(Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testifying under oath, before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 27, 2018, concerning her sexual assault allegation against Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Despite Dr. Blasey-Ford’s compelling, credible, non-partison and under oath testimony, Maine Senator Susan Collins cast the deciding vote in favor of Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the US Supreme Court. Four years later, on June 24, 2022, Justice Kavanaugh—who told Senator Collins he believed Roe v. Wade was settled law, voted with the Court’s right-wing majority to overturn the 50-year old decision which gave women autonomy over their own health care decisions. It was the single most damaging blow to Women’s Rights in half-a-century in the United States. Contrast the sworn Congressional testimony—under penality of perjury—of Dr. Blasey-Ford, with the unfounded accusations made by GOP operative Lyndsey Fifield, a long-time employee of the Extreme Right Wing Heritage Foundation—the authors of Project 2025, a religious screed against Women’s Rights and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,—which crusaded for decades for the US Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Fifield also led a group of pro-Trump Republicans to support Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court in 2018, and campaigned for Susan Collins, Graham Platner’s opponent, for Senator from Maine. Fifield’s statements were politically motivated, extremely biased, and made on social media and to the press,, where she was not under oath, nor under penalty of perjury for false ore misleading statements.)

((In a column released on June 12 across multiple media platforms, the brilliant Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Melinda Henneberger, who has written for the Kansas City Star and the Sacremento Bee , presents her perspective of “The Platner Problem: When Principles Meet Power.”

The column, which is easily accessible on Substack or via Google, could just as well have been headlined: “The Platner Problem: When People of Principle Who Care Deeply About Women and Women’s Rights are Manipulated by Malevolent Forces Dedicated to Destroying What They Care About.”

Melinda Henneberger’s writing and perspectives on life and humanity are often superb, but in the case of her writing concerning Graham Platner—in the context of decades of blatant destruction of human rights, and women’s health care equity which have been central goals of the Heritage Foundation, the GOP, Christian Nationalists and the Trump Administration—Henneberger’s writing is woefully short of facts, and long on comparisons that are not based in the lived reality of what’s going on in this country regarding economic injustice and civil & human rights—the biggest victims of which are women, the poor, people of color and the LGBTQ community.

I posted a streamlined version of this rebuttal to Henneberger’s column on her Substack page, and offer my fuller response here for my own readers. Henneberger is an important voice for all to hear, and because of her great credibility in the past, it is imperative that those of us who respect her abilities & insights, but disagree with her conclusions, speak out loudly and clearly, while freedom of expression still exists in the United States.

Here is my response, expanded for my own social media:

**

“Melinda: This column is so unscrupulously foul on so many levels. First, let’s examine some fundamental elements of fairness I expect from a Pulitzer Prize winning writer/journalist:

1. Did you go to Maine? 2. Have you interviewed Platner? His wife? 3. Did you interview Hannah Pingree, the young, progressive Democrat running for Governor? 4. Did you interview Representative Chellie Pingree, the long time women’s right advocate whose family has deep roots in the State, and she has long been a leader of Progressives nationwide? 5) Did you interview in person the ethically challenged Lyndsey Fifield, long-time political operative for the Heritage Foundation and opponent of Women’s Rights?

I expect nothing less from a writer of your stature and ability, yet you tell us you divined this perspective from a retreat, not from speaking with Maine citizens. That’s like Trump saying he knows “cheating in elections,” just because he knows it. Where’s your testing of the credibility of your sources, and your information?

Secondly, your Nader comparison is not even close to reality and ripped apart from any historical context. Yes Nader, and Susan Sarandon, were wrong in 2000, especially because the public records of Gore and Bush on all fundamental questions of human rights , and the composition of the Judiciary, were miles apart. Even those of us activists who detested Bill Clinton, and his sexual abuse of Monica Lewinsky and sense of arrogant entitlement, saw the clear difference between the political and personal philosophies of Clinton (Bill) and Gore.

Many of us ripped into Nader for being so narrowly focused on corporate influence in both parties, and being blind to the difference between the two Presidential Candidates on social justice issues, human rights, environmental justice, and the composition of the nation’s Federal Courts. Your brief plane ride of epiphany next to Nader, ignores all nuance and the depth of those differences, as Nader did. And, to make matters worse, you are doing the same kind of shallow, out-of-context reasoning that Nader did, which gave us George W. Bush, the War in Iraq, Justice John Roberts Justice Samuel Alito, and the cratering of the US economy costing millions of people their homes and livelihoods..

Before we even get to Susan Collins sell out of women by enabling Brett Kavanaugh, an accused sex offender, to become a Supreme Court Justice, it’s important to note that It was George W. Bush, guided by Karl Rove, Nicole Wallace and Steve Schmidt, who gave us John Roberts and Sam Alito, two of the most destructive voices on Voting , Civil and Human rights since Justice Roger Taney and his decision on Dred Scott. Nicole Wallace, who now Podcasts on “The Best People,” along with Schmidt, a self-righteous, self-aggrandizing scold, led the campaign out of the White House to put both Roberts and Alito on the Supreme Court. I’m not even mentioning their cheerleading for Sarah Palin. They were merely doing what they were told by their boss—indefensible from a moral standpoint, especially when two decades later the extraordinary damage done by Roberts and Alito, has ripped apart the US Constitution and this country’s desultory attempt to civilize itself on Civil Rights.

Even such a civil rights advocate like Joe Biden bears responsibilty for enabling the Supreme Court to be poisoned by not giving Anita Hill’s testimoney enough credibility, nor giving her Congressional protection, and running away fron the false and performative “racism” claims pushed by Clarence Thomas—himself an enemy of civil rights for others— and the deeply cynical forces of racism in this country—not unlike what’s being done by the Heritage Foundation and Christian Nationalists on the matter of misogyny right now, in Maine. Those groups of trolls and troglodytes wrote the book on mistreating women, winked at rape and sexual harassment laws, undermined women’s economic equality, and are actively working to turn the clock back in this country to before the time women were granted the right to vote.

Some of us, going back 30 years, excoriated Biden for his abject failure as the then- Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Mario Cuomo, with whom I worked at the time, was furious over Biden’s failure to use his position to defend Anita Hill and her testimony, and his outrage of such terrible timidity on Biden’s part came close to pushing Cuomo to overcome his personal misgivings, and run for President.

You ignore all of this history going back some 30 years, which made Susan Collins support of Kavanaugh—even more egregious—despite her constant blathering of giving nothing but lip service to the urgency of maintaining the health care and human rights protections of Roe v. Wade.

Some of us who crusaded for a Women’s Right to choose going back over 50 years, to when New York State passed it’s liberalized abortion law in 1970—3 years before Roe. v. Wade—find Collins caving in to 50 years of women’s health care, and civil rights progress, unconscionable—not to mention her 90% voting record in concert with the most misogynistic federal administration in US history.

NONE of that forgives Platner’s stupid , offensive decisions about insensitive,, tough-guy tattoos, unacceptable sexting, and misognyistic comments. Yet, you repeatedly glide over the clear political motivation of his primary accuser, a GOP right wing operative, out of the Roger Stone school, who worked for the most anti-women GOP organization of the past 40 years, the Heritage Foundation.

I suggest you re-readProject 2025, it’s attacks on DEI, on women, people of color and the LGBTQ community. To write as much about Platner’s past—without examining precisely where his primary accuser is coming from, is not “victim blaming”—since her public support for Heritage, Kavanaugh and Collins make her far from an innocent victim. Fifield is a perpetrator of pernicious policies against women’s rights. She is no Virginia Roberts Giuffre, and Platner is no Jeffey Epstein, Donald Trump or any other of the malevolent misogynists and pedophile protectors who have changed laws and bastardized institutions—like the military—to flagrantly discriminate against women. How can you ignore those actual, practical, catastrophic consequences of Lyndsey Fifield’s well-funded political activity over the past decade?

NONE of this occurs in a vacuum, nor without historical and personal context, yet you continually bulldoze all of that concering Collins, and her political and financial cronies campaigning against Platner, under the guise of “misogyny” when their own actual enacted policies have caused grave harm and been violent to women’s rights These duiplicitous, cynical, abusers of fairness and justice gave us Thomas, Roberts, Alito and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court; covered up the Epstein files and Trump’s involvement in them, ripped apart Roe. v. Wade protections at the federal level and in state after state, and are working hard bury women’s rights back to the Dark Ages, How can you ignore all this?

Finally, your writing fails to mention the other major source of opposition to Platner coming from AIPAC, because of his outspoken opposition to Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, his strong statements about cutting off all US military aid to Israel, and his determination to lead the Democrats into taking a powerful anti-war position. With Susan Collins unblemished record of supporting the past four wars, and of unquestioningly doing AIPAC’s bidding on Israel, how can you not examine this as a motivation to bring Platner down, and disenfranchise the voters of Maine?

As a superb journalist, I am suprised you have not questioned the integrity of the New York Times assigning reporter Katie Glueck, a past “AIPAC Activist of the Year” to cover BOTH the NYC Mayoral Campaign of Zoran Mamdani—where support for Israel was a key issue—AND the campaign of Graham Platner for Senator from Maine, when his criticism of AIPAC and Israel—and Susan Collins slavish support— is very well known. How did that egregiouis violation of journalistic integrity escape your notice? Does it matter to you that the Times reporter has a political axe to grind against Platner, as does the Heritage Foundation operative whose unverified statements Glueck relies upon? How can the working women and men of Maine not feel that cultural elites outside of their own communities and billionaire-backed financial interests are working overtime to keep them down?

I challenge you to layout, side-by-side, what Platner has done and said about women, next to what Brett Kavanagugh (and Justices Thomas, Roberts & Alito) have done.

I challenge you to research and write about the extraordinary destruction of human and civil rights, of women’s health care, and economic justice, being implemented right before our eyes every single day by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, Christian Nationalists, and the Trump Administration, and their enablers, like Senator Susan Collins.

(YouTube cover photo of the New York Times interview with Scott Pelley. Please click on the link BELOW these two introductory paragraphs to get direct access to the Interview.)

I struggled for days to write something that mattered about the Bari Weiss-driven “murder” of 60 Minutes, the flagrant $16 million bribe the old ownership of CBS paid Donald Trump to get the Paramount merger approved, and the importance of high-integrity journalists, like Scott Pelley, to the truth, to honest and fair jounalism, and to the very essence of dermocracy itself.

Then Pelley gave this video interview to the New York Times, answering all those questions, and making anything any of the rest of us have to say on the subject not relevant. So, I am making this full and remarkable interview available to all of my readers/viewers, right here. I urge you to spend the time viewing this incredibly important event in our country’s history, and consider it the final hour-long episode of a full, truthful, and no-holds barred episode of 60 Minutes with Scott Pelley:

(Mario Matthew Cuomo, r., speaks with my son, Matt Villano, following an exhibition basketball game in 1990; the inscription on the photo says “Matt, You make the shirt look good!” (photo by Ted Kaplan).

The brilliant Kunhardt Film Family—father Peter W, and sons Teddy & George—have produced the first, first-rate documentary about former New York State Governor Mario Cuomo debuting at the NYC Tribeca Film Festival on June 4, 2026, at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in Manhattan.

The multiple Emmy Award winning family film team—which has made many HBO Original documentaries— has a long and superb track record of making movies that matter about individuals who have had a positive impact on improving our lives. Their filmography includes docs about transformational leaders like Barack Obama, John McCain, Gloria Steinem, and the Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Bryan Stevenson. This new film, entitled “Mario” fits squarely into that genre.

“We are trying to make moral leadership the core of many of the films we do,” said Peter W. Kunhardt, now 73, who founded the Kunhardt Production Company in 1987 (now Kunhardt Films) with his father, Philip Kunhardt, Jr., and his brother, Philip Kunhardt, III.

The Kunhardt family, which dates back to Peter’s great-great-grandfather who was a Major in the Union Army in the Civil War; his great grandfather Historian Frederick Hill Meserve; and his grandmother Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt, who wrote the classic childrens’ book, Pat the Bunny, merits an HBO documentary about their own unique place in U.S. history. Peter Kunhardt himself—not to be confused with his son Peter, Jr., who has run the Gordon Parks Foundation for the past 15 years—worked on ABC News “20/20” for a decade before founding the family film company in 1987.

“What we are really after is the kernal of character who is universal, whom people can identify with, which is the driving force within someone,” Peter Kunhardt told Westchester Magazine (November 18, 2018, “Reel to Reel,” by Gale Ritterhoff').

The Kunhardts could not have found a more fitting person to apply their storytelling knack to for “moral leadership,” than Mario M. Cuomo, whose unshakeable sense of values, integrity, morality and personal purpose was the focus of my book “Tightrope: Balancing a Life Between Mario Cuomo & My Brother (Heliotrope Books, NY, 2017) I have since published many articles profiling Mario Cuomo as the “Anti-Trump.” One such story appeared in the Albany Times Union at the time of Trump’s first Inauguration in January, 2017. Link here: http://socialvisionproductions.com/2017/mario-cuomo-the-anti-trump/

I wrote the book (and many subsequent articles) because I became increasingly infuriated when I was asked at weddings, Bar Mitzvahs and every event where people knew I worked with Mario Cuomo, if it was true that Cuomo opted out of running for President because he had “mob connections.” Time after time, that thoughtless comment triggered me, and I transformed into the skunk at many “garden parties” by pugnaciously retorting “you wouldn’t ask that question if his name didn’t end in a vowel.”

I decided it was time for me to tell the story as only I could: that I knew from first hand experience that Cuomo had NO mob connections, because I did, and that my brother’s mob associates, considered Mario Cuomo “untouchable,” because of his impeccable integrity. Then, when people asked again, I could simply say, “Read my book,” and walk away from them, with my temper a bit more in check.

In Tightrope, (pages 118-120) I detailed my first-hand observations of the moment, in my judgement, that I knew Mario Cuomo would never run for President:

“ In early September, 1986, the Governor was already in a testy mood. His re-election, was never in doubt, but he was no longer having fun. The press, led by the New York Post, was pummeling (his son) Andrew’s law firm for allegedly doing business with State agencies, and for accepting clients who were seeking to curry favor with the Governor by hiring a law firm in which his son was a partner.

Halfway to the speaking event we were headed for (I sat in the unmarked State Trooper’s car directly behind the driver) the car phone rang. It was Andrew. I watched Mario Cuomo pick up the phone and listen quietly to his son for several minutes, deeply massaging his forehead with the large hand that wasn’t cradling the phone to his ear. Suddenly, the Governor started shouting into the receiver.

“What do you mean you’re a liability to me? What kind of talk is that? You’re tired, you’re working too hard on this campaign and you need some rest. Don’t let me hear you talking like that,” Mario Cuomo said to his oldest son, slamming down the car phone into its’ cradle.

There was complete silence in the car for a few moments. Finally, the Governor spoke, seething with anger.

“Imagine that. My own son, thinking he’s a liability to me. This is some god-damned business,” Mario Cuomo said. “You go into government because you try to do some good, and what do they do? They attack your kids. They spread rumors that somehow you must ne connected to the Mafia because your name ends in a vowel. And for what? All because you want to serve? At what price? And when did my kids ever agree to pay the price?”

I watched him look out of the passenger-side window of the black, unmarked State Police car, his anger barely contained and knew at that precise moment that Mario Cuomo would not run for President of the United States; he would never subject his children to the brutality of a Presidential campaign.

“Ah, the whole thing stinks,” Mario Cuomo said, waiving his right hand as if chasing away a fly, swatting his frustration into the air; brushing away the stench of stories which hurt his son and his family, and gagged him. With one wave of his large hand, he pushed aside any of the tightly reasoned arguments being advanced in favor of a “Cuomo for President” campaign in th next (1988) Presidential election.

“Mario Cuomo understood how news, rumor & innuendo worked better than any American politician of his time. He knew that a story, no matter how far-fetched, took on a life of its’ own, once reported and repeated. . .The damage was often subliminal, a mere suggestion to a jury quickly withdrawn, and it became impossible to erase from public consciousness despite detailed rebuttals or outright denials. All that was necessary for the phony charge to pass for fact, was for it to be repeated over and over again, until it became one with the Cuomo name, indivisible.

“Above all, he would not allow his children to be maligned by anyone or used as props in the no-holds barred media reality show which political campaigns were quickly becoming. His family had not asked for a life in public service; he had, and he would stand as a bulwark against their being bullied. I loved him for leaping to Andrew’s defense, and admired his certainity in being an unflinchingly protective father.”

In the Tribeca Film Festival synopsis that accompanies the information about the Kunhardt documentary “Mario,” one line jumps out and underscores the truth I observed first-hand over eight years:

“As he finally ends his political life and turns more deeply to family, Cuomo’s story is more than just one of leadership, but one of love, empathy and commitment to service that goes beyond a chronicle of political life.”

Only a multi-generational film-making family like Peter Kunhardt’s, with deep roots in American history, a passion for moral clarity, a track-record of uncovering universal “kernals of character” and with a fierce loyalty to those they love, could do justice to telling the story of the humanity of Mario Cuomo.

(What’s the difference between a billion-dollar Ballroom, a Wrestling Dome, a “Steel Asylum”, and a Chicken Wire Cage for “cagefighting?”)

A HAIKU FOR HUMAN COCKFIGHTING:

Billionaires’ Ballroom

Meant to hold big Balls,

Now cages

Shriveled Scrotums.

My father was an Anti-Fascist,

A child of immigrants

who worshipped free elections,

And not some flaccid erections of impotent potentates,

Who pump themselves up

On the deaths of humans and institutions great,

Unlike themselves.

My father curses you from his grave,

You bottom-sucking losers, depraved

Beyond redemption, not to mention how

Deprived you are of any shards of soul,

You democracy desecrating terrorists,

Humanity’s black holes.

My father didn’t want to leave three kids

But yet he did, to fight the Fascists and keep

Us safe from hate-filled fanaticism, intent

On killing mothers & babies, and tearing them apart,

Brutally separating families, for sport, & lack of heart.

My wife’s uncle, at 20, had reasons plenty to stay home

And not run off to Rome, to spend his youth fighting Nazis

So grotesque they pissed on Jewish graves, including his own,

Dug deep into Europe’s hills, before The War was won.

And now, you whine, you feces-smearing Trumpholes,

White faces contorted into masks of hate, and vicious howls,

Tearing down the delicate democracies Veterans’ blood sealed,

Defeating & containing destroyers like you for 75 years,

You chin-thrusting shills for criminals & cretins, you pig squeals.

My father and his fellow GI’s curse you from their graves,

You fucking, insane, deranged inanities,

Depraved more than the jackals

Who eat the entrails of dead soldiers, children and civilians,

Growing fat, feasting on the flesh of others, sisters, brothers,

In the crassness and crapulence of your full inhumanity.

The soldiers of freedom’s fortune, here and abroad,

Curse you from their graves, you failures, knowing the courage of their brave

Friends who, of all colors and faiths, came together for a cause,

Not simply for applause, revenge, nor profit, but to save the world,

From avaricious, hate-dripping, garbage pails like you.

My father fought the Fascists,

As did 300,000 fellow US Vets who perished,

And 700,000 more who bore bullets in their spines & rumps,

Fighting to save Democracy from soul-less, anti-human terrorists,

Storming the halls of Congress, Kristallnacht every night,

Taking orders from tyrants, like Orban, Hegseth & Trump.

My father, a Veteran of a foreign war,

Anti-Fascist, anti-racist, memorialized for his love,

Of family, of life, of the struggle it takes to survive,

Who believed fighting inhumanity everywhere,

Would keep us safe, forever, here,

Would keep us free, protected and alive.

Don’t mouth the words of memory when you have none;

Don’t invoke their struggle when you’ve not known one;

Don’t wave some jingoistic flag under which he fought,

Don’t think his sacrifice is something that can be bought.

I spit on you from my father’s grave,

And the burial grounds, of the poor, like him,

Fertilizer for rich men’s wars,

Plowed under for patriotic reasons, long ignored,

While you fake love for what’s free and brave,

For power, and for profit, and because, because…

You never learned how to behave, like a human.

I am a Jew.

I speak for no other Jews but myself.

I converted to Judaism 46 years ago this week, drawn to a set of beliefs not threatened, but strengthened, by rational questioning and debate; that found beauty in acts of faith and generosity, small and large; that understood, from centuries of experience, the insanity and inhumanity of exclusion and demonization; and was built on the bedrock of fundamental human decency, dignity, love and the preciousness of life.

Which is why, despite the current collapse of democracy in Israel and the careening of Israeli leadership into a fundamentalist, nationalist chasm not unlike those in history responsible for the slaughter of millions of Jews, I was shocked by the depth of hatred aimed at me for criticizing the Netanyahu government’s abandonment of the fundamental principles of Judaism and human rights.

Early last month, I wrote on an Instagram posting by Chris Cuomo of News Nation, that:

“I am a Jew. Netanyahu’s extreme Right Wing government is an attack on all of us. A fundamental tenet of Judaism is advancing humanity; the present Israeli government is setting humanity back. On Holocaust Memorial Day when we Jews say “Never Again,” we mean never against us again, nor against any other people—including non-combatant Palestinians. We are not attacking Israel; we are attacking inhumanity…”

While more than 250 readers/viewers agreed with my statement (including a reminder that the IDF’s own Code of Ethics, prohibits a disproportionate response to an attack) respondents from Israel and the United States alike (some of whom may have been Bots) piled on. A sampling of some comments:

1. “Whose side are you really on?”

2. “You’re calling for the death of your own people.”

3. “Thanks for showing us what the ‘Judenrat,” did. Jew.”

4. “Sad to see a fellow Jew who is product of Hamas propaganda.”

5. “Here we go with the “as a Jew” comment.”

6. “So, you’re one of those ‘Self-Hating Jews? You’re a fraud.”

7. “Palestinians must be slaughtered. We are dealing with psychopaths.”

8. “You’re not a Jew. Villano is anything but a Jewish name. Putz.”

9. “You probably love US garbage pails like Biden & Schumer.”

10. “Why don’t you just Convert—OUT of Judaism?”

The Judaism I converted to 46 years ago, was a far different Judaism than the false faith being practiced by some Extreme Right Wing and Ultra Nationalist Jews in Israel and the United States today. It was the Judaism articulated by Israeli writer and activist Fania Oz Salzberger, daughter of the great Israeli writer Amos Oz, who writes that:

“God does not belong as a political entity telling us what to do; what to teach; where to invade.”

Menachem Begin was Israeli Prime Minister at the time I converted, and while he was more conservative than Israel’s Labour Party leaders of the previous 30 years whom I revered, he had just, 2 years earlier, been a signatory to the Camp David Accords, along with US President Jimmy Carter and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat—an historic peace agreement which earned all three leaders the Nobel Peace Prize.

There was a flicker of hope in the air, that a nearly 30-year constant state of War between Israel and Arab nations could be taking a pause, and could, perhaps, lead to a more permanent peace in the region. Centuries old and seemingly irreconcilable differences over geography, demography, faith, ancestry and ancient rights of land ownership could be navigated if there was a willingness on each side to reach some livable accommodations with the other—and if the humanity of each side was respected.

If Menachem Begin, a leader of Israel’s armed revolutionary group for Independence the Irgun, who was labeled a “terrorist” by the British forces he fought for freedom, could shake hands with a sworn enemy of the State of Israel like Sadat, who led Egypt in the 1973 Yom Kippur War to retake the Sinai Peninsula which Israel had occupied since 1967—anything was possible.

There was great hope in the air for peace between Israel and some of its Arab neighbors, in the Spring, of 1980. And, there was great hope in my life, that, after years of searching, I had found in Judaism, a set of ethical, humane, spiritual teachings and practices, in which I could believe, and rationally act upon.

I was a father of a five-year old son at the time when I chose Judaism as my new faith, the faith of his mother. The hierarchy of my previous faith, Catholicism, had long since turned away from me by blindly supporting the American War in Vietnam, opposing equality for women, insisting that the promise of life was more important than life itself, discriminating against individuals because of their sexuality, and refusing to accept AIDS patients into their hospitals, and hearts, because of an outdated, and inhumane, concept of “sin.”

I spent years studying other faiths, and gravitated toward Judaism because of its grounding in reality, as well as spirituality; its’ fundamental commitment to repair the world (Tikkun Olam), and its’ insistence on refusing to wallow in darkness, and always, always work toward hope and the better side of human nature.

Converting to Judaism is not done on a whim; Jews have certain requirements for those they choose to let in.

After reading an article in the late 1970’s by the great Reform Jewish leader, Rabbi Alexander Schindler (the founder of ARZA, the American Reform Zionist Association) welcoming non-Jewish spouses in interfaith marriages to become Jews, I decided it was time to accept his invitation, and begin my journey toward Judaism.

It was a decision which did not make my mother, a devout Catholic happy. In fact, when I informed my mother I was converting to Judaism, she wrote me a letter in which she expressed how “heartbroken” she was; and that the announcement of “your becoming a Jew is not something I am proud of.”

“I will never accept your decision to change your religion,” my mother wrote to me six months before my Conversion to Judaism took place, on May 20, 1980. In reality, it took years for her to become “comfortable” with my becoming a Jew.

We joined a large Reform Jewish Congregation in Albany, N.Y., and I came under the tutelage of a leading Reform Rabbi, Rabbi Martin Silverman, a disciple of Schindler’s, who guided me in my readings on Jewish history and Judaism.

Rabbi Silverman, whose wife, Phyllis, taught with mine in the Albany Public Schools, was already a remarkably courageous figure within the American Reform Jewish Community. In the late 60’s and early 70’s before the Roe v.Wade US Supreme Court decision which declared abortion to be a fundamental privacy and healthcare right of women, Rabbi Silverman had a secret compartment behind the sacred Torah Scrolls in the Chicago-area congregation he headed. In it, he kept files of illegal abortions he’d helped women obtain, as well as a list of doctors willing to perform them.

Along with many other rabbis, ministers and priests across the nation, Silverman was a member of the Clergy Consultation Services, an underground network of fearless clergy, dedicated to protecting the life of the woman, first and foremost. That was, after all, an essential teaching of Judaism—that the woman’s life was of paramount importance, and even if an abortion was necessary to protect the life of the woman, up to the moment of birth, abortion was a required medical procedure under Jewish Law, as well as in the Old Testament.

Rabbi Silverman’s daughter, Amy Cohen, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Adoption Agency Adoptions with Love, and an advocate for women’s reproductive rights, told the Jewish Journal of Greater Boston:

“If someone was pregnant and couldn’t have or didn’t want the baby, he counseled women of all faiths and ethnic backgrounds about their predicament, explained what an abortion entailed, and then he’d refer them to where they could get a safe abortion.”

Cohen described her father as a “liberal, forward-thinking person, always involved in people’s rights.”

After my guided, independent study with Rabbi Silverman, I was considered to be ready to participate in a “Conversion class” sponsored by the Capital District Board of Rabbis, with Rabbis of all denominations of Judiasm—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform—participating.

Teaching the Conversion course, was the diminutive Susie Isser, no more than five feet tall--who was trained in the law and had escaped from Austria just before the Nazis made it impossible to leave. An immigrant to the United States in the late 1930’s, Isser—a Jewish, female attorney-- found the door to the American legal profession slammed shut to her, a similar story to the one recounted decades later by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

So, for 20 years, to help support her family, the brilliant Susie Isser scrubbed floors, and taught Hebrew Sunday School, one day per week. Her son, Dr. Raymond Isser, went on to become Chair of the Judaic Studies Department at SUNY Albany, my undergraduate alma mater, where my wife and I met.

Word of Susie Isser’s passion for teaching and her commitment to a humanitarian Judaism—and to the State of Israel—spread throughout New York State’s Capital District. In her class, the Jewish spouse was required to take the six-month long conversion class along with the spouse converting to Judaism. Among our fellow students, was an Iranian Jew, and his non-Jewish spouse—both of whom had just escaped from Iran before the Ayatollah and a cabal of fundamentalists had taken over that country.

In her lessons on Jewish history, Susie Isser cried when she spoke of growing up with a Tzedakah Box, found in Jewish homes throughout Europe, being filled with pennies each day, year after year, to support the development of a homeland for Jews—with the promise of no discrimination against any faith, and legal protections and respect for all human rights. In fact, those human rights protections, became key elements of the UN Charter which created Israel in 1948.

That was the Judaism I converted to in 1980, and it’s mission to advance humanity and repair the world, while not perfect, was carried out in spirit and substance by a succession of Israeli governments, from Begin’s to Yitzak Shamir’s, to Shimon Peres’, to Yitzhak Rabin’s.

That Judaism was violently attacked with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, by an Ultra Right Wing Nationalist disciple of convicted Jewish terrorist Meir Kahane, who was himself killed by an assassin’s bullet.

That Judaism began its slow slide toward assisted suicide, with the election of Benjamin Netanyahu, for the first time in 1996, and his repeated pandering to and enabling of the poisonous growth of Ultra Nationalist & Extremist groups throughout Israel by placing them in key Israeli government positions of extraordinary power—including power over religious matters, such as questions of “Who Is A Jew?”

Many of Kahane’s ultra nationalist adherents are now, nearly 30 years later, in key Israeli government positions, including Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli Finance Minister with oversight responsibility for the West Bank, arrested on terrorist charges in 2005 by Israel’s Shin Bet for plotting to block Israeli withdrawal from Gaza; and, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister, convicted multiple times for supporting terrorist organizations, and according to The New York Times investigation on Israeli extremists, published on Sunday, May 19, 2024, threatening the life of Yitzhak Rabin “ in front of TV cameras in 1995,” two weeks before Rabin was murdered.

Rabin was murdered at a Peace rally, where he was speaking on behalf of the Oslo Accords—the US brokered peace agreement in 1993 between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization—which advanced the long held US foreign policy objective of a two-state Israeli/Palestinian peace settlement.

My Judaism, like Rabin’s, is one that believes in diversity, equality, inclusion, humanity and love, and a sacred obligation to repair the world. My Zionism, like David Ben Gurion’s, Theodore Herzl’s, Amos Oz’, Susie Isser’s, and Yitzak Rabin’s is a Humanist Zionism, in which a State of Jews could only be a liberal democracy, NOT an exclusionary Nationalist Zionism.

As Fania Oz Salberger has so eloquently said:

“Ben Gurion, the child of Socialist Zionists and of old Labour, and Theodore Herzl, a liberal, BOTH believed that Arabs AND Jews had to be part of Civil Society.”

That was the fundamental premise upon which Israel was founded; that was the basis of the international agreement which created the State of Israel 78 years ago; and that was the pluralistic, humane, loving, generous and intellectually honest faith to which I converted 46 years ago this week.

(The Vitruvian Wheel of Life; based upon Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, dated to c. 1490, and inspired by the Roman architect, Vitruvius.)

It’s not even August yet, but I feel like we’ve been enduring the dog days for a very long time.

The bright promise of it not being 2025 faded early this year, with the news of the death of one of our closest friends from college, whose daily decline from dementia dragged on over seven years. Like a slow-growing cancer, the disease diminished her physical abilities—except for still going on her long, beloved walks; it robbed her brilliant mind and sharp wit from engaging in intellectual or cultural talks; and, soon, it would take away her capacity to talk at all, or even feed herself. Risa was the human we most enjoyed laughing through life with, from when we were 19 years old. Gone now; no longer ours.

To witness the gradual hollowing out of this friend so full of life and love, and easy laughter, whose mental quickness I first enjoyed in Professor Warren Roberts Advanced World History Class at SUNY Albany nearly 60 years ago, was to experience our own demi-death, in small cuts, each time we exchanged Zoom calls with her and her wonderful partner.

Toward the end, I could still make her laugh by loudly repeating the booming message which emerged from this petite five foot friend, when she needed to command the attention of students acting rowdy on her watch as a dorm Resident Assistant.

“Get Off the Quad,” she’d bellow, causing obnoxious, college boys a full-foot taller than her to quiet down and clear out. They didn’t mess with Risa.

“Get Off the Quad,” I’d shout to her, toward the end of all of our conversations, bringing a twinkle to her sometimes blank eyes, and eliciting laughter which carried us back to our college days for a split second. There was that spark of momentary connection once again, compounding the cruelty of watching her disappear into someplace none of us knew, nor could find her.

I understood the constant pain Mae & Angus Tuck felt in Natalie Babbitt’s eternal masterpiece, Tuck Everlasting, (Farrar Strauss, New York, 1975), who, blessed/cursed with unending life, outlive all the people they loved, including their contemporaries:

“We Tucks are stuck; so we can’t move on. We ain’t part of the wheel anymore. Left behind everything around us…Dying’s part of the wheel, right next to being born. You can’t pick out the pieces you like and leave the rest. Being part of the whole thing, that’s the blessing.”

Like the Tucks, I did not feel blessed to be part of the “changeless sweep of change,” especially when it recently swept away a sweet and good and decent man, our friend, Ed, who graced our lives for decades, casually crushing him over time by stealing his life, breath by breath, and pushing him off the wheel, before he wanted to go.

Now Ed, was dead, my calming model for how well a man could act under all circumstances, steady and kind at all times. His passing pulled the rug out from under me, careening me out balance, and making me useless to comfort his grieving partner, who was to us, like another sister. Ed’s death, and his characteristic acceptance of its’ arrival, knocked out my breath, and left me gasping for the clean, quiet air, that was, in the end, denied to this good friend.

Like Job, I lamented to God, whether she existed and was paying attention, why all the wrong people, the good people, were dying, while the evil were left behind to destroy the world, not repair it. My argument with any “higher power” who would listen went like this:

“When needed most, God, why aren’t you near?

All the wrong people are dying.

If there’s a God, she must be hiding—

Averting her eyes & ears to wailing and crying.

Taking Risa & Ed, Pretti & Good,

And Caroline Kennedy’s daughter.

Withholding food, medicine & water,

From babies within our own borders,

And Lebanese & Gazan children, tagged for slaughter.

Are you there, God?

Those innocents are NOT your target;

Unless you are gathering the best around you,

Creating Hell’s Tenth Circle of evil here, on earth,

Governed by ghouls, pedophiles and thieves,

Teaching the rest of us who want to believe,

That justice only comes to those of us who grieve

The good already gone from us.”

The actor Martin Short, now 76 years old—who has endured the Job-like tragedies of the death of a brother when he was 12; of his mother from cancer, when he was 17; of his father from a stroke three years later,; of his wife, Nancy, dying from ovarian cancer 15 years ago; and his daughter Katherine, dying from suicide, just this February—told the New York Times last week (“Martin Short and the Secret to Finding Joy While Surviving Tragedy”, May 15, 2026, by Jason Zindman); https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/15/movies/martin-short-marty-life-is-short.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jFA.pGsD.HIMhk6S-VF29&smid=url-share), that he believed “grieving gives you muscles to survive.”

In Short’s Job-like consideration of the role of a “higher power” in the death of loved ones, he quotes the legendary Director Mike Nichols: “I see no reason why you just can’t keep the conversation going.”

To those of us, like Martin Short, who’ve made it past 75 with our physical and mental abilities pretty much in tact—a rare gift, as noted by Dr. Zeke Emanuel in his controversial piece published in the Atlantic Monthly, October, 2014 Issue, entitled “Why I Hope to Die at 75,” in which he does not argue for a Kevorkian-like conclusion to our lives—Emanuel discusses the unrealistic arrogance of “American immortality,” in our obsessive belief that each of us is an exception to the norm, and like fame, will somehow “live forever:”

“American immortals operate on the assumption that they will be precisely such outliers. But the fact is that by 75, creativity, originality, and productivity are pretty much gone for the vast, vast majority of us. Einstein famously said, “A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.” He was extreme in his assessment. And wrong…There are some, but not huge, variations among disciplines. Currently, the average age at which Nobel Prize–winning physicists make their discovery—not get the prize—is 48.

Embracing our own mortality, instead of trying ot erase it, is Emanuel argues, essential to getting the most out of however much more time we have left, and simultaneously, recognizing our obligation to our children and grandchildren to redirecting scarce resources for improving life’s quality—not only for us, but for them, now and forever, Amen. Such courageous, selfless decisions are at the very heart of accepting that we are part of a “wheel,” as my father tried to tell me on his death bed by pointing at my watch, and mouthing the words, “time to go.” The wheel works because we are all part of it.

Emanuel goes on to explain how we are not like the Tucks, who have sipped from the waters of immortality, nor should we aspire to be:

“And I am not advocating 75 as the official statistic of a complete, good life in order to save resources, ration health care, or address public-policy issues arising from the increases in life expectancy. What I am trying to do is delineate my views for a good life and make my friends and others think about how they want to live as they grow older. I want them to think of an alternative to succumbing to that slow constriction of activities and aspirations imperceptibly imposed by aging. Are we to embrace the “American immortal” or my “75 and no more” view? (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/10/why-i-hope-to-die-at-75/379329/?gift=CMu1iNc-Sy6nzR8uCo5sAk7f3NMnGDlhxRnBJCPm7M0&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share).

At 77, I know that each day is a gift, especially as I near the 33rd Anniversary of my father’s death at 78. Mortality, mine and that of people I love, is ever present, in every waking moment. Bearing witness to too much desperation, suffering, disease and the deaths of children, friends and siblings; cradling my parents in my arms as they took their last gasp of life; and collapsing in shock when a bright, young 40-year old colleague was ravaged by an inhuman infection ripping him from his babies, is, I am aware, the high price of still being alive, after they have left us.

Like Natalie Babbitt’s Tucks, it is the passage of time that worries me most. For those of us neither “cursed,” nor “blessed,” with immortality, as Mae Tuck tells 10-year old Winnie Foster, who discovered their secret, we can no longer pretend we won’t die, when people who comprise important parts of our lives do, and take parts of our existence with them. The question for those of us surviving and trying to make sense out of why we are still here, is what do we do with what time we’ve got left? How do we give our lives more meaning? How do we live out our days well? How do repair a world that has been ripped apart? Love more? Or, as Martin Short, suggests, how do we, “head for the light?”

Noah Kahan, the extraordinarily talented singer/songwriter, who has struggled with mental health challenges for all of his nearly 30 years, and founded “The Busyhead Project” (named after his first Album to raise money for local mental health care groups), has just released his newest Album, at the same time Netflix is airing a revealing documentary about him entitled, “Noah Kahan: Out of Body.”

The album, The Great Divide (Mercury Records, 2026), opens with a beautiful, haunting song entitled “End of August,” where the sound of contemplative piano keys pull you immediately into Kahan’s musical explanation of belonging and loss, seamlessly coupling one with the other, of death with life:

“Ending of August,

The bugs are just starting to die;

All the neighbors are votin’ for someone

Who wins every time;

I thought getting older

Meant knowin’ it’s too late to try…

Kahan’s chorus celebrates how two things, life & death, attachment & loss, are true at the same time, underscoring the wisdom of Angus Tuck about “everything being part of the wheel,” and the need to “make a difference in the world:”

“Oh everything you see out here will die—

Oh, it’s a matter of time

‘Til its fields of ice and reflected lights,

‘Til it’s our time, ‘til it’s our time, ‘til it’s our time;

And it’s ours now,

Cause it’s ours now.

###

(An average American (l.)—one of 215,000 per day—sells his blood plasma for $60 to $80 per litre at one of 1,200 Plasma Extraction Centers in the US, while the 26-year old actor Connor Storrie arrives at the $100,000 per ticket MET Fashion Gala wearing a $93,000 Omega gold watch on his wrist, instead of a Y-tube for separating blood from plasma. There are more Plasma Extraction Centers in the United States than there are Costco Stores, according to NBC News.)

One month and one-day before the utterly over-the-top, garish Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2026 Fashion Gala for the fabulously rich, famous and momentarily famous, a life-and-death story bled out of the New York Times Sunday Business Section—dwarfed by a full-color graphic that dominated 3/4’s of the page dealing with “Teens and Chatbots.”

The story (April 5, 2026) by Kurtis Lee and Robert Gebeloff was headlined: “The Middle Class Is Selling Blood Plasma to Get By.”

In the daily orgy of news about Trump’s billion-dollar-a-day War against Iran; exploding oil prices that now cost a family at least $100 per week just to fill up one car; Jeff Bezos’ $10 million sponsorship of the MET Gala and $50 million Venice wedding to Lauren Sanchez, $120 million NYC townhouse, AND his $500 million yacht; and the Trump family’s plundering of the Presidency for their own pig-like, personal profit, no one paid much attention to the “blood-selling” story.

Two months earlier, NBC News’ Shannon Pettypiece did an eye-opening version of the “Blood Money” story , but few others paid attention, since most corporate network producers preferred puffing up their tiny nightly newscasts with a ‘feel good’ story about “America Strong.” Social media sites didn’t as much as sneeze at the story in the lead-up to the MET Gala, because lingering too long on tough-to-take stuff loses them clicks and cash.

In the Hunger Games-like dystopian world in which we dwell, where a completely corrupt government and a rich, removed, powerful ruling class controls the narrative and the wealth, no one of consequence wants the well-heeled citizens of “The Capitol,” to be made uncomfortable by whats actually happening to nobodies in the “poorer Districts” of the country. Better to fawn over how cute it was that singer Sam Smith’s boyfriend, designer Christian Cowan, held up the fabric train of the 52 pound ensemble he designed for Smith, than to worry about strangers starving to death.

Since the real-life interviews in Pettypiece’s NBC’s piece back in February of people selling their blood plasma for money to survive, hardly any other news organizations wanted to be bothered by the millions of Americans shamefully slipping quietly into so-called “Plasma Extraction Centers” in suburbs, cities and rural communities across the country several times per week. According to NBC, there are now over 1,200 “Plasma Extraction Centers” across the United States, more outlets than Costco, driving the multi-billion dollar industry American blood industry, which provides 70% of the world’s blood plasma., raking in billions of dollars in profits.

Of course, It’s far easier, loads more fun, and laughably more lucrative for all—including the flush-with-money blood plasma conglomerates—to amuse ourselves to death, by focusing on the “Hunger Games” model of a multi-million dollar celebrity costume party known as the MET Fashion Gala to which no working stiffs—and certainly no blood sellers— were invited.

Lost on the effusively empty-headed entertainment reporters gagging on every gaffe at the Gala, was the double irony that “The Devil Wears Prada 2” premiered at exactly the same time as the MET Gala, with Stanley Tucci reprising his role as high-fashion’s facilitator, and reminding us of his portrayal of Cesar Flickerman in the Hunger Games, where his bizarre character, demeanor and appearance ridiculed everything about the entire culture. Tucci’s dual roles served as a perfect validation at the precise time for the vacuity of all involved.

The price of admission to the MET’s Hunger Games Gala was fame, fortune or being carefully chosen (by the fashion elite) for a precious $100,000 ticket to attend the pretty predators’ ball in a city where 1 in 4 people live in poverty and the median household income is $79,000.

New York City’s extraordinary Mayor Zoran Mamdani recognized as much by skipping the grotesque gala of the greedy, and honoring NYC’s Garment workers, where the average annual salary for a seamstress is $41,271, or $793 per week. The Democratic Socialist Mayor wisely chose to stay in the Districts.

For those starved for sensory stimulation, why worry about 215,000 normal people a day, many of them your neighbors, selling their blood plasma to survive, when you can be whisked away from the gritty realities of the world on the long, flowing trains of the sparkling million dollar garments draped over the toned and tony, dripping down the MET’s storied staircase; or, when you be distracted and dazzled by the $93,125 Omega Constellation Watch in “moonstone gold” flashed by the Fashion Industry’s latest “It-boy”, Connor Storrie, one of the instantaneous stars of the wildly successful “Heated Rivalry” Netflix series. After all, wouldn’t you rather look at the smoothly muscled arm and perfectly pierced ears of a young Robert Mapplethorpe, than the scarred, unsightly arm of a middle-aged man’s pierced with with tubes designed to suck valuable plasma from the rest of his blood?

Why be such a downer when all everyone wants to talk about was which celebrity was wearing whose clothes? Who really cares if you had to sell your own blood plasma—twice per week, at $60, $70, or $80 per pop, to afford day-care for your child? Isn’t watching this Oligarchs’ orgy more fun? After all, like the Hunger Game’s competition for survival, it’s only entertainment— can’t you forget your troubles for a few hours?

Well, actually, no. Not when you have to sit still for a few hours every week in a “Plasma Extraction Center,” in suburban Houston, or downtown NYC, or rural Idaho, with a Y-tube hooked up to your arm, feeling the blood plasma being pumped out of you with the same mechanical, methodical way cows teats are milked.

The Times reporters Lee & Gebeloff described a typical day at two Webster, Texas “Plasma Extraction Centers” just down the road from the Johnson Space Center:

“On recent mornings, people waited in lines outside both locations. Many described themselves as middle class, and said that even a few years ago they would not have imagined exchanging their plasma for cash There was a 30-something tech worker trying to save for a house, a sixth-grade special education teacher looking to cover rising health care costs; a night shift nurse struggling to pay for child care fees.”

Most of the blood “sellers” were visiting the stark “Plasma Extraction Centers” twice per week—the maximum allowed under FDA regulations—earning an average of $70 per visit, or $140 per week, and in many cases, nearly $600 per month. Alternatively, they could do what’s done by the citizens of most other countries in the world—donate their blood for free to their fellow citizens, and family members. The World Health Organization discourages the practice of individuals selling their blood plasma, since long term health effects on the human body are not known.

Kathleen McLaughlin, an award winning journalist who specializes in reporting on economic inequality, wrote in her 2023 book, Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death and Profit Inside America’s Blood Industry (Simon & Schuster, NY) about how many of these so-called “plasma extraction centers,” first targeted communities of laid-off auto workers in the Rust Belt, and poorer communities along the US/ Mexico border. Now those extraction centers—which literally suck the plasma out of people for pay— are ubiquitous in suburban shopping malls in virtually every community in middle-class America.

Outside one such community near Phoenix, Arizona, a women laid-off from her job in finance making $87,000 per year and now making $16.11 per hour, told NBC’s Shannon Pettypiece a few months ago:

““I’m angry that I’m working this much, that I’m educated, that I’m articulate, that I have marketable skills, and that I’m reduced to selling my plasma,” said Jill Chamberlain. “I was ashamed at first, but now I’m angry. This is not how things are supposed to be.”

Peter Jaworski, a Georgetown University Professor who studies the ethics and economics of America’s plasma business told NBC, that: “As America’s economic divide widens, with the top 1% of households owning more than 30% of the country’s wealth, the payments people receive for selling plasma are playing a quiet role in keeping households above water financially.”

One of the most striking stories of blood literally being squeezed out of Americans gasping to breathe and stay afloat, was told to NBC’s Pettypiece by Michelle Egan from suburban Minneapolis, selling her plasma to pay her young son’s $700 per month pre-school tuition:

“It’s a nice preschool. Sometimes I do think, ‘I bet there are no other parents here that are donating plasma to pay for this preschool,’” said Eagan, who has made around $400 a month from her plasma since September.

NBC went on to report that:

The money has become a necessity for Eagan’s family after she left her job making $75,000 a year as a paralegal for UnitedHealth Group to care for her son full time. Even living in a relatively affordable part of Minneapolis, her husband’s $90,000 salary as a business manager hasn’t been enough for the family of three to get by, and their credit card balances have been steadily rising.

Eagan told NBC that she sells her plasma to BioLife— a part of the large Japanese drugmaker Takeda. Pettypiece went on to report that many plasma centers are run by a handful of biopharmaceutical companies that turn the fluid into medicine.

BioLife, like others, uses incentives to keep Michelle Egan coming back:

“For instance,” the NBC story goes on, “her first payment of the week is $45, but if she goes back a second time that week, she gets $65. In November, the company ran a “Sweater Weather” promotion where clients who sold their plasma eight times that month would get entered into a raffle to win $1,000. In December, BioLife offered reward points for people who donated seven times in a month or for three consecutive months that they could redeem for gift cards” Astonishing.

“It’s like a drug dealer,” Eagan added. “Once they have you in there, they have to keep you coming back.’

The Plasma Protein Therapeutics Association notes that it can take plasma from more than 100 people to support one patient each year. In a major American industry—the Blood Plasma Industry—which exported more than $6.2 billion of Plasma last year— the need for an endless supply of plasma sellers— driven to desperation by an increasingly crushing economic system—who must earn money to support their own families—even if those already-low Plasma harvesting fees are reduced as some of the blood-sucking companies have already talked about doing. Increased financial pressure on plasma sellers, and the industry’s ghoulish push to maximize its’ profits, are the two most powerful forces propelling this twisted, purely American, capitalist phenomenom.

Jill Chamberlain, scrambling to pay her bills for herself and her 18-year old son, has neither the time, nor the inclination to watch the obscene Hunger Games-like MET Gala, which mocks the daily struggles of working families, and glorifies gaude, greed, celebrity and vast differences of wealth in this country:

“We always heard the middle class was disappearing,” she said. “But really, really quickly, the rich are getting richer and the rest of us are sinking.”

Ten years ago, singer/songwriter Paul Simon wrote prophetically that “Wristbands” (Stranger to Stranger, 2016, Concord Records) were symbols of the increasing stratification of our society and the growing chasm between the very rich, and the rest of us who weren’t:

“Wristband, my man,

You’ve got to have a wristband;

If you don’t have a wristband, my man,

You don’t get through the door.”

I’m not sure even such a profound poet and visionary as Simon ever imagined a glittering gold $93,000 watch as the wristband of admission to a comfortable life, and a Y-shaped Plasma/blood sorting tube, as a Yellow tattoo, signifying omission from it.

(May the Force be strong in all of us, on May the 4th and everyday: my mentor and me.)

We are all Jedis, now.

Darkness descending, so fast,

Erasing the past.

Hate, Lies, Bigotry

Spreading plague-like, killing vows;

We are all Jedis, now.

Death and dying near,

Princess Leia no more here —

We are all Jedis, now.

Ali, Ali, where are thee?

Floating, and stinging like bees.

We are all Jedis, now.

Hal-le-lu-oo-ya

Leonard Cohen, you too-ya?

We’re all Jedis, now.

Easy, so easy

To turn out the lights, give in

To the coming night.

But we are alive,

With breath, mind and beating heart —

Each day, a new start

To love, live, create;

Never surrender our light,

Our hope, souls, our fight.

We are all Jedis, now.

Fearless with our strength and skills,

Hearts on fire, refusing to bow….

We are ALL Jedis, NOW.

(Jack Nicholson (l.) playing Randall Patrick McMurphy, and Will Sampson, as Chief Bromden, in the 1975 film version of Ken Kesey’s story “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”)

For years now, some of us have been asking how long the lunatic, chaotic, erratic, fanatical, pathological and dangerous behavior of Donald Trump can go on. Is he really this crazy, or just acting this way to keep others off balance and increase his power? What about the possibility that he is both: diabolically sane, and insane simultaneously, and the difference between the two behaviors is no longer distinguishable, even to him?

In Ken Kesey’s seminal work about insanity, control, compliance and rebellion within the world of a lunatic asylum, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, such dynamics are ever-present between Nurse Ratched who exercises authoritarian control over the Psych Ward, Randle Patrick McMurphy who wrestles her for power, control and dignity, and the narrator, Chief Bromden, a Native American , and the longest tenured resident of the ward.

Trump is the Nurse Ratched (Wretched?) of our nationwide asylum in which he has bullied and badgered all inhabitants into questioning their own sanity, not his, even though he may be more pathological and removed from reality than everyone else.

“You know it, and I know it,” Trump repeatedly bellows into the minds of people who neither know, nor believe he knows any such thing. It’s Trump’s hypnotic mantra of social control, implying that if you don’t know it, something is wrong with you, and since he knows it, and he’s famous and on television and a model of “American success,” it must be you who is wrong—or, as Nurse Ratched would phrase it, acutely insane.

Until recently—when Trump has gone utterly bonkers over sea shells in the sand; over the looks of Jim Comey and the laughter Jimmy Kimmel; over his gilded cage of a ballroom that keeps slip sliding away; over his Reich-like Renaissance Arch designed to cast a dark, demonic shadow over the graves of legitimate heroes of democracy; over a Pope who simply and faithfully preaches the Gospel of Jesus and exemplifies love over hate; over his waging of a daily war of terror against humans pursing a safe, peaceful life; over his transforming the US into an Apartheid state, like Israel, and, over the awful arming and executing a grotesque genocide against non-white populations in Gaza, Lebanon, and anywhere else around the world, I believed that much of his early insanity was calculated, and compared Trump’s behavior to that of one of his New York Mobster role-models, Vinnie “The Chin” Gigante.

New York Mob boss Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, the power behind the Genovese Crime Family during the 1980’s and 1990’s, avoided prosecution for decades by pretending to be “crazy.”

Nicknamed “The Oddfather,” Gigante took rambling street strolls in pajamas, a terrycloth robe and slippers around Greenwich Village, where he lived in a small apartment with his mother, who, in a screeching Stephen Miller-like defense of her son, insisted the only thing he was “boss” of was the bathroom. Whatever worked to keep The Chin out of the clink.

The Chin’s “elaborate deception” — as Federal Judge Eugene Nickerson described Gigante’s behavior in declaring him mentally competent to stand trial in the 1990’s — kept him out of jail for years, and the wealthy & powerful Mob boss manufactured reams of purchased doctors’ notes attesting to his lunacy; hypocritical notes in violation of doctors’ Hippocratic Oaths, like the ones Trump paid for, to get doctors to see bone spurs, and continue the Trump family’s cowardly tradition of actively dodging military service, like his grandfather Frederich, stripped of his German citizenship for failure to serve his country. Instead, Trump’s family role-model fled to the US and Canada, during the Gold Rush, where he operated a gold-lame decorated brothel (Oval Office inspiration?), the earliest know version of Epstein’s Island.

Who’s crazy now?

“The Chin’s” phalanx of paid psychiatrists missed a few salient facts: Gigante’s slipping out at night, dressed in normal clothing, to be with his girlfriend on the Upper East Side; Gigante ordering a hit on John Gotti, head of the rival Gambino Crime Family because he felt Gotti broke the Mob’s rules with the “unsanctioned” murder of Paul Castellano; Gigante ordering his underlings never to mention his name in conversations, but simply point to their “chins” when referencing him; and Gigante gingerly extorting payoffs from vendors and pocketing money donated to a neighborhood church during New York’s Annual Feast of San Gennaro. It all sounds very Trump-like.

In a weird way, Trump’s life of duplicity, deceit and Drag, was far more poisonous, if not as graphically violent—as far as we know— as the life of “Vinnie the Chin.” The “Chin” concocted his entire charade to keep his competition and the cops off balance AND to stay out of jail. Instead of executing other Mobsters, Trump goals were far grander: to kill the truth, and erase facts, history and humanity; to enrich himself beyond his grandfather’s—and father’s—wildest dreams; to take control of the culture; to place himself outside of the law, of everyday life and of any accountability for his actions; to use racial hatred or phony patriotism, or Elmer Gantry-like religious con-jobbery and his own, perverse obsession with celebrity (and America’s) to create a whole new universe, which he alone ruled.

In short, Trump worked relentlessly to craft the world as his own Jabba the Hut’s throne room, with himself pulling the chains of women and young girls, and to turn the country into the kind of mental asylum, which Nurse Ratched ruled. And, like Nurse Ratched or “Vinnie The Chin,” Trump needed to eliminate any challenge to his absolute control, or anyone who stood in his way.

Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest (either the 1962 novel, the 1963 Broadway Play starring Kirk Douglas who immediately bought the movie rights, or the 1975 movie starring Jack Nicholson and directed by Milos Forman) is incredibly instructive here, during this heightened period of society-encompassing insanity.

Nurse Ratched (Trump) exercises diabolical control over the 18 men in her Psych Ward by belittling each, and constantly setting off each against the other. Perhaps the most insightful scene takes place during the first Group Therapy Session experienced by the story’s protagonist, Randle Patrick McMurphy, who compared what Ratched (Wretched) did to her subjects as her getting them to peck each other to death, like chickens:

“ The flock gets a sight of a spot of blood on some chicken, and they all go to pecking’ at it, see, till they rip the chicken to shreds, blood and bones and feathers. But usually, a couple of the flock gets spotted in the fracas, then it’s their turn. And a few more get spots and get pecked to death, and more and more…”

And each time this occurs, it’s Nurse Ratched, who rules the roost with an iron fist, who draws the first drops of blood. She saves her fiercest venom—electric shock therapy and, eventually, lobotomization (in Trump’s case, he weaponizes the Justice Department, or unleashes vitriolic attacks on social media) for whom she (he) perceives to be the greatest threat to her continued reign of terror, or power. In the Psych Ward which the Wretched Ratched rules, that clear threat is McMurphy, a criminal con-man not insane at all, who sees right through her curtain of cruelty.

One of the key characters in Cuckoo’s Nest, Dale Harding, a closeted gay man who chose voluntary institutionalization over living in the real world (similar to Trump’s toadying Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent) who constantly kowtows to Nurse Ratchet for fear of retribution, makes a key observation about the struggle for power and dominance:

“Never before did I realize that mental illness could have the aspect of power; POWER. Think of it: perhaps the more insane a man is, the more powerful he could become.”

What’s left hanging out there is the question of self-control: what happens when the insane “actor” stops acting for effect and advantage, and slips into being utterly uncorked every hour of every day? What happens when he, or she, can no longer tell the difference, nor control it?

How is Nurse Ratched, (Trump Wretched) sane when she (he) orders a lobotomy ( or its’ equivalent, criminal prosecution, incarceration, reputational destruction) on her (or his) perceived enemies? Who is acting more pathological? More insane?

Kesey leaves no doubt in Cuckoo’s Nest, that the only “sane” response to the Wretched Ratched’s “insane” world was the unrelenting rebellion of McMurphy’s or the profoundly powerful escape of Chief Bromden, the powerful Native American, incarcerated in a mental institution for the last 10 years, simply because he was different, and misunderstood.

If the insanity is called out , if it’s no longer pumped up for fun, obscene profit or the comfort of predictability, then the insane world is challenged and shattered—like the huge glass window of the asylum smashed to smithereens by Chief Bromdem. Only then, are peace and sanity able to return, as least for some of us.

(Campaign poster from Mario M. Cuomo’s 1982 New York State Gubernatorial Campaign against multi-millionaire Lewis Lehrman, heir to the Rite Aid Pharmacy fortune.)

In 1982, Mario M. Cuomo, ran for Governor of New York State as a Democrat. He had no money, but was the incumbent Lt. Governor of NY State, and Secretary of State for the four years before that. Those eight years were Cuomo’s sum total of experience in public office.

A lawyer by training, and a brilliant one of the highest integrity, Cuomo gained another kind of hands-on public service experience when he was called upon by NYC Republican/Liberal Mayor John Lindsay in 1971, to mediate a highly controversial public housing proposal in Forest Hills, Queens. Cuomo, acting as a private citizen, succeeded by cutting the size of the NYC Housing Authority proposal in half. He documented his work in the book, Forest Hills Diary: The Crisis oif Low Income Housing, by Mario Cuomo, 1973. The preface to Cuomo’s book was written by the journalist Jimmy Breslin.

During his campaign for Governor, Cuomo picked up the endorsement of the State’s progressive public sector labor unions, and mercilessly attacked his GOP opponent—Lew Lehrman, heir to the Rite Aid Pharmacy fortune—for his “excessive” wealth of what was then $25 million, and of his trying to “buy” the Governorship by spending $8.8 million of his own money on the campaign. All of that, came against the backdrop of a Rockefeller (Nelson) spending a total of $10-12 million for all four (4) of his NYS Gubernatorial campaigns from 1958 through 1970.

Fast forward to California, 2026, and the battle for the Governorship of the nation’s largest state, and the world’s 4th largest economy. Again, the issue between two of the leading candidates in our State’s June 2 “Open Primary” election, is coming down to experience vs. money. In this instance the money gap is much greater, but the experience differences are far more difficult to pigeonhole.

For California voters, we’ll be fortunate if it we get to choose between Progressive environmentalist and change-agent Billionaire Tom Steyer—who has already spent $121 million of his own money on his campaign, and Xavier Becerra, a self-professed institutionalist, and a steady, life-long staple of California’s public life, and former Biden Administration HHS Secretary. Because of California’s crazy “Open Primary” system, the alternative to either of those solid and sane candidates could be calamitous.

The latest polling averages as of April 23, 2026, from the Race to the White House/California 2026 Governor’s Polling have such a Democratic dream match-up within the range of possibility, with the polling—two weeks before mail balloting begins —reflecting a tight battle between: MAGA Fox News commentator Steve Hilton at 18.2%; Tom Steyer, 14.5%; former Far Right Oathkeeper Chad Bianco, 14.3 %, and former HHS Secretary, Becerra, 13.7%. Less than four percentage points separates all four of them.

Having grown up on the intensely competitive political party primary system in New York State—and waging my one and only campaign for public office as a “reform Democrat” more than a decade before I began working with Mario Cuomo—I’ve always found California’s “Open Primary,” multi-party, anything goes system of voting to be both bizarre and begging for abuse, since it’s inception 14 years ago. The only thing I see as more “Open” here, are more open-ended political spending, more never-ending campaigning, and more second and third rate and perennial candidates who somehow persuaded themselves that they were ready for prime time, or were what we needed.

Barring the unlikely catastrophe of the two MAGA monsters finishing first and second in the voting on June 2—with the looney law precluding any opportunity to write in a new candidate, run on a third party line, do the whole nightmare over, or declare a state of emergency—the best scenario for sensible Californians would be for either Steyer or Becerra to finish in the top two.

Ideally, if those two Democrats finish as the top two vote getters, than we voters—who receive our mail ballots for the ‘Open Primary’ in two weeks—will face the best of all possible choices, between Steyer and Becerra, which could be an informative campaign for the heart and soul and future direction of the Progressive movement in this country.

Unlike Cuomo’s campaign against Lew Lehrman 44 years ago, it won’t be a campaign of “experience” vs. “money”, but of substantively different and compelling experiences and backgrounds, and of who can best control the runaway wealth of billionaires, and best deliver public services to all Californians. It’s well worth taking a look at the backgrounds and stories of Becerra and Steyer, both 68 years old, to understand what drives them, how hard, and what could be in store for all of us.

BECERRA:

Xavier Becerra is a true American success story, especially for many of us from immigrant families. The Sacramento-born son of Mexican immigrants, Becerra is the first member of his family to ever attend college, and that was as a Stanford University undergraduate, and Stanford Law School graduate, Class of 1984.

Becerra first worked for Legal Aid, and then joined the State Senate Staff of Senator Art Torres, an early and consistent mentor for many young Latinos in California government and politics, and the longest serving chair in the history of the California State Democratic Party. The Sacramento native stayed close to home, working for three years as a Deputy Attorney General in the California Department of Justice from 1987-1990, before getting elected to the State Senate for one-term, in 1990. In 1992, Becerra ran for, and won, a Congressional seat in the Los Angeles area, which he represented until 2017, or some 24 years.

Yet, Becerra’s smooth political career glide path was just beginning. In 2016, he found himself on Hilary Clinton’s short list for potential Vice Presidential running mates. When then California Attorney General Kamala Harris was elected to the US Senate from California that same year, Becerra popped up on another high-level “short list,” and was appointed by California Governor Jerry Brown to become the State’s first Latino AG—a position to which he was elected in his own right in 2018. During his tenure as State Attorney General, Becerra sued the First Trump Administration some 122 times on issues from the Affordable Care Act to DACA.

When Joe Biden was elected President in 2020, he selected Becerra to become the first Latino to run the federal Department of Health and Human Services in U.S. history. Now, the man with the golden resume is running to become the first Latino Governor in California, since 1875.

While Becerra’s political path appears to have been charmed from the outset, he has been consistently criticized during his pubic career for not being a risk-taker; not rocking-the boat; for moving too slowly and methodically on crucial social justice, economic, public health and environmental issues in Congress, as a State Attorney General and as the head of HHS under the Biden Administration. In an opinion piece in the LA Times (4/23/26), he was again labeled as too “chill” by the writer Gustave Arellano, and his preternatural imperturbability and pre-boiled boilerplate answers to most questions can often come across as glib, insincere, or just a polished way of avoiding any answer at all.

For example in a recent televised interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, the journalist asked Becerra if he didn’t think it was a bit strange that even though he was a former HHS Secretary, California’s Nurses had officially endorsed Steyer. Becerra’s smiling, stonefaced answer was incomprehensible, leaving the fact of the Nurses endorsement floating out there like a hot air balloon.

STEYER:

Tom Steyer’s story of success is no less compelling than Becerra’s and completely different.

He was born on the other side of the country, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, to a mother who was a remedial reading teacher at the Brooklyn House of Detention, and a father with the white shoe law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, who served as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. Steyer’s mother was a devout Episcopalian, and his father was Jewish, a fact of birth that has not prevented Steyer from courageously criticizing AIPAC’s “dark money” influence on American Political campaigns.

Steyer earned his BA at Yale, where he captained the University’s Soccer Team, ironically, a position held a few decades later by California’s current Attorney General Rob Bonta, who succeeded Xavier Becerra as California’s current Attorney General.

Stanford’s Graduate School of Business brought Tom Steyer out to Northern California in 1981, putting him and Becerra on the same campus—but at different Stanford professional schools—Business and Law—at precisely the same time. They were both in their mid-20’s. While at Stanford completing his MBA, Steyer worked on Walter Mondale’s long-shot campaign for President, against former California Governor Ronald Reagan. Not many Stanford Business School graduates could be found working on Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign in 1984.

A passionate environmentalist, Steyer was active in every Democratic Presidential campaign from Mondale’s right on through both of Barack Obama’s, becoming the single biggest fundraiser for Obama, and securing for himself a speaking position at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. Already a leading voice on environmental and energy policy, and working with leaders like Bill McKibben, Steyer told the nation that the election of 2012 was “a choice about whether to go backward or forward. And that choice is especially stark when it comes to energy.”

Steyer, whose present net worth hovers around $2.4 billion, made his fortune through the San Francisco-based hedge fund he founded, Farallon Capital. When he left the hedge fund in 2012, at the age of 54, Steyer disposed of his carbon polluting investments and his investments in private prisons—both of which have come under fire during this year’s Governor’s campaign. Steyer has rebutted those charges by pointing to his impeccable environmental credentials since then—and his support from leading environmental groups and environmentalists like McKibben—and his no-holds barred position on ICE, calling for the complete abolition of the agency.

In addition to being the founder and driving force behind “Next Gen America,” Steyer—a consistent backer of major environmental and voter protection initiatives— was the biggest contributor (some $12 million) to the Campaign to pass Prop 50, the historic California redistricting Proposition passed in November 2025, with some 64% of the Statewide vote.

And, unlike several other leading Democrats in the State of California—including incumbent Governor Gavin Newsom and San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, the quixotic captive of tech billionaires attacking Steyer for being a billionaire—Tom Steyer has given his full support to a wealth tax on billionaires and millionaires, winning him Progressive support from Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, Our Revolution, the California Teachers Association, the California Nurses Association, Smart Justice California, Courage California and State Assemblymembers who have supported prison reform legislation, including, Isaac Bryan, Lola Smallwood-Cuevas, and Mia Bonta—the partner of present California Attorney General Rob Bonta, Becerra’s successor in the AG’s Office, and himself, a prison reform champion.

In a story in the April 23, 2026, San Francisco Chronicle entitled “Bernie Sanders Group Makes Suprise Endorsement in Cal.Governor’s Race,” the Bay Area’s Our Revolution group—which vehemently opposes billionaires’ involvement in politics—defended its endorsement by saying Steyer is working “to challenge the very system that benefits people like him.”

Since leaving his private equity firm, some 14 years ago, Steyer has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of liberal/progressive candidates and causes across the country. In addition to supporting a wealth tax on California’s wealthy like himself, Steyer has pushed progressive ideas like breaking up the PG&E monopoly, and supporting a single-payer health care system—admitting that Bernie Sanders was right in 2020 on the single-payer issue and he was wrong.

Tom Steyer’s experience—and the crucial causes and progressive candidates to which he has devoted his personal fortune over the past decade—is extraordinarily different and far more enlightening and inspiring than anything that wealthy candidates like the GOP’s Lew Lehrman, 44 years ago in New York, or Meg Whitman, 16 years ago in California, brought to the public’s table on opposite coasts of the country.

Steyer is giving us the opportunity to give him the kind of chance we can all benefit from, and he’s got the tenacity, courage, fearlessness, flexibility, record, commitment, and yes, wealth, to fight with everything he’s got on our behalf.

(Is a nose with deviation such a crime agains the nation? Me and my “Rhino Rocket,” and Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle).

I didn’t start out searching for Dr. Robby.

All I wanted was for my spontaneous nosebleeds to stop.

The first one hit me some 36 hours after I flew from the West Coast into Nashville, Tennessee. It could have been from the dry air on my flight, or the even drier air in the hotel, or my parched and aging blood vessels in my nose, or a sinus infection, or allergies, or a deviated septum, fixed once, but ever quirky, or the fact that my nose is like a large landing-field for anything airborne. Whatever it was, I couldn’t stop the bleeding.

I bled for a half-hour straight that morning, pinching my nose, plugging it up with anything I could get my hands on to try to stem the red tide. I filled two hotel towels and two washcloths with blood, until finally, just as suddenly and unpredictably as the bleeding started, it stopped. I must have exhausted my blood supply, I thought, knowing that probably could not be true. But, I hadn’t had a nosebleed in decades, so it spooked me.

I was comforted being only minutes from Vanderbilt Medical Center, just in case my blood felt like flowing again, like the long, serpentine Cumberland River that was close by. And, I thought, I had a former colleague who administered the COVID vaccine to Dolly Parton at Vanderbilt, so what could possibly go wrong. I’d be in great hands. Vaccine, vaccine, Vaccine! The thought of Dolly made me smile.

Two days later, after viewing the Dolly exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame, with my nose still dry & tender, we flew from Nashville to Baltimore/Washington Airport to visit friends we’ve known for nearly six decades, from our college days, when our noses—and other organs—were young, supple, and resilient.. Mine bore scars from being broken by a baseball bat when I was 10 years old, and playing the catchers position in sandlot baseball without a catcher’s mask. It was a schnozz with “character” I was told.

At dinner with our friends in suburban Washington, D.C. the night we arrived, the only character my nose knew to play was the role of a bloody mess, once again. Pinching, plugging and bathroom hugging didn’t help. Off we dashed to an urgent care clinic around the corner. Paging, Dr. Robby.

I arrived bleeding profusely through my proboscis, was immediately admitted, and laying my finger aside of my nose, an Emergency Medicine, MD, appeared—unusual for an Urgi-care center these days. And, as we’d later learn, a rarity for 1 in 13 Hospital Emergency Rooms around the country.

Unfortunately, the Urgi-care center was under-equipped—not unusual at a time of crippling health care cuts— and the specific device they needed to stop the bleeding—known as, yes, a “Rhino Rocket,”—was not available. They only had a child-sized gizmo, and in my cavernous size schnozzola, it could only hold back the Red Sea for so long, and could do nothing for the coagulating of blood in my throat, making it tough to breathe. I panicked that I would bleed to death, or, worse, choke on my own blood, in an understaffed, poorly equipped Urgi-care center, a continent away from home.

“I’ve never lost a patient to a nosebleed,” the Urgi-Care Doc said, who also told me he worked as an ER Doc at a major medical center for 20 years. Comforting.

When all you can taste is your own blood, and you’re gasping for air, none of that matters. In fact, nothing else matters. I didn’t want to make medical history and be the first patient to die such an ignominious death. The Urgi-Care MD called the large, local teaching hospital and told them to take me immediately. Paging, Dr. Robby, or Head Nurse Dana.

My nose was bleeding non-stop for nearly 90 minutes when I arrived at the Washington Metro Area Hospital’s ER, and was immediately ushered into the hospital’s Emergency Department. I was greeted by two nurses, and a Physician’s Assistant who were on duty. They were caring and concerned but could not stem the blood flow for several hours, despite rigging up a Y-shaped wooden splint to slow the flow.

“Am I hemorraging?”, I spit out to the Physician’s Assistant along with a mouthful of blood. He didn’t think so, and like the Urgi-Care Doc, he’d “never lost a patient to a nosebleed.” Hmmmmm. A mantra, that, somehow, did nothing to calm my anxiety, which was driving my blood pressure up.

I gasped for air, and everytime I cleared my throat to grab a breath, the PA scolded me to not do that because it would unclot any clots that were forming to block the bleeding. The PA kept going back and forth to consult with the Attending ER Physician, whom I had not yet seen, and came back with the recommendation of applying the Nasal “Nuclear Option”: the “RhinoRocket.”

“You’re going to hate me,” he said, “because it’s painful to insert, but it will stop the bleeding.” Paging, Dr. Robby, please.

At that point, gurgling for air, and convinced my obit would read “Died of a Never-ending Nosebleed”, I would have agreed to anything, including slicing off my nice big nose entirely, so I said yes to the “Rocket.”

Billed as a “Tampon” for the nose, which soaked up the blood, The “Rocket” made me feel like a Rhino (not the nasal kind) overcome with rage. As it was inserted deep into my left nostril, I followed its upward trajectory by climbing up off my chair, making the pain much worse. The PA screamed at me.

“You can’t fight me,” he shouted.

“I’m not fighting, “ I sputtered. “It’s instinct.”

Once back on earth, with the “rocket” jammed up my nose, and it’s anchoring string taped to the side of my face, the bleeding was held a bay, for a while. The PA assured me he was contacting the ENT (Ear, Nose, Throat Physician) on call and that he would come and remove the “RhinoRocket,” once the bleeding stopped.

Two hours into this nasal nightmare, and I still hadn’t seen Dr. Robby, or any ER attending physician, and the DC-area emergency room was no where near as crowded as Pittsburg Trauma Medical Center on “The Pitt.” Such gaps in care, according to the American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM), are not unusual and raise serious concerns about corporate medicine’s ties to private equity firms.

The National President of the AAEM, Dr. Robert Frolich Stein calls it a “national trend,” which “unfortunately, are not rare. Across the country, independent physician groups are increasingly being replaced by large national staffing companies. These conflicts are becoming a defining issue in Emergency Medicine.”

And, according to AAEM, “about half of all Nurse Practitioners (NPs) and Physician’s Assistants (PAs) who work in Emergency Departments now work independently—without the supervison of a physician.”

Around midnight, or some three full hours after I’d continued to bleed in the hospital’s ER—despite the presence of a tampon up my nose and continual labored breathing—the PA announced to me triumphantly, that the ER’s Attending Physician, was about to see me. Sound the trumpets, but not too loudly because it might make me want to blow my nose.

The ER Doc came in, and quickly saw that the first-stage of the Rhino Rocket had misfired, was not doing its job, and that I was still gagging on my own blood. He carefully, and painfully, pulled the “rocket” out by it’s string, and told me I could blow my nose to get rid of all the clotting so he could have a look into the dark recesses of my Nose’s unknown. I was fearful of even clearing my throat, under the PA’s uncertain and anxiety producing demeanor.

Globs of clots came out enabling me to breathe again, and the ER Doc, calmly and competently painted the inside of my nostrils with Afrin to prepare my nose for a second, more skilled launch of the raging Rhino Rocket. He did the procedure in a matter of seconds, and I didn’t leap out of my chair as I did the first time.

I thought of what Dr. Jacob Lentz, a real ER Doc at UCLA Health and an advisor and instructor to the actors on “The Pitt,” said: “I think a lot of the success of the show is probably that people just like seeing people who are competent do nice things for other people and try to help them.” It was a relief but took much too long to get there.

Three days later an ENT specialist removed my now-saturated “Rhino tampon,” in preparation for my flight back to the San Francisco Bay Area from BWI. Things looked stable enough with my exhausted nasal septum, to risk a cross-country flight “rocket” free, but he loaded my partner and I up with cotton balls, and gauze pads—and a portable nose-tampon—just in case.

The flight home was blood free, and so were the next few days, but on the morning after the final Season 2 Episode of “The Pitt,” the nasal blood gates spontaneously opened again in my own bed at home. Fortunately, we live across the street from a terrific community hospital—Healdsburg Hospital—staffed 24/7 with an ER Physician on site. Just minutes after we walked into our community hospital’s ER, Dr. Robby appeared.

I didn’t have to wait hours to see him, nor endure a never-ending nosebleed; I wasn’t pre-screened by an NP, nor by a PA, to see if my condition was serious enough to bring it to the ER’s Attending Physician’s attention. My partner shepherded me into the ER with blood pouring out of my nose, and even out of my eyes in the form of tears. In the early morning hours, of a beautiful calm day at our small community hospital an hour north of San Francisco, the ER Doc saw me immediately—not because he knew me, which he did not, but because he knew exactly what to do for me.

Without hesitation or more bleeding on my part, he asked me to clear all of the clots of blood out of my nose, so he could see clearly what was going on. What he discovered was that I was a perfect candidate for nose cauterization, using the chemical silver nitrate to stop my recurring nosebleeds. “Chemical cautery” he called it.

Relieved to finally be in the care of a medical professional who knew what he was doing and remained unflappable throughout the process, I was finally able to joke:

“Good thing I have a Big New York Italian Jewish nose,” I said. “It gives you plenty of room to work.”

My own Dr. Robby laughed: “We are fortunate,” he said, making me laugh, and relax even more. I felt swaddled in his calmness and confidence.

Meticulously, he “painted” the inside of my nose and the bleeding areas with the silver nitrate. and carefully told me what I could and could not do over the next few days. With more than 20 years of intense ER experience in larger Emergency Medicine Departments in San Francisco, and Oakland, we were incredibly fortunate to have such a calm, competent, experienced ER physician in our corner.

The night before my lucky experience at our local community hospital, in our small, rural wine country community—the kind of places which around the country are starved for high quality Emergency medical care, since 92% of all Emergency Care occurs in urban areas—we watched the final episode of Season Two of “The Pitt.”

The incredibly written, acted and produced episode—some of the best, most effective storytelling and patient advocacy on TV since Dr. Neal Baer’s pioneering work on the orginal '“ER”—left our family in tears, especially during a few eloquent soliloquys by the main ER Docs. Dr. Robby’s monologue was superb:

“The most important things I’ve ever done in my life has been in this hospital. Nothing will ever matter more than what I’ve done in this hospital, but it is killing me. You know how they say that a part of you dies when you lose something you love? I’m not convinced that a part of you doesn’t die every time you see a fellow human being pass…”

Or, as his ER colleague, Dr. Jack Abbott summed up in an equally emotional comment, sharing with Dr. Robby the beauty and laughter and life that keeps him carrying on: “That’s what we’re here for.”

And, I’m glad they are.

##

(With the unhinged American President hallucinating about “sending Iran back to the Stone Age” or of wiping out Iranian civilians, and civilization, in “one night”, the terrifying possibility of the use of nuclear weapons against innocent human beings has become very real, for the first time in my 77 years of life. Having written and researched this subject extensively for over five decades, the prospect of the use of nuclear weapons against humans once again, must be exposed for the utter insanity—and international war crime that even the threat of committing such a genocide—constitutes.

It was 81 years ago this summer, when the United States dropped two nuclear weapons on the Japanese population centers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, three days apart, wiping out nearly 200,000 humans going about their everyday lives. (The first bomb, dropped on Hiroshima had more power than “20,000 tons of TNT,” far and away the largest bomb ever used in the history of warfare,” up until that time.

American journalist & author John Hersey wrote one of the earliest accounts of the horrific effect on human life of the dropping of the first of the two ”Atomic” bombs upon ordinary, non-combatant Japanese citizens. Originally planned to be published as a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1946, the publication devoted its’ total issue of August 31, 1946, to publishing Hershey’s entire story of “Hiroshima.”

Later published in hardcover book format by Alfred A. Knopf publishers of New York, in 1946, Hiroshima, has gone on to sell more than three million copies. Owning one of those original copies, has given me a deep sense of duty to read and share Hersey’s words over and over again, so that no such intentional mass torture of fellow human beings is every contemplated again.

This week, in my most recent re-reading of Hiroshima, as the madness of American threats against Iran have escalated to genuine Genocidal proportions, the simplicity and clarity of Hersey’s writing struck me as pure as a poem, demanding that we pay attention to the kind of terror we are, once again, threatening to inflict upon the innocent. The vision and observations in this version I’ve entitled “Hiroshima, Revisited”, are all Hersey’s; the extraordinary words of John Hersey’s are bracketed by quotation marks; other transitional words or phrases are mine; the selection, editing and emphasis of them are mine. The responsibility to prevent this crime against humanity, and war crime, from happening again, is all of ours.)

HIROSHIMA, Revisited.

A normal workweek began with a noiseless flash;

Clerks at their desks, nurses with patients,

Clergy at their best, families paying rent.

The windows of their offices,

Hospitals, churches and homes

Welcoming the morning light, one last time.

“A tremendous light cut across the sky;

It seemed a sheet of sun.”

The Reverend reacted in terror,

His instinct was to run.

“He threw himself between two big rocks in the garden,

Bellying up very hard against one.”

“He pushed his face against the stone, eyes shut,

Feeling a sudden pressure, and then splinters

And fragments of tile fell on him.

When he dared, the Reverend raised his head,

And thought the bomb fell directly on his neighbor’s house,”

And left him dead.

“Under what seemed to be a local dust cloud,

The day grew darker and darker.” It was 8 am.

The mother, a soldier’s widow, watched

“Everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen.

Her mother’s reflex set her in motion toward her children;

She took a single step when something picked her up

And she seemed to fly into the next room over the raised sleeping platform,

Pursued by parts of her house.”

“Timbers fell around her as she landed

And a shower of tiles pommelled her.”

“Everything became dark, for she was buried.

She rose up and freed herself;

She heard a child cry, ‘Mother help me,’

And saw her youngest—the five year old—

Buried up to her breast, and unable to move…”

She “started frantically to claw her way toward the baby,

She could here nothing of her other children.”

The Medical Doctor saw the flash.

“Startled, he began to rise to his feet;

The hospital leaned behind his rising, and

With a terrible ripping noise

Toppled into the river.”

An entire hospital, with patients and nurses; gone.

“The Doctor was alive, squeezed tightly by two long timbers

In a V across his chest—like a morsel

Suspended between two huge chopsticks.”

“Wounded people were hurrying across the bridge

In an endless parade of misery;

Many of them exhibited terrible burns

On their faces and arms.”

The Doctor “saw a nurse hanging in the timbers

Of the hospital by her legs, and then, another

Painfully pinned across the breast.

He thought he heard the voice of his niece for a moment,

But he could not find her; he never saw her again.”

“Of 150 Doctors in the city, 65 were already dead, most of the rest, wounded;

Of 1,780 Nurses, 1,654 were dead, or too badly hurt to work.”

“Wounded people supported maimed people;

Disfigured families leaned together.

Many people were vomiting.

In a City of 245,000, nearly 100,000 had been killed…

Or doomed at one blow; 100,000 more were hurt.”

“The eyebrows of some were burned off, and

Skin hung from their faces and hands.

Others, because of pain, held their arms up,

As if carrying something in both hands.

Some were vomitting as they walked.

Many were naked, or in shreds of clothing..

Those who were burned moaned,

Mizu, Mizu! Water, Water!”

“No country except the United States,

With its industrial know-how,

It’s willingness to throw 2 billion gold dollars

Into an important wartime gamble,

Could possibly have developed”

The largest bomb—an Atomic bomb—used,

In the history of warfare.

The morning after the Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima,

The Reverend went to “fetch water for the wounded

In a bottle or teapot he had borrowed…

There were many dead in the garden.

At a beautiful moon bridge, he passed a naked, living women,

Who seemed to have been burned from head to toe…”

When the Reverend had given the wounded water,

“the woman by the bridge was dead.”

On his way back with the water,

As he looked for a way back through the woods,

“He heard a voice ask from the underbrush:

Have you anything to drink? He saw a uniform.

Thinking there was just one soldier, he approached with water.

When he penetrated the bushes,

He saw there were about 20 men, and they were all in the same

Nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned;

Their eyesockets were hollow;

The fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks..”

(Photo by Steve Villano, taken in Assisi, Italy, birthplace of St. Francis (1181-1226) and a major Catholic pilgrimage site.)

100 years ago, when the KKK was at the peak of its power in the United States, when hooded-haters marched through the streets of Washington, DC, cloaked in their white sheets, 50,000 strong, and wrote the Xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Asian, anti-Italian Immigration Act of 1924, they despised Catholics as much as they hated all non-Christians and and non-Whites.

Messianic Nationalist & violent Christians who dominated the Klan, crusaded against the 1928 Presidential Candidacy of NYS Governor Al Smith, the first Catholic candidate to run for President. Their campaign against Smith was vile, and its very viscousness and vituperative attacks upon people of one specific faith, set the stage for Adolf Hitler’s genocidal attacks against the Jews just a few years laters. In fact, Hitler and Nazi lawyers in the 1930’s acknowledged that it was American Jim Crow laws in some 30 States—crafted by the KKK against Black people—which were their model for the discriminatory Nuremberg Laws against Jews.

Fast forward to today, when the KKK-hatched Immigration Act of 1924 is still the Bible for Stephen Miller and modern-day American Nazis, and when the first Secretary of Defense (or War) in 250 years of US History has held Messianic, Nationalist Christian prayer services on Federal, tax-payer paid for land, at the Department Defense (or War), and pointedly excluded Catholics--carrying forward the KKK’s continuing hatred of 1.3 billion fellow Christians.

At the same time, few Popes of the world’s 1.3 BILLION Cathollcs have been as Progressive and devout followers of the universal teachings of love--and the humanitarian actions--of Jesus Christ as the last two, Pope Francis, and Pope Leo--both of whom have been insanely vilified by Far Right Messianic Nationalist Christians, in the US and abroad.

Pope Leo has directly challenged the crimes vs. humanity committed by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza, and aimed at Christians & Muslims in Lebanon, and has strongly opposed the US/Israel War in Iran. He has directly chastised Trump, US Secretary of Defense (War)Pete Hegseth, and other Messianic, Nationalist, KKK-Christians for justifying the War as a Holy War of Christians & Jews vs. Muslims--and praying to their God to “kill” some of God’s own children. Whose God would sanction such slaughter?

What could possibly go wrong when Messianic, Nationalist and Violent Kahanist Jews, team up with Messianic, Nationalist, Violent KKK-loving Christians and go to war with Messianic, Nationalist, Violent Muslims?

Pope Leo has been fearless & relentless in exposing and criticizing this insanity and perversion of religion, and in making clear that the Christ he follows in his acts of humanity, kindness and compassion, must never be used as justification for War and/or Mass Murder.

It’s why Hegseth, and his fraudulent , Nationalist, Far Right KKK-Christians are waging their Jihad against anyone who actually follows the teachings--and actions--of Christ, and has intentionally excluded Catholics from prayer breakfasts--even on Good Friday.

Tomorrow, on Easter Sunday, the holiest day on the Christian Calendar, maybe the KKK-Christian Nationalists will see a glimmer of the Light. I doubt it, since their violent hatred--especially of Catholics going back more than acentury, or of humane members of any faith who disagree with them--thrives in darkness, feeding upon itself and the corpses of others.

Easter Sunday may be a celebration of rebirth and Resurrection for devout Catholics and other Christians, but for the ultra-nationalist, Messianic KKK-Christians, it’s simply another day in their continuing crusade to crucify anyone different, who honors love ahead of hate, or peace ahead of war.

Each Passover, over the past dozen years or so, I’ve written an original Haggadah for my granddaughters, emphasizing freedom, equality and humanity above all.

Each year during their lifetimes, as the Extreme Right Wing Fanatical government of Benjamin Netanyahu has jettisoned the beauty and universality of Judaism in favor of a narrow-minded nationalism that demonizes and destroys non-Jews, the challenge to tell the story has become more acute.

The first Haggadah I wrote was when our oldest granddaughter, now nearly 17, was almost 4 years old, and her younger sister was 2. Their youngest sister would be born in 2015.

I decided to write my own Haggadahs for my granddaughters since I found all pre-published Passover stories for children to be harsh, foreboding and sadly lacking in even the barest attempt to capture the attention and imagination of young children, without talking down to them. I scoured Jewish bookstores, on-line offerings, and even Jewish museums. Bupkus. Everywhere I turned: Bupkus.

I tried adjusting the standard Passover story with a few flourishes, but it just didn’t work. I wanted my granddaughters to feel the same passion for the story of freedom against all odds that I felt, as a convert to Judaism, and to absorb such lessons of humanity and Tikkun Olam (repairing the world) into their lives.

I agreed with the social commentary of Jon Stewart at the time, himself a Jew, that we Jews were utter failures when it came to “marketing” our own holidays for our children and grandchildren. We had to be more creative to compete with a plethora of presents under a glittering Christmas tree, or oodles of colored eggs to emphasize Easter—a masterful sales pitch for Christians to sell death, rebirth and resurrection.

Everyone of our holidays, it seemed—Passover, Purim, Hanukkah—revolved around fighting for survival and killing others to gain our freedom from oppression, from Pharaohs, or Hamens or other demented dictators, who hated us simply because we were not like them. The story of Jewish history, was not only one of resilience in the face of such constant threats, but the constant challenge and struggle to continue to exist.

The challenge, and struggle, I did not see coming, was how to tell the story to my granddaughters now, when we Jews had become the oppressors of others, and the anti-democratic totalitarians advancing nationalism, militarism, authoritarianism, or ever worse, ethnic and religious Genocide. What if we became our own worst nightmares?

Each year, I paid close attention to what was of greatest interest to my granddaughters, and wrote and enacted a personalized Passover story true to Jewish history, yet tailored to their young interests to make it even more riveting for them: Faery princesses, or Shopkins, or She-roes (from a TV show), or Cats, or, Puppy Pals. More recently, with the active and delightful participation of our youngest granddaughter—who declared our Passover “puppet-shows” to be her favorite holiday—we’ve added such new favorite themes like “Axolotls” in 2024, and “Rainbows” in 2025.

Those newer themes were a relief for me— coming in the two years after the October 7, 2023, mass murder of 1200 Jews by Hamas, and Israel’s extremely disproportionate counter-attack upon Gaza, which has grown into the Genocide of tens of thousands of non-combatant Palestinians—including some 20,000 infants and children.

In addition to being of great interest to our youngest granddaughter, now 10, those themes carried the blessed benefit of being able to focus on the remarkable “regenerative” powers of the Axolotl to overcome certain death, and on the resilience, diversity and humanity, represented by Rainbows, and not on the monstrous morphing of the Israeli government and armed forces into becoming, themselves, the awful oppressors we have battled throughout our history. We had become our own Amalek, the essence of all evil. How would I explain that twist in the Passover story to a 10-year old who loves the holiday—and whose loved for it I helped nurture—and whom I adore?

What makes the struggle even more wrenching this year—5786 in the Judaic Calendar, or some 5709 years before the creation of the State of Israel—is that the governments of both Israel and the United States have gone stark-raving mad. They’ve abandoned democracy and any semblance of respect for international law or any law; justify the slaughter of innocent non-combatants, in Gaza, Iran and Lebanon as “pre-emptive self-defense;” violate state sovereignty by reducing to rubble every part of any country they want to conquer; and commit campaigns of political assassination and abduction of world leaders they consider to be in their way.

Such paranoia can be used to justify the slaughter of anyone perceived to be different—precisely the kind of paranoia present in every Passover story, and used, throughout history against us Jews and of civilization. Only now, the Pharoahs are Jewish and American, and the targets of their state-sponsored violence and aggression are everyone else who is not, or who does not bend to their will. The symbolic Red Sea has become the Mediterranean, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Litani River in Lebanon.

Our 17-year old granddaughter is fully aware of this enormous gash in the universe, which has tipped our earth out of orbit, creating a new axis of evil, and a new level of inhumanity toward others. Her questions are acute, and reflected by the Jewish Voice for Peace:

“Why is this Passover different from other Passovers?: Genocide. The unique scale, and devastating brutality is still being measured; the dead are still being counted, while the death toll continuously climbs. At this very moment. Israel is dropping bombs on Iran, on Tehran, on Lebanon, on Beirut; while Palestinians in Gaza try to retrace their spiraling Exodus back to what? As we, Jews of conscience, try to go retrace our spiralling back to ritual, back to Passover, back to what?

We ignore those questions of this new generation of Jews, of exquisitely sensitive human beings, at our own peril. War is peace; lies are truth; the inhumane is humane. Everything has been turned on its head, and they know it.

In the Introduction to an alternative Haggadah entitled “ Next Year in Safety & Liberation: Fighting Fascism & Genocide in the Jewish Tradition,” Liv Kunins-Berkowitz writes:

“As we gather for Passover, modern day Pharoahs are rising to power all over the world. In the United States, a fascist government is using the guise of fighting antisemitism to punish those who speak out for Palestinian freedom. This Passover gathering is an act of refusal. We will not allow our tradition, history, and identity, to be fuel for authoritarian crackdown”

Throughout all of this, our 10-year old granddaughter and I are undaunted, driven by our joy in creation, our love for others, and our endless reserves of hope and optimism, that things can be better.

Two years ago, when we wrote of Axolotls—the indefatigable amphibian found in a small lake in Mexico City—we wrote that:

“Little did the Mean King know,

That Axolotls can grow and grow.

Cut off a leg, they’ll grow it back!

Poke out their eyes, they’ll pop right back!

Even if the whole sky turns to black, you foolish Pharoah,

Axolotls NEVER lose hope—

They have that knack!

And so, we rallied again, inspired by the little creature that could.

Last year, in my despair over the utter destruction of Gaza and the mass murder and starvation of Palestinian children, our “Rainbow Passover,” lifted us out of darkness:

“The Rainbow People were free at last;

Their days as slaves, now long past.

Their differences, valued;

Their diversity, a blessing;

Each with a dignity that left no one guessing.

They had made it to the Promised Land,

With each giving the other a helping hand.”

No matter the destruction and devastation, we would continue our efforts, no matter how small, to repair the world. As Jews, we have an obligation to do so; as humans, there is no alternative.

So this year, this Passover, gives us another chance to imagine an alternative universe— beyond the bombed out schools and deaths of 175 children at their desks in Iran, or the intentional destruction of a civilian apartment building in Lebanon, crushing all inside; beyond the death by malnutrition and starvation of another 18,000 babies and children in Gaza, intentionally denied bread, water and medicine by the fanatical Pharoahs of our time.

This year we’ll include olives on our Seder Plate, to symbolize the rows and rows of Olive trees, sustainer of life, destroyed by fanatical Far Right West Bank settlers, on the small parcels of land farmed by Palestinian families for decades. To uproot such a farm, is to uproot a family’s history and it’s future.

For weeks, we’ve crafted a new story of Passover, this year influenced by the eternal optimism of Pokemon—and of my granddaughter, a glowing light in a dark valley.

This year, our Passover Haggadah is a work in progress and is as old as a humanitarian Judaism, Islam and Christianity—where all children are cherished and equal; and all, not just some, are “chosen” to be loved, protected, nourished, fed, and housed, raised far from bombs, and cradled in our arms of peace.

##

(The Emperor has no clothes, no brain, no allegiance to the US Constitution, no respect for democracy, no heart, no conscience & no soul. But he has spawned the largest pro-democracy, pro-America demonstrations in the nation’s 250 year history.)

For Donald Trump’s 77^th birthday, almost 3 years ago—before he stole billions of our tax dollars for himself, his family and friends, the grotesque grifter was given the gift of a 37-count criminal indictment, with 31 of those charges pertaining to blatant violations of the Espionage Act, including spilling—or selling— Nuclear secrets.

His actions are similar to the 70+ year old case that resulted in execution by electrocution of Ethel & Julius Rosenberg for violating the Espionage Act, and allegedly passing national security secrets to the Russians. It’s so serendipitous, and certainly poetic, that, in the end, the lives of Trump and the Rosenbergs are intertwined, yet again, this time, without the repulsive Roy Cohn as the intermediary. Trump has transformed into his own stinking stain, exceeding the extraordinary evil of Roy Cohn.

A few years back, on the anniversary of the arrest of Ethel Rosenberg for allegedly providing valuable, top-secret information to the Russians about nuclear weapons designs, radar, sonar and jet propulsion engines, the WashingtonPost broke an explosive story headlined: “FBI searched Trump’s home to look for nuclear documents and other items, sources say.”

Now that we have physical evidence that boxes and boxes of highly classified US secrets—including Nuclear plans, and plans of how best to attack the US—were left in Trump’s bathroom, in a public ballroom and strewn about in closets and storage rooms, Trump’s illegal violations of the Espionage Acts are veering into Ethel and Julius territory. He’s already be behind bars if a Florida-based judge, jonesing for a future Judicial appointment, hadn’t improperly dismissed the airtight Espionage case against him.

As we’ve witnessed everyday in Trump’s incessant Smash, Destroy, Grab & Grift 2nd Administration’s frenzied fever to snort up every dollar and put everything in the U.S. up for sale—or put his own name on it—the prospect of Trump selling highly classified nuclear documents to Vladimir Putin or the Saudis for billions of dollars—or of his recklessness of his mishandling top secret documents he should never have had--has become increasingly plausible, thanks to documents accidently leaked this week to Congress by the Department of Justice, led by another Trump-kept Florida judicial officer, Pam Bondi.

This adds an entirely new, and dangerous, dimension to Trump’s reign of terror and massive error, including the possibility that Russian spies or foreign agents from anywhere, could have photographed these top secret military documents, while using the bathroom at Mar-A-Lago, or that Trump is still monetizing similar top secret, classified information—even while he is President.

Like Trump’s friend, mentor, role-model and lawyer Roy Cohn—lionized in the movie, “The Apprentice,” as Trump’s primary tutor—I grew up thinking that only alleged “communists” or “communist sympathizers,” spilled nuclear secrets to the Russians, and our enemies, not Presidents.

After all, it was Roy Cohn who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair for violating the Espionage Act. My devotion to the law, and faith in the US Justice system has been completely undermined over the past several years, but especially because Trump hasn’t been treated exactly the same way as Ethel & Julius, or as his best-friend Jeffrey Epstein, for abusing young girls. It is so unfair, as Trump himself would say.

And, since the geopolitical grifter Trump has not been treated the same way the Rosenbergs were, as a Jew, I believe the actions vs. the Rosenbergs were blatantly Anti-Semitic. It’s so on brand that Trump and his team of hatemongers —like Stephen Miller, Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth—have doubled-down on the phrase “Cultural Marxists,” a slur popularized by Adolf Hitler to demonize progressive Jews.

After I devoured the brilliantly researched and written 49-page criminal indictment of Trump which lays out not only his continuing theft of top secret classified documents over two years, but his willful obstruction of the Justice Department’s efforts to retrieve them, visions of Ethel Rosenberg, played by Meryl Streep in the HBO production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, began dancing on my brain. “Angels” is being produced again at a local theatre in my neighborhood later this Spring.

Quickly, I ran to get my printed and signed copy of Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize winning play.

I turned to the page where the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg shows up at Roy Cohn’s bedside, as he lay dying of AIDS. Cohn, who was Donald Trump’s personal role-model and fellow Studio 54 partier, as well as his attorney and the attorney for major organized crime families in New York to whom he introduced Trump, had hounded Ethel and her husband Julius into electric-chair executions three years after her arrest in 1950.

ETHEL: They won, Roy. You’re not a lawyer anymore.

ROY: But am I dead?

ETHEL: No. They beat you. You lost.

(Pause)

ETHEL:

I decided to come here so I could see if I could forgive you. You who I have hated so terribly. I have borne my hatred for you up into the heavens and made a needlesharp little star in the sky out of it. It’s the star of Ethel Rosenberg’s Hatred, and it burns every year for one night only, June 19. (June 19, 1953, was the day Ethel and her husband Julius were executed. Ethel had to be electrocuted three times before she finally died.) It burns acid green.

I came to forgive, but all I can do is take pleasure in your misery. Hoping I’d get to see you die more terrible than I did. And you are, ‘cause you’re dying in shit, Roy, defeated. And you could kill me, but you could never defeat me. You never won. And when you die all anyone will say is: better he had never lived at all.”

Will the same thing be said of Trump? Is Trump destined to become his own Roy Cohn? Will as Cohn did, die in his own shit, babbling baby-talk about ballrooms and ballpoint pens and stripped of everything he ever knew?

The only President in all of American history to be twice impeached (and working on a three-peat) twice indicted of crimes, and twice arrested (so far), Trump’s recklessness, carelessness and flagrant disregard for any and all laws—domestic or international—have surprised even those of us who have long pegged him as a criminal cipher, a con, a fraud, a liar, and a mob-boss wannabe.

Is he capable of selling nuclear secrets to the Russians or the Saudis, or the highest bidder? Is he capable of forgiving the Qataris of funding the single biggest act of violence and terror vs. the U.S.—committed 25 years ago this September 11— and accept gilded planes, gifts and billions of dollars in bribes from them and the Saudis?

Would Trump sell pardons to the highest bidders or the facilitators of such bribes, as he did with Michael Flynn, and then reward them with taxpayer-funded payouts for being prosecuted for crimes to which his handmaids pleaded guilty? Would Trump white wash the most heinous sex crimes committed against children in U.S. history, in which he participated, according to testimony given to the FBI? Would the porcine Pedofile protector profer a pardon for the female Sex Trafficker, Ghislaine Maxwell, who facilitated and participated in those crimes in exchange for her silence about his involvement?

Perhaps, the only appropriate eulogy that could be given for Trump’s lawless, truthless, soul-less half-century headlong flight from accountability of any kind for every crime he ever committed, and his unending drag show of distraction in public, is a variation on the theme expressed by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg—thrice electrocuted-- over Roy Cohn’s deathbed:

“Better he never had never lived a public life at all.”

(From Iran’s Anadolu Agency, pictures of some of the schoolchildren killed by U.S. bombs in Iran on the first day of the War.)

All the wrong people are dying;

If there’s a God, she’s not even trying

To even the score,

And maybe, just maybe a bit more.

Bob Mueller died this week,

And, before Rigor Mortis arrived,

Trump vomited through his teeth,

That he was glad our hero died.

Are you there God?

That’s your target.

Not Mueller, nor Jesse Jackson,

Nor Virginia Roberts Giuffre,

Nor 168 children in a classroom in Iran.

God, how could you let this happen?

All the wrong people are dying.

But, still breathing and lying,

Are Hegseth, Miller, Trump & Vance,

And anyone who’ll drop their pants

For a few million bucks or strokes or bribes,

Or anything that “cleanses” the human tribe.

Are you there, God?

They’re your target.

Not the Reiners,

Nor Catherine O’Hara,

Nor half the population of Gaza,

But men in suits, or wearing jackboots,

All the wrong people are dying.

Venality still high-flying

In the form of vampires

Like RFK and Kushner Jr.,

Witkoff, Dumbkopf and Lutnick’s liver;

Bibi, Marco & the terrorist, Ben-Gvir,

Surely you can make them slither,

And pay for the pain they all deliver.

Are you there, God?

They’re your target.

Not Jane Goodall or Country Joe,

Willie Colon or The Dead’s Bob Weir,

Nor anybody Trans or Queer,

Beaten to a pulp by Trolls

Utterly deformed by fear.

When needed most, God, why aren’t you near?

All the wrong people are dying.

If there’s a God, she must be hiding—

Averting her eyes & ears to wailing and crying.

Taking Risa, and Rocco, Pretti & Good,

And Caroline Kennedy’s daughter.

Withholding food, medicine & water,

From babies within our own borders,

And Lebanese children, tagged for slaughter.

Are you there, God?

Those innocents are NOT your target;

Unless you are gathering the best around you,

Creating Hell’s Tenth Circle of evil here, on earth,

Governed by ghouls, pedophiles and thieves,

Teaching the rest of us who want to believe,

That justice only comes to those of us who grieve

The good already gone from us.

(The Napa County, CA., Sculpture of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, by Napa sculptor Mario Chiodo. Photo by the Napa Valley Register)

I woke up the morning I learned the news and couldn’t catch my breath.

No, it wasn’t because of my age; it wasn’t because almost daily now, I hear of another old friend or former colleague getting a debilitating disease or disability, or dying.

It wasn’t because another school full of young, innocent Muslim girls was obliterated, or a high-rise residential apartment tower in the heart of Beirut, Lebanon, blown to bits by Israeli terrorists—masquerading as a government—with each floor pancaking upon the one below it, crushing into dust any humans still inside.

It wasn’t because something bad had happened, God forbid, to one of my granddaughters or my son or my partner of 54-years. Those are a steady drumbeat of worries, which always come in bunches, and not as single spies. That is the background music to my life; a constant hum.

And, no, it wasn’t because of another all-too real series of night terrors of mine, where I raced against time to prevent a bomb from going off, or spent the darkness loudly cursing out Trump or Bondi or Bibi or Hegseth or a long litany of monsters, until my shouts awakened others to how conscious my unconscious had become.

What made me gasp for air this time, was a headline in the on-line New York Times confirming disturbing rumors we heard about Cesar Chavez, the day before, but tried to dismiss because there were no credible sources for those rumors, and we know how anything can be made up by anyone, anywhere at anytime and become what passes for fact, instantly.

Only this morning, the source could not be more credible: it was Dolores Huerta, Chavez’ co-leader of the United Farm Workers union, and, at 96, the living heart and soul of the movement for social & economic justice for more than 65 years.

There was the New York Times headline: “Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years.” And there were the sources: Ana Murguia, Debra Rojas—two women raped by Chavez when they were young girls in the 1970’s; and Dolores Huerta, Chavez’ most prominent female ally in the Farm Workers Movement, and a labor-movement icon in her own right.

Dolores Huerta, 96 years old, who suffocated a secret for 60 years, of having been raped by Cesar Chavez, on more than one occasion, resulting in two pregnancies—which she hid—and the birth of two daughters, whom she gave away to be raised in more stable family settings. This was Cesar Chavez. This was Dolores Huerta. Two pillars of my life from my early years of college; two symbols of the urgency of struggle to bring about sweeping social change; two working-class heroes.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Melinda Henneberger was eloquent in her excruciatingly painful description of the torment which Huerta had hidden for six decades, in her Substack column entitled Kansas City Stack, headlined: “Why did Dolores Huerta wait 60 years to accuse César Chávez of rape? I hope I know the answer:

‘Ms. Huerta broke down, sobbing and wailing’

From the Times story:

Ms. Huerta said he abused her not only physically but emotionally. Union records document an argument at La Paz between the two of them over missing financial receipts during a board meeting in 1979. Ms. Huerta demanded respect and pushed back against his suggestions that she had stolen money. Mr. Chávez responded by shouting at her with curses and insults, repeatedly calling her a stupid bitch, according to the audio recordings of board meetings The Times listened to.

Ms. Huerta struggles to reconcile the César Chávez she knew, who inspired so many and achieved so much, and the man who assaulted her and publicly humiliated her. She said she was unaware of any sexual abuse of teenage girls. Moments after some of that abuse was described to her, Ms. Huerta broke down, sobbing and wailing.

Hennenberger: “That made me want to wail, too. According to the story, both times Chávez abused Huerta resulted in a pregnancy she said she concealed “by wearing baggy clothes and ponchos.” She gave birth both times, too, to baby girls, “and then arranged for them to be raised by others.” In her statement today, she said that even though she’s been able to stay close to those children, who know her other children, “no one knew the full truth about how they were conceived until just a few weeks ago.” That’s so enormous, for everyone involved, that there’s no way to overstate it.”

If that’s what happened, every single piece of this — being raped by your boss and work partner, whose brother later became your life partner — and then having to hide two children you could not raise or tell how they came to be — is so painful that if only those who’d walked that mile could judge, no one would.”

I re-read the New York Times investigative report on Cesar Chavez several times in disbelief. How could all of us not know that Cesar Chavez was Jeffrey Epstein before there was a Jeffrey Epstein? How could this God-like man rape little girls? Exactly because he wasn’t a God.

Henneberger and I did the same thing: ran to an authority we both knew on the Farm Workers Union and Cesar Chavez, the journalist/historian Miriam Pawel, who wrote two books on the union and Chavez. Melinda seized upon a telling paragraph written by Pawel:

“As Miriam Pawel relates in her authoritative biography—the second of two books she has written about the UFW’s rise and fall—Chavez’s personal obsessions, combined with his sudden fame and power, and some of the more malign elements of America’s culture in the 1970s, gradually caused him to turn narcissistic and to encourage a cult built around him.”

Perhaps because of my professional background as a labor organizer for national teachers unions—which I was practicing at the very same time that Chavez and Dolores Huerta were organizing Farm Workers—I was drawn to another powerful passage written by Pawel in : “The Union of their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement,” Bloomsbury Press, NY., NY, 2009:

“Those who once dedicated their lives to Cesar Chavez’s crusades now wince when they drive past farmworkers, hunched over rows of vegetables or trimming grapevines in the bitter cold. Once so certain they could change that world, the UFW alumni rue their failure. They applaud each other’s individual accomplishments, but lament the lost opportunity to collectively achieve even more. The memories still cause pain.”

Now, the pain is multiplied, and much, much more profound than the failure of a union or an organization or a government or a leader to live up to its, or his or her, promise, and our hopes. Those of us who have worked for unions, or non-profit organizations, or socially conscious corporations or good-government Administrations have all known that deep level of disappointment and disillusionment when things do not turn out the way we wanted.

But, the rape of young children, and of co-workers, and the decades long destruction of those lives, is something far more devastating, and damaging, than mere disappointment and disillusionment.

It’s enough to make all of us “break down, sob and wail,” and gasp for air.

###

( Israeli Ultra-Nationalists and warmongers National Security Minister Ben-Gvir (l.), Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, and Finance Minister Smotrech, far right.)

(US officials Trump & Hegseth conducting an illegal war with Israel against Iran, Lebanon, Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank.)

At long last, after decades of blocking any peace agreement between the Unite States and Iran, pleading for US support for “decapitating” (assassinating) Iranian leaders; undermining all efforts for a two-state solution with Palestinians; and succeeding in securing an endless stream of American armaments to annihilate 20,000 innocent Palestinian children and turn Gaza into a mass graveyard, Israel, under the totalitarian leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, has unveiled it’s secret weapon against the Muslim world: the United States military, led by a Christian Nationalist extremist who hates Muslims as much as the Netanyahu gang does, and green-lighted by an American Golem of a President who would do anything to escape jail, and the Epstein files.

Netanyahu and his extremist Ultra Nationalist government—driven by convicted terrorist Meir Kahane’s disciples Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israeli’s National Security Minister and Bezalel Smotrich, Israeli Finance Minister— chose to respond to the October 7, 2023, massacre by Hamas of more than 1200 innocent Israeli citizens and the forced kidnapping of hundreds of hostages, by grinding Gaza into the dust, and killing more than 75,000 Palestinian non-combatants. Such a genocidal counter-attack also blew up the most fundamental Jewish ethical standard of “proportionality of response,” which guided the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) since it’s inception.

Critics of the Netanyahu’s genocidal and disproportionate response to Hamas’ horrible murders and torture of innocent Israelis were instantly assailed as Anti-Semites—including Jews in Israel and abroad , if we questioned not only the Israeli government’s utter annihilation of Gaza, but Netanyahu’s sinister track record of previously providing funding to Hamas for the terrorist organization to torpedo any Palestinian hopes for a two-state solution—an outcome which Netanyahu and his extreme right wing supporters violently oppose.

Overnight, any semblance of the Israeli Defense Force’s (IDF), Code of Ethics for the IDF was obliterated by the Netanyahu government. Before BiBi bastardized the highly regarded Israeli Military and transformed it into his own ICE-like hit squad, the Code of Ethics for the IDF—based upon fundamental humanitarian principles of Judaism— commanded the IDF to adhere to specific rules of combat.

That Code of Ethics, required as part of basic training for IDF soldiers for decades, consisted of four essential principles:

· NECESSITY: “to apply force only for the sake of the mission;”

· DISTINCTION: “aim your fire at those who pose a threat, NOT at combatants indiscriminately;

· RESPONSIBILITY: “since you know there will be collateral harm of civilians, you have to do whatever you can to MINIMIZE the expected collateral harm.”

· PROPORTIONALITY: “Is the expected collateral harm proportionate to the military achievement?”

Netanyahu and his megalomaniacal, anti-Judaic cabinet— hell-bent on driving Palestinians and Muslims from all parts of Israel and from surrounding lands in the Middle East— negated all of that moral and ethical guidance for Israel’s soldiers, which had gained the IDF world-wide respect for decades. Unarmed Palestinian women and children—either in Gaza or the West Bank—were considered sub-human by the Ultra Nationalists controlling the Israeli government and its’ armed forces. Fanatical, law-breaking Israeli settlers were permitted to randomly kill Palestinians and to destroy life-sustaining olive-tree orchards of Palestinian families living in the West Bank for decades, while the IDF stood by silently and did not act to protect human life.

Instead of abiding by the IDF’s historic ethical code, Bibi and his band of extremists justified dropping 2,000 pound bunker-buster bombs—provided by the United States—on civilian populations by claiming, suspiciously, that Hamas or Hezbollah combatants had hidden themselves underneath non-combatant populations and structures, like hospitals, schools, day-care centers, or apartment buildings.

Just this week in Iran, the exact same bogus argument was used when US Tomahawk missiles, obliterated an all-girls school where some 150 young Iranian girls were massacred.

By its’ own actions, the Netanyahu government has not only trashed the humanitarian underpinnings of Judaism—an ethical, spiritual and religious standard that existed thousands of year before Israel did—but has single-handedly undermined the credibility of any statements or videos coming from the IDF or the nation of Israel, much as the Trump Administration and the US Defense Department under former Fox-News commentator Pete Hegseth has done. Facts and any concern for humanity have been suffocated completely in the fog and fury of of an undeclared, illegal war with extraordinarily high personal and political stakes for both Netanyahu and Trump.

Under the spurious “self-defense” definition defiled by Israel—and used as a fake shield to justify military attacks upon others— any civilian population in any country in which anti-Israel terrorists may be hiding is fair game for any indiscriminate—and non-proportional— IDF attack. National borders, international law, or individual state sovereignty do not matter under this new formulation of “self-defense” by the Netanyahu government, and echoed by the most anti-democratic, fascist government in United States history. To phrase it differently, “we have seen the enemy, and it is everybody else, but us.”

Netanyahu and the Ultra Nationalists ruling Israel, have effectively used the “self-defense” trap to ensnare the US and other allies in its illegal military actions, expanding it’s unending crusade for revenge for the murders of October 7, 2023, well-beyond retribution against Hamas, or the boundaries of Gaza and the West Bank.

Prior to this week’s unprovoked attack upon Iran by Israel and the United States, and Israel’s massive bombing campaign in Lebanon which has, so far, driven 700,000 Lebanese citizens from their homes, Bibi launched a Regional “Ring of Fire” War against the terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Anyone Netanyahu perceived to be a threat to Israel was fair game for a “disproportionate”attack, without any reason required, except those manufactured by BiBi. The Trump Administration has adopted the same nationalistic, militaristic approach to all other countries it deems a threat in the Western Hemisphere, includingVenezuela, Cuba, and at times, Mexico.

Before using the United States military as a shiny, new blunt instrument of terror against Iran over the past few weeks, Israel had already dangerously expanded it’s “Ring of Fire,” across the national borders of Lebanon, Yemen & Syria.

The first Israeli/American missile strikes against Iran’s alleged nuclear capabilities in June, 2025—which failed to take them out, despite Trump’s claim they were “obliterated”— was, the Israeli’s said, to retaliate for Iranian missiles being launched into Israel. In truth, Iran’s missile attack was done in response to Israel’s attack on Hezbollah strong holds in Southern Lebanon, the assassination of Hezbollah and Iranian leaders, and the maiming of thousands of Hezbollah operatives and Lebanese citizens with exploding personal communications devices—an illegal act on Israel’s part, considered by some, to constitute terrorism against the nation of Lebanon and its people. This week, Israel stepped up its acts of terror against the non-combatants of Lebanon by carpet-bombing Beirut.

Two years ago, in a remarkably prophetic piece, the Jewish publication The Forward outlined several military options Israel might take against Iran, which would shatter any hopes for a ceasefire, any chance of peace in the MidEast, and destabilize democratic nations and economies around the world, which is precisely what is happening right now during this current assault on Iran and Lebanon:

· “A tactical strike on Iran: A more substantial response could involve direct military action against Iranian assets, such as oil facilities or military installations. This would aim to inflict real damage on Iran’s infrastructure, forcing it to reconsider further provocations.

An attack on an oil installation, for instance, could disrupt Iran’s economic lifelines and send the clear message that Israel will not tolerate continued missile strikes. The goal here would be to create enough pain for Iran to deter future actions, without pushing the region into a full-scale war.”

· “A strategic overhaul of the region’s balance of power: This option is far more ambitious, and fraught with risk, but could reshape the Middle East. It would involve Israel somehow pushing the West to lay down the law with Iran, demanding not just an end to its missile strikes, but a full dismantling of its nuclear program and an end to its sponsorship of proxy forces across the region”.

The Forward goes on to point out that the most extreme option poses a serious, not hypothetical, risk of starting World War III:

“If Iran responds forcefully, the U.S. would almost certainly be drawn into the conflict to protect Israel. This could trigger a chain reaction, with Russia and China, both of whom have strategic relationships with Iran, seeing an opportunity to exploit the chaos. China could use the distraction to finally make a long-threatened move on Taiwan, while Russian President Vladimir Putin might take the opportunity to expand his war in Ukraine, or press into neighboring countries.

The global balance of power would be thrown into disarray, with potentially catastrophic consequences.”

The stakes here, at this very instant in human history, are extraordinary, and not just for the future existence of Israel, nor the existence of Iran, nor the entire Middle East, but for all of us.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin, in his final speech delivered at a Peace Rally where he was assassinated by an Ultra Nationalist Jewish extremist on November 4, 1995, stated clearly one of the fundamental principles upon which the State of Israel was built:

“The path of peace is preferable to the path of war. I say this as a military man…and see the pain of the families of the IDF soldiers. For them, for our children, in my case for our grandchildren, I want this Government to exhaust every opening, every possibility to promote and achieve a comprehensive peace.”

Netanyahu and the terrorist clones of Kahane now surrounding him, campaigned against every peace initiative put forth by Rabin going back 30 years--especially regarding a Two-State solution as outlined in the original UN Charter which created Israel. Cowardly US members of Congress—who received an extraordinary amount of money from the American/Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC)— enabled Bibi to directly undermine US National Security interests and Barack Obama’s Nuclear Peace Treaty with Iran in 2014, and again in 2024, when they facilitated BiBi’s bullying and bloviating before Congress to scuttle American cease-fire efforts in Gaza, tied to the freeing of the remaining hostages.

Netanyahu and his nationalist war-mongers never entertained any exit plan from Gaza nor the West Bank that involved Palestinian self-determination, or contradicts the fever dreams of the Ultra Nationalist coalition keeping Netanyahu in power, and out of prison.

The same nihilistic “no-exit” strategy applies to the brutal and illegal war being waged right now against Iran and Lebanon. But now Bibi has all-to-willing accomplices in the President of the United States—as eager to stay out of jail for crimes he has committed as Netanyahu is— and a messianic Christian US Secretary of Defense out to rid the world of, ironically, non-Christian infidels, who simply clutter the path to Armaggedon, the return of Christ to the Holy Land, and the forced conversion of all Jews to Christianity.

Ironically, Pope Leo, the Christian leader who heads the single largest Christian group in the world—1.39 billion baptized Catholics—has a far different take on the destruction of Gaza, the violence in the West Bank, the incessant bombing of Iran and Lebanon, and the Nationalist fiction that nations—like Israel and the United States—had the right to launch “preventive wars:”

“Let us raise our humble prayer to the Lord that the roar of bombs may cease, that weapons may fall silent, and that space may be opened for dialogue in which the voices of peoples can be heard.”

Two of Pope Leo’s most prominent representatives in the United States, Cardinal Blase Cupich, from Pope Leo’s hometown of Chicago, and Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington, have strongly denounced the latest War in Iran, with Cupich calling it:

“A real war with real death and real suffering being treated like it’s a video game—it’s sickening.”

Cardinal Robert McElroy, the Archbishop of Washington, told the Associated Press just this week that the U.S. and Israel had failed to meet the minimum criteria for the war to be considered morally just:

“Lebanon may fall into civil war. The world’s oil supply is under great strain. The potential disintegration of Iran could well produce new and dangerous realities. And the possibility of immense casualties on all sides is immense. For all of these reasons, Catholic teaching leads to the conclusion that our entry into this war was not morally legitimate.”

Jewish organizations in the US and worldwide, like the American Council for Judiasm, and the Jewish Voice for Peace have offered an alternative voice for Jews, offering “Judaism beyond Zionism,” which, according to a March 2026 article in The Nation by Joseph Dana (“The Long Shadow of the ‘Jewish Question’”) points to a growing collection of:

“Synagogues, study groups, and ritual communities whose identity does not depend on an attachment to any state…These groups argue that thriving diaspora life is not a deficiency awaiting a territorial cure, but a legitimate form of Jewish existence that predates and will outlast the current crisis—and is, in fact, necessary to resolving it…these movements share a refusal to let the Israeli state define what Jewish identity means.”

Dana goes on to point out that, “In 2024, the Jewish Council of Australia was formed to explicitly challenge the claim that established Zionist organizations spoke for all Jews. When the council called for sanctions on Israel and an end to military ties, it framed its position as emerging from rather than contradicting its members’s Jewishness.”

Perhaps the merging of Israeli and US nationalist, militaristic and totalitarian ambitions will finally force American Jews to face the future of our continued connection to Israel, to mainstream Jewish organization, to AIPAC, and to public officials who pretend to be acting in our best interests, when, in fact, they are acting against the fundamental humanitarian teachings of our Judaism.

Writing about many of us Jews, worldwide, seeking a different, more just and humane definition of Judaism, Dana concludes in his article in The Nation:

“They are proposing an identity that doesn’t need to be defended through domination. The answer to what it means to be Jewish need not come at Palestian (nor Muslim—my edit) expense.”

The wisdom of Rabbi Hillel, the Elder, has never been more necessary for American Jews, and Jews worldwide to heed:

“If not us, who? If not now, when?”

##

(Photo by S. Villano)

(60 years ago the War in Vietnam was raging. US troop levels had just leaped from 16,000 in 1963 to 180,000 in 1965—a ten-fold increase in less than two years. Americans and other citizens of the world were paying the price with our lives for over a decade of arrogant American destabilization of nations around the world, brought about by the American Colonialist foreign policies of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and his brother Allen, who headed the CIA.

Democratically elected governments in places like Iran, Guatamala, & Cuba—to name just a few—were overthrown through covert operations of the CIA throughout the early and mid-1950's. Vietnam, long a target of plunder for Western colonizers, soundly threw out French invaders at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, ending the First Indochina War, after up to one million people were killed during eight long years. That bloody battle led the French to withdraw its badly battered troops from Vietnam, and to a Geneva Peace Treaty that divided Vietnam into two countries—North and South—at the 17th parallel.

Despite the devastating defeat of the French by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam forces under Ho Chi Minh in the mid-1950’s the Dulles brothers and US corporate and military interests were obsessed with regime-change throughout Vietnam, pouring enormous amounts of money and military support into South Vietnam, setting the stage for the American War in Vietnam through 1975. Estimates of deaths in Vietnam from 1955-1975, including some 300,000 bombing deaths of Vietnamese and Cambodians, range from a low of 2.4 million to a high of over 3 million people. United States Military fatalities during the American War in Vietnam totaled 58,220 soldiers.

Against that backdrop, American folk singers like Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs used their music and their voices as sharp instruments of protest against the War in Vietnam and against American military arrogance. Phil Ochs (1940-1976) wrote and performed some of the most biting songs against US Military intervention around the world. One of those songs, written in 1966, ten years before Ochs death, was entitled “Cops of the World.” The lessons of Ochs’ remarkable songwriting are once again timely and poignant, as the Trump Administration has picked up where the Dulles brothers left off, in their quest to dominate, bully and plunder the natural resources of the world.

Recognizing that, and in tribute to Och’s fearless intelligence and foresight, I have written a parody of “Cops of the World” for the our present time, and have renamed it, “We’re the Cocks of the World.”)

“WE’RE THE COCKS OF THE WORLD” (with acknowledgement and gratitude to Phil Ochs, writer and performer of “Cops of The World,” 1966; Appleseed Music Inc; Electra Records)

Bow, get out of our way, boys,

Scrape, get out of our way;

We’re hot and you are passe, boys,

We’re big and you’ll have to pay.

We’ve sunk all your boats and killed all at your ports;

Trigger fingers so itchy, and attention spans short;

So give us your oil and we’ll grab us a snort,

‘Cause we’re the Cocks of the World, boys,

We’re the Cocks of the World.

We pick and choose as we please, boys—

Pick and choose as we please;

You’d best get down on your knees, boys,

Best get down on your knees!

We’re tattooed and liquored and hot to attack.

Venezuela or Cuba, Iran or Iraq,

Just take off your clothes and lay down on your back,

‘Cause we’re the Cocks of the World, boys,

We’re the Cocks of the World.

Egos need Epstein massage, boys

Be sure to rub us with lube;

We’ll obliterate you with a barrage, boys

It makes for good vid on the Tube.

We’ve got to protect all our citizens fair

So we’ll send drones and missiles for everyone there,

And maybe we’ll leave when we strip your land bare—-

‘Cause we’re the Cocks of the World, Boys;

We’re the Cocks of the World.

We’ll dump all your children in a pile, boys;

Dump your dead kids in a pile.

Targeting schools is our style, boys,

Hospitals, schools it’s our style.

We’ll piss on the streets of the cities we wreck,

And find you a leader that we will select;

Those treaties we signed were a pain in the neck,

‘Cause we’re the Cocks of the World, boys

We’re the Cocks of the World.

So, clean your johns with a rag, boys

Clean your johns with a rag.

If you like you can use your own flag, boys

If you like you can use your own flag.

We’ve got so much money but we want so much more,

We’ll pummel it from you, with your blood and gore

But we’ll stop the terror when you are our whore—

‘Cause we’re the Cocks of the World, boys

We’re the Cocks of the World.

Please, throw up your hands, boys

Please, throw up your hands.

We’re raping your land, boys,

We’re raping your land.

We’ll smash down your doors, we don’t bother to knock;

We’ve done it before, so why all the shock?

We’re the biggest, and cruelest Mob on the block—

And we’re the Cocks of the World, boys,

We’re the Cocks of the World.

And when we butchered your girls, boys,

When we butchered your girls.

We gave them a taste of our world, boys,

Gave them a taste of our world.

We own half-the world, oh say can you see,

All Power and profits to Bibi and Me;

So like it or not, you’ll never be free,

‘Cause we’re the Cocks of the world, boys

We’re the Cocks of the world.

We’ve been chosen by God, boys

We’ve been chosen by God.

Ours is bigger than yours, boys

Ours has more guns than yours.

HE blesses our skin, so white and so pliable,

Your birth, a mistake, for which you are liable,

No place for you in our hearts, or our Bible…

‘Cause we’re the Cocks of the World, boys,

We’re the Cocks of the World!