HaPpY BiRtHDaY, HoLoCaUsT! – Sunset Observer #48

January 27, 2017 Victor El-Khouri 2 Comments

…By Whitney Farmer
@farmer_whitney (Twitter/FLICKR) or farmerwhitney (Instagram) and whitney.farmer.146 (Facebook)
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Un Pop Culture

Today Dad turns 89 years old, which is 623 in dog years. I might have my conversion rate wrong…Maybe I should have made him into Celsius?

He came into the kitchen wearing his 501 Levi’s, Levi jacket with the furry lining, and Morro Bay t-shirt featuring an endangered sea otter with a black bandana tied around his neck. He said, “…another one!” after I had remarked on his latest milestone.

After I made him sailor-strong coffee with a peanut butter and toast chaser, he settled into his chair by the window in the living room with one of the white dogs to watch politics. He was careful where he put his feet because this particular little white dog bites the cuff of his pants if he accidently touches her tail. If Dad didn’t wear Levi’s daily, his cuffs couldn’t have withstood the assault. Miners in California bought these copper riveted blue canvas innovations for basically the same reason.

Two Jews, Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis, started the still-privately held company 164 years ago. Strauss came from the Bavarian area of what is now Germany, and Davis came from Latvia which in my lifetime had once been a part of the Soviet Union before 1991. The seaport of San Francisco was the perfect place to launch their company that would trade across deep waters in merchant vessels and bring treasure from afar.

San Francisco is roughly on the same latitude as the ancient Phoenician city of Tyre in what is now Lebanon. Tyre was also known for being the center of a famous blue fabric industry. At the time, only those of royal blood – or sometimes royal favor – were allowed or could afford blue cloth of Tyrian blue. The pigment was created by crushing countless Murex, a sea mollusk, for their defensive ink. The colors that were created ranged from red to purple to imperial blue, depending on the type of little creature that was sacrificed for couture.

One the other side of the world but on the same latitude, two Jews found fortune selling blue clothes instead to common laborers. Even after the California Gold Rush, the idea that there was treasure that could be found by digging with bare hands through dark earth lasted. But mostly it was farmers who benefitted by discovering the gold of the California sun that caused crops to grow and could feed the 49ers.

Strauss and Davis were fortunate not only to have made a fortune, but to have immigrated to the United States before their homelands were consumed by active policies of genocide. Hatred is possible wherever two people yearn for one opportunity of favor or provision. But when thought becomes action and then becomes policy…?

Cain killed Abel because he was a competitor. Prejudice still attempts to silence anyone who keeps you – or me – from having exclusive access to that one piece of forbidden fruit. The silent dialogue persuades that, if the Other is less than human and therefore less than me, I can do what I want.

So Strauss and Davis came to this land and made it Our Land. Davis didn’t die in the pogroms of his region, and his descendants didn’t need to flee to the safety of Bavaria. And the Strauss and Davis families didn’t meet there and start a company that would eventually outfit the early Nazi militia in the early 1920s, causing our history to write about “Blueshirts” – wearing durable indigo colored canvass with copper riveted reinforcements at stress points – rather than “Brownshirts”.

And the children of the children of Levi Strauss and Company didn’t burn in the fires of Auschwitz. Instead, the children of the children of those children can open the paper today, January 27th, and read that today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the liberation of that death camp.

And my Dad can sit here in his Levi’s jacket and 501s with a bandana around his neck, wearing a t-shirt that profiles an endangered species.

As he watches politics on the TV, he says, “…crazy…”. He can’t help himself. He has to say something. Then he curses, today, on his 89th birthday. Then he gets a migraine.

I’m glad he is here in his clothes made by Jews in the color of royalty with a t-shirt that expresses his opinion about a cute furry animal that almost disappeared because of unfettered enterprise. And I’m glad his compassion for our world aches enough to give him a migraine.

And when there is a knock on the door, I am glad that it is a birthday delivery of his new royal blue walker with wheels, paid for by insurance that he paid for throughout his working life. I’m glad the brown-shirted delivery isn’t someone tracking down…
…this Canadian immigrant…
…wearing a political opinion proudly across his chest…
…who openly expresses that he doesn’t like what he is hearing on the television…
…on his 89th birthday as the Santa Ana devil winds blow through that sanctuary city towards where we live at the edge of the sea…

Quote of the Blog, from 1984 by George Orwell: “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth.”

Image of happy birthday balloons, from www.lombard.com.
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