February 9, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-02-08

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. You can also read this email online here. Here we go...

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A coworker wanders into the office kitchen. I'm waiting for the coffee machine to squeeze out a double espresso.

"So, will you be watching the Superbowl?" He's speaking English with a slight British accent.

"I may watch the Half-Game Show, the next morning." I know it's Usher this year. I can't recall any of his songs, but the spectacle should be worth it.

"Who do you want to win?"

I stand there and try to think. I remember that the game's between Taylor Swift's boyfriend and... something else.

"You're not a fan?" he asks.

"Not really. Are you?"

"I am. It is such an American sport. Very technical. Violent, but technical." He pours hot water into a cup to make tea. "I remember some twenty years ago... no, it was much more than twenty... one of the theaters here showed the Superbowl live, like it was a movie. All the fans were there. Well, it was only a few hundred of us, but it was full. It was loud and fun. Now, of course, we all have the big screen TVs at home."

"Of course."

I've never been much of a fan. If memory serves, the preview story in our college newspaper one year began with "This Sunday, everyone in the world except Joe Zitt will be watching the Superbowl."

There may have been others not watching. I recall that a local musical duo broke up, at least for a while, when one scheduled a rehearsal during the game, which the other considered sacred.

I remember driving through Dallas one evening, right after the Cowboys had won. Traffic was a challenge.

My only brush with professional sports was in high school, when I worked with the first, short-lived World Team Tennis league.¹ I was a ballboy for the Philadelphia Freedoms until Billie Jean King slugged me. But that's loo long a story to tell now.

(I see that my spellchecker doesn't like "ballboy." But I was neither a bellboy nor a tallboy, whatever that is.)

It's a slow day at work. I don't get much done. My video editing software, which worked OK yesterday, crashes immediately every time that I run it. We're using a back level version, since that's the last one that my computer can handle. It was a hotshot machine with a killer GPU five years ago, but now, not so much.

I catch up on some news. What I see of the back-and-forth proposals about the war starts with each side demanding things that the other finds unacceptable.

People tell me that, here in the Middle East, every conversation starts with "No." Um, OK. I also have no idea how to bargain at shops. I've been trained in the States to understand that "no means no."

A high-level person from the other side claims that they are achieving what they wanted.² While he conveniently forgets to mention the vicious barbarism of their initial attack, he points out that the world, who had pretty much forgotten his people, are now talking about them again, and that world opinion has been turned against us. They are winning the propaganda war. They appear to see the loss of thousands of lives, except for how it plays in the media, as the cost of doing business.

He bases it all on the overt lie that we were ultimately looking to destroy Al-Aqsa. Um, no. But it's a useful story to get people yelling. And his description of our internal difficulties is pretty accurate.

An article at NBC News claims that some of our people are suggesting an end to the war that lets their leaders sail off into exile.³ Interesting. But they won't go for it if they think they're still winning.

One of my favorite bloggers, Ted Gioia, talks about how things look to people in what he calls a "binary crisis."⁴ That's a situation where people are split into two sides, and each thinks that the other is evil. There's no room for a third side. It maps well to our situation here, and to American political battles, as well as a lot of other human history.

I see among my links other pieces on why the American political system is such a binary mess,⁵ and on "Duverger's Law," which suggests why it is stuck that way, with close to no chance for third parties.⁶ George Lakoff's "FrameLab" blog⁷ and his essential book Moral Politics⁸ go deep on how and why our minds create these binary frames and how that affects politics.

During the last couple of hours of work, I track the New York Times' liveblogging of the arguments before the US Supreme Court on whether one candidate can be knocked off the Presidential ballot entirely. I listen to the livestream while I walk home.⁹

As I pass my usual café, one of the barista spots me and calls out, "Hi, Yosef! Cider or sachlav?" I wasn't sure whether I was going to stop in there. I guess I am.

I order a sachlav. I sit down at a small table under a heatlamp and read the news.

Ahead of me, four women my age chatter avidly in something like Russian.

To my left, three college kids, two men and a woman, talk in English. It sounds like the men are trying to impress the woman with their suave coolness. It isn't working.

A woman in the kitchen and the man collecting the used dishes from the table yell back and forth at each other. I can tell that it's Hebrew, but not what they're saying.

The music overhead plays something with an incessant beat and samples from "Walk on the Wild Side."

I tell myself that I should consume the sachlav quickly, then head home. It's chilly outside. It's warm in the café. The weekend is starting. It takes me a while to move on.

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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 at that Las Vegas address, 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.)

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L'hitraot.