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SQUEAKY WHEEL: A Memorable Day

Toni Mester

Friday May 26, 2017 - 02:36:00 PM

Toni Mester

For the seventh time, Memorial Day falls on my birthday, less often than leap year. The holiday previously known as Decoration Day used to be May 30, but it was changed in 1971 to the last Monday in May. And with that began a coincidence that coincidentally first fell on my 29^th birthday.

I could claim that celebrating my birthday on Memorial Day weekend made me a patriot, but that honor belongs to my father, who had been a criminal defense lawyer in Brooklyn during the depression. He once told me that he had represented two kinds of clients, the blacks and the Italians. The blacks, he said, were charged with petty crimes, but he had trouble “getting them off” and they couldn’t afford to pay him. The Italians, on the other hand, were charged with heinous offenses and paid well. And once he managed to get “a murder rap” acquitted. The retired mobster was known in our family as Uncle Joe, who would send us the same Christmas gift from Florida every year, citrus fruit wrapped in colorful cellophane in a fancy basket. I thought he was a long lost uncle until I was old enough to understand, at which time I asked my father how he could have defended such lowlife. He replied, “I was defending the Constitution.”

My real uncle Dudey and great uncle Sid were veterans of WWII, and Sid had also been a doughboy in WWI. He was over 40 when he enlisted to fight Hitler, but the Army was happy to take a mature chicken farmer who had a way with a rifle. He was motivated to save his sisters in Europe. The Uncles survived the Battle of the Bulge and after V-E day got permission to go behind Red Army lines to search for their family, but not a trace was left behind in Szatmar, now Satu Mare, Romania.

My uncles weren’t proud of their contribution to the defeat of the Third Reich. They didn’t boast like the other vets in town or join the American Legion because our people - the Hungarian Jews – had been decimated. The war didn’t feel like a victory. In comparison, another vet I knew, the father of a classmate, had brought home a big red flag with a black swastika and hung the trophy on a wall. My uncles seldom talked about the war, but on those occasions, we were eager listeners. Dudey had been landed on Utah Beach, Normandy, an experience that he summed up: “We were all shitting in our pants.”

Years ago, I was taking a conversational French class in Paris when the talk took a decidedly anti-American turn. I got riled and gave a little speech in lousy French about how my uncles fought to liberate France. To my amazement, the class applauded, and the teacher said, “How soon we forget.” Later she told me that her Jewish father had been in the resistance.

That Resistance

It’s no longer enough to be a Democrat. We are now in “the Resistance” and fighting fascism, taking on the mantle of a heroic underground.

My Danish sister-in-law Annette Mester translated Herbert Pundik’s chronicle of the flight of the Jews to Sweden, In Denmark It Could Not Happen, and there’s a Resistance Museum in Copenhagen that preserves video interviews with the partisans relating this and other exploits. It could be uplifting if you’ve never been to the Jewish cemetery and read the names on the memorial to those who died in Theresienstadt concentration camp. The rest were transported in small boats across the Sound in the middle of the night, aided by the underground, friends, fishermen, and the secret action of a good German.

The resistance was dangerous citizen soldiery that demanded exceptional courage, coordination, and loyalty. Waking up on any given day, an operative never knew if she would live or die. The potential of capture and torture was constant. Folks, we are not doing that. If it makes people feel good to call opposition to Trump “the resistance” then fine; the meaning of words change, but for me, it rings hollow.

Unseating the radical right is going to take a concerted political effort, but they are Republicans, not Nazis; they represent corporate power, not genocidal blood lust. The Republican leadership must decide whether they will continue to enable racists and lying scoundrels. In the long run Trump’s populist tactic is a losing game because of demographics and because the target population will figure out, sooner or later, that their interests are not being served.

I grew up in a conservative Republican town, but when I returned decades later for a high school reunion, I was surprised at how smart my classmates had become, good hearted and worldly wise. Many Americans have already begun to see through the Trump bluster, as his unfavorable poll numbers indicate.

At 74, I’m too old for glory, so I’m not signing up for any resistance. Any discretionary energy goes to absorb the not-fake news, write, speak my mind, attend meetings, lobby the City Council and write checks for causes and candidates further afield. That’s just ordinary activism.

I fervently hope that we can assign Donald Trump to the place were he belongs: the dustbin of history. It is sickening to watch him parade around, masquerading as the leader of the free world, when he should go down the garbage chute Watergate style.

I will never forget the day (August 8, 1974) when Richard Nixon resigned. We were traveling by car in Oregon and stopped at a roadside restaurant for dinner to find a large crowd at the bar watching TV. The President gave a short statement, after which nobody seemed to know how to react. A lot of muttering, and then we grabbed a table, silently smirking our delight. Please Goddess, please let it happen again. Visit those not yet brain dead good Republicans at night and sprinkle your magic dust on their eyes so they wake up and see the light.

London United

The terrorist attack on innocents in Manchester this week brought back memories of the 2005 bombings in London. I was working in England at the time, running a theater tour based at Canterbury Hall, near ground zero of the four coordinated bombs. A bus was blown-up at our stop on Tavistock Square with 13 fatalities. The Russell Square tube station, scene of the most horrific attack with 26 dead, was our transit hub, and the other two stations where 13 people died were familiar ground. On the day of the attack July 7, we had left early on a day trip to Stratford-upon-Avon to see the Royal Shakespeare Company. The bus driver got a call as we pulled into town, and for the rest of the day we managed to get the group to two shows and back into London early in the morning. The massacre occurred mid-way through the tour, and I credit an earlier experience of starting a bus trip to Ashland on September 11, 2001 for my ability to perform in a worse situation.

It’s one thing to read about such events and quite another to be at the scene and responsible for 25 people, to make arrangements, reassure clients, and hear first hand from witnesses. For a week after the attack, everybody relied on the metropolitan police. They were amazing, fully in charge, helpful and prepared. The London transport police not only emerged as heroes, volunteering to enter the tunnels and recover the bodies, but also successfully rerouted the hoards that daily use the underground.

The London bombings taught me that when chaos strikes, either an attack or natural disaster, people need the police. Please read the complete action item 55 on the City Council agenda of April 25, 2017 concerning the memo of understanding on distribution of Bay Area Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) grant funds and the Berkeley Police Department relationship with the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC) and make up your own mind on this topic of concern.

It’s bad enough that so many of our first responders live out of town, but when the Hayward Fault rumbles, we’re going to need resources including every penny in those pots. As for terrorism, it could happen here.