While starving youngsters in Gaza eat leaves President Joe Biden and VIP guests gobbled the best haute cuisine at Thursday night’s official state dinner to honor Kenya’s president. Set up in a pavilion on the South Lawn of the White House, the meal’s first course included Chilled Heirloom Tomato Soup, Sourdough Crisps and Arbequina Olive Oil.

Famished kids in Gaza are eating weeds.

Biden, the First Lady and connected guests devoured a main course of Fruitwood-smoked Beef Short Ribs, Butter-poached Lobster, Citrus Butter and Baby Kale, (with) Sweet Corn Purée.

Emaciated toddlers in Gaza are gnawing cactus leaves.

Dessert for privileged Democrats included White Chocolate Basket, Banana Ganache, Raspberries, Peaches and Candied Lime Zest

So bold and dinner party proud were White House staffers they emailed the menu to members of the press all over the world – including still living native-born Palestinian journalists still surviving in that hellish Gaza wasteland. Yet, while Biden and guests wiped full lips with crisp clean napkins, Israeli soldiers in our American government-sponsored slaughter forced a million Palestinians to move for as often as the ninth time just to stay alive as Israeli bombs continued to fall.

“As of April 2024, some residents of Gaza are eating leaves, weeds, and cactus leaves to survive due to food scarcity and a lack of aid supplies,” according to a Save the Children report. “Mallow, a variety of green leaf, is a common part of many Gazans’ diets because it’s inexpensive. Some residents also forage for food left by rats and eat animal feed.”

“Families in Gaza are forced to forage for scraps of food left by rats and eating leaves out of desperation to survive,” said the Save the Children report. War and rapidly declining aid supplies leave all 1.1 million children in Gaza facing starvation, the report says.

A traumatized Palestinian woman told aid workers, “My husband told me people have resorted to eating bird and animal food and tree leaves out of desperation. He has been forced to scavenge for scraps of food; he recently found scraps in his sister’s house that had already been ruined by rats but washed them and ate them anyway because there is literally nothing else left to eat. He said he will not perish from bombs, but from scarcity of food.”

No Candied Lime Zest for you.

Israeli tourist beaches, seaside nightclubs and countless high-end restaurants, what Pini Shani, Israel’s Tourism’s Deputy Director-General and Head of Marketing Administration, calls “the land of milk and honey,” are open for business as usual. At the same time, starving Palestinians await basic food distribution to be unloaded at a new pier American troops recently finished building on a sandy stretch of bombed-out barren land. American money paid for the pier because Israel continues to block crucial humanitarian aid while continuing to decimate the Palestinian civilian population, including men, women and children.

An increasing number of moral people in the civilized world have no appetite for this genocide. Judges at the top United Nations court, the International Court of Justice, or World Court, ruled Friday that, among other war crimes, Israel is intentionally starving civilians, a deliberate government policy that directly contributed to murdering more than 35,000 men, women and children — more than 14,000 of whom are women, children and old people.

Here’s the deal says Biden. Speaking at a celebration of Jewish Heritage Month Monday in the Rose Garden at the White House, Biden said Israel’s military assault in Gaza in the wake of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks “is not genocide.”

“We reject that,” he said, telling an audience of Jewish leaders and activists that Americans “stand with Israel,” according to The New York Times.

But what about Palestinian children with hollow eyes chewing leaves or trying to fill empty bellies with rat food?

Have they tried the Sourdough Crisps?

I can just hear Biden smacking his lips saying, “Man, we didn’t get Butter-poached Lobster like this when I was a kid growing up in Scranton.”

Ah, Scranton, Biden’s allegedly beloved birthplace in Northeastern Pennsylvania, a still demanding region where a recent economic report estimated almost 25 percent of households scrape and save to live on a family income of less than $25,000 a year — a stark fact you never hear from Scranton Mayor Paige Gephardt Cognetti, an official Biden booster and re-election campaign surrogate, or any other pampered elected Democrat such as my honorary Zionist neighbor U.S. Sen. Bob Casey or my congressman U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright.

You don’t have to get invited to an official White House state dinner to stuff yourself full of hypocrisy. If Cognetti, Casey and Cartwright keep sucking up to Biden and enabling his Gazan slaughter, though, their presence might very well be requested at the next state dinner — or at least lunch with Israeli lobbyists. If the White House does call, I urge our fallacious public servants to try the wine.

While Gazan youngsters scrounged for gutter water on Thursday night, White House servers poured Hartford Court Chardonnay “Four Hearts Vineyard” 2021, St. Innocent Pinot Noir “Shea Vineyard” 2019 and Iron Horse Classic Vintage Brut 2020.

Once you’ve been invited to sit at the king’s table, once you’ve feasted on Biden’s buffet of political opulence, how could any bourgeois bureaucratic gorger think of anything but using both bloodstained hands to grab more and more and more for himself or herself?

Political hustlers can’t help bellying up to the trough to satisfy their gastronomic greed for sustenance that feeds their self-absorbed aspirations. Government gluttons all, America’s publicly-funded enablers of Palestinian annihilation are to blame for human devastation, cultural decimation and the end of the world as Gaza knew it.

How about those bananas?

Or should I say Banana Ganache?

BEWARE

a feared woman

with good reason

Ixtabay sits by the sea

awaiting tanned fishermen, spanish sailors or bearded pirates

men

always men

enter her web

and disappear

into their own excesses

don’t blame

Ixtabay

blame yourself

MOMENTS

our picture now graces the wall at abuelos

the young woman server at the small family restaurant

asked if she could snap our image

you’re a beautiful couple, she said

i ordered a large margarita with salt and lime

stephanie asked for the cabernet

a whole bottle so I could carry what she didn’t drink back to our hideaway to finish while listening to night waves wash over my mind

then i ordered modelo negra

ah, un otro, i said in my greenhorn spanish accent

guacamole

whole red snapper on the bone

sea steaks with yucatán paprika maya style

 creatures comfort creatures

THIRD EYE

an afternoon siesta in the sun

seems like a lousy idea

too hot to sleep beneath beach umbrellas anchored in the sand

who dares doze

on plush cushions stretched across seaweed free playa norte?

who orders orange neon drinks swimming in cracked ice delivered by young barefoot women wearing thin black ankle-length sundresses?  

never close your third eye

savor electric shivers up and down your pineal gland

intuition never sleeps

awareness is a dark frigate bird hanging in bright sky

almost motionless

a calling card to strangers

drifting in blue space

a ticking kite

an arcane kite

watching   

IGUANA

empty in peach sun

above the beach

morning drinks at the guru beach club

for world travelers rich enough to afford luxury

our terrace awakes to mango pudding heat and hummus humidity soaking rich and poor in mexican majesty or yucatán misery

swimming with the lizards isn’t for everybody

survival depends on the lizard

TURTLES

you couldn’t see them at first but they were out there

bobbing helmeted heads

riding the tide

ancient surfers from faraway lands a thousand miles away

swimming toward edgy earth to accept Ixchel’s help

in choosing a mate

connecting in cosmic unity

giving birth to new life that awakened in sifting sand before crawling slowly with baby turtle steps back to the sea

SATORI

my first drink off the menu brought mescal and pepper salt

to cracked dry lips

a welcome drink at the guru beach club bar

ah, good, sings a brown-faced jack kerouac diety in a song sung by a black messenger bird

sand seeker suckers at the bar don’t hear jack’s melody

i whistle back

through pineapple passion and lime juice spit

wetting my whistle to share knowledge I know

but not too much

no guru should know too much 

until the time comes to order another cocktail rimmed with

hot pepper salt and a double shot of  

enlightenment that comes served in a big glass

Maya moon goddess Ixchel guards the entrance to Punta Sur.  

Giver of life to humans and nature, she protects women above all, offering refuge on this island of women from pirates who plunder at their own risk.

Marauders die.

Ixchel lives.

Giving birth to purple rainbows, our mighty ancient diety gives us love when we most need her warm embrace.

Fierce when necessary, directing floods and storms, Ixchel punishes mad ravers who betray kindness.

A sea turtle sits atop her head. Other times a snake decorated with human bones wraps around her head and neck. Claws shape her feet. Holding a fertility fish, she brings nourishment and breath to the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula where we walk softly the sacred land of our earthly existence.

Surrounded by dancing palm trees, pristine white sandy beach and an aquamarine lagoon bordering the Caribbean Sea, I told the bartender where I was from.

“Scranton, Pennsylvania,” I said.

The deeply tanned young woman’s eyes immediately lit like burning turquoise gemstones glistening in the afternoon Mexican sun.

“No,” I said before she could respond. “Don’t tell me.”

“I love ‘The Office,’” she said, accommodating me in fluent English and digging into instant common ground we suddenly shared as strangers in Isla Mujeres, a tiny tropical island off the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula.

As far as she was concerned, idiot characters Dwight Schrute and Michael Scott from the American TV show are my lovable loser first cousins.

The next day, our guide for a tour in a golf cart — golf carts and scooters are ubiquitous on the island — picked us up at the Lotus Hotel with a smile offset by a brain loaded with local lore, history and deep cultural facts.

“Where are you from?” he wanted to know.

“Pennsylvania,” I said.

Blue eyes fired on all cylinders.

“Scranton?”

In a weird moment better suited for “The Twilight Zone,” another addictive American TV rerun, I knew I couldn’t escape the brand that shadowed my existence like a bad prison tattoo inked on my face.

“Somebody in the hotel told you,” I said.

The grin widened.

Nobody told him.

Sad to say, “The Office” now defines Scranton as the center of a nitwit universe populated by Dwight, Michael, Jim, Pam, Kevin and other imaginary friends who make the best of a dull and mundane life in my hardscrabble former coal town built by immigrants and their descendants who deserve better than a facetious comedy to label who and what we represent.

Scranton Mayor Paige Gephardt Cognetti actually endorses a plan to make the city more “walkable” that includes utilizing “The Office” as a theme. Jeff Speck, the urban design planner and a Boston-based business called Nelson\Nygaard pocketed $239,800  in Scranton’s American Rescue Plan Act funds for a “study” that  suggests and encourages placing statues of show characters throughout the city, resulting in what Speck called “a downtown rebirth of a magnitude that cannot yet be imagined.”

Speck spoke with a straight face.

“I think maybe you’re a little proud and you don’t want this to be your world image. I’ve got news for you,” Speck told the public last year when he and Cognetti unveiled their bubbleheaded plan. “It is your world image. And people love it and they love you because of it. And I think it’s a mistake to not hitch your wagon to the star and do something about it.”

I’d prefer hitching the wagon to Speck’s dorky vision so Cognetti (if she ever regains her intellect) can drive him and his asinine advice back to where he came from. I seriously urge the mayor to rethink her misplaced exuberance for foolishness and refuse to pay the publicly-funded consulting bill. Instead, Cognetti should loudly berate the carpetbaggers’ incompetence for even suggesting we showcase our tough still-struggling town as an insulting sideshow attraction that turns hard-working ethnically and racially-mixed people into an international laughing stock. 

Instead of Scranton shining on the world map because of our proud yet painful anthracite mining history, a past that still defines countless Scranton families including my own, a history of sacrifice, hard labor and achievement, Scranton looms synonymous with a harebrained television show.

Reviewers call the NBC mockumentary cringe-worthy and sarcastic – in too many ways the definition of Scranton community leaders who embrace contemporary cool rather than ancient coal in all its gory glory.

No one should fault our Mexican friends or anyone else for enjoying the show. The laugh’s on us. Ha ha. But stamping Scranton’s seal of approval with trademark tomfoolery and wallowing in its frivolity is like slinking into a VD clinic and asking for more disease instead of penicillin.

To make matters worse, rather than evolve with Mexico’s bold tradition of resistance and revolution, Maya brilliance and breath-taking natural environmental beauty, young Mexicans and who knows how many others globally embrace American pop culture at its worst with Scranton targeted as ground zero.

To our golf cart guide’s credit, his first stop included a three-paneled pastel color wall mural showing scenes from the Mexican Revolution that showcases women rebels, Zapata and Pancho Villa all cradling rifles above ferocious national emblems of the snake and eagle that mark Mexico as a powerful civilization.

I told our guide about the goofy Dwight Schrute wall mural near the National Bakery in Scranton. But I shamefully kept quiet about “The Office” cast mural that takes up another whole building wall in the heart of Scranton’s business district.

I had already related to the hotel bartender my personal experience with Rainn Wilson who plays Schrute in the show and how I once reached him on his cellphone when he blew off attending a local party with all the other stars of the “beloved” production. The bartender stood in awe as I described Wilson as whiny and incensed by my call, demanding and failing to find out where I got his private phone number and ordering me to never call him again.

I also told her about the recent foot race where 1,500 runners from across the country and the world flocked to Scranton to dress like their favorite “Office” character and run or walk down streets and past sites featured in the show that isn’t even filmed in wannabe hip Scranton but in too hip California.

“‘The Office’ used Scranton,” I said.

Only one other force of power and influence has used Scranton as much if not more. That singular dynamic phenomenon with hooks deep into Scranton’s roots is Joe Biden, a buffoonish caricature in aviator shades and an ice cream cone hat  who even has a new city street and nearby expressway named after him.

Our golf cart guide wanted to know if American voters will choose Trump or Biden in the November presidential election. How did this bright young man who flew a Palestinian freedom flag from his golf cart perceive a doddering American president getting sucked deeper and deeper into the Israeli genocide in Gaza he supports, enables and helps with taxpayer-funded bombs?

Good question, señor.

I later pondered his inquiry as our United Airlines flight home detoured presumably because of bad weather in the southeastern part of the United States. Our pilot hugged the Gulf coast east of New Orleans, cruising over Biloxi, Mississippi, Mobile, Alabama, La Grange, Georgia and other onetime hotbeds of slavery, heading north through the Confederacy American rebels are convinced will rise again as a beacon of conservatism in the land of cotton.

How do narrow-minded antebellum-brained right-wingers perceive “The Office,” Scranton and “Scranton Joe” who makes more and more of his “hometown” Scranton birthplace each day as he crisscrosses America begging for re-election votes?  Like Trump, endless Dixie rednecks still hate Blacks, Jews, women, immigrants, queers and blue-belly Northern elites like Biden. Do you think the average gumbo bar bouncer, shrimp fisherman or abused single mother serving beer in a hillbilly bar watches “The Office” reruns on days off and will vote for Biden?

Official Biden surrogates like Cognetti might unwittingly be doing Biden more harm than good as she cheers for “The Office” and Biden at the same time. The mayor better search deeper than the shallows of Biden loyalists’ minds for meaning as she sings along when Dwight Schrute and Michael Scott warble, “Ain’t no party like a Scranton party ’cause a Scranton party don’t stop.”

If voters turn on Biden, the party’s over.

On Thursday night, home in Scranton at last, I headed downtown for a tomato and basil pie. Standing outside Buona Pizza I watched a guy across the street take pictures of “The Office” mural. He snapped a shot, turned slowly in an aimless circle, snapped another and rotated in the other direction. Then he stood staring into space like he forgot where he was.

No, it wasn’t Joe Biden.

On second thought, maybe it was.

 you have too much, señor

we do not have enough

we will share with you what we have