click above to watch episode #837click above to listen (audio only)
Here is the 837th episode of the long-running radio show/podcast, Dave’s Gone By, which aired live on Facebook, Saturday morning, Feb. 12, 2022. Info: davesgoneby.com
Guests: playwrights & actors Keith Alessi, Grant Bowen, Mike Lemme, Brian Schiller, Julia VanderVeen, Vicki Quade; theater critics David Sheward and Leslie (Hoban) Blake.
Featuring: Rabbi Sol Solomon chats with artists of the 2022 FRIGID NYC Festival, including Julia VanderVeen, Brian Schiller, Mike Lemme, Grant Bowen, Keith Alessi; Greeley Crimes & Old Times; Colorado Limerick of the Damned (Castle Pines); Today/Yesterday Trivia Quiz (Feb. 12 w/ Vicki Quade, Leslie (Hoban) Blake, David Sheward).
00:00:01 DAVE GOES IN w/ Joyce (Fringe fests, Youtube censorship, misanthropy) 01:00:30 GUESTS: Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews Keith Alessi, Grant Bowen, Mike Lemme, Brian Schiller, Julia VanderVeen. 02:03:00 TODAY/YESTERDAY Trivia Quiz (Feb. 12 w/ Leslie (Hoban) Blake, Vicki Quade, & David Sheward) 03:23:30 GREELEY CRIMES & OLD TIMES 03:44:00 Friends of the Daverhood 03:55:00 COLORADO LIMERICK OF THE DAMNED (Castle Pines, CO) 03:57:30 DAVE GOES OUT
Brian Schiller
Julia VanderVeen
Keith Alessi in “Tomatoes Tried to Kill Me”
Grant Bowen
David Sheward
Leslie (Hoban) Blake
Vicki QuadeCastle Pines, CO (photo: Jeffrey Beall)
(Rabbi Sol Solomon’s 165th Rabbinical Reflection aired Jan. 16, 2021 as part of the Dave’s Gone By show. watch video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Y0DFpad8eto).
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of January 17th, 2021.
Can we speak freely? No, I mean, can we speak, freely? I don’t like the “Stop the Steal” mishegoss any more than you do, and I think the nudniks who stormed the Capitol building deserve the strongest punishment. Like fines, imprisonment, or being trapped in an elevator with Jeanine Pirro in your left ear and Nancy Grace in your right. And they’re both using megaphones. And guess what? They’re angry.
But back to the point: we’ve got a paranoid President who is circling the drain because he’s terrified of being called the one thing he is–at least in terms of the 2020 election–a Loser. Not with Israel and the Middle East; he’s a winner there. Not with Wall Street and big business; he’s a Superman there. And, up till March of last year, not with the economy, which had low unemployment, tons of job growth, and a gung-ho attitude.
But COVID knocked him down, as it did 350,000 of his countrymen. Trump’s rash pronouncements and veiled racial signaling appealed to America’s baser instincts, so although 75 million people voted for him, 80 million didn’t. He lost. Deal with it. I wish he would. I wish his Confederate flag-waving acolytes would. I wish the folks on QAnon would get a Clue-Anon.
However, just before the riots, the President gave a speech where he dubbed the elections fraudulent, the news fake, and the elections rigged by Big Tech. He called on Congress to recount everything, and he said, and I quote, “I know that everyone will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard,” unquote. He also praised the size of the crowd–he does love a big crowd–and urged them to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. As a protest. As a way for those who legitimately felt the election was stolen to make their voices heard.
For this, Donald Trump was again impeached. For spinning a false narrative, yes, about the election, but moreover for inciting the crowd to riot. “Something is wrong here, really wrong,” he said, “and we fight. We fight like hell, because if you don’t, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” You know what that’s called? Rhetoric. Not insurrection, not incitement to anarchy. It’s a politician telling his believers not to give up hope and to channel their rage into action. If some followers in buffalo skins and football-fan camouflage took that to mean storm the government, break stuff and take stuff, that’s on them. At the very least it’s trespassing; at most it’s sedition.
The Democrats are accusing the President of having a signed First Sedition. True, he wound the bozos up, but he didn’t set them loose, any more than the makers of Cabbage Patch dolls doing TV commercials telling parents “buy these horrible things for your even-more-horrible children,” caused riots in Kmart.
But pushing past impeachment and trying to remove Donald Trump from office–which will happen two weeks after he’s already been removed from office–my problem is with the censoring of free speech. President Trump has been banned, permanently, from Twitter. Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram have deleted him for however long they choose, and YouTube has pulled his channel down. Far more worrisome, they’re doing the same for all his nutty followers who now have no place to share their cries of “fraud!” and “conspiracy!” Google, Apple, and Amazon have all removed the social-media site Parler, because too many kooks were spoiling the broth.
Now, these are private companies–sort of–so their CEOs have the right to monitor everything that goes on them. If you own a restaurant, you can’t discriminate against your customers based on race or gender, but you can still demand, “No shirt, no shoes, no service.” I’ve thrown people out of my synagogue for wearing dirty tallises. Well, they weren’t wearing anything underneath them, but that’s neither here nor there.
The point is we are on a very slippery slope when our biggest purveyors of public palaver start telling us, “Well, you’re allowed to post hopeful things about Joe Biden’s inauguration, but you can’t write anything questioning the legitimacy of his victory.” “You’re allowed to condemn the violent idiots rioting in Nancy Pelosi’s office, but don’t you dare encourage the peaceful idiots to keep marching two blocks away.”
When I was a little Rabbi, a Rabbette, I was taught three things you couldn’t do: yell fire in a crowded shul, slander someone, or be so obscene that a reasonable person would go, “dude, I’m as kinky as the next fetishist, that’s messed up.” But no law says you can’t lie. That’s not even one of the Ten Commandments. Wait, let me make sure (thinks and counts), nope. False witness is different. And there’s certainly nothing in there about not sharing things that you actually believe are true–even if there’s overwhelming evidence they’re false.
So what happens when you censor folks on the fringe? You make them angrier, you drive them deeper underground, and now it gets harder to track them to make sure they don’t escalate from angry TikTok videos to kidnapping Ilhan Omar. You also cause everyone else to self-censor. “Hmm, maybe I better not post this because they’ll just take it down anyway. Maybe I better not think this, because then I’ll waste time posting it, because they’re just gonna take it down anyway.”
I am of the mind that you say what you have to say, and if I hate it, I get to say what I have to say back at you, louder. The problem in 1925 was not that Hitler published Mein Kampf; it’s that not enough people read it and went, “ooh, this guy’s bonkers and maybe dangerous.” The problem is not that right-wing Republicans are posting that the elections were a fraud; it’s that they believe it and won’t be de-convinced no matter the proof. Still, prohibiting them from non-violent, non-slanderous, non-obscene communication is non-okay.
Big Brother is already watching us from every stop light, website, Smart TV, closed-circuit camera, and GPS system. You can’t sneeze without someone in the CIA muttering gezundheit. Must we have social-media platforms that restrict content based on alternative narratives? Do we really want to side with Cardinal Maculani over Galileo? With Anthony Comstock over James Joyce? With Ayatollah Khomeini over Salman Rushdie?
In my version of reality, Donald Trump was an okay president who made just enough poor decisions to lose the election. In your version of reality (points), Donald Trump was a terrible president who should have been impeached before he was elected. Or in your version of reality (points elsewhere), Donald Trump was a great president who got cheated out of a second term. Can’t we all just not get along? Tolerating stupidity is one of the great virtues of our nation. That and cream soda. What, you disagree? That’s your right.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.
Click above to listen to the interview (audio only).
Rabbi Sol Solomon chats with performance artist Penny Arcade
Topics include: The Girl Who Knew Too Much, Andy Warhol, rape, Anna Liv Young, theater, self-censorship.
Segment aired March 17, 2018 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
Please Note: Segments extracted from “Dave’s Gone By” may have music and other elements removed for timing and media re-posting considerations. For the full interview with all elements, please visit the audio of the complete original broadcast.
All content (c)2018 TotalTheater Productions. More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com More information about Rabbi Sol Solomon: http://www.shalomdammit.com Download video file of audio content
RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #10 (3/27/2011): Tsunami Tweet
click above to listen (audio file)
aired March 26, 2011 on Dave’s Gone By. https://wp.me/pzvIo-2rN. youtube: https://youtu.be/XxqV1jT8YD8
Shalom Dammit, this is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of March 27th, 2011.
My congregation has been asking, “Rabbi, when are you gonna talk about Japan? It’s such a huge calamity, when will we hear your thoughts about the earthquake, the tsunami, the nuclear plant – where are your words of wisdom?
My dear friends, what can I say? A tragedy is a tragedy. What can a human being say about an event that is beyond the scope of human understanding? Granted, I’ll bet some World War II veterans are thinking, “At last! Pearl Harbor payback!” But if the world truly worked like that, the tsunami would have hit Berlin. Followed by a tornado, locusts, a polio epidemic and a fast-moving iceberg.
No, sometimes, as in Japan, these things just happen, and we can only guess at the motivations of HaShem and the universe. As the Yiddish phrase goes: men tracht, und gott lacht – man makes plans, God laughs.
And speaking of laughter, what I really wish to discuss in this Rabbinical Reflection is the overreactions to reactions to the disaster. People make a few bad jokes, and the wrath of political correctness is upon them.
I speak specifically of Gilbert Gottfried, beloved voice of the Aflac duck. He’s fired from that job because of his Twitter tweets or, in his case, quacks. He makes a joke about breaking up with his girlfriend – but it’s okay because, as they say in Japan, another one will be floating by any minute.”
This is funny. It amuses me. But even if it didn’t, Gilbert Gottfried is not a psychologist; he’s not a scientist; he’s not a schoolteacher. He’s a comedian. And he’s a comedian best known for making another funny joke that bombed – about September 11th – and then saving the evening by telling yet another joke: “The Aristocrats” – the most vile, crude, sexually explicit, violent, vulgar, perverted, disgusting joke ever written. And if you want to hear it, give me a call on my cell `cause I have my own version, and it kills. Not to give it away, but in mine, the father brings in two camels and an enema bag. Priceless.
But getting back to Aflac: the insurance company does a lot of business in Japan, so when Mr. Gottfried let his fingers move a little faster than his brain, they gave his career a karate chop. Do I think this was justified? No, their judgment was just as poor as his. They may be contractually in the legal right, but can you imagine hiring anyone else to do the same quack? In fact, if it’s the same quack, Mr. Gottfried can sue for imitation. So it would have to be a different but similar quack.
I could do it: “Aflac.” “Aflac dammit!” It’s just not the same.
Nobody likes actor switcheroos. The only time it ever worked was when “Bewitched” got another Darrin, and that was only because Dick York was crippled by a bad back. I only hope, if they do hire another actor, Aflac’s campaign is crippled by a bad hack.
I’m all for sensitivity. To quote Mel Brooks, “I’ve got sensitivity coming out the blow-hole.” But I’m tired of political correctness running amok. From NPR to Charlie Sheen to that anti-Semite French designer. You can’t have a personal conversation anymore without somebody spitting it back to the media to make you look like a schmuck.
And jokes? To fire a comedian because he makes jokes? A comic understands better than anyone the natural tendency of humans to mix schadenfreude with “thank God it wasn’t me.”
I hope no one at my temple is so humorless as to target me if I make a joke or two. Even a shameful, tasteless joke. Such as: what is the only meal you can get in Japan? A big shake, then tuna melt.
That’s terrible! Or asking, why is a Japanese supermarket like a Taco Bell burrito? Neither has any actual food in it.
How dare I find humor in this! Or in a joke like – What do Japanese power-plant workers have in common with court-martialed U.S. Marines? They both got burned by the corps.
Or what’s the difference between a nuclear meltdown and cancer? Ehhh..about 15, 20 years.
Such dark, unfeeling jokes! Like: did you hear about all the Japanese went through a massive religious conversion. They were Buddhists; now they’re quakers.
Shame! Shame! How dare I ask: how many Japanese does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None. They don’t need light; they’re all glowing.
What a sick, heartless, joke that is. Or even worse: Why are they nicknaming the tsunami victims New Kids on the Block? Because they’re washed up overnight.
My friends, I do not tell these jokes to be funny. Thank goodness because, well, you’ve heard the jokes. I tell them in solidarity with Gilbert Gottfried and 50 Cent, and anyone else who saw yet another catastrophe in the world and went, “what can you do but laugh?”
Well, you can give to charity, you can write sympathy cards, you can help mobilize relief efforts; but still, you should be able to have a giggle. Because, like it or not, life is a cycle, and one day the joke will be on you.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches, in Great Neck, NY. Domo arigato.
Rabbi Sol Solomon chats with performance artist Penny Arcade