Social Commentary | FJY.US

Nothing Matters Anymore

By Frank Yacenda | August 25, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

Now we know, as if we had any doubts before: Nothing matters anymore. That might be an odd conclusion to come to for me, who has a Substack called Issues That Matter. But it’s consistent, actually. That nothing matters anymore is an issue that matters. Or should. Unfortunately, there is bloody little anyone can do about it except grin and bear it and suffer the consequences, or look for a way out of the madhouse that the United States has turned into. That’s the option I’m once more looking at.

So Jell-O Joe Biden, the Grifter in Chief, unilaterally has “forgiven” big chunks of student loan debt. Never mind that he has no legal power to do so. Even the Queen of Grift, Nancy Pelosi says so. But who needs laws any more? Laws are for the pissants, not for the Big Guy. Certainly not for the ruling elites (provided they’re of the right party). Whether it’s allowing people out of their contractual obligations to pay their debts or allowing now more than 2 million — heading toward 4 million — illegal aliens and border crashers to enter with impunity into the country, or using his official offices to further his family’s corrupt enrichment, law and the Constitution are irrelevant. If you haven’t noticed that, you haven’t been paying attention.

If you had student loans that you struggled to pay off, if you saved and scrimped so you didn’t need student loans, or maybe you never got to go to college, why would you mind paying off some rich kid’s loan? Are you really that selfish? Maybe you went in the military and risked, or even gave, your life or your limbs. Maybe you were counting on the GI Bill to pay for your education. You don’t think this was a fair deal, what Biden did? You self-serving bastard!

You pay your taxes and are distraught about our record $30 trillion-something national debt, and now you’ll be asked to contribute your share — estimated at $2,000 per taxpayer — to pay off the $300 billion (which is just a guess, no one can say how much this lawless act really will cost because no one has a clue how many people will be affected) this give-away will cost. You must not understand your role as a taxpayer, which is to support without question every mindless and insane thing your government does. Add the increase to inflation all this extra money going into the economy will bring, and the costs are likely to be even more. Who’s problem is that? Why, yours, of course!

And if recent history is any indication, fraud will take a big part of that money. Like the $100 billion-plus in pandemic relief funds that were stolen by fraudsters, only a very small percentage of which has been recovered or prosecuted. But that’s “official” fraud. Most of the funds will go to the “unofficial” fraud that lies at the basis of this whole thing. Biden’s “generosity” (at your expense) is aimed as a payoff to young voters to vote for Dems in the upcoming midterms, and an even bigger payoff to the colleges and universities that profit off the student loan program.

See those huge tuitions? $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 a year, for at best a spotty education? When the student loan program was taken over by the federal government, it was just an incentive for college administrators to really jack up tuitions, which have risen at rates far in excess of the general inflation rate. Given the huge endowments most of these institutions have — not just measured in the billions of dollars, but in the several tens of billions of dollars — why should they not be forced to bear the costs of this largesse? Because this is really a payoff for all their contributions to the Democratic Party, to which 90 percent of university contributions go. When I lived in Key West 40-some years ago, it cost a six-pack of beer to buy a vote. The stakes have gotten a whole lot higher in the current game of political corruption and vote buying.

Nothing Else Matters, Either

Beat, rape, rob, or car jack someone in some of our biggest cities and at most you might face a misdemeanor charge, if that. You’re likely going to be back on the street the same day or the next one, all set to commit your next crime. Defend yourself against this kind of rampant criminality, and you might be the one who faces real criminal charges. This is not just speculation, but has become a daily occurrence in cities ranging from New York to L.A,. Chicago to Seattle, Philadelphia to San Francisco, and many in between. Is it any wonder that crime rates are rising at the fastest rates since the 1960s, or are reaching record rates in many places? If you’re a law-abiding citizen, just STFU and pay your taxes and take it. You don’t count. You don’t matter. You’re just some freaking racist if you complain about this kind of treatment. You’re getting in the way of remaking America, so move aside or get crushed.

Remember when Trump said there was a plan to do away with single-family zoning and moving urban problems right into your neighborhood? Well, guess what. That’s exactly what is happening. Not far from where I live, the city council of the city where I went to graduate school, Gainesville, Florida — home of the University of Florida and a city mostly of single-family homes — voted to do away with single-family zoning. The future is coming to a place near you, and it’s coming fast. Don’t like the idea? Tough. You don’t matter.

I’ve already opined and lamented what has clearly become a dual standard of justice in this country, and you can read about that here and here and in lots of others of my postings. This is no longer a collection of isolated incidents but has become what is called a pattern and practice. Combined with pervasive corruption, this might be the biggest threat facing our democracy, aside from the repression of any dissenting views and the near-total silence and even complicity on the part of the nation’s mainstream media.

When Nothing Matters Anymore, It Becomes Pervasive in the Society

If you have the stomach to watch the news, you’ll often see images of people being beaten, shot, and otherwise attacked on the streets while onlookers capture the scene on their phones, hoping for their 15 seconds of fame, while doing nothing to intervene or try to protect the victim. We’ve become a nation of voyeurs and cowards.

In the 1960s we had the famous case of Kitty Genovese, a young woman raped, robbed, and murdered on the street in Queens, New York, while onlookers observed from their apartment windows and did nothing. The incident shocked the conscious of the nation at the time. Today, we can’t even muster shock when these things occur. The onlookers that don’t scurry away watch and video the events.

This tendency was brought home to me yesterday. A young man doing some work for me related how he was driving down a busy street in the next town, and there was this little 4- or 5-year-old girl skipping down the center line of the street. Cars just drove by, paying her no heed as if she wasn’t a vulnerable little human but rather some curiosity or maybe even a nuisance to speed by. To his lasting credit, this guy stopped, turned his truck sideways across the road to stop traffic, began to try to get the girl off the road, and to find what careless adults had let her slip out from their attention. Down the road were a couple of guys looking at their boat on a trailer. He shouted at them, and they suddenly “noticed” that the little girl, who belonged to one of them, had gone missing. The damned boat was more important to him then the presence and safety of the little girl. The pair hadn’t even noticed she was missing.

It’s entirely possible this young guy saved the little girl’s life. But this is what we’ve come to. People can’t take a few minutes to stop and try to save a little girl skipping down the middle of a busy street. A boat takes precedence to a life. We see kids left to die in hot cars and people are advised to put their phones or their purses in the back seat so as not to forget their kid, as if a phone or purse is more important to them than the kid. People watch and look on as criminals attack innocent people, and they and the courts and the law look the other way. You struggle to pay your debts and your bills and your money is stolen and given to those who don’t.

The Romans at least confined their barbarity, their bread and circuses intended to placate and buy off the populace, to the arena. In modern-day America, the entire country is the arena.

When nothing matters anymore, nothing matters anymore.

Featured Image, Factory, Peter Hermann/Pixabay. Used with permission.

Wires, Cottonbro/Pexels. Used with permission.

Scrap Metal, Tom Fisk/Pexels. Used with permission.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Please comment, share this piece, and subscribe here, and there.

That Time of Year Again: Thoughts on “the Longest Day in the World”

By Frank Yacenda | June 21, 2022 | Comments 2 comments

This piece initially appeared five years ago, on June 21, 2017, the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. I originally posted this piece on this blog, and it became an annual event to post it each year on June 21. Two years ago I began posting it on my fiction blog, Stoned Cherry. This year it will appear on both blogs and on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Today, June 21, 2022, it is once more the Summer Solstice, and the actual solstice officially occurs at 5:14 a.m. EDT/09:14 a.m. UTC. The time and other references and weather comments in the piece are as they were five years ago, when the post first appeared. I’m no longer living on the boat, and there have been other changes. This year it has been 53 years, more than half a century, since my father’s death, and Sunday was Father’s Day here in the U.S. I hope you enjoy the piece. And play the music at the end.

It’s June 21, the day of the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s a day that holds various meanings for different peoples, and its significance goes back millennia. The solstice, whether summer or winter, officially took place at 12:24 a.m. U.S. Eastern Daylight Time this morning, or 04:24 UTC.

Just to set the record straight and dispel any questions about my scientific knowledge, I know it’s not the longest day in the world. It’s the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, the shortest day in the Southern Hemisphere. But we’ll get to this a bit later.

It’s been a mixed bag today here on the West Coast of Florida. We’ve been having a lot of rain, something we didn’t have much of over the winter, and the rainy times are interspersed with sunny breaks. Right now, as I look out the window of my boat, the sun is mostly out but I’m looking at the light through rain-drop spattered glass. At least we’re not getting the effects of Tropical Storm Cindy, which is much further west and at this moment dumping lots of water on the upper Gulf Coast.

In this country, the summer solstice marks the official beginning of summer, though in other places and other cultures it marks the middle of summer, as indicated by the name Midsummer Night, which can occur anywhere from the 20^th to the 24^th of June. And really it is midsummer, since the days, which have been lengthening since the equinox three months ago, now will start to grow shorter, the nights longer.

The sun has reached its apogee in this hemisphere, as it stands today directly over the Tropic of Cancer. I feel summer ending, we already are on the downhill side, the side that will take us through the hot coming months but already on the slide back into winter, the cold time of year. Just as in the Southern Hemisphere the days will begin to grow longer as the seasons move back to summer.

A year ago on this day I was in Alaska, where there never really was a night. Where I was, well below the Arctic Circle, the sun went down sometime around midnight, but there was a kind of twilight that lasted until the sun rose again a few hours later. Above the Arctic Circle on this day, the sun never sets, and it truly is the Land of the Midnight Sun.

My thoughts turn to other things on this day. Someone asked me the other day, which was Father’s Day in the U.S., what thoughts I had of my father on that Sunday. But really, I think of Father’s Day as a commercial holiday. I also remember the last Father’s Day I had with my father, and how my mother did her unwitting best to create conflict between me and my father. While I may wish a happy day to the fathers I know on Father’s Day, it is today, the day of the solstice, that I think of my father. June 21 was his birthday, which in most years coincides with the solstice. I was told as a child that it was the longest day of the year, which I translated in my own way into it being the longest day in the world, and I would go around telling everyone who would listen that it was.

“It’s the longest day in the world!” I’d exclaim each year on his birthday, from morning until night.

I think today of my father on this day, the 21^st of June. Gone now, for nearly 48 years. And I think back to the day of his birth, June 21, 1913. One hundred and four years ago. Even had he not died young as he did, just 56 years old, it is hard to imagine that he would still be alive today had he not died when he did. A prolongation of the inevitable.

A factoid I learned earlier is that today is not the longest day in the history of the world, as one might imagine it to be given that the earth’s rotation on its axis generally was slowing. Rather, the longest day in the history of the world is believed to be June 21, 1912, and things like the earth’s tides and recession of the glaciers have caused a slight increase in the rate of the planet’s rotation since then. My father was born a year later, which arguably could have been the second or third longest day in the history of the world, if not the actual longest day in the world.

I wonder what it was like on that June day, the day of the solstice, the longest day of the year, the day my father was born, in Jersey City, New Jersey. Did his father and mother, his Italian parents, my grandparents that I never knew, know it was the solstice? Did they even know of the solstice? Regardless, I’m inclined to think they did not think of it, if for no other reason than that they had something else on their mind that day. And then I think of the things people from then knew and were taught and how many of those things have been lost today, in these encroaching new Dark Ages in which we find ourselves, and I have to wonder. Perhaps they knew, better than most people today know. Or care to know. And they did note the auspicious day on which their son was born.

I’ll think of my father again on July 27, the anniversary of his death, and by then even our summer, the summer as we define it, will be half over.

The solstices, like the equinoxes, serve as a kind of punctuation for me. I watch the ebb and the flow of the days, the seasons, the years, and they mark the passage of time, time that increasingly slips by way too quickly. All of life is punctuation, I think. Slowing. Stopping. Breaking things, even waves on the water, into different parts, different pieces, different rhythms and fugues and movements and phrases and sentences. It is through such punctuation that we mark our lives, mark our transit through summer and back into winter, from day into night, from life into death. Watching, as a reader of a story does, while the time of our lives flows past. When we lose that punctuation, everything blends into one big mass, and we feel lost in the current, flailing and drowning as we’re pulled inexorably along. At least I do.

Enjoy this song, which I found today amid my files, and with which I end this post, and enjoy the time that nature and life give us.

Click here if song doesn’t play.

Striking Thirteen: Where We’ve Arrived

By Frank Yacenda | May 31, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

— George Orwell, opening sentence of 1984

It has taken thirty-eight years, but at last we have arrived in 1984. Lies have become truth, truth has become misinformation, and ignorance has become strength. It may not be a bright cold day in April, but the clocks are, indeed, striking thirteen.

As some of you may have noticed, it has been distressingly long, more than a month, since I’ve written in this blog. The easy, if only partially truthful, explanation is that I’ve been distracted with several other projects, some of a writing nature, some not, and some just to fill the void and, futilely, avoid dealing with the ever increasing absurdity that surrounds us and that seems so difficult to even explain any more.

In my last post I wrote of how Elon Musk planned to buy Twitter, hoping to return some semblance of free speech and thought to the platform. For this, he was viciously attacked and maligned, mostly by those on the political left, for whom free speech would seemingly be a priority. But in the way in which contemporary American life is twisted and mutilated in ways hard to explain, to those on the left, the idea of free speech, of all different views being openly expressed, is like holding up a crucifix to a vampire. It cringes and raises its arm over its eyes, screaming at the very idea. The left has gained the political strength it previously lacked through the use of its own misinformation, crushing and blocking any views that contradict its view of the world, and it is strongly resisting relinquishing that power.

Government becomes a parody of itself

And why should it, considering we now have an alleged president who, through his minions, daily tells the most bald-faced lies in the hope, not entirely without basis given a docile and compliant media, that they will be accepted by the masses as truth. To further its assault on the inconvenient truth, it — through the Department of Homeland Security (itself something of an Orwellian name) — came up with its own version of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, suitably dubbed the Disinformation Governance Board.

It turned into one of the rare instances when government becomes such a parody of itself that it can’t be covered up, no matter how diligent and proficient the liars at the White House podium are. We had the department, headed by the monumentally incompetent Alejandro Mayorkas, whose incessant misinformation about the catastrophe taking place on our southwest border is uttered under oath to Congress, appointing a self-anointed “disinformation fellow” and “Russian disinformation expert” — herself a clownish figure and Dem partisan given to spreading massive disinformation — to head its new Ministry of Truth.

If you haven’t been sequestered in a Nepalese rice patty over the past several weeks, you’ve probably seen this clip of the new (and then) Czar of Disinformation, Nina Jankowicz, doing her best (which is not to say good) Mary Poppins imitation on TikTok at least several dozen times. Viewer warning: If you are of weak stomach, or wish to retain any vestiges of faith in what passes for your government, you may wish to skip this short video . Viewer discretion definitely advised.

Aside from being an embarrassment to even herself, Jankowicz is a major purveyor of disinformation, calling the now infamous Hunter Biden laptop a product of Russian disinformation (it’s been well established to be authentic, and in fact was before the 2020 elections, though Twitter blocked any mention of it), and a promoter of the Steele Dossier, which formed the basis for the Russia Hoax that dogged the Trump administration for its entirety, an utter falsehood which has now been definiteively tied to the Hillary Clinton campaign.

But we can take heart, gentle reader. After just a few weeks on the job, and under cover of claiming she and her family had received death threats, Jankowicz resigned as Disinformation Czar, and DHS put its Disinformation Governance Board on hold. Clock, in this case, pushed back to 1983. But the fight is far from over.

The Supreme Court Springs a Leak

While the Ministry of Truth story was unfolding, an even bigger story broke lose. Unprecedented in U.S. history, someone — still undetermined nearly a month after the fact — leaked, to Politico, a draft of a majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, in which the 1973 landmark decision of Roe v. Wade was to be overturned. And, no surprise, all hell broke out over this news, and pro-choice demonstrators immediately showed up at the High Court, and then they took to raucous demonstrations outside the homes of the conservative justices after someone “doxed” their addresses.

As shocking as this unprecedented leak was — no one has yet been held accountable for it, despite an investigation announced by Chief Justice John Roberts — more shocking was the Biden Administration’s statement that it did not view the leak as a crime, and its refusal to condemn the demonstrations taking place at the justices’ homes. It seems the separation of powers — the Supreme Court being one of the three branches of government — holds little importance to the administration nor to the Democratic leadership in Congress. The latter should come as no surprise since no less than Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer previously, in 2020, threatened conservative justices that they would “reap the whirlwind” if they went ahead with decisions of which he disapproved.

“I want to tell you [Neil] Gorsuch. I want to tell you [Brett] Kavanaugh,” Schumer shouted out to an abortion-rights rally from the steps of the Supreme Court. “You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

As a matter of law, 18 U.S.C., Paragraph 1507 makes the actions and words of Schumer and those demonstrating outside the Supreme Court and the justices’ homes a crime:

“Whoever, with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty, pickets or parades in or near a building housing a court of the United States, or in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer, or with such intent uses any sound-truck or similar device or resorts to any other demonstration in or near any such building or residence, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”

But with an administration and a so-called Justice Department for which law means little, you can expect no action to be taken to enforce the statute. Justices couldn’t even get police protection for their homes in the liberal jurisdictions in which they live.

In a country where virtually every aspect of life is swirling down the toilet at an alarming rate, with the blame squarely falling on Democrats, who control the White House and both houses of Congress, it would not be cynical to see the leak as a way to try to gin up voter support to keep the party from going over an electoral cliff in the upcoming November midterm elections.

With support for Dems falling to record lows among Hispanic and black voters — upon which the party depends — the last remaining bastion of support was among women. So what better way to mobilize that support than by leaking the Alito decision? Of course, that logic escaped some on the left, including NPR Legal Affairs Correspondent Nina Totenberg, who led the false-flag counter-charge, claiming the “leading theory” was that a conservative clerk leaked the draft. “Leading,” to whom, other than Totenberg and the left?

Driving the school bus onto the tracks

If the domestic mess isn’t big enough, Jell-O Joe decided he needed to bolster his cred overseas, so he went off to South Korea and Japan, fumbling and bumbling as he went. But it wasn’t enough that he addressed the South Korean President by his predecessor’s name, or that he told jokes no one understood, or that he looked like his usual sleepy, disoriented self. No, that wouldn’t do.

Once again going off the remarks prepared for him by his handlers, while in Japan Biden announced that the U.S. would intervene militarily if China attacked Taiwan, in a moment reversing decades of U.S. policy. Needless to say, this drew an immediate outcry from Beijing, and Biden’s handlers once more were left walking back his remarks and cleaning up the mess in Biden’s brain. So, in an instant, the guy you wouldn’t trust to drive your kid’s school bus drove it, with all us kids aboard, onto the railroad tracks and stopped it there, with a train coming.

And then, if all this doesn’t tell you the clocks are striking thirteen in America, we have the mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde. And all the lessons we should have learned from Colombine and Sandy Hook and Parkland weren’t learned, and we’re back to mourning the dead and asking how these individuals slipped through the cracks when the warning signs were writ large and unmistakable. But that gets into a whole new area. I think I’ve depressed you, and myself, enough at this point, so will end it here.

Listen for those clocks, my friends, that tell us where we’ve arrived, and may they be a wake up call to all of us.

Featured image: Pure Evil’s George Orwell Graffitti Wall, Southwold, England. From streetartsheffield.com. Used under Fair Use.

Nina Jankowicz, from TikTok. Used under Fair Use.

Chuck Schumer reaping the whirlwind, AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.

Elon Musk accepts Axel Springer Award Berlin December 2020

Turning Twitter Around: A Battle Won in the War for Free Speech?

By Frank Yacenda | April 26, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

Unless you’ve been living in an ice cave deep in the far reaches of the Antarctic continent for the past couple of weeks, you’re aware of the battle between Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest human, and the guardians of the septic system known as Twitter. You’re probably also aware that on Monday this week the battle was ceded by Twitter’s board and, pending government regulator approval and a vote of the shareholders, Musk will acquire all of Twitter’s stock and take the company private.

With an offer of $54.20 a share — a price encapsulating a subtle hidden message — the deal, valued at about $44 billion, was achieved with finance from Morgan Stanley and some other banks. Musk, worth an estimated $268 billion, is expected to put in about $21 billion in equity, the balance coming from debt and margin loan finance.

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a statement following announcement of the deal. In a recent public presentation, he also said, “Having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization. I don’t care about the economics at all.”

One would think that those for whom free speech should mean a great deal — people like the journalists, commentators, writers, academics, politicians, and other members of the chattering class that populate the platform — would be buoyed by those words. And sadly, tragically, one would be disappointed, hearing the great outpouring of blather criticizing both Musk and his ideas about the importance of free speech. For those people, the only free speech that matters is that which promotes their own leftist, woke, elitist, and establishmentarian view of the universe, and anyone who disagrees with it can stuff it. That is the state of discourse in this country and beyond, Twitter being but a distilled version of it.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth

Judging by the wailing and gnashing of teeth, ranging from Twitter employees, themselves responsible for so much of the repression of free speech on the platform, to commentators on CNN and MSNBC, to so-called celebrities, both known and unknown, one would think Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was akin to the death of unbiased speech, instead of its — far more likely — liberation. But in a time when “misinformation” equals anything that doesn’t support the official party line, however ludicrous and discredited that line might be, and when the epithets “racist” and “homophobic” can be bandied about like beads at a Mardi Gras parade, a true supporter of free speech might take heart at Musk’s intents.

While one can factually argue that Facebook and Google are both far bigger platforms and far more repressive of free speech than Twitter, Twitter is — as Musk describes it — “…the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” So in that sense, it is where the society’s gatekeepers and opinion setters gather and, for that reason, it holds far more power over the direction the society takes. And those who have benefited the most from holding sway over that direction are now panic-stricken that their oversized power and prestige and position might be threatened.

Actress Jameela Jamil who, pardon my ignorance, I confess I’ve never heard of, tweeted, “Ah [Musk] got twitter. I would like this to be my what lies here as my last tweet. I fear this free speech bid is going to help this hell platform reach its final form of totally lawless hate, bigotry, and misogyny. Best of luck.”

Not to be outdone, an “activist” named Shaun King deleted his Twitter account after posting, “At its root, @ElonMusk wanting to purchase Twitter is not about left vs right. It’s about white power….He’s upset that Twitter won’t allow white nationalists to target/harass people. That’s his definition of free speech.”

Huh?

Irony, irony, and more irony

Not a huge surprise, given contemporary realities, that the left, once married to principles of free speech, now dread, fear, and even condemn it. Irony? Or the result of the relentless erosion of traditional liberal values? Both you say?

Being unintentionally ironic, Star Trek actor George Takei, whom I’ve at least heard of, had this to say: “I’m not going anywhere. Should this place become more toxic, I pledge to strive even harder to lift up reason, science, compassion and the rule of law. The struggle against fascism, misinformation, and hate requires tough fighters. I hope you stay in the fight, right beside me.”

One has to wonder if “reason and science” include blocking and de-platforming, as Twitter has done, any questions that COVID-19, arguably the biggest story of the past two years, might — might — have originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, or if they include the possibility that the COVID vaccines maybe aren’t all they were cracked up to be. One also wonders if “the rule of law” and “the struggle against fascism, misinformation, and hate” could extend to the criminal activities of the Biden crime family, given that Twitter not only blocked but locked out the accounts of those reporting, or even linking to the articles, on the Hunter Biden laptop, the so-called Laptop From Hell, and the damning evidence it contained in the days leading up to the pivotal 2020 presidential elections. Or possibly the “Russia hoax” story and all the hatred it generated, which Twitter and much of the mainstream media were more than eager to promote as “truth” (and still do, despite the proof we now have that it was a manufactured lie promulgated by the Hillary Clinton campaign).

Similar questions might be raised about the tweet of Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, founder of the World Health Network. who wrote, “Just a thought–next time we have $44 billion laying around, can we please spend it to solve the pandemic, climate change, hunger, poverty, and malnutrition?” Maybe, one might think, some honest debate on those subjects can lead to more reasoned understanding of them, rather than treating them as tenets of religious faith.

None other than the nearly canonized Barack Obama told Stanford University students last Thursday that not more, but less free speech is needed to combat dreaded “misinformation” (read: anything that disagrees with the ruling class and official orthodoxy) on social media platforms. This coming from a world-class spreader of “misinformation” in the form of promulgating the Russia hoax, among other falsehoods. Of course, this view encapsulates Obama’s inherent distrust of the ordinary citizen to make his or her own judgments when faced with conflicting information.

Some of the silliest outcries were raised by those who said billionaires shouldn’t own tech companies or media. Do they mean people like billionaire Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame, who owns The Washington Post, or Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, who owns a significant chunk of The New York Times? Or perhaps they mean billionaire Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, or Google billionaire founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, or possibly billionaire Twitter founder Jack Dorsey? One suspects not, given the liberal tilt of all those billionaires. It’s just the billionaires, like Elon Musk, of a libertarian and free-speech tilt that they don’t approve of. Apparently lacking any sense of irony, one WAPO columnist went so far to say it was “dangerous” when billionaires buy media, seemingly oblivious to his own boss’s net worth.

And of course, behind much of the angst is the fear that the dreaded Orange Man, Donald Trump, might be allowed back on the platform. The horror! That a former president of the United States with tens of millions of supporters might be allowed to speak his mind. But those afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome — which should be a bona fide mental illness listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM — might take comfort in Trump’s announcement that he didn’t plan on returning to Twitter but would stay with his own new platform, TRUTH Social.

A disclaimer

In the interest of fairness and honesty, things not much found on Twitter, let me offer a disclaimer of my own. Actually, two disclaimers.

First, I am not now nor have I ever been a member of Twitter. Even before it fully descended into the sewer of hatred and venom and bias in which it now wallows, I found it to be unconducive to effective communication. I wrote about this several years ago, and my opinion of it has not changed, except in a negative direction, since. Actually, it was back in 2015 when I had this to say in my comment about Twitter.

I am sure I could more effectively promote my own work, which continues to languish in obscurity, were I to take a place on Twitter, but I feel I have to deal with enough negativity in life without diving into the waves of mindless invective that permeate Twitter and, in truth, just about every other place online where people express their views, no matter how mindless and hateful. I fully acknowledge that that trend might continue, and possibly accelerate, if and when Musk takes the halters off the platform, but that is the price of free speech. Of course, as Twitter in its current manifestation demonstrates, it’s also the price of repressed speech.

I’ve long been a believer in the view expressed by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in his concurring statement in the 1927 case of Whitney v. California: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

My second disclaimer concerns Elon Musk. There is much about Musk I admire — his brilliance, his acute business acumen, his successful track record in creating effective private access to space. I also admire his mouthiness and willingness to not to take guff from anyone, whether it’s the head of the Russian space program, Elizabeth Warren, or the raving critics of his acquisition of Twitter. On the other hand, I’m not a huge fan of Tesla and EVs in general, but especially since Tesla is arguably more a Chinese than an American company. I also strongly disagree with Musk over the role of hydrogen, which Musk calls “incredibly dumb,” as the fuel of the future. Further, I’m not a fan of naming one’s child X Æ A-12, as he and current wife Grimes, AKA Claire Elise Boucher, named their son, youngest of Musk’s six children. But I try not to be too judgmental of peoples’ parenting.

One can take heart in Musk’s invitation to his fiercest critics to remain on Twitter.

“I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter,” he tweeted, “because that is what free speech means.”

The war to preserve free speech is far from over, but this could be an important win on the battlefield of ideas.

Featured image: Elon Musk accepts Axel Springer Award, Berlin, December 2020, Britta Pedersen/Pool, via Getty-Images. Used under Fair Use.

George Takei, OOOH MYYY, ed7, Giphy.Com. Used with permission.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.

A Time When the World Needs Elie Wiesel

By Frank Yacenda | April 5, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

Seeing the scenes of devastation, cruelty, and inhumanity — one might call it barbarity — coming out of Ukraine, and especially witnessing the hundreds of dead, tortured, and raped men, women, and children in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, I was reminded of my encounter with Elie Wiesel, modern times’ foremost advocate for the oppressed, some twenty-three years ago. I met Wiesel when assigned as his control officer during his visit to Albania, sent by President Bill Clinton as his personal envoy to look into the state of the Kosovo refugees finding safe harbor in the country and in neighboring Macedonia.

In his report on the visit, WIesel, a Holocaust survivor, wrote, “What I saw and heard there was often unbearable to the survivor that still lives in my memory. In fact, I never thought that I would hear such tales of cruelty again.”

And yet, here we are, again. Twenty-three years later and just 700 miles (1,120 kms) distant, and once more we’re witnessing the imposition of unspeakable cruelty by one people upon another.

In the lingering heat at the end of a long Albanian June day, I vividly recall Wiesel expressing to me his biggest fear, that the hatred being engendered by the terror wreaked on the victims would only lead to a desire for revenge and, he feared, that revenge would carry over to future generations. Already now we’re hearing mention — perhaps remarkably restrained given the horrors these people have suffered and witnessed — of a new hatred for the Russians uttered by Ukrainian refugees and those who stayed behind amid the violence and destruction and killing. As Wiesel wondered in 1999, whether the world had learned anything, and concluding, “I am not so sure,” we can say today that the world, and its evil-doers, has learned pitifully little.

Wiesel died on July 2, 2016. His loss is inestimable. Indeed, the world would benefit if it could hear his voice today. This is a time when the world needs Elie Wiesel. And if it can’t hear his voice, it can look back at his words spoken during his life.

I wrote the piece below, and it appeared on the first anniversary of Elie Wiesel’s death, July 2, 2017. I think it worth republishing it now, and the horrors and the inhumanity Wiesel and I heard recounted in 1999, and his concerns for the future, apply equally, if on an even bigger scale, today.

Remembering Elie Wiesel

The news of Elie Wiesel’s death reached me on the car radio last July 2 as I was driving through Banff and Jasper national parks in Alberta. The sun had come out after a very rainy Canada Day the previous day, but the news of Wiesel’s passing arrived as a shock that darkened even that bright Saturday. I had a most personal and moving encounter with the Holocaust survivor, Nobel laureate, author, teacher, and renowned advocate for the oppressed 17 years prior, and I knew I needed to write something of my memories of him. Unfortunately, circumstances were not conducive that day or in subsequent days as I made my way back to the U.S. and to Florida, and the months that followed proved far more tumultuous and challenging than I had imagined. But now, on the anniversary of his death, I feel it’s finally time I share my thoughts on this man who touched my life so profoundly.

In June of 1999 I was again posted to the U.S. Embassy in Tirana, Albania, returning there on TDY at my request from my then-permanent station in Brasilia. I couldn’t bear to read any more accounts of what the Serbs were doing to the Kosovar Albanians during their onslaught on the province of Kosovo – perhaps in part due to my own partially Albanian ancestry – and I asked to be sent on temporary duty back to Tirana, where I arrived in mid-May and was to remain through most of July.

It was during the first week of June 1999 that Elie Wiesel was sent as a personal representative of President Bill Clinton to visit the refugee camps housing the displaced Kosovar Albanians in Macedonia and Albania. The President wanted to get a first-hand read on what was going on, and what the state of the refugees was, and so he turned to the man who had spent so much of his adult life speaking out for the oppressed of the world. The man who himself had survived internship, at the age of 15, at two of Nazi Germany’s most notorious death camps, Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Perhaps because I constituted a significant part of the embassy’s collective memory, having been posted to Tirana from 1995 to 1997, including during Albania’s own internal descent into temporary madness following collapse of the country’s massive pyramid schemes, I was assigned as control officer to Mr. Wiesel. What that meant was that I was to accompany the visitor wherever he went, look after his safety and well being, oversee the translators, drivers, and other personnel assisting in the mission, serve as liaison to the embassy and whatever relevant agencies to assure that his requests were met, answer his questions about the country and the situation to supplement what knowledge he was garnering on his own, and to generally provide whatever support the President’s envoy might need or want. It struck me then as a great honor to be selected to fill this role, and it still strikes me that way.

Interestingly, in his report to the President, Mr. Wiesel said he was “accompanied by three able US government officials” during his visits to the two countries, and in acknowledging the role played by the embassies and the U.S. government agencies that assisted with the visit, he said, “They went out of their way to be helpful. They bring honor to our country.”

In truth, I felt that it was he who brought honor to us through his visit and, more than anything, the serious, sensitive, and intense manner in which he approached his role and the kindness he showed to everyone he came in contact with.

June brings heat to Albania, and the tents housing the thousands of refugees who had fled their homes in Kosovo were hot in the June sun. Elie Wiesel never faltered for a moment as we went from camp to camp, interviewing dozens of people in each camp, conducting the interviews in the tents, working through a translator, and listening intently to the unrelenting accounts of personal horror and loss that poured out. I sat in on most of these interviews, and hour by hour and day by day the strain and the sadness grew.

We got out into the areas where the camps had been set up, and this provided me with the occasion of my first-ever helicopter ride, aboard a U.S. Navy Sea Stallion that carried our entourage west out of the capital to our first stop. The schedule we kept up would have been grueling all by itself, but Wiesel was unstopping in his quest to speak with as many of the refugees as he could, seemingly disregarding any jet lag he might have picked up coming from New York, even at the age of 70 at the time.

We set up individual interviews as well as, as I recall, one or two group sessions, always in the big white refugee tents. For hours upon hours we heard women tell of watching their husbands and sons taken away and gunned down by the Serbs. We heard of parents separated from their children, of children watching their parents killed before theirs eyes, of the difficult and dangerous trek over the mountains and out of Kosovo to relative safety in Albania.

As Wiesel wrote in his report to President Clinton, “I listened to their tales of senseless cruelty and inhumanity which characterized Milosevic’s army and police; they have been reported in the international media. Still, it is different to hear it first-hand. One feels frustrated and powerless in their presence. And embarrassed. Pristina and Pec, Djakovica and Cecelija, Mitrovica and Glogovac, Kuraz and Izbica: eyewitnesses brought back harrowing detailed graphic reports from Kosovo’s killing fields. They go on and on. Forced expulsions, houses looted, villages burned, insults, threats, imprisonment, repeated rapes of young women, beatings of young men, separation of men and women, summary executions: everywhere, the process is the same. And the tormentors – who are they? Most of them are former neighbors.”

He heard again and again how it was former neighbors who were inflicting these cruelties, and I remember the interview Wiesel cites in his report: “ ‘A policeman came with his 5-year-old son,’ a man with an extraordinarily kind face told me. ‘He pointed at us and asked the boy to choose the prisoner to be beaten that morning.’ ”

When we took breaks, or when it was time to head back to Tirana at day’s end, we would watch the refugee children playing their games between the tents, as children will do.

“In this haunted world of Kosovo refugees, adults wept,” Wiesel writes in his report to the President. “Children did not. They sang. They played games. They laughed. And I no longer know what hurt us more: the children’s laughter or their parents’ tears.”

But what is not contained in those words is what we saw, again and again, which was children not just laughing and singing, but also pretending in their play to capture and execute one another, having picked up perhaps all too well what they had witnessed back home. I remember being at dinner in an open-air restaurant with embassy colleagues the evening of our camp visits and trying to describe what I had witnessed. But I was unable to get past the image of children forming guns with their fingers and using them to play-shoot their playmates in the back of the head, and breaking down at the table, not able to go on. The memory still haunts me and brings tears to my eyes even as I write these words.

It’s relevant to recall the details of Elie Wiesel’s life, being born into a town in Transylvania, a part of Romania that was transferred to Hungarian control for several years during World War II. And from there being hauled off with his family to the Nazi concentration camps as part of the Holocaust. Only Elie and two older sisters survived, their parents and younger sister killed in the camps, and the only reason Elie survived was by lying about his age, saying he was 18 and so able to work and prove useful to his captors. His life since then was marked with concern for the oppressed, and working to see that something like the Holocaust could never be repeated.

I think hearing the Kosovar refugees tell of the horrors that they were subjected to and witnessed brought back too many bad memories to Elie Wiesel. I could see it in his face, a look I can still see today, the effect all this was having on him. And in a low voice what he conveyed to me was his fear that this terror the refugees experienced was just going to carry on, was going to engender hatred and a desire for revenge, and the adults and the children playing their games were going to return to Kosovo with a desire to inflict on the Serbs what the Serbs had inflicted on them. It was this fear for the future that concerned him the most.

He writes in his report, “What I saw and heard there was often unbearable to the survivor that still lives in my memory. In fact, I never thought that I would hear such tales of cruelty again.”

His fear was that the victims would become the victimizers, seeking to wreak back onto the Serbs what their Serb neighbors had done to them. Toward the end of his report Wiesel expresses his concern for the future: “Their bitterness, indeed their hatred for [Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic] and his subordinates, will not fade away.”

When Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, the Norwegian Nobel Committee called him “a messenger to mankind.” But at the entrance to the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, it is Wiesel’s words that are carved in stone: “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”

Other words spoken by Wiesel must give us pause for thought, though. Lamenting that his father had no grave at which he might grieve, he said, “What can I tell him? That the world has learned? I am not so sure.”

In June 1999 and afterward, Elie Wiesel bore witness to the suffering and cruelty brought down on the Kosovar Albanians, and I think it added to his uncertainty that the world had changed since the Holocaust. But for me, a lowly embassy control officer, I will never forget his presence or his concern. In those couple of days, my life was truly touched by him.

Read Elie Wiesel’s full report to President Clinton here.

Photo by Remy Steinegger, World Economic Forum. Used with permission.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.