The Zeitgeist

 

In Oz, the Lion ultimately found his courage (left) and there really are such things as "Wicked Witches" and "Flying Monkeys."

Lions and Tigers and Bears:

We Need Democrats in the

Fight to Defend the Emerald City

A few weeks ago my local 24-screen stadium-seating mega movie-plex had a special screening of the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz. Never having seen it before on a large screen (let alone a huge one) I thought I should see what the flying monkeys look like when liberated from the confines of television. I can faithfully report that the monkeys are really terrifying and Margaret Hamilton’s performance as the Wicked Witch of the West is only done true justice when she’s 20 or more feet tall.

Inadvertently, I also came away with some other revelations from the giant screen experience – while Wizard is couched as a children’s story, it actually makes some pretty stark statements about good and evil and what to do about that aforementioned evil.

We are shown that the citizens of Oz, be they Munchkins, residents of the Emerald City or even the Wizard himself are all living in terror of the two Wicked Witches, those of the East and the West – so much so that when Dorothy (spoiler alert if you never grew up as a kid in America) upon her arrival to Oz kills (or her house kills) the Wicked Witch of the East; the Munchkins lay on a spontaneous parade of joy – hailing Dorothy for killing the former owner of the ruby slippers.

When towards the end of the movie Dorothy (with the help of Toto, the Lion, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man) “liquidates” the Wicked Witch of the West, even the witch’s own soldiers are beside themselves with relief and happiness. There was no relativism or ambiguity about the bad guys (or gals) and no guilt in rejoicing at the witches’ demise.

While The Wizard of Oz is fantasy, like many fairy tales, it was meant to impart to its juvenile audience that evil really does exist (even in a candy-coated place like Oz), that it’s frightening, but that it can be overcome when good people band together to fight it.

Much as there was great evil in the real world of 1939 there is a whole lot of bad stuff going on in the real world of 2015, no matter how much we’d like to sugarcoat it or escape to somewhere over the rainbow to avoid it.

We face the dangerous and devious machinations of a Wicked Wizard of the East in the form of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. He’s just signed a military cooperation deal with Iran which provides for joint military exercises and training along with pledges of cooperation against US “interference.” Putin arms Syria’s genocidal Bashir Assad and through Iran indirectly enables Hezbollah and Hamas, the twin Iranian proxies on Israel’s borders. Iran is also menacing Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula through its auxiliaries there. Mr. Putin also has a sophisticated Russian spy ship in Havana harbor and is planning Russian military bases in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. Let’s not forget his ongoing bullying of the Ukrainians.

And talking about the Hussars of the Wicked Witch of the West’s army and her squadron of flying monkeys – we’re now dealing with the crucifying and decapitating ISIS hordes rampaging across Sunni Mesopotamia; the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan; a resurrected Al Qaeda exporting wanton murder and mayhem across the world and the Nigerian Boko Haram rolling all Pol Pot-style by eradicating whole villages of non-Muslims and other opponents. Let’s not forget the A-bomb seeking Ayatollahs in Teheran – they’ve got intercontinental ballistic missiles sitting on launch pads with guidance systems aimed squarely at the West. It’s always “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” and these people mean it. This is not make-believe, it’s all too real, just ask the Charlie Hebdo survivors in Paris

From 1939 to 1945 advances in technology didn’t deter the forces of evil – in fact technology enabled the more efficient killing of millions. Our web, wifi and cloud-based world of today is not a shield against nefarious maniacs – to the contrary, our new technologies are a boon to their efforts, not a civilizing palliative. In World War II it was only by mustering a greater resolve and greater determination that evil was vanquished – and at great cost to humanity.

For most of the 20^th Century it was the Democratic Party in the US that was at the forefront in the fight for freedom – from Woodrow Wilson through Truman, JFK and LBJ. The Republicans were the isolationists with their heads in the ground.

In January 1941, with much of the West under the thumb of fascism and with external threats against the US mounting each day, Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his State of the Union Address said that “thinking of our children and their children, we oppose enforced isolation for ourselves or for any part of the Americas” because “the democratic way of life is at this moment being directly assailed in every part of the world…We must always be wary of those who…preach the ‘ism’ of appeasement…enduring peace cannot be bought at the cost of other people’s freedom.”

FDR asserted that America needed to be front and center in the fight for what he called “The Four Freedoms.” They are “the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want, and freedom from fear.” Just as in 1941, civilization is under attack from those who trample upon and make a mockery of freedom and human rights. The difference today is that we’re perhaps at the “1933” place on the dial, not 1941. The key is to ensure our world doesn’t see the equivalent of 1941 in 2017or 2018.

A sure sign that most Americans still believe in good and evil, in the Four Freedoms, in America’s leadership role in ensuring a better world for all mankind is the resounding box office success of the new Clint Eastwood film American Sniper. Yes, it’s a great piece of movie-making and Bradley Cooper turns in a stellar performance reaching way beyond his prior goofy roles, but the film is resonating with Americans in a big way because it shows American leadership in the struggle against the bad guys and portrays what most Americans want our country to stand for. Jack Kennedy would have scoffed at calling this a “Republican movie” as some critics have dubbed it.

Back in Oz the Lion needed to find his courage, and find it he most certainly did because of his love for Dorothy. Since Vietnam vast swaths of the Democratic Party have become averse to the legacies of Harry Truman and JFK when it comes to projecting American force in the world.  Sometimes the only way to save the Munchkins and create security for the Emerald City is by liquidating witches and hobgoblins, however difficult that may be. Democrats need to love liberty as much as the Lion did Dorothy and join arm in arm with Republicans here and our allies abroad in a global effort to protect the yellow brick road so that all of humanity (not just Americans) can enjoy lives blessed with peace and freedom.

The Zeitgeist

Christian Bale (left) as Moses and Joel Edgerton as the Pharaoah Ramses the Great in Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings.

Ridley Scott’s Exodus:

Splitting the Sea for a Whole New Generation

Ridley Scott is no Cecil B. DeMille. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. What it means is that Scott’s new epic Exodus: Gods and Kings is as much a product of our high-tech new-millennium era as The Ten Commandments was of the Eisenhower gray-flannel suit period.

Scott has crafted a big picture – and not just because of the excellent 3-D effects (this film really ought to be seen in 3-D) – but because it tackles one of history’s most dramatic events with the scope, breadth and grandeur it calls for. To the viewer it seems as though no expense was spared in recreating ancient Egypt, right down to every pyramid, sword, sandal and piece of body armor. The verisimilitude is so exact that in this respect, DeMille’s sets seem cheap by comparison and DeMille spent a fortune.

Scott (and DeMille) tells us the story of Moses from the Bible’s Book of Exodus, from his early years as a prince of Egypt through the giving of the Ten Commandments. Scott takes great dramatic liberties with the biblical narrative. For Bible literati, Scott’s deviations and interpretations from the actual text can be maddeningly frustrating. Like DeMille, Scott relegates Moses’ brother Aaron to a peripheral role. Aaron just can’t get any respect in these cinematic versions of the Exodus story. Scott does away with a lot of the face-to-face confrontations between Moses and Ramses during the plagues period and he dispenses entirely with the pillar of cloud and fire that was one of the analog special effects masterpieces of the DeMille film and that is a critical part of the written story.

Moses’ first encounter with God is depicted agnostically, perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not. Moses gets hit in the head by a big rock and awakens to what his wife tells him later was a hallucination from a probable concussion. The Almighty is depicted throughout the film as a cherubic messenger in the form of a little boy with a thick English accent that only Moses can see – this is another major divergence from the written account.

Initially, Moses returns to Egypt from Midian intent on mounting a guerilla-style insurrection against Pharaoh. While this notion of partisans battling the fascists is very romantic and will probably play well in certain Israeli precincts, this never happened. God (in the form of the little British boy) has to convince Moses to let him do the heavy lifting in the form of the Ten Plagues.

The Plagues are where Scott’s movie shines brightest. His crocodiles, frogs, boils, hail; locusts, darkness and smiting the Nile with blood are all exceptionally well imagined and executed. The final plague of the killing of the Egyptian first born is probably the only one that falls short, with DeMille’s green fog representing the Angel of Death having greater dramatic and visual impact.  Given that Scott had today’s computer generated graphics and effects at his disposal only enhances my admiration for DeMille’s hand-made plagues and effects that were often crafted out of whole cloth or painted in frame by frame.

The apex of the movie (as it should be) is the splitting of the Red Sea. Here, Scott is true to the biblical account of a strong wind gradually blowing the water aside and his depiction of the crashing down of the sea on the Egyptian soldiers and their chariots is masterful.

Christian Bale is probably the best celluloid Moses since Charlton Heston. He’s dashing. He’s manly. He’s smart. He’s heroic. He can also remind you of Batman (one of his prior screen roles) in that he’s got the same somber moralistic tone in both parts. Bale has been playing a bunch of Jews lately. As New York Jewish con man Irving Rosenfeld in American Hustle he gives a tour de force performance of a despicable Jew whereas in Exodus he shows us the diametric, idealized opposite.

Scott reaches back to his 2000 masterpiece Gladiator for the casting and presentation of the Pharaoh Ramses the Great played by Joel Edgerton in what can only be described as full Joaquin Phoenix mode. Nothing Yul Brenner-ish about him. Edgerton’s Pharaoh could easily be mistaken for Phoenix’s Emperor Commodus, right down to the dynamic between him, his father Seti I and Moses (in the same way as it was between Commodus, Marcus Aurelius and Russell Crowe’s Maximus). No one who unworthily inherits the crown can be expected to be noble and he will get his comeuppance. Our hero will have his revenge either in this world or the next.

The great thespian surprise of the film is John Turturro as Pharaoh Seti I – this role is a significant departure from Turturro’s typical performances and shows that Turturro actually has great range and ability beyond the quirky roles of Barton Fink or as Jesus Quintana in The Big Lebowski. Turturro plays a very believable Pharaoh and helps ground the first part of the film.

What Exodus lacks is the plethora of character actors who populated DeMille’s film – people like Edward G. Robinson, Vincent Price, John Carradine, and Anne Baxter as the leering, venal and narcissistic Neferteri. Scott’s bringing in of Ben Kingsley (dull) and Sigourney Weaver (playing a stiff WASP matron in Egypt) isn’t enough to give Exodus a dash of wit. At nearly two and a half hours, Exodus needs some humor and light moments and seems to run longer than the actually much lengthier Ten Commandments.

Is Exodus worth seeing? Absolutely. A great film for our time? You bet. Something that we’ll be watching every year as a ritual some 50 or more years from now like the DeMille film? Probably not. Will it hold up as well as Gladiator? Maybe not. But it’s worth the price of admission just for the plagues and the Red Sea in 3-D.

The Zeitgeist

The 747 in My Sukkah;

Captain Sully at My Shabbat Table

(Note: This article appeared during the first week of November 2014 in The 5 Towns Jewish Times and deals with some very hyper-local NIMBY issues in my neighborhood)

When the rabbis who wrote the Talmud set forth all the intricate rules for the construction of a Sukkah, including how its roof is to be partially open to the sky, they knew about rain, wind and cold, but no had idea about jumbo jets screeching overhead.

If it’s raining, extremely windy or bitterly cold, we are in fact enjoined from eating in the Sukkah because we’d be uncomfortable. But what about deafening noise pollution? Would this detract from the performance of the mitzvah of Sukkah or provide a legitimate excuse for relocating indoors? If you can’t hear yourself (or anyone else) talk, if the heavy noise would cause headaches, make you irritable or even rattle your bones wouldn’t this be on a par with being rained on?

As fantastical as these questions may sound, over the past six weeks in many parts of the Five Towns, this has not been hypothetical or theoretical. Sections of our area have been bombarded with an aural blitzkrieg that at certain times of the day and evening make our neighborhood seem like it’s situated atop the deck of an aircraft carrier.

Since Rosh Hashanah the southern and western ends of the Five Towns have been under unremitting and unrelenting air “attack” at some of the most inconvenient hours. Planes have routinely been careening across our nighttime sky from 10:30pm to 12:30am. Naturally, these are the hours when most people are trying to go to sleep. This is seven days a week. The planes have been coming over about every 90 seconds or so without pause. If you went to the Woodmere Town Dock at the end of Woodmere Blvd, you’d have seen dozens of planes all lined up in their descent to JFK just a few hundred feet apart from one another. No end of people coming to New York.

The planes resume their auditory assault at about 5:45am running past 8:30. This is also every day. Who needs an alarm clock or 1010 WINS when you can know exactly when the midnight flight from Tel Aviv crosses over your house? It could be argued that the FAA is concerned that we make it to the 6:30 minyan or that the kids all catch their buses, but the time we arise in the morning ought to be our choice, one shouldn’t be jolted out of bed by the sound of jet engines while in a semi-somnolent state.

On the weekends, having a Shabbat shalom can be difficult to say the least because the planes have been coming over uninterruptedly day and night.  Saturday and Sunday afternoons have been a nonstop jet scream fest. Because on Saturdays most of us have no electronic media options to masque the noise, we have planes as our Shabbat companions. Again, I’m sure the FAA, in its own way is urging us to sing plenty of zmirot at the Shabbat lunch table to improve our ruchniut and drown out the cacophony. Plenty of food and alcoholic drink will be necessary for that Shabbat nap if your consciousness is to contend with the planes screeching overhead as well.

Because this time of year we’re not using air conditioning, there are fewer noise buffers. If you want to open your window, the noise gets louder and louder yet. Interestingly, it’s actually less noisy while in the plane or at the airport as the planes and terminals are girded with heavy noise insulation. Not so most of our homes.

The planes come in across Hewlett Bay, fly over the southern streets of Woodsburgh and then continue on over parts of Woodmere, Lawrence and Cedarhurst. Why the planes can’t fly over Reynolds Channel (or the Atlantic Ocean) and then make a right turn to the runway after bypassing the Five Towns, I have no idea. At La Guardia the planes take some sharp turns to make the runways, why can’t they at JFK?

Our villages don’t allow construction work or gardeners before 7;00am or after dark or on Sundays in most of our neighborhoods, why then is JFK permitted to send planes over about every 90 seconds late at night and before dawn day in and day out? This materially detracts from our quality of life.

We just had elections a few days ago A lot of our local elected officials were running for reelection. There were a slew of candidates looking to fill vacant seats in Congress, the Assembly and elsewhere. Yet air noise was not high on the agenda of folks on the ballot. It seems as though from candidates to residents, everyone has become resigned to the notion of living with intense levels of noise pollution, kind of like the way a lot of our ancestors in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries made their peace with pogroms by the Cossacks. Why all the candidates weren’t championing this key quality of life issue is mystifying. Why we weren’t pushing them (and our sitting officeholders) about it is ridiculous.

Equanimity in the face of a major diminution of our quality of life is no virtue. (Apologies to Barry Goldwater). One of the few elected officials not on the ballot last week has been just about the only one who has taken these complaints seriously and has actually tried to do something about it. I’m referring to Senior Town Councilman Tony Santino.  When alerted by yours truly to the deafening situation he got on the phone with the FAA and sent strong letters out to our US Senators and Congresswoman. Unfortunately, it’s resolved anything yet. According to one of Santino’s staff people: “It's a constant finger pointing game between the FAA -- who controls flight patterns and approach and landing routes (a federal matter under their jurisdiction)  and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who administers the number of aircraft slotted to takeoff and land from gates at JFK (LGA and other area airports as well).”

“In addition to Councilman Santino's continued work to pressure the FAA to alter their flight, departure and arrival patterns ensuring all communities surrounding the vicinity of the airport share the burden of the noise -- and as someone who was there[in the Five Towns] all weekend myself less than a mile and a half from your home, I can concur that this has happened -- it was plane after plane landing as I was at Rock Hall with friends and on Central Avenue yesterday. It's really ridiculous. I believe that when multiple governmental complaints are lodged, the FAA and Port Authority seem to take the concerns more seriously.”

Which brings me back to getting our officeholders and candidates on the horn to the PA and FAA on our behalf. Having our representatives stand up for Five Towns residents to the airport managers would be a direct, tangible benefit that would improve our daily lives.

Last week it was announced that after something like a ten year wait, the Feds finally approved the expenditure of millions of dollars to install noise meters in our area to gauge the decibel levels overhead which means they’ll let the planes continue their patterns so they can compile data for a tome-like study replete with myriad suggestions to mitigate the noise. It’s high probable that implementing those eventual suggestions will take as many years as it did to get the noise meters installed in the first place. The planes fly quickly overhead as the wheels of government grind ever so slowly.

Most of us pay a fortune in taxes to live the suburban dream here and we shouldn’t be victimized by our own government (in the form of the FAA and the Port Authority) by living under bone-crushing noise pollution. Noise pollution is just as bad as air pollution or toxic chemicals. We’d be appalled by the specter of either of the aforementioned forms of toxicity if they were directly upon us and so we should also be angry about crazy, uninterrupted deafening sound levels.

If you’re as upset about the air noise as I am and would like to be proactive, you can call the FAA’s manager at JFK. His name is Jerry Spampanato and his office number is 212-435-3640 and his mobile number is 718-244-4111 (found on the FAA noise complaint web page). You can also email the FAA’s Noise Ombudsman at

9-AWA-NoiseOmbudsman@faa.gov.

In Fiddler on the Roof someone asks the rabbi if there is a blessing for the Czar, and to paraphrase the rabbi’s answer, “may G-d bless and keep the planes far away from us,” so we can enjoy some of the peace and quiet most of us moved out of the City for in the first place.