Leonid Goldin | People and years

Where there is art, where there is talent, there is no old age, nor loneliness, nor disease…
A.P. Chekhov.

Fathers and children

In the past, the idea of old age was usually associated with knowledge and wisdom. The brave new world has changed this attitude; now, old age is dementia and computer illiteracy. You can’t argue with reality: cognitive and physical abilities are waning, and knowledge and information are being updated in a decade faster than they used to be in centuries.

Globally, in the coming decades, the number of people over 65 will outnumber teenagers, and those eighty and older will outnumber newborns. In the Western world, Japan, and China, the aging process is even more pronounced. In Europe, about 25% of the population is 65 and older, among whites more than a third. In Japan, more than 30% are in this age category. In the USA 18%, among whites about 25%.

Age-related conspiracy theories about the plans of the world behind the scenes to get rid of unnecessary people on the planet, using artificial intelligence and pandemics, and to establish the rule of the chosen, in power and wealth, not subject to disease and death due to the latest achievements of science and technology are multiplying.

The problems associated with aging are evident in all areas of life, from economics and social relationships to politics, morality, and culture. The Bible says, “Honor your father and your mother,” but in the long list of wars: ideological, economic, cultural, racial-ethnic, and gender, there is also a generational war. This is not a new phenomenon. The great Socrates lamented: “Today’s youth is accustomed to luxury, is characterized by bad manners, despises authority, does not respect elders”. The Greek poet Hesiod believed that people’s lives were deteriorating with each new generation: “I have lost hope for the future of the country if today’s youth take the reigns tomorrow. This youth is unbearable, terrible”.

The ancient world knew other assessments. Aristotle wrote that “Older people are often wrong, they are cynical, they see everything in a black light. Their experience encourages distrust and suspicion. Their thoughts are shallow and centered on survival.”

The satirists of Antiquity and the Renaissance spared neither the young nor the old. Absolutism and feudalism did not prioritize age, but status. The place in society was determined not by years but by power and wealth. Relatives took care of the old and infirm.

The acceleration of social progress, and the expansion of freedoms politicized generational relations. Turgenev’s “Fathers and Children” reflected this process: young nihilists reject traditions and foundations and see the task as “clearing a place”.

Democracies have approved measures to safeguard the rights of the young and protect the elderly. There are laws against age discrimination, but nowadays, if you are over 40 and you are not a Nobel laureate, not on the Forbes list, not a relative of a big politician or oligarch, and not a beneficiary of alternative shares, no laws will help your chances of finding the job you want. Another problem of aging: the new world demands full commitment from the working people, and there is no energy and time left for the old people; the solution – a nursing home for any money will not compensate the family.

Gloomy forecasts promise that new technologies, artificial intelligence will make most people unnecessary even for the exploitation of labor and knowledge. Today, however, most unnecessary people end up in economically and socially underdeveloped countries, in search of a better life worsening the quality of life in developed countries, creating acute social tensions and contradictions.

Beyond age and prejudice

In many spheres of social life, age is an obstacle, sometimes insurmountable, in continuing career and social activity. But there are, as always and everywhere, exceptions. In literature and art, experience and creative maturity are invaluable, irreplaceable capital. Classics do not become obsolete, at least, if not in the sales market, then in the civilizational, intellectual environment.

In the stage arts, careers are usually short, competition is great, and stars constantly arise and quickly fade away, but there is still room for veterans. Norman Lloyd lived and kept in touch with his career to the age of 106, Vladimir Zeldin to 102, Mel Brooks to 98, and he is still brilliant. William Shatner, the 90-year-old hero of “Star Trek,” has been to space. Theater schools are luring seniors into theater schools, and there are timeless roles for them.

LA MAMA Experimental Theater presented an improvised performance of “Above Ground – You’re Never Too Old to Play – Not Quite a Comedy.” The cast ranged in age from 74 to 98. Some have had colorful careers in theater, film, and television, while others have had modest and short-acting lives. Actors talk about memorable episodes of childhood, life at home and on stage, and changes in interests and outlook. They play themselves – what they experienced and what they feel today. Part of the performance is active interaction with the audience.

We were at the opening, and almost everyone in the audience, regardless of age, is or was connected to the theater. My life partner, a ballerina, had spent her professional life on the big stage, her neighbor happened to be a former ballerina as well, they had a lot to remember and talk about; at the end of the performance, the audience and the actors were chatting freely. I asked several of the participants if they had known at the beginning of their careers everything they know today, would they have chosen the same path. All answered the same: they wouldn’t have changed a thing.

The play did not make the now inevitable attempts to modernize, to declare, to present ideas and messages, and it left a very pleasant impression. Such stage improvisation is in the tradition of Bertolt Brecht, the revolutionary dramatist, and the founder of the Political Theater and the Epic Theater. But in the LA MAMA performance, there was no politics, no extraordinary history, no revolution, for which thanks to its creators Nancy Gabor, Paul Binnerts, and the actors; only free improvisation and stage freedom were taken from Brecht.

Theater requires a total commitment of physical and spiritual strength, a clear mind, and an understanding of people, place, and time. On the stage, there were people in wheelchairs, with physical ailments, but all retained a lively soul, interest, and love for life and skill.

On the main stage

Shakespeare’s famous maxims “The whole world is a theater, and people are actors in it… And each plays more than one part”; “Life…an hour on the stage…. A story told by an idiot, full of noise and fury” have prehistory. Researchers find origins and parallels in Homer, Pythagoras, Lucian, Seneca, Plato, and Dante. Psychologist Eric Berne, author of the international bestseller “Games People Play,” has described and categorized the many games that adults consciously and unconsciously participate in at all times and in all circumstances.  Many games and masks are lifelong, others episodic.

Psychologists today have to deal with the fact that many have lost their natural behavior, unable to step out of roles conditioned not only by personal choice but above all by environment and circumstances. At a time when psychoanalysis – finding and understanding oneself is dying, “coaches” – “life coaches” are teaching roles for everything from career to family relationships.

The concept of “actor” – a subject that has an impact on others – has entered the social sciences, media, and the general public. The neologism is used in relation to active participants of social events and processes.

Boris Akunin has a novel “The whole world is a theater”, understanding of this truth helped the hero of the novel Erast Fandorin to achieve harmony with himself and the world and the first stage of wisdom.

Many participants of play situations achieve a large audience and recognition, but perhaps no one can compete in the influence on society with the characters of political theater (or often circus, absurd show) – here we are not talking about the performances of Brecht and Pescatore, but about real politics and real politicians.

In either approach, politics is closer to art than to science. It is a mechanism for influencing the thinking and behavior of the masses, the ability to understand values, interests, motives, to find an approach and language, images that appeal to the public consciousness.

A successful politician is always adequate to the place and time and can change role behavior depending on circumstances. Big politics is always public, aimed at the whole society and social groups. And here heightened senses, intuition, resourcefulness, charisma, charm, art of speech, and image play a decisive role, especially in a democracy. Knowledge, experience, intellectual and moral merits are not enough if there is no attractive image, or ability to arouse sympathy and trust. A huge role is played by irrational influence on a wide audience, the ability to evoke emotional reactions adequate to the politician’s intentions.

Aristotle considered politics to be the art of state management, and man to be a political creature. Machiavelli wrote that a politician, depending on the circumstances, should be like a lion and a fox. He demanded that the politician master the art of creating an image no less than Stanislavsky in “In the course of Acting”.  Stanislavski’s famous phrase “I don’t believe it!” is a test and criterion of success for a politician even more than for an actor.

One rarely enters big politics at a young age. The average age of a U.S. senator is 65. Many statesmen have remained highly effective into old age. Mahatma Gandhi and Konrad Adenauer to 79, Deng Xiaoping and Lee Kuan Yew to 91, Elizabeth II to 92, Henry Kissinger to 100.

But there are also sad examples when power ends up in the hands of outdated politicians for a long time. The Kremlin’s irremovable gerontocracy has brought the country to stagnation and degradation.

Biden, even with a multi-party system and separation of powers, has led the country to a deep and dangerous civil division, extremism, loss of trust in state institutions, and ideological and political degeneration.  recently met Congressman Jerry Nadler at Park East Synagogue on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Normally, on such occasions, I do not miss an opportunity to talk and ask questions, but the 78-year-old veteran of big politics could barely move and made a helpless, pathetic spectacle of himself. Trying to keep up with his younger colleagues, he said that cutting federal support for universities, where pro-Palestinian bacchanalia reigns supreme, has nothing to do with anti-Semitism: “This is the Trump administration’s war on education and science.”

Jew Nadler and his fellow party members, had plenty of power and time before Trump was elected to change the toxic atmosphere at universities, to stop the instigators of provocations, but they did nothing and continued to defend them with demagoguery about free speech.

But the rejuvenation of political leadership is also far from a guarantee of favorable change. Young bureaucrats and oligarchs have replaced the Kremlin elders and committed plunder of national wealth unprecedented in history, bringing the economic, social, national, and cultural divisions in society to crisis limits.

The aged Biden only continued the destructive course of the young, energetic, well-educated Obama, deliberately aimed at the socio-political and demographic degeneration of the country by discrediting Western civilization, revising history, ideologizing education, media propaganda, multiculture, mass illegal immigration, forced “inclusion,” affirmative action.

Young progressives, led by the Squad strike team, are highly visible and active in Congress today, their average age is 20 years younger than members of the House of Representatives and 27 years younger than senators. In Prof. Maurice Isserman’s definition, “kindergarten Leninists.” While it is hard to suspect them of knowing the basics of scientific communism, they make do with the most primitive social, racial, and anti-colonial demagoguery, which, in a country where the minority sets the tone in domestic politics and the majority must pay and repent, is a perfectly effective way to broaden the base and displace the old guard of Democrats.

Progressives have contributed greatly to polarizing society, exacerbating racial tensions, supporting extremist protests, and drugging students with leftist ideology and utopian chimeras. Although the members of this team come from different countries and conditions, what they have in common is their passional aggression, their insolence, their blatant desire to destroy traditions, values, and norms, and their slumbering anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel. Today they have launched an attack on their teachers and patrons, accusing them of insufficient resistance to Trump.

The Squad actors play their act without masks, but they have mentors and directors. The most notable is Bernie Sanders, who is 84 years old. He tried to teach his mentees international and class solidarity of workers but among progressives dominates racial ideology, the idea of whites as privileged exploiters who usurped power and capital, and the first in this row are Jews.

Sanders found himself in the unenviable position of being asked during a television interview if he would support Ocasio-Cortez in a Senate election, she would likely run for Schumer’s Democratic leadership seat. Sanders dodged the question, but progressives are already doing without his advice and help.

A process of radical rejuvenation has swept through higher education and the media. These spheres are dominated by liberal ideology, supplanting traditional ideas about history, culture, values, justice, human rights, and civic responsibility.

Education does not teach critical thinking, instead indoctrination with social demagoguery and “Critical Racial Theory”. Anyone who has any knowledge of the university environment knows that a white male has almost no chance of getting a professorship in the humanities. A new generation of historians, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and literary scholars are teaching an understanding of the basic laws and categories of cognition adequate to the perceptions of urban dwellers downtown. The classical canon is replaced by programs accessible to the intellectual potential of the beneficiaries of affirmative action and diversification.

Mentors and students have shown themselves in the pogrom protests of Black Lives Matter, in support of Palestinian terrorists. A proponent of a different opinion, neither student nor faculty, will be allowed to open their mouths. Logic and law are subject to new demands. Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, a defender of Israel and fighter against anti-Semitism, has lost the opportunity to appear on a university faculty, but Harvard professor Noah Feldman continues his career and defends Hamas supporters on CNN against the government’s “attack on the First Amendment.” No one will think of free speech if it threatens minorities of color, and gays if it justifies terrorist actions against America. But against Israel, you can, and here a Jewish professor from a prestigious university is the most appropriate figure to play the role of advocate. The ideological rebirth is especially noticeable in television and the press, which have become organs of party propaganda and agitation. No journalist enjoys the trust of the entire country, like the veterans Walter Cronkite, Walter Lippman, Phil Donahue, and Larry King, for whom partisanship and personal bias were unacceptable.

The new face of the mainstream is represented, for example, by Patrick Kingsley, the Jerusalem bureau chief of the New York Times. He is 35, educated at Cambridge University, and worked for 7 years as an international correspondent for the Guardian, England’s leading liberal newspaper, and a longtime harsh critic of Israel. At 28, he was invited to work for the New York Times. He claims to follow the norms of America’s most famous newspaper, avoiding political commitment and seeking objective information.

But here’s what his interpretation of the Israel-Hamas war looks like: “I’ll explain how the ceasefire collapsed… Because Israel and Hamas have an incompatible vision of how this war will end.” So much for objectivity – adversaries, a democratic state under barbaric terrorist attack, and an organization of murderers and rapists recognized as terrorists by America are equalized in responsibility. Perhaps the correspondent in Jerusalem is unaware that Hamas is not returning hostages, has no intention of ending terror, and is demanding the exchange of innocents for thousands of criminals. There was no apology, no clarification in the newspaper. When it comes to Israel, the moral pathology of journalism is normalized.

At least 90% of mainstream coverage is anti-Trump. If one relies on such media, it is impossible to understand how he could convincingly win the election when his opponents had much more financial and propaganda power and took full advantage of the legal system. In ideological blindness, popular will and common sense mean nothing.

The art of the impossible

“Politics is the art of the possible,” said Otto Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor of the German Empire. The quote has entered the diplomatic canon as an adequate reflection of the conditions for success in domestic and international relations. But there were and are statesmen who did not recognize boundaries and notions of the possible and who dared to transcend them.

Today, there is no leader more convincingly attesting to the ability to overcome any obstacle or resistance than President Donald Trump. More than 100 lawsuits, more than 30 court verdicts, allegations of sexual harassment, financial crimes, and fraud, conspiracy against democracy, failure to recognize election results, violation of the Constitution, secret ties to foreign countries, mental disability and mental abnormality, assassination attempts, hatred, slander, sabotage… Trump’s harassment may remind one of the fighting enemies of the people in Soviet times. Trump stood his ground, his will, his courage, and his conviction in his mission won out.

The opponents have not retreated, they are fighting with redoubled energy. This is not a matter of personal ambition or political competition. It is about the fate of the country, about the political and social conditions in which people will be able to live or in which there will be no place for them.

Trump’s enemies are trying to portray his position as resistance to a dictator usurping power. This is both false propaganda, narrow-mindedness, and a lack of understanding of the driving forces of history. Trump was chosen by the times, social conditions and sentiment. He is the leader and mouthpiece of the forces that want America to remain America, for its values and civilizational foundations to survive. In fighting Trump, opponents are willing to sacrifice the country, to drag it into civil war. This is not a fight against an individual, it is a fight against the democratic choice of the majority of the people, against the basic ideas and values of Western Civilization.

In addition to partisan infighting and civil division, there is a huge baggage of geopolitical and socio-economic problems in the country in the world, accumulated in the post-war years, which were not only not addressed, but deliberately exacerbated by predecessors seeking to change the face and way of being America. Illegal emigration, ideologization of education, culture, and the media have become tools of social engineering of the Democrats aimed at changing the national identity and America’s role in the world.

Trump has inherited crisis relations with China, Russia, radical Islam, European liberals who have imposed on America the costs of their security and welfare, countries benefiting from unequal economic relations, the consequences of America’s foreign wars, the decline of its international standing, and the loss of support in the UN and other international organizations.

Trump is not young but has managed to overcome unthinkable obstacles for the average person, he works 12-14 a day, sleeps 4 hours, and is active intellectually and physically. He does not shy away from sharp public policy and polemics and retains self-control and confidence in the most difficult circumstances. He is often a showman, but a brilliant showman, art is a powerful weapon of a public politician. What is worth the unprecedented form and content of his speech to Congress, which broke the boring routine of his predecessors.

He can say without ceremony what he thinks to a foreign leader who has forgotten who he is talking to, to a naked journalist and a political opponent. He says to Squad demagogues, “Go back to where you came from and help fix your total broken and criminal countries.”

A touch of portraiture.  Most American Jews are liberals and go to the forefront of the anti-Trump resistance despite all evidence of his efforts to fight anti-Semitism and support Israel. But ingratitude has not changed his attitude. It can only be understood and explained by the fact that the Jews and the biblical prophets were little honored, but they remained faithful to their mission.

Talk show host Mark Levin jokingly referred to Trump in his presence as the first Jewish president. You don’t have to change or embrace religion to be a decent human being. Especially since there are enough examples of Jews being the least concerned about the fate of their people. And when Trump said that his Jewish opponents hate their religion and Israel, in many cases there is nothing to object to.

Trump has spent most of his life in construction, but his main task today is to dismantle the system that has brought the country to its current division and crisis to allow America to revitalize its way of life, morals, and values. His time is short, and his obstacles and opponents are many, but he has already proven that the impossible is possible.

When it comes to age and the limits of what is possible in politics, Benjamin Netanyahu is not to be overlooked. He is 75 years old, and he has been in big politics for 40 years, as Prime Minister for 17, a record term in the history of Israel. Netanyahu is a political longevity, there are many of them, but what he has no equal in is the conditions in which he has to work.

Both friends and foes of the Jewish state and its prime minister are well informed about the situation in Israel, everything that happens in this country is always prime time, front page news.

Most media outlets explain Israel’s domestic and foreign policy as an attempt by Netanyahu to stay in power, but there is no country where, in the absence of a constitution, parliament, legal institutions, intelligence services, religious organizations, retired army commanders have as much power to influence the course of events as in Israel. In many cases, not only to influence but to paralyze the work of the government and the prime minister. There is much chaos and arbitrariness in the multi-party system and uncontrolled media. In the words of Israeli law professor Moshe Cohen-Eliya, “Israel has a worse deep state than America.” (Tablet article).

There are two ungoverned states within the country: the Arabs and the ultra-Orthodox Jews, for whom laws and norms are unwritten. Dead-end issues are their military service, government subsidies, and radical group interests. The Israeli left is out of control as well. Protests, demonstrations, resistance to police, extravagant actions like dancing in the Knesset as a declaration of unwillingness to serve in the army, all this is an Israeli daily routine, even in the face of war and incessant terror.

When viewed from the outside, which is more often than not, the view of an anti-Semite, Israel is united by Zionist goals and religious unity, has enormous international influence and the ability to pursue its goals. But in the UN and other international organizations, at all sorts of forums and conferences, Israel has not found support for a long time. Most American Jews are Democrats and Reform liberals, and they see their mission as teaching Israel from across the ocean how to live, fight, and think. It’s hard to say who is worse for them, Trump or Netanyahu.

And inside Israel, chaos is unthinkable in a war. The society is a fractured conglomeration of beliefs, convictions, and cultural differences. Civil strife is even more violent in Israel than in America.

Operating under such external and internal conditions, Netanyahu has become a figure of biblical proportions. During his time in power, he has made a tremendous contribution to the development and security of the country. But there were also many mistakes, inevitable in such circumstances, and only history will judge and evaluate his decisions and deeds. Today there are no impartial judges to be found in Israel or in the world.

The leadership problem for Israel is not Netanyahu’s. In other conditions, there would be no question of changing the leadership of a democratic state. But today the problem is that although there are many educated, energetic, ambitious politicians younger and without the baggage of the past, there is no one to replace Netanyahu without severe consequences for the country. Especially when today his hands are not tied by his haters in the White House, and America’s president is a staunch friend of Israel, Donald Trump. Americans have a saying: “Great minds think alike”. Management textbooks say that the system always beats the individual. This is true, but if he is not the bearer of a great mission. The Torah says, “God goes with you to fight for you against your enemies and to give you victory.” (Deuteronomy 20:4).