Jan/Feb 2024

e c l e c t i c a
s a l o n

Salon


(These are excerpts—click on the title to view the whole piece!)
 

Another Word about Israel-Palestine

Europe and the US through the United Nations assuaged their collective guilt for the Holocaust by dumping the Jews of Europe on the Palestinians while at the same time avoiding any responsibility themselves for them. They also gave the Zionists carte blanche to deal with the Palestinians as they saw fit, in effect absolving them from any obligation to observe the international laws that had just been codified largely because of what had been done to Jews and millions of others by the Nazis.

Thomas J. Hubschman
 

The Divine Afflatus and the King's Bare Butt

The tolerance, even admiration that we have for stilted, overblown speech requires its own suspension of disbelief on our part. It's as artificial as the atonal turns of Asian music sound to Western ears. I know little about classical Asian art, but I do know what works in English and what is a willed hallucination of eloquence, not unlike the imagined clothes of Hans Christian Anderson's naked king.

Thomas J. Hubschman
 

The Completely True Story of How I Learned to Love Pickleball

Did pickleball four times a week hone her reflexes so she could thwart closing elevators so quickly? I check to see if she used one of those overgrown ping pong paddles to part the doors. Is the husband with cane because he doesn't play pickleball? Did some demented younger relative or friend gift her that sweatshirt, or did she buy it on Etsy or make it herself? Maybe like the light going off or not when you close the refrigerator door, could she have already been inside the elevator? Schrödinger's paddle? Is this even the same elevator interior?

Marko Fong