A Peace of the Pie

This morning I awoke to news of Israel and Lebanon signing a deal to recognize each other's borders on the Mediterranean Sea. Quite an accomplishment for two countries that have been at war with each other since the 1948 implementation of the state of Israel.

Terms of the deal are focused on two gas fields: parts of Karish, which is a confirmed field, and Qana, which is a prospective field. Israel gets full rights to Karish, while Lebanon gets the rights to Qana, with some potential revenues from that part of Qana in Israeli waters going to Israel.

Like all deals between enemies, this one is brokered by a third-party: the U.S. So if something goes wrong, the U.S. will be blamed. But the real dealmaker here is Russia, whose threat to cut off its gas supply to Europe has created a situation where enemies can be partners -- if the stakes are high enough. That the source of these stakes should come from that which is killing the planet (fossil fuels) is somehow beside the point.

So my question now is, does Hezbollah have a climate policy? If not, why not? They have policies on most things concerning political economy and civil society. A quick search ("Hezbollah climate policy") revealed nothing on Google Scholar.

One Tin Soldier (1969)

 

Even the most indifferent student of History knows that the June 28, 1914 assassination of the Archduke of Austria-Hungary by a Serbian national was not the reason for the First World War, only the last of many. Indeed, one of the greatest lessons of that war is its multiple triggers.

One of these triggers concerns the many and shifting alliances and treaties that had been forming and dissolving in the years prior to the Archduke's assassination, in part due to increasing paranoia (the Balkan Wars, militarization, imperialism, nationalism), and resulting in obligations by those allied with those declaring.

Not long after the Archduke's assassination, Austria-Hungry bombed Belgrade (Serbia), Russia mobilized, then Germany, and soon everyone was involved, not just in Europe and the UK, but in Arabia, Africa, the Far East ... Hence the name the Great War. Then a quarter-century later, World War I -- after the start of World War II.

NATO is a Treaty Organization that began with North Atlantic nations, and like an expansionist state (Germany and Italy in the 1930s, Israel since its inception in the late-1940s, China, India and Russia in our current moment), added those nations willing to join it, often to the chagrin of countries who had unfinished business with them.

Russia is an odd place. Neither Europe nor Asia, it is, continentally speaking, its own thing: a forest of poetry loving grumps with extreme and merciless positions on whatever matters most to those who disagree with them, certainly no less racist than Ukraine. And did I say paradoxical? The Russians I am descended from were wholly paradoxical. 

That Russia's Putin has laid claim to Ukraine has been justified for many reasons, among them the importance of Kiev as the spiritual (Christian Orthodox) centre of the Russian people. That Russia should destroy a country in an effort to connect with its spiritual centre is itself a paradox of the highest order.

For my part in the resistance I am currently at work on a Russian translation of Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter's 1969 song "One Tin Soldier", which I am told through intermediaries that a Pussy Riot cover band has offered to perform (dressed as Cossacks) outside Moscow's Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. More on this story as it unfolds.

Lillian Hellman: the Image, the Woman (1986) 2

A better sleep last night than yesterday's, if that makes sense, since last night's sleep began at 11pm, making yesterday's sleep and last night's sleep, etc. When I awoke at 4:50am yesterday (I'd forgotten to take the before-bed gummy that makes me think I can't sleep without it), my unmedicated mind went straight to work, sifting through the written and image rubble of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and trauma fantasy of trauma fantasies: the potential of a Russia-China Non-Agression Pact, like the one Soviet Russia signed with Nazi Germany in August, 1939, a week before Germany and Russia invaded Poland and Russia did the same to Finland, the latter an event that ruined the friendship of "fellow travellers" Lillian Hellman and Tallulah Bankhead, when the former refused to grant permission for a Finnish fundraising staging of her play The Little Foxes (1939) that had, by then, made the latter the star she was destined to become. On the topic of the Russian invasion, Hellman was reported as saying, "I don't believe in the fine, lovable Republic of Finland that everyone gets so weepy about. I've been there and it looks like a pro-Nazi little republic to me." Some people say the same of Ukraine, though our disgust with a post-Show Trial Stalinist Russia is nothing compared to how many of us feel about Putin and his Maldivian armada of oligarchs.

William Wright's Lillian Hellman: the Image, the Woman (1986) is turning out to be a great read. He writes precisely on the historical events paralleling Hellman's rise (particularly those she aligned herself with, such as the Loyalist cause during the Spanish Civil War), and is most thorough in pointing out the facts of Hellman's life versus her fiction-as-fact insistences, which include the impossibility of her alleged visit to Finland. Further to that, we hear a great deal about Hellman's general disposition; not just in Wright's words, but from Hellman's great friend Dorothy Parker, who is quoted as saying, "When Lillian gets angry, I regret to say she screams," and there was much screaming on the topic of Bankhead. On the topic of Parker, a soft-pedal personification of Twitter if ever there was one, Wright provides this paragraph:

"Parker was a small, dark-haired woman, given to such girlish grooming flourishes as bangs and bows on her shoes. She was soft-spoken, quick to create a confidential intimacy with anyone with whom she was conversing, and while sweetly demolishing with her razor tongue whomever offended her -- and often fame or importance was sufficient provocation -- she never lost what Margaret Case Harriman called 'an overpowering air of dulcet femininity.'" (67)

And on Parker, Wright writes:

"Not long after their meeting [Hellman and Parker first met in NYC], Parker went to Hollywood [where Hellman was with her longtime lover Dashiell Hammett], and the friendship would not be ratified until Hellman herself return to Hollywood as a famous playwright. At that reunion they became lifelong friends despite Hammett's antipathy to Parker, which increased until eventually her appearance would send him running. He was once asked why. Although Parker was as radical as Hammett, they would often find themselves on the opposite side of a position. Hammett said he didn't want to be around Parker because he couldn't argue with her. "She cries," he explained. (68)