking by second-rank powers. Russia, Turkey, Iran are contenders. We in Israel shall have to search for another competent and interested ally/protector. The next five/ten years will be tense for us. We may have to fight the Ayatollahs.  

Dreaming about Narayama Bushiko

The Ballad of the Narayama Mountain, an old Japanese movie. Last night I dreamt that I was sitting in a circle with old women and suddenly realized that I was in the place shown in the movie. The movie is based on a Japanese folk story of a remote village, living on the edge of starvation, where people reaching seventy had "to go to the mountain" to die. Summary from the wiki (with my editing):

The film is set in a small rural village in Japan in the 19th century. According to tradition, once a person reaches the age of 70 he or she must be taken by his son to a remote mountain to die of starvation, a practice known as ubasute. The story concerns Orin, who is 69 and of sound health and good teeth, but notes that a neighbor's son had to drag his father to the mountain, so she resolves to avoid clinging to life beyond her term. She destroys her front teeth so she will not be pitied, she sends her bad daughter-in-law with a present to her family - just when she know that they are going to be lynched (therefore cutting her line's link with the "black" family of the community), and recruits a friend to help her younger son to lose his virginity. The film shows the brutal, desperate life of the villagers, interspersed with beautiful vignettes of nature – birds, snakes, and other animals hunting, watching, singing, copulating or giving birth.