Jimmy Carter, retreat of the American right, partying with the Russian intelligensia

Druzya, I'm back with a vengeance and promise to be more frequent in my postings from now on.
several people have criticized me here for commenting on the Jimmy Carter controversy without reading Carter's book. Fair enough, but I know enough about the controversy and about Carter's seminal role in helping Israel secure its first peace treaty with an Arab country back in 1979 to know that he doesnt deserve being savaged, as he was by Dershowitz, for "having (Jewish) blood on his hands. Recent coverage of Carter's appearance at Brandeis by my friend Larry Cohler in the Jewish Week reinforces my thinking in this regard.


Now for a few other points>
Watching Bush's State of the Union earlier this week made me realize how irrelevant he has become and how the country has already moved on and suddenly become a much more progressive place. The November election crashed down the door, but power continues to flow away from Bush and his now-discredited ultra-conservative ideology. If we look to the issues of the immediate and long term future, the horror in Iraq, health care, the chickens coming home to roost re global warning, none of which the right has a solution for, there is reason for optimism that the ultra-conservatism that has dominated our politics since at least 1980 has finally been put to rout. How the Dems will deal with their chance is a big question, whether Hillary is the way to go, or whether she has lost all her progressive principles and now only craves power--what about Obama and Edwards--these are important questions for the next 12 months, but for the first time in decades there is reason to be hopeful about the direction of America. It is just that Bush and company have done such enormous damage to almost every facet of life in this country and a lot of the damage is irreversible. To me, the main issue now is how quickly the country's leadership--and the world's--will move to come up with a serious plan to slow and eventually reverse global warming; the very survival of our civilization and our kids and grandkids depends on it. For his flagrant fiddling while the world burned over the past 7 years, Bush will earn the eternal contempt of history.


I went to a terrific party last night at the home of a couple well known as members of the Russian intelligensia of Washington Heights. There were about 12 people there, several artists, a new age therapist, a doctor, a lawyer, a few computer people, but they evinced a special free-thinking Russian sensibility that I had long heard about but never experienced first hand before. I got quite drunk by mixing wine, cognac and vodka, never a good idea at my age, but while I remember relatively little, some impressions remain; here were a number of Russians who were ardent lefties (although I found that the justified contempt of the host of the affair for Bush, made him entirely too tolerant of Putin, the thug in the Kremlin, who he saw as a useful counterwieght, together with the Chinese, against the power of the U.S. Talk about a delightful form of congnative dissonance. They were hardly perfect, but it was refreshing to find myself with Russians with progressive politics and in love with art, music and ideas as opposed to money and fancy homes in New Jersey and Westchester and expensive cruises.


They quizzed me a lot on Israel and Jewish issues; several were to the left of me on Israel, but it seemed to me, sadly, that they totally didnt 'get' what makes Israel such a vibrant and life-affirming place despite the horrors of the conflict with the Palestinians. I spoke about my encounters with Pamyat, Cossacks and various other neo-fascist thugs back in the 1980's and early 90's and one, a doctor with a blonde Russian-non-Jewish wife told me that he feels strongly and proudly Jewish except that he was never attracted to Jewish women. I told him I used to have similar complexes until I discovered Israeli women back in the mid-70's and blondes never again had the same appeal.

Anyway, my partner Tanya and I had a wonderful time at the party and it was great to experience a very different, lively and eclectic face of Russian New York