Impromptus

Tempest-tossed lives, &c.

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A scene at the Arabian Sea in Karachi, Pakistan, June 15, 2023 (Akhtar Soomro / Reuters)
On a Kazakh from China; the Holocaust; free speech; Coco Gauff; the NFL; electric bikes; and more

There are certain phrases burned into the American mind, or at least many of our minds — phrases that come from Emma Lazarus’s poem, “The New Colossus”: “huddled masses,” “wretched refuse,” “homeless, tempest-tossed.” (Actually, the poet wrote “tempest-tost.”) I occasionally say that someone has had a “tempest-tossed” life. And I certainly thought of the phrase when reading about Ersin Erkinuly:

• Late last season, I reviewed a song recital by Samantha Hankey, an American mezzo-soprano. Let me paste a paragraph:

Another of her Strauss songs was “Frühlingsfeier,” which sets a poem by Heine. I mention the song, and the poem, because the English translation in our program booklet was rendered by Emma Lazarus — best known for a poem of her own that appears on the pedestal of a certain statue in New York Harbor.

• Here is a report from FDD, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies:

The September 6 surfacing of an antisemitic speech by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas drew swift condemnation from Israel and Germany. Addressing the Fatah Revolutionary Council on August 24, Abbas asserted that Hitler persecuted the Jews not because of their ethnicity or religion but because of their “social role,” which he described as including “usury.”

Etc. For the report in full, go here.

President Abbas has been at this for a long time. You may recall that he is a holder of a doctorate — from Patrice Lumumba University, in Moscow. The title of his dissertation: “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism.”


More in China

Uh-huh.

• A headline from the Associated Press: “Holocaust survivor Eva Fahidi-Pusztai, who warned of far-right populism in Europe, dies at age 97.” Just one paragraph from the article:

Fahidi-Pusztai was 18 years old when she and her family were deported in the last transport to Auschwitz, on June 27, 1944. Her mother and little sister Gilike were murdered immediately after their arrival. Her father succumbed to the inhumane camp conditions a few months later . . .

Eva Fahidi-Pusztai was 97. In a column last week, I mentioned the 98-year-old German who has been charged with being an accessory to murder in the Sachsenhausen camp. Very soon, they will all be gone: survivors and persecutors.

• Turning to an issue in America:

A northern Wisconsin sawmill has agreed to pay nearly $191,000 and stop hiring children under 16 to settle a federal lawsuit labor regulators filed after a teenager was killed on the job this summer and other child employees were hurt in a string of accidents.

To read the article I have quoted from — an AP report — go here.

I am in favor of youth employment. But I’m thinking, like, Dairy Queen, not sawmills.

• Everyone’s in favor of free speech — speech that he likes. FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) has illustrated this skillfully:

• I was reading an article about Alaska. It quotes the state’s Department of Fish and Game, which says that Alaska is “famous for its complete absence of snakes.”

A sheepish confession: I did not know that.

• Last month, I recorded a podcast with George F. Will. Toward the end of our conversation, I asked him about books that influenced him, early on. The first book he mentioned is by Walter Berns (whom we both admire a great deal): Freedom, Virtue, and the First Amendment. Berns, said Will, “makes an argument that I don’t fully or even largely accept, but he makes it so well, he made me think.”

Can you imagine prizing a book whose argument you don’t fully or even largely accept? Will is a real thinker, a real intellectual.

I have a young friend who is just like that. He has begun a doctoral program at Harvard. And this reminds me . . .

America is a very young country — a stripling, almost. Harvard was founded in 1636. Is it our oldest institution? (I attended 350th-anniversary celebrations in 1986. That number 350 was whopping to me. I was more used to, say, centennial celebrations.) (And we had had our national bicentennial in ’76.) (Some may recall that Israel carried out the Raid on Entebbe on the day itself. I mean, July 4, 1976.)

Back to Berns. One of his main subjects was capital punishment — he was for it. He wrote a book titled “For Capital Punishment: Crime and the Morality of the Death Penalty.” I once heard him speak on this subject at the American Enterprise Institute. My views on capital punishment are complicated-ish. Basically, I am against the practice. But I nodded along with almost every word that Berns spoke.

Do I have a point? An overall point? If I do, it’s that one can be influenced or impressed by thinking or arguments, even if one does not completely or even largely agree.

I had a professor I admired very much — a U.S. historian. He told me he would love to have dinner with Karl Marx. Talk with him about things. This bothered my 20-year-old, liberty-loving self. I understand my professor better now.

• The Detroit Lions are one of the worst franchises in professional sports. I mean, in the history of professional sports. This year, in our opening game, we played the Kansas City Chiefs — in Kansas City’s stadium. The Chiefs are the defending Super Bowl champs. And we beat them.

If ever you are feeling hopeless — remember my Lions, stuffing the Chiefs, on opening day at their house.

Mirabile dictu, as Bill Buckley would say.

• Concerning the new U.S. Open women’s tennis champ: Let me say simply that I am loco for Coco.

• I am not so crazy about electric bikes. They are a menace. More accurately, boorish people who ride them are a menace.

All your life, you’re used to seeing bikes and gauging whether you can cross the street, etc., when they are coming. I mean, when you are on foot. For decades and decades, you have seen bikes, and you have a sense of how they travel. How fast they go.  Obviously, some people ride faster than others. Still, you have a sense, developed over the years.

Electric bikes have thrown all of that off. Where I live, in a big city — Manhattan, N.Y. — the electric bikes often go faster than the cars. In fact, they usually do.

And the riders, in my experience, tend to be heedless — arrogant, reckless. I have seen many near-misses. There have been collisions — fatalities — too.

I think something ought to be done. Now, it’s easy to mock me: Grumpy old man says, “Get off my lawn!” “These kids and their new-fangled bikes!” I don’t give a fig. I know I am right, and age doesn’t have anything to do with it.

• Let’s have a little language. My late friend Martin Bernheimer was, among other things, a keen neologist. He loved words and wordplay. (For my appreciation of him, go here.) I used a phrase of his the other day: “time-dishonored.” People speak of “time-honored practices.” Martin sometimes whipped out “time-dishonored.” He would be talking about some convention in opera productions, for example — a convention he thought was silly.

I used the phrase in a rather serious context: blaming antisemitism on the Jews. People have done that from time immemorial. They are doing it still. X (formerly Twitter) is a showcase.

• What do you name your business? An interesting exercise. One that can be enjoyable. An exercise that is multi-faceted, surely. I smiled at the name of this refrigeration company:

• Marilyn Lovell — Jim’s wife — has died. Let me quote the heading of the obit in the New York Times: “Marilyn Lovell, Astronaut’s Wife in the Spotlight, Is Dead at 93.” The subheading reads, “She embodied the glamour and the hardship of being married to an American hero. Her husband, Jim Lovell, was the commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission in 1970.” The obit is by Alex Traub.

I was surprisingly moved when I read it. Embarrassingly moved, actually. Don’t tell anyone, but there may have been a little moisture in my eye.

Well, I did tell someone — a wise writer. He said something like this: “One of the things an obit can do is acknowledge and describe an outmoded way of life. There is also the recognition that a firsthand memory of that way of life is passing out of existence. No wonder we are moved.”

Yeah. Anyway, I thank you for joining me, my friends, and I’ll see you later.

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