Raphael Shevelev

It’s no news at all that China has been stealing intellectual property from all the major intellectual property producers in the world. This was well known to U.S. Presidents Carter, Reagan, George H. W. Bush (who had served as U. S. Ambassador to China), Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama. Each chose, when appropriate, and keeping balance in mind, to enlist allies in the complex business of trade diplomacy in the attempt to reduce China’s infringement of WTO rules. In the process of becoming a member, China had to make serious adjustments to its economy. No President acted as though China’s economy was a sudden, direct, existential threat to his domestic voter base. Until now. I have no quarrel with the idea of having a business person become President of the United States. But if it is going to be so, we should hope that he/she would bring a deep knowledge of macro-economics to the job, some experience of governing, and the humility of enrolling the efforts of superb experts in pointing the way to policy decisions, in concert with our closest allies. This demands knowledge, insight, understanding of primary, secondary and tertiary effects, devotion to democratic institutions, and really hard work. All far beyond the capabilities of the gentleman now in the Oval Office, who chooses flash over substance all the time, seeking some easy, spectacular answer to every problem, when and if he notices a problem at all. Or manufactures one. The notion that a trade surplus or trade deficit is of itself a determinant of a country’s wealth is as much nonsense as “supply-side” economics. Managing the government of the United States is not remotely like developing a golf course, a hotel, or establishing a fraudulent “university.” It also does not require sending hugely unqualified family members out to do the diplomacy of the country. The idea that the President’s pretty, ignorant and potentially criminal son-in-law can, while disparaging the need for specialized knowledge, be unleashed to conduct, without Senate confirmation, the foreign policy of a great nation, is appalling. Same for his pretty, ignorant daughter. That these overwhelmingly unqualified family members have had high level meetings with powerful foreign government officials without the presence of the relevant U.S. ambassador, is begging for disaster. Peace in the Middle East? No problem. Rapping China’s knuckles? No problem. It’s all so easy, that no wonder the current occupant of the Oval Office is deluded into thinking himself The Greatest. All made much easier by entertaining the President of China at Mar-a-Lago, and then congratulating him upon becoming President for Life. Amazing what good chocolate cake can accomplish. Censuring Russia? Well, just a little, while also congratulating Putin for achieving his “electoral success.” Oh, if only the President could enjoy the fealty that comes with being a complete demagogue, not only as in China and Russia, but also the Philippines. The President’s threats to execute the dealers who push opioids should be taken seriously, not only by physicians who could be accused of over-prescribing, but also the executives of those great pharmaceutical companies who produce the stuff, though the latter may be excused for their contributions to political candidates. If you’re rich enough and well-tailored…. At the close of trading today, the Dow had lost 724 points, wiping out an enormous amount of wealth. But it must have been a considerable consolation to see the President signing a new order for tariffs on China, especially as he sees no way for China to retaliate. That China now holds close to $2 trillion in U.S. debt, and is one of our most important customers, is just an irrelevancy. Now the steel workers and coal workers of America can rejoice, and those awful Chinese will have learned their lesson. At the end of the day, we learned that the most extreme hawk, John Bolton, will be replacing Gen. H.R. McMaster as National Security Advisor, now making the United States less secure than ever. Protectionism and isolationism hurt most those who practice it. Why bother with the difficulties of diligent diplomacy when there’s a strongman’s diktat available? Our “leader” has claimed he has the best words. I’d recommend he use them: “I resign.” Once in a while, I’m forced to remember that my first profession was as a professor of politics and international affairs. In extreme cases it draws me back from art. This is an extreme case._________________________________________________________ Raphael Shevelev, a former professor of political science and international relations, is now a fine art photographer, digital artist and essayist. Diktat From The White House — Why Bother With Substance? was originally published in All Things Examined on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Would you consider being a character witness for my Senate confirmation hearing? At last, a really good — and totally appropriate — job in the White House is available, and the President has decided to nominate me. This week, speaking in San Diego, he proposed a new Space Force, and I’m ready to serve my country and the universe by becoming the first Commandant/Czar. My credentials are impeccable. I was born on H4, the fourth of a series of planets known as the Hiersoux Galaxy, four very similar planets visible only in bright light from a tiny area of our planet, about 5,000 square feet, two miles or so North of the UC-Berkeley campus. Below, you’ll see an image of my first descent from Space to Earth. I was quite young at the time, new to the navigational arts, so miscalculations forced a lengthy interim stop for bagels and other refreshments on the Southern tip of Africa. My subsequent corrected flight path took me to the United States, where, to confirm my extraterritorial birth, I was assigned an Alien Registration Number: A14 xxx xxx. That was my main official identification before, just ten years later, I was given a U.S. Passport so that, with minor surgery, I could secretly blend in with the population. I now appear more or less authentically human, almost Amurrican. I’m with the President on this. We desperately need to spend much more on Defense/Offense, and in any case, this is the right President to overcome the obstacles. Having had the inestimable advantage of withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords, the Trans Pacific Partnership, threatening to withdraw from NATO and NAFTA, trying to impose tariffs in contravention of WTO rules, he is just exactly the guy to withdraw from the several treaties and conventions regarding the weaponization of outer space. The Attorney General remains conveniently silent, as shall I. All I want is access to my West Wing office, the right to design my own uniform, and the privilege of joining the President in continuing to make Russia and China great again. He was so right when he speculated that if Secretary Clinton had won the Presidency we would not be thinking of these glorious adventures. We’d be bogged down in trying to create better environmental rules, a more equitable tax code, trying to defeat gross racial and gender injustice, improving health, using much more diplomacy than chest-beating, making better policies based on science, imagination and art, all those little ordinary things that would likely promote the common good, our better angels, and fewer porn stars. Boring! If I am confirmed, I shall insist on bringing along my own Chief of Staff, the determinedly serious Warrior-Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Grassy, as we call him, is as enthusiastic as I am about designing our new uniforms and ordering the dining set for our offices. To preserve a reasonable budget, he’s offered to bring along his very own telescope. I’m The Man! See for yourself. Will you support me? Donations in multiples of $100,000 will guarantee you a seat at our (dining) table, and a chance to cheer up Grassy. ___________________________________________________________________ Raphael Shevelev, a former alien from the Hiersoux Galaxy, expects to be nominated by the President of the United States as the first Commander/Czar of the Space Force. Up to now he has been an artist and author, whose work can be seen at www.raphaelshevelev.com. My Nomination to Command the Space Force was originally published in Human Parts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My mother was born one hundred and eight years ago, in 1909, in the village of Yliakiai, in Northwest Lithuania. She used its Yiddish name “Yelok.” She was one of four children who were orphaned very, very young. With some community help, the oldest child, Esther, then just a teenager, raised the children for a while until they could be sent to other families for foster care. They were desperately poor. Three of the four children, mother, her older sister Tzila, and my favorite uncle Abe, faced with increasing antisemitism, left Europe and made a life in Southern Africa. Esther, the oldest child, whose name mother spoke with hushed reverence when I was a child, perished in the Holocaust. Dora (nee Abramson) Shevelev was a kind, loving, emotionally generous mother, always preaching to me about honesty and integrity. She’d had the most minimal education, and remained much more comfortable writing in Yiddish, my first language, than in English. But that didn’t negatively impact her wisdom. More than at any other times, I remember the sheer pleasure on her face on two very specific occasions. The first was just a handful of years after the end of the Second World War. My school, the South African College High School, had a military cadet corps. Each Tuesday I would dress in my impeccable cadet officer’s uniform, three earned marksmanship badges on my left arm. To her I might well have seemed a General, a Jewish boy who was not going to be intimidated by Germans or anyone else. The other notable occasion was when I graduated at the University of Cape Town. Just before the ceremony in December 1959, though I didn’t need it, I asked her to help me on with my robe and hood, and words fail me in trying to describe her expression. Perhaps great pride mixed with great solemnity. She died, as did my father, while I was in my twenties. I was then in the United States, teaching at the Santa Barbara Campus of the University of California. On the early morning of her death, my father found her in bed, clasping my framed graduation picture to her breast. She had kept it on her bedside table. I still resemble her side of the family. She was eighteen years old when this portrait of her was made, shortly before her departure from the Baltic. She taught me many lessons, including the value of love. This was precisely attuned to a phrase given me by my first, gentle Latin teacher. He could have been translating her Yiddish: Amor omnia vincit. _________________________________________________________ © Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form. Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries MOM was originally published in Human Parts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After a stay in a hospital near my home in Berkeley, California, I received a questionnaire from the Administrator. I responded that I had been delighted with the courtesies and professionalism of the nurses, technicians and physicians, but I resented the antisemitism. On my second morning there, my breakfast tray contained a curious item: wrapped in cellophane was a round, cold, soggy bread-like substance, ashamed of its own pallor. The menu labeled it as a bagel. I told the administrator that anyone calling that deeply offensive object a bagel must be a rabid antisemite. The episode got me thinking of the bagels in my life. The early ones spoiled me rotten; they were a gastronomic high point of my 1950s youth in Cape Town, South Africa. What I remember best were the summer weekend expeditions to Muizenberg beach, and the interruption, either on the way there, the way back, or both, to buy bagels from Mrs. Marcus. Mr. and Mrs. Marcus lived in a very modest house on the east side of Buitenkant Street, just a block or so north of Mill Street, in Cape Town. I think he was a cobbler. In order to augment the family income, Mrs. Marcus began to bake bagels for sale in the community. They were so delicious that she soon had to install a second, larger commercial oven. That’s when she became famous. Her bagels were exquisite, crispy golden brown on the outside, soft and addictively chewy on the inside. I remember a time when we stopped on the way home from the beach, and my mother went into the Marcus home for six bagels. We lived only about a mile away, and by the time my parents and I got home all we had left was a crumpled brown bag and a few crumbs. That was the ultimate test: they needed no butter, or cream cheese or lox. Mrs. Marcus’s bagels were not coated with onion flakes, or sesame seeds, sun-dried tomatoes, or, heaven forfend, blueberries. Now, if challenged to choose an accompanying drink, it would have to be the finest Ceylon tea, the most expensive Kona coffee, or a bottled product representing the ultimate of the Bordeaux region. At the time, I think I liked Coca Cola. Mrs. Marcus’s trade soon brought her to the notice of the authorities, who insisted that she obtain a baker’s business license and arrange her premises in a more commercial way. That would have incurred an expense that she could barely afford, and led to a ploy the memory of which still charms me. On one occasion, when I entered her house to make a purchase, she had company. Two young gentlemen were present, distinguished from her other customers by their crew-cut hairstyles and what looked very much like police-issue boots. Before I could ask for bagels, she introduced them by name, and though here my memory fails, they were probably called something like Mr. van Zyl and Mr. van der Merwe. To the introduction she added softly, in Yiddish, “blanke kneplach” (“shiny buttons”), a metaphor for police uniforms. She then handed me a bag of bagels, kissed my cheek and hoped I’d enjoy the gift. No money had changed hands, and therefore no evidence of commercial transaction. This scene was acted out repeatedly with others over some months, and finally the authorities gave up and withdrew the bagel police for other, more questionable, law enforcement work. A day or two later after each event, her customers brought Mrs. Marcus the money. There’s much to remember about my youth in South Africa. The beauty, the warmth of family and communal life, the early education that eventually led me to universities and careers elsewhere, and the crushing injustice, the immense crime against humanity, of apartheid. I have since eaten bagels in Berkeley, Los Angeles, New York, Vancouver, London, Paris, Krakow, Tel Aviv and even near my daughter’s home in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where the hotel menu described them as un tipo de pan Ingles, a kind of English bread! For the last twenty-five years, after careers in academia, then business, I am now, most enjoyably, an autodidact student, and occasional instructor, in art, an exhibited and published artist. I’ve come to realize that the experience that began with visits to the National Art Gallery in Cape Town, exposure to the work of artists at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, and my frequent attendance of symphony concerts, led me to consider those elements which contribute to greatness in art: composition, coloration, balance, harmony, surprise, and sensory nourishment, among others. I found these in the great paintings, sculptures, architecture, photography, literature and music that have illuminated my soul and so enriched my life. That’s when I realized that Mrs. Marcus had also been an artist. _________________________________________________________ © Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form. Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries

Once a week, usually in the morning, the fruit and vegetable man drove his Jewish truck down our street in Cape Town, stopping outside our home and blowing the horn. Until I walked out to look at his truck, I didn’t know motor vehicles could be Jewish. But there it was, on the nose, a star of David, with the initials “DB” in the center. Dodge Brothers. Even then it was an old truck, Dodge having been acquired by Chrysler Corporation in 1928. Maybe that Jewish truck was why my parents felt good about purchasing produce from the old man, who was certainly younger than I am now. Growing up in a major port city, I knew that ships could be Christian, having once read about the violent process of christening, smashing a bottle of champagne on the hull, and hoping that my Christian friends survived their baptism intact and sober. We lived in a small flat, in a block of four very modest homes. The other residents were also Jewish European refugees. Mother would take her purse, and go out to the truck and buy fruits and vegetables on a very limited budget. In summer, on rare occasions, she would carry in the ultimate treat: a tiny wicker basket, lined with leaves, containing a dozen or do small strawberries. After dinner, my parents and I shared the delight, sometimes annoyed at the rotten ones. Dad and Mom were Litvaks, who grew up in a northern climate that favored berry fruits, so our fridge usually had a bottle of strawberry jam, to be applied in very thin layers to rye bread. I can remember at least two occasions when, just returned from junior school, the only snack available was a cup of tea and a piece of toast with breadcrumbs scattered on top. Mom and I laughed about our inventiveness. As the years went by, Dad made more money and we moved to a more comfortable flat on a hill. There were a dozen pine trees on the property, and that’s when a friend introduced me to pine nuts. We’d search for fallen cones, and remove the nuts. By placing them on top of the brick wall that surrounded the property, we’d use a fist-sized rock to smash the shell, rescuing tiny, mashed portions of the nut. It was a lot of effort for very limited results, and may have sparked my later interest in Adam Smith. As we became better off, the range of fruits, nuts, and other comestibles became more ample, and included small amounts of European chocolate, but those early days and the Jewish truck have stayed with me. Now, so many years later, here in California, the legacy of early privation hasn’t entirely escaped. My wife and I greatly enjoy having friends over to dine. Just recently, I stopped at a local farmer’s market to buy ingredients for the fruit salad we’d serve for dessert. Among the other items, I came back with three pounds of luscious California strawberries, each one so ample that it seemed to require an entire shipping container for itself. I also bought a pound of shelled pine nuts to scatter in the dinner salad. Good food, great friends. I have become prosperous. _________________________________________________________ © Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form. Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries