While I agree with many points in the Counterpunch post, the argument that by Palestine, Helen didn't mean all of Israel seems kind of silly.
If she had meant it only to refer to the territories annexed after the 1967 war, why didn't she suggest that the Jews in so-defined Palestine relocate to, say, Tel Aviv, instead of skedaddling to Poland, Germany, etc.?
This is the actual blog of an actual Buddhist. As such, it does not support harming sentient beings, while it does support generating inconceivable compassion toward all sentient beings without exception including Dick Cheney.
2L4O
N.B.
This blog frequently and deliberately uses vile sexist language in order more clearly to demonstrate its ubiquity and unacceptability, so don't get your panties in a twist about it, sweeties. ;)
Card-carrying buddhist. Recovered existentialist. Lifelong leftier-than-thou Democrat. Two baby steps and one umbrella step to the immediate right of Arthur Silber. (That's how left, mm-kay?) Humorless lipstick feminist. Clintonista Obamist. Clinician treating adults and children with complex PTSD.
Card-carrying buddhist is, in fact, a card-carrying buddhist. She can show you her card. Or she could if she wanted to.
Card-carrying buddhist thinks her relationship with the buddhadharma is well expressed by a line from "Air America," the movie, where Mel Gibson's character says, "I said I was Buddhist, I never said I was a good Buddhist."
CCB is one of the few/the proud graduates of a tiny experimental college at Planting Fields, a bastion of liberalism that attracted a number of interesting persons.
Planting Field's lifespan was short--after a mere 3 years, it was shut down in disgrace by the State of New York for being unacceptably insane. Its demise made the front page of the New York Times. Its president was Harris Wofford who later became a Senator and then later un-became one. Planting Fields Experimental College's wild and crazyrabid leftwingery drove once uber-liberal-professor Michael Novak into becoming a conservative Republican. Oh well.
CCB has an MFA in creative writing (poetry/playwriting) from SLC, which she liked a lot, and which was also filled with interesting people. Two of her friends from there, have, like Michael Novak, alas gone over to the Dark Side. One of them is/was a talking head. CCB can't believe that someone she invited to her wedding says stuff like that on TV. Well, at least with the decline of Bushist fascism he's not on so much any more.
She is the author of, among other things, a play called "Sacco and Vanzetti Meet Julius and Ethel Rosenberg!! (or, Patrick Henry in Hell)" which she started at SLC and which ran Off-Off Broadway, brilliantly directed by William Finley, and which her late lamented theater professor and LaMaMa Experimental Theater Club (with John Braswell) director Wilford Leach liked.
One of its highlights, in CCB's opinion, is a four-part chorale in the style of Bach by Schreier-Roth & Associates entitled "Death to The Fascist Insect That Preys On the Life of The People" a phrase CCB ripped off from the Symbionese Liberation Army because really why not.
It features an actual stripper stripping while reciting the entire Bill of Rights, Marilyn Monroe ironing shirts for Patrick Henry, Che Guevara seducing William Randolph Heart's Mistress, the Empress Wu ranting about Albigensians, Bill and Emily Harris tap-dancing with Jonathan Livingston Seagull, not to mention Sacco and Vanzetti and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg singing and dancing their hearts out.
TMI? Don't read so far down on the page, dude.
CCB liked Wilford, and misses him (and she misses Jane Cooper, too). She liked and misses Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, who she met when she was working at the Academy of American Poets, after she sent out a thousand fliers with his name mis-spelled. He is her favorite poet.
CCB still writes plays, but no longer writes poetry; she enjoyed a brief but pleasant career writing faux-Georgette Heyer Regency novels.
She spent a decade in Manhattan doing Off-Off Broadway experimental theater while also doing this and that (high-priced fecal-homogenizer, temp secretary at CBS News, shelver of books, medical research editor, failed waitress) then unaccountably moved to Kathmandu, Nepal where she lived for the next ten years-ish.
In monsoony Kathmandu she taught English as a Second Language at the American English Language Institute and studied Nepali and Tibetan at Tribhuvan University.
She met Mr. NBFH in KDU while choreographing a charity fashion show for AWON, the American Women of Nepal; she served a term as its Youth Committee Chair, organizing Halloween, Christmas and parties at Phora Durbar, and led a pack of British Brownie Guides for a year because no one else wanted to. An American by nationality, CCB was unusually elected to the School Board of The British Primary School, and attended lots of meetings.
She was in Nepal during the Revolution of 1990.
CCB and family moved to New England in 1993. She ruined her knees doing restraints at a residential school for emotionally and behaviorally-challenged youth (the only job she could get). She went back for a second master's degree, becoming on the way a state-certified rape crisis/domestic violence counselor.
CCB is now a licensed clinician specializing in complex PTSD/DESNOS. She sees adults and children.
She has a family, a flower-oriented garden, and a dog. She likes to tango.
2 comments:
While I agree with many points in the Counterpunch post, the argument that by Palestine, Helen didn't mean all of Israel seems kind of silly.
If she had meant it only to refer to the territories annexed after the 1967 war, why didn't she suggest that the Jews in so-defined Palestine relocate to, say, Tel Aviv, instead of skedaddling to Poland, Germany, etc.?
Vast: Either way, Ms. Thomas' comments were perfectly legitimate. The furor over them reflect the racism against indigenous peoples in our society.
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