I just got back from almost a week in Martha’s Vineyard, where I have been hanging out with my sweetheart and my son for several days on a funky but charming forty-year-old sailboat.

That boat is really changing my life in unexpected ways. The more time I spend on that thing the more I like it, to my amazement — I just don’t feel that facing into the wind and doing things like “keeling” and “jibbing” is in the urban Jewish DNA — but it is becoming an acquired passion (I don’t actually do anything as rigorous as “sail.” My job is strictly as passenger.) There is something very soothing about having to pay attention to which way the wind is coming from — or to really listen to the weather report, which on the nautical bulletin is somehow so much more serious and poetic than the everyday TV or radio weather report — something incredibly uplifting about what happens when the key to the motor is turned off and the wind lifts the sail out and somehow you are on the primeval momentum — the same speed, same technique that people have used on the water for millennia. The last day we were out on the water we sailed into harbor after dark, and literally minutes before the last big storm front opened the heavens upon us; and there is something kind of infuriating and humbling at the same time about having to dinghy out to the dock wearing slickers, huddled under a downpour — it is both good and maddening to be reminded, through the bubble of artifice that one tends to live in, artificial light and climate, that nature always has other plans than one’s own.

It feels good to approach a new town from the water. I feel like I could do this for the rest of my life, and not be tired of it.  You tie up the dinghy and make your way through through industrial buildings, or marine yards, or pass tumbledown bars that have been there forever, as in New Bedford; or you step into a nineteenth-century whaling neighborhood — lost, looking for food and ice — as in South Dartmouth. It’s like seeing the underside or the backstage of a town; a town can’t bullshit you from the water.

On the Vineyard, the Obamas, of course, were vacationing; we just missed seeing them a couple of times — when we sailed into Oak Bluffs, there were crowds around Nancy’s, an outdoor-seating casual restaurant, where he and his family had just been — and there, facing us, unsmiling, out on a pier, was a casually-dressed secret service guy, blond, dark glasses, black polo shirts and khakis, arms folded, scowling. He did not wave back when we waved, and I actually felt rather relieved. (I heard from the peace activists on the island that other secret service members were also casually dressed, which is a definite departure in propotcol — one table of female secret service, at a more formal restaurant, had appeared in black cocktail dresses and pearls, doubtless armed — a look that sounded kind of sexy.)

Matthis Chireaux, the 25-year-old antiwar activist who is with IVAW and is a veteran of Afghanistan — the young man who tokd Congress he could not obey illegal orders to redeploy to an illegal war, so if they were going to arrest him, “I’ll be in Brooklyn”  — came up to the Vineyard to join an antiwar encampment on a piece of land near where the Obamas were staying — the idea was to reproduce the peace camp that had set itself up outside of Crawford, Texas. We handed Mattis over from one boat to another as his colleagues in the peace movement took him to the encampment. The idea of it — the thought that young people could have a destination again that idealistic, and that spontaneous — made me happy.
Not so happy was the turnout; the organizers had hoped for thousands, and far fewer showed up. Is the left reluctant to criticize “their own” President? I very much hope not but it is difficult to avoid that conclusion. The warsin the Middle East are in some ways worsening.

The last day of our trip, an antiwar activist, Nick, hosted a brunch for Cindy Sheehan at his beautiful cottage facing the sound. Nick turned out to be the guy who had taught my guy to sail — giving the whole gathering the feeling of extended family. I greeted Ms Sheehan, who had been determinedly getting the antiwar message out; we’d met briefly once before. I was startled and upset to hear from her spokesperson that Sheehan’s entire antiwar listserv — which now included my own email address — had been `frozen’ by Verizon and made inaccessible for the duration of most of the time they were on the island, trying to organize a nationwide protest (I am not techie enough to understand the process, but I understood the effects.) She suggested that I should consider that email address corrupted. A chilling conversation in an otherwise serene setting; an otherwise bucolic American day.

This week — back in the city. I reached out to a contact who works for a TV station reporting on Gaza, and asked him if I could go live with a Gazan family for a week over Christmas. I received a very warm, welcoming response. Don’t worry about contacts, he wrote — we have 1.5 million of them. I will have to start right away with my conversational Arabic study — I want to be able to have a minimal exchange of pleasantries by the time I go.
Holder appointing a special prosecutor, likely, from news reports, makes me feels heartened and queasy at the same time Heartened because of how far we have come when the AFC and a few oter voices were calling three years ago for prosecutions — at a time when that seemed like a marginal position. Queasy because once again they are going for the low-hanging fruit — those lower on the food chain who overzealously carried out torture beyond the “legally mandated” torture — as all implementers of torture do — while leaving the architects of the torture — yes, you, Mr. Cheney — to swan around, free men, on the weekend talk shows, trying to rebrand sadism.

When Cheney makes the case that torture kept america safe — I hope his interlocutors bring up the routine photography of nude, shaved, blinded prisoners that the newly released ACLU documents confirm was protocol. And why, if it was just instrumental, threaten the prisoners with rape and sexual assault of their family members — rather than just the plain old asexual drill bit? There is nothing instrumental about the sexual sadism that runs through and through these directives, and I hope we will not be dragged, disoriented, into a morass of Nazi-era apologetics and will keep that in mind; ain’t no rebranding torture, sexually perverse or otherwise — plain old morally perverse.

My piece on Mohamed al-Hanashi’s death in custody came out today (“What Happened to Mohamed al-Hanashi?“] — and will probably, because I wrote it for a global syndicate, be picked up in countries around the world, but probably will not be covered widely in the US. We are still awaiting the results of the autopsy report — of almost three months ago! Ask your representative to ask the Pentagon what happened to this young Yemenite man — the detainee’s elected representative – who “committed suicide” suspiciously at Guantanamo?

And keep asking…