ELI WEISEL: Plight of a Gentle Jew

When Eli Weisel died on July 2, it was astonishing to discover he lived to be 87-years-old.  By all probability, he should have been dead in 1944.  I also felt some shame as I had not read or thought about the author and holocaust survivor in quite a few years.  I had read Night when I was in college and was jarred by almost every sentence in the memoir.  In this book barely more than 100 pages long, Weisel speaks about his recollections of Auschwitz.  Much more personally, he speaks about the death of his mother and sister and, at greater length, the murder of his father that he was present to witness.

Night is not merely a depiction of the horrors or Auschwitz.  Weisel devotes much of the book towards how his experienced impacted his religious beliefs.  Some of the most moving pages of Night take place in the years before Weisel even knew Auschwitz existed.  During his early teenage years, Weisel sought instruction on the Cabal, and was mentored by an eccentric teacher who prayed chiefly in order to learn how to pray.  Weisel sought such instruction because – deeply sensitive as he was – he knew that the organized Jewish faith was not enough to satisfy his mystical cravings.  

It was this same teacher, by the way, who was first to warn the small community about the manner in which Jews were treated in Nazi-occupied territory.  A firsthand observer of a slaughter of Jews at the hands of the Nazis, Weisel’s teacher faced mockery in his community who thought he was mad.  No one knew how truthfully he spoke until the trains entered Auschwitz. And it was what Weisel saw at Auschwitz that made him declare: “Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.  Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself.  Never.”

While struggling with my own religious beliefs during my college years, this was in great deal a pose to demonstrate my intellectual independence.  Weisel struggled because of his inability to come to terms with what he saw in the Nazi concentration camps.  If one ended with what Weisel communicated in Night, you would assume Weisel no longer believed in God.  Yet whatever happened in the intervening years, Weisel later stated that belief in God was a continual necessity for otherwise one would cease to exist.

I do not feel I am in the position to question anyone who had seen such things regarding his inability to believe in God, nor his finding religious significance in what he had seen.  So I spent years trying to reconcile the Weisel making his statement about the death of God and his later statements about his belief.

Weisel did engage in political controversy long after he became famous as a writer.  He was a strong advocate of Israel and thought such a nation entirely necessary because of the manner that so many countries abandoned the Jews before and during World War II.  He begged President Ronald Reagan to not visit the Bitburg cemetery in 1985 because buried there were members of the SS.   Reagan did visit the cemetery after making the statement that the Nazi officers buried there were also victims.  However, Reagan did change his itinerary by also visiting the Bergen-Belsen concentration site.  Weisel was also firmly opposed to providing Iran any sort of opportunity to develop nuclear devices.

Disagreeing with Weisel over such issues proves almost as difficult as disagreeing with him over his statements about religious beliefs.  The problem in confronting Weisel is that you had in one man a holocaust survivor plagued by guilt, an author and intellectual, whose ideas sometimes appeared to be contradictory, and a decent man who was a truly deserving award winner of the Nobel Prize.

With his passing, we are coming towards the end of holocaust survivors who can speak about their experiences.  Sadly, such lessons do not appear adequately learned by most of us, and we may be in danger of raising a new generation who thinks little more about the lessons of the holocaust than they will about the Spanish Inquisition – which they already probably know little to nothing about.

I wish I had come across Night in some other setting than a college class.  It is a book that more individuals should seek to read on their own in the privacy of their homes where the lessons can be truly absorbed.

July 31, 2016

© Robert S. Miller 2016

MUHAMMAD ALI: 1944-2016

If he didn’t rule boxing, Muhammad Ali at least dominated the conversation regarding the sport for twenty years.  When it came to conversation, other fighters had little else to say.  As great as his boxing skills were, we won’t remember him for this alone.  What made him probably the most famous boxer in history was the manner in which he inserted himself into popular culture through his boasting, his conversion to Islam, the changing of his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali, and his refusal of induction to the Vietnam draft.

He called himself the greatest, but in later years he admitted that he really didn’t mean it.  Ali actually picked this gimmick up from watching the professional wrestler, Gorgeous George.  The highlights of his career included his defeating Sonny Liston and later George Foreman – both holders of the heavyweight championship at the time of these fights and viewed as being almost invincible.  Ali actually defeated Liston twice, but the second fight ended so controversially that it’s difficult to know what credit Ali should receive.  But from winning the gold medal in the 1960 Olympics to revenging his defeat against Leon Spinks in 1978, there were many moments of brilliance during his fighting career.

Ali knocked out Archie Moore in four rounds.  He twice defeated former champion, Floyd Patterson.  Even late in his career he managed to outbox Ernie Shavers, one of the hardest punchers in heavyweight history.  And no one will ever forget the three fights he had with Joe Frazier – the last in Manila and probably one of the greatest fights of the 20^th Century.

Yet with his dazzling speed and his remarkable ability to slip punches thrown at his face, we forget that he had his awkward moments in the ring.  Henry Cooper knocked the then 21-year-old Cassius Clay down, and that fight may very well have ended in a knockout if not for the delay tactics of Ali’s corner man, Angelo Dundee.  Ali did have trouble with a number of lesser fighters like Oscar Bonavena, Ron Lyle and Jimmy Young.  And while he fought both Ken Norton and Joe Frazier three times, it’s arguable that both of these opponents actually got the better of Ali overall in these fights.

It’s obvious now that Ali’s greatest mistake was staying around the boxing ring too long.  Like Jim Jeffries and Joe Louis, he had to see if he could make that one last comeback against a superior foe.  Larry Holmes, whose boxing skills were probably as great as Ali’s when Ali was in his prime, won by TKO over Ali in ten rounds, and it was a fight that many of us now wish had never happened.  This would probably include Holmes who was in tears after the fight for inflicting so much damage upon his hero.  (Holmes went on to make a similar mistake when he attempted a comeback fight against Mike Tyson.)  Ali still did not learn his lesson and tried to fight one more time in a losing effort to a boxer named Trevor Berbick.

We will never know how much more there would be to say about Ali’s boxing career if he had not lost three years of his boxing career due to his refusal to serve as a soldier.  The boxing world stripped Ali of his championship.  He then had to wait for the U.S. Supreme Court to unanimously rule that he was certifiably a conscientious objector.  Only then could he again fight.  Whatever else we can say about Ali’s judgment, he at least did not flee the country and he risked jail time rather than serve in what he called an unjust war. Ali stated in his own defense: “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?”

Yet just like during his boxing career, we forget that Ali was not always the perfect public personality.  In fact, at times the monologues could be grating and extremely self-righteous.  Ali seemed most comfortable when he was the center of attention, and only did he during his later years seem to get past his own narcissism.

Ali said many unflattering things about his greatest rival, Joe Frazier.  Ali went so far as to call Frazier an “Uncle Tom” – a slight that is almost unforgivable considering where Frazier came from.  Ali directed this remark at a fighter who came up in much worse circumstances than Ali ever did.  Frazier, the son of a sharecropper, grew up in poverty.  Frazier gave Ali money during the time Ali could not fight.  When defeating Ali for the first time in his professional career, Frazier earned the victory and deserved respect.

Time tends to make us forget.  I recall seeing Ali on the television screen for almost as long as I have been alive.  As kids, we debated about whom would win: Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali against almost whoever else he was fighting.  Many times we hoped Ali would come out on the losing end, but that almost never happened.

Ali outlasted his opponents and the negative press.  Many sportswriters now rate Ali as the greatest heavyweight fighter in history.  Muhammad Ali, someone with little formal education, has received honors from Presidents and other world leaders.  Ali as a fighter and as a public figure endured the punishment inflicted upon him and perhaps this is where Ali’s greatness lies.  He never felt sorry for himself, and never criticized the very sport that likely contributed to his Parkinson’s disease.  Unlike the critics of boxing, he understood that he would never have had the fame and celebrity he did without his great boxing skills.  And so he took the almost 30,000 punches to the face while participating in the sport that he loved.

In the future, we will mostly read about other great fighters in the record books.  Ali’s name will show up in a large number of history books.

June 18, 2016

© Robert S. Miller 2016

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS – Both the Good and the Bad

Most recent commentary in the United States – be it political, economic or scientific – is predictable.  There is doctrine on the left and doctrine on the right that liberals and conservatives abide by without second thoughts.  The notable exception to this predictability (in practically all areas of thought except one area where he became all too predictable) has been Christopher Hitchens.

Hitchens was all over the board concerning whatever else he believed in.  He criticized people from all sides.  Against the war in Vietnam in 1960s, he became a supporter of America’s efforts in Iraq following the 2004 invasion.   He was an avowed socialist in his youth but later flirted with libertarianism.    During his later years he spoke glowingly of capitalist innovation.  Yet even after this reversal he still somehow managed to assert that Lenin and Trotsky were great men.  Hitchens was against George W. Bush in 2000, briefly for Bush in 2004 and later became a Bush’ neutral.  God only knows where he stood on relations with Israel because his viewpoint on the matter always seemed to be in flux.  It was I guess his prerogative to later think something else, but it was also a fault.  His varied views may in part be due to his temperament, his need for attention, and his lack of intellectual discipline.

I’m not going to defend the man and suggest that he had a great mind or had his hand upon the pulse of our times.  What Christopher Hitchens did have was a certain degree of courage.  No matter how many times he changed his mind on any particular subject, I don’t doubt that he was always speaking his mind concerning what he felt at the time he spoke it. 

Religion was the one area where his views always remained consistent – and strident.  He once said that he wanted none of the promises of religion and instead seemed to prefer oblivion at the end of his life.  When Christopher Hitchens spoke regretfully how Christians are passing up the wonders of today for some obscure hope during the afterlife, I believe that he was being sincere.  Yet when he referred to religion poisoning everything around him, he was pandering to nihilists that like to loudly boast about their intellectual superiority. 

The followers of Hitchens religious theories were also the followers of Richard Dawkins.  Their admirers are non-believers that disparage religion and describe theists as a grouping of weak-minded individuals subsumed by fairy tales.  Such non-believers are usually college educated and often overstate their own IQ scores.  For the most part they’re as narrow-minded, dogmatic, humorless, disingenuous, unhappy and deluded as a member of any religion or cult.  These were the very people that Hitchens should have sought to avoid.  One can admire an honest atheist.  One can admire another person that wonders about the magic of our world and still does not see a divinity behind it.  One can’t admire a person that refuses to pause and wonder yet still belittles those that come to different conclusions than they do.

We all make mistakes.  Even Christopher Hitchens made mistakes as many of his obituaries will attest.  Hitchens claimed to be fairly well read, though he probably was guilty of a few misreadings in his lifetime.  For example, he admired the works of Dostoyevsky – a writer whose primary theme was religion and who was a defender of the Russian Orthodox Church (the church Hitchens was so happy to see Lenin overthrow).  Also, as a student of history, Hitchens seemed to miss that history lesson beginning in 1917 (or maybe even 1789) where attempts to remove religion from our lives, under whatever guise, have been no less injurious than inquisitions performed by any sect. 

We know quite a bit about Hitchens’ personal life.  We know that he admired George Orwell above all other writers.  We know that he smoked and drank too much.  We know that his mother committed suicide with her lover in Greece.  We know that he was married twice, and that for a number of years he didn’t speak to his brother (a born again Christian).  He was said to possess an extraordinary memory.  And, probably, Hitchens was not a particularly happy man. 

Hitchens publicly pronounced that he didn’t want to contemplate God or prayer from his deathbed.  This was somewhat due to his stubbornness, but it was also his own personal business.  Cancer of the esophagus is not the way any of us want to go and Hitchens had the right to deal with his impending death in any manner that he pleased.  Still, I hope the suffering was somewhat bearable for him - with or without religious faith.  

December 20, 2011

© Robert S. Miller 2011

AL DAVIS AND THE OAKLAND RAIDERS: “Just Win, Baby!”

The Pittsburgh Steelers were the dominant football team in the late 1970s, but their chief rival was on the opposite coast.  In 1975, Oakland defensive back George Atkinson delivered a blow to the Steelers’ great receiver, Lynn Swann, and in the process Swann suffered a concussion.  In 1976, Atkinson again delivered a blow to Swann in a regular season game and this caused the receiver to suffer a second concussion.  So outraged was Pittsburgh Steelers coach, Chuck Knoll, that Noll was quoted as referring to Atkinson as being part of the “criminal element” of the National Football League.  Few people doubted that Noll was referring to the Oakland Raiders overall when making his statement.  It was a statement that Noll would come to regret.  Not only was Noll fined by the NFL for making this statement, he was also sued by Atkinson for defamation.

Atkinson lost his lawsuit, but it proved to be a victory for Al Davis.  The Raiders have always been renowned as the dirtiest professional football team in the league.  However, introduced as evidence in the lawsuit were film clips showing other professional football players -including members of the Pittsburgh Steelers – taking dirty shots at their opponents.  Al Davis was allowed to put on display the hypocrisy of Noll and others like him that hurled accusations of dirty play by the Raiders while not cleaning up their own actions.

It seems ironic that Davis, who for a number of decades ran the team that produced the highest winning percentage in all of football and who for four years was the commissioner of the AFL, was disliked and considered an outsider by most of the other football owners.  It’s understandable, however, because Davis was never hesitant to take the NFL to court if they objected to any of his proposed moves.  It seemed like Davis could never decide whether he wanted to play in Oakland or Los Angeles.   Any effort to block him from moving from one city to the other resulted in an antitrust suit being filed by Davis against the league.  Davis actually openly supported the creation of the USFL, which was competing directly with the NFL. 

Davis was long time enemy and tormentor of NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle.  Rozelle probably long resented that Davis, while involved in the AFL, was aggressively scouting and recruiting players that it was taken for granted would sign with the NFL.  So successful was Davis in his pursuit of such players that the NFL finally decided to merge with the AFL rather than continue to compete against them.   Rozelle certainly must have suffered each and every time that he had to award Davis the Vince Lombardi trophy after the Raiders won the Super Bowl.  The Raiders won the Super Bowl three times while Rozelle was commissioner.

Probably the most fascinating aspect of Al Davis as an owner of a professional football franchise was the colorful characters that he introduced and/or brought to the AFL and NFL as members of the Oakland Raiders franchise.  These would have included: Darryle Lamonica, George Blanda, Gene Upshaw, Jim Otto, Willie Brown, Ted Hendricks, Ben Davidson, Fred Biletnikoff, Art Shell (coach and player), John Matuszak, Jack Tatum, Lyle Alzado, Ken Stabler, Jim Plunkett and Howie Long.  John Madden, Tom Flores and John Gruden were some of his head coaches.  Many of these players were either recruited directly by Davis or brought in after being rejected by other franchises.

Sadly, Davis was probably a victim to his own ego when he continued trying to fully control a football team while not keeping up with football trends.  The scouting techniques he had used so successfully during the 1960s through the 1990s was not conducive with the internet age.  Davis, who used to personally scout every player that he drafted to get an edge on his opponent, couldn’t understand that other owners and coaches could now effectively scout through use of a wireless connection.  And his habit of micromanaging his football team became counterproductive.  It seemed like during the last dozen or so years of his life Davis could not go a season without having to fire the Raiders’ head coach.  The Raiders could no longer claim to be the most successful team in the NFL during these last years, and much of the reason could be blamed on Al Davis.

It’s probably been overstated about how much Davis cared for his players.  Many of his players adored the miscreant, but others didn’t seem to come to such a great ending in their playing careers.  Matuszak and Alzado both had their lives cut too short – the former because of known substance abuse and the latter allegedly by steroid use.  I use the term “allegedly” here because, though Alzado claimed the brain tumor that would eventually kill him came about due to steroid use, no medical specialist has yet to give his claim any credibility.

There are few things I do admire about Al Davis.   One was that he seemed more concerned with his football team’s success on the football team that he did about any ledger statement.  The other was that he kissed up to no one and ran his team exactly like he wanted it to be run.  It’s remarkable story that he could have so much success in a league that wanted nothing to do with him or his organization.  From the day he took over as head coach and general manager of the Raiders in 1962, he put his personal mark on the team that was to be his until the date of his death almost fifty years later.  At the age of 33, he was the youngest individual to ever play these two roles.  Besides revolutionizing the scouting of players, he opened up the passing game and created what was to become known as the “west coast” offense.  Only Al Davis, someone with enough assets to run a professional sports franchise, could have been viewed as an anti-establishment outsider.  The logo of the Raiders, one of the most famous in all of football, was one that Davis created.

In one real sense Davis had a positive influence upon the game.  Davis was well ahead of his time for an owner of a football team when it came to race relations.  Davis scouted heavily for black players in the early 1960s.  Davis refused to allow the Raiders to play a preseason game in Mobile, Alabama and also refused to allow an AFL “All Star” game being played in New Orleans because of segregationist policies in both cities.  Davis was the first NFL owner to hire a black coach.  The rest of the owners were far behind Davis in these practices.

For sentimental reasons, I wish that there could be more owners of sports franchises like Al Davis.  I grow tired of a media that covers sports as if all great athletes were plaster saints.  Al Davis was at least open about his own flaws.

October 29, 2011 

© Robert S. Miller 2011

NORMAN MAILER: R.I.P.

Norman Mailer once mentioned that he wanted to write the novel that would impress Karl Marx, James Joyce, Freud, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust, Dostoyevsky, Oswald Spengler, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.  Now that he is dead, he will probably be categorized with Tom Wolfe and Gore Vidal.  Mailer will likely be remembered most for writing The Naked and the Dead, his most orthodox and therefore atypical Norman Mailer novel.  His second novel, Barbary Shore, is where his writing career really began because it put on display Mailer’s ongoing goofy fascination for radical political ideas.  During the 1950s, he could just as well have stopped being a novelist altogether and instead become a public personality.  Mailer wanted to be popular, respected and controversial, and at least in the reading public’s mind, he achieved all three things.  Yet I doubt he was ever fully satisfied with his achievements.

 

When Mailer was young and stupid, he became a Communist.  When he was middle-aged and stupid, he desperately craved attention.  And when he was old and stupid, his brand of liberalism almost became conventional (sort of a cross between John Edwards and John Kerry).  Still, all of this stupidity was mixed in with some brilliance.  Whatever his political leanings were in the 1940s, The Naked and the Dead was an extremely well written novel that’s comparable to John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers.  During the 1950s and 1960s, his book long journalism was notable for sometimes showering shrewd praise upon those he would have considered his enemies.  (In Miami and the Siege of Chicago, for example, he often praises candidate Richard Nixon for his political astuteness while likely being revolted by the man.)  And after turning eighty, Mailer devoted a great deal of time to religious speculation while at the same time condemning displays of piety.

 

Mailer probably could never accept the fact that he was not one of the giants.  After publishing his novel, The Deer Park, he sent a copy of the book to Ernest Hemingway.  On the inside cover, Mailer wrote that if Hemingway chose not to respond “then f**k you.”  The package containing the book was returned to Mailer unopened.  In correspondence with William Faulkner, Mailer implied that the southern white man (Faulkner’s neighbors in Mississippi) feared the sexual potency of the black male.  Faulkner replied that he had heard this idea spoken before, but it always came from white middle-aged women.  It’s difficult to know if Mailer ever got over the snubbing.  Mailer was to go onto spar with lesser writers like Germaine Greer, William Buckley and Gore Vidal (in Vidal’s case, quite literally).  In these debates, Mailer came across as brash and rude.  Mostly, he attempted to humiliate his opponents, but more often than not he humiliated himself.

 

Even worse, Mailer, the kid from Brooklyn, came across in print as often provincial.  Advertisements for Myself, which contains an essay entitled The White Negro, expresses admiration for the stereotypical black male of the 1950s.  “Knowing in the cells of his existence that life was war, nothing but war, the Negro (all exceptions admitted) could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the character and quality of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm.”  (Mailer never quite understood why black writer, James Baldwin, took exception to his description.)  And Mailer writes a book entitled The Prisoner of Sex in which he insults an entire gender by stating: “But finally, by his [Mailer’s] measure of these matters, he had seen too many men who failed to accomplish what they desired because a woman had ground them down, and had seen even more women who never discovered what they desired, and on the consequence set out to hobble their men.”

 

Yet I preferred the Mailer who did not fit in with polite society to the one who received awards for his books.  Only the first third of Armies of the Night, which was to win the Pulitzer Prize, was all that interesting to me.  Mailer was always better when he criticized the constituency he claimed to support than when he attempted to romanticize them.  And Executioner’s Song, for which Mailer won his second Pulitzer Prize, is unbearably long and not particularly insightful.  Unlike In Cold Blood, we never have a real glimpse into what turned a man into a murderer.  Mailer, himself, must have missed a portion of the lesson because a short time later he campaigned for the parole of Jack Abbott, a writer who would kill again.

 

I guess the outrageousness of what Mailer could say always appealed to me because I’ve been a reader of him for close to thirty years.  In between his antics, he often managed to throw in an observation that went outside the norm.  His essay Ten Thousand Words a Minute puts a favorable reflection upon Sonny Liston, the former heavyweight champion that Mailer wanted to see get beaten at the hands of Floyd Patterson (Liston knocked Patterson out twice in the first round).  While supporting desegregation of the schools, Mailer acknowledged that the opponents of it probably understood the consequences of such a policy better than he did – nevertheless, he was always (and rightly) convinced he was on the correct side of the issue.  Mailer always flaunted convention, but at least until his later years he always understood exactly why that convention was in place.  He took drugs while acknowledging that the drugs never enhanced his writing or his ability to function.  He spoke graphically about sex while still advocating an almost strict Puritanism when it came to sexual matters.

 

Mailer did not rely upon his Harvard education in order to speak about life.  In World War II, he volunteered to be a rifle-man when he could have been an officer.  He remained physically active most of his adult life, and sparred with former Light-Heavyweight champion, Jose Torres.  Courage and instinct to him were superior to rational thought.  He was arrested during the anti-war demonstrations during the 1960s rather than remain in the press box.  He fell in love many times as was evidenced by his six marriages.  Mailer never wrote the novel that he will be remembered for like J.D. Salinger or Jack Kerouac, yet he didn’t throw himself into seclusion or drink himself to death, either.  He wrote more than forty books.  And if the books were flawed, it was often because he tried to say too much rather than too little.  As I mentioned above, he probably was never satisfied with his achievements, but that lack of satisfaction also prevented him from ever becoming complacent.  He was still attempting to say something to the very end.  His last book, On God: An Uncommon Conversation, was published less than four weeks before he died.

 

Hopefully, there will not be too many eulogies placing him in the company of John Updike and Phillip Roth.  In a strange pairing, I find Mailer more comparable to the early 20^th Century writer, Jack London.  London glorified eccentricity and individuality in his short stories and novels while at the same time identifying his self as socialist.  Probably, while in reality practicing the part of rich capitalist and rugged individualist, London had no true socialist leanings.  London identified with the political ideology of socialism because it was made up of political outsiders, and his brand of individuality would not allow him to become comfortable in any sort of establishment.  When late in life, London discovered that there was no real revolutionary passion in his fellow party members and he completely disassociated himself from their movement.

 

Likewise, the role of being a dissenter and outsider probably always appealed to Mailer – at least until he reached old age.  He was always a fighter, and harmony, communion and compromise had no appeal for him in his life.  Mailer always wanted to have the competitive edge over everyone that he met.  He once said that he found democratic man in America to be both noble and “obscene as an old goat.”  The same could be said of the recently deceased writer who drank too much and swore too much, whose hair looked like it never had been combed, and who always looked like he had just slept in the clothes that he wore.  Mailer was lean and tough and opinionated and very much an American.

November 12, 2007
© Robert S. Miller 2007