What Matters

and letting what doesn't matter go

“The Third of May 1808 in Madrid,” Francisco Goya

The title of this blog is Masses and Edges. I chose that title for its ambiguity. “Masses” can describe large visual shapes, but the term also has sociological implications. “Edges” are the interactions at the border between masses. At one point on an edge, things come into focus and get sharp, there is a clear distinction between this mass and the one beside it. At another point of the edge things blur out, and the border between one mass and the next becomes indistinguishable.

As in the Horseshoe Theory, where the extremes of one political ethos become indistinguishable from the extremes of the opposite political ethos.

In nature, interesting things happen at edges. On the border between wilderness and city, certain animals thrive — Eastern coyotes, sparrows, ravens — and they live off the detritus of man. On the border between forest and field, deer graze; they need the grassland like cattle but they also need to hide in the forest at the least danger. Edges are places full of life.

I was born into an ethnic group that constitutes 0.2% of the world’s population, yet is held responsible for all of the evil that takes place on the earth, and that role, as scapegoat, as the Evil against which everyone defines the Good, as the Disruptor of the Status Quo, that role was projected onto us and is foundational to both religions that sprang out of Judaism — Christianity and Islam. These two supercessionist religions/cultures define themselves by maligning us. We Jews are, by definition, the edge. We are the dividing line between West and East, between the Individual and the Group, between Democracy and Dictatorship. Interesting things happen at the edge. Wherever we go, we are not considered one of the group, part of the mass, so we have to be ten times better at whatever we do than our colleagues if we want to make a living wage. In any profession, we’re shut out, not hired, we have to start our own things, we starve if we’re only as good as the others, so we have to study harder, work harder, work smarter, just to get by. Which is why there are so many Jewish hospitals, because regular hospitals refused to treat Jews. Which is why there are so many great Jewish stores, legal firms, financial houses, fashion designers and tailors, they had to start their own companies because no one would hire them. The fact that we could never get away with mediocrity is why there are so many great Jewish physicians, writers, philosophers, musicians. Why there are so many Jewish Nobel Prize winners. Which sets us off more and makes us hated more. If we had just known our place and died when knocked down, that would have been OK, but we refuse to die, we keep springing up, like dandelions that push up through cracks in the pavement.

Dandelion greens clean your liver. They flush out your toxins. We’re like that.

If we have made such attempts at assimilation that it’s hard to tell us from those around us, once our place at the edge gets blurred, that sharp edge has to be reasserted, the people in whose midst we live have always defined themselves as not like Jews, so we get expelled or we get killed, anything to reassert that edge. That literally has been the pattern since Egypt. When you study Jewish history, the pattern reasserts itself with painful monotony in every generation, so for at least 2500 years we have been pissing off our neighbors by keeping our noses to the grindstone.

It’s the lies that get us killed. The libels. Blood drinking, children-killing, every culture projects its fears and the things they’re ashamed of on us, over and over it’s DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender). There’s an adage, “You tell me what you accuse the Jew of, and I’ll tell you what you’ve done.” All the blood libels from the Middle Ages have been once again dredged up, news stories are twisted in such a way that whenever someone tries to wipe us out, their violence is blamed on us. Lies and fabricated images are trafficked all day, every day, and the Final Solution is full on, it came on so fast we realize it never went away, it just went into its closet, and is now out with the joy and exuberance that can only come from allowing your hatred its pure honesty, from allowing who you truly are to shine.

We on the edge have been squeezed out of every profession, our kindergartens are shot up, all in the service of freeing “Palestine,” which by the way never existed and was dreamed up by the KGB in 1964 with a whole ahistorical past that also never happened. The love child of Stalinism, Nazism (via the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem) and the Islamic requirement to take over the world, “Palestinianism” is the justification of the spread of an evil Caliphate that has taken over Europe, Australia and Canada and is threatening the US.

As the world is going dark, we on the edge, we Jews, have an assignment to keep the lights on. As the world is becoming overwhelmed by a death cult, we Jews haven’t gotten with the program and are stupid enough to have chosen life because we are commanded to choose life, it’s what we do. Meanwhile, the world cheers for Intifada, which means to kill all the Infidels, that is, everyone who is not Muslim.

We warn you, we warn you, we warn you, but no one ever believes us, because they say “Jews lie.” The Muslims literally have a concept, “taqqiye,” that says it’s right and proper to lie to the Infidel if it will help you conquer them, and we have absolutely nothing like that, but you believe them.

I don’t just worry for the Jews. I worry for the Christians and the agnostics and the atheists too. They have no idea what’s coming for them, this horrible force of darkness barreling forward.

Whatever starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews.

I am here in Israel with my family, on the edge of the edge, ducking every few hours into bomb shelters while the world wishes Iran would just bomb us off the map and the world could happily just murder all its homosexuals and dissidents and retreat into its burqas. The world is rooting for the IRGC to win simply because the IRGC exists to kill Jews and anyone who wants the Jews dead can’t be bad.

That said, a blog about art technique can feel pretty trivial. I had threatened a few months back to explain to you about transparency vs opacity. Sargent called that business of using transparent pigments for shadows vs opaque pigments for lights “a trick,” meaning you can get your point across in paint whether you’re using opaques or transparents, meaning the technical issues aren’t the point, meaning the seeing is the point. Transparency vs opacity is a nice technical effect and using that technique is the basis of my own style, but I have more important things to talk about.

Everybody who’s been following me for art technique who’s been annoyed by the fact that I’ve talked about being Jewish, please leave. Almost none of you have paid anyhow, there is nothing to lose.

I am here in Israel with my family, with bombs falling from psychopathic regimes and the West cheering the psychopaths, repeating ad nauseum the lies and the lies and the lies and not bothering to investigate if the lies have any validity, and I daily think about what matters. What do I have to contribute. What do I worry about.

I worry about the Jews I left behind. I don’t worry about the bombs. I don’t worry about myself. I worry about the old people in my old shul in Maine, where the current Democratic gubernatorial candidate has a bona fide Nazi tattoo, and where Mandani started a chapter of SJP and propagandized young people in the area to “Globalize the Intifada” right in their backyard. I am here in Israel essentially as a refugee, having hunkered down in what I see as a world war against the 0.2% of the population that gets all the blame but is actually trying to save the West, and I ask myself how can I be of use. Pictures painted for interior decoration are not something of use. I want to help the Diaspora. I want to help those left behind.

Those on the edge who are now falling through the cracks.

Some of the people left behind stayed to fight for their country. They don’t want to see their country circle around the drain. A country that blames all its problems on the Jews is a country that is not asking how to fix their problems. A country that blames all its problems on the Jews is a country that is going down because it won’t fix its problems. It happened to ancient Egypt. To Babylonia. To Assyria. To Persia. To Greece. To Rome. To Inquisition Spain. To Inquisition Portugal. To Deuxième Empire France. To Nazi Germany. To Soviet Russia. To the Ottoman Empire. And now to most of Europe, Australia, Canada, and perhaps to the United States. We’re watching it happen again in real time, blow by blow, every day.

It has a lot to do with how for two generations, Qatari money has set the direction and content of academic discourse, and of course Qatar is the bankroller of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is hellbent on colonizing the West into an international Caliphate. It also has to do with Facebook/Instagram and Russian and Iranian troll farms bent on destabilizing the US. It also has to do with TikTok and Chinese efforts to destabilize the US. The Great Powers are fighting for hearts and minds, and they know from history that any country that blames its problems on its Jews is on its way out, which is why they insinuate the indoctrination that the Jews are behind all problems.

News flash: Qatari money dwarfs Jewish money by several orders of magnitude and have dictated that our educational system from college to kindergarten teaches Nazi-style indoctrination, and we haven’t even gotten yet to Saudi money. You guys who think Jews run the world have been duped.

My days are consumed by Ulpan, which are Hebrew language classes. It will be years before I’m fluent, if I ever get there. I’d like to be useful right now but between Ulpan and the triviality of easel painting, that’s not so useful. But I’m not just a trained painter. I’m also a trained writer. Every day I’m out there online trying to get the helpless in the Diaspora, the abandoned in the Diaspora, the clueless in the Diaspora, to do something to help themselves.

Come here where there’s an army and advanced missile defense systems to protect you, or if you must stay there in the Diaspora to stand your ground and defend your country from its own internal rot, band together and learn how to physically defend yourselves. And for G-d’s sake learn Jewish and Israeli history, so you have facts and answers to the outrageous lies. Because most people in the West and the Middle East now believe that the Russian forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is Gospel truth, so the police will not defend you, at best they will sweep up after you’re attacked and deny that there’s such a thing as “antisemitism” because the term “antisemitism” implies that Jews do not rule the world and “antisemitism” is an “Islamophobic” term anyway, because it’s unreasonable to be afraid of people who devote their lives to exterminating you.

You have to learn to shoot, you have to learn how to fight, and you have to learn to throw off the shtetl “wisdom” that says make yourself invisible, lay low, don’t fight, because with current surveillance technologies, that shtetl “wisdom” will no longer protect you. You have to learn to stop being passive. You have to learn to band together for mutual protection.

What matters? I am worried for the people I left behind who don’t even know they’re in mortal danger.