July 10th.  This is my birthday card for you,Alan

I go through my days as a widow with our adult children and have figured this out :alan,how lucky, how miraculous that we found each other at metro goldwyn-mayer - what a random accident,how it might not have happened by a slightly changed timing or  by passing each other by, how different both our lives could have been..  After all, we came from a different class of Jews, you were so American,I was  then,so the Refugee..... but you took all that in and made me feel safe  for the first time. Have I thanked you enough for that?Nor did I know when we married how truly talented y0u were in literature,music,& the changing issues involving  social justice. As JerryCohen recently said:Alan had wit and he had integrity!And then, through marriage,through raising individually talented  children, through working as partners (English onWheels, Natividad Medical Center,Family Medicine) , we became each other's echo  - it doesnt get better than that   and my deep love  for you doesnt go away.Not a bit.  Lotte

Alan Richard Marcus, 92 years old, whose life was dedicated to the arts and who was also a passionate advocate for social justice, passed away unexpectedly on May 5th at 5:25 AM. He suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage that came with no warning and no pain.

A Carmel Highlands resident since 1955, he was loved and is mourned by his wife and frequent collaborator of 63 years, psychologist Dr. Lotte Marcus, as well as his three adult  children, Naomi Beth, Anina Ruth, and David Jonathan, son-in-law Colin Campbell, daughter-in-law Barbara Hall,  three grandchildren, Gabriel Joseph, Ana Sofia and Jonathan Alan, brother-in-law Marvin Okanes, and two nephews, Jonathan and Paul Okanes.

A professional writer over the course of seventy years, Alan worked commercially in radio, television and film. In addition, he wrote four novels (one just recently published on Amazon.com), and many short stories, one of which won an Atlantic Monthly First Prize, and poetry. His fictional work received acclaim from Archibald MacLeish, Saul Bellow and Dorothy Parker, and was honored with a Guggenheim and a McDowell Colony fellowship. He wrote critical essays on politics, psychology, public policy, and multiple sclerosis.  He was also a jazz pianist and over the years he composed both words and music for songs he performed with daughter Naomi and son David, with whom he recently composed a piano rag. He mentored and was passionate about helping artists to bring their work to fruition, though he could be a very acerbic critic at times.

Born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island, Alan Marcus was the son of Philip Marcus and Rose Duwinsky, and brother to Barbara Marcus. Educated at Brown University, Alan served in the US Army in World War II, during the invasion of Normandy, the liberation of France, and the post-war occupation of Germany. The short stories that emerged from these experiences appeared first in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, culminating in the publication of  his first novel, Straw to Make Brick, which is about the chaos and trauma of Germany immediately after the war.

He then became a staff writer for MGM Studios in Los Angeles, scripting half a dozen feature films and numerous other television dramas. His treatment titled “Wives Ahoy” became the basis for the hit ABC series, “Here Come the Brides.” This commercial work led to the writing of his much-praised second novel, Of Streets and Stars, a poetic description of the lives of those who work and live in the artificial Hollywood film world.

In the 1970’s, Alan, with his wife Lotte, founded AKTOS Inc. This educational company was dedicated to producing and teaching video dramas for English-As-A-Second-Language classrooms, which evoked and cut through cross-cultural dissonance in the Salinas Valley. He then turned his attention to health care policy, and published a series of articles in medical journals such as Family Medicine and Family Systems Medicine.  His final years were spent supporting  playwright  Rick Foster’s  non-profit organization, Duende, dedicated to bringing California history into children’s classrooms in Sonoma County. On the last day of his life, he was engrossed in editing a new novel, Promised Land, the third that he will have published on Amazon.

Our dear Alan will be cremated by the Mission Mortuary within the next two weeks, and a memorial service will be held on the Monterey Peninsula at some future point.        

Our entire family, and especially Lotte, would gratefully appreciate any memories, photos, or thoughts of Alan that will help us in our grief. These may be posted at Alan’s memorial site, http://www.forevermissed.com/alan-richard-marcus/#about. Contributions in his memory may be made to your local library. If you would please let us know of any such library contributions through the memorial site, we, in turn, will ship Alan’s latest books to the library as our co-donation, as Alan was disconsolate about the state of reading in our culture.

After my father died, I wondered where all that extraordinary "Chi", that brilliance, that force of intellect, that Energy....where did it go after the body that housed it went dark?   I ask the same of Alan, whom I only knew as an old man, but so full of piss and vinegar, a know-it-all, passionate, compassionate outraged ranter and disturber of the peace and status quo. Then that disarming chuckle - and you knew he was enjoying every minute of it!  He often told me that like him, I am a writer, and so I must write. But my writing would not do justice to Alan, and so I offer one of my favorites of his in his memory.     

Manli                                  *****************************************************  
 Sitting Shiva Among The Gentiles!  ( The “Liberator”        
 and the “Survivor” visit Mercy High School )                                                                                                                ********************************************                                                Recently, my wife Lotte and myself yielded to an “ecumenical” impulse after Lotte got a call from a teacher at a plushCatholicBoarding  Schoolfor High School girls inSouth San Francisco, who happened to hear about Lotte’s web-published Holocaust-related adventures from a friend and fellow teacher.                                  
What Lotte and I experienced at Mercy High is partly something which perhaps might be  subtitled:  "Sitting Shiva for the Holocaust Among the Gentiles..." ( “Sitting Shiva” : a jewish group mourning ritual for the dead) . At one point, we  all found ourselves reverently standing  in the "Commemoration Room" (for the Holocaust) ---an elaborately decorated salon with (donated) survivor portraits of Holocaust Survivors -- or kids of Survivors, -- populated by invited  overweight well-intentioned Jewish philanthropist-types , (many with multiple chins!,) bowing their heads to the earnest  fervent remarks of Jim,, the teacher who founded the Holocaust Studies program at Mercy High  ---incidentally, learning  a lot of yiddish phrases along the way( i.e. "nash", "meshuganeh", "zoftig." )

Jim’s devotion to the memory of the Holocaust has produced an annual  ceremony & colloquy , which draws scholars, witnesses, survivors, ecclesiastics , historians, free lance humanitarians, and many others equally dedicated, as he is,  to the perpetuation of the Holocaust saga  as both living monument, --and Cautionary Tale ---recalling yet again to those who may have forgotten  what we as erstwhile inheritors of the Enlightenment and representatives of a technologically advanced age,-- nevertheless,  --in the grip of our worst daemons, --- remain capable of. .

After Jim spoke,  there was a chorus of  "never agains!" by several octogenarian ex concentration camp inmates,. We were then requested to bow heads again to the  prayers  of a young (holocaust  circuit-riding) reform Rabbi (wearing a high-style Macy's knitted yamulkeh!) who intoned an abbreviated version of the kaddish prayer for the dead beneath a large framed  stone statuette of Mary Magdalene & baby Jesus nailed  to a nearby  wall. This statue  he interpreted,   as the unsurpassed  symbol of "that mysterious eternal gift of  mother love for which, let us now  open our hearts  together in prayer,  -- ah-men."  At which, one of the scheduled Main Speakers, -- a sly 79 yr old perky chipmunk of a Viennese jewish survivor, with a definite twinkle in his eye,  (in current retirement from his previous 30 yr Professorship of French at UC Berkeley). gave me a mischievous wink. These days, he spends quite a bit of his time going around, making speeches about his own getaway from Vienna to Belgium, meanwhile peddling his own self-published memoir, "Breaking The Silence,"from out of the trunk of his car,--He finally couldn't help nudging me with a grin, surreptitiously nodding towards  beatified Mary and Jesus on the wall while  wearily shrugging his dissent from all the instant piety flooding the room, and simultaneously  summing up the  ironies he saw invoked in the Mother and Child statue by correctly identifying the two figures on the wall  -- ---as “those two Jews”----(which   they, inarguably, were !…)                

It was the Main Event ,though,  during which Lotte and I, were seated side by side on the stage in a huge auditorium, before a large audience of female teen-agers, all dressed in school uniforms,( plaid skirts and white blouses, their bursting bosoms barely contained by their prim outfits) many with pigtails saucily framing their open faces, ) which really got to me.

They sat, spellbound,  whilst Lotte eloquently recited the poignant history of her own Getaway from Vienna to Shanghai, beginning with the goose-stepping entry of Nazi  troops into her native city, Vienna in 1938,  then going on to the trials of life under the Japanese Occupation in the international city of Shanghai, , and then, later, dodging bombs  the Yanks began loosing on the city----a prelude to their  own subsequent triumphal entry into Shanghai itself, after the Japanese surrendered to McArthur at the close of WW2. . And  finally Lotte described the Wizard of Oz ( though temporary! )

Happy Ending to her saga, by bumping into me one day in the corridors of the Irving Thalberg bldng at MGM studios in Culver City, California, where she'd been hired as a german-speaking legal secretary (and where I --- -----in the guise  of a neophyte screenwriter ----entertained myself with fantasies of blowing the whole place up ----including our loveable leader ---that  famous human-orangutan ---- L.B. Mayer ------in a cloud of satisfying smithereens!..) ...                   

In our first upbeat encounter, ---- (I should mention that in those days Lotte used to wear pigtails nearly down to her waist )---- I noticed a  radiant dirndl-wearing young woman lighting   up the grayish  corridors of the Thalberg building at  MGM with  her unnerving  1000 watt smile,  itself often punctuated by frequent exclamations of  happy surprise &  wonderment at  so much American peace & plenty all around her. --- Imagine : toilet paper available in seven different shades !,  Nineteen different offerings of  breakfast cereal for sale at the corner store ! And how about the festivity of the good humor man’s regular appearance ,  --his hurdy-gurdy daily playing from atop his white ice cream truck parked just outside the gates , summoning enthusiastic  executive- types from their top floor offices , streams of actors, many  still in makeup and costume,  and flocks of female clerical workers --bursting   from their secretarial cubicles –all joining in our spontaneous national ice-cream eating pastime,  hollering their favorite flavors  to Pedro, the wise-cracking  vendor standing on the truck; s flatbed, who used to brandish sugar cones as if they were bandilleros  

Everything seemed so wonderful to Lotte in those days, so  marvelous, so fairy tale like, almost too miraculous to last. -.               
Which, alas, turned out to be true. ! For , as she memorably recounted to the students, , -after 18 months or so, her Shangri La existence in LA  abruptly  collapsed; she began to suffer scarifying flashbacks  , trembling suddenly at sudden noises, became unnerved at bright lights or unexpected movement,;, The sound of German spoken anywhere in her vicinity made her want to throw up,  Worse, she started to dream of  images  she’d had --ostensbily ---long since  put behind her… --Her ex-Viennese childhood chum & playmate. from Vienna, for instance --Maxerl, --returned, in dreams,  as the ghostly goose-stepping Nazi he over night had turned into in 1938., bristling with polished boots & swastikas, shiny pistol in hand, proudly brandishing his brand new Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth) badge!  The hospital  bed in which her dear  father-- dying of cancer---lay, listening to a small bedside table radio, in dreams, kept inching closer & closer to the radio to which his ear was permanently glued, as it kept relaying exuberant bulletins of  successive US military victories & advances against the Nazis  .And eventually, ----(though  by this time her father had died) ----it reported  American bombs were  falling nearer & nearer to Shanghai itself. Then the contorted swollen face of  a 26 yr old Japanese army Sergeant  named Khano  Goya  kept re-appearing. Sgt Goya  had  been appointed  “official” Overseer of the improvised ghetto for “Stateless Refugees” which the Japanese had instigated, and into which Lotte and her family had been herded. The Sergeant like  to  call himself “King of the Jews”  And in Lotte’s dreams, he began to loom more and more balefully, --- castigating Lotte  for this or that (imaginary) infringement of Ghetto rules,   & slapping  her face in public (as had happened once in life ) only this time the face slapping kept repeating itself, , over and over again…It was as if a  ferocious, (though  soundless)  hurricane ,-- a miniature invisible  earthquake, -- had seized her -& wouldn’t let go –She  felt herself  assaulted night after night -- pulled & buffeted and tossed around like pieces  of  debris from a wrecked  ship  &  wondering,  ---through chattering lips and  light-blinded eyes, ---when –if ever – these malevolent apparitions from the past , (which I tried to exorcise as best I could  by holding her in my arms,)  would, please God,  finally stop and go away for good, once and for all !… ….                  

Well,  stop they did! . In two years time , as she recounted to her Mercy High listeners, ,most of her worst symptoms ---legacy of her previously suppressed charades of terror &  fear, --, the trembling , the stop-and-go shivers,  the drum rolls of chattering teeth, --- -- began draining away  as mysteriously as they’d begun. AFter the birth of our first child--- by which time we’d moved to Carmel , California,  a paradisiacal village above the Pacific Ocean hundreds of miles from LA ----Lotte was well on the way to recovery, putting down roots, in our new community , which today –after 50 odd years ---numbers her among its most distinguished Senior Citizens.. Yet the experience left deep fissures., From time to time,  they can still occasionally, trigger a  minor relapse. At Heathrow airport one time in  England,   for instance, just after we’d flown in from the States, she sat down and adamantly refused to join the long queue of  international arrivals,  being processed before a row  of  uniformed custom agents seated at their  Union-Jack bedecked tables; perhaps it was the  sudden crowding and chaos . Or the  jumble & clash of foreign tongues. Or the felt presence of an arbitrary authority ----But it all seemed to produce an involuntary recoil in Lotte, , --a temporary paralysis of  terror and fear . Indeed, it was only after I sat down and gently began pointing out to her that this time , in fact, she, had all the necessary attributes and bonafides,–---i.e. she had  1) a stamped & validated US passport; 2) ,a pocket full of  US travelers checks;, 3), an international driving license . Gradually, after a few minutes,  the black cloud enshrouding her began to lift; within a few more minutes she was able to pick up her bags, square her shoulders  and follow me calmly through the vaudevillian maze of the usual customs folderol, , enduring the airport pandemonium roaring around us with determined calm. .               .

Our individual experiences , of course, inevitably shape our response to whatever befalls us. . Perhaps that’s why, over the years, Lotte--and myself, too, as an  ex-member of the U.S. military--engaged in the victorious tide-turning struggle against Hitler in 1944-45  ---have turned into steadfast backers of justice-mongering causes; we ran a Settlement house in Salinas, CA,,  for instance, aimed at trying to secure–among other things--- better working conditions for farm workers; we lobbied for more equitable --& affordable -- health care for Seniors,  we publicly decried our Government’s seeming affection , (to us, incomprehensible!)  for foreign dictators,  & we demonstrated against  environmental degradation, while, at the same time, emphasizing  the vital ( and statistically indisputable) link between economic –and political---democracy  And Lotte remembered to remind her well-meaning (and plainly well fed!) students, that -even as she spoke ---- that very minute! ------hundreds of thousands of  desperate fugitives were in flight all over the world;---  running from hunger, from exploitation, from peonage , from atrocious abuses of one kind or another etc. She pointed to the current crop of  the expelled, the visa-less , the “ethnically cleansed”, ---daily expanding numbers of  would-be escapees drawn from the widening ranks of  political, ethnic, and economic “undesirables.”  They were crowding into overloaded fishing boats, trudging through tropical forests, climbing icy mountain passes,  braving attack dogs , brutal border guards, wayward brigands and cynical bounty hunters, --all in order to reach some tantalizing , idealized, desperately clung to dream of political and economic “ sanctuary”, where, , finally,( if they were lucky,) they might  be able to  feel safe enough to think of themselves as “free.”.            

Notwithstanding this melancholy litany of  flight and pursuit, Lotte managed to finish her contribution  on an upbeat  refrain. She  sounded a “despite everything” note by quoting from “Anthem,” a haunting hymn-like song  by the distinguished  Canadian poet , singer and  songwriter Leonard Cohen,  which even though  its main stanzas indict widespread deceit  , fraud & cruelty in the world , nevertheless manages to  tease  a sort of saving grace out of the two line choruses –or “mantras” –Cohen has slyly inserted  between  the main stanzas , which  hint of redemption & possibility,--- something Lotte’s own long life experience has eloquently confirmed in spades, (and which makes her own appearance at  Mercy High , together with other Holocaust survivors, such a truly celebratory event.. )                       

(Lines from “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen)                                              
“The birds they sing                                                
At break of day                                                  
Start again                                            
I hear them say                                            
Don’t dwell on what                                            
Has passed away                                            
Or what has yet to be…                                                                                        Chorus:                            
Ring the bells that still can ring                            
Forget your perfect off-ering                    
there is a crack –a crack, --in everything…                            
That’s how the light comes in                          
 That’s how the light comes in…..”  
           ******************************************************************************              
 After Lotte finished speaking , she handed me the microphone. I stood , speechless, for a few seconds. ( According to the “official” brochure, I wasn’t even scheduled to be on the program!.)  They’d seated me next to Lotte, I’d been told, - -- so that the impressionable audience of young girls  ---already primed with more than their share of Holocaust horror tales ----would be able to see, with their own eyes, what an authentic American “liberator” (me!) looks like.                    

Not having prepared remarks , I decided ,first ,  to try to downplay the too easily invoked ( though  duly enshrined in many countries ----–and richly  endowed -- - -- globally thriving Worldwide Holocaust Remembrance Biz… Its automatic Golden Oldie mantra, , “Never Again !  -- ( though mocked, and profaned every time  a new  slaughter-of-innocents tale pops up somewhere in the press !)) ) is regularly repeated ---and earnestly prayed for  (in the direction of heaven, let’s  hope !)  ,year after year after year.                     

I then went on to describe how one day , in April, `1945, near the war’s end, , I came upon a heart-stopping scene:  wraithlike beings,  skeletal, some scarcely breathing, cavernous of eye and bearing their death-sentence tattoos like lepers stigmata; they were   jammed into bunks  blanketed by what seemed cast-off  rags or scraps of paper, listlessly bunched in sardine like clusters,  oblivious  to the stench around them (plus an occasional rotting corpse or two,)  and by this time seemingly indifferent   to the advanced decay of their coffinlike barracks as well  –What I was looking at were the pajama-clad remnants of the walking dead  at Buchenwald Concentration Camp!. .

Then, a month later, ---as  one of only three German speaking members of a Mil Gov team assigned to Erlbach, a medium sized town,  in the state of Bavaria , I found myself charged with sorting out the "bad" nazis" from the "nominal" ones.  We military linguists were supplied with dozens of  boxes of  printed questionnaires ( ‘ fragebogen” in German )  which had been professionally prepared, so we were told, by “experts” in the psychological warfare section of the US Dept of State .                  .

Employing these  carefully prepared  instruments, , -- which consisted of  long lists of queries involving political affiliation, party membership , attendance at rallies ,  contributions to Nazi groups, ratings of the nations  leaders , attitudes towards the War , etc..( demanding mostly simple yes or no answers)--- ---- we’d soon be able , we were told,  to “accurately”  distinguish  "toxic" nazis from "not so toxic”  ones , and  "borderline” ones from  “reclaimable” ones, etc, ----& thus be ready to place those being queried on a statistically determined Nazi “complicity” graph,”  which would help us in administering whatever legally mandated punishment –as set down by Mil Gov regulations, ----might eventually be decreed. .  

To me, the whole questionnaire project was a sample  of pure think-tank malarkey, cooked up by well paid (and doubtless well tenured! ) refugees  from academia !  ….It  was based, of course,  on our national fixation on measurement  ----our confidence that anything and everybody  is capable  of being accurately  summed  up  statistically --- and hence can thus be rewardingly sliced, diced, digitized, and “explained.” !.....

–Meanwhile, my own knowledge of  German had already made me privy, to a great deal of local political and social gossip, as well as a fair amount of Erlbach’s  more familial—or  “tribal” -- history--- Which meant I had already been able to glean a general sense of what actually had been  occurring in the territory under our control  (a unit of local government called a  landkreis , comprising an area  about the size of RI.) That’s why I quickly managed to “lose”  my  latest batch of think-tank  fragebogen  , into the nearest waste paper basket !. Which left me, of course,  with nothing to officially “orient” myself with  --..-no uniform “criteria” --  by which to assess degrees of“political innocence or complicity, though that was ---supposedly --part of our mission --- in regard to potential  war crimes proceedings which might be inaugurated later on. . .

But my 22  yr old “intuition”  proved no match for  the infinite variety—and ambiguity --of individual responses among the people I was dealing with.  I soon found out  they’d been compelled to live their lives  under constant scrutiny –and intimidation --by the local branch of  the Nazi terror machine,  an often invisible , yet increasingly threatening presence, which kept swelling –or metastasizing—(like some faulty sci-fi laboratory experiment gone wrong !)  -to Orwellian size by the time Hitller’s vaingloriously  proclaimed  “Thousand Year Reich” --- was forced to  surrender -- a mere dozen years after it was founded --in 1945.                          

 I related to the students, too, how  one night, I found myself  assigned ,-- to my distaste , --- to lead a group of fellow GI’s  surreptitiously “shadowing” a sallow-faced  teen-ager, . back to his home in the  working class district of the city, (where, we suspected, he’d  been stock-piling US cigarettes, chocolates, soap, cereal, and other difficult-to-get items, filched from our Mil Gov storehouse. .) As it  happened,  these suspicions, turned out  to be true., But all at once, I  found myself witnessing an appalling: scene: my  dear army buddies seemed to have abruptly morphed into replicas of that publicly caricatured  figure , the “Ugly American”,  made so notoriously infamous in Vietnam.    They were taking out all their pent up frustrations, fear, loneliness, homesickness (and God knows what else,! )--,  ..on the quivering 14 yr old "perpetrator ,” hand-cuffed in front of them, while his terrified family, --a war-widowed mama and his two younger sisters ,-- stood helplessly by, shaking with fear;;  in a few minutes they’d  practically destroyed the first floor of this family’s  bungalow --- smashing cupboards, kicking open glass doors, throwing all kinds of stuff ----food, toiletries, cosmetics, clothing etc ---helter skelter all over the floor in a spontaneous orgy of self-righteous ”evidence-seeking”  zeal. Preposterously, I found myself having to pull rank on them -- even brandish my  favorite battle-scarred tommy  gun in their faces, --so as to get my avenging, freaked-out, fellow countrymen to cease & desist their violent, illegal,-- unauthorized, --rampage ….                

That  night, though, I couldn’t sleep. I began to realize  that  I’d been forced to  face into something I’d been trying ---for weeks --- to AVOID facing into : i.e. the demoralizing fact that it was the Occupation itself  that was probably responsible for the kind of freak-out I’d just been describing: for weeks we’d been on the receiving end of anonymous threats & rising hostility  (due, I think, to the occasional arbitrary,  or heavy-handed way somebody from our office would treat a local Erlbach-er  or functionary.

Word  of this indiscretion would soon spread, stoking up the  temperature of residual humiliation, still simmering among hard liners hunkered down behind  their still- closed  curtains and dead- bolted doors ;  it was a humiliation worsened , too,  by the bitterness of demobilized returning German war vets who would sit around, disconsolate , unable to  find work to help feed their families… --- I’m talking here about the often unintentional blunders or psychological faux pas that we ourselves,  at times, committed, contributing to a backlash  among various segments in town . They sowed the seeds which often hardened attitudes on both sides.  And --for our part,--  they threatened to endanger  the stability ---or “mental health” –---of a number of our personnel, ----I’m referring here to decent, steadfast, veteran campaigners ,-- decoration-honored GI’s, with some of whom I’d been in various sticky situations  from Normandy to the Rhineland.   It wasn’t their fault, after all,  that they’d ended up in Erlbach, forced to play roles they were wholly unequipped to play,  --marooned in an obscure  Bavarian township , unable to cope with contingencies and circumstances they’d  had no training for  &  no  context  ,either, to help them  evaluate, analyze or understand just what we –and they ----as Occupiers---might, sooner or later, be up against… …. … … ….                  
Next morning, to relieve my conscience , ,-- ---after the near impromptu mayhem I’d interrupted the night before, ---I trudged back to  the working class part of town, lugging a few gifts , as  penance –(or maybe as a kind of  bribe for forgiveness  from the widowed mother of the jailed teen-ager)  -- offering my purchased and wrapped “apology” for the sudden  brutality  we’d inflicted on her 12 hours earlier ….                       

When the woman caught a glimpse of me, however, she turned & fled down a nearby street..., Who could  blame her ? In her mind, I was no different than those who had trashed her home the night before,..  This was  the exact moment , I think, that I decided, to hand in my resignation to Mil Gov &  put in a request for demobilization  , so I could reserve a seat as soon as possible on one of those military transport trains chugging North to the port of Brest  in France from whence ships carrying GI's back home to the States were embarking daily .                  

I can remember, though, how astonished , --and moved ---I was  at the agitation the recital of these just described events  raised in  many young listeners.. At one point, one of their teachers, --a young  woman in her thirties, be-shawled,  dark haired, & fierce- eyed, ---rose and began cross-examining me about torture.  How  harshly should we  judge those who ordered torture to take place  under Bush? -- How far up the chain of command should we go to pinpoint and hold accountable those who contrived to make such torture "legal?-“---,- How should one  find one's way, -- one’s “ethical compass”  -- in such  seemingly out-of-control, heartless,  jehad-threatening  and increasingly violence-stricken times etc..?  Excruciating questions,  to which I admit I didn’t,  ---and  don’t----  have readily acceptable  answers.  (Who does ? )

Yet questions, somehow  which forced me to acknowledge that our pilgrimage to Mercy High School ---- despite its accidental asides  into humor (or “inter-faith-y” geniality )--- had inspired us to try to “transmogrify” Cohen’s mournful (musical) roll call of our  collective and individual transgressions & betrayals   i.e. exploitation, greed, deceit , war, mendacity,  murder, self-aggrandizement , spiritual vainglory etc. into a kind of reverse spin communiqué, encoded with agendas of  hope and healing ,(helped by clues hinted at –--between stanzas --by the poet himself! ) which  reflects in some  way our own lifelong  attempts (however miniscule)  to bind up wounds whenever  & however we could. The   song itself , in fact, amounts to a kind of  instruction manual, suggesting implicit ways to smuggle  a rehabilitative and restored humanity into the cracks and crevices of our common life, by summoning ---and embracing ----the genius of a rare human attribute,-- magnanimity,------something apt to be extolled  say, by High School or College Graduation Day Speakers, but more likely to be lamented.--.within the handed-down treadmill routines of  our (often unrecognized) uppmanship-paced days  -- as largely quote Missing In Action end quote.!...Yet if one keeps looking long enough and hard enough ,---as Cohen himself has succeeded in doing ---- one may find it possible to locate unexpected opportunities for such rehabilitative break-throughs in familiar , though surprising , places ----- May this happen sooner rather than later----ojalla! ( And may it happen not very far from where you and I happen to be standing  this very minute.!.)                    

As our Poet himself  sings,  in his hoarsely eloquent, ambiguous, & wise threnody of resignation & renewal..,                                “”                                                        
“ The wars, they will be fought again                                              
The holy dove,                                            
She will be                                                                       
Bought again..                                               
Bought and sold                                          
And bought again..                                                           
Still,  there’s a crack, --                                        
a crack in everything””                                      
that’s ’how  the light comes in..                                      
that’s how the light comes in                                    
that’s how the light comes in…..                                                         (Amen!.)                                                                       
--------------Alan M.