New Direction
There's a special on FOX news right now about "church and state" in the US, and the trend toward eliminating religious symbols from public life.
Didn't the founding fathers - and closeted founding mothers - attempt to create a society of religious pluralism, one inspired by faith in G-d? Then again, what happens when religious symbolism is used to breed hate, as in so much of the Islamic world today? Just what is the best direction to take regarding church and state?
Examining some of this week's happenings, I hit upon the theme of "direction." I just came from the movie Borat, where a Central Asian journalist comes to the US in search of what makes America great. His provincial habits and bad manners present significant obstacles to good reporting.
Within days of landing, Borat changes direction for California in search of his dream women, Pamela Anderson. Along the way he stumbles on some troubling "directions" in American society, ranging from frat boys' alleged contempt for the female gender to good old-fashioned Jew hating. Strangely, though a Jew-hater himself, Borat speaks Hebrew throughout the film, and also looks pretty Jewish.
Borat's strategic change of direction mirrors one of my own this week. At my creative writing tutorial, I presented a short essay I wrote about the Muffin being my life coach. During the half hour before reading the essay, the teacher presented works by Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion on the themes of death, tragedy and generalized depression. As such, my light romp at the playground with the Muffin went down like bad Chinese food.
Even the Muffin could not bring a smile to this dreary group, fixated as it was on birth defects and the death of children. A lot of "telling" and not enough "showing" was the general critique of my piece, along with mild disdain for not explicitly detailing personal pain and mental illness.
Perhaps I do need more "life experience" and exposure to Sylvia Plath before diving into the personal essay genre. Or maybe I'm just not focused enough to write something resembling a book, or collection of related anythings. After all, you might have noticed this blog's topics range from bad dates to Ariel Sharon to penguins.
As detailed in my last entry, I'm already engaged in several writing projects. Me thinks I will stick to telling other people's stories for now - to raise awareness, promote change, and avoid writing about myself apart from this blog and my journal. The op-ed I wrote about Israel-Diaspora relations (see entry below) was picked up by JTA (Global Jewish News), Jewlicious.com, and several C-list blogs. Won't I have more of an impact writing about "the big picture" than about how I got arrested for stealing playing cards from 7-11 back in the mid-90's?
Actually, thinking about it right now, doesn't finding and crafting stories illuminate the author as much (or more) than the subjects? Don't you get the sense that Stephen King is a sick puppy even without reading a biography on him? And what about those Joan Rivers Oscar night fashion run-downs? Joan isn't taking about herself, but you sure learn a lot about what and who she's into, as well as what makes her gag like bad Indian food.
Finally, the most obvious "direction" change I noticed this week involves my quaint, tree-lined street, Derech Beit Lechem, aka, the House of Bread Road. City planners intend to reroute traffic onto my quiet street, the heart of Jerusalem's gentrified (and French-ified) Baka neighborhood. Neighbors have banned together to protest these plans, staging rallies, hanging banners and making claims like "Baka is in Danger" and "The Municipality Will Destroy Baka."
City schemes to alleviate rush-hour traffic by funneling it through my neighborhood have struck quite a cord on my street, one of the few commercial/residential sections of Jerusalem not plagued by too many buses, too much noise, and the occasional dumpster set ablaze by yeshiva boys from Brooklyn. Like a bad falafel sandwich, the reroute plan has inflamed residents' bowels and tempers, causing them to demand the status quo concerning the direction of traffic.
Personally, I think concerned citizens have bigger fish to fry if we are to save Jerusalem; however, in a few months, my new direction will likely be a few thousand miles west of this Holy City of Traffic, so who cares what I think?
(Photo courtesy of Borat...but not like I asked.)
