Chaos, Cruelty and Corruption

Bulletin: The latest war started too late for this post. Cry havoc! Let slip!

First, I want to expand on my comments of yesterday. To recap, I had suggested that the God of Judaism, God of Islam and God of Christianity, supposedly the same God, confuses things by speaking out of three sides of his (His) mouth at once, saying different things to different people. As I thought about this a little more yesterday afternoon, I realized that this is in fact the true Trinity, God who is one God and three Gods at the same time. Theologians, pay attention.

Next, for my Christian readers, I have a question: In the New Testament, when placed on the cross, Jesus says (presumably in good Aramaic), “God, why have you forsaken me?” A high school friend of Edie’s put this on Facebook yesterday (why, I am not sure; this was the entire post) and I told him that I never understood this line. He didn’t seem to understand my confusion, I didn’t want to get into an open Facebook discussion, but I ask you: Hadn’t Jesus read the script? Hadn’t he been given the script? Didn’t he know what was going to happen? Was he just told what his pre-crucifixion lines were, and not what was going to happen once the Romans caught him and strung him up? This part of his story, and only this part, was a surprise to him? I am sure I am not the first to ask the question.

Third, my old (getting older) friend and former law partner Jeff posted a comment yesterday commending me for offten seeing both sides of a story. I thanked him, and it reminded me of my old client Gordon, no longer of this world. Gordon was several years older than me, lived in New England, came from a prominent family and spent his career rehabbing single family homes, duplexes and triplexes as low income housing. He was indeed somewhat of a character (as were most of my clients) and was one of those who, when faced with providing quality housing for his tenants or following to the letter the regulations of HUD and other relevant agencies, always chose good housing as paramount (giving his lawyer a lot of business, as an aside). Gordon and I were very friendly and he would call me up sometimes just to talk about world affairs, usually when something happened of importance. He told me that he called me, and not any one else, for the same reason that Jeff thought he should commend me, that I would never see anything as black and white, and that even when talking about Israel or things Jewish (something that Gordon was not), I could always explain it from more than one side. He valued this, I guess. 

One day he called me somewhat exasperated and said “I was just looking at the bill I got from you and I realize that you aren’t charging me when I call you about what’s going on in the world. I am not trying to waste your time or take you away from other business. I expect to be charged.” Of course, he never was.

Finally, on a topic very different, Edie and I went to Theater J yesterday to see a play called Berlin Diaries. As Edie pointed out, Berlin Diaries was about only one diary, so the name of the play itself was a bit misleading, even if unimportantly so. But I must say this. In spite of yesterday’s positive review in the Washington Post, there were many better ways I could have spent yesterday afternoon. Just being honest.

The play is semi-autobiographical. The playwright, Andrea Stolowitz, is also a character in the play. She is a playwright in the play and she has been given a grant to go to Berlin to write a play based on the diary of her great-grandfather Max Stolowitz, which he started in 1939 and, I think, finished in 1948. The diary was given to her mother and then her mother gave it to Andrea who put in on a shelf for a decade or so before she opened it up.

The meta story is that, while in Berlin for a year, she had a difficult time figuring out how to turn the diary into a play. The play itself is presumably the result of her frustrating year in Berlin, and I think she proved her point as to how difficult she found it. There are only two cast members (good choice, Andrea, that makes it less expensive to produce and more likely to be performed), playing a large number of characters. That is okay, but what is weird about it is that the two actors (one male, one female) are not given specific characters to play. One minute the female is playing Andrea, the next minute the male is playing Andrea and sometimes they are both playing Andrea at the same time talking to each other or simply alternating lines. The whole play is like that. It made no sense as a structure to me; it would have been better as a one-woman play, or even as an actor with a hand puppet play.

There were other things that frustrated me. In real life (IRL), museum is called the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In the play, it is called the United States Holocaust Museum; no “Memorial”. In informal speech, this is no problem, but “Memorial” is omitted several times even when an actor is reading correspondence from an archivist at the museum. Why?

The story of Andrea’s family may have been interesting, but while we hear a lot about her coming up with names of lost relatives (like her otherwise missing Great Great Aunt Flora), we don’t learn anything about any of them. We just know that there were relatives who did not make it out of Germany whose names Andrea never heard.

If her purpose was to make these names known, I guess she succeeded. If she wanted to tell their stories, she failed. She didn’t even try.

We saw no one we knew at Theater J. That is unusual.  I asked Edie who these people were. She told me they looked like people who didn’t drive at night. I think she was right. We were part of the young crowd.

And finally, we watched the documentary Grenfell Towers, the story behind the 2017 fire that claimed 72 lives in London. I recommend it. A story of a fire that never should have happened and a response that should have been much different. On Netflix.

Chaos, Cruelty and Corruption.