Here Escapism Day is Every Day!

Where I come from – a country, it is now clearer than ever, where rules not only a pseudo-heroic cult of death (or is the death-cult, actually, a genuine aspect of the heroic?), but also a bullying government of cruel idiots, with an inexplicable bloodlust for casualties on as many sides as possible – Memorial Day is a chauvinistic festival of violent self-justification. While this national day of grief is perhaps the last resort of pseudo-concensus, second only to the "Holocaust Day" that is observed a mere week before (and no less tinged with chauvinism and self-righteousness), our Memorial Day is hard to avoid, no matter how much of a Tel Avivian escapist or post-Zionist activist you are. Whichever stance you choose against the deafening Other-phobia that infiltrates every square foot of this tiny land (and its exterritorial waters), reality is in your face. You know the casualties. You are the casualties.
In the traditional Hebrew "they are out to get us! but we will outsmart them all… MUhahahaHAA!!!" outlook, DH and I are a symptom of what is institutionally called in Israel, allow me to slightly embellish here, "Fugitive Minds". The Jewish womb is failing the Jewish state! It has produced brilliant minds that go live in peace in Hyde Park where they can rightfully disregard the homeless three blocks down and the US killing in Afghanistan because it's not OURS, and perhaps make a living off being an intellectual and have their kids grow up and actually NOT GET KILLED at the age of 19 warding off enraged civilians. You see, Memorial Day here in the US is distant. It it impersonal. From the sheer enormity of this land, war and those who do it are at the outskirts of, if not completely eliminated from, your field of view. Yes, there are (I guess?) some official ceremonies, which are probably meaningful for the young veterans and their families. I can even attest to some bohemian interest in the subject, if a working-draft of a play that I recently got to review – about a young man returning from WAR (is that what we call the terrorist-civilian-soldier confrontations these days?), completely incapable of emotional rehabilitation – is any indication. For the rest of us (us? what first person pronoun do I belong to now?!?), this is a day for SALES and BARBECUES. I have made my cultural assimilation almost complete by contributing to both of these and some other holiday-spirit activities during the 3-day weekend we enjoyed.
Saturday morning, I helped out at a yearly festivity of neighborhood activists of South-Side Chicago, bringing together students (White) and community (Black) for live amateur music, arts and crafts, and free food prepared in a church kitchen where I had the pleasure of peeling sweet potatoes (with a knife!…. arggg) the day before. This is for real: a girl of no more than ten drawing her map of the neighborhood and writing "Stop the Killing" on the top; women referring to me as "Baby GIRL!!". I should have brought a camera but then would have probably felt like a colonialist documenting the beautiful and exotic natives. Later on Saturday: The God Soul of Szechwan at a local theatre some one hundred blocks north from here. Not a black person in sight. Brechtian reflections on social injustice, with cultural translation of the tobacco factory to a heroin dealer's headquarters. Good entertainment that was. But then – what to do about the homeless man lying on the floor literally 5 meters from the theatre entrance, when the smallest change in my wallet is a 5 dollar bill? A CONUNDRUM, I tell you.
Sunday we hosted a slightly-blown-out-of-proportion brunch. Goods were BAKED. Eleven people were seated in our big living room (yay for the best apartment ever. Big living room AND big oven) drinking ice tea and ice coffee and homemade Bloody Marys from scratch that were more like Vodka-infused-Gaspacho and eating home-baked CARBS for a few hours. Special unexpected treat on the verge of performance art: I got a home-made haircut from one of the guests!!! Whoever was left at that late hour saw our floor and my shoulders fill with chopped hair and my head being cropped Jean Seberg-like.
The menu also included a quick tour of Israeli Eurovision highlights on Youtube (how the hell did we get to that subject?!), with me giving a very shallow explanation, using the word "fundamentalist", of the incongruity of the transsexual Dana International being sent as an Israeli representative to the gayest competition in the world. Not to mention the incongruity of the inclusion of Israel in "EUROPE". For the record, DH has his misgivings about my one-dimensional rants about Israel in the presence of people who really know almost nothing about it, and so can not understand the complexity of the situation. I agree that it is as uninformative as an American yuppie ranting that the US is fundamentalist. But I'm not sure whether I am supposed to be informative, or to assume that my hearers cannot take me with the same grain of salt they would their fellow left-wing ranter, and to make explicit that Israel is less oppressive than some Muslim states where little girls are forced into marriage or "circumcised" etc etc.
Also, let it be publicly noted that I misuse and abuse the word FASCIST as a general expletive of vaguely right-wing connotations.

Now that I've set the record straight, I shall not deny you the gory details of how we finally celebrated this national holiday with the most American of all methods: SPEND MONEY, preferably at a designated Memorial Day SALE. Oh yes. And where did we spend nearly two-hundred dollars?
The Seminary Coop Bookstore, of course.

Intellectual Escapism, I tell you. The ultimate BEST kind.