By Phyllis Chesler
Weather has become a rather Big Player in our daily lives and definitely in our travel plans.
I expected a very dear guest today, Rebecca Bynum, the founder of The New English Review Press—the very woman who, together with Naama Sandrow and myself, is co-hosting, as well as publishing, Ibn Warraq’s new book Churchill’s Secular Creed: Empire, Zionism and Islam’s Complicity in the Holocaust. She has three of my books in print as well.
God bless her. May angels sing her way to Paradise.
Still, Rebecca’s plane from Nashville was cancelled early this morning. Leftover/still ongoing? weather conditions from the recent storms on the East Coast. Hundreds of flights have also been cancelled; thousands more have been delayed. Tomorrow? We’ll just have to see.
Luckily, the launch party is set for tomorrow, 7/21. However, great rain, thunderstorms, and flash flooding are all predicted but not until the afternoon. Will other guests be able to get here? From one of the five boroughs, from crosstown, from other cities in the American South?
Look: Odysseus turned up twenty years later. Penelope could never be sure of the time or the date of his return. And none of us are much like Penelope. We are impatient, arrogant, used to having our way. Back in the day, Middle Eastern friends and colleagues of mine would definitely arrive but only after the sand storms, ships, highway brigands, and various very inconvenient wars allowed them safe passage through. Before them—the major Jewish scholars—OMG! It took some years to get to their desired destinations.
We have been so spoiled. We assume that our trains, planes, cars, and buses will all leave and arrive on time. We assume that we can actually control our destinies. What fools we be!
We are all being thrown back to early times and to life on other continents where a person rarely left their own village or did not travel very far from where they were born. Of course, there were exceptions, but this was and still is the rule for most on planet earth.
Oh, but that’s far from everything. There are all the very hot “foreign” wars, coming ever closer to our American shores. Seventeen—or is it eighteen?—very young American soldiers killed by Iran. And the regime far, far from collapsing. And their proxy paramilitary jihadist armies in Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza lining up for their continuing Jihad—maybe Jihadist cells elsewhere, and all over the world, will start attacking…. Israel has already bled too many of its young at the hands of Iranian Shia proxies Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, etc. Iranian citizens have been at the mercy of fundamentalist fanatics for nearly half a century. I hope that the American administration really, really understands with whom they have been trying to make a “deal.”
And then there are the information and disinformation wars that keep everyone in a state of daily confusion, which provokes ignorance, frustration, and a great rage. What is really going on? Who’s in charge of the nuclear weaponry? Why in God’s name ask Pakistan (!) to mediate anything? How can anyone erase the deepfakes that are everywhere upon us?
My own personal misery: I simply refuse to learn how to enter medical portals. I am totally defeated by the continued Apple upgrades; the streaming platform scams—it is no longer enough to pay their monthly fees. Now, in order to avoid all the ads they’ve begun to drop into the movies, one has to pay again to upgrade these greedy platforms. I was re-watching one of my all-time favorite British police procedurals, Endeavor, when, after the first three or four episodes, the entire series would have to be bought for more than $125.00. Amazon Prime: Is this really fair?
Endeavor is Morse’s first name. He is an Oxford-educated lad, a literary and classical music loving oddity for a police officer, and yet he is very good at this job. He is also impossibly “cute.” I believe there are at least six seasons. Shaun Evans is the Oxford-educated one; Roger Allam is his very steady-ready superior; and Anton Lesser is the Capo di Tutti Capi.
I wonder if I try to re-watch Foyle’s War on Brit Box whether I’ll run into this same thing.
Luckily, if you live long enough, you might forget the series you watched more than a decade or more ago. And both these programs are far superior to the cartoon-level shoot-outs that now pass for The Latest Thing. My ass.
I don’t even want to rant on about the uses of AI. I have checked it out, and I fear it.
I am old enough to actually miss landlines. Why? Because when one left one’s home or office, there was no way people could find you. One could enjoy a long train ride into the country with time to read and dream and to actually gaze at the landscapes at one’s window.
Gone forever—unless the weather and all the wars destroy our already failing infrastructure entirely.
First published in Phyllis’ Newsletter
