The soft dictatorship

The personal is political and the political is personal.

I personally favour a socially liberal, free political environment, but I live my life under a 'dictatorship of the soft'. This is not at all what Marx or Lenin saw coming, but all they had to deal with were kaisers and czars. I have cats.

The prevailing system in this household is what I call 'unenlightened furry despotism'. The supreme ruler is Spot, whose picture appears above.

Imperious Meow, aka The Despot, established her rule at the age of three months. One evening she rounded the corner into the living room and saw me on the couch, with the ironing board open next to me. She jumped up on the board, from which vantage point she could look down on me. She made eye contact and then barked a sharp, concise command: "Meow!"

I didn't understand right off what she was trying to say. I looked at her and responded with my own "meow!" She looked indignant. "Meow!" she repeated. Because it was so cute, I kept responding in kind, but she eventually wore me out. Once I remained silent for a good couple of minutes, she seemed satisfied and jumped off the board, headed for a victory celebration of piling individual pieces of paper under my bed - she used to do that, very methodically and purposefully.

All semblance of equality disappeared that night. In the picture you can see her sitting on the imperial pillow her grandmother bought her, where she symbollically sits on and smothers a wolf. She only climbs down when she wants to play with something, use the litter, explore the balcony or hallway, or terrorize her twin brother, Ares. For food, she issues commands from the pillow. For affection, the same thing. If Ares eats treats or drinks water while she is on her throne, she barks and moans at him until he goes away.

Ares and I are both stronger than her but we do what she says. It's said that no dictator rules for long without the implicit consent of his or her subjects, and I think this is a good example - we have internalized the idea of her dominance to such an extent that we don't even question it anymore. And when my obedience wavers, she sprawls on her back or side, revealing her soft, white, furry tummy, which she knows I can't resist. She's also not stingy with corrective measures such as nosebites and swats across the face or arms to protest real or perceived slights.

The Despotic Kitten is also an expert in psychological warfare. She stares Ares down to back him away from his chicken-flavoured treats. Spot doesn't like them herself, but she doesn't want him to enjoy them, and has kicked them out of his bowl and used them as toys. She sometimes stands at the entry to the balcony when he's out there, barring him from coming back in.

Spot cultivates a cult of personality, and I'm not the only one who gets sucked in. Spot and Ares turn six on Saturday, and my crazy-cat-person mother sent them cards and a 20-dollar bill for cat toys, of which they already have plenty. She also sent them a Mozart music DVD meant for human infants and toddlers, to develop their aesthetic and mental capabilities. Although the gifts are to be distributed equally, my mother has confessed a special love for Spot, who seems to return the affection. I think it takes one control freak to truly appreciate another.

OK, enough for now. I'm being summoned. The hind paws are elevated and the expressive green eyes are shining brightly. "Meow," she said.

The Unbearable Tweeness of Yiddish

I don't speak Yiddish. I know a fair number of words but I don't really speak the language and I have no desire to. To the extent that my Jewish identity is expressed linguistically, it is through Hebrew, the modern version resurrected from the ancient language of prayer and spoken by almost six million Jews in the modern state of Israel. Yiddish makes me wince when I hear it, which I acknowledge is unfair in some ways and a huge slap in the face to my own heritage. And it makes me sound like I have a massive chip on my shoulder, which of course I do.

Yiddish was the mother tongue of millions of European Jews well into the twentieth century. Although written with Hebrew characters, its semantic backbone is German, with dialects incorporating various proportions of Hebrew, Russian, Polish, Romanian, other east and central European tongues, and even English in small amounts. Jews, being the archetypal wandering people, relied on Yiddish as a means of communication with their coreligionists in other lands, a means often less than intelligible to gentiles, which was not only useful, it was life-saving. Similar Jewish languages and dialects evolved from Morocco to Bukhara in central Asia, including unique forms of Arabic, Spanish and Italian (Ladino), Turkish, Farsi and several other languages.

But Yiddish had by far the most speakers, including the vast majority of the 3.5 million Jews of Poland, the 5 million of the Soviet Union, the 850,000 of Romania, the 800,000 of Hungary, and millions in smaller communities from Amsterdam to Tallinn. Yiddish was not only the language of everyday life, it was a language of literature and song, the means of expression of countless intellectuals and poets. It was even the basis of vibrant theatre and film scenes, in the twilight years between the world wars. Only a small remnant of these communities survived World War II: Yiddish virtually disappeared as a mother tongue, and for decades few bothered even to study it.

This gives you some idea of the emotional power of Yiddish in the Jewish consciousness and its formative influences on modern Jewish life.

But I can't stand to hear it.

The evil Chucky doll in Child's Play has nothing on my ultimate nightmare: A broad-faced gray-haired female doll dressed in a fur coat that when you pull the string says "abi gezunt" (to your health in Yiddish) and then makes a noise like it's sucking on a hard candy, followed by a deep sigh to the accompaniment of klezmer music.

Yiddish, to me, is the language of the disapora ('exile' - go figure), the language of powerlessness, rootlessness, self-abnegation, self-renunciation, superstition and interminable waiting. It is to me what Euro-American names are to a lot of African-Americans - a reminder of a time of subjugation and permanent second-class status. Hebrew, in contrast, is to me the language of self-determination, of assertion and restoration. And it generally avoids the tweeness of Yiddish words and expressions that I don't care to repeat here. The kitsch and saccharine factors are so high I'm surprised Celine Dion doesn't sing in Yiddish, at least as far as I know.

The latter-day revival of Yiddish in university departments, Jewish cultural activities and even literary works is remarkable, given the completeness of the destruction just six decades ago. But it is often creepy, particularly in the hands of non-Jews in places like Germany, who increasingly wallow in echoes of pre-war Jewish culture. Euros in their twenties watch Yiddish films and listen to klezmer bands ... it not only smacks of appropriation, it is positively ghoulish, given the history. It is as if such people are not comfortable with Hebrew and other more current manifestations of Jewish culture - they have to reach back to something far less threatening, less threatening because it is dead.

North American Jewish politicians and community leaders will often throw in Yiddish terms when it's "just us," which is annoying enough, but now even non-Jews do it sometimes with Jewish audiences, and I find it difficult to stomach. I assume they don't break into negro spirituals in front of Black audiences, so please spare us, or learn a few choice words in Hebrew.

I don't know how to reconcile any of this with the fact that I enjoy Fiddler on the Roof, but sometimes we just have to live with inconsistencies. I imagine most Jews reading what I've written here would be furious, but I'm OK with that.

Yes, I'm posting again and it's so gay

Sorry for the absence. I had a note but the cats ate it.

Today's topic is Brokeback Mountain. You're right. This is terribly overdue. However, I only saw the film last weekend, in the company of a straight but not narrow friend whose taste in film is so bizarre he deserved to see something quality for a change. I had wanted to get him to watch some John Waters movies, but after viewing some of his top film choices, I think Waters might be too Disney for him. Besides, he took some of my pizza home so I don't want to talk about him too much.

Yes, about the film. I read Annie Proulx's short story last summer at the insistence of another friend, a huge 'mo and all-around good guy, who distributed photocopies of the tale like confetti, such was his enthusiasm. He's a country boy and has had half the men between here and Red Deer, so he related to Brokeback Mountain's themes and characters. I thought the story was OK, though I was put off somewhat by the hayseed dialogue and the slow pace. I thought the film was better than the short story, and not just because the protaganists were played by two guys I enjoy seeing naked (my 'mo friend has the same smile and the same expression in his eyes as Heath Ledger, by the way). The director brought the story together in a way that made it much more vivid and emotionally intense than it was on the page, at least for me. The actors did a great job too, and I won't soon forget the scene where Jack and Ennis met after their first long separation and kissed like they would never ever let go, no matter what.

They did let go, of course, and without giving away too much to those who have yet to see the film, this is not a happy story. That's the main reason I avoided seeing it for so long my countryboy friend threatened to revoke my gay card. As if he has the authority - he wears solar-strength orange shirts with bright red pants. I am sick to death of sad gay films. I'm grateful we've reached the stage where not every gay-themed movie has to be about AIDS, but I don't see that we've made much progress since the bad old days described by the late Vito Russo in his book & film The Celluloid Closet: "In twenty-two of twenty-eight films dealing with gay subjects from 1962 to 1978, major gay characters onscreen ended in suicide or violent death."

That's pretty heavy stuff. It sends a powerful negative message, and the trend continues. For every Beautiful Thing, Prom Queen, or But I'm a Cheerleader, there are ten films out there about gay people where it all ends in tears or death or both. I don't expect every film about us to be a recruitment poster for happy homo-osity, but this is gross misrepresentation that heteros would never tolerate. Imagine, straight readers, if almost every film about het romance ended like Fatal Attraction or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Or even better yet, Carrie or The Shining. I like all those films, but wouldn't it grate on your nerves to know that every onscreen protaganist you came to appreciate ended up permanently scarred emotionally, axed, bludgeoned or shot to death, or killed after being bathed in pig's blood? How would Hugh Grant, Julia Roberts or Jennifer Aniston ever sustain a film career?

My other objection to Brokeback is its timidity in portraying gay romance. There was more onscreen hetero humping than gay humping, but the little gay action there was was too much for some in the small audience the evening I attended. The male halves of two 60-something couples sitting behind us sputtered with outrage at the first how-do-you-do between Ennis and Jack and left the theatre. My friend told me he found the man-on-man kissing and sex "shocking," as he had never seen any before. There really wasn't much in that film that could reasonably be described as graphic. You want graphic, watch an episode of the recently retired Queer as Folk. We need more gay sexual imagery, not less - it's a substantial part of the world we live in.

And filmmakers need to remember that 'gay' is a synonym for 'happy' - I'd like to see that reflected back at us more often. For example, a better ending for Brokeback would have seen Jack and Ennis opening up a B&B in the Montana foothills, with two-stepping classes on Thursdays and special camping trips into the mountains. Now THAT would have won the best film Oscar for sure!