WHAT POSSESSED THE CDC TO TREAT AMERICANS THIS WAY?

 By Dominique Paul Noth 

How dare the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention!  What could those bureaucrats at the CDC been thinking of! They are treating the American public as rational sentient human beings rather than bovine herds that need to be rounded up like cattle and shipped to waiting corrals. 

The main herd is the obedient one, willing to follow orders from people in authority, though they have some confusion about whether those people are politicians or medical experts. 

The smaller more boisterous herd is the stiff-necked one, interpreting any rule as a blow to their personal freedom, whether it be motorcycle helmets, seat belts, carrying guns into retail shops, smoking in restaurants or wearing a mask when mingling in public. What could be clearer as an attack on personal freedom than a government mandate to care for your neighbors, wash your hands and maintain some social distancing?

Into this stampede of competing herds steps the CDC, sticking with the dictates of science and a rash belief that people can think for themselves. 

The CDC has landed on the side of common sense -- not insisting on 100% protection from this strange pandemic that has frozen the US for over a year.  But more than enough protection in a new America under Joe Biden that has already vaccinated 61% of us and has ordered so much vaccine that everyone over 12 could be vaccinated by the summer.

In the interim the science confirms a general safety for the fully vaccinated. Broader information about protective antibodies in the nose are far outweighing new concerns that COVID can be slightly more airborne than thought.  The result is a parody of the “The Karate Kid” -- wax on, wax off, VAC on, VAC off.

Parents and private businesses, while generally heeding the rules of the road, can decide for themselves how to behave in a freer environment.  The media, when not hysterical about the exceptions (we all wish for perfect clarity), offers valuable avenues of help, recognizing that families can match their circumstances, not rely on one size fits all.

It’s uncomfortable in rich America to think of us as the self-congratulatory privileged, but there is a whiff of vaccine apartheid when we remember India is still a pandemic graveyard while America looks ahead a few more weeks for full normal.

Once a real president got going, though, he reinforced the value of our democracy. And while we all should still feel guilty that we have not grieved sufficiently for a half million dead, we at least now have a president who understands the responsibility of grieving.  

How free the CDC made you feel still depends on location and circumstances.  If you are union nurses in California, where statewide mask mandates have been extended into June and COVID stubbornly keeps surging, or if you work in a school or are crowding extra work hours into a slaughterhouse, darn right you want to take your time. 

Let’s also be honest with each other.  Children statistically are relatively safe from serious COVID illness, but “relatively safe” is not a phrase that will convince all moms and dads.

Dr. Fauci rightly warns not to shame people without masks or those with them.  Shaming is a self-defeating social tool, mainly because we can’t know enough to pass judgment on other people’s concern. I know parents who don’t want to go back to work till their children are fully protected.  Their definition of “fully” may differ from yours.

Nor do I endorse an honor system of trusting your unknown neighbors.  Knowing how many patients tell their doctors they are following the diet or exercise ordered – when they’re not – I’m keeping my mask close at hand. Which seems to me fully compatible with the CDC guidelines.

But then we stumble into the worst behavior of the unruly herd.  These are the people, once the CDC issued new advisories, who whipped off their masks gleefully to say “See? We were right all along! No reason to ever wear them!”

They are not persuaded by the facts, such as how -- long before vaccinations became commonplace -- the US death toll dropped 81%, largely because we were careful around each other.

This is the dumbest of the dumb herd not worth the saliva we are tempted to spit on them.  Just be thankful the CDC is finally out of his clutches.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

HOW ISRAEL OVER 7 DECADES LOST ITS GRIP ON US THINKING

 By Dominique Paul Noth

I was born the same year as Joe Biden (how nice to have a hero old enough for the World War II generation) but I suspect my awareness of the demand for a Jewish state was even earlier than his.

My parents, after all, were known anti-Hitler activists who had to flee from Germany to France in 1933 and then to the United States in 1941.  She was a secular Jew who converted to Catholicism in France, partly through the influence of such intelligentsia as Darius Milhaud, Paul Claudel and Gabriel Marcel (she was a successful opera singer influenced by their work). He was even better known as an anti-Nazi editorialist and language scholar whose lack of religious leanings was pronounced, as was his love of alcohol, poetic excess and self-pity as the self-proclaimed forgotten John the Baptist of Germany’s descent into Hitler.

Gregory Peck and Anne Revere as his mother in "Genlemen's Agreement" (1947), a powerful expose of anti-Semitism, slightly romanticized in its lighter US form than Jews had seen practiced against them in Europe.

Out of that mix, as the first US born of their children, ferocity for a Jewish homeland was inevitable -- as was facing the genteeler form of anti-Semitism in the America of “Gentleman’s Agreement” (1947), genteel compared to the open hatred so many Jews had experienced in Europe and still conveyed in America by Middle Eastern college students my parents encountered.

My earliest memories (I must have been 4 or 5) were of the refugees from the war flooding into our home apartment on Manhattan’s 89th St., wanderers with broken limbs, scarred  faces and   gaunt skin seeking a friendly greeting, many of whom found US refuge teaching around the country.  In a strange echo of today’s Dreamers, many found homes through an underground network of sympathetic Americans who pretended to be relatives and knew how to maneuver around the US brand of anti-Semitism.

From such an upbringing, even a child who didn’t comprehend or care about politics was moved, as so much of America was in 1948, by the creation of Israel, the so-called Palestinian Mandate immediately supported by President Truman. 

My, how those childhood beliefs have soured.

Recent polls confirm the drop in allegiance, even among American Jews, where two-thirds of those over 65 still admit an emotional attachment to Israel while it drops to under 50% for younger generations of American Jews.

Israeli’s early success in armed conflict was easily transformed in the minds of children to brave righteousness over population might.  The world may seem different today but for decades after 1948, there was swelling pride as Israel beat off wave after wave of Arab attacks, mightier forces that in our minds were routed by heroic determination to never again succumb to the Holocaust mentality.

I suspect that same sense of loyalty to the Israeli cause explained the hefty military buildup supported by US policy. The belief in Israel ruled Biden’s early years in the Senate in the 1970s.  He said then, I have read, that if Israel hadn’t been created by the United Nations, the US should have done it. That sense that Jews needed protection from their zealot Arab neighbors dominated US thinking.

The thinking continued even when Arab nations subdued their attacks. It was pushed to the front of American headlines by how cowed and fearful the region was when Hamas used rockets and terrorist methods against nearby domestic Israeli citizens. It was a scenario viewed by many, somewhat uncomfortably, as more unconscionable on the Palestine side than the Jewish right-wing settlers side,  seizing Arab land in Jerusalem and other locales despite generations of legal claims and actual occupation by Palestinians. 

The history is complicated. Israel’s claims to this land are not anywhere near as pure as its American allies have suggested.  Nor can anyone clearly explain to me what belief in the Rapture or the Messiah’s second coming has to do with Christian support for Israel against its enemies.  This sidelight of selling Christianity on the basis of keeping the Jewish state is one of the craziest dogmas out there, but it sure has been exploited by pastors and politicians raising money.

The once enthusiastic support of earlier generations has clearly faded, mainly thanks to Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu and Israel’s move to the hard right (while understandable given the dangers they live under). Many people I know question the simplified vision they long maintained.  They are asking serious questions.

 Much of the change of heart is the tragic circumstances of the Palestinian people – poverty, always present occupation, fear of movement, instant death from the skies whether you fight or not, ineffective foreign pressure.  The same violation of basic human rights that brought so much empathy to Jews after WWII has now been transferred to unsettling visions of the Jews as the new blitzkrieg. 

Americas are now going through this uncertainty.  The strongest argument for Israel is the right to protect their families from enemy hatred. The current reality is that Bibi, not able to form a new government on his own and remain as prime minister, has some unnatural incentives to make war with the Palestinians.

When Trump was president and so clearly in Bibi’s pocket, Hamas leaders knew that violent reaction was not going to help them one bit, so they held off.  With Trump gone, Bibi knows that pushing Hamas to its extremist tendencies would draw in the Biden administration and put the US lifelong support of Israel to a new test.  That new test is now underway.

Israel has something else going for it – the blind hatred against it. More than seven decades after its creation, the Arab rhetorical virulence toward Jews seems to have inflated, not diminished.  No imam worth his salt from Saudi Arabia to Syria, from Iran to the Emirates, can raise money or followers without vindictive quotes against Israel.  Amazingly they are even more virulent than Israeli quotes against Iran, which are plenty bad on their own.

Ehud Barak, the famous former Israeli prime minister born in 1942, the same year as Biden, once remarked rather sadly that if he were a Palestinian of a certain young age he would probably join a militant group.  But Barak also said rather more famously:  “The Middle East is a region where predictions go to die.”

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.