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Gordon Campbell Freelance May 21, 2011 EditorialCartoonists.com

Do you understand this cartoon? I confess I do not. Does the cartoonist think Obama is betraying Israel by a pro-Palestinian stance, or is he being insufficiently pro-Palestinian [as Abu Mazen has gone on record as saying] Just goes to show the confusion surrounding what exactly Obama said, IMHO.

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Rob Smith, Jr. The Glenn Beck Program May 21, 2011 EditorialCartoonists.com

Why There's Been a Gap in the Blogging

My son, quite rightfully, has complained that I haven't blogged in a long time. It's true. Not for want of subject matter, however.

An average Antigonos day begins about 7:30 in the morning, when I crawl or stagger from my bed. It usually takes me about 2 hours to sufficiently limber up to the point when all my joints stop screaming at me and my vertebrae stop feeling like a Slinky toy going downstairs (as long as I'm horizontal, the vertebrae are loose enough to only ache; once vertical, I feel them all compressing downward, due to the influence of gravity. I have several ruptured discs in my lumbar spine, with corresponding degenerative changes. Hell, I'm a nurse and I'm in my mid-60s. I've had back pain since I was in my first year in nursing school). After the usual ablutions, I have to check my blood sugar, and take my medications (type 2 diabetes, hypertension, congenital high cholesterol, gastric reflux, and an antidepressant because of all my other chronic conditions). Then, I eat breakfast while watching the news on Sky (British and world) and the BBC. When the antidepressant and my pain medication have kicked in, it's time to begin cleaning up yesterday's mess. And there is always a mess: the Holy One, Blessed Be He, has decreed that for giving my ultra-neat mother, z"l, many years of anguish with my slovenly habits, I should marry a slob and produce slob children. The children are all adults, but we still have a married daughter and husband living with us -- and, as of mid March, a further distraction:

My granddaughter, Shir. Yes, I've become a savta.

By this time, if I'm lucky, it is about 11 a.m. Now I rush to the bank, the shops, the market, etc. Fill the car with gas, get more credit in my E-Z Park device, in short, do everything else. And, not forget to arrange for some lunch to take to work. The life of a diabetic is obsessed with food; you can't skip meals or even delay them much or there will be an attack of hypoglycemia.

At 2 p.m. I'm at work. It isn't physically demanding work, in the main, but the pressure is steady and constant. Every woman who comes to the Women's Health Center I work for wants instant attention. I give instruction about injections, or the injections themselves, to women undergoing fertility treatment; do regular antenatal checks on women who have appointments with one of our high-risk specialists as well as give instruction to those diagnosed with gestational diabetes on how to check their blood sugar properly; and handle all those women who come to the walk-in "emergency" part of the clinic. (Rarely are these women actual emergencies, but nearly all of them are anxious and do not want to wait in line for the doctor. Some are downright crazy; some are physically aggressive)

When I get home at 7:30 p.m., my husband wants pampering and by the time I fix him a meal (we had an agreement that he'd eat his main meal during his working day, but he has long ago forgotten that), and my own, I fall into bed at about 11 p.m., having made the mess I'll have to clean up tomorrow. Let's not talk about laundry.

In between all this, I read my emails and a lot of internet journals and blogs. Often I say to myself, that I simply must reply to this or that article -- but never get around to it, and events usually overtake me long before I have the time to compose anything. Right now I badly need to revise my blogosphere list, as well as post links to my favorite commentators and news analyses. Ah well, I'll get to it when I retire, I say, much as Scarlett would think "tomorrow is another day". The only problem with this is that, although legally I reach retirement age in October, I doubt that, for financial reasons, I can stop working then.

I belong to a number of internet lists. Some are literary, dealing with the works of Dorothy Dunnett and Diana Gabaldon. The Dunnett lists have sub-lists for discussion of other topics, notably politics, and the Compuserve Writers' Forum actually is involved with much more than Diana's writing. I've made, over the years, some great friends on these lists; in 2000 I got to meet other Dunnettophiles in a Gathering in Edinburgh; next time I'm in NYC to visit my son I hope to meet some Gabaldonians.

My other interests include midwifery: two notable blogs are At Your Cervix and Navelgazing Midwife, although I find myself philosophically at odds with both, more or less. These bloggers probably have reservations about me, too. I can only point to my 40 years of experience in the field in defense. I also read some medical blogs written by both American and British doctors --it makes me sad to read what the Brits have to say about the NHS. When I was part of it in the mid-70s there was a lot of grousing about excessive politicization, but in Cambridge at least, it worked well, and there's nothing wrong with the concept.

The first internet list I ever belonged to (and still do) is Tachlis, which is a list devoted to giving practical answers to questions about all aspects of aliyah. "I'm coming to live in Israel in 4 years --should I bring my pressure cooker?" is one of the more meshuggeneh questions asked on the list, but many posters have real concerns that the various aliyah agencies can't, or won't answer. The list is very wide ranging.

The list of online magazines I read is long, tending to political analysis, particularly about Israel, but also about US and European politics, since those issues affect us eventually. My son was particularly concerned about what I thought of Obama's speech the day before yesterday. I'll deal with that in a separate post.

And now it's back to the @#$%^&* dishes....

Somethin's Happenin' Here....

What it is ain't exactly clear...

At this point, 7 p.m. on Saturday evening in Israel, whatever I write will be overtaken by events, but America, no less than we are, should be afraid, very afraid of the domino effect caused by the popular uprisings in Tunisia, and now Egypt.

Tunisia will likely be under the thumb of Islamic radicals shortly, even though this is not what the protesters wanted, and Mubarak is finished, and Egypt is likely to turn much more fundamentalist as well.

About 40 years ago an Israeli, Rafael Patai, wrote a very good book called "The Arab Mind" in which he noted the degree to which there was an almost total disconnect between the educated and uneducated classes in the Arab world, particularly in Egypt. The educated emulated Western culture, felt considerable shame for the "primitive" fellah, were usually less fanatic and more secular. The peasantry, however, which constitutes the vast majority of the population, saw the educated and wealthier classes as something not quite "Egyptian", something alien. Whoever comes out on top now, one of the first things they will do, once the looting stops, is to close as many Western-style institutions as they can. Incidentally, that will destroy one of Egypt's main sources of income, the tourist industry. Moslem Brotherhood terrorists have already targeted foreign, "decadent" tourists repeatedly. One can only hope that, in the name of Islam, Egypt's ancient treasures won't be damaged as being "idolatrous". Certainly the 10% of Egyptians who are Coptic Christians have reason to be very fearful for their very lives in a Islamic Egypt.

We, of course, are similarly worried. Although the peace treaty signed with Sadat has never actually been a peace treaty -- much more an agreement of non-belligerence, as Egyptians cannot visit Israel nor has there ever been any common business ventures between Israel and Egypt [indeed, the flow of money has been only one way, with Israelis visiting Egypt] and in fact there is rampant, vicious, and government-sponsored anti-Semitism in Egypt -- any change of government in Egypt brings with it a possible abrogation of that treaty. In the case of an Islamic state, it will be almost a certainty. [That's why, when all Israel was in ecstasy over the end of the formal state of war Egypt claimed to be in with Israel, I was opposed to the treaty, back in 1977-78. I was sure it would not survive Sadat. In that I was wrong, because when Mubarak took over after Sadat's assassination, he endorsed it. But I was sure -- am sure -- that the treaty would not last after the Mubarak era]

What is happening in the Middle East is that the traditional fault line between Shi'a and Sunni is reasserting itself. There is huge poverty and corruption in both populations, in all the countries from Turkey to North Africa. The simple folks see Islam as the solution, not the cause, because they are told so, from the mosques. And they are ignorant enough to believe the demagogues who will find a scapegoat for their own inability to give the people what they want. Israel sits, as a kind of mini-America in their midst like a bone in the throat. Now that Obama has shown, in his speech endorsing Mubarak, that he's not only weak but stupid, and that the Americans, fleeing Iraq, aren't to be feared anymore, animosities that are nearly a millennium old are reviving.

Israel is like a pimple, not a cancer. If you are Shi'a, the cancer is any Muslim not Shi'a. If you are Sunni, the cancer comes from certain heretical views held by the Shi'ites. And so on. And, it must be remembered that the Middle East is far from homogenous ethnically. Those who revolted in Tunisia are Berbers; Lebanon is a patchwork of ethnic groups, the Turks are yet another distinct group, as are the Syrians and the Iranians. The modern Egyptian is only marginally racially related to the Egyptian of the Pharaonic period [the most pure are in the remotest villages that never were touched by the Hellenistic or later periods], and the so-called Palestinians are a really mongrel people, with more than twenty distinct ethnic groups participating in their composition, from as far away as the Sudan and the Balkans. The only true Arabs are the Saudis. All are linked by Arabic [it is forbidden to translate the Koran so every child learns enough Arabic to understand it] but Arabic is not the mother tongue of Turks, Tunisians, Iranians, Iraqis, or Kurds, who have very unique cultures.

There's not a lot we can do but sit quietly at present, but like a pimple which constantly reminds you of its existence by pain, needs to be squeezed for relief, and ultimately will be. Watch and see how Iran re-directs its venom from Israel to Sunni nations who attempt to thwart its march toward hegemony of the northern part of the Levant. Watch and see how a resurgent Islamic Egypt and North Africa try to delegitimize those countries with large Shi'a populations and governments, like Lebanon and Iran.

And in the midst of it all, like a tiny amount of flavoring for a cake, sits Al Qaeda, ready to "purify" all Islam in its crusade to conquer the entire Infidel world for the True Faith.

It will take a while for all this ferment to have concrete effects on the US; but it will come, because the adherents of Islam aren't "politically correct" and do not believe in tolerance. But it will come. Welcome to the medieval world of resurgent Islam at the end of the Crusades.

[to be continued, as things, in the words of Howard Cosell, "eventuate".

Kay, Lamb, Cronin, and Howatch

Sounds like either a legal firm or an advertising agency !

Well, this is really about four authors I'm currently reading [or re-reading, as the case may be], and the similarities between some of them.

Harold Lamb is a big favorite of mine, although his is not a common name in literature these days. He began in the era of pulp fiction, back in the '20s and '30s, writing for Adventure magazine, with his tales of Central Asia, especially those about Klit the Zaporovian Cossack, set in the beginning of the 17th century, and progressed to non-fiction, in particular chronicling the Mongol invasions of the 13th century and their impact on the countries they conquered. March of the Barbarians was one of the first books I read --oh, I guess I was 10 or so --from my father's library, and its influence was immense. Not only did Lamb recount the history, he wrote with great insight of all the cultures of the area, and how so much history is dependent on population migrations. Reading his books [he also wrote a history of the Crusades, and fictionalized biographies of numerous individuals of the period that interested him, such as Sulieman the Magnificent, Omar Khayyam, and Tamerlane, as well as Genghis Khan] was like reading novels. His pulp stories, often of novella length, are now available for Kindle; and I just splurged [mea culpa, mea maxima culpa] $40 for a second-hand first edition of "The Earth Shakers", which is a combination of "March of the Barbarians" and "Tamerlane". His biographies of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane are also available in audiobook form [read by Charlton Griffin] from Audible.com. I'm sorry he's mostly out of print these days; I think he'd have quite a following if reprinted.

When talking about exotic places and times, I've got to admit that, for a long time, I avoided reading anything by Guy Gavriel Kay, because, in general, I'm not a fan of the fantasy genre. Well-written, and plotted SF I enjoyed throughout my childhood because my Dad was also a fan, and I got to read his copies of Astounding/Analog Science Fiction magazine when he'd finished [one of the most memorable stories was a serial called "Dune", for example, which has become a classic] but by my teens, and the Apollo missions, technology seemed to have caught up, more or less, with the imaginations of SF writers [except that no one predicted the PC] and I no longer found the genre so interesting. Fantasy often was a bit too twee for me.

However, the customer reviews on Audible.com for Kay's latest, "Under Heaven" were good, and I like Simon Vance as a narrator, so I thought I'd chance it, and now I'm a fervent fan of his. It helps, of course, that the story takes place in an analogue of China and Mongolia several hundred years before the rise of the Mongols, an area and time that already interested me. I just downloaded the two books of the Sarantine Mosaic for my Kindle, and have "The Lions of Al-Rassam" on order [why Amazon, when it begins to Kindlize an author, don't do Kindle editions of ALL his major books, I don't understand, especially if they are a series]. Kay seems to have started out writing much more fantasy into his novels at the outset of his career, and with each book there is less of it, which is fine by me. I'm not sure yet whether I'll attempt "Tigana" or the Fionavar Tapestry novels. When I read the word "magic", I get a little uneasy [although I did like Marion Zimmer Bradley's "Mists of Avalon" and "The Firebrand" very much. The sequels and prequels to "Mist" were ghastly, IMO].

And this brings me to Susan Howatch's "historical novels": "Wheel of Fortune", "Penmarric", "Cashelmara", "The Rich are Different", and "Sins of the Fathers", in which she retells actual periods of history by placing the main players [renamed, of course], in other periods. Kay creates analogues --alternate universes, if you will, while Howatch shows how history can be "transferred" to another period as fiction. Both are interesting ideas, and are well done, and rather different than standard historical fiction. Very satisfying.

A.J. Cronin is a different kettle of fish entirely. The only real points of similarity are that, like Lamb, he is largely forgotten these days, and like Howatch, he fictionalized real events in several of his novels, most notably in "The Stars Look Down". However, I find his characters to be honestly written, and persuasive. I've known persons like the protagonists of "The Judas Tree", and "Hatter's Castle". His delineations of the working class -- Cronin was an unabashed social activist --at the beginning of the 20th century ring true. The Second World War and the Welfare State largely ended that kind of subculture. Indeed, "The Citadel" was supposed to have been a big influence in starting the NHS. Cronin manages to say a lot with relatively few words. Recently a number of his books have been made available on Audible, but I think they were recorded in the early days of audiobook production. The quality of the recording of "The Citadel" is abysmal -- the narrator sounds like he's at the bottom of a well -- but "The Stars Look Down" is well narrated [but one does hear pages turning and the occasional throat-clearing], and so is "The Judas Tree". It can be a little difficult at times to understand the dialect in "Stars", the narrator is accurate almost to the point of incomprehensibility [unless you're from Yorkshire, I guess] but I prefer that to having the reader give everyone a BBC accent. I think Cronin, who, like Lamb, wound up in Hollywood writing screenplays, should be re-discovered. He's still got a lot to say.

Hope this provides a bit of thought for those "I haven't got anything to read" moments. It might also excuse the thin blogging, recently.

Vindicated, Unfortunately!

I wrote this on November 8th, 2008. Alas, the midterms have turned out as I predicted. Quite a few other things have come to pass as I expected as well.

Just give me a gaudy turban and a crystal ball....

Now, what will happen in 2012? I'll let you know as soon as my demons inform me, but before I start with the pentacles and incantations, I want to let the election dust settle a bit

The Franchising of Jamie Fraser

Once upon a time, there was a book called Outlander. It spawned Dragonfly in Amber, and Voyager, and so on, until, in the fullness of time, there are seven books in the series, with an 8th in the works. Somewhere along the line, the author, Diana Gabaldon, began writing a number of novels and short stories featuring an 18th century nobleman, Lord John Grey, who is a career military man and diplomat, homosexual, and given to solving mysteries. These books are spin-offs of the Outlander saga -- he first figures in DIA as a 16 year old, and he reappears occasionally in the later books, becoming a major character in the most recent, An Echo in the Bone. Although she occasionally writes something contemporary, Gabaldon, most of the time, sticks with the universe she began to create in Outlander. Each book has some characters die or disappear, each book introduces new ones, so that the cast of characters has become quite large in the two decades that "Gabaldonia" is in existence.



Diana Gabaldon is a lush writer, lavish in description [all carefully researched], and full of small details. In fact, it is this that gives credibility to an otherwise fantastic conception: that time travel exists, and that a British nurse, at the end of WWII, can be transported to Scotland just before the Rising of 1745.



She has been immensely successful: about 17 million books in print so far, with a large fan following, several internet groups who discuss her books endlessly, and she herself is involved with a Compuserve writers' forum and not infrequently meets her fans at publicity events, where she talks and signs books. I've corresponded with her, and got an mention in the Acknowledgments in "Echo" for help with information concerning how to do a breech delivery. She seems a very nice person.



She is also a very intelligent one, and a good businesswoman. Her background is not history, but marine biology, and prior to writing Outlander, was a university lecturer. It's obvious she's good at multitasking; when she was still in academia, as well as raising three children, she had worked for Disney, writing comics, and was beginning her first novel.



Now Ms. Gabaldon seems to have been searching for new horizons with her tale of Jamie Fraser and Claire Randall. There's a new CD called "Outlander: the Musical" and a graphic novel, which is supposed to be the first part of Outlander told from a different viewpoint. What comes next? A Hollywood company has an option on Outlander, for a film, but it's all very vague at this time, and it has been hinted that perhaps a TV miniseries might at some point be considered. What's next? A line of men's colognes and/or women's perfumes named for Jamie and Claire?



The big initial problem Outlander had was of classification. It's not a book one can describe in 30 seconds or less. It is a historical novel with overtones of fantasy [the time travel aspect]. It's an adventure story -- there's plenty of action, and in fact, a not inconsiderable number of men find the saga interesting. And it definitely has a major love story, with explicit scenes that would qualify for an X rating. By default, although it radically departs from the standard formula for the genre, it was usually found on "Romance" shelves in bookstores, despite Ms. Gabaldon's crusade to move it. "Simply call it fiction", she has said. In many ways, it is similar in genre to Clavell's "Shogun" [Blackthorne discovers an unknown civilization, not through time travel, but through journeying to a virtually unknown destination, 17th century Japan, and is transformed by it].



No one would claim Outlander to be high class literature. Yet the decision to turn Outlander into a musical, and then into a graphic novel do not seem to help it achieve recognition that it is anything more than an upwardly mobile bodice ripper. Both the musical and the graphic novel will bring in scads more readers, undoubtedly. But will it also cheapen the original product and turn what should be a serious novelistic ouvre into fluff?


I think it will. I will frankly admit that I can't listen to the CD musical. I've tried, but find it saccharine and sentimental, but I'm not a big musical fan anyway. Just think about Anna Karenina as a musical, or, a better comparison, James Clavell's Shogun as a musical with Dutch sailors in chorus lines or humming samurai in the background while Blackthorne and Mariko sing a love duet. Sort of puts you off your breakfast, doesn't it?



The graphic novel is worse. It absolutely bastardizes the original work, reducing it almost to parody. An 800-odd page book is reduced to 184 pages [actually a bit less as the chapters are divided by title pages]. No one in the book resembles my mental image as based on the written descriptions in the novel itself, and there is enough variation in the artist's renderings that at times one can't even recognize a character who was in a different panel on the same page. In more than one drawing, Jamie looks as if he has mumps. Claire is reduced to a caricature [and is almost a twin of Jamie's sister] Murtagh bears a marked resemblance to the actor Sean Bean. But, to be fair, since I have no experience with graphic novels, it might be that the art work is above average in this book. If so, then the artistic level of graphic novels as a whole must be pretty abysmal.



In order to make fans feel that they are getting full value, a completely extraneous storyline, with a new character, is introduced, for what purpose I really can't tell. The backstory of Claire's particular circumstances, and even why she came to the stone circle through which she traveled back in time, is left out. This must make it a bit difficult for those who haven't read Outlander first. There is so little text that I think, were I asked to make an outline, chapter by chapter, of the original novel, I'd have more text than we have in the graphic version, and most of it is verbatim quotes of snatches of dialogue from the book. This is a book, in short, for the functionally illiterate, who would never dream of actually sitting down and reading a big, thick book. I was always sure it would sell very well -- and the NY Times has had it as #1 for two weeks now. In order to "hook" more readers into buying the other books, Amazon has been selling Outlander for $0.00 for about the same time, undoubtedly hoping that the graphic novel readers would decide they wanted to go for the hard-core stuff after reading the "trailer" that is the graphic novel.



So, as a business decision, the graphic novel seems a good idea. Certainly most of the fans are cooing over it. [So far Amazon hasn't posted any comments by anyone who hasn't already read some of the series, so it is difficult to gauge how the non-Gabaldonophiles are reacting.] Ditto the musical. Both will spread the story of Jamie and Claire to a larger audience. But what will it do to Ms. Gabaldon's literary reputation?

The English Defence League

Reading this article, I was reminded of those wonderful books by Leo Rosten, "The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N" and "The Return of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N", which are hilarious tales of a WASP teacher in an evening "Americanization school" in the 1930s, which were filled with immigrants from just about everywhere, who were all avid to become "real" Americans. These classes were much more than English lessons, they were about civics and culture too, and immigrants flocked to them, usually after a working day that could be 12 hours long.

Mr. Parkhill ["Mr. Pockhill"] is not at all apologetic for his cultural origins. Neither are his students, for theirs. They don't perceive learning a new culture to denigrate their old one, just that they WANT to be able to live "as Americans" in the wider American culture. They want to show their gratefulness for the opportunity to escape poverty by embracing new values in addition to their old ones. At home, the Italians undoubtedly still "eat Italian" while the Eastern European Jews keep kosher; Madame Olga Trasha goes to a Russian Orthodox church, but not one of this group would dream of trying to demand that all restaurants be kosher, or Italian, or all churches Russian Orthodox.

Yet what we see, over and over again, is that Muslim immigration demands that the host country conform to their requirements, and there is no feeling of being beholden to the host country at all for improved health, work, social conditions. They see no reason why non-Muslims cannot comply with their religious and cultural outlooks. They have provoked the backlash that has created the EDL, and while I deplore any violence, I have to side with those, in Britain and the US who think immigrants should adapt to the host country, or return to where they came, and I'm not apologetic, either.

Chelm, Israel

The newest idiocy of the religious parties:

Every year, the date for changing clocks back and forth in the autumn and spring is determined by the Orthodox/ultra-Orthodox parties in the Knesset to suit what they perceive as important religious realities. The date for the autumn change, to "winter" time, is set for just before Yom Kippur, in the quaint belief that it makes for a shorter fast.

Of course, it doesn't. The fast is 25 hours long no matter what time you're on. But on daylight saving, or "summer" time as it is called here, one can sleep through a bit more of the fast following the prayers in the evening, and before they begin again the next morning. In fact, because Tel Aviv and Miami are on roughly the same latitude, the difference between summer and winter time only changes Shabbat and holiday times by about an hour during the year, unlike the UK, for example, which because it is so far north, can bring Shabbat in at 3 p.m. in the winter and not end until 11 p.m. in the summer.

This year the High Holidays come unusually early. Yom Kippur begins on the evening of the 17th of September, so the clocks are due to go back a day or two before. There has been a loud outcry from the general public [including quite a few religious]. It's still summer, really. The temperature is hovering in the high 80s, the sky is cloudless, and will be for a couple of months yet. Besides, nearly all the countries which use a daylight savings system wait until the end of October to change back, and that causes a lot of problems with companies which need to be in frequent communication with firms overseas. But no, the religious element in the Knesset is standing firm!

Dalia Itzik, an MK, demanded that the head of the haredi bloc, Eli Yishai [Shas] come up with an "innovative solution" to the problem. After some thought, he thought he'd found a way out. Israel will still move to winter time just before Yom Kippur, but then return to summer time until the end of October, to remain in sync with the rest of the world! In other words, make an already unpalatable situation even more complicated, not to mention ridiculous.

Words fail me. As of this writing, his ingenious plan has been rejected, and we're due to spend about 6 weeks on different time from everyone else.

I haven't posted a lot recently; the cruise to Norway, and pressures of work, and family, have been pretty stiff, but I hope to remedy that soon.

Here's wishing everyone who reads Antigonos' Annals a healthy, happy, prosperous New Year.

גמר חטימה טובה לשנה של בריות ,פרנסה,ואושר

A Distinction without a Difference

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Angelo Lopez The Tri-City Voice Sep 8, 2010 EditorialCartoonists.com

To Jews, what Christians find objectionable in Muslims and what Muslims find objectionable in Christians is much of a sameness. Both are proselytizing religions which deeply resent the other's proselytization. But then, it is said, isn't it, that that which you dislike in others is that part of yourself with which you are uncomfortable. From the sidelines, as Jews are, in this fight, it is amusing how both sides don't realize this.