December 29, 2023

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2023-12-28

Hi. I'm Joseph Zitt. I moved from the US to Israel in 2017. This is my newsletter about more-or-less daily life in my city in the shadow of war. You can select these links to subscribe or unsubscribe. There are more links at the bottom. Here we go...

---

Arak in the Afternoon

I ask one of my bosses why we're gathering, partway through the day. "Who knows? End of the week? End of the year? They asked us to do it. We're here."

This is unusual. We have rarely had two get-togethers in the same month, let alone the same week. I don't know who asked them to do it. I never really find out.

It's 4 PM. The other boss has just uploaded a lot of information into my brain about parts of a program that neither of us has looked at in years. I haven't had time to write the information down.

Someone has laid out plates of nuts and chocolates in the middle of the conference room table. Plastic cups and shot glasses form a perfect rectangle beside them. Between the two, one bottle each of vodka, arak,¹ and piña colada stand in a precise line.

A little over a dozen of us squeeze in there. We sit down. The bosses, of course, get their usual seats, at the center of the far side of the long table. People pour drinks. I get a shot glass of arak. We toast. We drink. We eat. We talk.

One of the bosses asks us for stories about unusual things in our lives. None of us come up with much of anything. He launches into a long story, which the other boss joins in telling. I barely understand it.

Apparently, it's about that time that he had to run barefoot through the night. In sub-zero weather. Without pants. Chasing a thief. Who had stolen their Blackberry phones and computers. From their family's RV. In Oslo.

The other boss, unarmed, caught the thief, just by tracking him down and yelling at him. That's why she's the boss.

I may have some of this wrong. They are, after all, both speaking at once, in Hebrew. And I have been drinking arak.

O Ye of Little Faith

Friends ping me asking me what this new Kanye West kerfuffle is all about. I investigate.

It turns out that Ye (which is the name that West is using now) has posted something new to Instagram. I don't do Instagram or follow him, but a link² that I'm given works.

I can tell that he used Google Translate to create it. Some of the punctuation has been flung into implausible places in Translate's signature style. I can understand many of the words, but I don't get what he's trying to say.

Several sites carry a translation (or perhaps the original).³ He's apologizing to the Jewish community for being an abusive jerk, though in a mealy-mouthed corporate way. He has pulled some doozies of late, such as praising Hitler, then rapping that he can't be antisemitic because he just slept with a Jewish woman. (That's the Safe-for-Work version of the lyric.)

TMZ (who have a bad reputation, but whom news people that I trust tell me tend to be accurate, often adding a sleazy twist) digs into the message.⁴ They ran it through an AI content detector, which gave it an 85% chance of having been written by ChatGPT. They then asked ChatGPT to write a similar message, and got something close to identical.

One of my favorite online thinkers, Seth Godin, blogged today about translating corporate-speak into human English.⁵ Chat-GPT actually did a pretty good job with an example, which he then further tweaked into something quite clear. (Disclosure: Godin graciously wrote a back-cover blurb for my book "19th Nervous Breakdown" a dozen years ago.)

Fallen Star

In other music-related news, the media here has carried the story of a singer from the next town over. A few weeks ago, he competed on "The Next Star," a show akin to America's "The Voice." The winner of that competition represents our country in Eurovision.

He performed in his military uniform. He got a high score. Afterward, though, he dropped out of the composition, posting a clip of his performance to Instagram with a message:⁶

"I imagined this year differently; a year of ambitions and fulfilling dreams. Now I am living an old dream, to fight for my country and we are currently in the middle of the night ... a new dream and another dream will have to wait a little longer ... At the moment there is only one thing on my mind and that is to continue fighting in the darkness until we see the light."

He died yesterday, fighting across the border. The show's producers and judges all posted condolences.⁷

The Supremes Meet the Temptations

Apparently, someone with access couldn't resist leaking a decision-in-progress from our High Court. There could be repercussions.

Long ago, before October, the country was being torn apart by dissent over a battle between our parliament and the court.

We've never quite gotten around to creating a constitution here. Instead, we have what are called Basic Laws. As I understand it (and it does get complicated), the laws say that the court gets to cancel executive decisions if it thinks that they are "unreasonable."⁸

Led by the ruling coalition and its far-right toadies, the parliament passed a law removing the court's ability to do this.

The law was then challenged in the courts. If the court knocks it out, we'll effectively have two branches of government declaring that each other's actions are unconstitutional. That would be bad.

Over the course of the year, through the end of September, we had massive protests on the street, with hundreds of thousands of people getting together every Saturday night to protest. Most were in favor of the court. Some were in favor of the coalition. Groups would march across the country (which took a few days on foot), block the freeways, put up massive billboard displays, and the like.

People were saying that it was the closest that this country had ever come to civil war.

Then we were attacked on October 7th. Everyone pretty much forgot about the argument and focused on the real war. The effectively leaderless organizations that had come together for the protests (apparently funded by well-heeled folks in the tech sector, though we don't know exactly whom) switched their focus and pulled together ways to help. They gave a lot of aid to victims and evacuees, while the government spun in circles and got little done.

Apparently, the high court has kept working quietly on their response to the law. Today, someone leaked a draft of the decision. According to it, they are going to rule against the parliament. It's 8-7, with the left wing out-ruling the right by a single vote.⁹

No one is happy about the leak. The court says that things are still in flux. The Justice Minister says that it would be a call for a civil war. Most people want to wait until the current war is over before we resume fighting among ourselves.

On a podcast today, journalists discussed whether the newspapers should have published stories about the leak. They agreed that it would have been better if the leak had not happened, but once it did, their responsibility was to report it.¹⁰

Meanwhile, the right wing is even more annoyed at the court, which unanimously ruled yesterday that same-sex couples can adopt children. That hadn't been possible before.¹¹

Somewhere is Here

In one more musical note, in looking for other things I came across this lovely video of a cross-cultural group of musicians here singing "Somewhere" from "West Side Story" in English, Arabic, and Hebrew. Definitely worth a listen.¹²

Back on the Chain Gang

The party at work winds down. We head back to our desks.

I stare at what I'm writing for a few minutes, then go back to the boss with some further questions. I tell him that I feel like I'm being given an odd test: I've been told complex information, drunk arak, then have to write about it. He is amused.

I'll be back at work on Sunday. When I come in, I'll see if I can still decode what I have written today.

---

Feel free to forward the newsletter to other people who might be interested.

Here’s an archive of past newsletters.

You can find me via email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and, just out of inertia, X/Twitter. There's more about me and my books, music, and films at josephzitt.com.

The newsletter’s official mailing address is 304 S. Jones Blvd #3567, Las Vegas NV 89107. (I’m in Israel, but if physical mail comes to me there, it’ll get scanned and emailed. I don’t expect that to happen much. If you want to send me physical mail, ask me for a real address.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

L'hitraot.