Here is the 523rd episode of the long-running radio show/podcast, Dave’s Gone By, which aired on UNC Radio Aug. 22, 2015. Info: davesgoneby.com.
Featuring: Dave chats with Michael Paul Smith and Gillian Pensavalle and with UNC General Manager Matthew Davis. Plus: Rabbi Sol Solomon‘s Rabbinical Reflection on Jimmy Carter, Inside Broadway, My Sick Mind, Saturday Segues (Tori Amos, In the News), Bob Dylan – Sooner & Later (Bob Johnston).
Host: Dave Lefkowitz
Guests: Michael Paul Smith and Gillian Pensavalle (“The Residuals”), UNC Radio General Manager Matthew Davis.
00:00:01 DAVE GOES IN (back to school, commercials) 00:19:30 SATURDAY SEGUE – Tori Amos 00:44:00 GUESTS: Michael Paul Smith & Gillian Pensavalle 01:24:00 INSIDE BROADWAY 01:47:30 BOB DYLAN – Sooner & Later (Bob Johnston) 02:13:30 sponsors 02:22:00 RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #121 (Jimmy Carter) 02:32:00 Update: The Miracle of Long Johns 02:38:00 Friends 02:44:30 MY SICK MIND 02:52:00 SATURDAY SEGUE – In the News 03:08:00 GUEST: Matthew Davis 03:41:00 Weather 03:44:00 DAVE GOES OUT
Aug. 22, 2015 “Hey Jupiter” (00:24:30), “You Can Bring Your Dog” (00:30:30), “Original Sinsuality” (00:34:30) & “Crucify” (00:37:00; Tori Amos). “The Entertainer” (01:44:00; Scott Joplin {via piano roll}). “To Be Alone with You” (01:56:30) & “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” (01:58:30; Bob Dylan). “Human Bomb” (02:53:00; Donovan). “The Subway Diet” (02:57:00; John Pinette). “Throw the Anchor Away” (02:58:00; By the Beautiful Sea 1954 Broadway cast). “Sad News from Korea” (03:00:00; Lightnin’ Hopkins). “Ashley” (03:03:00; Big Jean). “School Days” (03:50:00; Phil Ochs).
Shalom, Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of August 23, 2015.
Two weeks ago, 90-year-old former president Jimmy Carter announced that he was battling an advanced stage of cancer—or, as Jewish people call it (whispers) cancer. Snipped from his liver was a tumor, but they also found badness elsewhere, which is not surprising since both of Carter’s parents, his two sisters, and his brother all died of pancreatic you-know-what.
Jimmy still has his 87-year-old wife, Rosalynn, who says she will be “right there with him” throughout his treatment. So will the town of Plains, Georgia, and a lot of Americans who remember Carter as one of the smartest, most honest, and most decent of men to occupy the oval office.
My feelings are a mite more mixed, however. Just because Carter was a mensch doesn’t mean he was a good President. In fact, up until George W. Bush, he was the worst Commander in Chief in a hundred years. And considering that crop included Richard Nixon and Warren G. Harding, that’s saying something.
In case you weren’t around from 1977 to 1981, what you missed was the recession, the oil crisis, the hostage crisis, the Cold War, and the confidence crisis. You know your President is a bona fide schlemiel when he has to go on television to tell everyone, “It’s not me, it’s you. Have a little faith.” Faith is hard to come by when you’re idling at the gas station for two hours on odd and even days, or when you can’t find a job to pay what gasoline costs, or you’re turning your thermostat to 50 because the Mullahs at OPEC want you to.
And speaking of the Arabs, the Carter years were also, of course, the years of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Fifty-two American hostages were taken prisoner as part of the Iranian Revolution. I suppose we should be grateful all the hostages survived. If they were captured now, Isis would cut their limbs off and rape the stumps. Still, these Americans remained in captivity for a year and a half, until Ronald Reagan made backroom deals to have them released on the first day of his presidency.
Until then, Jimmy Carter had three responses to the Iranian hostage crisis: He barricaded himself in his office for a hundred days, because as any eight-year-old knows, if you hide in the closet, nobody knows you’re there, and all the bad stuff goes away. His second tactic was to wear sweaters, because that’ll show those big bad oil sheiks we can live without heat. And finally, he sent helicopters to try a rescue mission—and they all crashed in the desert.
It was right about then America stopped laughing at Billy Carter and turned her woeful eyes on his older brother. If Watergate was a cancer on the Presidency, Jimmy Carter was a herpes all over it.
Still, lousy as Carter’s term was, I would still want to respect the man. After all, he brokered an impossible deal between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat to create a small piece of peace in the Middle East. It truly was and remains an unbelievable, wonderful, and, alas, one-of-a-kind event in that region. And yet, can peanut boy leave well enough alone?
No, he spends the last few years bleeding through his sleeve for the poor, poor Palestinians. He writes a damn book with the inflammatory title, “Palestine: Peace, not Apartheid,” equating Israel with racist South Africa—even though the Palestinians are demanding land that belongs to Israel, land Israel annexed after being attacked, land that should be for Jews and Israeli citizens because the Arabs have a zillion other places to live.
Carter tries to play both sides of the fence. He sometimes makes nice-nice to Israel, saying he doesn’t support a boycott of the country over its policies. But then he turns around and chastises Eretz Yisroel for the way she conducts a war against an enemy that’s lobbing rockets in her backyard.
Like so many liberals and misinformed do-gooders, Jimmy Carter loves to invent a moral equivalency when there isn’t one. “Both Israel and Hamas are equally wrong and share equal blame,” which is not true; and let’s harp on Israel but be really gentle with the Arabs because we don’t want to make them mad. After all, Islam, the religion of peace, blows a ton of shit up, peacefully.
My main point is: considering his failure at almost every aspect of domestic and foreign leadership, and how he was humiliated by the Ayatollah—a guy who looked like Sean Connery wearing a microwavable heat wrap on his head—Jimmy Carter has as much business telling Israel what to do about the Muslims, as Michelle Duggar has telling the Pritzkers how to raise children. Of all people, Jimmy Carter should be the last one to believe you can reason with radicals, bargain with bullies, and mollify murderers.
After all, as we speak, Jimmy Carter’s body is being invaded by cancer cells that mean him only harm. Should the president’s doctor say, “Well, it’s not right to kill these invaders; it’s your fault for having a desirable host they want to live in. But tell you what. Why don’t you sacrifice so you can live in harmony with your cancer. Let them take your pancreas, your liver, your balls and your bones, and you can live side by side. And they promise never ever ever to move into your blood. Or least not for a week or two. Whaddya say?”
I say, “Jimmy Carter, you’ve done some good in this world, so I don’t wish you prolonged suffering. Still, if you had to get the big C, couldn’t you have gotten it in your mouth?”
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches, in Great Neck, New York.
RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #8 (3/13/2011): Gas Prices
click above to listen (audio file only)
aired March 12, 2011 on Dave’s Gone By. https://wp.me/pzvIo-2s0. https://davesgoneby.net/?p=32927. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-CzdJjq9kY
Shalom Dammit, this is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of March 13th, 2011.
How times change! It used to be, if I was sick to my stomach, I would get gas. Now, I look at the price of gas and get sick to my stomach.
Thirty five years ago, this country went through a so-called gas crisis. After millions of centuries with animals and humans finding different sources of energy, suddenly we were out of fuel. Prices at the pump went through the roof, there were shortages, lines around the block – anybody remember filling your gas tank on odd-and-even days? I’ve had my share of odd days, and I still wanna get even.
But then we learned that although fuel is not an inexhaustible resource, we still had a tushie-load more of it than the government, the Arabs and the ecologists were telling us.
The 1970s gas crunch was a manufactured crisis; the oil conglomerates said “jump,” and we jumped. Our president was too busy worrying how to deal with the Arabs… to deal with the Arabs. So, like the mouse biting the elephant, OPEC sank its teeth into their favorite enemy: us.
But did Americans learn anything from the Jimmy Carter catastrophe? Did we conserve, demand more efficiency, do ANYTHING differently? Of course not.
In fact, for the next three decades, the unholy trinity – General Motors, Ford and Chrysler – went to the American public and said, “You know what you need? Hummers, stretch limos and SUV’s.” Cars that use enough oil in a day to run a banana republic for a month. And these banana-oil salesman made their case. American families bought cars large enough to house Chinese families. In a matter of months, you’d look around parking lots and there were no sedans anymore, just all-utility vehicles. You’d see a teenager driving a schoolbus and you’d think to yourself, “Why is a teenager driving a schoolbus?”, and then you’d realize, it’s his goddamn car!”
So what happens then? People forget about the 1978 gas crisis until…we get the worst president since Mr. Peanut, George W. Bush. Not only does he hate the Arabs and make war on the Arabs, but he’s financially in bed with the Arabs and stands to make a fortune from oil. Magically, oil prices go up.
And people bite the bullet, we manage, we hunker down – until the big recession of 2008. Don’t listen to the media when they say the recession was caused by unstable mortgages, insider trading, terrorism, taxes – I’ll tell you what made the economy tank – our tanks! As soon as gas hit $4 a gallon, wham went the wallets, whump went the purses, and clink went the padlocks on foreclosed businesses and houses.
After three years of economic misery, only now are we starting to taste fudge at the end of the tunnel. Unemployment might be easing, and we’re seeing new jobs – and I don’t just mean three-dollars-an-hour jobs at Nike for a dozen undocumented people all named “Jose.”
But what happens then? The Middle East goes meshuggeh, and gas goes gaga. Let me tell you something. I’m no Alan Greenspan (although we do share the same nose), but I will predict the next recession. If gas goes over 4 bucks a gallon, kiss the recovery bye-bye.
Not three dollars and ninety-eight cents; we’ll handle that because we’re used to getting shtupped, and we’ve been expecting it anyway. 3.99 – fine. But one penny over four dollars, and the toilet flushes. Again. No travel, no vacations, no big-screen TV’s, no expensive gifts for your favorite Hebrew spiritual leader…
“But Rabbi,” I hear you say, because I have very good ears, “We know, we know! The question is: what can we do about it?”
I say, if mobs of Arabs can overthrow their dictators, we can at least kick our democratically elected dictators where it hurts. No need for torches, marches, massive rallies – yet. For now, everybody get out your pens, your papers, your postcards – because we’re gonna write to the putzes in power. Not these long editorials from “concerned citizens”; those are as boring as the genealogical chapters in Leviticus.
We keep it simple. “4.01 and you’re out.” If gasoline climbs even one cent over four bucks, we will remember in November and give your job to another slob.
This message must go to everyone – from the President of the United States to the Melonville county clerk to the class president of Grover Cleveland Middle School. Doesn’t matter what the party affiliation is – the Republican Party, the Democratic party, the Donner Party, the Rent is Too Damn High Party – every single person in power. Send it to the CEO of your bank, the head of every Fortune 500 companyopolis, the captain of your softball team. 4.01 and you’re out.
Somewhere, among the millions of people receiving this message, will be someone who gets the message. If not, well, I hope you have a skateboard.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches, in Great Neck, NY. Fill `er up – halfway.
