(From my journal on Thursday 22 July 2021)

John Patrick Lynch died peacefully at home on the 21st of July. The length of his illness didn’t soften the shock I felt at the news as I was waiting for a driver’s test at the Capitola DMV. It was one vanishing after that of three brothers. Only my imagination keeps them alive. As he said every Thursday before Cowell college night when he was provost: Nil non mortale tenemus pectoris exceptis ingeniique bonis (Ovid, Tristia 3.7.43–44). Or: “We possess nothing that is not mortal except the blessings of heart and mind” (LCL translation). His love of Greek and Latin and his long, great training—starting at eight years old or so—took many forms. Not only did he publish his important book on Aristotle’s school (Aristotle’s School: A Study of a Greek Educational Institution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972) under the guidance of first-rate scholars, but he and N.O. Brown were in a class of their own in terms of knowledge of the classics. They would compose in Greek and JPL confided that NOB excelled at it. John was loved by his students and went far beyond the call of duty in encouraging them to achieve their highest possible levels. To teach was his passion. His competitive spirit, in sport and learning, was both fierce and remarkably generous.

Last Thursday before his passing, during one of the so-called great lectures that we watched together every week, he could quote Alexander Pope’s famous verses:

Be not the first by whom the new are tried
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

He certainly had the courage and sometimes the impetuosity to try or rather enact the new, in hiring and in supporting people who were confronting difficult circumstances.

In his role as provost, he brought numerous visitors to campus. In particular, he helped us organize an evening with Alan Stivell who was touring the United States alone in 1985 and played his electronified Celtic harp. The show, in the middle of a powerful winter storm, was a complete success. thanks to John’s and Sheilah’s hospitality in the Cowell Provost House. Breton was alive in Cowell for a brief moment.

As Peter Blackshaw said on the occasion of JPL’s retirement:

In so many respects, John fulfilled the true Santa Cruz ideal of teacher/scholar, and he did so with an understated, almost humble form of over-achievement. He truly walked the talk on UCSC’s college vision.

Peter also reminded us on this same occasion that the official UCSC mascot design owed much to John’s teaching:

When student leaders mulled over the establishment of a centralized student government (now the SUA), John provided thoughtful guidance and counsel. And here’s a big one for the history books: when the first SUA voted to put the banana slug on ballot as official mascot, John unwittingly inspired the current, and now official, Fiat Slug design. Indeed, when Cowell student and artist Marc Ratner (Cowell ’87) and I collaborated on the slug design, it was no small coincidence that the slug was wearing glasses and diligently reading Plato.

He became a trusted friend to many faculty across disciplines. He mentioned that aspect in the remarkable chronicle kept in the Regional Project archive at UCSC. His oral history has a passage on the so-called Kervorkian episode, which gives an idea of his occasional impishness and sense that there were limits to what could be done to sustain institutions. The situation in the Literature board of studies had become extremely challenging in the eighties. John was asked to chair but despaired from making any progress, finally leaving a meeting in medias res. “But what are we going to do, John?” was the plea. “Call Jack Kervorkian!” i.e. the doctor who was infamous at the time for helping patients to die.

The daily things we do
For money or for fun
Can disappear like dew
Or harden and live on.
Strange reciprocity:
The circumstance we cause
In time gives rise to us,
Becomes our memory.

(Philip Larkin, 1979)

On January 18, 2021, I listened to MLK’s last speech and was again moved by his radical call to justice, his courage to go beyond the timorous personal interests, safety and longevity. “The right to defend rights… I’ve been to the mountain top… I’ve seen the promised land… I’ve seen the glory…”

This dramatic ritual makes me think about the notion of duty to remember, right before Yom ha-Shoa, which begins in Israel on the evening of the 7th of April. On the expression in French, current since the nineties, of le devoir de mémoire, I quote François Dosse:

L’historien a ici pour tâche de traduire, de nommer ce qui n’est plus, ce qui fut autre, en des termes contemporains. Il se heurte là à une impossible adéquation parfaite entre sa langue et son objet et cela le contraint à un effort d’imagination pour assurer le transfert nécessaire dans un autre présent que le sien et faire en sorte qu’il soit lisible par ses contemporains (F. Dosse, “Le moment Ricœur de l’opération historiographique”, in Vingtième siècle 69 (2001): 139)

In English:
The historians’ task here is to translate, to name what is no longer, what was other, in contemporary terms. In doing so, they come up against the impossibility of a perfect match between their language(s) and their object(s). This forces them to use their imagination to ensure the necessary transfer to a present other than their own and ensure that it is readable by their contemporaries.

The first use of the expression, according to the records of the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA), which archives French radio and television programs, dates to 1988 (radio) and 1992 (TV). It happened relatively late, in spite of the existence of archival notices that refer to early testimonies of the forties to the seventies as using this expression. These notices may have been written under the influence of another “present,” however, that of the eighties and nineties.

If one looks at different media more widely, one sees that the expression “devoir de mémoire” takes off in the 1990s in French books. The Google Ngram viewer (books) confirms that the y-curb takes off for French from 1990 on. The English equivalent, the “duty to remember” (see the second diagram below), has a more complicated history, it seems, but I won’t go into it here. The ngram curve for “duty to remember” is at its lowest in 1980 and picks up consistently in 1990 and on, in parallel with the curve for “le devoir de mémoire.”

This datable irruption of a devoir de mémoire got me interested in the fate of the word holocauste in French culture. The word has long been used in ancient Greek and Christian (Catholic) liturgy. It meant an offering that was entirely devoted to a divinity and burned, for instance in an animal sacrifice. In its more recent use in French for the murder of Jews in WW II, two main steps seem to have been significant. One phase would be its restricted use for many years—since the fifties—by the author of La nuit, Elie Wiesel, because of its evocation of fire and the story of the ’aqedah, but unfortunately joined to François Mauriac’s Christological interpretation. Wiesel abandoned the use of that word because he felt that it had become used all too superficially. This may have happened in the late seventies, in reaction to the US film mini-series The Holocaust and the ensuing commodification of the word. The second step in the increased use of the word holocauste starts already with Eichmann’s trial in 1961 and continues with the influence of The Holocaust US series (1978), itself a competitor of Roots. The capitalized form—the Holocaust—takes off in the seventies, while the non-capitalized word has always been in usage, most probably because of its liturgical and biblical importance. Its renewed usage in French in the seventies, with a new meaning, corresponds to the massive decline of Christian practice, especially Sunday mass, its readings and prayers. In English, the word “holocaust” evolved much earlier into a metaphor and made a secular meaning possible. Its religious charge became diffuse in the seventeenth and eighteenth century according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and the word could apply to a local fire or catastrophe, often with a considerable number of victims.

Shoah, in its US spelling (it is also spelled Shoa and Sho’ah), has been spreading in French since the early eighties, especially since Claude Lanzmann’s film of the same title (1985). It competes with French holocauste or English holocaust, but has remained limited in usage. Much more limited yet, at least outside of Jewish religious circles, is Hebrew/Yiddish churban or khurbn eyrope. It has the tangled advantage of situating the event in a long historical chain bound to the destruction of the two temples but is linguistically and theologically baffling for non-Jews and even for many Jews. One wonders what Elie Wiesel, quoted above, made of this element from his mama loshen. Holocauste has seen a decline in French but is as current in English as genocide. See those terms in the Google Ngram viewer for further evidence of these reconstructions of the past with feelings and notions of the present.

Back briefly to the contemporeanousness of multiple presents and pasts that historians are expected to navigate expertly. Or rather back to their porosity. The borders between the assumed present memories are not clear. Neither are those between past(s) and present(s). Something real, however, points beyond “holocaust” and “genocide,” the markers of a live, present, evolving collective memory. The present memorialization is partly created of new cloth (“genocide” is a neologism) and partly made out of the débris of an ancient “memory palace” (“holocaust”). What does it mean for us to remember and reconstruct a past on the basis of a re-imagined present whose social structures seem so difficult to grasp? Or: Doesn’t the call to remember need the support of historical inquiry, and vice-versa? This question is triggered by my reading of Maurice Halbwachs’ Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Colin, 1925), especially the last two chapters on religious and social memory. An English version exists: On Collective Memory (Chicago: 1992).

The United States is in better shape than one might think for the short term and maybe even the long term for at least three reasons. One, the astonishing, hard-won victory of the Democrats in Georgia, which is a signal for the ‘centrist’ Republicans—there are perhaps more of them than one thinks or at least several are recasting themselves as such—as well as for the Democratic Party, that it is necessary to go back to political programs—the Republican Party had not even bothered to offer one for the November 2020 elections—and collaborate on certain issues rather than wage an all-out war that started long ago with Newt Gingrich. Two, the election of Biden and the putative composition of his cabinet, which seems very professional, measured, centrist, and experienced. All the capitalist institutions are of necessity behind the new government, given the events. And finally the failure of the insurrection of Wednesday, after which a Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley of the senate, as well as a hundred plus representatives of the chamber, still felt constrained to repeat Trump’s lie and place their bets as his demagogue heirs for 2022 and especially 2024.

I was personally afraid of seeing this demagoguery succeed, because we cannot hide the fact that the labor, health, financial, and economic situation of the states and the country, despite the present possibility of borrowing at very low interest, is causing great misery. Greater difficulties may follow. It would not be surprising to see the Republicans play this old card of capitalist redistribution and quickly rebuild their reputation: less taxes and above all less social programs, no matter the consequences of the pandemic, while stoking anger, radical mistrust, and division to mask their support of economic and social division. Prior to Wednesday’s events, I thought that Trump’s haphazard demagoguery was a logical step in sync with the consequences of vast economic disparities. I thought that it would lead to worse demagogues like Cruz and Hawley, who would be far more calculating, organized, and dangerous than Trump himself. Now I think that these cynical demagogues have erred in judgment by betting on Trump. But the poisonous lie that they glibly repeat regarding the fraudulence of all elections has taken a life of its own and will live on, whether there is a Trump in the background or not. The coming weeks will tell us if the Republican Party will stop to think about its choices and anchor itself in a traditional right rather than marking time and eventually continuing its march towards fascism.

In yesterday’s NYT, T. Friedman gave a wrong-headed analysis of the situation in the Persian Gulf and what Biden should try to do now that he is boxed in by the attack in Iran three days ago. His advice is that one should recognize how significantly the Middle-East is changing because the US have become the top world producer—fourth exporter, however, far behind Saudi Arabia—and this has led to a new alliance against Iran by Israel, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia (mezzo voce). This fundamental fact should be recognized in new negotiations. Not a word about Palestine or about the history of the Persian Gulf and Iran, most importantly. According to him, the negotiations should not center on the past nuclear agreement but on a second reality-changing fact, namely that Iran has been manufacturing and using dangerously sophisticated missiles, as shown for instance by an attack in September 2019 on the Abqaiq refinery (by Iran or the Houthis?), and selling them to its proxies (Iraq, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis). Not a word about the continued presence of overpowering US forces in the Persian Gulf. And even less on the sale of US sophisticated weaponry to the UAE, SA, Israel, and others.

Very bad news today: the assassination of Iran’s head of nuclear research, Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, by an armed group of at least five to six people who were clearly very prepared and had complex support. How did they put a pickup truck full of explosives on the road this scientist was supposed to take, have a car full of armed operatives right near, and then manage to disappear?

The most worrying aspect is the date chosen for an attack whose objective appears to be—on the most irenic reading of it—to prevent a return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action signed in 2015. In fact, I don’t think it simply makes the declared task of the president-elect—rejoin or renegotiate the JCPA—much harder or rather impossible. It goes much further, into uncharted territory. The murders of two weeks ago (by Israel?) and the prior assassination of Qasem Soleimani by US forces, make it more likely now that Trump’s electoral goals and the military designs of those who use him (the present government of Israel and Pompeo, I imagine) have become one single end, just when US election laws and courts left no hope to Trumpists. It looks like the circumstances—new right-wing personnel in the Defense Department and reluctance by this outgoing administration to inform Biden’s team—are ripe for war, whether Iran retaliates or not.

The Associated Press published the election results. Here are the details, plus some calculations I did to see by what margins Biden won battleground states.

1. Very clear popular vote (plurality) for the presidency: 75,215,431M (50.6%) for Biden, 70,812,515M (47.7%) for Trump. Difference: 4,402,916 votes out of 146M. The count is not finished and the recounts will need to be taken into consideration. I am quoting here the results given by the AP at 10:00 am PST.
2. Translation of these results in electoral college slices: 290 voters for Biden, 214 for Trump. The total is 538, the absolute majority 270.
3. For battleground states, the figures are:
   

   States	Electoral college	Margin (Biden)	total votes	Comment
   Michigan	16	146 123	5.4M	clear
   Wisconsin	10	20 540	3.24M	narrow
   Georgia	16	10 195	4.9M	narrow
   Arizona	11	18 610	3.2M	narrow
   Pennsylvania	20	41 223	6,6M	narrow

4. Florida, Texas, South Carolina, Iowa, were clearly for Trump. Remember that Biden’s margins in disputed states are much larger than Trump’s in 2016.
5. For the Senate, no democratic blue tsunami but a nail biter: 46 Democrats, 2 independents (who will have a lot of power, practically), two seats in Georgia that will be disputed in January, against 50 Republicans (including 2 who are in the process of being confirmed in North Carolina and Alaska). Even if two Democrats are elected in Georgia, no major decision can be made by majority without calling for a vote by the vice-president. Tensions will be very strong as soon as the new government is put in place.

Results, from my point of view: the constitutional checks and balances of the electoral college and the senate continue to play their basic, anti-democratic role, seventy-five years after the second world war. This role is to protect the institutions of the republic but also to ensure that the accumulation of all created wealth goes to a narrowly defined minority — certainly capable and merit-driven but including many who inherit culture and power—, rather than to the whole society. The existence of the electoral college and the choice of two senators per state — be it Alaska (pop .: 731,000) or California (pop .: 39.5M) — are awful brakes on democratic decision-making. Nothing solid can be done without the Senate, for example, when more than 40M citizens are not represented there. This is in addition to the over-representation of the conservative right in a majority of states (governors, local senates, and chambers of deputies). This over-representation is the result of political divisions that the Republican Party has encouraged since at least Nixon, say the 1970s. Cultural and moral war (religion and abortion), as well as immigration and latent racism, have served as a cover for anti-social programs that are much more costly for society and eventually for those who vote on the right: lower taxes on profits and increased inequalities, very conservative internal and foreign security policy, budgetary restrictions aimed at destroying social security (pensions) and Medicare / Medicaid, impossibility of setting up a universal health program.

Given the structure of the American republic and the economic, social, cultural, and moral divisions that exist, what can Biden, the Democratic House, and a divided Senate do?

Let’s think of the possibilities, let’s dream. Fortunately, certain elements of the economy are favorable. Public treasuries can borrow huge sums at very low cost. At least that’s what we’re told. So Biden may well be able to fund both the jobless created by the pandemic and his climate and job creation program. Perhaps some of the GOP representatives would join him in this. There may also be a real effort on labor laws (maternity or paternity leave, sick leave, and most importantly, a decent minimum wage): I very much doubt it, however, when we see that the deceptive ideology of the “independent contractor” continues to wreak havoc in California (I am thinking of Uber and Proposition 22, which passed easily). What about a universal health program, or at least one with a public option? Perhaps the loss of insurance due to the pandemic will make many rethink their opposition to Medicare for all. Further: can one have more regulation of deposit banks and big investment banks? I don’t believe it will happen either, although there certainly might be one or more study committees … Next, eliminate the taxation law passed in 2017 and so disadvantageous in the long run to the vast majority of Americans? I don’t think it can even be seriously discussed, because the opposition will be too strong. As for foreign policy, there are lots of positive: support of NATO, reintegration into the World Health Organization, rejoining the Paris climate accord, perhaps also the resumption of negotiations on the Pacific treaty (strategy of “Containment” of China, but too late perhaps? The horse bolted out of the barn…). As for Iran, let’s hope Biden will be loyal to Obama’s plan and will work with Europeans, Russia, and China, on reintegrating Iran in the global economy. The opposition of Israel’s present government and the two parties will be very strong, however. Biden himself felt compelled to approve of the “treaties” made between the emirates and Israel, and didn’t say a word, as far as I know, about the complete lack of quid pro quo …

A few comments on this Amichai poem, part 5 of Jerusalem 1967 (below the translation).

Translation slightly different from that of Stephen Mitchell:

On Yom Kippur in 1967, I put on
my dark holiday clothes and walked to the Old City in Jerusalem.
For a long time I stood in front of an Arab’s cave-like shop,
not far from Damascus Gate, a shop with
buttons and zippers and spools of thread
in every color and snaps and buckles.
A precious light and many colors, like an open ark.

I told him silently that my father too
had a shop like this, with thread and buttons.
I explained to him silently about all the decades
and the causes and the events, why I am now here
and my father’s shop was burned there and he is buried here.

When I finished, it was time for closing.
He too lowered the shutter and locked the gate
and I returned home with all the worshippers.

My few notes on this poem, verse by verse: the date in the first verse (1967) reminds me of my daily walks from the Collège des Frères to the École Biblique, via Damascus Gate. Sometimes four times a day, between August 1966 and June 1968. There were people selling vegetables, bread, drink, haberdashery. A dense and jostling crowd came from the Gate on their way to the Holy Sepulchre or the Western Wall, or emerged from the two large shuqs where they had shopped for food or clothing. I didn’t stop to contemplate the goods of any seller, especially since I had been warned not to do that. I don’t think that the Jaffa Gate was yet open and allowed orthodox Jews and Christian pilgrims to go directly to the Western Wall. So, visitors usually came to the Old City via Damascus Gate. Gone was the tall cement wall and the no man’s land that ran along the Old City’s northern wall and that separated Jordan from Israel since 1948. That Yom Kippur was on Saturday, October 14, 1967, about four months after the Israeli victory in June and the immediate taking over of Arab Jerusalem as part of Israel. The initial shock of the loss and victory was beginning to wane.

1967–68 corresponds to תשכח in Hebrew, which can be vocalized to mean: “Forget,” or as Stephen Mitchell translates, “the year of forgetting?” The poet puts on his dark holiday clothes, though on Yom Kippur, it is an old custom to wear white. Dark clothing, as in a scene of mourning or rather because of the all-around sadness of the situation? The Arab’s shop becomes the ark in the temple, or rather the souvenir of this long-disappeared ark. A heavy curtain, the parokhet, separated the hekhal (sanctuary) from the holy of holies, where this ark rested and the divine presence was expected to abide. This parokhet was embroidered in threads of all kinds and must have been an extraordinary sight, if the book of Exodus and Josephus’ accounts are to be believed. The liturgy’s or poem’s ark and the temple extend to an Arab’s shop and the souvenir of the poet’s father’s livelihood.

The poet stands and later gives in petto explanations, as in the Amidah prayer, recited standing and silently, three times a day in synagogues, but five times on the day of atonement. Can peace arise between the two displaced peoples, without a house they can call home, caught in a concatenation of endless events?

Closing time and locking of the gate(s), late in the day. Closing is the name of a special ceremony of closure at the temple when the amidah, the prayer of repentance, was recited, silently again, for the fifth time. Closure: messianic solutions to historical conflicts are for dreamers. After closing, it is time for all the praying masses to go home to their mini-temples, in peace for now, neither in triumph nor in shame.

Last night, the Washington pharaoh read re-purposed hieroglyphs from teleprompters. Like kings of old, he wrapped his prosthetic iron hand in velvety empathy. The sun god once more guaranteed order. His family and fly-swatting servants reminded everyone that he has been showering us with infinite blessings such as our beyond-belief response to plagues. Everything is great! If only our brick-making people were content to eat onions in their gilded cages and stopped dreaming of a trustworthy foreign god in the Sinai desert.