Dear Family, Friends, and Colleagues,
First, I want to express my thanks for your thoughtful responses welcoming me back to substack - even from some of you who seldom agree with me!
In 1960, during the summer following my graduation from high school, I had three jobs. From 11pm to 7am I worked as a roving-frame-tender at Pandora Mills in the Manchester millyard. Then I would take a bus, go home, and clean-up (boy, did I need cleaning-up!) before going to work at Jim’s Men’s Shop on Hanover Street where the Georgopoulos family treated me like a extra son.
On weekends I worked at the Puritan Drive-In, mostly serving ice-cream and shakes, including to many kids with whom, just weeks earlier, I had gone to school.
The Puritan, a Manchester institution, was created and owned by the Pappas family. They were never anything but kind and generous to me - which made writing some parts of the column below a bit more difficult than usual.
Salamaat,
Robert
As a young photojournalist in the Levant I once took advantage of an assignment in Alexandria, Egypt to make a small pilgrimage to honor a poet I admired.
While I knew Alexandria both from Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet and as the location of one of the fabled seven wonders of the ancient world - The Lighthouse at Pharos - my objective that day was to have lunch at the rundown and decidedly untouristy Cecil Hotel, legendary as the hangout of Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933), whose work I had discovered as a teen.
Cavafy, described by E.M. Forster as “a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe,” was a civil servant by day, poet by night and, like other savants, revered more posthumously than in life.
Cavafy’s poem - In Che fece ...il gran rifiuto [He who made ... the Great Refusal] - explores the consequences of making tough choices in life, reframing the Great No as potentially tragic in a personal sense but also as a valid - and morally essential - act of personal and political integrity.
“To certain people there comes a day
when they must say the great Yes or the great No.
He who has the Yes ready within him
immediately reveals himself, and saying it he goes
against his honor and his own conviction.
He who refuses does not repent. Should he be asked again,
he would say no again. And yet that no —
the right no — crushes him for the rest of his life.”
- Constantine P. Cavafy
Cavafy acknowledges that voting “No” - even if it is the absolutely right and ethical choice - does not come without risks, that refusal may alter the personal and political trajectory of their life. Cavafy speaks to such a burden, especially when it results in a life of unanticipated sacrifice.
There are no guarantees in life, no advance warning when we are to be tested.
Earlier this month, in our House of Representatives, an amendment was offered to a State Department spending bill (H.R. 8595) that would have eliminated $3,300,000,000 in funding for Israel.
Predictably, because of near unanimous Republican support, the amendment failed 314-104.
However, 103 House Democrats who - not knowing whether it would crush them for the rest of their personal and political lives but knowing intuitively that it was the right thing to do - voted the Great No, expressing through their constitutionally-protected franchise disagreement, condemnation, and outage over Israel’s ongoing criminal behavior in the occupied Palestinian territories of Gaza, Jerusalem, and The West Bank, and in Lebanon and Iran.
NH Representative Chris Pappas (D) voted “Present.”
In his Inferno - a work which some scholars believe influenced Cavafy - Dante condemns to Hell the person who made “the great refusal” out of cowardice.
Today, I condemn Congressman Chris Pappas for his cowardice.
Not Yes. Not No.
Just Present.
When Chris Pappas first ran for Congress I wrote a column supporting him. I had worked for his grandfather - an immigrant from Greece - while I was in high school and never would have believed that any member of that family would ever ally themselves with agents of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
When, last week, nearly early half of the House Democrats voted to cut off aid to Israel, our congressman, Chris Pappas, voted “Present.”
He didn’t have the testicular fortitude for either the Great Yes or the Great No.
The AIPAC financed and supported coward voted “Present.”
New Hampshire’s Chris Pappas voted the Great Yes within him, and has revealed himself a coward.
Many Democrats voted the Great No that day.
Not Chris Pappas.
Chris Pappas voted as AIPAC instructed.
“When everything goes wrong,” wrote Nikos Kazantzakis in Zorba the Greek, “what a joy to test your soul and see if it has endurance and courage.”
Chris Pappas’s soul was tested - and it failed.
Remember that: He failed the Great No. He failed humanity. He failed you and me.
Say NO to Chris Pappas - vote a Great No.
Resist.
Stay strong.
Hold your keffiyeh close
Salamaat,
Robert
One of my great pleasures is owning a signed copy of the book Homage to Cavafy which contains 10 photographs by the late-great photographer Duane Michals, each accompanied by a poem by Cavafy. Michals died on June 9, 2026 age 94.
From Aperture Magazine:
Duane Michals doesn’t mince words—about his photography, or anyone else’s. And why should he? Born in 1932 in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, Michals had traveled the world by age thirty, from the truck stops of Texas to army service in Germany to the gray-gold landscape of Cold War Russia. By the mid-1960s, he found a home in downtown New York, a partner in the late architect Fred Gorrée, and the kind of success in commercial and editorial photography that allowed him to take risks in his own work: building sequences with the theatrical engagement of cinema, staging narratives about queer desires, and adding text in his unmistakable script. Michals risked sentimentality in pursuit of talking about “unphotographable things …
https://aperture.org/editorial/duane-michals-had-no-regrets/
Thank you again for welcoming me back!
Robert
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