NON-FICTION – ESSAY – HUMOROUS: Rabbi Sol Solomon’s Rabbinical Reflection #141 (11/6/16): ELECTILE DYSFUNCTION

RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #141 (11/6/16): Electile Dysfunction

Aired Nov. 5, 2016 on Dave’s Gone By.  http://davesgoneby.net/?p=25895. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cX5zCpfhuk&feature=youtu.be

Shalom Dammit!  This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of November 6, 2016.

Well, my friends, this is it.  In three days, we drag ourselves to the local junior high school, sign our names in a guest book, hold our collective noses, and pull the lever to choose which nightmare we wish to endure for the next four years.

On one side, we have Hillary Clinton: experienced, resilient, hardworking, honest as the day is long.  At the South Pole.  If you ask this woman, “what color is the sky?”, her answer’s gonna be, “Well, depending on the time of day and the light refracting away from various planets, we could be somewhere in the azure-like spectrum.  But until I’ve done more research, I have to reserve comment on that.”  Hillary Clinton gets a memo with a giant “C” on it for “Classified,” and she thinks the “C” stands for, “Come, put this on your home computer — where you haven’t updated Norton Utilities in three years.”

And two-faced?  This woman has more faces than Mount Rushmore in a hall of mirrors.  She tells rich fatcats she’s for open borders, but then she tells middle-class Democrats she’s for protecting trade.  She bashes her opponent as a sexist pig but persecutes any woman who humped her husband.  Which is a full-time job, by the way.  Hillary promises to get tough on America’s enemies, but when was Secretary of State, the Middle East turned into Terrorist Disneyland.  Heck, Hillary Clinton wouldn’t even be the nominee if Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her party apparatchiks didn’t treat Bernie Sanders like a naughty puppy who was soiling the carpet by lifting his leg to the far left.

For all his faults, people still love Hillary’s husband, Bill.  He’s got the twinkle, he’s got the polish; he’s got another box of cigars at the ready.  But that popular love just doesn’t transfer to Mrs. Clinton, who’s been in the political game too long to ever be a real person again.  Even people who don’t dislike her understand that if she’s elected, the country will stay the same.  The economy will still grow at a pace that makes photosynthesis look like the Indy 500.  ObamaCare will put more people in hospitals . . . with heart attacks after they see their premiums.  And America will still lag behind the rest of the world in everything except obesity and unwatchable cable TV channels.

And yet, of the two candidates running for the two major political parties, Hillary Clinton is the better choice.  I know that’s like saying a bowl of chocolate-covered horse radish is preferable to a dish of month-old sheep vomit, but if you had to pick, you go with the maror over the moron.  No question, Donald Trump is a wildly successful businessman.  He’s successful, and he’s wild.  I like that he has balls, but then again, what else do you shoot with a loose cannon?

Now, I don’t hold against Donald Trump that he’s gone bankrupt a couple of times.  It takes a savvy entrepreneur to pick yourself up, dust yourself up, pay your creditors two cents on the dollar, and start all over again.  And I don’t mind that he hasn’t paid any taxes since the Hoover administration.  If I could find a legal way not to pay sales tax every time I bought a pastrami sandwich, I’d be owning Trump Hotel.  Which would be especially ironic since neither of us owns it.  For all his building development, Donald Trump does not own most of the buildings he has his name on.  But I don’t hold that against him, either.  After all, if my last name were Parkinson, would I want my name on a disease?

What I do begrudge The Donald are his deals with the devil.  When The Orange One first announced his candidacy, his whole shpiel was about being an outsider.  He wasn’t a lifelong politician and therefore took no money and owed no favors.  That’s tremendously appealing, especially when you’re also plain-speaking, pro-Israel, and promising to play by your own rules.  Had Mr. Trump gone with a third party or created his own party—and I don’t mean the kind of party where he offers a supermodel $10,000 to polish his cornerstone—I mean Ross Perot-ing it.  Saying “shtup you” to the Pelosis and the Paul Ryans, because he could.  Between his bank account and grass-roots support among the kind of white people who think Canadians are as exotic as foreigners should be allowed to get, Donald Trump could have funded a truly “outside” campaign.

Instead, he gets in bed with the elephants.  The same people who gave us eight years of George W. Bush, not to mention Fox News, Richard Nixon, Sarah Palin, Strom Thurmond, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  So the Republicans think they can corral Trump, Trump thinks he can streamroll the G.O.P., and I think they should both go down in flames.  Trump wants to build a wall to keep out Mexicans?  Who’s gonna pick my etrogs for Sukkos?  He’s gonna give tax credits to the ultra-wealthy so their money will trickle down?  Wanna bet it trickles down into their yachts, their jewelry, their private islands . . .  Trump wants to pick Supreme Court justices who will protect the Constitution.  The Constitution doesn’t need protecting; it just needs an annotated edition with color pictures, a worksheet, and an interactive website.  Actually, the Torah could use that, too.  I’ll have to tell that to God next time we talk.

Anyhoo, Donald Trump says, “What have you got to lose?”  Everything stinks; maybe I’ll stink less.  Of course, the last guy who said that was Ralph Nader, and we all saw how well that turned out.  So for what it’s worth, I endorse Hillary Clinton for President in 2016.  It is not a ringing endorsement.  In fact, it’s more of a thudding endorsement.  But look at the alternatives: the Trumpster fire?  The Libertarian guy who thinks Aleppo is a tiger with spots?  The independent party run by a dude named “Joe Exotic?”  Look him up.  He’s got eight rings in his ear, a Fu Manchu moustache, and a mustard-yellow leisure suit that should be kept 1,000 feet from any building and detonated.  Or the guy from the Legal Marijuana Now Party — because, of course, the most urgent problem facing our nation today is finding a place to get your mellow on with some sweet bud?  Or the guy from the Nutrition Party, whose sole claim to fame is inventing the Muscle Maker Grill?  I mean, I like George Foreman, but I wouldn’t want him negotiating with North Korea.  Except about barbecue, and even then, kimchi would be a dealbreaker because who the hell wants to eat that?  Seriously.

So we come to the long-awaited end of this contentious, obnoxious, unfathomable election cycle in America.  A cycle that had one candidate call a war hero a coward and another whose every private email makes the New York Times bestseller list.  Meanwhile, the rich get richer, the bridges are crumbling, the schools are stupid, the terrorists are multiplying, and Steven Tyler is making country music.  We’re in big trouble.  But vote anyway because if we’ve gotta choose between an egotist with a messiah complex or a liar who understands complexity, I’ll take the one who isn’t relentlessly battling crucifixion.  Let’s face it…what Rabbi wouldn’t?

This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches, in Great Neck, New York.  Vote early, vote often, try the veal.

(c) 2016 TotalTheater. All rights reserved.
https://davelefkowitzwriting.wordpress.com/2016/11/06/non-fiction-essay-humorous-rabbi-sol-solomons-rabbinical-reflection-141-11-6-16-electile-dysfunction/

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NON-FICTION – ESSAY – HUMOROUS: Rabbi Sol Solomon’s Rabbinical Reflection #139 (5/8/16): DONALD TRUMP

RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #139 (5/8/16): Donald Trump

Aired May 7, 2016 on Dave’s Gone By.  Youtube clip: https://youtu.be/UcZDJBjwbW8

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of May 8, 2016.

Just over a year ago, I did a Rabbinical Reflection about the 2016 presidential candidates for the Republican Party. There were a dozen and a half of them—remember? Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Scott Walker—a veritable who’s who of who’s hooligans.

Almost as an aside, I included the candidacy of Donald Trump. I said, and I quote, “Donald Trump, who went bankrupt three times and yet brands himself as a financial genius.  Donald Trump, who has a magnificent knack for self-promotion but spends money he doesn’t have like it’s going out of style—why isn’t he running as a Democrat?”

The idea of Donald Drumpf actually getting traction as a viable candidate, and the thought that more than a few flakes would vote for this narcissistic, self-aggrandizing Oompa Loompa was downright comical. And even if he did ride the cult of celebrity for awhile, you had fifteen other G.O.P. hopefuls with their own deluded followers. But then America happened. And the people rejected Chris Christie and his highway robbery. They rejected Marco Rubio the wind-up doll.  They rejected Ben Carson, who didn’t need anaesthesia during heart surgery because he could put patients to sleep just by talking to them.

By the time the conservative muckymucks realized that Donald Trump was not just a fad but a movement—and I don’t just mean the kind of movement I have every other morning if I’m lucky and drink my prune juice—by the time the powers that be of the G.O.P. realized their conservative groundswell was getting dug up by a real-estate developer, it was too late to stop him.

My God, their best shot was Ted Cruz, a man who couldn’t find one person to like him—even when he was looking in the mirror. Ted Cruz was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, vehemently pro-Israel (God bless him for that), and seemingly in line with everything the Republican party wanted to roll back from the last eight years. And yet, not a single soul in the House or Senate wanted to work with him.  Former speaker of the house John Boehner called Ted Cruz, quote, “Lucifer in the flesh!” and “the most miserable son of a bitch” he ever worked with, unquote.  This from Boehner, a man who always behaved like he had a stick so far up his tushie, you could see splinters on his uvula.

And yet, this loathed and despised senator, Ted Cruz, was the Republicans’ last hope of putting one of their boys into the White House. Oh, wait, I’m forgetting about John Kasich.  Because we all forgot about John Kasich. The past three months, he should have just changed his name to something Chinese, like: “Oh Him Too.” Especially since his name was on ballots like those restaurants in Chinatown that keep items like putrefied eggs and pig bladders on the menu even though no one in their right minds would order them.

To be fair, Kasich seemed like he had a brilliant strategy compared to go-for-broke losers like Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz. Why spend money? Why knock yourself out in races you can’t individually win?  Just keep treading water, don’t make waves, and when it’s time for the contested convention, make your perfect dive. What Kasich didn’t realize is that voters saw through his shabby chicanery with Cruz and voted straight up for the man who wasn’t endorsed by the party, wasn’t owned by the Koch brothers, and wasn’t a career politician.

So when the dust settled last week, and the delegate votes were counted, the only candidate with a clear mandate was the one with the cloudiest agenda: Donald Trump. The clown had become the clown prince. This despite—or maybe because of—his penchant for school-bully insults and his crazy, off-the-cuff statements about the Klan and Mexicans and ugly women and pretty women being punished for their abortions. They used to call Reagan the Teflon president because everything stupid slid off him. Well, Trump is Teflon sprayed with Pam, coated with goose grease, and dipped in K.Y. Jelly. Whatever he says, his followers counter with, “He really speaks his mind” or “well, he may say one thing, but we know what he really means.” Do we?

Look, I’m the first to admit—or, if not the first, maybe the 12,030th—to admit that Donald Trump’s wildcard, shoot-from-the-lip status has a visceral appeal. If the two parties running, and usually ruining, the country for the past 30 years don’t approve, he must be good, right?  And being a great persuader, he appeals to our emotions—unlike Hilary, who appeals to, well, not even her husband.

But let’s not forget that Donald Trump is a man who promises a robust job market, and yet he grew famous from a TV show on which he fired everyone! This is a man who used to be pro-choice, but when he becomes a Republican, hup!, he suddenly turns anti-abortion. This is a man who vows to fix the country’s troubles by collaborating with the best and brightest, but he couldn’t even find enough intelligent minds to teach in a bogus university. This is a man who wants to keep out immigrants, unless they’re six feet tall, anorexic, and look good on a bearskin rug. This is a man who wants to help the little guy, by building casinos to take their money and hotel rooms that only movie stars can afford.

In other words, the wizard behind the curtain has done very, very well for himself. For others?  Not so much. For better or worse, we’ve spent the last eight years led by a community organizer who, perhaps naively, thought he could bring everyone together to solve problems. Are we now ready, instead, for a semi-benevolent dictator who thinks he knows everything and whose answer for every crisis is, “It’ll be amazing. It’ll be beautiful. Believe me.”

We’d like to believe you, Donald. We’d like to believe in something. But 240 years of politics, not to mention the Bernie Sanders campaign, have taught us the futility of belief. And I’m a Rabbi saying this! So if the votes are counted on November 8th, and America chooses the bloviating, thoughtless TV star over the jilted, calumniating harridan, all we can do is what we always do every four years on January 20th: pray.

This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches, in Great Neck, New York.  

(c) 2016 TotalTheater. All rights reserved.

NON-FICTION – ESSAY – HUMOROUS: Rabbi Sol Solomon’s Rabbinical Reflection #139 (5/8/16): DONALD TRUMP

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NON-FICTION – ESSAY – HUMOROUS: Rabbi Sol Solomon’s Rabbinical Reflection #122 (4/19/15) – CAMPAIGN 2016

RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #122 (4/19/2015): Campaign 2016

(aired April 18, 2015 on Dave’s Gone By. https://davesgoneby.net/?p=27298. Youtube clip: http://youtu.be/h-wdAa7RXFM)

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of April 19, 2015)

Well, the Presidential race for 2016 officially began this week when Hillary Clinton threw her hat into the ring as the presumptive Democratic nominee. Her decision to run came as a shock to an order of Trappist Monks in Burkina Faso, but pretty much everyone else in the universe was expecting this, oh, seven-and-a-half years ago.

And why not? For all the negative publicity and setbacks, the past six years of Obama-America has been moderately successful—spectacularly successful if you compare them to the previous eight years under Shrub. The economy slowly turned around, real-estate is up, gas prices are down, we managed the wars that Dubya started, gay marriage and legal pot became the norm (and, astonishingly, the empire did not collapse), people who couldn’t afford healthcare . . . still can’t afford healthcare but now they have to have it, we’re making nice-nice with Cuba, and we turned bin Laden into fish food. Not perfect but not bad, considering Obama inherited a country that was so rotten, it could have been a Renny Harlin movie.

Through it all, Hillary Clinton took her lumps in 2000 and bided her time visiting a million countries between then and now in order to keep us out of new wars and, let’s face it, to avoid spending quality home time with her husband. The GOP is gonna hammer Hillary over Benghazi and ISIS and her seeming inability to answer a direct question, but half the Republican candidates won’t answer a direct question, either–`cause they can barely speak English.

I kid, I kid, but look at what the Red States are throwing at the next election: Jeb Bush. Do we really want to hear that last name connected with the White House ever, ever again? Sure, comparing Jeb to his brother George W. is like comparing Steven Spielberg to the guy who directed “Gummo.” But Jeb’s intelligence is a danger in itself. Let’s not forget who was governor when Florida hijacked the presidency from Al Gore 15 years ago. (In case you forgot, it was Jeb Bush.) And while he’s pro-education and more sensible than most in his party about immigration, he would decimate social services and be so right-wing on abortion, he’d make jacking off illegal because you’re killing a bajillion potential human beings in spermatozoic form.

Then you’ve got Ted Cruz. He looks like Joseph McCarthy, sounds like Rick Santorum, and comes off like a Sunday preacher on acid. Gotta love him for being pro-Israel, but no Federal money for Hurricane Sandy? No leeway on gun control? No compassion for unwed mothers? No comprehension of global warming? No remorse for shutting down the government in 2012? No admitting that he can’t even run for president because he was born in Canada? (Actually, he can `cause his mom’s American, but why isn’t he up north shooting moose and ordering Terrence and Philip to get a haircut?)

Then you’ve got Marco Rubio, who makes one crowd-pleasing speech, and suddenly he thinks he can run the free world. (Remember how that hot-speech thing worked out for Sarah Palin?) Anyway, he’s Latino, and he’s got charisma. Good for him. I liked Desi Arnaz, but I wouldn’t’ve voted for him. Rubio is anti-same-sex marriage and has so little experience in foreign policy, he makes pre-2008 Barak Obama look like Henry Kissinger. Including the glasses. Worst of all, Marco was mentored by none other than Jeb Bush — the guy he’ll run against in the primaries. Who says there’s no loyalty in politics? I do; I say there’s no loyalty in politics.

Also in the hunt: Rand Paul. He’s so right wing, he makes the Koch Brothers look like Emma Goldman. Paul is another of those religious fundamentalists who thinks conception begins in the nut sack, and he is the epitome of the Republican who believes the way to govern is to block anything and everything the Democrats wanna do. If Obama says walruses have tusks, Rand Paul will filibuster to make sure they’re called “long teeth” instead.

Other rambunctious Republicans who might give Jeb a jolt include Chris Christie, who was desperate enough to accept a Democratic handout but arrogant enough to clog up the George Washington Bridge. Rick Perry, who is currently under indictment, hates gays, hates abortion, and worst of all, comes from Texas. Scott Walker comes from Wisconsin, for which he deserves sympathy. And I hear he’s very much an advocate of two-year colleges – by which I mean that he’s cut so much funding from state universities, they won’t be able to afford four years of teachers.

And did I mention Donald Trump was running again? Just take a moment to process that. Donald Trump, who went bankrupt three times and yet brands himself as a financial genius. He does have a magnificent knack for self-promotion, but he spends money he doesn’t have like it’s going out of style — so why isn’t he running as a Democrat?

Oy. It’s gonna be an interesting year and a half. Night after night of Rachel Maddow shilling for Hill and Sean Hannity sugarcoating anything the Republican party scrapes off its shoe and smears on a ballot. My parishioners tell me, “Rabbi, you bitch and bitch and bitch but don’t offer an alternative. Why don’t you run for President, you’re so smart?” The answer is, I’m smart enough to know my limitations. If I were President, the first thing I’d do is declare war on every country threatening Israel. The second is to make it illegal to use the New Testament as anything more than literature or a doorstop. And the third would be to make pastrami a mandatory part of all school lunches. As for immigration: look, my wife and I have 21 ½ children. Where the hell are we supposed to get nannies for less than six bucks an hour if we send back all the illegals?

Global Warming? Half my relatives live in Florida, and their skins are like komodo dragons from the sunshine. For the sake of the Jews, let’s at least get some umbrellas down there and maybe a few icemakers. Quality of life crime, like graffiti or noise pollution? A simple and effective plan. First offense, 25 hours of community service. Second offense? Death penalty.

As you can see, I am not meant to be the leader of the free world. `Cause I’m a schmuck. I’m saving you the trouble; I’m telling you, I’m a schmuck. The hard part is keeping some other schmuck from becoming president. For 227 years, we have failed at this almost uninterruptedly. I wouldn’t hold out much hope for the next four.

This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.

(c) 2015 TotalTheater. All rights reserved.

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