Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
In 1889, poet Eugene Field, “the poet of childhood” and a man of letters wrote the poem, Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. Field was from a somewhat storied family in Missouri as his father, an attorney, famously represented Dred Scott in his failed attempt to litigate for his and his immediate family’s freedom in 1857. This led to the infamous Dred Scott Decision wherein the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that he was not entitled to sue for his freedom since the constitution did not allow for African Americans to claim citizenship because it would upend property rights for slave owners. It was this decision that led quite directly to the galvanizing feelings across our nation that let to the Civil War and the eventual Emancipation Proclamation six years later. Strangely enough, Dred Scott and his family themselves were “manumitted” after the trial, which means that they were set free voluntarily by their owner. This act of freeing a person is a strange notion. It harkens a sense of a gracious noblesse oblige, wherein a person of privilege bestows upon their chattel the freedom of which inalienable rights entitle them. Strangely enough, the concept of manumission has both good and bad connotations in history. Please do not mistake me as a supporter of Governor Ron DeSantis in referencing this, but it has sometimes in history been seen that the manumission of slaves is a cruel and inhuman act of setting them adrift in a world where they have no skills or means to support themselves. What a crazy and perverted world we sometimes find ourselves in where the oppression of people should put them in a position where they are better off in captivity than in what would otherwise be the state of freedom that they undoubtedly deserve.
What got me going down this path today was my watching the interactions of our Secretary of State Anthony Blinken yesterday as he attended meetings in Israel in the wake of the Hamas attacks on Israeli settlement residents last weekend and the ensuing counteroffensive begun by Israel’s IDF against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Until now, that counteroffensive has been in the form of predominantly air strikes by rockets and planes against what the IDF considers Hamas targets particularly in norther Gaza, but also some ground actions to root out Hamas insurgents that remained in hiding in Israeli territory after their gruesome and shocking sorties into the various Israeli settlements.
This week has been an evolving week of more and more revelations and evidence of atrocities that validate the Israeli contentions of brutality at the hands of these Hamas operative. The outpouring of grief from the world community has been notable. In a country torn apart lately by political extremism, Israel seems to have set aside its internal differences for the moment and unified in their cry of “Never Again!….Again!” regarding Hamas more so than Palestinians in general. As for the rest of the world, I have no empirical evidence of this, but I estimate that 98% of the sentiment is indelibly pro-Israeli with a somewhat radical but vocal minority (including such notable cohorts as vocal students at Harvard University and NYU) who are using this moment to point the finger at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and at least the right wing half of Israel for pursuing policies of “Apartheid” toward Palestinians and especially Gazans, and that such treatment was the root cause of the out-lash by Hamas in this evil and ferocious manner. Of course, just like there is the difference between pre-meditated murder and manslaughter, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the planning, preparation and intelligence gathering in evidence, shows that Hamas was both high on pre-meditation and intent in its brutality. We are likely to see more of the same in the next week as the counteroffensive takes to the ground and the amassed 360,000 IDF forces, bolstered by Israeli reservists returning home from all around the world, will encounter a likely very well-prepared cadre of dense urban fighters with probably very devious and deadly booby-traps and tactics. The battles for Fallujah in Iraq are not lost on anyone with a memory. And the manumission of the Gazans (with its positive and negative implications) should not be lost on us for a moment, given the lack of a safe corridor from which to exit Gaza.
But there stands our Secretary of State, Anthony John Blinken, descendant of Hungarian Jews, step-son of a Holocaust survivor, part of a family raised in the diplomatic service of the United States with both a father and uncle who were U.S. Ambassadors to Europe. Blinken himself is a product of privilege and went to the best schools in Manhattan (Dalton) and then on to Harvard and Columbia. He has spent his whole career in the sphere of foreign relations and rose steadily in Washington D.C. through a number of posts in the State Department and National Security networks. He is what the MAGA crowd would call a deep-state operative and what I would call a highly educated and well-prepared diplomat who has paid his dues and done the work to really understand the complexities of international relations at the highest and most intricate levels. What the nihilists that populate the Right think is a detriment, I think is a necessity for success in an ever-more complex world. What could be more complex than the situation underway right now in Israel and Gaza? What would unprepared and ham-handed hacks like Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo or, God forbid, Jared Kushner do in a situation like this? Very simply, they would do what Donald Trump did over and over in the foreign relations arena, fuck things up to a fare-thee-well. Thank God we have a man like Anthony Blinken on point for us at this desperate moment.
In the poem by Eugene Field, the opening stanza says:
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe,—
Sailed on a river of crystal light
Into a sea of dew.
“Where are you going, and what do you wish?”
The old moon asked the three.
“We have come to fish for the herring-fish
That live in this beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we,”
The problem now isn’t so much whether Israel through its IDF will root out and destroy Hamas (as much as anyone can destroy a movement rather than a proper organization), but rather what will become of the initiative as it destroys large parts of the northern half of Gaza and undoubtedly encounters significant collateral damage to Palestinian civilians along the way. Even nets of silver and gold do not always catch the right fish. With that, of course, will come increasing outcries by some of that 98% that stand in solidarity with Israel at this moment. World opinion will moderate and adjust, but how much is a function of how the IDF goes about its efforts. The key question will haunt Israelis for some time… “Where are you going, and what do you wish?”
This is where Anthony John Blinken can help. It almost seems to me that he is the PERFECT person for the job of balancing the issue to the benefit of Israel in the long run, the soldiers of the IDF and the people of Gaza in the short run, and the world at large in every way. In fact, I will be so bold as to suggest that Blinken’s ability to show the eternal value of a balance of strength with honor and compassion should be recognizable to all students of history as the wisdom we so badly need in a world gone otherwise mad. In the same way that the Dred Scott Decision galvanized the righteousness of America to change its ways on slavery, the Israeli/Gaza/Hamas sandwich and the path being forcefully and humanely guided by the likes of Anthony Blinken might just help us realize that trained and proper diplomacy has incredible value to us all. Given the utter confusion this week in the Republican controlled (but not at all led) House of Representative, with its poster child of incompetence, George Santos and the stymied Senate with their dueling poster children of Tommy Tuberville (representing uninformed raw and destructive populism) and Robert Menendez (standing tall for foreign policy corruption), wouldn’t it be nice if an Abraham Lincoln emerged to lead us to some semblance of the Promised Land? At this moment, Anthony Blinken gets a wink and a nod from me as the leading contender to such a throne.