WHAT'S IT ALL MEAN?

Everitt Dirksen, the late senator from Illinois, was famous for once remarking, “A billion here and a billion there, and before you know it, we’re talking about real money.” He should only have lived to see what’s happening today.

We need to put the amazing numbers floating around in some rational perspective. A billion here… a trillion there… what’s it all mean?

For example, we all know what $100,000 is. Many of us make that much or more in a single year, or we know someone who does. It’s not abstract. A hundred grand is a number we understand. So, do the math - how many years do you have to work to make a million bucks? Ten. Okay, you say – I can handle that. But, we are now giving away billions – not millions. Let’s try to get a grasp on exactly what this means. How long must you work, if you’re making a 100 grand a year, to make - not a million - but a billion? The answer is… ten thousand years. Yes, that right! It’ll take you that long. A word to the wise – you don’t have it in you, sorry.

If we just gave AIG $170 billion, what does the “we” part really amount to? Who are “we”? How many of “us” does it take to equal this so-called “we”?

The average household income in the United States is $53,100 – and for the most part it takes 2 wage earners to accumulate that much. That’s roughly half the 100 grand we’ve been talking about. For the average American household, instead of ten, it will take about 20 years to earn a million dollars. If you figure a lifetime of working at about 40 years, and you count two people healthy enough and skilled enough to manage that kind of effort, then your average American household will bring in about $2,000,000 in a lifetime. Of course, odds are they’ll need to spend every penny of that money – after taxes of course - just to stay alive… pay the mortgage, buy food, run the family car, send the kids to college… you know, that kind of stuff.

How much was it we just gave to AIG? Oh, yeah - $170 billion.

Remember, each billion dollars is a million dollars, a thousand times over!

And, each $1,000,000 represents the lifetime earnings of 2 American workers… multiplied by 1,000 - in order to make a billion - and then multiplied again by 170 to reach the $170,000,000,000… Or you could say it equals 340,000 working Americans.

So, we have given to one company – AIG – an amount of money equal to the lifetime earnings of 340,000 Americans… every single cent they’ll ever earn in their entire lives!

In order for a tiny group of men and women who have owned and operated AIG – and run it literally into the toilet - not to suffer the consequences of their enormous ineptitude and phenomenal incompetence, the results of 13,600,000 years of labor by 340,000 individuals have been gifted to the least deserving among us.

Why are we doing this? Does anyone know? Can you explain – specifically and exactly – what terrible things would happen if we allowed all these gangsters and their criminal enterprises to collapse inward upon themselves and fail? Don’t give me platitudes like… “The banking system will fail…” or, “The world’s financial systems will come tumbling down.” Tell me exactly what that means – exactly what will happen - How When, Where and Who.

Can you do that? Is any of what we’re doing worth what it's costing?

Can you tell me how “we” the taxpayers will ever get our money back?

And, if it’s not coming from your pocket and from mine, can you tell me where (besides a printing press) all this money is coming from?

HOW STUPID DO THEY THINK WE ARE?

How stupid do they think we are? And - be honest - how stupid are we… really?

Answer these six questions:

1. Who knew all about the AIG bonus payments, long ago, not just in the last week or two?
A) President Obama and his top economic advisors and Cabinet members.
B) The members of Congress, House and Senate, who are on the Banking Committee.
C) Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, George W. Bush and Henry Paulson.
D) All of the above.

2. Who knew – long ago – that mortgage based derivatives and credit swaps were destined to collapse and bring down the credit markets and the banking industry?
A) Nobody.
B) Only a tiny handful of very smart economists.
C) Lots of people in a number of US companies in the mortgage, banking and investment industries.
D) Thousands and thousands of people around the world in a host of companies involved in banking, hedge funds, mortgages and investments.

3. Who knows how to solve the economic mess we are all in now?
A) President Obama and his top economic advisors, including academics and Cabinet Officers.
B) Members of Congress.
C) Highly paid professionals still working in the world’s leading investment banking companies.
D) Nobody.

4. Why has the American dollar gained strength through all this crisis and chaos?
A) The fundamentals of our economy are sound.
B) The productivity of the American worker will assert itself eventually.
C) The vitality and integrity of the American business model is the envy of the world.
D) Forty-thousand nuclear weapons together with a worldwide air and naval force.

5. Why isn’t President Obama doing the right thing?
A) He is doing the right thing.
B) He’s trying to do the right thing.
C) It’s too early to know if he’s doing the right thing.
D) He hasn’t the slightest idea what the right thing is.

6. How screwed are we?
A) Blued.
B) Tattooed.
C) Royally.
D) All of the above.

PAPA'S BRACKETOLOGY

America loves “March Madness.” We like college basketball – but not really that much. But, never underestimate the power of gambling. Everyone loves to bet on something. We’ve chosen the annual tournament matching some of the best college basketball teams against one another, with a handful of undeserving, but handsomely paid, patsies thrown into the mix.

I mean, really… Binghamton is playing Duke? I beg your pardon. Isn’t that like the Little Sisters of the Poor playing the Pittsburgh Steelers, or you teeing it up against Tiger Woods? At least the powerhouse team from North Carolina will be properly tested, right? Wrong. They get to play a team from an institution of Higher Learning called Radford. Anyone ever heard of it? I didn’t think so.

If the match-ups aren’t immediately indicative of legitimate competitive action, why do we go so crazy about this? It’s all about the money. All across America, even Claude Raines knows BRACTETOLOGY is the word. Grease ain’t nothin’. Americans will bet more money on the NCAA College Basketball Tournament than on any event including the Super Bowl.

Papa wants to help. So, for all you devotees of P.T. Barnum, here are the NCAA First Round winners:

In the Midwest Region – LOUISVILLE, SIENA, ARIZONA, WAKE FOREST, DAYTON, NORTH DAKOTA STATE, USC and MICHIGAN STATE

In the East Region – PITTSBURGH, TENNESSEE, FLORIDA STATE, PORTLAND STATE, UCLA, VILLANOVA, TEXAS and DUKE.

In the South Region – NORTH CAROLINA, BUTLER, WESTERN KENTUCKY, GONZAGA, TEMPLE, SYRACUSE, CLEMSON and OKLAHOMA.

In the West Region – CONNECTICUT, TEXAS A&M, PURDUE, WASHINGTON, UTAH STATE, MISSOURI, MARYLAND and MEMPHIS.

Are there some upsets in there? Sure. Anyone can bet the chalk. As they say in the sports shoe biz – just do it! That should be enough to hold you for a while. But, for those too anxious to wait it all out, here’s your Final Four:

LOUISVILLE v MEMPHIS – and – NORTH CAROLINA v OKLAHOMA

The winner? The National Champion? --- MEMPHIS over NORTH CAROLINA 79-73!

Now, go out and make some big bucks.

PEGGY NOONAN HAS TOO MANY MIRRORS

Papa thinks Peggy Noonan, who came to prominence working for Ronald Reagan, “The Great Communicator” - by putting her words in his mouth - has too many mirrors in her house.

Ms. Noonan somehow believes it is she who confers credibility on American Presidents. I suppose, since she thinks she did it for one of them, with his approval, she has a license to pontificate forevermore.

In The Wall Street Journal, she proclaims that Barack Obama, in an instant of self-realization, “became” the President during a moment in his speech to Congress – a moment naturally of her choosing. She doesn’t add, but - in order for that to be true - we must assume Mr. Obama failed to comprehend his victory in the election we had last November. You almost wonder what he was doing in Grant Park that night thanking a quarter of a million people gathered to hear him speak. Likewise, he also missed out on understanding what the transition was all about. I wonder why he even bothered? And, of course, Mr. Obama completely lost track of the significance of his inauguration. Perhaps, the confusion between him and the Chief Justice was because Obama didn’t realize it was he who was taking the Oath of Office. We’ll have to ask Peggy.

According to Ms. Noonan, it was only last Tuesday, while on television, standing before a joint session of Congress, that Obama finally understood that he was indeed the President of the United States.

The difficulty I have with Ms. Noonan, and the entire panoply of conservative pundits, is — they feel that until they declare the legitimacy of a President, he has none. Until she casts it aside, he is only a doubtful Chief Executive. Where was her analysis for our last doubtful POTUS? The 2000 election was as corrupt and destructive of honor, dignity and whatever it is we are fond of calling “democracy,” as any since 1824 or 1876. History has taught us little or nothing.

In January 2001, we inaugurated the loser of our election — and we never lifted a finger to object, except perhaps to order another glass of wine. If she had her legitimacy concerns about Bush 43 then, as she seems to indicate she did, now - Peggy Noonan kept them to herself — for eight long years.

Today, while announcing Obama’s newfound Presidential legitimacy, Noonan compares it to her old favorite and trumpets the Reagan victory in 1980 conveniently overlooking his despicable and near traitorous secret and illegal interference with Iran, during that campaign, urging them not to make a deal on the American hostages with Jimmy Carter. Nor does Ms. Noonan make any mention of her hero’s payback to Iran’s ruling clerics via arms shipments engineered in the White House by the bottom-dwelling Col. Oliver North. That’s legitimacy? For Peggy Noonan, it appears to qualify.

She goes on to praise Bush 41 as a symbol of the only other legitimate Presidency in recent times. Again she forgets. Of all the American Presidents who ever ran for a second term, Bush 41 received the smallest percentage of the vote in our national electoral history. Where Papa comes from, that equals a thunderous rejection of his Presidency by the American people. That’s a far cry from legitimacy.

And, yes, Peggy Noonan asserts that Bill Clinton, who actually won his election and then actually won his reelection too, was not a legitimate President. Reagan, YES – Clinton, NO. Like Papa said, too many mirrors in her house.

If I may once more associate myself favorably with a cinematic bunch of Mexican gold bandits... I don't need no Peggy Noonan to tell me who my President is.

BASEBALL & STEROID STATISTICS: WHAT A MESS

With this A-Rod steroid business there's a lot of new talk about the statistics compiled by steroid users. What do we do with Barry Bonds, McGuire, Sosa and the others? Do we reestablish Henry Aaron as Home Run leader? Babe Ruth?

The problem: baseball is a team sport, and every play, every ground ball, every hit, every piece of strategy involves the statistics of many ballplayers simultaneously. For example, do we take away Roger Clemens victories, or even some of them? If we do - if we don't count the games he pitched in his later years - what do we do with the statistics of the hitters who batted against him? If you take away a Win from Clemens what about taking the Loss from the pitcher who lost that game?

What if a player batted .298 in a season in which he was 0-6 against Clemens - what do we do? Take away those 6 hitless at-bats and refigure his batting average which would now be over .300? How do we make up the extra money that hitter did not get paid that he might have as a .300 hitter?

What about the pitchers who faced Bonds? Do we take away the home runs given up, refigure the wins and losses and reevaluate the ERA? If you take away Bonds' RBIs, do you also take away the Runs Scored for the players on base when he homered? Eliminate Bonds' intentional walks and then what - take away all the RBIs of the hitters who followed him and knocked in runs?

How about all the games Bonds, McGuire, Sosa and the others (do we even know who these others are?) were responsible for winning? If you take away their statistics, do we change the wins and losses for the games they personally influenced and alter the season standings? How about changing the World Series results?

There seems to be no workable solution other than to just "take it all into consideration" when coming to an opinion. If you don't accept Bonds, then Aaron is your Home Run champ. If you vote for the Hall of Fame, you can decide not to induct any steroid user. But when it comes to game statistics, you can't make it good... for all concerned, can you?

PRESIDENT OBAMA - TAKE A LESSON FROM FRED C. DOBBS

Why is everyone so worried about how the Congressional Republicans feel, what they think, why they don’t like the stimulus plan now before Congress and what they might want in return for their votes?

Has Papa missed something? Didn’t we have elections? Didn’t the Democrats win – in the House – in the Senate – and the White House too? Have the Democrats forgotten what winning means?

Haven’t we just finished 8 years of a Republican administration that didn’t give a rat’s ass what the Democrats felt or thought or what they might have wanted? What was it the right-wing’s radio drug-fatty said about bending over and grabbing your ankles?

The President and the Congressional Democrats need to stand up – straight up.

As far as Papa is concerned, we didn’t vote for Obama – and we didn’t provide him with solid majorities in both houses of Congress – so he could sit down with the GOP and grovel for their unnecessary votes. If the Republicans want to get something, in terms of legislation, let them go out and elect majorities in the House of Representatives and in the Senate. Until they manage that electoral challenge, let them learn the meaning of being in the minority.

We elected Obama based on what he promised, and I have no recollection of any speeches he gave during that stirring campaign in which he said he would cow-tow to the Old Guard in the Republican Party before sending new legislation to Congress.

Papa’s advice to President Obama – send your plan to Congress and make sure your own party votes for it. That’s all you need to do to make it law. I know you’re not really old enough to remember the great American movie, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” Too bad… because right now – at this moment in political history – you don’t need no stinkin’ Republicans. And it would be nice if you could see Humphrey Bogart warning his opposition: “Any more lip out of you and I’ll haul off and let you have it. If you know what’s good for you, you won’t monkey around with Fred C. Dobbs.” Mr. President – try that line on the GOP the next time they start yapping.

Papa’s word to media – stop already with all the stuff about the Republicans in Congress. To the children who serve as TV producers - you need to look up the meaning of the word: irrelevant. In our system, you can’t have a legislative controversy, and a bill is never in question, unless there are two possible outcomes. Since every Republican in both the House and Senate can vote against every bill introduced by the Democratic leadership – and every bill will still pass anyway – when will the media realize that the Congressional Republicans simply don’t matter anymore.

JEWISH DISEASE

For fifty years, I have been struck by the transformation which grips so many liberal, secular, humane American Jews – and I have known plenty -- when talk turns to Israel.

Recently, I think of the phenomenon as a condition of mind, an emotional affliction. Possibly something akin to William Kunstler’s highly debatable “Black Rage” syndrome, at least in its intensity and ethnic peculiarity. Sometimes I think of it as “Jewish Disease.”

By which I mean -- what?

In a word, “Israel.” In a phrase, “An emotional attachment to Israel and its perceived interests.”

The term describes a set of connected feelings, thought patterns, and behaviors -- in this case mainly verbal and expressive behaviors, except where emigrant settlers from Philadelphia and Brooklyn are involved.

I would not label Armenian-Americans’ historic sentiments this way, or Japanese-Americans’ fascination with Hawaii, or Italian-American braggadocio or Boston’s weakness for the IRA. This in a class by itself because of the involved feelings, ideation, and consequences.

Feelings Associated with Jewish Disease

This condition is distinguished by loyalty and anger.

The intensity of the sufferer’s loyalty may influence his or her susceptibility to rage. More likely, anger levels will reflect the individual’s general emotional equilibrium.

Loyalty has probably been with us from our pack days.

At the national level, it is conventionally awarded to one’s own country, native or adopted. Divided loyalties have been all too frequently attributed to “foreign” communities -- East African Hindus, Indonesian Chinese, European Jews. Such communities have been persecuted -- in at least two of these cases, genocidally -- for alleged lack of national loyalty.

Many American Jews experience deep loyalty to Israel. Even those nominally critical of Israel’s expansionist behavior or ad hoc theology identify themselves fiercely with its prerogatives. I have asked J. D. sufferers which country would command their loyalty should the two become antagonistic -- and heard a range of answers.

Most Americans do not regard Israeli loyalties as a fault. More often, Zionist sentiments are considered admirable by Jews and non-Jews alike. This will probably continue until Israel is popularly perceived as causing more trouble than it is worth.

Loyalty cannot be considered pathological, except when wrongly attached, i.e. to a criminal organization, destructive person, or wrong-headed cause. Then it may contribute to a social or political pathology. Patriotism is one good example. Many progressive J.D. sufferers reject bellicose American flag-waving for the horrors it enables. They will not renounce the other nearly so quickly.

Anger has a more distinctly harmful profile. Symptomatic of other psychiatric conditions, anger causes violence. Symptomatic of Jewish Disease, anger impedes clear thought and disrupts friendly gatherings. Get these people started and they cannot let it alone.

Some yell. Some leave the room. Some seethe. All interrupt. It is a compulsive, abiding anger. It suggests inner conflict. The people I know -- know better. I know that. They see footage of babies blown apart and think … I can’t imagine what.

But they behave as though impelled to defend the practice. Often as not, the defense become enraged.

Thought Patterns Associated with Jewish Disease

The condition permits harmonious persistence of these two fundamentally contradictory ideas: 1. Israel serves as a refuge and safe haven for all Jews, and 2. Jews face graver danger in Israel than anywhere else.

Sufferers defend this paradox largely by ignoring or denying it. They address other factual and moral contradictions with an array of well-known, vigorously asserted ideas.

Grounding all these ideas is the proposition that hostile Muslim behavior must always be seen in its worst light, and all hostile Israeli behavior in its best light. This master conceit enables:

An opportunistic attachment to the word: “terrorist.”

This arrangement of syllables has come a long way since Ariel Sharon used it to describe any unappreciative person or suspect action in occupied Lebanon twenty five years ago. It got a mighty boost on 9/11. Some think that’s why Israelis jumped for joy on the Jersey side of the Hudson as they watched the towers tumble.

Since then, it has become a sacrament for hundreds of millions. J.D. sufferers pronounce it compulsively during any discussion of the Middle East. It’s used to describe all active resistance to the hostile occupation of Palestine.

The phrase operates like a drug in bucking up outrage and short-circuiting errant focus on contravening facts or reasons.

It dominates the vast rattle of talking head opinion in print, and on radio, network, and cable TV – where the condition is endemic in its core form and its non-Jewish variation: Jewish Disease by Proxy.

Emphasis on hostile thoughts.

Hostile thoughts include belief systems and verbalizations written or spoken – real, imagined, or mistranslated for the purpose.

Often, hostile expressions and beliefs are presented as requiring a decisive physical response. For example, the Israelis must impose a devastating blockade on Gaza because Hamas denies Israel’s right to exist. Iran may need to be bombed because its leaders aspire to nuclear weapons and Ahmedinjad wants to wipe Israel off the map. The Jewish state is justified in bombing houses as long as Jew Hatred prevails because they all want to kill Jews and teach their children that Jews are bad.

Jewish Disease rules out consideration of whether or not the hostile words and thoughts suggest ability to do harm. The words are the problem; thoughts pose threats; intent equates to danger.

Listen to the language. The theme predominates.

Here, Jewish Disease resembles other paranoid formations by confusing real or imagined hostile wishes with material threats. Of course, it is the rare paranoid who gets to level the neighborhood.

The deeply held conviction that Israel faces an existential threat from the Muslim world.

The word “existential” denotes a threat to existence – in this case to the existence of the state of Israel. It has no other reasonable meaning. With regard to the existence of the Jewish state:
Israel has dominated the region militarily since 1967, when its attack on three Arab nations demonstrated invulnerability to military defeat. Its only reversal came in Israeli-occupied Egypt in 1973, from which embarrassment Israel was rescued by the United States -- then as now reliably influenced by the Israeli interest – using the arguably dangerous tactic of nuclear threat against the Soviet Union.

Since 1973 Israel has repeatedly invaded Lebanon without a hint of intervention from other Muslim lands. Israelis have overflown, invaded, and wiped out Lebanese and Palestinians at will and whim -- in ways that other nations rarely do – with fully merited confidence in their ability to do so without risk. They have bombed Syria and Iraq with equal impunity. They have meddled directly in the politics of Iran, Lebanon, and Iraq without fear of consequence.
They have occupied and exploited Syrian and Lebanese territory for decades and presently – without any physical challenge whatsoever from Syria, and only small-arms, local resistance from Hezbollah.

Having attacked Lebanon in 2006, Israel experienced only slight damage and limited casualties from the best rockets which Iran-supplied Hezbollah had available. The Gaza massacre of 1/09 encountered no respectable military resistance.

Israel has, for many years, been at formal, functioning peace with Egypt and Jordan. Currently, it enjoys tacit alliance with Saudi Arabia against Hamas and Hezbollah. Fatah maintain this alliance explicitly.

Israel’s military is described as the world’s fourth most powerful. It has a huge atomic arsenal. It confronts two non-state militias lacking heavy equipment of any kind – supplied by a beleaguered Iran which itself has slight military significance outside its borders.

Further, Iran’s alleged nuclear aspirations, even if fully realized, could never constitute a threat to Israel’s existence – unless one sees Iran willing to annihilate as many Shia and Sunni Muslims as Jews, and eager to experience its own annihilation within minutes.  

Rarely have a single year’s suicide bombing deaths approached the number of innocent Israeli men, women, and children slaughtered by other Israelis in traffic accidents. Since 1983, the ratio is about ten to one. The most successful violent killers of Jews in Israel are its notoriously homocidal and suicidal drivers. Yet even they prompt no existential uncertainty.

No hostile army has set foot on present-day Israeli soil since 1948.

Still, Jewish Disease reduces its victims to jabbering robotically about the ongoing Muslim threat to Israel’s existence.

 
The tactical elevation of explicit, announced intent as the sole criterion for moral culpability.

Israel has, over the years, killed and wounded many times more Palestinians than the number of Israelis killed and wounded by Palestinians.

According to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, just over two thousand Israeli civilians and military have been killed by Arab terrorists from 1920 to 2008. Since 2000, the IDF identifies 431. Within weeks, the IDF killed almost 1400 Gazans and wounded another six thousand including many children. In the 2006 war, another thousand Lebanese civilians died. Over time, and with military deaths included, the disparity grows dramatically.

J.D. ideation dictates that one crucial difference offsets this imbalance: most of the dead Gazans – like the dead Lebanese and other Arabs -- were not intended targets. (For these purposes we leave aside the many Palestinian children shot through the head and upper torso - arguably odd endings for individuals not marked as intended targets.)

Conversely, the far lesser numbers of Israelis slaughtered and maimed weigh more heavily on the scale of moral judgment because their deaths were intended.

This distinction recognizes only first degree murder as a crime. Murder in the second gets a pass. Reckless disregard has no meaning in this context. Neither does predictability of outcome. What makes homicide a culpable act is the specific, overtly avowed intention to kill civilians. Absent that single, announced intent, homicide is readily justifiable -- certainly when performed by the IDF.

This view effectively equates harm to very, very few Jews – with harm to many, many Palestinians.

The intentional deaths and woundings of tens – again, tens -- of Jews by rocket fire (and the psychological burdens imposed on thousands more) is rendered by the prism of Jewish Disease more egregious and less tolerable than the wholly predictable killing, maiming, traumatizing, and stunting of thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians – although that behavior itself drives additional killings and woundings of Jews – which in turn sinks the Palestinian or Lebanese force deeper into moral culpability -- from which Israelis are excused because, in the words of the adorable scamp of an elder brother who has mutilated the younger yet again, “It was only an accident, Ma.”

This exclusive recognition of specific, first-degree intent is increasingly used to trump the notion of proportionality – the idea that you cannot invade and destroy Poland because of a border incident, or devastate Gaza within a week because toy rockets without guidance systems have killed and wounded a handful of Israelis over several years.

Proportionality is a fundamental provision of international law. Yet it is denounced as irrelevant by the noted J.D. sufferer Tom Friedman, who duly notes that only Palestinians intentionally target civilians.

I do not know Tom Friedman. But the people I do know would not allow themselves within miles of such depraved thinking – were it applied to any other set of actors in the world.

 
The abiding presence of anti-Semitism.

Where would J.D. sufferers be without it? In fairness, the tactic of scare-calling is as old as the Judean hills, or the Hittite plains. There have always been magical words and they have always been used to disqualify opposing ideas.

Jewish Disease is notable for its attachment to the associated beliefs that: 1. Serious criticism of Israel or frank anti-Zionism indicates hostility to Jews, or “Jewishness” 2. Hostility to Jews disqualifies the source as fair, objective, or moral, and 3. This applies to Jews as well as anyone else.

The fragrant term “self-hating Jew” has always been a red flag for the condition. This is important because Jewish Zionists and anti-Zionists lead attempts to resist the Israeli agenda – here and in Israel. As American Jews fling back the charge of self-hatred with increased vigor and public notice, the discussion opens up.

Jewish Disease also implies acceptance of anti-Semitism on the part of Israel’s friends. Most notably, whack evangelists leeringly anticipate the annihilation of unconverted Jews as they strut beside Israeli leaders and enjoy the affection of Jews skilled at spotting self-haters at fifty yards.

Billy Graham set the tone years ago, noting on the Nixon tapes that although he condemns Jewish media shennanigans (as did Nixon) Jews love him anyway because all they care about is his support for Israel.

Anti-Semitism is a dangerous sentiment with ongoing potential for great harm. It is also a social fact susceptible of rational inquiry. Jewish Disease tends to deny such analysis.

J.D. thinking extends a broad Western reluctance to analyze anti-Semitism as resulting in any way from culpable Jewish behavior (which line of inquiry has been attempted by Israeli scholars.)

Fair enough. I can understand why we decline to explore the economic impact of carpet-bagging Jewish interests on property relations in Austria after World War I as a factor shaping the direction of anti-Semitism in Vienna in the ‘20s. This may or may not represent a useful area of study – but even if it does, it seems creepy to me.

Not so the impact of Israeli behavior on feelings toward Jews. I don’t think there’s much rational question about this: Zionism and its consequences ignite most of the anti-Semitism with which Europe, Asia, and Africa are currently afflicted. Israeli behavior and global Jewish support for that behavior trip anti-Jewish outrage among Algerians in France, Indonesians in Amsterdam, Shia and Sunni in Baghdad, Greeks and Turks together.

In terms of practical harm alleged, the worst of the old-fashioned anti-Semitic canards fail to cover what has transpired in Palestine 1947-1948, in Lebanon in 1982, 1996, and 2006, in the West Bank and Gaza, 2009 – the disappeared villages, cluster bombs, white phosphorous, self-righteous war on ambulances and schools. What blood liable approaches this scale of dispossession and carnage?

This is certainly how most of the Muslim world and many elsewhere feel about it.
Who can calculate the spread of anger loosed by these activities? Repeatedly and relentlessly, Israeli behavior creates anti-Semitism. Since World War II anti-Semitic feeling can be reasonably viewed as a cost of the Zionist project increasingly more consequential than any antidote offered by it.

However, J.D.’s symptomatic formula casts anti-Semitism as: 1. The cause of anti-Zionist and anti-Israel animus, 2. An apparently irreducible aspect of human nature, and 3. A peril faced by all Israelis and Diaspora Jews -- regardless of individual circumstance.

The unmanageable threat of anti-Semitism serves as a persistent justification for all the moral deformities we have seen. The mystique of primordial, uncaused anti-Semitism is a prominent feature of Jewish Disease.  

Consequences of Jewish Disease

The Israeli interest helps shape American policy. To do so, it draws on the money and genius of powerful American Jews backed by the reliable support of most ordinary Jews, adaptive politicians, and right-wing Christian allies (in the grip of Jewish Disease by Proxy cum Religious Mania.)

The prevalence of J.D. unifies the powerful and the ordinary, the circumcised and the goyim behind the Israeli interest – which usually asserts a right wing perspective, regardless of the Israeli party in power.

To the extent that Jewish Disease continues to dominate these groups, it will continue to enable Israel by compelling Congressional support for Israeli preferences. To the extent that J.D.’s influence retreats, the Israeli interest’s grip on American policy will be weakened, and Israel’s behavior will necessarily modify.

The Future of Jewish Disease

I believe that the main factor working to limit Jewish Disease is generational. Polls suggest that younger Jews are, on average, less afflicted than their elders. Most J-boomers grew up with Israel front and center. Many of their children did not. Now, many Jewish kids think of Israel as just another country. Increasing numbers are learning to stand against it.

Jewish Disease may undergo gradual modification as more left-leaning friends of Israel compete for influence with the entrenched rightist leadership – and as the massacres continue. As J-Street and more radical outfits offer attractive alternatives to the described ideology, some relaxation may occur.

Should these trends attenuate the impact of Jewish Disease, voices and dollars may drift from the traditional leadership and mass indifference may mitigate support for the old agenda. Liberal heroes may crawl out from under rocks to honor their finer instincts.

Then, American policy may desert Israel’s expansionist project. The Jewish State will have to accept a now gasping Geneva/Arab League solution predicated on 1967 borders, and accept the risk of civil war -- or face real pain at the hands of a fed-up world.

If this country experiences a 9/11 encore – and especially if the perpetrators identify American support for Israel as a precipitating cause – pro-Israel feeling may quicken. Jewish Disease fattens on reactive American hysteria so another attack could well give J.D. a secure and expanding place in the frightened American heart.

On the other hand, Americans might decide that continuing to underwrite the Zionist dream is no longer worth the loss of buildings, neighborhoods, or business districts in Chicago or L.A.

Bombing rice paddies is how John McCain hoped to turn Vietnam against Ho. Leveling homes and civic buildings is how Ehud Barak hoped to pry Gaza loose from Hamas. Ditto Hitler and London. It hasn’t worked yet.

But America is, by its own definition, always the great exception.

HELL FREEZES OVER... TODAY, AT NOON!

On this special day, Papa wishes he were still in the broadcasting business. There are times when nothing compares to running a radio station – especially a black radio station – when it comes to political satire, irony and just plain good-natured silliness.

Back in the day… at WAOK Radio in Atlanta, Georgia, we had things like “Commander Neville DuPree’s Fighter Jet Traffic Reports” – always flying too high and going too fast to ever see any traffic jams down below – and our locally famous series of “Celebrity Interviews” minus, of course, the actual celebrity we were supposed to be interviewing. Yes, we made it all up. Yes, you were supposed to figure that out if you were listening. Yes, sometimes there were a few listeners who… missed it… And no, we never got sued.

What would I be doing today, if I still could? I would have news reporters – live! – all across the southern states, broadcasting from the gravesites of people like Governors Wallace and Faubus of Alabama and Arkansas, Senators Strom Thurmond and Herman Talmadge of South Carolina and Georgia… and any one of a dozen or more places you could name. We’d call it “Earthquake Watch ’09,” and we would be looking for the ground to start shaking and the bodies to begin rolling over. And, yes we would – we would have the radio station’s Science Reporter (we'd have to make that up too) on full alert to report on "Hell Freezing Over" today - at the stroke of noon.

Today, in America, a black man will be sworn-in as President of the United States.

MADNESS

The Times of 1/19/09 includes these two articles about Gaza.

Page 6 carries the headline: “Shocked and Grieving Gazans Find Bodies Under the Rubble of Homes.” It pictures and describes some of the horrors experienced by civilians, with appropriate emphasis on dead and wounded children.

The first page carries a News Analysis above the fold which is headed: “Parsing Gains of Gaza War” with the subhead, “Israel Cannot Be Sure of Lasting Deterrence.”

The last paragraph on the first page reads as follows: “The Israeli theory of what it tried to do here is summed up in a Hebrew phrase heard across Israel and throughout the military in the past weeks: ‘baal habayit hisdtageya’ or ‘the boss has lost it.’ It evokes the madman who cannot be controlled.”

The currency of this phenomenon is reported and acidly condemned by Uri Avnery, the great Israeli leftist, in a Counterpunch article today.

The Israeli’s crazy boss theory mimics Richard Nixon’s madman logic; the crazier they think we are, the less likely they are to resist us.

An Israeli “former national security advisor” is quoted as follows: “The phrase means that if our civilians are attacked by you, we are not going to respond in proportion, but will use all means we have to cause you such damage that you will think twice in the future.”

The corollary seems to me this: “We may therefore do whatever we like to you without fear that you will respond by attacking our civilians. As our military is entirely beyond your reach, you will have no means of retaliating, which will allow us to operate entirely as we choose.”

The article continued directly below the national security advisor’s quote (re Shock and Ruin) substantiates what the phrase “all means” comes down to in practice.

“All means” include economic blockade leading to malnutrition and medically preventable deaths; the widespread slaughter and maiming of civilians; the systematic destruction of private and public property including civic and government buildings, universities, refugee facilities, food depots; the repeated killing of medics and shooting of ambulances, etc.

Routinely, these events have been described as collateral damage unavoidably caused by legitimate pursuit of military targets. The “crazy boss” idea suggests something quite different – a strategic philosophy applicable not only to Gaza but to Lebanon, Jenin, and wherever else the results have been similar.

The “crazy boss” mindset suggests the purposeful creation of horrors so intense as to paralyze the enemy’s ability to resist. It suggests the imposition of sufficient pain on civilians to frustrate any and all attacks and counter-attacks. In other words, it defines “terror” in the most explicit and unequivocal use of that widely misapplied word. It evokes Lidice.

The charge of “state terror” is hardly new, especially in this context. But it is a choice rarity to have all the elements so frankly displayed on the front and inner pages of the New York Times.

The newspaper of record shows us general depravity -- prevalent popular indifference to, and support for, the destruction of civilians in large numbers, and the reduction of civilian life to rubble. This much is now writ large in the public square – unpainted by euphemism, naked as flesh.

Not all of us find this a revelation. In our view, it carries forward quite naturally Israeli history and the history of resistance to Israeli expansions and occupations – from the start.

Nor is this kind of thing unique to the neighborhood. It thrives today in Congo and Sudan, and on a far grander scale than anything Israelis or Palestinians have ever contemplated. It once defined the history of Europe, and the Americas. It recently devastated East Timor, Southeast Asia, South Asia.

The struggle against mass depravity seems always to have been an uphill effort.

What is currently unique about Israel’s situation is the Jewish state’s ability to involve nearly the whole of the West in its generous use of massively applied terror as an instrument of national, and in this case mini-imperial, policy. The Tamil Tigers, Russian Army, Sudanese militias, Rwandan business agents, Zimbabwean police, Khmer Rouge, CIA, Taliban, Al Quaeda, Indonesian military … all have excited widespread Ministerial and Presidential condemnation of their dreadful tactics.

Even the United States has been obliged to denounce and deny the military and informal terrorism it has sponsored here, there, and everywhere.

Where the Holy Land is concerned, the American government – right, left, and center – vigorously asserts Israel’s right to do whatever it wants, when and for whatever reason it wants to do it. Comrades Sanders and Feingold vote “yes” in full knowledge of the mayhem they are blessing and the justifications offered.

The Europeans, who sometimes show at least the fragmental decency required to look embarrassed by their own moral decrepitude, dare not speak aloud in responsible tones.

Alone in the West, Venezuela and Bolivia object unequivocally.

The madman theory is, of course, the psychological underpinning of all terror – whether feebly implemented by slaves under lash or more robustly by colonizers maintaining order.

When strong, armed-to-the teeth nations put the madman theory to work on a massive scale with compulsive regularity, we are at least tempted to consider how the violently insane are, and must be, treated in other circumstances -- confined when possible, or, in rare and tragic circumstances, put down.

Anti-Semitism in The Sun Also Rises

I just finished The Sun Also Rises, again, although it was so long since I first read it that this might have been the first time. Re-reading something good is like meeting up with an old friend and realizing that you didn’t really know them.
One thing I had forgotten was that Anti-Semitism is a character in the story, as important as any other. It was directed at Robert Cohn by all -- Jake, Brett, Bill and Michael. “The Jew,” “the morose Jew,” “the damned Jew,” “doesn’t he know he’s not wanted,” “don’t you know that you’re not wanted,” “don’t you know that Brett doesn’t want you here,” “why don’t you just get the hell out of here and leave us” – over and over again like a drum beat so regular that you forget about the headache it gives.
But Jake, while he succumbs to the rant at times, hates Cohn not for being Jewish but for having been with Brett. I could not help feeling that Hemingway was drawing the picture of Anti-Semitism as an odious character, and Cohn as a sad but heroic person. Certainly, it is not anti-Semitic that Cohn was a boxing champion at Princeton and then have Cohn thrash Jake and Michael (together) when he could no longer bear their insults, and go on to beat Romero, the bull fighter, to a bloody pulp when he finds him and Brett together.
Cohn is treated with contempt by Jake's friends with some justification. Yet I found myself recoiling from the anti-Semitism that supported their contempt and finding it repulsive in these otherwise exceptional and amusing characters. I give Hemingway too much credit to believe that my revulsion at their anti-Semitism was unintended. Hemingway’s own distaste is revealed when Michael, a Scotsman and Brett’s fiancé, tells Jake that the Jews take their interest up-front when they advance to Brett her allowance each month, and then Michael says, “They are not really Jews, they’re actually Scots -- we just call them Jews.”
Perhaps I identify with Cohn because our names are Robert, we are Jews, we boxed at Ivy League colleges, we hung-out with people more interesting than ourselves and we could be humiliated by a beautiful woman who cared nothing for us. Nevertheless, I take comfort in my view that Hemingway preferred Cohn to Anti-Semitism. (We take comfort where we can find it.)