Forgive Us Our Trespasses

Stand-up comedian George Carlin’s humour sometimes relied on simply asking slanted questions. A sample: “Why do they lock gas station bathrooms? Are they afraid someone will clean them?” Questions that prodded your imagination.

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You picture a clean-up crew attired like Ninja Warriors staging a 3:00 a.m. break-in at a filthy gas station bathroom on Route 66 and stealing away before dawn, leaving behind a pristine, gleaming “restroom facility” deserving of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Then: At 9 a.m., Frank, the garage mechanic, wanders in to relieve his ballooning bladder (all that java), takes one look around, and in a state of near-panic backs out into parking lot. “What the hell !” he exclaims. His eyes narrow into tiny slits. Might this have any connection to stories of midnight cattle mutilations over in the next county? Occasionally, life will imitate screwball comedy. Take Jozef Mlot-Mroz, a zany, anti-Semitic gadfly well-known to local authorities in Salem, Massachusetts, back in the 1980s. He had made a habit of burning Israeli flags in downtown Salem as a form of protest. When a local synagogue was desecrated by vandals in the late summer of 1989, they left behind anti-Semitic graffiti. Shortly after, Jozef Mlot-Mroz was arrested for breaking into the house of worship on a Saturday night, and caught industriously trying to paint over the ugly graffiti. He said he feared the vandalism would create a false impression of anti-Semitic harassment in the community and, hence, had sought to deflect such an outcome. He also probably resented the sympathy Salem’s Jewish would receive as a result of this despicable act of desecration. On the drive home from the University of Calgary on Saturday night, after attending the lecture by Gideon Levy, a journalist with the Israeli daily Haaretz, I got to thinking how Mlot-Mroz’s madness was not without some method. The university lecture hall had been half-full, and the crowd in attendance richly diverse in terms of race and age and outlook; their mood respectful and attentive. It was a civil atmosphere. Gideon Levy’s an excellent speaker, but his message was not encouraging: A message already carried in Time’s September 13th issue which the magazine headlined, “Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace.” The Time cover story described an Israeli culture of assertive hedonism as the motive force in Jewish society. As for the plight of the stateless Palestinians, still living under occupation after several decades, they were a minor concern, almost an afterthought. According to Levy, Israelis suffer from a collective narcissism that enables them to remain impervious to outside criticism, and yet still feel good about themselves, still feel superior to their detractors. Not a constructive mindset for the multilateral approach to solving those many festering, land-dispute issues; indeed, he averred, the long-heralded, diplomatic, two-state solution was in its twilight. Levy is an inspired story teller. He shared with his audience members the moving tale of a pregnant Bedouin woman and the ordeal she and her West Bank family endured as they tried desperately to get her to a hospital as she came due. Alas, they were denied access at all Israeli-manned checkpoints. Until the woman, at last, gave birth in the back seat of the car; and, afterwards, had to walk several kilometers in a torrential downpour through the back country to bring her baby to a care facility. The newborn, in any case, was d.o.a. This story, said Levy, would elicit no significant degree of empathy among his wary and insular co-religionists, after it appeared in the Israeli press. But it was the story of an experience Levy had in a shantytown in Gaza that brought the old crank, Jozef Mlot-Mroz, to mind. In his reportage for Haaretz, Levy had, until 2006, routinely gone into Gaza to report on conditions there. When solicited by broadcast journalists for a major French TV network for the right to accompany and film him on one of his trips, he agreed. With the camera rolling, Levy described his sorrow on finding an elderly Palestinian woman, a paralytic, sheltering inside a tumbledown dwelling being cared for by her daughter, her sole caregiver, in circumstances of abject penury. Later, when he found the home turned to rubble by an IDF missile, the carnage inside moved Levy to express deep shame for being an Israeli. Some time after, as the broadcast date approached, Levy told of taking a phone call from Paris, from one of the TV journalists who shadowed him in Gaza. The man expressed deep regret for having to inform him that his bosses had decided to edit out his profession of shame at being Israeli, sensing that French audiences mightn’t be ready yet for this kind of emotive confession, fearing it might prejudice them against the Jewish state. The decision shared a little of the logic that moved the Salem man, a slightly demented, chronic Israeli flag-burner to break into a synagogue with a bucket of paint to whitewash Jew-baiting graffiti that had the potential to elicit gentile empathy for Jews. It, too, was all about the manipulation of sympathy, albeit in a different direction. Homeward bound inside my Subaru station wagon, the air was vibrant with the noble music of a Beethoven composition, the Quartet in B flat major, opus 133. I reflected that in his own day Beethoven had also withheld sharing some of his quartets with the public, feeling that Viennese audiences mightn’t be ready yet for the somber colour of the works. Orest Slepokura is a retired schoolteacher, after 30-odd years spent teaching, much of that in Alberta; but also in and around Montreal, as well as in a Native community on James Bay, over in London, England, and Toulon, France. A lifelong reader, Orest continues using much of my time reading books, journals, and newspapers.

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