Category Archives: Memorials and Obituaries

Eminent Domain and the Resort to Force

Posted on by under cancel culture, Fatwas, Memorials and Obituaries, slices of life

I was pleased to see that my letter on Princeton’s use of eminent domain to acquire Westminster Choir College was printed in the January 7 issue of Princeton’s Town Topics, with a note from the editor (p. 13): “Thank you for your letter. We stand corrected.” Good to hear it.

Whether the topic is genocide or eminent domain, mainstream American journalists have an addiction to euphemism about the use of force that should be corrected at every turn. If journalists described the use of force more vividly and accurately, people would grasp its ubiquity in public life, and stop being surprised when it took egregious forms, as in the killing of Renee Good. Continue reading →

If You Want Blood

Posted on by under Fatwas, Memorials and Obituaries, migrant defense, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

Do yourself a favor. Go back and re-read the Declaration of Independence, but do it this way: skip the beginning and the end, and read the bill of particulars in the middle. It’s too long to quote here. You really just have to read it for yourself. Once you do, you’ll see that details aside, we’re living in the very world that the Declaration describes, excoriates, and uses as the basis of its declaration of war. Virtually everything in it is something that our present government is doing to us. Like the people of British North America ca. 1776, we are a people under military occupation. Continue reading →

Robert Massie at Princeton

Posted on by under activism, ethics, General announcements, Memorials and Obituaries, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

“Divestment and the Boundaries of Conscience”
As regular readers of this blog know, I’ve been involved since 2024 in the campaign to induce Princeton University to divest its holdings, not just from Israel, but from arms manufacture and military affairs as such. 

It was about a year ago that I got it into my head to get Robert K. Massie IV involved in our efforts. Massie is one of the architects and chroniclers of the decades-long campaign to divest from apartheid South Africa; I’d first encountered his book Loosing the Bonds twenty years ago, and been impressed by the rigor of his argument, as well as by the wealth of detail and moral passion he brought to the subject. Continue reading →

Albert Aghazarian, a Postscript

Posted on by under Memorials and Obituaries, Palestine

About five years ago, I posted a memorial essay here for the late Albert Aghazarian, the Armenian-Palestinian translator I met on my first trip to Palestine about twelve years ago. By chance, I met a friend of Albert’s tonight, Gaby Kevorkian, a retired physician and resident of Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter, currently living in Princeton. Gaby points out that my description of Albert’s home–“he lived so simply”–may well have been misleading. “Have you ever been inside Albert’s home?” Gaby asked. In fairness, I had not. “Well,” he pointed out, “If you go inside, there are many rooms.” The latter claim does indeed raise doubts that Albert lived quite as “simply” as I had suggested. I have amended the post accordingly.

Morituri Te Salutant

Posted on by under cancel culture, Memorials and Obituaries, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

I woke up this morning to find an email from one of my best friends in Palestine, someone who lives in a small village in the South Hebron Hills. I’ve excerpted it below, deleting personal names, and omitting place names and other particulars, and corrected the grammar of one sentence for clarity. It’s in English, but I’ve provided a tl; dr translation just after the block quote. The word “football” refers throughout to soccer. Continue reading →

The Lessons of War

Posted on by under Memorials and Obituaries, Notes on the Anti-War Movement

Most years, on 9/11, I’ve brought this post back up to the top and re-posted it. I want to do something different this time. I want to give a brief (or semi-brief) answer to one of the most pressing questions that arises on 9/11: why do Americans not learn from history? Or to narrow it a bit: why do Americans learn nothing from the military history of their own country? Continue reading →

Dreams of Death

Posted on by under Memorials and Obituaries, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, slices of life

I dreamt last night of my late wife, Alison. I didn’t see or hear her, and I was in a mostly unfamiliar place, but her presence was unmistakable. I knew that we were somewhere in Washington Heights near the George Washington Bridge, where we used to live. We were dating in the dream, not yet married, and it was late, so I’d decided to go back home. For some reason, I had to go across the street to a pay phone to call an Uber. It was midnight, but paradoxically enough both bright as noon and dark enough to obscure the way. I called the Uber guy, who was hard to hear, but he said he was coming, and there the dream ended. Continue reading →

Dreams of MacIntyre

Posted on by under Memorials and Obituaries, slices of life

I dreamt of Alasdair MacIntyre last night. He looked exactly like his Wikipedia photo, except that he was wearing the old blue jacket he always wore when I knew him, with a grey turtleneck underneath. I was sitting down, reading or writing something about Machiavelli: it was either a philosophy conference or a bus station, I’m not sure which.

He walked in, smiling this weird Mona Lisa smile. He seemed happy to see me, or maybe just happy to be back. My first impulse was to ask him what the Afterlife Dept was doing about the genocide in Gaza or ICE, but I didn’t. It somehow seemed inappropriate to ask, like those were my obsessions, not the afterlife’s. You might as well ask a retiree to solve problems at work. Gauche. I hugged him, something that neither of us would have done in real life. I was sort of shocked: bro was ripped. For a second I wondered what part of the afterlife they’d sent him to. Did Mac get misdirected to Hell and spend the last couple of months working out in the yard? Stuff you never expect. The dream ended there. He was inscrutably silent the whole time.