The Promised Land, By Whitney Farmer – Un Pop Culture

June 16, 2010 Whitney Farmer 5 Comments

Last week, Helen Thomas – retiring Dean of the White House Press Corps and former White House bureau chief of United Press International (UPI) – was taped in extreme close-up giving a personal opinion on what should be done about the political unrest in Israel. Reveling in her Constitutional right to free speech and her new found freedom of personal expression that wasn’t allowed in her former professional code of unbiased journalism, she unleashes hatred. When questioned, she stated that the Jews “…should get the hell out of Palestine”. When asked where they should go, she said “…back home to where they came from – Poland, Germany, wherever….”

When I first started working with the bands who come through our my door as they sweep through our city during their tours, it felt very much like the first day of school for along time. I would pick my clothes carefully and try to act cool and say things that made me sound like I was smart. During the load-in for the gear from one of the first big groups I met, I took time away to interview a potential bartender, a beautiful Brazilian woman. Later, I was walking across the floor of the main venue and saw the woman chatting up the band. Not a good sign. The last thing anyone wants who is tired from touring and has tons of gear to move and a looming door time is to have to be ambushed by an overeager fan in a place where you should be able to let your guard down. I went over to her casually with the intention of pulling her away to talk more about the interview, but then move her along so the band could have some peace. As I came to her, I began to ask questions about her availability for a trial bartending shift and if she had some references. She didn’t answer for a moment, then began to ask me some polite but confused questions. In an English accent, not the Brazilian one that she had had before.

It turns out that the bartending prospect that I had interviewed earlier was in fact a dead ringer for the wife of the lead singer of the band that had just arrived. And I was apparently trying to recruit her to bartend…I thank God that the English have been trained to be kind and polite in circumstances such as this. Philosophically, I decided that my career reputation at that moment could go no where but up.

She and her husband came to a show over this weekend as ‘civilians’, there because they were friends of the headiner rather than performing. She and I – and two bands – took turns laughing at me over what had happened before. I was grateful that the new kid at school agony has worn off, and I was grateful that I noticed that I have gotten wiser with age. I continue to hope that a lifetime of living will first reveal than remove anything foolish and hateful in me, than refine and strengthen what’s left. As the U2 song says, “..with a wrinkled face and a brand new heart.”

I remember first seeing what has become my favorite sculpture in an art history class in college. It is ‘Mary Magdalene’, carved from a gnarled tree stump by Donatello during the Renaissance. This Mary was different than any that had been done before, which were commonly almost pornographic as they played on the myth that Mary was a harlot. The Mary of Donatello followed the scripture: This was a woman who had been tormented by demons for years, living as an outcast in an ancient desert land. The Mary of Donatello was visually descimated, but spiritually breathtaking. Her clothes were in tatters and revealed not curves but scars, tendons, and gristle. Her hair was filthy and knotted as it fell down her body and gave her modesty. But her skeletal hands were clasped in worship, and the mouth that was missing teeth was open in joy and thanks. During a flood that hit Italy about a generation ago, the statue was submerged and came out with all of its paint stripped off. What was left was to me more beautiful: A vision of a purified woman carved from the dead stump of a tree, the rings of time visible again.

Helen Thomas, the child of Lebanese immigrants to America, enthusiastically ignored the historic necessity of Jews becoming the diaspora, literally “scattered seeds”, time and time again. To say that they can’t go back to Poland or Germany because that is where their communities were annihilated ignores the truth that those places were only a temporary home following earlier persecutions and subsequent wanderings. Perhaps their history reads in most to least recent order Israel, Poland till WWII, Spain until the Alhambra Decree, and Palestine until the Ottoman Empire prohibition. Where is their home? It would be just as valid for me to tell Helen to get the hell out of America and go back to where she came from, in this case Lebanon. My Apache and Chippewa bloodlines made me want to jump this conclusion when I first heard her calm hatred come through the airwaves.

Putting my spiritual beliefs aside – that I believe in the God of Abraham – I have active compassion for a people who have been nearly annihilated within living memory. And I stand by a people who I believe have an ancesteral claim on a land, and that they have been chased across the plant for generations doesn’t invalidate their claim.

Just like the Gibeonites who were written of in Joshua Chapter 8 and from whom modern-day Palestinians are descended, there can be a place for both in this land. But there is no room for hatred anywhere, Ms. Thomas. In America, Lebanon, anywhere.

At the end of my career or the end of my life when the floods rise and all of the paint is peeled off of me, I want no words of death still embedded in me for all to see. Just like that tree stump that was used to carve the desert grace of Mary, I want my rings to show new growth until I get chopped down.

Whitney runs a rock music venue in L.A. and is a good driver.