The Hamlets of Bastogne

Nearer to you

Before he could pioneer human demolition aftercare in post-WWII California, veteran Motto had grown up during the Great Depression of the Thirties, he had got himself enlisted with the US Army and he had fought his GI way through occupied Europe to end up trapped in Bastogne, Belgium in the winter of 1944. Deep in the snow Over There, that question arose: will I be saved? Will death or ''red and blue and green and yellow parachutes polka dotting the sky the colour of bleach'' be my liberation from this cold, violent, vert-de-gris death trap? (highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles ''The BestWay to Save People from Suicide'').

C-47s dropped supplies to the stranded men. Saved.

What civvie Jerome Motto also remembered once back home was how important his pen-friend's letters had felt to him during his war-time service in Europe. This is no cargo cult. There is one thing though the Pacific island of Tanna holds in common with the Golden Gate bridge land: a drop in the Ocean. When Chief Isaac of Tanna visited California in 1995, he noted nobody smiled, and that poverty was widespread. The Bridge is notorious: in Motto's days, a young man jumped from it, and a note was found in his flat. He wouldn't do it, he had written, if he saw one smiling face on his way to the bridge.

Jerome Motto became not Frum, but an unorthodox psychiatrist who based his suicide prevention system on letters, in fact long questionnaires he and his army of volunteers dropped on suicide patients just released from hospital, but maybe left out there in the cold. What a singular character he was, a Unit Aerian who never really left the embattled Army men (what veteran does), who married a former nun out of her sisterhood, who led an army of volunteers, and who lived surrounded by an ever-growing number of books replete with bundled letters ready to be dropped on expectant readers, in a house with a pool he never used. Not taking the fatal plunge, not opting for baptism, nor for the mikveh of his ancestors. Maybe the status quo in that regard too felt more adequate in the ever-renewed fight to catch dangling lives in their fall and to balance out the drop.

Unitarians believe in the one God, not in the Holy Trinity Father-Son-Holy Spirit. One of their founding fathers was a Spaniard called Michael Servet (in Latino, ''head angel who serves''), a theologian and a scientist who tried ''to reform the reformed'', and who discovered the workings of pulmonary circulation way after the Arab Ibn-al-Hafis had. In short, how oxygen, ''air'' is carried from the lungs to the heart and back again by blood vessels: more of units, air, vessels, lives saved. Not Miguel's, he was burnt at the stake by Calvin in Switzerland in 1553 on account of his ''just the one God'' heresy.

Re-formed by the Word, Protestants attach great value to salvation. Salvation is respectability. Those interested have a multitude of paths ahead of them to get there. I'm still entangled.

Still, we have a lot of units here: military, professional, marital, scientific and religious, geographical and historical, all interconnected and working together in a body. The gap is being bridged between the cracked nuts cold-shouldered in the post-war New World living the American Nightmare, and the frost-bitten GIs of the 3989th Truck Company encircled in the age-old Ardennes. Celts are mad, Americans are crazy. The melting pot won over the Ghastly, soldiers dressed as snow with bedsheets and table cloths given by the Bastogne residents did not surrender, and they were immortalised by the legendary McAuliffe in a gloriously singular, yet plural linguistic unit: NUTS!

Der Ewige Muselmann

But it wasn't over yet, you wish. The Allied with soldiers of all possible extractions pushed through the borders to salvage what they could of the haggard survivors tottering in the ruins of Old Europe, liberating death camps so revolting even the most seasoned Patton had a diffidence with a pile of dead bodies in Ohrdruf-Dachau.

For/because of/thanks to a nice Jewish young man of note, and to many others, among whom the secretive British also polka dotting the sky, this land is mine unto this last. Yet grateful as I am, and as I always will be to my dying day, I'm not well, if alive. I wanted to end my life all my life, and I had to battle the ''evil inclination'' with an astonishing regularity. Just as an aside, I'm more Jutland than Jew. Why, when the whole world came to save m^i v^i cul, my old backside, my other half. Too many wars, too many invasions, too many occupations. Many times I wanted to walk into one of those clinics, although not terminally ill. Belgium used to be very Catholic, the Netherlands very Calvinistic, yet both countries have now become notorious for their relaxed approach to assisted suicide - please note that as is the case in Switzerland I think, 80% of the claimants are rejected. These countries are not yet doling out death like a vending machine. As for suicides as committed by self, Belgium has one of the highest rate, along with very diverse communities such as South Korea, Lithuania and Greenland Inuits. All are alienated and isolated, mostly male groups struggling without much of flying vessels dropping polka dots in a sky the colour of bleak. One Jerome Motto, one Anand Poulsen can't do it all on their own: World Too Big. Even Baby Yoda can't solve everything - yet, but I'm sure Disney is working hard as we speak on that sensational science-fictional vaccine.

These days if you live in DeadEndia, lives don't matter, your people have died for nothing, yourself and/or your descendants are deprived of life essentials ranging from food and shelter to identity and a sense of purpose, just so that Bark und Navel can prevail, their new-fangled kapos with teeth long enough to scratch the floor ripping through your nights. Ridiculous Yahoos - Swift's, not the web's - crap on your head, especially so if you happen to be a Muselmann, '' ascetic'' ''fakir'' (''l'ete a moitie nu, mais tout a fait modeste, je devenais Indien'' as sung by Jacques Brel) in the beautiful, respectful words Vidal Haim Sephiha found in Nacht und Nebel (sefarad.org Nuit et Brouillard) to describe human beings of any background emptied of the will to live as soon as they hit the camps. No wonder Mengele and his criminals Nazi creeps experimented on twins. If you listen to Vidal Haim Sephiha's account of his arrest in Brussels for not wearing the sheriff star (INA archives), and if you look at the casualised use of violent nudity against the Prophet (BBHN) in Conflans and elsewhere, you'll see something of the Nuit: a public rape of the sort that got Varian Fry going. Isaac and Ismail were a band of half-brothers. They are both buried with Abraham the father of three religions in Machpelah. A sans-culotte revolution neither Glorious nor Velvet that delivered butchery and genocide by activating a beheading machine cannot command respect for its ''freedom'' stance, and it certainly cannot hope to control his modern-day radicals (and the rest of the populace) with pissing alley graffiti financed by the hapless - and muted - taxpayers. Our kids isn't learning, they are being brainwashed into accepting a state-sponsored ratonnade for ''an eddication'' that effortlessly rhymes with indoctrination. Which of these kids (and of you) has ever heard of Ismail Necdet Kent (Blessed be his memory) a la gare de Saint Charles? A Turkish vice-consul who offered to sacrifice his Muslim modesty to teach the Nazis a lesson in decency is a saint who didn't learn his human lesson through stereotypes. Bosnia will have been quickly forgotten, with the St Barthelemy, the Vendee, Vichy, and what next? As for schoolroom caricatures, Jacques de Lacretelle gave them a good hiding with Silberman. In 1922. The strong of heart searching for an educational star-system may in-vision Rabbi Jacob Reuven's film Hashem Took Back His Millions. Taken aback you will be. Me too: I submit that males ask the PC brigade to protect the integrity of their precious possessions with the same passion for equality they demonstrate when defending the right of objectified women.

Hamlet Unbound

Just like in the olden days, people here and now are abused and willed to disappear because they won't live to be brutes or to be brutalised by cheaply cloned kapos and their dime-store Nazis. A savage only jungle-savvy would know better. Here are the eugenics of the post-post-war world: ''natural'' wastage of lives through the desperation of unescapable entrapment; poverty, un/sub-employment, paucity of thought. loneliness, alcoholism, ''re-creational'' drugs and tranquillity opioids have become the killing norm for too many. You don't live, you barely exist, and then you die. You can be your own thing, not your own self. Depression and suicide are the last outposts of a new race of humanoids mass-deprived of the dignity of a decent living not by fate, but by meaningless non-entities who glorify the struggle for life they let us fight for them, the ''fittest to survive'', locking us up in a world where a decent living has become a Logan's Run type of lottery; but not an undignified death. Death has never been so democratised. ''Who would fardel bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life''[…] ''when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin?'' In other words, why suffer a lifetime of filthy abuse, when you could end it all in one fell swoop? To Hamlet, depression is rebellion, death is liberation. Does democracy do itself justice when its feudalised citizens' dissidence can only mean disappearance?

''God is dead'' said the death camp survivors. I don't propose to be a revisionist to negate the assertion. I believe them, and I believe God chose to die with them, that God was in the camps with all of them.

''Asi pues, la muerte hablaba Yiddish'' dixit Jorge Semprun when he and Albert rescue a Buchenwald living dead Jew buried under a stack of dead bodies, in Writing or Living (sorry i can't type the Spanish accents with my keyboard). A few years ago, a Catholic Bulgian country priest said something along the same lines at a funeral I was attending: it's not just a death and the end, it's getting used to another kind of presence. That is a narrative. In the voluntary absence of God, the organised chaos of religious anarchy by which the only one to answer to is God, Allah, Hashem and so on is gaining momentum now that ideologies, big political governments, conventional religions and bigoted secularism have shot themselves in both feet by deserting their own. Vox populi, vox dei: it's their opium people want, not Trump, Putin, or anybody else of populist lineage. Revival will not be coming from the domination of the West - the West being an obsolete, caricatural view of the old-fashioned mind since the Cold War has ended, and that we are now one with the East - or the domination of Germany uber alles Europaisch, or the cocos as dead as dodos. Dominants would be God, and blood came out of them. The Greeks should know, they graced us with civilisation, democracy, metics with philosophy and drama, and the whole lot got sold down the river by greedy gits. And here we are, souls frozen to death in a cold, violent, deadly abusive world, trying to spot a few polka dots in a foreign sky the colour of bleach.