Changing the Filter
Subarus, Blacklists and Gaza
Sometimes, I need to prove that I can do something for myself. This is not just a "guy thing." Computer programmers, home owners, cooks, knitters, kids and cats all get similar impulses. Most recently, the DIY urge centered on my Subaru's air filter.
This car, a 4X4 Forester, is 24 model years old. Cars age in something like dog years. Converted from auto to human, this vehicle is older than I am. But it runs better. It has buttons and dials and no touch-screen video displays. It goes reliably from here to there. It isn't a browser on wheels. It doesn't have any monitoring devices or transponders, it has no built-in video cameras inside or outside the cabin that can be activated remotely, and it can't drive itself. These are all positive attributes.
I can change this car's air filter, I said to myself. Various do-it-yourself videos on the Web promised (to the accompaniment of chirpy music and suspiciously edited breaks in the video feed) that you can do this in "just a few minutes." Uh huh. Ya sure, ya betcha. Of course, there are "just a few minutes" in an hour... and in a day, and in a week.
I should have known better. When I was in high school, I decided to replace the seized two-stroke motor of my second hand Vespa. What I thought would take a day took me every day for the entire summer. In the process, I managed to strip the kick starter. Forever after, I had to push start this two-wheeler by running along side it, manually shifting from neutral into first gear, popping the clutch, and then, like in an old Hollywood Western, leaping onto the saddle while the scooter was rolling. But! I succeeded in replacing the motor. Then, as now, there was that primal "urge" that has to be satisfied.
Unlike newer automobiles, I could still find the engine in my Subaru and identify its parts. But unlike other 20th Century cars I have owned, the air filter was not a doughnut shaped ring inside a round canister sitting on top of the carburetor held down with a thumb screw. In fact, this Subaru - albeit one that is 24 years old - has no carburetor and the air filter is contained within a small, hard to manipulate box crammed in on the side, held together with multiple inaccessible spring clips and connected by obscure hoses to devices that do mysterious things. Still, with a little effort, I could get the box open. I was able to unplug the hoses and reconnect them. There wasn't a lot of room to work with, but I could just wriggle the old air filter out and squeeze the new air filter in. I could re-close the lid. But one of the spring clips wouldn't shut. I worked for hours and hours. I tried wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers... and hammers. I still couldn't get one last spring clip to lock shut.
The new filter must be the wrong size, I decided. So I opened the box again, wriggled out the new air filter and squeezed in the old one. Everything went back together smoothly. But, still, I couldn't get all of the spring clips to close. I tried the new filter again. Same result. The spring clip was in a weird and inaccessible place and no tool or muscle could force it to behave.
Maybe, just maybe, the last clip wasn't important. I started the engine. It wheezed like it had asthma - So! The last clip was important.
I reread the owner's manual. I re-watched the DIY videos. Useless. I tried to use brute force, but stopped just short of what I knew would be the eventual sequelae: something critical would snap off, or a piece of metal would fly up and hit me in the face, or I would drop a small tool into the dark rotating parts of the motor never to be seen again. I knew I had to stop because age does equate to wisdom.... especially when one has previously suffered precisely those consequences of such "brute force" solutions in the past.
I drove the asthmatic Subaru to my local car repair shop. The owner thought this was very funny. So much so that he refused to charge me. I think he thought it was good business not to bill me. It is good business - because, undoubtedly, I will bring him another DIY fiasco, a disaster that will cost a lot to undo. The same thing happens in my law practice, the half of which consists of digging clients out of the deep holes they have dug for themselves.
In the future, will I skip the self-help and go straight to the experts?
I am sure I won't. We learn by trying and doing. We might want to talk to experts and get their advice, but we want to get there ourselves, by ourselves, for ourselves. That's part of being human rather than a domesticated farm animal.
It's not about saving money. It's an existential declaration of independence. It's the same whether coding or debugging your own computer software, baking your own pie, knitting a sweater... or your cat hunting its own dinner rather than always eating out of a can. Otherwise, Homo Sapiens, the thinking animal, thinks less and becomes a beast of burden.
* * * * *
You can feel the walls closing in. The world has become increasingly unfriendly and complex and obfuscatory. This increases our dependence on inscrutable systems run by unresponsive institutions for the benefit of unseen interests.
People who want to change their own air filters are deemed persona non grata.
People who want to change their own air filters also want to understand things - unfiltered, so to speak. They want to form their own opinions. People who want to form their own opinions want to know the facts - not a "filtered" narrative, not "curated" stories, not infotainment, not infantilized, denatured spoon-fed baby-news.
People who want to form their own opinions are also deemed persona non grata.
I graduated from high school not long after I hacked my Vespa. I decided to ride out the Vietnam War by attending college in Munich, Germany. The My Lai Massacre in South Vietnam happened in 1968. More than 500 unarmed Vietnamese villagers - women, children, old men - were rounded up, some raped, some knifed and most of them machine-gunned.1
The crime was covered up. Journalist Seymour Hersch finally exposed the massacre in 1969 for what it was: the ghastly tip of a ghastly war waged by the United States against the people of Vietnam. President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, in large measure, because he did not want to escalate the war. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968 after he connected the dots between war, profit, racism, colonialism and poverty. Also in 1968, Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and JFK's brother, Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. The U.S. dropped almost 400,000 tons of jellied gasoline napalm on Vietnam. In 1972, the U.S. started to carpet-bomb Hanoi.
These were dark and turbulent times. Like now. I remained in Munich through my junior year by slipping sideways into the Lewis & Clark College year abroad program at the Ludwig-Maxillians-Universität.
Geschwister-Scholl-Platz stands outside the main entrance to the Ludwig-Maxillians-Universität. There are several bronze leaflets embedded in the paving stones. From 1942-1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl were part of a small network of young Germans, the White Rose, that resisted the lies and deception of the Third Reich. There was no Internet in those days. They disseminated their resistance by hand, by mail and by leaflets randomly thrown out to students and faculty. Thus the bronze leaflets commemorated today in the university's paving stones. The Gestapo hunted down and caught the Scholls. They were quickly tried for treason and sedition, and then beheaded. Hans was 25. His sister Sophie was 22.
Liane Wuttig was one of the local instructors at the Lewis & Clark Year Abroad Program that I enrolled in. Liane Wuttig taught early 20th Century German history, art and literature - Germanistik, or German philology. She didn't teach from a book or a lesson plan. She taught from the perspective of one who had been there. She taught by sharing her first-hand experience growing up as a young woman, first in the raucous, cabaret years of Weimar and later in the belly of a fascist state. She taught by sharing what she had personally experienced with students 40 years her junior.
I vividly recall one such "lesson" that Liane Wuttig taught. It was in the context of the Hans and Sophie Scholl memorial, the two college students who had been guillotined for resisting the State. The issue for her students - we who had largely grown up steeped in contemporary American culture - was how could a cultivated, educated nation like Germany - the land of technology, music, literature, art, philosophy and science - how could such a civilized people be seduced by fascism? What had caused this highly educated people to so passively submit to totalitarianism? What was it in the German character, we students wondered, that allowed it to enthusiastically embrace a Nazi state? We who were Americans simply could not believe that anyone but Germans could have swallowed the lies.
I clearly recall Liane Wuttig's answer:
You do not understand because you weren't there. When all of the news outlets, when all of the newspapers and all of the radio broadcasts, and all of the movies, and all of the wall posters, and all of the political and business leaders are all repeating the same lies at the same time, in the same way, anywhere and everywhere, over and over and over and over and over again, and everyone recites false things and nothing else; and you hear no dissenting opinions, and you are informed of no contrary facts... then you accept it all as the truth. You become seduced, captured and ensconced in the narrative of what (apparently) everyone knows and believes is "true." Humans are herd animals. And furthermore, she prophesied, you Americans are not immune to it. One day this can happen to you, too. You must understand, that what happened in Nazi Germany can happen anywhere. If you cannot accept and understand that, then it will happen to you, too
"It will happen to you, too."
I hear her words as clearly today as the day she spoke them.
But I was young then. We American students didn't believe it. We had a Constitution and a Bill of Rights. We had laws in our country. We were proud. And arrogant. We were young. And foolish.
2024. We now have had our own experiences and insights.
* * * * *
Gaza.
What Israel has embarked on - and what the United States has funded, tacitly blessed, financially supported and militarily enabled - is ethnic cleansing.
It has become ever more clear that Israel knew in advance about Hamas's attack on October 7th. It is also quite possible that Hamas is an Israeli Frankenstein, like various other terrorist proxy groups that have been created and/or funded by the U.S. or its confederates. It is not clear whether Israel deliberately allowed the Hamas attack to happen as a pretext for expelling Palestinians from Gaza, or if the Israeli intelligence services were simply negligent. I doubt the latter. It is obvious, however, that current Israeli policy (encouraged by various American mad dog politicians howling for blood) is intended, by terrorist acts or false flag operations conducted directly or by proxies, to provoke Iran to intervene in the Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah conflagration. That, in turn, would draw in the United States - just like in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan - as a first-party belligerent in a wider conflagration.
Mr. Netanyahu is outraged by opposition to his policies. He has asserted that no one has the moral right to criticize him or Israel. It is true that many states have an inglorious history - notably the U.S., England, France, Turkey, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Australia, Portugal and Spain... to name but a few. But the fact that others have been thugs does not mean that Israel, too, has license to act thuggishly. Members of the Netanyahu cabinet are now floating the concept of "voluntarily" resettling Gazan Palestinians (now that Israel has rendered Gaza uninhabitable and destroyed its infrastructure) to central Africa or elsewhere. The irony is that this perverse idea resembles the initial Nazi plan (prior to the adoption of the "final solution" at the Wannsee Conference in 1942) to "voluntarily" resettle European Jews to Madagascar off the coast of East Africa.
If not already an apartheid state as South Africa was, Israel, by its acts and words, seems determined to become one. The policies of collective punishment, expulsion and the expansion of Lebensraum advocated by the cabinet of Benjamin Netanyahu confirm what no media campaign, no propaganda and no high pressure lobbying can perfume.
A thin veneer of hypocrisy has been ripped off. The vapid, Tinkertoy causes du jour, such as gender transformation and pronoun dysphoria, have withered in the face of true and inexcusable evil. The "woke" generation ought to now be truly awake. They've been played and they've been pwned, and now they are being browbeaten.
We are witnessing the reemergence of the world that my college professor, Liane Wuttig, warned us about. The media dogs are barking uniformly; plutocrats and politicians are demanding conformity.
This is not a new phenomenon in the United States. The House Un-American Activities Committee (known by its acronym as "HUAC") was established in 1938 to "investigate" citizens alleged to hold "communist" or "subversive" beliefs. HUAC was America's second "Red Scare." It was preceded by the Palmer Raids conducted during the Wilson Administration from 1919-1920.
During the "investigations" of the House Un-American Activities Committee, jingoist and histrionic politicians (much like certain politicians today from both sides of the aisle) subpoenaed writers, actors and playwrights to appear in public hearings. The subpoenaed witnesses were then humiliated, castigated, smeared and intimidated. Among them were Paul Robeson, the Black lawyer, singer and scholar. Robeson was bullied, but he would not submit. As a result, his career was ruined and his passport was revoked. In derogation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, many other actors and screenwriters were blacklisted, reputations were destroyed and dissent was silenced. Mere suspicion of the wrong political sympathies or the accusation of "disloyalty" resulted in a beat-down. HUAC later spawned the political pogroms spearheaded by Senator Joe McCarthy.
And it all looks just like today.
Recently, Harvard's president, Claudine Gay, was burned at the stake.
I am not particularly fond of Harvard University. Its main purpose is not so much to educate as to sustain an elite leadership class and to socialize the sons and daughters of the Peers of the Realm.
I do not really care who is the "president" of Harvard, or what her skin color, education or sexual orientation might be. The primary purpose of Harvard's president, just like the president of any small college or large state university, is to raise money. Claudine Gay's true job had nothing to do with pedagogy. Her main job was to hobnob with the wealthy folk and induce them to contribute huge sums to Harvard's enormous endowment. Such is the nature of the American university system that, by design, all "higher education" depends on the largess of plutocrats.
As Claudine Gay has learned, however, those who pay the piper demand that they also call the tune. That means that those who fund the universities demand that their administrative lapdogs do their bidding. Otherwise, they will be kicked to the ground. The university administrators must impose the approved dogma on faculty and students alike, and strictly enforce it. It is no different in academia than among those who produce today's print, digital, social or cinematic media.
Claudine Gay was not attacked because of plagiarism. True or not, the accusation of plagiarism was a ploy. Before the hounds began to bay in defense of Israel, no one cared about the quality of Ms. Gay's academic credentials. The president of Harvard was dragged before the Inquisition because she would not grovel, because she would not punish Harvard's students who either expressed support for Palestine or for Hamas or who criticized Israel.
No one should ululate over Claudine Gay's immolation. Those who sacrificed her would not hesitate to kindle your own auto-da-fé, or mine. Her immolation - like the prison camp at Guantanamo or the incarceration of Julian Assange - serves as a warning to anyone else who might get out of line.
* * * * *
Eventually, the Age of Aquarius becomes the Age of Arthritis. But not just yet.
Although we might take false steps and make mistakes, we can still change our air filters by ourselves. What we can't do we will learn to do. We have the ability and the cognitive tools to understand what is happening around us. We can think for ourselves.
My old Subaru is running fine now. It could last another 25 years. Let me know if you need a lift.
But for the heroic intervention of helicopter pilot CWO Hugh Thompson, many more would have been slaughtered.