Judgment Call

Once upon a time, I chose to be confirmed in the First United Methodist Church. I was twelve years old and a singular outlier in a closed society. I joined, hoping that membership would foster a kind of belonging I hungered for. I needed to feel embraced and protected by a great, all-encompassing love. The Methodist Church promised me that all were welcome there. I believed.

It is clear now that my iconoclastic half-  Jewish self would not even be invited to join the United Methodist Church today. Having recently announced their decision to allow ministers and administrators to ostracize members of the LGBTQ communities, the church has tacitly granted their congregations a license to shun anyone with traits the church finds offensive. There is no way they would welcome me.

I stopped attending church and identifying as a Methodist some sixty years ago. But until the announcement, however, I harbored a feeling of warmth for what I believed were its precepts. Those I learned from my father, perhaps the noblest Methodist of them all, and they are rooted in a memory I have of a time he acted in a way that demonstrated what I still believe Christianity is basically all about. Long after leaving his church, I attributed his accepting nature to the education it had given him.

In the 1970s, my brother was about to come out to my parents. I worried at first that my father might be less than sympathetic.  

Daddy, a conservative, Iowa-born Republican, belonged to the First United Methodist Church in my small Upstate New York home town. He was known there for the dour parables around which his lay sermons were constructed and by the incongruently kindly manner with which he delivered his fire and brimstone messages to the seventh graders he taught in Sunday School. Though he treated all people with compassion and consideration, his attitude could be harshly judgmental toward people with ethical or moral standards that were not his.

From early childhood, Daddy had been taught that liquor, gambling, card playing, and dancing were sins, as was pre- or extra-marital sex. His sense of humor was corny, old-fashioned, chaste.  He allowed no swearing of any kind in his presence. I was reprimanded when I said, “Oh, gosh,” or “Jesumcrow,” the faux curses that punctuated our Adirondack lingo. In our home, there were no alcoholic beverages, no playing cards, no off-color books or art house nudes. All were banned, I assumed, because my father’s faith required that he disdain them. He seemed to have been indoctrinated by a kind of paradoxical orthodoxy. It was hard to predict how he would react to being the father of a homosexual.

In the first place, the news did not surprise him. And in the second, it did not faze him. “You are my son, and I love you,” he said to my brother. “Nothing could change that.” Not long afterward, my brother, newly mustered out of the Air Force and figuring out what to do next, moved in with my parents. The man who was his first serious partner moved in with him.

I needn’t have worried.

One evening, I arrived at my parents’ house to find my brother and his boyfriend intertwined and making out on the couch in the middle of the family room at the center of the house. More surprising than their unabashed PDAs was the fact that my father sat in the easy chair next to them watching television and eating watermelon. “This doesn’t bother you, Daddy?” I asked pointing to the lovers, who were oblivious to my arrival.

“Should it?” Daddy replied.

“No. Not at all,” I stammered. “But your religion. . . “

“My religion is Jesus Christ,” he said. “Jesus said, ‘Judge not lest ye be judged.’ Shall I be less open than Jesus, whose teachings define my life?”

“But the church, Daddy, won’t the church. . . .”

“The church would never defy our Lord’s teachings.” He stopped. His eyes were distant. He lifted his arms. He was in preacher mode. “The Church welcomes all.”

I accepted him at his word. And I trusted that his beliefs emanated from the doctrine espoused by the religion to which he had unfaltering allegiance. He never missed a Sunday service, never failed to participate in church programs, never refused to teach or to counsel or to take to the pulpit. He was a true believer. So I presumed – hoped – that this church, in which he had raised his seven children, was as accepting as he was.

Hence my shock and confusion when I read the church’s announcement. Traditions I was not aware of had superseded those I had inferred. Traditions of barring homosexuals from ordination, of refusing to sanction same sex marriage, of enforcing strict penalties against clerics who broke the rules and accepted the “gay life style” as a viable human alternative.

Luckily, the declaration is no more than an abstract annoyance for me. And an affirmation of my choice to leave the church all those many years ago. But what of the people – there must be many – like my father. . . the true believers, the ones who honestly see their church as the messenger of their Christ? Does this feel like a betrayal to them? Their church has rejected the notions of inclusion, of loving one’s neighbor as oneself, of refraining from a judgment that Jesus demonstrated by washing Mary Magdalene’s feet, by breaking bread with sinners, by feeding and healing the lepers.

Surely Jesus would be disappointed in this Methodist manifesto. I know Daddy would be.

 

 

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L’Dor V’Dor – A Sports Team’s Gift (Reprinted from The Algemeiner)

Listen to the roaring whisper of a sports crowd. It’s compelling and mesmerizing. When it stops, when the crowd waits silently for the next spectacular move, there is no mistaking the powerful moment. The teams assembled hold every man, woman, and child entirely in their thrall. It’s a potent force that extends far beyond the confines of any single game or country and is free of the barriers of color, ethnicity, or age.

In the UK, Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich and his leadership team know the power that they hold in their hands.

Their Say No to Antisemitism initiative is a fist raised at hate-mongering, which, though targeted at Jews, has subtle, insidious consequences for all. By funding a variety of educational opportunities and experiences on antisemitism and race-based hatred, they plan to promote cross-cultural communication and understanding.

Say No to Antisemitism arrives just in time in the UK, where antisemitism is deep-seated, inbred, and, frighteningly, on the rise. And it’s a program that should be adopted worldwide because the UK is not unique.

Antisemitism, the oldest racism, is systemic. It is embedded in the DNA of nationalist and populist groups everywhere. It has been a fixture of countless societies since the Assyrians cast Jews out of the land of Israel in the eighth century BCE. This hatred of Jews is so deeply implanted in the world’s consciousness that antisemitism is under-reported and largely un-protested.

Despite the fact that it is open, virulent, and relentless, antisemitism remains the one form of discrimination that almost anyone — anywhere — can perpetrate with impunity.

Many of us, especially those whose parents and grandparents escaped the Holocaust, live with a persistent strain of PTSD when it comes to antisemitism. Some of us wonder if we too must flee. But where would we go?

No place feels safer than any other. Whom can we trust? No one group is responsible for the current proliferation of antisemitism. No one ideology espouses it. Hateful rhetoric on the political left is as without censure as it is on the right. Society is tacitly complicit by failing to condemn the Yellow Vests, bombs, swastikas, and threats that turn cafes, synagogues, colleges, cemeteries, streets, and sports arenas into danger zones.

We need a strong voice to rise above the hate-mongering din. The Chelsea Football Club and Abramovich understand that.

Under their program — in classroom settings, auditorium presentations, and group travel experiences — fans and players will listen intently and actually hear one another. Furthermore, the program is on the move.

NYU has incorporated the program into the Tisch Institute for Global Sports curriculum. Later this Spring, fans will learn more about the program when the Chelsea Football Club plays the New England Revolution in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Personal pledges of $1 million each from Abramovich and Revolution owner Robert Kraft, plus all proceeds from the game, will be dedicated to the campaign.

Those who fight antisemitism are aware that they’ve embarked on a journey that may be slow and ponderous. But they are committed. Slow or fast, Abramovich’s is a rare and special exertion of power. It’s a model for sports organizations throughout the UK, the US, and everywhere.

Carla Stockton’s writing has been featured in publications such as Guernica, Moment, The Toast, The Guardian, and others. You may visit her blogsite at carlastockton.me.

 

Last Note From the Temporary Curmudgeon

I’m home. Glad to be here. I missed family, friends, New York. Now I miss my daughter, my grandson, the colors of Bangkok. It feels good to be cold, to see blue sky. To breathe air that doesn’t choke me.

the homecoming was relatively easy. My flight was on time, arriving early on a Wednesday morning. Amazingly, despite the predictions of horror in the immigration hall, the line moved quickly. I thanked the officer who checked me in, and he squeezed my hand.

“Thanks.” He said. “That’s good to hear. Let’s just hope it ends soon. . . ” Then he looked wistfully at me and said, “Welcome home.”

Qatar partially redeemed itself on the return flight. On the first leg, from Bangkok to Doha, I was fortunate enough to have sitting behind me a loud, drunken Russian lout. He and three of his cronies were shouting with one another, drinking and singing disruptively. It was 8 in the evening, and I planned to sleep as soon as the cabin lights were turned off. So I donned my best NY ignore’emall demeanor and settled down to pretend he wasn’t there.

After the meal was served and cleared, and darkness enveloped the cold space, I leaned my seat back and wrapped myself in my winter layers preparing to drift off. The Russian behind me leaned forward and said, “No, madame. No no.” His voice was threatening. I could hear the mob vibrating in his growl.

Still in ignore’emall mode, I paid him no heed.

He kicked the back of my chair. I failed to react. He called the flight attendant. Then he called five more flights. He insisted that I be reprimanded for insisting on reclining my seat. Each of them insisted their turns that I had the right to do just that. They offered to move him to a bulkhead (premium) seat with more legroom. He refused, insisting yet again it was their job to make me stop reclining into his space.

They would not budge. Neither would he. It got absurd, and his friends were beginning to be audibly agitated. The scolded him but clearly worried that he might explode.

I offered to move. The Qatar people gratefully put me in the bulkhead. No reclining seat there. I sat awake for the entire duration of the seven-hour flight. The flight attendants stopped by begging my forgiveness, offering me food, drink, et al. I told them again and again that it was not their fault. I was fine.

In Doha, the security check I endured from one flight to the other was humiliating. The body checks one is forced to endure once one has a prosthetic limb or joint are intolerable. We have no choice but to put up with them. There is no avoiding them. Each time they constitute a moment of awful, and then you move on. This was among the worst. But no more than a moment.

When I sat in my seat in the NY-bound aircraft, I saw a chance for total retribution. The flight was empty. I asked permission and then moved across the aisle, where I prepared to spread out. A few minutes before take-off, a lovely young attendant came and asked me would I move to the middle seat so that a woman in a seat a few rows ahead could sit here. I felt tears bubbling as I looked at the young woman and said, “Let me tell you my tale of woe. If, after you hear it, you need my seat, I will relinquish. . . .”

When I wrapped the tale of the Russian thug, the flight attendant was overcome with emotion. “You can stay here,” she said, patting me on the shoulder. “If anyone insists that you move, you tell them I said you are to keep these seats all the way to New York.”

And that is just what I did.

Notes From A Temporary Curmudgeon – Day 6

6. Complacency and the Government Shut-Down

The most depressing spectacle to watch from my faraway perch was way the orange-faced toddler masquerading as a potus made a mockery of our Constitution. It is far from surprising that he throws bigger and louder tantrums, that he engages in increasingly disturbing manipulations. It’s what two-year-olds do. We can’t expect any better from him.

But why do we put up with him? We stand by wringing our hands and calling him names, laughing with the comedians who mock his outrageous idiocy. But we don’t do anything to stop his actions.

He shut down the government, putting our national security and the livelihoods of millions of our compatriots in jeopardy. We did nothing.

He reopened the government and simultaneously threatened to shut it down again. We laughed.

He suggests that unpaid government workers, the Joe Schmoes who are forced to live without income until the baby gets his way, should ask their churches and grocers for help when they can’t afford to buy food. We shake our heads in dismay.

Why is the country not out on a general strike? Every union in America, every group in this country should be refusing to work, refusing to carry on until the government is reinstated in full. It’s not a simple matter of establishing solidarity with the workers being exploited. We all have much to lose.

Many public servants, from teachers to street cleaners, stand to be cut off in many states that depend on aid from the National government. Railroad, airline employees, dock workers, and all manner of public transportation people could be expected to accept pay cuts at very least. Medicaid and Medicare will eventually suffer, as will Social Security.

Once the government gets away with eliminating paychecks, there is no barrier to ending others, to shutting down the country in myriad financial ways. They have the control. They can do it. None of us is safe.

We have given the little whiner well more than an inch. Who knows what he will take?

 

If we let him.

Notes From A Temporary Curmudgeon – Day 5

5.Watching American politics from afar  

So depressing. It is bad enough that the hideous behaviors of our current so-called administration are still supported by a healthy portion of the population. It’s bad enough that my taxes – taxes that have been realigned so that my income has fallen considerably — to keep children in cages, to fund ridiculous immigration policies, to enable the clown president and his evil henchmen, band of oligarchs, to rob the middle class from any possible hope of prosperity.

That the opposition cannot find common ground on which to stand to resist them is the most terrifying reality of all. It’s one the overseas world is pointing at. “This is what you call democracy?”

The women’s movement, which should be a unified effort by women in this country to take the power out of the hands of narcissistic males who would strip us of our reproductive and employment rights, is instead driven by the enmity between the Sarsour-dominated Women’s March Alliance and the NYC Women’s March. Through my cloudy telescope, the Alliance looked like a bunch of bullying thugs, equally as toxic as the patriarchy we should combine forces to overthrow. Women’s rights, even those we worked so hard to win, are eroding away all across the country. Slipping out of our granddaughters’ reach.

Instead of creating a united front to stand against the mansplainers who feel the need to dominate women, each organization is more concerned with having things one own way without the other.

Sad.

Notes From A Temporary Curmudgeon – Day 4

4. Mary Poppins Returns 

My daughter and I love Mary Poppins, and we share a high regard for Emily Blunt and Lin-Manual Miranda. How could we resist trekking to the theater the day the new film opened in Bangkok?

How could we know that the best part of the film was that which followed the previews but preceded the feature. The part where we stood at attention to show our abject admiration for the King of Thailand, to watch a short documentary covering his life story and listened respectfully to the rousing national anthem? After that, the experience was generally tedious and vacuous. A complete disappointment.

 Nothing was fresh except Blunt’s performance. Miranda’s expression never changed from beginning to end of the film, and his songs and scenes were sappy, over-acted, void of either humor or interest. Fortunately for us, some of the cartoons transfixed my grandson for a little while, and he was happy to eat popcorn and sit quietly. But before long, we had to pull out his little iPad so that he could return to the thrall (for the 90th or so time) of the endlessly repetitive episodes of Paw Patrol we had previously downloaded. I was relieved to have the Paw Patrol distraction myself. Rob Marshall’s film is a kettle of tasteless, rubbery squid. Not exactly delicious fare for a diehard vegan.

I know I’m not “normal.” I’m back to where I am with Mrs. Maisel. Everyone else loves the achievement. I feel like that lone little boy at the storybook parade shouting, “But the emperor is naked . . . .” At least with Mary Poppins, I am not alone. My daughter shared the displeasure.

This was especially upsetting for me. I am an inveterate Poppins fan. I began reading the books to myself before I was 5, and I read them to my many siblings in the intervening years before I grew up and shared them with my own progeny. I saw the trailer for Mary Poppins Returns, and I could not wait to see the whole movie – it looked like it might have something in common with the original P.L. Travers’ stories on which it was based.

Alas, I was wrong. This so-called adaptation bore almost no resemblance to the material co-writers David Magee and Rob Marshall theoretically translated for the screen.

Magee and Marshall eliminated everything Travers wrote. Except the title character, who is, I should add, played superbly by Emily Blunt. Were that she had had a script worthy of her talent.

To be fair, they did insert Blunt’s Poppins into momentary glimpses of the various sequels P.L.Travers actually wrote. For the most part, however, the writers have created an entirely new set of characters that they have stuffed into a story that is no more than a very distant cousin of the fantastical tales Travers told about her mesmerizing British nanny.

I have read that the writers at Disney found the original material too dark. Ironic that.

There must be a Disney trope that demands that, in order to be significant, a film for children must begin with youngsters dealing with the tragic and sudden loss of their mothers. This seems to constitute a leit-motif for young audiences. I’m confused. What’s darker than the premise that three children under 11 have had to grow up all too quickly in the wake of their mother’s horrific, untimely death?

The “too-dark” material of the P.L. Travers books features no dead mothers. In Travers’ Mary Poppins Comes Back or Mary Poppins Opens The Door, all the Banks family members are very much alive. Including the parents who first endure and then engage Mary Poppins over and over again. Jane has not grown up to defy her class station and take up the sword of socialism as is her Emily Mortimer film shade, and Michael Banks is not the widower portrayed by Ben Whishaw.

Both siblings remain children through every one of the Poppins books. Two of five very realistic children, in fact. Their fantasies are not always sweetness and light, but they are always wildly creative. The children wander in and out of conundrums and dilemmas they encounter in their dream worlds, but they never fail to come home to their ever-loving if somewhat misguided parents. Two of them.

Conversations with sea slugs and other unlikely animal heroes, who figure adorably and prominently in the books, are apparently too disturbing for a children’s film. By contrast, the threat of homelessness is clearly unthreatening enough an adventure for modern children. The original Travers material never once suggests, as the film insists, that the house the family lives in is in jeopardy. Mary Poppins’ role as savior is to liberate the children from the ignominy of unmannerly behavior. She protects them from the failure to be imaginative. She struggles against their individual and collective loss of innocence. She never has to fight thwart the bank manager’s evil intentions.

Obviously, Travers wrote far too darkly for a children’s musical.

On the other hand, a dance sequence populated by multitudinous men cavorting with a single female becomes, in the world of Disney, no more than a tasteful romp. Dozens of dirty chimney sweeps in step with one young Poppins and a leering Miranda felt creepy to me. Not one female dancer in the crowd. I guess kids must accept that women can never be cast as chimney sweeps (we certainly can’t ask women to play males), especially not in the 1950s version of the 1890s that’s been put on this screen. It just wouldn’t be right.

An aside here . . . did the Script supervisor not notice that the skyline shots were far too modern for the theoretical setting?

In both Mary Poppins Comes Back and Mary Poppins Opens the Door, Travers takes the children to places where they are forced to learn about their responsibilities to self and country, to parents and each other. Many of the characters are loony. But there is no person or situation nearly as sinister as any of those Marshall interjects into his version.

In the book, for example, Mrs. Turvy, played in the film by Meryl Streep, is madly contrary. She has to be. She is happily married to Mr. Topsy. The concept of a husband-wife partnership in comic turmoil must have been a controversial concept for Marshall and his merry men. Mr. Topsy has been eliminated from the film. The magical couple that spends most of their episode laughing at the absurdity of it all have been replaced by the innocuous cardboard figure allotted to Ms. Streep. Turvy without Topsy floats obnoxiously in a tone-deaf, flat-bottomed skiff of a song. Oh well, at least there’s a happy message — Meryl Streep can still do accents.

My favorite of the Travers sequels was Mary Poppins Comes Back. Poppins returns just when Jane and Michael appear to be turning into impossible children. They won’t bathe properly, won’t sit at the table long enough to finish eating, won’t speak respectfully to their parents. The Banks family has expanded to include twins Jon and Barbara, who are just about to age out of infancy and become toddlers.

Another aside here: Unfortunately, Marshall wrote Jon and Barbara out of the equation entirely, along with Annabel, the youngest child, who appears somewhat later. I understand compressing the three characters into one. Composite characters are a great way to avoid clutter. But did they have to dump three children and add a Georgie? Would a spirited little girl child have been less viable an idea than this vapidly incorrigible Georgie Disney has invented here?

Anyway, in Mary Poppins Comes Back, the twins’ moment of maturity is a poignant one. Their friend the local starling, who lives on the Banks’ second story ledge, has been coming daily to converse at length with the twins, who have always been fluent in starling. Then one day he arrives and asks, as he does every day, for a bit of biscuit. Neither twin responds. Neither twin is pleased to see him. Neither twin has anything to say. Poppins explains to the frustrated starling that human children lose their ability to talk to animals when they are no longer infants, no longer connected to their primitive past.

Yup that’s just the kind of scary reality that could keep your preschoolers up at night. Good thing this film has protected us by providing the un-terrifying mediocrity of a meaningless script peopled by vacuous characters performing derivative musical numbers.

Thank goodness my grandkids are safe. 

Notes From the Temporary Curmudgeon – Day 3

3. Being a mouthy, Western woman in Asia.

Every time I return to Asia – and I have been going periodically for the past seven years – I realize how entirely out of place I am there.

To begin with, I hate the climate and the air pollution over there. As soon as I step out of the airport in Taiwan or in Bangkok, I am reminded of Tom Hanks emerging from the airplane that has taken him to Thailand in Volunteers (HBO Pictures, 1985). “Oooh. Jeezuz H. Christ,” he moans, shielding his eyes from the glare above him. “We must be a mile from the sun.”

Bangkok p0llution this week

The air is hot and steamy, and the smog drifting in from China sits squarely overhead.Pollution index hovers characteristically in winter between red (horrible) and purple (get out).

 

“China is the single largest source of PM2.5 pollution, not motor vehicles or power plants. . . .”

I’m a New Yorker. My feet are my transportation of choice. I cannot walk in Asia.

Pedestrian travel is high risk. In the first place, sidewalks are rare. In Taoyuan, Taiwan, where my family lives, a beautiful, broad sidewalk will disappear at the end of a block, dumping the walker, trike rider, stroller pusher, or other intrepid walker into the narrow street. The oncoming drivers, especially those on motor bikes, hardly see anything that might impede them. They rarely notice anyone, least of all women on foot. They bear no obligation to observe caution and avoid colliding with the living beings clogging up their streets.

In Bangkok, sidewalks are equally intermittent and rare.

Those that do exist are too crowded for easy navigation. Street food vendors, priests and their sacred altars, resting Maylaysian workers, and full-sized trees in gigantic planters in the center of the walkway impede foot traffic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In both countries, the law has little or no bearing on drivers’ behaviors. In Taiwan, motorbikes swarm through red lights without so much as slowing down. In Bangkok, drivers customarily bend or break all traffic laws. Crossing a street there is no less dangerous than crossing the Grand Canyon on a tight rope.

In Asia, my northern European structure makes me feel like an abominable snowman publically, embarrassingly melting. I’m too big, too loud, too profane, too averse to obsequies. My feet are gigantic, and I galumpf into rooms where my dainty, demurely quiet Asian counterparts stare at the anomaly that is me. I. Me.

I try to hide my frustrations when I am unable to make myself understood, but my resting face insists on looking angry, and my voice insists on blaring above a whisper. I am incapable of delicacy.

Worst of all, I am a quintessential New Yorker. I voice my pleasure as well as my displeasure in every situation. I yell at drivers who try to kill me. That is not the custom in Asia. There, it is considered impolitic, uncouth to complain even in situations where there are legitimate reasons for complaint. I read recently that in the Buddhist community, complaining or scolding disrupts the karma of the person being addressed. I don’t want to hurt anyone, so I try to remember to bury my discomfort.

Which often whips up a perfect storm. If I hold back, I am frustrated. If I let go, I am embarrassed. Either way, I’m guilt-ridden.

I’ll never be compatible with that world.