Chapter Forty-Seven
“Once you have your
vision, don’t let hearsay
cloud the way.”
“And I’m, like, not sending one ounce of an emotional vibe—still, it went where it went anyway.”
“At that Sensual Touch cult of yours?”
“Cult, shmult—and thennn, the little bastard opened me up like a cultured oyster…”
Between flighty intolerance theories and three more teetering porta-toities on a wooden plank platform creaking and leaning further in the wind—conditions were ripe for further bench jockeying, a little recuperative downtime. So Reese Paulen and I momentarily rode pine anew, barely leftward of this conversation, resting our cases and hammies, collecting our breathless selves as the Gate fog dissolved and resolved to re-mound. But here was where whatever we may have been discussing on the Judeo-Palestine front was occluded by the diminishing bay view, not to mention these snippets of gal-gab straight out of The Feminine View.
“Better than your rape fantasy with Mario?”
“Pure unadulterated service with a smile—a real female sympathizer. The guy—Seth, I think it was, had all the mechanics down firm, down to a sweet science, yet nice and slow. Then it’s wham, bam, you’re welcome, maam…”
“Wow, orgasmic meditation—you go, girl…”
“Smooches, honey! A total money shot. I went going off like a nuclear reactor. You’ve just got to join in, Carlene—the naked yoga class is positively transformative.”
“Ewwww, I don’t know, Corinne, I’m just not that genitally focused. I’ll stick with Hypoblast and thinking myself off—or trolling Craigslist for the paraphilial chat rooms with my hard-core avatar. Even if it means having to background check them through Vali-Date. I’m serious, where have all the good men gone?”
These two ladies next bench over were laying bare their intimate secrets like so much down pillow talk, on a sand-basted bed of pine needles and wood chips. What could possibly be the context for OMing or naked yoga? Ewwph, oh, yeah—I remember now: Syd’s sun-bathed bedroom, holy schoolkids chanting uniformly in the Catholic church yard, a love supreme three floors up. Oh, terrifique—now we’re starting in again with the flashbacks: cold, rash withdrawals from my memory bank. Delinquent overdrafts, negatively amortized, positively splitsville, can feel it back there between my precuneus and posterior cingulated cortex…
Still, uneasy as such coital recollection could make me, Paulen seemed glued-in yet uncomfortable all the more, impatiently whisking his cord lapels and brown suede loafers. Not that we were eavesdropping or anything. But who could not overhear something like that? Still, so as not to have appeared as having done precisely that, we smiled the oblivious gal pals’ way. Once the twenty-thirtyish pair commenced hugging and stroking their Lululemon designer hoodies, we found ourselves amply rested and ready to move the sticks, curving back down the plank-board path to the promenade.
“Amazing the things women can talk so openly about, huh?” I said, seeking to pry open another door as we rose in unison and retreat. “But college campuses are ground zero for all the genderal dissent, right?”
“Battlegrounds, to be sure—only that just sounds like more feminine mista…er, mystique,” Paulen remarked elusively, rearranging his slacks. “Merely one flashpoint among many, however. Case in point, back to the curious contours of secular Zionism: God by committee? That wasn’t the half of it…”
“Wasn’t the other half, either, like the better distaff half,” I muttered in frustration—you could look it up, my tush—yet cratering and catering on, feeling anew for an activated switcheroo. “But the Zioneers said it was essential for a liberal democracy with its moral teaching and social justice, not necessarily religious, huh? As mainly white-kippa good guys built a progressive powerhouse nation?”
“Not all of them were, by any measure,” Paulen replied, ably holding court. “Plenty of the Diaspora never lit out for the Israel frontier whatsoever.”
“W-w-wait, I thought you said Israel welcomed the Jewish peoplehood the world over to a safe, secure national homeland of their own,” I relented. “So what was with project and the rest of it?”
“Nu, perhaps too many shefs spoiled the knish…haven’t any problem with that, have you?”
There we left this insular tree-cropped rest area in the trail dust, back down a plank-board side path, merging like Iowa sated truckers onto the interstate. But road conditions were taking another turn for the worse, as in those Hazzerd brothers continuing to mill their way along the Crissy footpath.
“No problem, not one bit. Hey,I’m not taking up anything against anybody, all right? It’s just curiosity, part of my thing,” I blurted defensively , as we hit stride in line. “Truth is, I sidelight as a news clipper, kind of a cheapo freelance curator, for this political consultant who makes a killing writing attack ads. It’s just a little oppo research gig for some client he has who’s gunning for Dianne Feinstein’s senate seat. So I read all the rags and stuff, keep up on all kinds of local and global developments—you know, feed him the raw meat and votemeal—among other…odd clients. Guess that’s why I know a little about a lot.”
“A lot more than a little, it would appear. And what would be the other part?”
“The congenital after-hours OCD hoarding part on my part, what’s the dif…Crissake, why am I even spillin’ when he is scarcely tricklin’?! Time is draining and I still can’t fathom going any further or longer here getting nowhere, given that sirens are still wailing in, above and beyond…
Nevertheless, some light-headed chardonnaysayers, who likely as not had strayed afar from a Fort Mason oenofest, were propping each other up around the very next EcoGlobe, plastic long-stems still in hand. They would have had a much warmer reception in Napa-Sonoma; but inexplicably, out here they happened to be. Still, with bubbling serendipity, the tasteful threesome—two shawl-wrapped women and a fading fancy man—reconnoited around a pea green, map pin-dotted sphere, waxing ironic on where their insouciant gadding had inadvertently led them, rather in need of a quick red-eye coffee and espresso shot.
“So be it, what I meant is in some quarters,” Paulen continued, scanning me again, “the secular project has always been halvah in the sky.”
“Now that’s very tasty stuff,” I wistfully recalled Moon’s Boulder kitchen creations with mixmastered emotions. “Tried some myself way back then…”
“Who wouldn’t, hey?” he winked. “Regardless I’ll have you know some strains of the ‘peoplehood’ decried that Zion Project from the very beginning.”
“Rejected Israel’s birth? Why the hell so?” Time and fog pressed in, far as I could see—otherwise none of this was my business, not my concern, even if it was…
“Not the birth per se, but the channel…”
The globe’s color-coded pins represented population density worldwide, particularly clustered in urban centers, from Hong-Kong to Houston to Hamburg and Bombay. The viticultured trio was in a Malthusian tizzy over the plotted fossil fuel consumption. I momentarily focused on the pincushion around metropolitan Chicago, of all places
“Too much static in the reception?” By now, I entertained the impulse to bolt altogether, but damned if I was even close to flushing out a smoking bullet rage-wise, much less a probative twist of fate. Gotta step it up, gotta move the chains…
“Too much signal misdirection,” Doc parried. “The detractors said was so little religiously spiritual about it. That your Zioneers projected a secular state eschewing Jewry’s biblical inheritance and imperative in favor of ideological purity. That it was an illegitimate enterprise—against God’s will.”
“So they were saying the Zioneers were Godless?” I followed irresolutely further into the trail flow—the onshore winds were picking up, nearly picking us up, for that matter…
“Rather saying the ‘repugnant’ secular project had already outlived its usefulness in 1948,” he added. “Moreover secular Zionism’s ‘Waterloo’ at least was the 2nd Palestinian intifada—that it was an exhausted ideology never properly Jewish at all.”
Blowing by us all was a PowerAde-propelled runner in graphite jogbra, matching sports pants and compression socks clutching, flexing her Nomex gloves with 2 lb. hand weights. Her gasping inbound male partner pulled up, calves half-knotted, not far behind, sucking in a lung load of her waffle-soled dusty trail wash—as we stepped aside accordingly.
Doc and I then turned outward once more, taking in what was left to be seen of layer upon baffled ridge layer of Marin’s smoothly rounded, rambling hills. For a long tail of fog slowly began to re-snake through the Gate, obliterating the tiny cars hard charging up 101 North’s distant Waldo Grade. As for the trail running out here, I had long ago buried my heart on a twisted knee.
“B-b-but what on earth exactly is irreligious about dignity, equality an human rights?” I asked, thinking gotta go along to right a wrong—some feeble cliché like that…
“Only because secular Zionism’s social justice is presumably not God’s justice, which they fervently believe is innermost to the Israel process.”
“So I’ll call them Zionays or Zionots for sake of argument, and wonder who are they to so dissent?”
“More precisely, the Chosen People…”
“You mean by the UN, or…”
Nearer by, a ‘Regrow Green Cities’ globe depicting in fabricated fiberglass ’Nawlins and a boulevard skyline curiously redolent of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. Beyond that, silky bush lupine and scraggly soap root rustled on salt windy shoreside dunes and permeable pavement, as if bracing for climate-modeled heat spikes on the horizon.
“By God himself, man—in the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Genesis, 12:3,” Paulen declared. “Wherein he further gave Jews the Promised Land of the Israelites.”
“God’s will, no strings attached, how so?” Wait, not really my problem, remember—not my cross, especially at the moment…
“Only that they populate that very Eastern Mediterranean through the Abrahamic Covenant: a homeland from the Nile River to the Euphrates.”
“The whole blintz, aka Jordan River to the sea?” I said, yet wondering where the hell he was going here, why I instead couldn’t get him to say much about Ms CU Buff lid on Chestnut Street—why aren’t we talking about that?.
“So believe the religious Zionists, who proffer a Redemptive Israel, populating and policing their Promised Land according to God’s law and Torah—in anticipation of the ‘collective miracle’…”
“…Miracle?” I asked, although thinking I really couldn’t care less, yet in retrospect actually could. “So they are more like Zionauts?”
Cutting between the globes, a sandy, s-curved path revealed another, harder-core daypacked birder scuffling toward our way, nose buried in an avian handbook. Minus his L. L. Bean wear and tan chukkas, the moke could have been a dead ringer for what I remembered of a long-haired Nate Grimaldi. Which reminded me, gotta read his letter, but can’t be caught dead reading that letter. Steady, mate—feeling that tension, getting more and more anxious and wary, Nathan’s letter burning a hole in my newspaper and pocket.
“Puleeze, these traditionalists foresee a coming of the Messiah according to Hebrew scripture—a Messianic Age in which devoted religious Jews reap total sovereignty over the entire historical land of Israel,” Doc said. “That being Canaan, the ‘Promised Land’ to Abraham’s descendants—not least Patriarch Jacob. In due course, it was inhabited by Israelites upon their Exodus from Egypt, who were then deemed safe and free to rule their very own ancestral homeland by the light of God’s law.”
“Good god, when and where is such a spirited movement coming from anyway?”
“The Old Testament actually. But this strain of religious Zionism/Jewry essentially manifested in 1870, via a Mikveh Yisrael settlement—well before Herzl’s secular writings,” he extrapolated, dodging an errant stroller. “The movement was more generally founded by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, informed by mystical Hasidism and in the Lithuanian Talmudic tradition.”
“Lithuanian, Kook?” I recalled the tumult of Chicago’s Marquette Park way back. “Had plenty of exposure to that myself, believe me.”
“So I’ve heard, but it was Kook with a capital K, for godsake—nothing kooky about him. Serious business, that religious strain believes their holy duty is to gain domain over the West Bank and Gaza as well, from their pure spiritual center in the whole of Jerusalem. In service of a Greater Israel.”
“How’s that, since Palestinian Arabs happen to be in the way?”
Then, on a somewhat elliptical orbit out toward the Golden Gate, that sightseeing zeppelin with the Disney imprimatur had cleared priority airspace for a second orange-white helicopter. This next wave of concussive blade thwapping was loud enough to fluster the seagulls, the cormorants and sandpipers already squabbling over mollusks and crustaceans in the shallows of a wind-rippled tidal marsh to the left of us—not to mention an unlikely couple of early adopters shuffling outbound against the tide, too few edgy trail steps behind.
Sheeit, them again! If only I hadn’t witlessly glanced back over my shoulder, catching sight of what seemed to be gaining on us. Pulling up behind a band of birdwatchers, the Hazzerd brothers slipped in and about Crissy’s dunes and day trippers—furtively shambling forth in all their ragtag, Jew’s-harping devilry. Doc payed no mind to any potential menace, but I couldn’t get past the fear that they believe I bore witness to their off-Lombard beatdown. Toothless or no, Hap and his delusions clearly posed consequences that I wanted part of—be it here, there or anywhere. So hop to it, moron, gotta beat an ignoble retreat…
“Why, I should think, to dutifully consummate by any means necessary,” Paulen ventured, over the squawking and flapping of ducks and gulls on the long Tidal Marsh to our left.
“Including Gush Emunum by 1948?” I anxiously turned, high time to push more buttons, if not to tighten a screw or two while I still could. “Hounding and pushing native Palestinians all around…”
“But Jews were killed and harassed as well in those battles,” Paulen flushed, caught rather off guard. “Besides, just what would you know about the ‘Bloc of the Faithful’?
“Told you, I do read some,” I noticed as how fog was climbing the bridge towers. “Like about Zionista ultra radicals calling for Messianic rule per a constitutional monarchy—from occupation gushers to Hilltop youth ganging up on the West Bank to this day, quashing the Project advancements, plot by piece…”
“For their part, they would point out the Palestinians as placeholders, at best,” Doc said, stunned, wind-whipped onto his back foot.
“Placeholders? In their own homeland?”
“Until the coming of Messianic Redemption, if not beforehand,” he pounced, as if spotting a tell when he heard one. “Because they argue Palestinians don’t genuinely want their own country anyway, only a cause. Wanting terrorism more than territory of their own.”
“Sounds like the Christian Zionists talking, huh? Even I know something about their Armageddon in the Holy Land crapola. Evangelicals with their End of Days, Rapture, ‘blood flowing as high as horses’ saddles’, heretical Jew nonbelievers left behind in the Tribulations—all that nonsense,” I rattled, mindful of an oncoming pack of helmeted trail bikers. “Only they see the Jews as penultimate placeholders, at least so long as their holy Rapture trip doesn’t begin to rupture. By the way, what if this messiah of theirs turns out to be Jewish as well. What then?”
“In any event, who can blame Jews and their advocates alike after so many terror attacks by Palestinians, Hamas, or Iran’s Hezbollah refusal to accept Israel’s very existence?”
“But couldn’t the Palestinians say the same thing?” Mox nix, what’re you doing?! Gotta get off this trail somehow dammit, get off this whole damn track. Except goin’ empty-handed meant comin’ up empty on payday, right? Sooo, bite the bullet Sherlock…or whatever else may be incoming…
“They say nothing but terror campaigns and failed peace negotiation,” Paulen countered. “Thus haltn the progressive secular cause, religious Zionists cry, “because the clock is ticking on Tikkun Olam and the ‘land for peace’ pipe dream, much less any notion of a two-state solution.”
“Gad, what kind of solution is that? Really, compared to Prime Minister Olmert’s latest peace plan?”
“To them, woeful, crooked Ehud can go pound sand. That the likes of Bibi Netanyahu will take it from here…”
“Netanyahu, him again–wasn’t he already ousted once?”
“Apparently, yet he is poised for an encore…”
“So let me get this straight,” I sighed, scuttering to the bottom line. “You’ve got Zioneers realizing an idyllic secular Project, and righteous Zionays foreseeing no spiritual promise in their Promised Land. The Zionizers laying the national groundwork, while Zionons cite scripture and bemoan that project as against God’s will.”
“Enough with the trite bynames already—just another of your gross oversimplifications…all of which are beneath our professional station, I might add…”
“No really, Zionablers prevail to realize their liberal democratic state, with Zionots accusing secular elites as flouting God’s Law and Torah—forsaking Abraham, Jacob and Isaac,” I spouted, just the same. “As Zionauts guide Israel to greater global heights, religious Zionistas negate the whole woeful project as illegitimate and violating the biblical behest of a Greater Israel—not to mention ultra Zionators who take road graders to the place…”
“Patently absurd, Herbert, offensive on its face!”
“Aww, So which’ll it be, Doc, Zionascendent or Zionassailed?”
“Nonsense, not when we are merely parsing exiguous degrees of disagreement,” he replied. “Still, it does appear you could stand to dig a bit deeper yourself.”
“Deeper?! I’m having enough trouble trying to figure out how Zionism has gone from being an honorable prerogative to a pejorative.”
“Get in line, Heebert,” Paulen cuffed my shoulder. “Stand up and pick your pathology…”
Care for more?
Chapter 48. Strained relations beget
irreconcilable actions and purges, as
nearby waters churn all the more…