Jon Reisman

My maternal grandfather, Abraham Plaut, left me many gifts — a love of baseball, bridge, parody, the English language, and Yiddish idioms. Lately, all of those have been combining into a recurrent thought/meme: Oy vey iz mir, or woe is/to me. The Ashkenazi cultural overlay usually brings the phrase a touch of coping comedic optimism (hand wave/press to forehead) as opposed to depressed despair (chin cup/frown), but recent events have been challenging. 

Oy Vey: 

• The Red Sox are certainly a major source of both entertainment and aggravation. The recent West Coast swing meant late nights, some early inning successes followed by youthful misplays, mistakes, frustration, and disappointment. From April through September, on any given morning, the mental health and happiness of a significant portion of New England reflect the Sox's result the night before. Sox fans are on a wild, potentially manic-depressive ride, and the therapy and medication bill could necessitate another special emergency double secret legislative session. 

• My bridge group has fallen into disrepair due to hospital visits and a late spring trip to commune with the black flies on the St. John Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Rendezvous. 

• Actual events and parody are getting harder to tell apart. The 2025 LA riots led me to pen a California Screaming parody, and the ongoing political theatre involving the deported/now returned “Maryland man”/human trafficker/domestic abuser has led me to the Kingston Trio’s Charlie and the MTA (did he ever return, no he never returned, and his fate is still unlearned). The victory of Democratic socialist Zohram Mamdani in the New York City Democratic primary led me to wonder if the Bowdoin grad had taken an economics course (and what a Bowdoin economics course would actually contain). His “anti-zionism” advocacy to “Globalize the intifada” translates to me as “Kill as many Jews as possible,” but that’s just me. My snarky response: We need an Empire State intifada, from the Hudson and East Rivers to the sea.

• Operation Midnight Hammer to Bomb, Bomb Iran (https://youtu.be/88VeGQaXoBI) was Trump’s triumphant coda to Operation Eagle Claw, Jimmy Carter’s 1980 failed desert crash hostage rescue mission. The partisan press and an unknown Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) afflicted leaker (either a left-wing bureaucrat or Congress critter) is doing its best to muddy the waters and cast Trump and the mission as a failure, and they will have some success amongst the TDS afflicted. I don’t take anything at face value from the legacy media anymore (Distrust, then Verify).

• The 12-day Iran/Israeli war could be as transformative to the Middle East as the six-day Israeli victory over Egypt, Syria, and Jordan was in 1967. The conflict is hopefully both the beginning of the end of the Gaza conflict, ignited and financed by Iran and the Biden administration’s Afghanistan surrender and Iranian sanction relief policies, and the 46-year Iranian-American conflict of Islamism vs. freedom. The stage is set for an expansion of the Abraham Accords between Sunni Arab states and Israel. I bet AOC, Jasmine Crockett, and socialist Bowdoin grad will blame it on Trump and the 77 million plus racist fascist Americans who voted for him despite the heroic agitprop and disinformation efforts of their betters. Oy vey iz mir.

Jon Reisman is an economist and policy analyst who retired from the University of Maine at Machias after 38 years. He resides on Cathance Lake in Cooper, where he is a Selectman and a Statler and Waldorf intern. Mr. Reisman’s views are his own, and he welcomes comments as letters to the editor here or to him directly via email at [email protected].