Mendel Letters 111 — Puzzlement
In the musical “The King and I” by Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein, the character supposedly based on King Mongut of Siam sings “A Puzzlement.” As I was writing this letter, the song played over and over again in my head. “When I was a boy, world was better spot. What was so was so, what was not was not. Now I am a man. World have changed a lot. Some things nearly so, others nearly not.”
I’m not convinced the world was in a “better spot” when I was a boy. We were in the midst of the Cold War with a constant threat of nuclear annihilation and racial segregation was still the law in much of the United States. But as I get older, I’m 73 now, and today the world is definitely a puzzlement. I don’t know what you would make of it.
Republicans have a majority in the House of Representatives and they are threatening to drive the country into bankruptcy unless the Democrats agree to cut programs like Social Security and Medicare. One of the Republicans elected to Congress from Queens and Nassau County may be the biggest crazy in the group of crazies. He is definitely a fraud with a capital “F.” He lied about where he went to school, where he worked, and where he got his campaign funds. When speaking to Jewish groups, he claimed to be “Jew-ish” and the descendant of Holocaust survivors. All not true. It is difficult to believe any sane person voted for any of these idiots?
I live in a state where it is now legal to smoke pot and eat marijuana candy and cookies. Hey, but not if you are under 21. They are definitely marketing the marijuana-laced candy and cookies to the elderly. Ads do warn you to keep them out of the reach of children. In many states and cities you can buy pot at your local store. Schools may need a new definition for a high-ranking student?
Not only is gambling legal, but to make it is easy to lose your money, you can place bets on your cell phone. Radio ads that promote betting always include that if you are an addicted gambler you can get help. I’m not sure if the help is to stop gambling or to make it even easier to gamble.
Guns are all over the place because the Supreme Court threw out most gun restrictions to protect the freedom of Americans. Meshugeners bring their automatic weapons to church, shopping malls, and restaurants and parade with them in the street to show how free Americans are. But people wonder why this country has more mass shootings than the rest of the world and fifty times more school shootings than all of the other industrialized countries combined.
In a 1956 speech, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev warned the United States “We will bury you!” Well, the Soviet Union collapsed long before they had a chance, but now it looks like the United States will bury itself without any help.
I know you closely identified with Israel and you would be very unhappy about what is taking place there. A rightwing government controlled by religious fanatics is moving to impose religious mandates on the entire population, end legal protects for non-Jews, gays and lesbians, and even non-religious Jews. They want to annex Palestinian territory on the West Bank, possibly leading to a war with the potential to expand across the Middle East and involve much of the rest of the world including the United States. Oy vey iz mir!
I was looking over the original Broadway caste list. White actors played all of the major Siamese parts in the play. Mendel, as King Mongut, the real King of Siam would probably say, the depth of racism in the United States then and today, “It’s a puzzlement.”
Your son
Hard copies of these typed letters were discovered in an old camp trunk in the basement storage facility of one of the few buildings that remain standing in this Brooklyn neighborhood. The building is quite decrepit and is scheduled for demolition. The letters were found in November 2048 by a teenager who believes they were written by his great-grandfather. The letters are addressed to Mendel, the letter writer’s father, who appears to have been dead for at least six years when his son, whose name we are unsure of, started to write him. The son appears very agitated in some of the letters. With permission from the family, we are publishing them on the date they were written, only 28 years later.
