There stirs a pain, and where and why

Journalism isn’t poetry and on most days it would be hard to describe the pabulum issuing forth in the Hebrew print press as anything of the sort. But it’s possible to draw a thin squiggly line from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Sonnet 43 to the goings-on covered in Israel’s major dailies Sunday morning, with news dominated by a dark kiss, a deadly rampage carried out by a teen and a summer of political turmoil across the sea.

Millay’s Sonnet 43, titled “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,” is a melancholy reprise of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s much more famous Sonnet 43, titled “How do I love Thee?” a favorite of the hopeless romantic high-schooler. And just as St. Vincent Millay, whose poem explores the theme of knowing things were once better, turns on its head the idea of loves and memory explored in Browning’s version, so too does Gen. Ofek Buchris’s about-face in admitting to have kissed a girl who claims she was raped by him — after having denied so far that he even touched her.

“What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why / I have forgotten, and what arms have lain / Under my head till morning,” St. Vincent Millay wrote in 1920, and Buchris’s comments to investigators, first reported by Channel 2 and quoted in Yedioth Ahronoth and Haaretz, has a few more details.

“There were hugs, maybe kisses; when it happened it was mutual,” he’s quoted saying in Yedioth, under a gauche headline putting his newer quote alongside his earlier claim that “There was absolutely nothing. Not sex, not even a touch.”

“There was one time that we kissed and afterwards we had a talk where we said it was a one-time thing, we would stop right away, and not think that there was any romantic connection. It was an single lapse. We kissed on the cheek and afterward on the lips and that’s it,” he’s quoted saying this time around. “It was at Nahal Oz, in the office.”

Yedioth, which tends to skew toward the gossipy, is the only paper to lead with the story, allotting it the first three inside pages. The paper also makes much ado about a quote by Gen. (ret.) Gershon Hacohen, who tried to defend Buchris by recalling the story of the biblical King David, who remained king despite the grimy affair of taking Bathsheba for a wife after having her soldier husband sent to the front to be killed.

St. Vincent Millay wrote of ghosts in the rain “that tap and sigh/ Upon the glass and listen for reply,” and that reply comes down on Hacohen like fury.

Yedioth’s own headline calls the comparison to King David “wretched” and columnist Chen Artzi-Sror tears Hacohen and others a new one for their attempts to defend an alleged rapist.

“Just when the storm started to pick up, Hacohen offered a feeble apology. ‘You didn’t understand me,’ he claimed. So let’s be clear, we understood you perfectly,” she writes. “You and your ilk are just another version of the manly-man, good ol’ boys who see every woman as a seductress, an object or a liar.”

Israel Hayom is the only paper not to put the Buchris story on its front page, and in fact its treatment of the affair, buried on page 19, focuses not on Buchris’s admission, but rather details about one of the woman who filed a complaint against him, which were leaked online. One can draw one’s own conclusions about the tabloid and its values given the fact that while it leaves Buchris’s admission of (some) guilt out, it include several passages in defense of the former top army commander.

What the paper does lead off with is Friday’s rampage in Munich, calling it a “Massacre of Children” on its front page, and making an unfortunate attempt to be cutesy inside with another headline “Invitation to murder,” a reference to the fact that the killer lured teens to McDonald’s with a promise of free food.

St. Vincent Millay wrote of “a quiet pain/ For unremembered lads that not again/ Will turn to me at midnight with a cry,” and while her stanzas were clearly referring to lovers past and forgotten, it could easily also refer to lives snuffed short in Munich. While the killer’s name and picture appear prominently, none of the victims are named in Israel Hayom’s report, and only their ages given, admittedly a problem not unique to the tabloid.

Though the massacre is ruled not terror-related, the paper still links it to the Nice truck rampage and the train axing in Germany and assigns political motives to Germany’s determining it was not terror.

“German sources found it important to emphasize this, in light of the fact that if this was an attack by the Islamic State carried out by one of the hundreds of thousands of refugees absorbed by Germany in the last year and a half, there would be significant political ramifications in light of the public discourse that has developed in Germany around this issue,” the paper writes.

Had it been a terror attack at least it would have fit into a narrative. But Dana Regev reports from Munich for Haaretz on the somber mood that has overtaken the city despite the summery weather in the wake of the shooting (“Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,” St. Vincent Millay wrote) and notes that at a makeshift memorial a sign bears a single unanswered word: “Why?”

“I never imagined something like could happen in Germany, in Munich. This is safest place, and now in a few days these attacks happen” she quotes a teen Munchner, who was nearby at the time of the slayings, saying. “We were in shock. We’re still kids, just 18, but the shooter was my age. It could have even been someone I know.”

St. Vincent Millay’s poem ends with the heartbreaking stanzas “I cannot say what loves have come and gone/ I only know that summer sang in me / A little while, that in me sings no more.”

The forlorn feeling is likely one that’s not unfamiliar to those closely watching the American election cycle and seeing a large chunk of the country fall in line with GOP candidate Donald Trump, remembering the good old days of hanging chads and Sarah Palin.

In Haaretz, Chemi Shalev notes that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s choice of Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine as a running mate should add a bit of balance into the insanity that has come to define the race, terming Kaine the anti-Trump.

“Other than in the fact that they are both white men, Kaine comes across as Trump’s antithesis: a veteran professional politician, a creature of the establishment, a devout Catholic, an avowed liberal, a man well-liked on both sides of the political aisle who is, as he admits, a little boring,” he writes. “Clinton assumes that adding Kaine to her ticket will boost her image as an experienced and pragmatic candidate who prefers action to words and moderation to bluster. She assumes American voters will prefer her levelheaded responsibility to Trump’s populist gimmick, her optimistic outlook and positive image of the state of the union to the kind of dark, dystopian vision that Trump presented in his speech in Cleveland. She could be right, of course, though the very fact that Trump is the GOP’s candidate indicates that times may have changed along with the factors that sway the electorate.”