SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS

Of course it's always the season these days around the world, and especially in Gaza and the West Bank of occupied Palestine. Two-thousand idealists sit helpless at the gates as  they and their humanitarian aid are blocked by the US, Israel, and Egypt while 1.5 million Gazans starve and freeze inside their open-air, sewage-bathed prison, and US military engineers help Egypt sink a steel wall under ground so even the few supplies that make it through the tunnels will not be able to get in.  Some might call it genocide. As a Jew, I am mighty ashamed. As a human too.That's right. 'Tis the season. Check the bible.  Matthew 2: 16-18.

I wrote some about the pathology of thinking one belongs to a, no, THE Chosen People in my novel, Golem Song, and about the consequences of golemization -- building a world of self-destructive self-protection. It's my Israel/Palestine novel without being about Israel or Palestine, which, per se, enter only once, in a dinner-table conversation between Alan Krieger (who lives on hot dogs and Wing-Dings) and one of his girlfriends, a German psychiatrist of more sophisticated tastes.

The scene is too long for an FP post, but you can download it from my public folder at http://public.me.com/mestrin . It's funny -- comic funny, but also peculiar.

I was actually taken to this restaurant as a high-school student by my more sophisticated girlfriend. She ordered snails for me, and I thought I had never eaten anything more delicious. Actually, it was just that I had never eaten garlic before. I've been a garlic-head since.

Golem Song exists as a recorded book which can be downloaded from audible.com. I'll put the restaurant chapter (with me reading) in my public folder (above), in case you want to listen, hands-free, in your car. Warning: although amusing enough to have attracted two interesting women (he'll lose them both), Alan is also a racist, male-chauvinist pig.