Introduction to Falwell's Relationship with Menachem Begin

The frst-ever documented meeting between Menachem Begin and Falwell dates back to 1975. During Begin's meeting with a group of Evangelical leaders, Jerry Falwell pledged to support Israel. Jan Pieterse wrote about that meeting in his book: “During the meeting in Washington D.C. in 1975 between evangelical leaders and Menachem Begin, the evangelicals pledged full support for Israel. Jerry Falwell stated during the meeting that ‘we proclaim that the Land of Israel encompasses Judea and Samaria, as integral parts of the Jewish patrimony, with Jerusalem as its indivisible capital. Israel stands as bulwark of strength and determination against those who by terror and blackmail threaten our democratic way of life.’” However, the close relationship between Begin and Falwell commenced only after the political upheaval of 1977 and the formation of government by Menachem Begin.

Before exploring the personal rapport between Falwell and Menachem Begin, it is important to briefy introduce Begin's background to readers unfamiliar with his trajectory. Born in 1913 in Brest-Litovsk (then Poland), Begin rose to prominence as the leader of the Revisionist Zionist youth movement Betar, and later as commander of the Irgun, a Jewish underground organization that fought the British Mandate in Palestine. After Israel's independence, Begin founded the Herut party, remaining in the political opposi-tion for nearly three decades.

Cento Sonnet à la P. VERGILIVS MARO

Let me make this final effort to work the fields without damage, Arethusa, before the media flee from the work, never claiming the land though ‘she’ favours its people over herself, and the fretwork of metal trees tunes only erosion. Where there were recently olive groves there are now graves— the scent of leaves and wood lost in gunpowder, shrapnel. All prayers are blasted as the hand holds the head, the earth. Who in Sicily will hear the songs that once sprang from Gaza? It is not our right to interfere in your disputes and yet arms from across the oceans flow over ravines and waste the land. All moisture is lost as blood flakes on rubble, windows are gone. The green of camouflage replaces the trees taken under duress. All the words we write hoping they will shepherd a peace, while supreme untruths wreck even the joys of night.

—JK

Cento Sonneto à la P. VERGILIVS MARO

Extremum hunc, Arethusa, mihi concede laborem: et quo quemque modo fugiatque feratque laborem, dum fovet ac ne me sibi praeferat illa veretur, uestra meos olim si fistula dicat amores! Disce et odoratam stabulis accendere cedrum ipse caput tonsae foliis ornatus oliuae ut nuper, frustra pressabimus ubera palmis— carmina pastoris Siculi modulabor auena.

i think we should co-write an overt short preface discussing our tendency to difference as well as strong overlap, r. this is quite a different book from the last. in the main, i differ over any living thing that's made unliving being an extension of the living world. it becomes an extension for the human, but not (necessarily for) the non-human – as ‘science’ affirms the complex communication of trees as well as animals, autonomy and connectedness becomes declared in discourse as much as it is already known by many traditional societies and some individuals (i’ve heard trees talking since i was a kid – as i walked over their roots, as i stood near them etc.) and groups outside such societies. but knowing is separate from application, and not all who know make use of this knowledge in the same way, of course. it might be culturally extant, and i respect that, but that's a whole different legitimization and is separate from the autonomy of, say, a tree (and certainly an animal). the interconnected nature of all life is evident, and the more totemic a culture, the more this seems true, but i still see a tree as a tree that ceases to be a tree when it is killed. it's a definitional thing in the main, but it is a difference, i think, and that likely has other threads that emerge into how we do or don't live and the mutual respect that entails (which it has, and it does). it's not essential, but i think it offers us room to discuss more things over the years – to go where we haven't gone yet. thoughts?

I was going to write this immediately after the moment of ‘encounter’, but decided to leave it 24 hours to allow event to free itself of me and its moment, and to become conceptual as well as experiential.

Tim had been worrying that for all the early onset of heat, and with weeks and weeks of total dryness, we hadn't seen any black-headed monitors this ‘spring’ (false season attribution both in Noongar reality, and in terms of massive climate shifting here). I was also concerned. There has been a lot of laughing kookaburra (introduced in the early twentieth century to the south-west of Australia to ‘reduce snakes’) predation around ‘Jam Tree Gully’ and environs this year, and as well as other bird nests, they grab many waking reptiles (very short sleeping period these days!).

But I was sitting here thinking about the absolute necessity of Alain Badiou in New York talking with Emily Apter about Rimbaud, and mentally writing these words (which I would type onto an email later that evening) to Emily about my version of Season in Hell via Delmore Schwartz's 1930s translation: ‘that rimbaud season [i have attempted] is a collapse of silence into a rowdiness of de-chronologising of the modern which i think is interesting re Alain Badiou's position. The poem is neither modern or late modern in that making—it is, however, a dialectic (plus), and it confirms witness and trauma of “history” by stepping outside event […]’…

Literature in the era of global warming might be deemed a relatively new phenomenon given that the formal consideration of climate change and global warming is itself historically recent. However, the conjunction between ecology and literature and the interplay between the environment and creative practices have for a long time been distinguishing features. As Édouard Glissant wrote in 1981, “The relationship with the land, one that is even more threatened because the community is alienated from that land, becomes so fundamental in this discourse that landscape in the work stops being merely decorative or supportive and emerges as a full character. Describing the landscape is not enough. The individual, the community, the land are inextricable in the process of creating history.” Eco-criticism and eco-feminism are now established scholarly felds as a result of groundbreaking works on these questions. There has also been a profusion of innovative works in felds such as art history, philosophy, history, political science and sociology, including recent works that have called for a rethinking and overhaul of the existing theoretical apparatus in order to foreground environmental approaches.

A thing often isn't what you think it is about. Clapping isn't about clapping.

Clapping seems like an ordinary action that you perform without thinking. And yet, behind the ordinary action lies a world of possibilities. All you need is to pay attention. It changes everything.

Let's list a few of the reasons for which we clap and the energies we employ to clap: polite applause; extroverted celebration in a group; a reaction of surprise and delight at something that happened suddenly and unexpectedly, a soccer goal, for instance, a clever movement by a street dancer, a joke; forced clapping, when the unwilling assembly must clap to honor the dictator. Proud clapping, celebratory clapping, encouraging clapping; hypocritical clapping, ironic clapping, sarcastic clapping; two hands coming together and making sounds to hurt someone or to annoy someone; clapping to insult, to protest, to dismiss.

Each reason to clap creates its own clapping techniques. Joy and anger don't clap alike. The virtuoso clapper taps into a hundred motivations, employs a hundred gestures, and produces a hundred diferent sounds. The hands of the virtuoso are clever, skillful, and adaptable. Clapping, then, can become another way for you to develop your Creative Health.

We’ll write the clapping manual together, page by page, exercise by exercise.

humani nihil alienum and yet I am wary of a “Nation’s” e pluribus unum;

not of the inner sanctum we are often out of fashion— humani nihil alienum?

and then we’ve the homo sum humani nihil a me alienum puto variation e pluribus unum.

we can feel them twitch à la jus ad bellum, and the dire straits of human vs human: humani nihil alienum?

but love is love and thus cor unum? reach across the chasm and be more than a many as [that] one? e pluribus unum?

in cauda venenum? sine qua non? humani nihil alienum ≠ e pluribus unum…[?!…]

John Kinsella, pacifist

The local ‘polycrisis’ is not new and is part of ongoing colonial rapacity. Whatever term we evoke to talk of the cascading crises of environment and injustices, the fact is that where I live, they are entangled with ongoing colonialism. We live on stolen Noongar Boodja, and until the land is restored to its people, it cannot hope to repair. The collapse of the biosphere has come about through greed, exploitation and abuse of the environment, and only a respect for Indigenous knowledge/s will move us all towards rectifying these damages and wrongs. At present, we are in a drought crisis, with rainfall lessening each year. The massive clearing of land (less than 3 per cent of pre-invasion/pre-settlement vegetation exists) in the ‘wheatbelt’ of Western Australia has played a large role in this reduction of rainfall, and has been a significant contributor to global warming. The damage of country is exacerbated by monocultures of agriculture, mining and other ‘developments’. Near where we live, a massive nickel–copper–platinum group element mine being developed by Chalice Mining threatens the great Julimar Forest is sold to the public as a ‘green metals’ panacea, when it is in fact a devastation of environment and biosphere. As mining companies become more adept at giving poly-answers to the polycrisis, they adapt to the changing awareness with arguments to ‘sustain’ their own operations. Capitalism is at the core of these exploitations and, to my mind, is inimical to the well-being of the planet.

The Republican primary candidate for the 2016 elections, Donald Trump, arrived at Liberty University on January 18, 2016, one week before the frst primaries in Iowa. He was introduced to the students by Jerry Falwell Jr., the university's president and son of Jerry Falwell Sr., who followed in his father's footsteps and echoed Reagan's visit to the campus in 1980. During the speech, where Trump was portrayed by the popular conservative broadcaster Sean Hannity as the “defender of Christianity,” the candidate pledged to defend believers in the United States and around the world. In that same speech, Trump explicitly responded to the dangers of the nuclear deal with Iran and even vowed to cancel it. The support he received from Falwell Jr. on the eve of the frst primaries held in Iowa on February 1, 2016, was of signifcant value. Falwell Jr.'s political stance and support of Trump were extensively discussed in the American media, mainly in terms of the damage such support could have on Republican Senator Ted Cruz from Texas, whose father was an Evangelical pastor and should have received this portion of the Republican Party voters in the primaries. “This support [for Trump, K.B.] is a blow to Ted Cruz, less than a week before the primaries in Iowa, in which he needed the support of conservative Christians.”

If I see the house as a boat

finding purchase on the valley wall,

and the remnant vegetation the damaged sea,

and the delta—vertical—on the curved tank wall

lapped by passerine birds, bobtails, black-headed monitors,

and describe how the kangaroos would come and patiently drink

damp gravity, then you might count my experience

as inland sea legs. I crave no acknowledgement

of being here, because I can't claim anything,

but it doesn't completely mean I am unwelcome—I cling

to this hope, on the hillside, draft keeling as storms

build at the festive time of year, as some call it, but not necessarily

me; edgy arc that sails towards no god, lacks an ark's gravitas,

strains in the heatwaves, expands and contracts against building

specifications, the caulking growing drier and powdery,

topsoil blown or washed away, and the threat of salty

incursions late in the piece. I touch the rainwater tank

to measure depth through concrete—differential between

water and air, sun on the round, the limey extrusion

where leaks dry as the freshwater ocean recedes.

This exposure was five days ago but has been on hold in the twitching and eliding of time. Brooding or brewing

are composite pictures, montages of then and now, the frames of what can be taken in as other tasks of keeping going

roll on—that wait and anticipation of maintenance of collapse, or an evasion of what chance might throw

into the mix of refrain as if it will give grip, ensure a safe crossing, which is not what thirteen oblong turtles

received crossing a road near Bibra lake as narrated today. Crushed by passing cars despite the signs, the time of year.

Tim and I saw three Oblong turtles in Coal Dam during that exposure, that intersecting with its cross-references of human observation

those five days ago. Now, citation. Tim's first seeing of Oblong turtles and he saw three swimming and hunting together just below, the sun

raying an angle that would let seeing take place, but closing out quickly as it should to let cells configure outside the human interstice.

The sun knows what's it's doing with water, even if it is thwarted by human activity time and time again. This temporal intersticing

is compelled by a family of scared kingfishers clinical about their flooded gum nesting hollow—darting and precision, and colour

Horseshoe gorse fire coercivity to strengthen the burn to shape the heat of hillside climb a wasting of world to tradition an end as manifest as Christmas lights afterburns smoke sky stars always behind always willing even when they’ve passed us by, been dragged up the hill by the beast of strife.

—JK

There's a moment every dawn when the night starts dissipating and the day afrms itself, tentatively at frst. The light falling upon the city is special, hazy, otherworldly. You’re walking to the bakery down the block from your home, along the usual sidewalk, with the usual trafc going by next to you. But the light is so strange that you might feel that you’re in a movie set, where a story is being enacted and you are part of it, and you don't really know your lines or what the director expects from you. The experience is a bit dreamlike, a bit hallucinatory. “It's night and it's day, at the same time; it's both, or maybe neither. I don't know exactly where I am, and I don't know exactly who I am” (Figure 16.1).

We’ll call this a liminal experience. The word “liminal” means “of or pertaining to a threshold.” It's related to the word “limit,” which some scholars say might be related to the Latin word “limus,” which means “transverse, oblique.” I’ll put the dictionary aside and I’ll compose a little poem instead:

The liminal territory, which isn't necessarily an actual place in space, joins two seemingly separate or opposite states. The liminal experience consists in being in between two states or spaces, belonging to both at the same time (Figure 16.2).

Literacy and Cultural Loss

According to most estimates, Australians spoke between 200 and 300 languages before the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. If every dialect was counted as a language in its own right, the figure would be two or three times greater than this. At the end of the twentieth century, however, a government report found that the number of First Nations languages spoken fluently and regularly by all age groups had fallen by 90 per cent since 1800.1 The percentage of First Nations people speaking Indigenous languages had also fallen from 100 per cent in 1800 to just 13 per cent in 1996. Many languages had simply become extinct; many more were only used by small groups of a few elderly people and their survival was therefore highly endangered. Just as in other parts of the world like Canada, colonisation destroyed First Nations cultures, and Indigenous languages disappeared with them. Languages were lost because of several factors: deaths from war and disease left no surviving speakers; population dispersal destroyed the communities which spoke them; the removal of First Nations children from their families disrupted the chain of cultural transmission; and the teaching of English on mission stations and reserves drove out the use of other tongues. Literacy, as anthropologist Penny van Toorn put it, never arrives naked.2 It came clothed in the garb of colonial power. Literacy was associated with European conquest and the violent expropriation of the land, and inevitably identified with the exercise of white hegemony.