At this moment all across America, people are reflecting on one single event, the assassination of John F. Kennedy. There are millions of people of a certain age who can tell you just where they were, what they were doing and what everyone else was doing at the moment it was announced that he’d been shot. Undoubtedly, his assassination, like the bombing of Pearl Harbor a generation before or the September 11, 2001 attack two generations hence, became the defining moment of the baby boomer generation. Books upon books upon books have been and still are written about every detail of the assassination, and the theories range from radical conspiracy theories of every color to the notion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Today, I’m finally asking a question that’s been plaguing me for years. Why? Not, “why was he killed,” or “why didn’t the Secret Service prevent it,” but why is Kennedy so venerated by our culture, and veneration is just what we do, make no mistake about it.
How many people in the year 1930, let us say, still held candlelight vigils and could tell you just where they were on these two dates: July 2, 1881 and September 14, 1901? If you didn’t recognize them, you’re not alone. I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t looked them up. The first is the day President James Garfield was shot and killed by Charles Guiteau in the 6th Street station of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad. The second date is the day President William McKinley died of his wounds after Leon Czolgosz shot him eight days before on the 6th. In fact, I guarantee you that most Americans wouldn’t recognize the names Garfield or McKinley as the names of presidents. No, the president that Kennedy is most often compared with is Lincoln, Honest Abe as he’s often called.
“But wait a minute,” you might be saying, “Kennedy was much more accomplished than either of those two guys, and the technology available to the media was light years beyond what was around in 1901.” I grant the second point readily enough. But as to the first, let me advance what’s going to prove to be an unpopular hypothesis, but one I find defensible. Kennedy wasn’t that remarkable a president. I don’t mean he was a bad president, just a slightly better than average one. So why the idolizing?
Kennedy’s presidency is known mainly for four things: his handling of the Russians during the Cuban Missile Crisis, his green lighting of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, his push for civil rights legislation, and his death. His handling of Russia during October of 1962 was shrewd and effective, no doubt. Still, it’s not as though Kennedy thought of some brilliant way to end the situation. Back channel negotiations by both diplomats and spies was necessary to guide both sides, which wanted out, towards a workable and face-saving solution. The Cuban Missile Crisis is, to my way of thinking, the only truly exceptional event in Kennedy’s administration, and now most high school kids would probably give you a blank look if you asked them what they knew about it. As for the other events, the Bay of Pigs is an unmitigated disaster, a point even the most ardent Kennedy fans would agree with me about.
What about civil rights? It is true that Kennedy was in favor of and issued calls for sweeping civil rights legislation. It’s possible that without his call for civil rights legislation in his speech of June 20, 1963, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 wouldn’t have happened. but it was Johnson’s administration that made it happen. Johnson’s particular brand of power politicking as president, plus his playing on the fact of Kennedy’s recent death, got the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through its many congressional hurdles, and we’re all the better for it and the laws that followed. Who can say, however, whether Kennedy would, with Johnson stuck as his vice president, have been able to muster the votes and the force of persuasion needed to get Congress to pass the bill? That remains a question mark.
Even if we grant that Kennedy’s conduct during the latter half of October 1962 was most commendable and that he at least started the process of broad-based civil rights reform, does that fully explain our cultural idolizing of the man? I don’t think it does. Kennedy’s time in the Whitehouse is popularly referred to as the Age of Camelot, with all the associations of knighthood and chivalry that that term carries with it. Again, why? Was it because Kennedy, like Lincoln, the president with whom he is most often compared, is a rags to riches hero, a poor boy who made it big, who got his American Dream? Well, not exactly. To say that Kennedy came from a background of extensive wealth and power would be rather like saying that Bill Gates is financially rather well off. His father, Joseph P. Kennedy SR., was both extremely well connected and extremely determined that his son, Joe JR. become president. The death of the younger Joseph Kennedy during World War II caused the pater familias' ambitions to fall on John. His power brokering during JFK’s senatorial and presidential bids was indispensable to John’s winning both his senate seat and the Whitehouse. In an often repeated anecdote, JFK was once asked how much his father had helped him during his presidential election. The president is reported to have said that his father called him up on the eve of the election and asked how many votes he needed to win, because he, Joseph, wasn’t paying for a landslide victory. Still, no one should hold this against JFK. Family connections and money, lots of money, are at the heart of almost every presidential election since about 1800. But it is a sharp contrast between the two iconic presidents, Lincoln and Kennedy.
Do we call Kennedy’s time in office the Age of Camelot because Kennedy was a man of strong moral character, an example to the people and a role model for how people should live their lives? Not really. In fact, the number of sexual dalliances Kennedy conducted in the Whitehouse, not to mention anywhere else he could manage, is staggering and possibly unknown. It makes the Lewinsky affair look like peanuts, actually. One interesting illustration of the cultural differences between now and then is the media’s behavior concerning Kennedy’s private life. No president today could get away with the things he did, Franklin D. Roosevelt either for that matter. Presidential dalliances didn’t start with Kennedy, to be sure, and they didn’t end with him either.
The designation of the time of Kennedy’s administration as the Age of Camelot dates back, so far as I can tell, to a November 29, 1963 interview with the recently widowed Jacqueline. More important than the origins of the term, however, is its continued use. In answer to my own question, I submit that we venerate JFK not necessarily for anything he did as president, but because as the youngest ever president, he exemplifies the culture of youth and perceived youthful immortality that America thrives on. Having died young, his representation of that aspect of our culture is immortalized. He represents the glamorizing and glorification of the young in America and all the associations with ideas of freshness, boldness and adventure that the term ‘young’ has acquired in our culture. Even today, companies often use phrases like, “a young and innovative team,” when characterizing themselves and their staff. Yet, our obsession with the young and with youth culture is unhealthy to say the least. That obsession, however, is a subject for another day.
Friday, November 22, 2013
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
The Most Universal Hatred
Introduction:
Anti-Semitism is a topic I’ve never covered before, not in my blog anyhow. Given the scope of major issues I’ve covered over the past couple of years, it’s about time this one came up. I’ve been considering how to approach it for the better part of a year, and it’s time the attempt was made. I’ve been working on this post for the better part of a month. My contention is this: anti-Semitism is unique, because it is almost historically and geographically universal. Put another way, I don’t believe that there has ever been a culture, a nation state or a geographical region of the world which, if it had a substantial Jewish population, didn’t also witness some form of anti-Semitism in time. India is a qualified exception, though in Portuguese-controlled Goa quite a substantial amount of persecution took place under the Goa inquisition, decimating the Jewish populations of Goa and resulting in harsh measures against the Jews of Kerala. Robert S. Wistrich, Neuberger professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, calls anti-Semitism “the longest hatred.” I would also call it the most universal hatred. In any case, my claim is a huge one and deserves a book to explore it. I don’t have time for a book, but we’ll just make due. If anyone wants a bibliography of sources, I will provide a selected bibliography upon request.
Anti-Semitism is a topic which, if you study German—any aspect of German—you will encounter for obvious reasons and in myriad contexts. This, though, won’t be about German anti-Semitism or the Shoah (more commonly referred to as the Holocaust). Rather, I’ve assembled a list of items which, taken together, demonstrate my claims about the universality of anti-Semitism through history and across the globe. Some examples are German – some are not. Following my list, which consists of fifteen items plus descriptions, I will have some concluding remarks. You may skip around on the list as you like, or you may want to read the whole list.
Defining the Term:
How should we define anti-Semitism? This may seem obvious, but it’s not. For example, Jews are not the only Semitic people in the world, though the term anti-Semitism is widely understood as applying to that group. Whole volumes exist that explore just this problem of definition alone. For our purposes, I’ve chosen to go with the definition offered by the European Monitoring Center for Racism and Xenophobia posted on the U.S. Department of State’s website. The definition is expanded and further nuanced, and it can be downloaded as a pdf document if you want to study it further. I’m using the full-length expansion of the definition as I work out this post. The basic definition provided runs, "Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/fs/2010/122352.htm
About My Chosen Selections:
Why did I choose these items, and why fifteen? Some of the following are extremely well-known, and this list might be laughable without them. Others are less well-known and are included to draw your attention to the time or place in which they occurred or to the culpable people involved. Some are writings, some are laws, some are specific crimes, some are visual representations, and that variety alone is telling. So read on, and if you didn’t find something you expected here, it’s not because I didn’t know about it, although I make no claims to know about every instantiation of anti-Semitism. It’s because I could only choose fifteen things without writing something much lengthier.
After Bar Kokhba:
The Bar Kokhba revolt (132-135) isn’t the first instance of mass anti-Semitism in world history, far from it. It is, however, a seminal event in Jewish history and makes for an adequate starting point. The Talmud discusses it at length, and you can find numerous books and treatises on the subject of this three-year rebellion against the emperor Hadrian. For our purposes, I’m choosing to focus on its immediate aftermath. Following the final defeat and execution of Simon Bar Kokhba in the summer of 135 at the fortress of Betar, Hadrian, in addition to executing Judaic scholars and burning copies of the Torah scroll on the temple mount, enacted a number of putative ordinances against the Jewish people collectively. Among these were not only the prohibition of circumcision and the banning of the observances of the Hebrew calendar, but also the expulsion of the remaining Jewish population from Jerusalem and its outlying districts. Finally, Hadrian changed the name of the region on Roman maps from Judea to Syria Palaestina. From this nomenclature comes the modern words Palestinian and Palestine. Many Jews consider the Diaspora to have begun with these events.
Peri Pascha:
Living in the second century A.D., Melito of Sardis is known for a number of things in the early Christian church including coining the term “Old Testament.” Melito’s canon is one of the oldest known lists of the Christian Old Testament books as distinct from the scriptures as presented in the traditional Hebrew Bible, and much of what we have of Melito is handed down by later historians. One thing of Melito’s that survives though is his Easter homily “Peri Pascha,” 167 A.D.
The homily is notable for being one of the earliest surviving records of the Christian charge of deicide, the killing of a god, a refrain echoed again and again throughout the history of the Christian church. I must be careful here, because I don’t want to suggest that Melito personally advocated the persecution of the Jews or that he himself bore a particular hatred for them, but he lays the culpability for Jesus’ death at the feet of all Israel. Parts of this homily are quite pointed, and the charge of deicide is one thrown in the faces of the Jewish people for nearly two thousand years. As such, the origins of this accusation in the writings of the early church ought to be included here. Starting in line 72, Melito talks about “Israel’s” sin. He speaks of Israel collectively, and the climax of this portion of the homily is found in line 96, “The one who hung the earth in space, is himself hanged; the one who fixed the heavens in place, is himself impaled; the one who firmly fixed all things, is himself firmly fixed to the tree. The Lord is insulted, God has been murdered, the King of Israel has been destroyed by the right hand of Israel.”
The Fez Massacre:
While some towns and cities in North Africa like Kairouan witnessed expulsions, Fez, located in present-day Morocco, witnessed a massacre. During the month of May to June 1033, Berber forces under Tamim, while engaging in an internecine war with other Berber tribes for control of the region, slaughtered roughly six thousand Jews, carrying Jewish women of the city off into captivity. It was neither the first nor the last assault on Jewish life and liberty carried out in the Muslim world of the time. Books are still written examining Islamic anti-Semitism, past and present.
Leaving Britain:
The expulsion of the Jews from Britain in 1290 by King Edward I is one of the most well-known acts of expulsion during the Middle Ages. I wouldn’t be surprised if reports of resurfacing anti-Semitism in Britain over the last decade have caused some to reflect on this incident. The Edict of Expulsion came about after nearly a century of increasing restrictions on Jewish life and lending practices and increased taxation of the Jewish community. One example: in 1218, Britain became the first European country to require Jews to wear a badge denoting their status as Jews following the ruling of Innocent III and the Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1199. The Edict of Expulsion followed decades of increasingly anti-Semitic legal codes and social stigmatization, and the edict was not formally repealed until 1651.
Judensau:
As a scholar of German, I am painfully aware that the German-speaking world has been a focus of rhetoric about and against anti-Semitism for a very long while. It does not help at all that many of the images classified under the name ‘Judensau’ are found in buildings dating back to Medieval Germany as early as 1210 and including the Stadtkirche of Wittenberg where Luther preached and which contains a Judensau dating back to 1305. The various images of the Judensau capture anti-Semitism in a highly recognizable and graphic visual form. Images of Jews suckling from or copulating with pigs are disgusting not only on general principles, but they are also a deliberately targeted bit of visual filth.
Leviticus 11 outlines one set of regulations (Kashrut) concerning which animals are fit for consumption (kosher) and which are not. Other regulations appear in Deuteronomy as well as the Mishnah and the Talmud. The bottom line is this: culturally and biblically, it would be hard to find a more recognizable animal that would be offensive to Jewish sensibilities. Adding pornographic images of bestiality and scatology to it, the results are some of the most disgusting and outraging visual depictions of Jews that have been devised. The Judensau archetype was highly popular throughout the high Middle Ages and is still occasionally to be found.
On Luther and the Jews:
Oy vey. I gave serious thought to not including this one, but I can’t exclude it. Martin Luther is one of the most recognizable names in the world. Who doesn’t know something about him especially in Europe or the Americas? I’ve taught about his bible translation and his impact on the spread of both the vernacular bible in German as well as his influence on the standardization of the German language. There are hospitals, schools and even a substantial denomination named after him. Though to be fair, Luther himself had no interest in, and even appears to have discouraged, people calling themselves Lutherans.
Unfortunately for Luther’s reputation, he also became a pronounced and impassioned anti-Semite. It’s a pity to compare, for example, this excerpt from a 1523 essay, "That Christ Was Born a Jew" with later writings:
If I had been a Jew and had seen such dolts and blockheads govern and teach the Christian faith, I would sooner have become a hog than a Christian. They have dealt with the Jews as if they were dogs rather than human beings; they have done little else than deride them and seize their property. When they baptize them they show them nothing of Christian doctrine or life, but only subject them to popishness and mockery...If the apostles, who also were Jews, had dealt with us Gentiles as we Gentiles deal with the Jews, there would never have been a Christian among the Gentiles …”
Martin Luther, "That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew," Trans. Walter I. Brandt, in Luther's Works (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1962), pp. 200-201, 229.
Twenty years later, when his fervent hope to see the Jews converted en masse to Christianity remained unrealized, Luther wrote the book-length work Von den Juden und ihren Lügen (On the Jews and Their Lies) followed shortly thereafter by Vom Schem Hamphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi (On the Unknowable Name and the Generations of Christ). Compare the above excerpt with this excerpt from Part XI of On the Jews and Their Lies:
What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews? ... I shall give you my sincere advice:
First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians. For whatever we tolerated in the past unknowingly_and I myself was unaware of it_will be pardoned by God. But if we, now that we are informed, were to protect and shield such a house for the Jews, existing right before our very nose, in which they lie about, blaspheme, curse, vilify, and defame Christ and us (as was heard above), it would be the same as if we were doing all this and even worse ourselves, as we very well know.
Trans. Martin Birtram. (1971). Luther's Works Vol. 47. Fortress Press and Augsburg Fortress.
http://www.humanitas-international.org/showcase/chronography/documents/luther-jews.htm
What impact Luther had on Nazism, whether the Nazis derived any of their views directly from Luther or whether Luther’s writings were simply used opportunistically is a debate that continues, and it’s one I find largely uninteresting. The fact is that Luther wrote what he wrote, and because he wrote the material, it was available for co-opting by the Nazi regime which gleefully and repeatedly cited him as an inspiring bulwark of anti-Semitism, building a cultural basis of their program in part on this towering pillar of German religious and intellectual history.
General Order No. 11 (1862):
There is considerable debate amongst historians as to how deeply anti-Semitism courses throughout U.S. history. Some idealists would like to argue that, excepting a few flair-ups here and there, America has proven to be a land of peace and opportunity. Others have contended that anti-Semitism has always been present in American life. The danger lies in relativizing the phenomenon. The question becomes: by simply asserting that we haven’t seen any mass expulsions, pogroms or Kristallnacht here in America, can we say that American anti-Semitism is somehow milder, more tolerable, or easier to live with? I don’t have an answer to that, and the Jewish community is divided in its answer to that question as well. To be sure, America is not, nor has it ever been, totally free of anti-Semitism in all its forms.
General Grant’s order of December 17, 1862 is interesting because it is the only mass expulsion order issued by a serving member of the U.S. government or military establishment in our history that I can find. This is distinct from anti-immigration laws that targeted eastern European countries with large Jewish populations or from population quotas of immigrants. Those would come later. In December of 1862, Grant was concerned with checking the black market in southern cotton that had sprung up as some traders sought to sell cotton outside the military-issue system of permits that had been established for that purpose. Believing certain groups of Jewish speculators to be the problem, he issued an order which, rather than narrowly targeting the culprits regardless of their racial or religious background, targeted all Jews in those areas of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi then under Union control. The heart of the matter lies in the order’s opening sentence, “The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department [‘department’ referring to Grant’s command] within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.” Following direct orders from President Lincoln, Grant repealed the order on January 17, 1863, but it was too late to prevent the expulsions of Jews from some of the towns in the affected region.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion:
Remember I said at the outset that some items would have to appear on my list, lest my list be considered laughable? This document is one such item. It is probably one of the best-known examples of literary forgery in modern history, and that fact notwithstanding, it is also probably one of the most insidious anti-Semitic treatises out there. Composed in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, the Protocols purports to be a collection of minutes from a mysterious Zionist congress that discusses, in general terms only, various strategies and necessary conditions for Jewish world domination.
Subsequent investigation revealed the document to be a fraud and a literary forgery, quoting extensively from novels by French author Maurice Joly and German author Hermann Gödsche among others. Despite being proven to be a blatant forgery as early as the 1920’s, the Protocols continued to enjoy wide acclaim and circulation throughout Europe. Not surprisingly, Hitler spoke of them in glowing terms in Mein Kampf, and they were required reading in German schools after 1933. More recent endorsements of the Protocols can be found in the statements of former Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, Islamic scholar and recent Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Ekrima Sa’id Sabri, American Young Earth Creationist Kent Hovind, and Greek Member of Parliament Ilias Kasidiaris. One has to conclude that, whether anyone quoting this document actually believes in it or not, like Luther’s Von den Juden und ihren Lügen, the Protocols has certainly been opportunistically taken up by many, and the fact of its forgery and fraudulent origins has not diminished its effect in some quarters.
Kristallnacht:
It would be preposterous to write up anything on the history of anti-Semitism, no matter how casual the forum, without directly discussing Nazi Germany. Yet, what does one choose? The Nuremberg laws? The camps? The Sonderkommandos? The problem isn’t the lack of options, but too many options. I chose Kristallnacht, because few anti-Jewish events in Germany were as widely reported as that one even as it happened. On the night of November 9-10, Jewish synagogues, Jewish homes, and Jewish businesses were vandalized, ransacked and burned allegedly in response to the killing of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath. The name Kristallnacht or Night of broken Glass as we call it in English comes from the images of broken glass from littering the streets in its aftermath. While 91 Jews died during that night, over thirty thousand were arrested in the aftermath and deported to the concentration camps. The event serves as a sort of archetypal representation of Nazi persecution both in the past and in the regime’s later years. Since then, vandalism of Jewish-owned property has occasionally been called Kristallnacht.
Voyage of the MS St. Louis:
The story of the St. Louis is the stuff of high drama, and indeed, Voyage of the Damned, a 1974 book by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts tells the story well. There is also a movie of the same name that recounts the tale. Whether or not the voyage of these 930 plus Jews from Hamburg to Havana was a propaganda stunt designed by the German propaganda ministry (the RMVP) to illustrate the rest of the world’s refusal to take in the Jews, as the book and movie claim, the fact is that more than 930 Jews set sail from Hamburg on May 13, 1939 bound for Cuba. The passengers and the captain, Gustav Schröder, had reason to believe they would be allowed to land in Cuba where the passengers would be granted political asylum.
The ship arrived early on the morning of May 27, and the passengers found out that their visas, because of recent changes in Cuban immigration law, were now invalid. After six days of fruitless negotiation with Cuban authorities, the St. Louis again set sail, this time bound for Florida. America vehemently refused to allow the refugees entry into the States, even dispatching a pair of Coast Guard cutters to monitor the ship, preventing Schröder from landing. Schröder even contemplated running his ship aground and freeing his passengers on American soil by destroying his vessel, but the Coast Guard’s presence prevented that. While at sea, word reached the St. Louis that, despite intense efforts by some clergy and academics, Canada also refused outright to admit the refugees. The St. Louis recrossed the Atlantic Ocean, docking at Antwerp on June 17. Britain accepted nearly 300 of the passengers, while the remainder, over 600, were allowed refuge in Belgium, the Netherlands and France. Since those countries fell to Germany within less than a year of that day, this turned out to be a poor solution. Historians working on behalf of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum determined in 1998 that of the 620 St. Louis passengers who returned to continental Europe, 254 later died, most of them in the camps at Auschwitz and Sobibor. As an epilogue to the story, Captain Schröder received the Order of Merit from West Germany. In 1993, he was posthumously designated as one of the Righteous among the Nations, a title bestowed by the Yad Vashem holocaust memorial in Israel, an honor given to those who risked their lives in the rescue of Jews from Nazi persecution. I included the story of the St. Louis not so much to applaud Captain Schröder, as valiant as his efforts were, but to point out the complicity of three western nations in creating the circumstances under which his heroism was necessary at all. That number totals four if Britain were included, because it would not have exactly killed them to accept one ship’s load of passengers rather than a mere third of them. That last observation may be unfair to the British, since historical hindsight, unlike my own sight, is usually 20/20.
Terrorism, the Left, and Japanese Anti-Semitism:
The notion of anti-Semitism in Japan seems a bit hard to believe when one remembers that Japan is a majority Buddhist and Shinto nation with a vanishingly small Jewish minority. Nevertheless, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are alive and well. In 1972, in what is now known as the Lod Massacre, three Japanese Red Army members opened fire at Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport, what is now called Ben Gurian International, killing over two dozen employees and passengers. Initially, the Japanese public couldn’t believe that their own citizens had carried out the attack which was sponsored by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the person of Wadie Haddad. In the aftermath of the attack, several JRA members were arrested and returned to Japan. Kozo Okamoto was the only one to survive and be tried in Israel, where he spent the next 13 years in prison. Wadie Haddad was killed by Mossad operatives in 1978.
Japanese anti-Semitism today largely appears in the form of leftist books and films that exercise influence on public perception. Professor Bruce Davidson of Hokusei Gakeuen University in Sapporo, japan has been observing the growth of Japanese anti-Semitism for over twenty years. One of the leading proponents of both anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in Japan today is the photojournalist and documentary producer Ryuchi Hirokawa, whose photograph collections and widely acclaimed DVD series Nakba: Palestine 1948 both portray Palestinians as victims while demonizing Israel. This point of view is wide spread and is almost a point of dogma among Japanese anti-Semitic intellectuals and media personalities. For one of the few (and most thorough) studies of Japanese anti-Semitism that explores these issues, I’d recommend David Goodman’s and Masanori Miyazawa’s 2000 book, Jews in the Japanese Mind: The History and Uses of a Cultural Stereotype.
China and Anti-Semitism:
The most visible hallmark of conspiracy theory-based anti-Semitism in China today is the bestseller Currency War by the Chinese computer engineer Song Hongbing now living in the U.S. The computer engineer and amateur, make that very amateur, Chinese history enthusiast who wrote it argues for a massive worldwide Jewish conspiracy of money and influence underpinning everything from the Battle of Waterloo to Hitler’s rise to power to the Kennedy assassination. Did anyone tell Hitler that, by the way? It’s hard for me to disguise the disdain I have for this book, a feeling only matched by my alarm over the knowledge that the book is read widely in China including, supposedly, by policy makers in government and that it parallels similar books that have appeared in Japanese presses, fueling the anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist hatred that’s been brewing in East Asia for decades. What effect this book will have on the public mind in China and whether it will spark a raft of books of the same type remains to be seen.
UN Resolution 3379:
One consequence of decolonization was an explosion of member states in the UN General Assembly as newly independent nations sought and were granted entrée into the United nations. Unfortunately, many of these nations saw Israel as a threat, as the backer of their enemies, or otherwise as the promoter of ideologies they opposed. One result is resolution 3379. The resolution starts out resembling just one more lukewarm statement condemning racism and discrimination in all its forms. However, the word Zionism appears four times in the brief resolution. While whole books can be and still are written attempting to define Zionism, the term is broadly understood as the belief in the right of the nation of Israel to exist and the belief in the rights of the Jewish people to have a national homeland and a right to national self-determination like all other nation states. The resolution explicitly links Zionism with South African apartheid, refers to Zionism as racist and imperialist ideology, and lastly, refers to Zionism as, “a form of racism and of racial discrimination.” This resolution had the effect of sanctioning anti-Israel and, by extension, anti-Jewish sentiments throughout the third world, the Soviet Union and leftwing Western intellectual circles. The United States and Israel were vehement in their outcry against the resolution, and it was 16 years before it was repealed in December 1991.
The Jews of Peru:
Peru, a country with approximately thirty million inhabitants, has a Jewish population of about five thousand. It also has its own neo-Nazi party led by native Peruvian Martin Quispe Mayta. Mayta’s organization, the Andean Peru National Socialism Movement, is adamant about expelling the Jewish population from Peru, and Mayta himself cites what he calls Jewish conspiracies for world dominance as being the cause of his own childhood poverty and the country’s and world’s ills at large. Rabbi Guillermo Bronstein, who heads the largest synagogue in Lima, has been observing a sharp rise in anti-Semitic threats and attacks in Peru over the past several years. He attributes the anti-Semitism to public reaction against the nation’s long-term instability.
Living Social:
Two weeks ago on October 26, the sale and discount site Living Social through a Halloween party with the theme The Seven Deadly Sins. Interesting. Partygoers paid $59 for admission to the F Street location of Living Social’s headquarters in Washington D.C. to enjoy what was billed as a chance to treat yourself to a “night of tricks and sins.” In the Greed Room, tables had been set up featuring dreidels, a four-sided spinning top with each side bearing a letter of the Hebrew alphabet and most often scene during Chanukah. Each dreidel was surrounded by heaps of gold coins for game pieces. Talk about upfront, in your face symbolism. Kevin Nolan of Living Social’s publicity department described the decision to feature dreidels in the greed room as, “not very smart.” The company has offered full refunds to any customers upon request.
Patrol 36:
I gave careful thought as to which of many incidents should be the last one on my scant list of entries. I settled on Patrol 36, because anti-Semitism in Israel itself is unthinkable to many, and yet it exists. Patrol 36 was a small gang of Israeli neo-Nazi youths ranging in age from 16 to 21 years old. Their families had settled in Israel under the Law of Return, though none seems to have practiced Judaism. Based in Petah Tikva near Tel Aviv, the gang members were known for desecrating synagogues with swastikas and for attacking various groups e.g., migrant workers, ultra-orthodox Jews and the elderly. One of the members arrested and sentenced was the grandson of a Holocaust survivor. These incidents led to calls to amend the Law of Return since, as one politician put it, “Israel has become a haven for those who hate Israel, hate Jews, and who exploit the Law of Return to act on this hatred.”
Concluding Remarks:
I have discussed anti-Semitism from the height of the Roman empire to yesterday’s headlines and from the churches of Europe to the streets of Japan and the halls of the United Nations. For every incident I included, ten were left out, or maybe a hundred were. Taken together, I believe these incidents point to a nearly pandemic impulse of anti-Semitism throughout the Gentile world. By the way, there have been anti-Zionist Jews as well, but that gets us into deep psychological waters, and yes, there are books about that too.
My definition of anti-Semitism is probably conservative in some circles, liberal in others. I don’t challenge Israel’s right to exist under any circumstances. I don’t blame the Jews, collectively or otherwise, for any world event or event in my country’s own history. While I don’t philosemitically glorify Israel and give it a pass for everything that it has ever done or may ever do, I also say that anyone who sees suicide bombing in Tel Aviv shopping malls as an acceptable response to Israel’s presence in the West Bank is a lunatic regardless of where they got their doctorate. As a side note, I don’t give any other nation a universal pass on all its actions either, the U.S. included.
Finally, I would challenge the Israel haters to consider something. Allow me to speak directly to them for a moment. Supposing that you are living in a small country occupying a miniscule fraction of land space. Suppose also that you are surrounded by tens of millions of people belonging to other countries who would love nothing more than to see your country go down in flames and to see you and the rest of those who identify with your ethnic and religious people group cease to exist. Supposing further that you are surrounded not only by radical religionist governments with their hands on massive stockpiles of very unpleasant weapons, but also governments whose daily rhetoric to their own people includes stirring up hatred for you, your neighbors, your government and anyone who thinks like you do. Try to imagine all that, and then tell me this, what right do you have to anti-Zionism or anti-Semitism? My reasoned suggestion? You have none at all. Everyone else, thanks as always for reading.
Anti-Semitism is a topic I’ve never covered before, not in my blog anyhow. Given the scope of major issues I’ve covered over the past couple of years, it’s about time this one came up. I’ve been considering how to approach it for the better part of a year, and it’s time the attempt was made. I’ve been working on this post for the better part of a month. My contention is this: anti-Semitism is unique, because it is almost historically and geographically universal. Put another way, I don’t believe that there has ever been a culture, a nation state or a geographical region of the world which, if it had a substantial Jewish population, didn’t also witness some form of anti-Semitism in time. India is a qualified exception, though in Portuguese-controlled Goa quite a substantial amount of persecution took place under the Goa inquisition, decimating the Jewish populations of Goa and resulting in harsh measures against the Jews of Kerala. Robert S. Wistrich, Neuberger professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, calls anti-Semitism “the longest hatred.” I would also call it the most universal hatred. In any case, my claim is a huge one and deserves a book to explore it. I don’t have time for a book, but we’ll just make due. If anyone wants a bibliography of sources, I will provide a selected bibliography upon request.
Anti-Semitism is a topic which, if you study German—any aspect of German—you will encounter for obvious reasons and in myriad contexts. This, though, won’t be about German anti-Semitism or the Shoah (more commonly referred to as the Holocaust). Rather, I’ve assembled a list of items which, taken together, demonstrate my claims about the universality of anti-Semitism through history and across the globe. Some examples are German – some are not. Following my list, which consists of fifteen items plus descriptions, I will have some concluding remarks. You may skip around on the list as you like, or you may want to read the whole list.
Defining the Term:
How should we define anti-Semitism? This may seem obvious, but it’s not. For example, Jews are not the only Semitic people in the world, though the term anti-Semitism is widely understood as applying to that group. Whole volumes exist that explore just this problem of definition alone. For our purposes, I’ve chosen to go with the definition offered by the European Monitoring Center for Racism and Xenophobia posted on the U.S. Department of State’s website. The definition is expanded and further nuanced, and it can be downloaded as a pdf document if you want to study it further. I’m using the full-length expansion of the definition as I work out this post. The basic definition provided runs, "Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/fs/2010/122352.htm
About My Chosen Selections:
Why did I choose these items, and why fifteen? Some of the following are extremely well-known, and this list might be laughable without them. Others are less well-known and are included to draw your attention to the time or place in which they occurred or to the culpable people involved. Some are writings, some are laws, some are specific crimes, some are visual representations, and that variety alone is telling. So read on, and if you didn’t find something you expected here, it’s not because I didn’t know about it, although I make no claims to know about every instantiation of anti-Semitism. It’s because I could only choose fifteen things without writing something much lengthier.
After Bar Kokhba:
The Bar Kokhba revolt (132-135) isn’t the first instance of mass anti-Semitism in world history, far from it. It is, however, a seminal event in Jewish history and makes for an adequate starting point. The Talmud discusses it at length, and you can find numerous books and treatises on the subject of this three-year rebellion against the emperor Hadrian. For our purposes, I’m choosing to focus on its immediate aftermath. Following the final defeat and execution of Simon Bar Kokhba in the summer of 135 at the fortress of Betar, Hadrian, in addition to executing Judaic scholars and burning copies of the Torah scroll on the temple mount, enacted a number of putative ordinances against the Jewish people collectively. Among these were not only the prohibition of circumcision and the banning of the observances of the Hebrew calendar, but also the expulsion of the remaining Jewish population from Jerusalem and its outlying districts. Finally, Hadrian changed the name of the region on Roman maps from Judea to Syria Palaestina. From this nomenclature comes the modern words Palestinian and Palestine. Many Jews consider the Diaspora to have begun with these events.
Peri Pascha:
Living in the second century A.D., Melito of Sardis is known for a number of things in the early Christian church including coining the term “Old Testament.” Melito’s canon is one of the oldest known lists of the Christian Old Testament books as distinct from the scriptures as presented in the traditional Hebrew Bible, and much of what we have of Melito is handed down by later historians. One thing of Melito’s that survives though is his Easter homily “Peri Pascha,” 167 A.D.
The homily is notable for being one of the earliest surviving records of the Christian charge of deicide, the killing of a god, a refrain echoed again and again throughout the history of the Christian church. I must be careful here, because I don’t want to suggest that Melito personally advocated the persecution of the Jews or that he himself bore a particular hatred for them, but he lays the culpability for Jesus’ death at the feet of all Israel. Parts of this homily are quite pointed, and the charge of deicide is one thrown in the faces of the Jewish people for nearly two thousand years. As such, the origins of this accusation in the writings of the early church ought to be included here. Starting in line 72, Melito talks about “Israel’s” sin. He speaks of Israel collectively, and the climax of this portion of the homily is found in line 96, “The one who hung the earth in space, is himself hanged; the one who fixed the heavens in place, is himself impaled; the one who firmly fixed all things, is himself firmly fixed to the tree. The Lord is insulted, God has been murdered, the King of Israel has been destroyed by the right hand of Israel.”
The Fez Massacre:
While some towns and cities in North Africa like Kairouan witnessed expulsions, Fez, located in present-day Morocco, witnessed a massacre. During the month of May to June 1033, Berber forces under Tamim, while engaging in an internecine war with other Berber tribes for control of the region, slaughtered roughly six thousand Jews, carrying Jewish women of the city off into captivity. It was neither the first nor the last assault on Jewish life and liberty carried out in the Muslim world of the time. Books are still written examining Islamic anti-Semitism, past and present.
Leaving Britain:
The expulsion of the Jews from Britain in 1290 by King Edward I is one of the most well-known acts of expulsion during the Middle Ages. I wouldn’t be surprised if reports of resurfacing anti-Semitism in Britain over the last decade have caused some to reflect on this incident. The Edict of Expulsion came about after nearly a century of increasing restrictions on Jewish life and lending practices and increased taxation of the Jewish community. One example: in 1218, Britain became the first European country to require Jews to wear a badge denoting their status as Jews following the ruling of Innocent III and the Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1199. The Edict of Expulsion followed decades of increasingly anti-Semitic legal codes and social stigmatization, and the edict was not formally repealed until 1651.
Judensau:
As a scholar of German, I am painfully aware that the German-speaking world has been a focus of rhetoric about and against anti-Semitism for a very long while. It does not help at all that many of the images classified under the name ‘Judensau’ are found in buildings dating back to Medieval Germany as early as 1210 and including the Stadtkirche of Wittenberg where Luther preached and which contains a Judensau dating back to 1305. The various images of the Judensau capture anti-Semitism in a highly recognizable and graphic visual form. Images of Jews suckling from or copulating with pigs are disgusting not only on general principles, but they are also a deliberately targeted bit of visual filth.
Leviticus 11 outlines one set of regulations (Kashrut) concerning which animals are fit for consumption (kosher) and which are not. Other regulations appear in Deuteronomy as well as the Mishnah and the Talmud. The bottom line is this: culturally and biblically, it would be hard to find a more recognizable animal that would be offensive to Jewish sensibilities. Adding pornographic images of bestiality and scatology to it, the results are some of the most disgusting and outraging visual depictions of Jews that have been devised. The Judensau archetype was highly popular throughout the high Middle Ages and is still occasionally to be found.
On Luther and the Jews:
Oy vey. I gave serious thought to not including this one, but I can’t exclude it. Martin Luther is one of the most recognizable names in the world. Who doesn’t know something about him especially in Europe or the Americas? I’ve taught about his bible translation and his impact on the spread of both the vernacular bible in German as well as his influence on the standardization of the German language. There are hospitals, schools and even a substantial denomination named after him. Though to be fair, Luther himself had no interest in, and even appears to have discouraged, people calling themselves Lutherans.
Unfortunately for Luther’s reputation, he also became a pronounced and impassioned anti-Semite. It’s a pity to compare, for example, this excerpt from a 1523 essay, "That Christ Was Born a Jew" with later writings:
If I had been a Jew and had seen such dolts and blockheads govern and teach the Christian faith, I would sooner have become a hog than a Christian. They have dealt with the Jews as if they were dogs rather than human beings; they have done little else than deride them and seize their property. When they baptize them they show them nothing of Christian doctrine or life, but only subject them to popishness and mockery...If the apostles, who also were Jews, had dealt with us Gentiles as we Gentiles deal with the Jews, there would never have been a Christian among the Gentiles …”
Martin Luther, "That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew," Trans. Walter I. Brandt, in Luther's Works (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1962), pp. 200-201, 229.
Twenty years later, when his fervent hope to see the Jews converted en masse to Christianity remained unrealized, Luther wrote the book-length work Von den Juden und ihren Lügen (On the Jews and Their Lies) followed shortly thereafter by Vom Schem Hamphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi (On the Unknowable Name and the Generations of Christ). Compare the above excerpt with this excerpt from Part XI of On the Jews and Their Lies:
What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews? ... I shall give you my sincere advice:
First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians. For whatever we tolerated in the past unknowingly_and I myself was unaware of it_will be pardoned by God. But if we, now that we are informed, were to protect and shield such a house for the Jews, existing right before our very nose, in which they lie about, blaspheme, curse, vilify, and defame Christ and us (as was heard above), it would be the same as if we were doing all this and even worse ourselves, as we very well know.
Trans. Martin Birtram. (1971). Luther's Works Vol. 47. Fortress Press and Augsburg Fortress.
http://www.humanitas-international.org/showcase/chronography/documents/luther-jews.htm
What impact Luther had on Nazism, whether the Nazis derived any of their views directly from Luther or whether Luther’s writings were simply used opportunistically is a debate that continues, and it’s one I find largely uninteresting. The fact is that Luther wrote what he wrote, and because he wrote the material, it was available for co-opting by the Nazi regime which gleefully and repeatedly cited him as an inspiring bulwark of anti-Semitism, building a cultural basis of their program in part on this towering pillar of German religious and intellectual history.
General Order No. 11 (1862):
There is considerable debate amongst historians as to how deeply anti-Semitism courses throughout U.S. history. Some idealists would like to argue that, excepting a few flair-ups here and there, America has proven to be a land of peace and opportunity. Others have contended that anti-Semitism has always been present in American life. The danger lies in relativizing the phenomenon. The question becomes: by simply asserting that we haven’t seen any mass expulsions, pogroms or Kristallnacht here in America, can we say that American anti-Semitism is somehow milder, more tolerable, or easier to live with? I don’t have an answer to that, and the Jewish community is divided in its answer to that question as well. To be sure, America is not, nor has it ever been, totally free of anti-Semitism in all its forms.
General Grant’s order of December 17, 1862 is interesting because it is the only mass expulsion order issued by a serving member of the U.S. government or military establishment in our history that I can find. This is distinct from anti-immigration laws that targeted eastern European countries with large Jewish populations or from population quotas of immigrants. Those would come later. In December of 1862, Grant was concerned with checking the black market in southern cotton that had sprung up as some traders sought to sell cotton outside the military-issue system of permits that had been established for that purpose. Believing certain groups of Jewish speculators to be the problem, he issued an order which, rather than narrowly targeting the culprits regardless of their racial or religious background, targeted all Jews in those areas of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi then under Union control. The heart of the matter lies in the order’s opening sentence, “The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department [‘department’ referring to Grant’s command] within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.” Following direct orders from President Lincoln, Grant repealed the order on January 17, 1863, but it was too late to prevent the expulsions of Jews from some of the towns in the affected region.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion:
Remember I said at the outset that some items would have to appear on my list, lest my list be considered laughable? This document is one such item. It is probably one of the best-known examples of literary forgery in modern history, and that fact notwithstanding, it is also probably one of the most insidious anti-Semitic treatises out there. Composed in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, the Protocols purports to be a collection of minutes from a mysterious Zionist congress that discusses, in general terms only, various strategies and necessary conditions for Jewish world domination.
Subsequent investigation revealed the document to be a fraud and a literary forgery, quoting extensively from novels by French author Maurice Joly and German author Hermann Gödsche among others. Despite being proven to be a blatant forgery as early as the 1920’s, the Protocols continued to enjoy wide acclaim and circulation throughout Europe. Not surprisingly, Hitler spoke of them in glowing terms in Mein Kampf, and they were required reading in German schools after 1933. More recent endorsements of the Protocols can be found in the statements of former Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, Islamic scholar and recent Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Ekrima Sa’id Sabri, American Young Earth Creationist Kent Hovind, and Greek Member of Parliament Ilias Kasidiaris. One has to conclude that, whether anyone quoting this document actually believes in it or not, like Luther’s Von den Juden und ihren Lügen, the Protocols has certainly been opportunistically taken up by many, and the fact of its forgery and fraudulent origins has not diminished its effect in some quarters.
Kristallnacht:
It would be preposterous to write up anything on the history of anti-Semitism, no matter how casual the forum, without directly discussing Nazi Germany. Yet, what does one choose? The Nuremberg laws? The camps? The Sonderkommandos? The problem isn’t the lack of options, but too many options. I chose Kristallnacht, because few anti-Jewish events in Germany were as widely reported as that one even as it happened. On the night of November 9-10, Jewish synagogues, Jewish homes, and Jewish businesses were vandalized, ransacked and burned allegedly in response to the killing of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath. The name Kristallnacht or Night of broken Glass as we call it in English comes from the images of broken glass from littering the streets in its aftermath. While 91 Jews died during that night, over thirty thousand were arrested in the aftermath and deported to the concentration camps. The event serves as a sort of archetypal representation of Nazi persecution both in the past and in the regime’s later years. Since then, vandalism of Jewish-owned property has occasionally been called Kristallnacht.
Voyage of the MS St. Louis:
The story of the St. Louis is the stuff of high drama, and indeed, Voyage of the Damned, a 1974 book by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts tells the story well. There is also a movie of the same name that recounts the tale. Whether or not the voyage of these 930 plus Jews from Hamburg to Havana was a propaganda stunt designed by the German propaganda ministry (the RMVP) to illustrate the rest of the world’s refusal to take in the Jews, as the book and movie claim, the fact is that more than 930 Jews set sail from Hamburg on May 13, 1939 bound for Cuba. The passengers and the captain, Gustav Schröder, had reason to believe they would be allowed to land in Cuba where the passengers would be granted political asylum.
The ship arrived early on the morning of May 27, and the passengers found out that their visas, because of recent changes in Cuban immigration law, were now invalid. After six days of fruitless negotiation with Cuban authorities, the St. Louis again set sail, this time bound for Florida. America vehemently refused to allow the refugees entry into the States, even dispatching a pair of Coast Guard cutters to monitor the ship, preventing Schröder from landing. Schröder even contemplated running his ship aground and freeing his passengers on American soil by destroying his vessel, but the Coast Guard’s presence prevented that. While at sea, word reached the St. Louis that, despite intense efforts by some clergy and academics, Canada also refused outright to admit the refugees. The St. Louis recrossed the Atlantic Ocean, docking at Antwerp on June 17. Britain accepted nearly 300 of the passengers, while the remainder, over 600, were allowed refuge in Belgium, the Netherlands and France. Since those countries fell to Germany within less than a year of that day, this turned out to be a poor solution. Historians working on behalf of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum determined in 1998 that of the 620 St. Louis passengers who returned to continental Europe, 254 later died, most of them in the camps at Auschwitz and Sobibor. As an epilogue to the story, Captain Schröder received the Order of Merit from West Germany. In 1993, he was posthumously designated as one of the Righteous among the Nations, a title bestowed by the Yad Vashem holocaust memorial in Israel, an honor given to those who risked their lives in the rescue of Jews from Nazi persecution. I included the story of the St. Louis not so much to applaud Captain Schröder, as valiant as his efforts were, but to point out the complicity of three western nations in creating the circumstances under which his heroism was necessary at all. That number totals four if Britain were included, because it would not have exactly killed them to accept one ship’s load of passengers rather than a mere third of them. That last observation may be unfair to the British, since historical hindsight, unlike my own sight, is usually 20/20.
Terrorism, the Left, and Japanese Anti-Semitism:
The notion of anti-Semitism in Japan seems a bit hard to believe when one remembers that Japan is a majority Buddhist and Shinto nation with a vanishingly small Jewish minority. Nevertheless, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are alive and well. In 1972, in what is now known as the Lod Massacre, three Japanese Red Army members opened fire at Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport, what is now called Ben Gurian International, killing over two dozen employees and passengers. Initially, the Japanese public couldn’t believe that their own citizens had carried out the attack which was sponsored by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the person of Wadie Haddad. In the aftermath of the attack, several JRA members were arrested and returned to Japan. Kozo Okamoto was the only one to survive and be tried in Israel, where he spent the next 13 years in prison. Wadie Haddad was killed by Mossad operatives in 1978.
Japanese anti-Semitism today largely appears in the form of leftist books and films that exercise influence on public perception. Professor Bruce Davidson of Hokusei Gakeuen University in Sapporo, japan has been observing the growth of Japanese anti-Semitism for over twenty years. One of the leading proponents of both anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in Japan today is the photojournalist and documentary producer Ryuchi Hirokawa, whose photograph collections and widely acclaimed DVD series Nakba: Palestine 1948 both portray Palestinians as victims while demonizing Israel. This point of view is wide spread and is almost a point of dogma among Japanese anti-Semitic intellectuals and media personalities. For one of the few (and most thorough) studies of Japanese anti-Semitism that explores these issues, I’d recommend David Goodman’s and Masanori Miyazawa’s 2000 book, Jews in the Japanese Mind: The History and Uses of a Cultural Stereotype.
China and Anti-Semitism:
The most visible hallmark of conspiracy theory-based anti-Semitism in China today is the bestseller Currency War by the Chinese computer engineer Song Hongbing now living in the U.S. The computer engineer and amateur, make that very amateur, Chinese history enthusiast who wrote it argues for a massive worldwide Jewish conspiracy of money and influence underpinning everything from the Battle of Waterloo to Hitler’s rise to power to the Kennedy assassination. Did anyone tell Hitler that, by the way? It’s hard for me to disguise the disdain I have for this book, a feeling only matched by my alarm over the knowledge that the book is read widely in China including, supposedly, by policy makers in government and that it parallels similar books that have appeared in Japanese presses, fueling the anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist hatred that’s been brewing in East Asia for decades. What effect this book will have on the public mind in China and whether it will spark a raft of books of the same type remains to be seen.
UN Resolution 3379:
One consequence of decolonization was an explosion of member states in the UN General Assembly as newly independent nations sought and were granted entrée into the United nations. Unfortunately, many of these nations saw Israel as a threat, as the backer of their enemies, or otherwise as the promoter of ideologies they opposed. One result is resolution 3379. The resolution starts out resembling just one more lukewarm statement condemning racism and discrimination in all its forms. However, the word Zionism appears four times in the brief resolution. While whole books can be and still are written attempting to define Zionism, the term is broadly understood as the belief in the right of the nation of Israel to exist and the belief in the rights of the Jewish people to have a national homeland and a right to national self-determination like all other nation states. The resolution explicitly links Zionism with South African apartheid, refers to Zionism as racist and imperialist ideology, and lastly, refers to Zionism as, “a form of racism and of racial discrimination.” This resolution had the effect of sanctioning anti-Israel and, by extension, anti-Jewish sentiments throughout the third world, the Soviet Union and leftwing Western intellectual circles. The United States and Israel were vehement in their outcry against the resolution, and it was 16 years before it was repealed in December 1991.
The Jews of Peru:
Peru, a country with approximately thirty million inhabitants, has a Jewish population of about five thousand. It also has its own neo-Nazi party led by native Peruvian Martin Quispe Mayta. Mayta’s organization, the Andean Peru National Socialism Movement, is adamant about expelling the Jewish population from Peru, and Mayta himself cites what he calls Jewish conspiracies for world dominance as being the cause of his own childhood poverty and the country’s and world’s ills at large. Rabbi Guillermo Bronstein, who heads the largest synagogue in Lima, has been observing a sharp rise in anti-Semitic threats and attacks in Peru over the past several years. He attributes the anti-Semitism to public reaction against the nation’s long-term instability.
Living Social:
Two weeks ago on October 26, the sale and discount site Living Social through a Halloween party with the theme The Seven Deadly Sins. Interesting. Partygoers paid $59 for admission to the F Street location of Living Social’s headquarters in Washington D.C. to enjoy what was billed as a chance to treat yourself to a “night of tricks and sins.” In the Greed Room, tables had been set up featuring dreidels, a four-sided spinning top with each side bearing a letter of the Hebrew alphabet and most often scene during Chanukah. Each dreidel was surrounded by heaps of gold coins for game pieces. Talk about upfront, in your face symbolism. Kevin Nolan of Living Social’s publicity department described the decision to feature dreidels in the greed room as, “not very smart.” The company has offered full refunds to any customers upon request.
Patrol 36:
I gave careful thought as to which of many incidents should be the last one on my scant list of entries. I settled on Patrol 36, because anti-Semitism in Israel itself is unthinkable to many, and yet it exists. Patrol 36 was a small gang of Israeli neo-Nazi youths ranging in age from 16 to 21 years old. Their families had settled in Israel under the Law of Return, though none seems to have practiced Judaism. Based in Petah Tikva near Tel Aviv, the gang members were known for desecrating synagogues with swastikas and for attacking various groups e.g., migrant workers, ultra-orthodox Jews and the elderly. One of the members arrested and sentenced was the grandson of a Holocaust survivor. These incidents led to calls to amend the Law of Return since, as one politician put it, “Israel has become a haven for those who hate Israel, hate Jews, and who exploit the Law of Return to act on this hatred.”
Concluding Remarks:
I have discussed anti-Semitism from the height of the Roman empire to yesterday’s headlines and from the churches of Europe to the streets of Japan and the halls of the United Nations. For every incident I included, ten were left out, or maybe a hundred were. Taken together, I believe these incidents point to a nearly pandemic impulse of anti-Semitism throughout the Gentile world. By the way, there have been anti-Zionist Jews as well, but that gets us into deep psychological waters, and yes, there are books about that too.
My definition of anti-Semitism is probably conservative in some circles, liberal in others. I don’t challenge Israel’s right to exist under any circumstances. I don’t blame the Jews, collectively or otherwise, for any world event or event in my country’s own history. While I don’t philosemitically glorify Israel and give it a pass for everything that it has ever done or may ever do, I also say that anyone who sees suicide bombing in Tel Aviv shopping malls as an acceptable response to Israel’s presence in the West Bank is a lunatic regardless of where they got their doctorate. As a side note, I don’t give any other nation a universal pass on all its actions either, the U.S. included.
Finally, I would challenge the Israel haters to consider something. Allow me to speak directly to them for a moment. Supposing that you are living in a small country occupying a miniscule fraction of land space. Suppose also that you are surrounded by tens of millions of people belonging to other countries who would love nothing more than to see your country go down in flames and to see you and the rest of those who identify with your ethnic and religious people group cease to exist. Supposing further that you are surrounded not only by radical religionist governments with their hands on massive stockpiles of very unpleasant weapons, but also governments whose daily rhetoric to their own people includes stirring up hatred for you, your neighbors, your government and anyone who thinks like you do. Try to imagine all that, and then tell me this, what right do you have to anti-Zionism or anti-Semitism? My reasoned suggestion? You have none at all. Everyone else, thanks as always for reading.
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Shutting It All Down
I have been reluctant until now to blog about the government shutdown for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that I wanted to get my facts straight. Times like this are always rife with people fulminating against this party or that concern. So, I wanted to make sure that if I was going to say anything about anyone, it would be factually accurate. The second reason is that I don’t want to be taken for a member of either party – oh, Brad’s only saying that because he’s a Republican/Democrat/Libertarian/Green. Actually, I’m none of the above and have no party affiliations. It leaves me free to give credit or to critique either major party without stepping on any interests of my own. Similarly, my views on foreign and domestic policy are both developed and articulate, and either major party would take issue with them at various points depending on the issue. That said, I’ll go on.
Everyone compares this shutdown with the last one – how is it the same and how is it different. That’s understandable seeing as there hasn’t been a shutdown in almost two decades. Still, this shutdown doesn’t remind me much of the shutdown in 1995 to 96. With its protracted duration and its relationship to healthcare-related issues, it reminds me more of the three government shutdowns that took place between September 30 and December 9 of 1977. All of those revolved around whether Medicaid funds could be used to pay for certain types of abortions. I don’t want to go more deeply into that, because I don’t want to spend any time talking about abortion or 1977. After all, I’ve written a whole cycle of blog posts about abortion, none as yet about 1977!
As I have read and read and watched and watched, a couple of things strike me as interesting. First, there are those who lambast President Obama for being a weak and indecisive leader. I’ve had conversations in which he was compared to Jimmy Carter and not favorably. In such conversations I invariably point out two things. First, because of the separation of powers set forth in our constitution—a document I’ve read repeatedly—it is Congress’s sole responsibility to pass budget bills, not President Obama’s, and all other conditions being equal, Obama probably couldn’t have done anything in the immediate past to forestall this particular shutdown. Secondly, President Obama’s refusal to budge--which is to say, he is refusing to allow a minority of lawmakers in one house of government to defund his landmark healthcare law as a condition of reopening the government—doesn’t strike me as weak or irresolute. I don’t agree with everything the man’s done, but liberal and conservative commentators alike seem to agree that capitulation on Obama’s part would be disastrous. Well, it doesn’t look like he’s giving in. Love the man or hate him, how is that weak? I ask you.
The second tendency I’ve noticed is for people to want to blame all of Congress. People talk about Democrats and Republicans acting like children, how the whole congress is to blame, etc. To an extent, this is understandable. There have been plenty of times when extremist elements on both sides of the isle have behaved unreasonably at the same time. Blaming both sides is an impulse that also stems from the American people’s deep-seeded cynicism about government and the people who make up governments. Mark Twain once observed, “politicians and diapers should be changed often and for the same reasons.” Finally, it seems that some people want to blame both sides because they hesitate to actually name particular groups or individuals. I don’t share this reluctance at all, the caution being that I still want to know what I’m talking about if and when I do name names.
Just the same, if all I wanted to do was name names, I wouldn’t have written this. I want to consider two key points about our government and how it functions or doesn’t function as the case may be. Consider, what does it mean to live in a representative democracy? Among other things, it means that the representatives of the people pass, for the most part, laws that the people want or need. That’s the theory. As with all theories that explain human systems, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Let me review some basic civics. A law passes both houses of Congress and goes to the president’s desk for a signature, and if the bill is sent to him during a congressional session, he has ten days excluding Sundays to sign it. If he signs or ignores the bill, it becomes law. If he vetoes it, called a return veto, it goes back to Congress and has to pass by a two thirds majority in each house if the president is going to be overruled. This majority is hard to come by. Out of 1497 regular vetoes, that is vetoes of the type that could have been overridden by Congress and excluding the pocket veto, only 110 have been overridden, about 7.3%. Just the same, in today’s case we’re talking about the Affordable Care Act, which passed both houses and was signed into law.
If a bill becomes law, there are two ways it can be done away with. One is for the Supreme Court to declare the law unconstitutional. The Supreme Court isn’t required to review any given law; it may decide to do so or else not. The other is for the law to be overturned by later legislation. This is the democratic process as the founders of this country designed it.
Why did I include a mini-civics discourse? I included it, because a small party of extremists in the House of Representatives seems to have forgotten their civics classes! What bothers me most of all, however, isn’t even that Tea Party extremists are leveraging power to keep the government shut down until they get their way including such notables as Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Representative Todd Rokita of Indiana, Representative Kerry Bentivolio of Michigan, and Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky. What bothers me most is how this tactic seems to be regarded as a legitimate thing to do in the way of running a government.
A friend of mine who calls himself an arch conservative once put it to me like this, “they [presumably the Tea Party and its affiliates] know that shutting down the government is a valid tactic they can use, so they’re not afraid to use it.” If that’s true, and recent U.S. history suggests that it may be, then the question becomes, valid in what sense?
What might ‘valid’ mean in this context? Is shutting down the government valid in the sense that it is possible and not in violation of any laws? Given the right set of variables, those being a looming budget deadline and an extremely polarized congress with just the wrong apportionment of votes, yes, you can indeed legally shut down the government. It’s happened almost twenty times in forty years, and it’s happening now. Somehow, however, I don’t think that that definition of valid is the one we ought to go by. Consider this: by that set of parameters, Hitler’s ascension to power and his subsequent transformations of the state into one of totalitarian rule were quite valid. He used the constitution of the defunct Weimar republic against itself to gain power, and he did it legally. Yet, when German history refers to Hitler’s rise to power, the word almost always used is ‘die Machtergreifung’ (seizure of power). Interesting. That suggests to me that just because you can do a thing via the machinery of government, it doesn’t follow that you ought to.
One thing the Democrats have right is this observation, stated so often that I hesitated to include it. The Affordable Care Act passed both houses of Congress. It was signed into law by a sitting president. It was upheld by the Supreme Court, and it survived as a central issue in a national election. Clearly, most of America wants to give it a try. The solution if you don’t like it, then, is to vote enough people into Congress to overturn it through correct use of the legislative process. TO borrow a sound bite from the president, “don’t boo. Vote.”
In conclusion, I have no strong opinions about whether or not the healthcare act will work, because I don’t predict the future. What I can say is that there was vehement opposition to social security, Medicaid and Medicare when they were first passed, and yet millions of people have benefited positively from those programs over the years. What I can also say is that I have a ton of friends and acquaintances who work multiple part-time jobs, who have no access to health coverage and no prospects of any access to health coverage possibly except for the Affordable Care Act. There are millions more like them. Will the law help them? I don’t know, but if it doesn’t, we can always change it. Fairly, democratically and reasonably.
What we should not be doing, however, is allowing a handful of House republican extremists, including the speaker of the house, John Boehner, to use fiscal deadlines and funding stoppages as a means of forcing action on legislation they happen not to like, regardless of what the legislation is. No matter which party does it, that is not democracy. That’s power play with stopped paychecks and closed programs for consequences. I hope and pray that a spirit of reason descends on Congress and that we get back to business as soon as possible. I would have been happy to see the shutdown ended as I wrote this, making this blog post obsolete. ... It seems it's not obsolete.
Everyone compares this shutdown with the last one – how is it the same and how is it different. That’s understandable seeing as there hasn’t been a shutdown in almost two decades. Still, this shutdown doesn’t remind me much of the shutdown in 1995 to 96. With its protracted duration and its relationship to healthcare-related issues, it reminds me more of the three government shutdowns that took place between September 30 and December 9 of 1977. All of those revolved around whether Medicaid funds could be used to pay for certain types of abortions. I don’t want to go more deeply into that, because I don’t want to spend any time talking about abortion or 1977. After all, I’ve written a whole cycle of blog posts about abortion, none as yet about 1977!
As I have read and read and watched and watched, a couple of things strike me as interesting. First, there are those who lambast President Obama for being a weak and indecisive leader. I’ve had conversations in which he was compared to Jimmy Carter and not favorably. In such conversations I invariably point out two things. First, because of the separation of powers set forth in our constitution—a document I’ve read repeatedly—it is Congress’s sole responsibility to pass budget bills, not President Obama’s, and all other conditions being equal, Obama probably couldn’t have done anything in the immediate past to forestall this particular shutdown. Secondly, President Obama’s refusal to budge--which is to say, he is refusing to allow a minority of lawmakers in one house of government to defund his landmark healthcare law as a condition of reopening the government—doesn’t strike me as weak or irresolute. I don’t agree with everything the man’s done, but liberal and conservative commentators alike seem to agree that capitulation on Obama’s part would be disastrous. Well, it doesn’t look like he’s giving in. Love the man or hate him, how is that weak? I ask you.
The second tendency I’ve noticed is for people to want to blame all of Congress. People talk about Democrats and Republicans acting like children, how the whole congress is to blame, etc. To an extent, this is understandable. There have been plenty of times when extremist elements on both sides of the isle have behaved unreasonably at the same time. Blaming both sides is an impulse that also stems from the American people’s deep-seeded cynicism about government and the people who make up governments. Mark Twain once observed, “politicians and diapers should be changed often and for the same reasons.” Finally, it seems that some people want to blame both sides because they hesitate to actually name particular groups or individuals. I don’t share this reluctance at all, the caution being that I still want to know what I’m talking about if and when I do name names.
Just the same, if all I wanted to do was name names, I wouldn’t have written this. I want to consider two key points about our government and how it functions or doesn’t function as the case may be. Consider, what does it mean to live in a representative democracy? Among other things, it means that the representatives of the people pass, for the most part, laws that the people want or need. That’s the theory. As with all theories that explain human systems, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Let me review some basic civics. A law passes both houses of Congress and goes to the president’s desk for a signature, and if the bill is sent to him during a congressional session, he has ten days excluding Sundays to sign it. If he signs or ignores the bill, it becomes law. If he vetoes it, called a return veto, it goes back to Congress and has to pass by a two thirds majority in each house if the president is going to be overruled. This majority is hard to come by. Out of 1497 regular vetoes, that is vetoes of the type that could have been overridden by Congress and excluding the pocket veto, only 110 have been overridden, about 7.3%. Just the same, in today’s case we’re talking about the Affordable Care Act, which passed both houses and was signed into law.
If a bill becomes law, there are two ways it can be done away with. One is for the Supreme Court to declare the law unconstitutional. The Supreme Court isn’t required to review any given law; it may decide to do so or else not. The other is for the law to be overturned by later legislation. This is the democratic process as the founders of this country designed it.
Why did I include a mini-civics discourse? I included it, because a small party of extremists in the House of Representatives seems to have forgotten their civics classes! What bothers me most of all, however, isn’t even that Tea Party extremists are leveraging power to keep the government shut down until they get their way including such notables as Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Representative Todd Rokita of Indiana, Representative Kerry Bentivolio of Michigan, and Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky. What bothers me most is how this tactic seems to be regarded as a legitimate thing to do in the way of running a government.
A friend of mine who calls himself an arch conservative once put it to me like this, “they [presumably the Tea Party and its affiliates] know that shutting down the government is a valid tactic they can use, so they’re not afraid to use it.” If that’s true, and recent U.S. history suggests that it may be, then the question becomes, valid in what sense?
What might ‘valid’ mean in this context? Is shutting down the government valid in the sense that it is possible and not in violation of any laws? Given the right set of variables, those being a looming budget deadline and an extremely polarized congress with just the wrong apportionment of votes, yes, you can indeed legally shut down the government. It’s happened almost twenty times in forty years, and it’s happening now. Somehow, however, I don’t think that that definition of valid is the one we ought to go by. Consider this: by that set of parameters, Hitler’s ascension to power and his subsequent transformations of the state into one of totalitarian rule were quite valid. He used the constitution of the defunct Weimar republic against itself to gain power, and he did it legally. Yet, when German history refers to Hitler’s rise to power, the word almost always used is ‘die Machtergreifung’ (seizure of power). Interesting. That suggests to me that just because you can do a thing via the machinery of government, it doesn’t follow that you ought to.
One thing the Democrats have right is this observation, stated so often that I hesitated to include it. The Affordable Care Act passed both houses of Congress. It was signed into law by a sitting president. It was upheld by the Supreme Court, and it survived as a central issue in a national election. Clearly, most of America wants to give it a try. The solution if you don’t like it, then, is to vote enough people into Congress to overturn it through correct use of the legislative process. TO borrow a sound bite from the president, “don’t boo. Vote.”
In conclusion, I have no strong opinions about whether or not the healthcare act will work, because I don’t predict the future. What I can say is that there was vehement opposition to social security, Medicaid and Medicare when they were first passed, and yet millions of people have benefited positively from those programs over the years. What I can also say is that I have a ton of friends and acquaintances who work multiple part-time jobs, who have no access to health coverage and no prospects of any access to health coverage possibly except for the Affordable Care Act. There are millions more like them. Will the law help them? I don’t know, but if it doesn’t, we can always change it. Fairly, democratically and reasonably.
What we should not be doing, however, is allowing a handful of House republican extremists, including the speaker of the house, John Boehner, to use fiscal deadlines and funding stoppages as a means of forcing action on legislation they happen not to like, regardless of what the legislation is. No matter which party does it, that is not democracy. That’s power play with stopped paychecks and closed programs for consequences. I hope and pray that a spirit of reason descends on Congress and that we get back to business as soon as possible. I would have been happy to see the shutdown ended as I wrote this, making this blog post obsolete. ... It seems it's not obsolete.
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Are Words Only Words?
As in most other communities and subcultures, the blind community has terms it uses to denote in-group members and out-group members. Conceptually, this doesn’t bother me. On the ground, however, I am bothered, because the terms used are either demeaning in and of themselves, or they, to put it plainly, sound silly and reflect poorly on the user. Let’s start with two in-group terms, blink and blindy.
As with a lot of contemporary slang, users may disagree on the boundaries or limitations of a particular word, and there’s really no reliable documented source to go to. However, being blind myself, I hope I have some idea of what I’m talking about as I attempt to set up these terms. Blink is a slang word for a blind person. It is mostly used by blind people to refer to other blind people, but not always. In an online blog, one person, presumably someone who can see, refers to himself as “an honorary blink.” O … k. Blindy gets a little more airplay. Twitter has a page styling itself Blindy.Tv, described television for the blind. I’ve seen some anecdotal evidence that some blind users of these terms consider there to be a difference between blink and blindy. Namely, a blink can allegedly be anyone who is anything ranging from being qualified as legally blind on to totally blind, whereas a blindy is usually described as being totally blind or having no functional vision. Interesting.
Let me move on. Sighty and sightling are interchangeable words used to designate a person who can see, one who is not legally blind. They can be derogatory, but they don’t have to be. It depends on the attitude of the speaker. If someone is frustrated and says, “the damned sighty kept asking me whether someone picks out my clothes for me,” then obviously it’s being used negatively. However, if someone says, “so when I couldn’t figure it out, I decided to see if I could find a sighty to help me with it,” the word isn’t being used derogatorily, at least in so far as the intent of the speaker has anything to do with the meaning of the word.
As a linguist, I know that many groups throughout history have taken intended epithets and made them sources of in-group identity. We’ve seen it in both the Gay and African-American communities, to cite two modern examples. However, I’m not at all certain that the four terms I’ve talked about originated as out-group epithets. So far as I can trace them, which is not very far, they originated within the blind community itself. TO my way of thinking that makes a world of difference.
As a blind person, I have to start by asking this question: are words like blindy and sightling the best we can do? Really? I’ve heard everyone from blind college professors to blind high school-age students use them, and I find that no matter the user, they leave a bad taste in my mouth. They sound demeaning and silly to my ear, and as an in-group member of the community, being blind, I ought to be qualified to make that judgment call. Moreover, I know I’m not alone. Most of my blind friends also reject these terms outright.
So what is the blind community trying to do by propagating these terms? Is it trying to create an identity for itself? Let me close on a humorous note. If I find terms like these offensive and inane, overcorrection in the form of ridiculous political correctness is also silly. I am not visually impaired, for example, because I have no vision to impair. I’m not handycapable, differently abled or physically challenged. I’m blind. More specifically, I’m a person who is blind, the relative clause making all the difference. That said, I’m not a blink or a blindy, thank you kindly. So, you might ask, which terms do I use? When I’m referring to someone I know has some range of usable vision, I’ll say visually impaired. Otherwise, I’ll say blind, that is if the disability comes up at all, and there’s no law saying it has to.
In conclusion, I want to reply to those who would say that these words are just words, and nothing more should be made of them. On the contrary. Words are extremely powerful. The bible calls the tongue a two-edged sword, for example, and we should take care in how we exercise it. Words matter. What people say about a group matters, and what a group says about itself matters even more.
As with a lot of contemporary slang, users may disagree on the boundaries or limitations of a particular word, and there’s really no reliable documented source to go to. However, being blind myself, I hope I have some idea of what I’m talking about as I attempt to set up these terms. Blink is a slang word for a blind person. It is mostly used by blind people to refer to other blind people, but not always. In an online blog, one person, presumably someone who can see, refers to himself as “an honorary blink.” O … k. Blindy gets a little more airplay. Twitter has a page styling itself Blindy.Tv, described television for the blind. I’ve seen some anecdotal evidence that some blind users of these terms consider there to be a difference between blink and blindy. Namely, a blink can allegedly be anyone who is anything ranging from being qualified as legally blind on to totally blind, whereas a blindy is usually described as being totally blind or having no functional vision. Interesting.
Let me move on. Sighty and sightling are interchangeable words used to designate a person who can see, one who is not legally blind. They can be derogatory, but they don’t have to be. It depends on the attitude of the speaker. If someone is frustrated and says, “the damned sighty kept asking me whether someone picks out my clothes for me,” then obviously it’s being used negatively. However, if someone says, “so when I couldn’t figure it out, I decided to see if I could find a sighty to help me with it,” the word isn’t being used derogatorily, at least in so far as the intent of the speaker has anything to do with the meaning of the word.
As a linguist, I know that many groups throughout history have taken intended epithets and made them sources of in-group identity. We’ve seen it in both the Gay and African-American communities, to cite two modern examples. However, I’m not at all certain that the four terms I’ve talked about originated as out-group epithets. So far as I can trace them, which is not very far, they originated within the blind community itself. TO my way of thinking that makes a world of difference.
As a blind person, I have to start by asking this question: are words like blindy and sightling the best we can do? Really? I’ve heard everyone from blind college professors to blind high school-age students use them, and I find that no matter the user, they leave a bad taste in my mouth. They sound demeaning and silly to my ear, and as an in-group member of the community, being blind, I ought to be qualified to make that judgment call. Moreover, I know I’m not alone. Most of my blind friends also reject these terms outright.
So what is the blind community trying to do by propagating these terms? Is it trying to create an identity for itself? Let me close on a humorous note. If I find terms like these offensive and inane, overcorrection in the form of ridiculous political correctness is also silly. I am not visually impaired, for example, because I have no vision to impair. I’m not handycapable, differently abled or physically challenged. I’m blind. More specifically, I’m a person who is blind, the relative clause making all the difference. That said, I’m not a blink or a blindy, thank you kindly. So, you might ask, which terms do I use? When I’m referring to someone I know has some range of usable vision, I’ll say visually impaired. Otherwise, I’ll say blind, that is if the disability comes up at all, and there’s no law saying it has to.
In conclusion, I want to reply to those who would say that these words are just words, and nothing more should be made of them. On the contrary. Words are extremely powerful. The bible calls the tongue a two-edged sword, for example, and we should take care in how we exercise it. Words matter. What people say about a group matters, and what a group says about itself matters even more.
Friday, September 20, 2013
20 Signs That You Attended a Massive Public University
20 Signs That you Went to a Massive Public University
1. You spent your first two years taking classes and you rarely if ever met an actual professor.
2. You learned the Greek alphabet by driving down fraternity/sorority row.
3. The word Campus Town was used to describe the dozens of square miles occupied by university buildings.
4. "Is that on campus," was a frequently asked question because: A. you just didn't know when campus ended, and B. a lot of local businesses set up shop between classroom buildings and kitty-corner to dormitories.
5. Half of your town's local businesses close between May and August and for a month starting in mid-December because the town's population seasonally drops by tens of thousands and can't sustain them.
6. Once admitted, you have to apply to a department in order to declare its major as your own.
7. University departments are so big that most classes in the major are restricted to those majors, because in terms of enrollment figures, they can afford not to give a flying flip about what you're interested in if you're not one of them.
8. You went through your major courses and never had the same prof twice.
9. When it comes time for grad school, you have to remind your letter writers about you and your achievements, because they've forgotten who you are completely.
10. The university police force functions as a heavily manned police department in its own right, patrolling the town at large.
11. The question, "are you a student at U. of X" results in a "yes" in three out of four cases no matter where you are in town.
12. There are so many bars that they can be rated using a likert scale, and so many social sciences majors around that someone is likely to have done so.
13. New apartment complexes invariably target students before townspeople.
14. There are enough graduate students so that they either have formed or would like to form some kind of union.
15. Nearby eating and drinking establishments can be divided into graduate or undergraduate hangouts.
16. Your library, invariably a massive, sprawling edifice, measures its collection count using 7 or 8-digit numbers.
17. Your dormitories average five stories or taller, and there are a ton of them.
18. You need more dormitories, always.
19. You have your own memes, and everyone in your part of the state, possibly in the entire state, recognizes them.
20. Everyone you meet is automatically impressed when you tell them where you go to school. So you can leave out the fact that you're failing that course and dropping out anyhow.
1. You spent your first two years taking classes and you rarely if ever met an actual professor.
2. You learned the Greek alphabet by driving down fraternity/sorority row.
3. The word Campus Town was used to describe the dozens of square miles occupied by university buildings.
4. "Is that on campus," was a frequently asked question because: A. you just didn't know when campus ended, and B. a lot of local businesses set up shop between classroom buildings and kitty-corner to dormitories.
5. Half of your town's local businesses close between May and August and for a month starting in mid-December because the town's population seasonally drops by tens of thousands and can't sustain them.
6. Once admitted, you have to apply to a department in order to declare its major as your own.
7. University departments are so big that most classes in the major are restricted to those majors, because in terms of enrollment figures, they can afford not to give a flying flip about what you're interested in if you're not one of them.
8. You went through your major courses and never had the same prof twice.
9. When it comes time for grad school, you have to remind your letter writers about you and your achievements, because they've forgotten who you are completely.
10. The university police force functions as a heavily manned police department in its own right, patrolling the town at large.
11. The question, "are you a student at U. of X" results in a "yes" in three out of four cases no matter where you are in town.
12. There are so many bars that they can be rated using a likert scale, and so many social sciences majors around that someone is likely to have done so.
13. New apartment complexes invariably target students before townspeople.
14. There are enough graduate students so that they either have formed or would like to form some kind of union.
15. Nearby eating and drinking establishments can be divided into graduate or undergraduate hangouts.
16. Your library, invariably a massive, sprawling edifice, measures its collection count using 7 or 8-digit numbers.
17. Your dormitories average five stories or taller, and there are a ton of them.
18. You need more dormitories, always.
19. You have your own memes, and everyone in your part of the state, possibly in the entire state, recognizes them.
20. Everyone you meet is automatically impressed when you tell them where you go to school. So you can leave out the fact that you're failing that course and dropping out anyhow.
Friday, September 6, 2013
Loaded Language, From "Communist" to "Homophobe"
Commenting on loaded language is a tricky business, because you run the risk of being called the very things you’re talking about if and when you upset someone. Still, in seems to me that every era has particular terms that can be used by one side against the other to stop the public discussion and turn it ad homonym i.e., make what might otherwise be a legitimate airing of political views into nothing more than a vicious personal attack. For this commentary, I selected two terms that particularly interest me, communist and homophobe. I have to say at the start that this essay isn’t about political systems. Nor is it an endorsement of or a philippic against homosexuality either in the public square or anywhere else. It is, however, a brief look at these two words and their power to alter public perception and/or derail discussion.
For much of the twentieth century, the quickest way to trash your political opponent and start fist fights in bars was to refer to the person as a communist. Other fashionable terms for a communist included red, used as a noun, pinko, commie fascist, and other such charming descriptors. From the first Red Scare, 1919 to 1921, to the much more widely remembered McCarthy era and beyond, dissenters were effectively silenced or ruined through the application of the sobriquet “communist.”
In the early 1920’s, the media made a regular habit of portraying labor strikes and other attempts at collective bargaining as threats to the American way of life. If you were pro-union, you could count on being called a communist by someone at some point. The government also got into the act. In alleged crackdowns against militant anarchism, which really was a threat back then, the government arrested and deported quite a number of what it considered “undesirable” persons, applying the labels communist, seditionist or anarchist, for they meant just about the same thing, to them all.
Here, though, I’m less concerned with what the government does than with what the average person or the average journalist, some of them being very average indeed, does. Consider this. Do you think southern segregation was wrong? Now, who’s going to answer no to that, right? As it happens, southern dixycrats of the 1950’s and 1960’s, in their fight against desegregation, argued vehemently that desegregation would irreparably harm the American way of life. Those who favored desegregation were often called, you guessed it, communists. Never mind that the desegregationist’s didn’t believe in the tenets of Marxism-Leninism at all and could prove it. Calling your opponents communists, whether pro-labor activists or desegregationist’s, was an effective means of framing them in public discourse as a threat to society. It shifted the discussion away from the pros or cons of the particular issue and turned the discussion to topics like national safety, the American way of life, etc. In so far as the individual so named was concerned, it effectively stopped the original discussion.
The word homophobe strikes me as interesting, because even though its history is shorter than communist (Mariam-Webster traces the word homophobia only to 1969) it’s doing the same thing today. Regardless of your sexual preference or point of view, I think you’ll agree with me that gay rights is one of the hottest issues in the American public sphere today. With recent supreme court decisions about laws concerning marriage, states passing, banning and then unbanning laws against same sex marriage—hello, California,--I would be hard pressed to find another issue that is more before the notice of the American public than this one.
That brings me to homophobe. Let me say up front that I’m aware of the radical right fringe. I know there are those who identify themselves as conservatives and who espouse nothing less than hatred or deep-seeded fear of homosexuals. There are, in short, genuine homophobes out there, just as there were those comparatively few who got called communists and who actually were.
What concerns me now is those who are not homophobes, but who are being so labeled in liberal media, which is to say most media. I’m avoiding mentioning particular names for two reasons. First, I’m not interested in defending or criticizing any particular person or publication. I’m talking about the broad picture here, and people should be free to apply what I’m saying to whoever or whatever needs the application within reason. Second, the moment I drop a name, the discussion will turn from the merits of what I’m saying to a defense of or an attack on that person or publication. So for both reasons, I’m steering clear of names.
What is a homophobe? The Free Mariam-Webster dictionary defines homophobia as, “irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosexuals.” Fair enough. That definition brings to my mind the image of sign-waving radical chanting about how homosexuals are hell bound. I don’t have any tolerance for that sort of behavior and would agree with my liberal friends and colleagues in terming it homophobic.
Having said that, if the term homophobe was being applied only to that sort of person, I wouldn’t be writing today. Alarmingly, I’m observing a tendency in a number of media outlets, particularly online media outlets, to use the word homophobe rather loosely, and it’s starting to have an effect. Pretty soon now, if you voice anything other than unqualified support of gay marriage legislation in your state, for example, you will be liable to a charge of homophobia. If you voice anything other than unqualified endorsements of homosexuality in your churches, you will be liable to a charge of homophobia.
My question is this: are we coming to such a point in our discourse that no divergent views on homosexuality will be tolerated? Those on the left, whether they’re called liberals, progressives, whatever, have a reputation for promoting fairness, tolerance and diversity. I should know. Being blind, I can attest to the fact that I’ve been most successful in more liberal environments, and I’ve had the hardest time making my way in very conservative ones. That’s very ironic, considering my strong Christian values often align me with those in whose communities I find it hardest to live and work. So, I have nothing against an atmosphere of fairness, tolerance and diversity.
However, what I’m seeing vis-à-vis the use of the word homophobe is a growing intolerance for those with whom the left disagrees. This is deeply ironic, because the left often styles itself as being open to divergent points of view. Yet, labeling someone a homophobe does not seem to be reminiscent of tolerance, fair-mindedness and diversity. So then the question becomes, are we as a society now going to tolerate only those who agree with us? Are we going to demonstrate fair-mindedness and openness just so long as the other person doesn’t disagree with our point of view? As I asked in a recent Facebook comment, can you disagree with anything having to do with homosexuality itself or homosexuality in the public sphere, no matter how the disagreement is voiced or what the disagreement may be, without being labeled a homophobe? I’m coming to the fearful conclusion that you almost can’t.
In conclusion, if what I’m talking about sounds like public suppression of opinion, it is. And yet—and I know this won’t go down too well in some quarters—public suppression, which is to say societal suppression, of divergent opinion is part of the American way of life just as much as the first amendment and its guarantee of free speech. If you look at our history, you will find this truth played out both on the governmental and the personal level. The use of the term communist in our public discourse is one proof of that claim. Is the term homophobe starting to serve the same purpose in the public square? I’ve told you what I think. The question is what do you think?
Saturday, August 31, 2013
On Being Useless
There’s nothing quite as heartwarming and uplifting as being told that what you’re doing is unproductive, unprofitable, and useless. I’ve always said that. Further, at no time are you likely to be given this soul-stirring assessment of your interests, dreams and goals than when discussing your choice of college major. I’m leaving out graduate degrees, because for now graduate school still has a certain, if limited, prestige to it, and so we’re not subjected to quite as much abuse as undergrads. Note that I didn’t say we don’t come in for any ridicule at all, just not quite as much.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about what the most and least useful college majors are. Site after site, from The Daily Beast to Forbes, has been publishing its take on what’s most useful and what’s least useful to aspiring work force initiates. What’s interesting is that Forbes and the Daily Beast used the same data provided by Georgetown and came up with differently ordered lists, but that’s a methodology question interesting only to those of us in the social sciences. The lists are based loosely on earnings data and projected earnings and growth in the field.
You will notice that money, and only money, is the driving concern behind both of the lists I’m going to present as well as any others you may find. “How much will you make with that,” seems to be all that matters, and from a philosophical perspective (philosophy ranking somewhere on everybody’s list of useless majors) I find that interesting and discouraging. Here are the lists, ordered from most abominably useless, number 1, to merely unprofitable at the bottom. If you don’t want to read them, skip down to find the rest of my thoughts.
The 13 Most Useless Majors From Philosophy to Journalism
Published April 23, 2012
http://www.thedailybeast.com/galleries/2012/04/23/the-13-most-useless-majors-from-philosophy-to-journalism.html
1. the fine arts
2. drama and theatre arts
3. film, video, and photographic arts
4. commercial art and graphic design
5. architecture
6. philosophy and religious studies
7. English literature and language
8. journalism
9. anthropology
10. hospitality management
11. music
12. history
13. political science and government
The 10 Worst College Majors
Published October 12, 2012
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2012/10/11/the-10-worst-college-majors/
1. anthropology and archaeology
2. film, video and photographic arts
3. fine arts
4. philosophy and religious studies
5. liberal arts
6. music
7. physical fitness and parks recreation
8. commercial art and graphic design
9. history
10. English language and literature
Did you major in anything on those lists? I double minored in two of those items and majored in a foreign language. I didn’t see foreign languages on either list, possibly because they fall outside the parameters the “researchers” were using.
Honestly, these lists tell us more about the people who compiled the data and about our culture as a whole than they do about any value there may be in these majors. What does it say that value is defined by so many through earnings? Countless people, from the guy next to me on the bus to Governor Rick Scott of Florida, have called for the closure of departments like anthropology and philosophy and for increased funding to STEM fields, science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
With those calls, a misperception of liberal arts is on the increase. College students and their families will talk about religious studies and English lit in one breath as they slam the liberal arts, and then they go on to extol the virtues of biology and calculus as though those subjects are outside the liberal arts. In reality, math and science have always been at the heart of liberal arts studies as well as language. Grammar, rhetoric and logic have been at the core of the liberal arts since the ancient Greeks. Rome gave their study the name Artes Liberales, and during the Middle Ages, the study of these three core subjects was expanded to include music, geometry, astronomy and arithmetic. So we see from this thumbnail sketch of history, another of the subjects deemed useless in both lists above, that subjects like music and language arts have been considered just as essential to the makeup of a person as science, technology, engineering or math.
These lists, while they might appear convincing to some because of their use of statistics and projected earnings data, also don’t represent the whole picture even from an employer’s point of view. Carol Christ, president of Smith College, makes a few interesting points. Here’s her article, www.smith.edu/docs/president/Spring2012Christ.pdf. She quotes a recent survey by the Association of American Colleges and universities in which three quarters of employers surveyed indicated that the most valuable skills they seek in new hires are: strong communication, flexibility, creativity and critical thinking. Now, I ask you. In which subjects are those skills taught? Mathematics? I don’t think so. Physics? Not likely. Engineering, sometimes. You’re going to find those foundational skills taught and fostered in core required subjects: communications (public speaking), English, philosophy, logic, history, to name but a few.
President Christ goes on to make another telling point. Even as we’re trying to narrow down the focus of education and slashing funding to certain liberal arts departments, our economic competitors, particularly China and Japan, are discovering the value of a broadly based liberal arts education:
Surveys in China and Japan, cultures long held as supporting regimented learning, have begun to show that employers there are complaining about the inflexibility of a workforce educated without a focus on creativity or problem solving. Facing the same pressures of internationalization and innovation that have generated increased scrutiny of educational styles in the United States, universities in Asia are adapting liberal arts education as an economic necessity.
You shouldn’t need to be the president of Smith College, where I applied for a job last year by the way, to know that other liberal arts apart from math and science have value. As a doctor, how are you going to make judgment calls about patients’ lives e.g., quality of life and the merits of continuing life support without a basic understanding of ethics? How are you going to communicate your scientific findings in a way that will land you that three million dollar grant without a good grasp of writing skills in general and of persuasive writing in particular? How are you going to find that creative solution in particle physics if you’ve never been taught to think outside the box? The short answer is that you’re not.
Being able to think across fields and disciplines makes you a more valuable hire than having expert knowledge in one subfield of physics and that only. Leastways, that’s what President Christ seems to have uncovered. So where does that leave us with our handy lists of “useless” majors?
It’s time we reconsidered the notion of value as being solely money-driven. The fact that a graphic designer might get paid less than a computer engineer is trumped, for me, by the possibility that it may be that designer’s logo that makes the computer engineer’s company universally recognizable, boosting sales, productivity and pay checks for those computer engineers. It’s worth thinking about.
Friday, August 30, 2013
Small town, Champaign-Urbana?
As I write this, John Mellencamp’s “Small Town” has been playing in my head. After five years here, if I were asked to describe Champaign-Urbana, the description “pleasant small town” is the first thing that would come to mind. Calling Champaign-Urbana a small town, what with its population of about 123,000 not including the rest of the county outside the towns of Champaign and Urbana, is something of an understatement. Even subtracting the tens of thousands of University of Illinois students and faculty who leave each summer and Christmas, it’s still pretty big. So how can I get away with calling it a small town?
It’s the atmosphere. The longer I live here, the more I like the personal touch you find at local businesses. The Urbana Garden Restaurant on Lincoln Avenue is one of my and my wife’s favorites. Whenever we go there on a date, the serving staff usually recognizes us and asks how we are. At my favorite Indian restaurant, Bombay Indian Grill on Green Street, they know how I like my vindaloo and my korma. Our preferred cab company, Orange Taxy housed on South Neil Street, keeps our debit cards on file. We know most drivers by name, and our favorite drivers, people we ride with whenever we can, never fail to treat us with friendly respect, and city bus drivers greet me by name.
We live on a residential street across from a middle school and high school in Urbana, its population being half that of Champaign. When I catch my morning bus at the corner of Vine and Washington, I can usually count on at least one driver pulling up to the stop sign and asking me if I need any help getting somewhere or whether I’d care to cross the street. Lately, a lady drives by with her dog who’s always barking. At first, she apologized for the dog, seeing me standing there with Delaney, but now I simply wave to her when she pulls up and she greets me in return.
Some part of this neighborliness may be chalked up to our blindness. I’ve noticed that people are often a bit nicer to me on that account. But I would be doing people a great injustice to suppose that was all of it or even a significant part of it. For many, my disability may play no part whatsoever.
I rather think that much of it has to do with the kind of atmosphere that town residents, which is to say those who aren’t university students, want to engender in the town. I think the university and its student population get most of the attention when people write about the CU area, so I’m deliberately not talking about U. of I. itself. Neighborliness is a quality that hasn’t totally disappeared from America yet, though I suggest it’s on its way out. Getting ahead and staying there has become a driving force in our culture, so when people you do business with take the time and effort to remember your name without consulting a computer screen, it’s simply pleasant. Wouldn’t you say?
Saturday, July 6, 2013
Where are They Now?
Alright, so it’s been a while. In tech terms, it’s been forever. And why have I been absent? Life, like the Borg, has a habit of intruding and occupying one’s attention. I’m sure a good psychologist would have a field day with my life/Borg comparison. What have I been doing? That implies an update. After five months and four days, an update is due, to be sure.
First, I finished my dissertation! Alright, I nearly finished my dissertation. That is to say, I finished writing the bulk of the thing and survived my doctoral defense on May 2. If you have never had the pleasure of enduring a doctoral defense, imagine a group of four or five professors who have read over a piece of your work and take it upon themselves to ask you the hardest, most trying questions their minds can conceive. Further imagine that your answers determine your fate, and imagine, lastly, that this exercise is done before the merciless gaze of the public. If you can imagine these conditions, you well imagine a doctoral defense. It happened. When it comes to my university endeavors, my wife is the most supportive person I know. Before the defense, she was trying to talk me out of my pessimistic view of the pending exam. She even joked that we would have to work on my “Pollyanna complex.” After the defense which she witnessed, all she had to say was, “I understand now.” Like most other dissertations, mine did not escape unscathed. I have revisions to do which are fairly minor and fairly inescapable.
“Wife,” you ask? Alright, I got married. I told you I would, and I did on April 20. My stoner acquaintances were delighted. Being a German scholar, I didn’t think of weed and 4/20; rather, my first thought was that it was Hitler’s birthday. I decided not to let this ruin the day, because it’s also my paternal grandmother’s birthday, may she rest in peace. It was an excellent star trek-themed wedding and reception. We don’t have it on YouTube … yet. Suffice it to say that we chose not to dress up in costume, but all the music was from trek, with all four major series (I reject Enterprise utterly) being represented in the ceremony, and the preacher wove a number of trek references into his sermonette. Good for him! Being a graduate student and living on a graduate student’s pay, the planned honeymoon in Fiji will just have to wait.
So, I’m married and the biggest milestone of a Ph.D.’s life, my defense, is behind me. Where are we now? What about the job market? … We’re still here in Illinois. To put it bluntly, this year on the job market has been a near total flop. Apart from the Boston interview (see the blog entry for January 6) nothing else has happened except a pile of reject letters. My professors tell me that this is not unusual, and now that I have defended successfully, I have raised my job prospects for the next round of applications. The department at U. of I., meanwhile, has offered me a final year of teaching so that I can do two things: finish my revisions with the help of Disability Services’ text conversion office, and make another run at the job market. It was kind of them to offer me that year of funding; they did not have to by any means. So this year I will teach and work on turning my dissertation into a pair of publishable articles. At least this year, if there are MLA interviews, they’ll be in Chicago, the site of the 2014 MLA conference. My advisor, meanwhile, is encouraging me to continue bolstering my application by submitting an abstract to the American Association of Applied Linguistics conference, which will happen in March of next year in Portland. I would be thrilled to visit Portland again, as my guide dog came from there and two dear friends live there. Aside from great memories and awesome trekies, this means no massive conference hotel expenses and no overpriced conference hotel food.
Lastly, we’re moving. We’re moving into a duplex in Urbana so that we can pay less and get more. It’s a one-bedroom residence with a shared front and back yard. Delaney will be delighted. It’s also within walking distance of several stores and other things that will be worth walking to, not the least of which will be bus stops that will enable me to do certain things such as … going to work? My future students and current employer would appreciate it if I were to do that. Selecting this place proved an exercise in discernment and necessitated a crash course in CU apartment hunting. For example, when one place, a reasonably attractive prospect, waited until the tour to tell us about the mandatory $30 per month water bill, we rejected it.
With all of this going, the logical supposition would be that I have not had any time for a social life or hobbies. That would be logical, though incorrect. I am still playing chess, still watching the news for blog topics, and still teaching at church. In fact I’ve recently started playing what may be the only respectable star trek RPG on the web. As someone who has done administrative work on online games, I’m impressed with the massive size and detail work of the gaming environment, especially the Enterprise. And as a footnote, I should add that playing a Vulcan is proving interesting, though with my decade plus of studying that race and its relatives, I should be able to manage it in a way that would be, as a Vulcan would put it, “satisfactory.”
So, what topics of note interest me? Edward Snowden? Perhaps. Prop 8? Not really. I always thought that was a states’ rights issue. The George Zimmerman trial? Maybe. We’ll see. But it is time to start writing again. Now that I’m not writing a dissertation, working on this blog has again become possible.
PS.
I loathe the fact that the appearance of this blog site continues to change. I thought for a few minutes that it was inaccessible now.
Saturday, February 2, 2013
The Language of Abortion, Part IV
Hello
again. First, before I get to today’s topic, an update is in order. The bad
news is that I haven’t been invited to any further interviews. I’ve received a
couple of reject letters, and to be fair, one of them was of the, “we’re
keeping your file open,” variety, so perhaps it doesn’t count as a total
rejection. This is nothing unusual. One particular school’s pass stung, because
it was a position that everyone I know, including me, really wanted to see me
get, but that’s normal. In fact it’s quite normal for someone in my position.
That doesn’t make reject letters any more fun and it doesn’t make waiting any
easier. As my advisor pointed out, only academic searches can get away with the
amount of wait time they put people through. The good news is that more
positions continue to come out. Right now they’re of the one-year visiting
lecturer or visiting professor variety—the idea being that you stay there for
one to three years and move on—and I’m applying to five positions as we speak.
Meanwhile, I’m putting out appropriate feelers in other areas, but we’ll see. I
can only continue applying, continue working on my dissertation, and continue
trying to think positively. While I’m not a pessimist at heart, that isn’t
always easy to do. Some Christians seem to find it very easy to pull out those
scriptures about God’s good plans for you and use them when they’re troubled,
and the result is a serine individual even when everything’s gone completely
wrong. Those people are rare, and admittedly,
I am not as yet one such person. I pull out those same scriptures, I remind myself
of their truth, and I tell myself to knock it off with being anxious. Still, I
repeat that I am not a pessimist by nature, and things will work out somehow.
More accurately, things will work out as God means them too. Now on to today’s
topic.
Abortion is
a topic I’ve tackled before as you may know. I have posted a series of items on
the topic under the title “The Language of Abortion.”
Part I:
Part II:
Part III:
In the series I examine the language we use when talking
about abortion e.g. words and shades of meaning we use as a culture when
seeking to promote abortion. In part III, I shifted to talking about the
growing consistency in the language of those who advocate abortion. In that
essay, I talked about several cases, the wrongful birth angle and two legal
cases that came out of it, and the case of Emily Rapp, who wrote an article in
defense of abortion given her son’s Tay-Sachs Disease. In all of those cases, I
was talking about what I might call post hoc abortion rhetoric. These people,
the Estrada family being the exception because they don’t appear to have ever
wanted abortions, talk about the abortions they might have had if only they’d
known. In other words, these are the abortions they would have had in light of
birth defects. The rhetorical situation, however, is worsening, and so I’ve
decided to speak up again concerning our growing, and shocking, consistency in
our views about abortion.
What do I
mean when I say the situation is worsening? I simply mean this: some are starting to set aside euphemistic
labels such as ‘termination’ and ‘tissue,’ and even outside of notions of
wrongful birth and genetics testing screw ups, there are folks passionately arguing
that, yes, the baby is definitely alive, and that, yes, the mother definitely
has the right to decide if it lives or dies. They argue that not all life is,
in fact, created equal, and that mothers should be left alone to make the
decision about this medical procedure and life choice for herself. At least
they’re setting the euphemisms aside, though now that they have, the
conversation changes direction.
Two things
recently grabbed my attention. One is an article in the online news venue
Salon.com. The writer, Mary Elizabeth Williams, passionately defends the very point
of view I’m talking about. Since I will be referring to this article heavily,
here it is:
Please also watch the Planned Parenthood video that’s on
that page, because I’ll be discussing it as well. So to get straight into it.
Williams’ title is, “So What If Abortion Ends Life?” There are two ways to
interpret the intended meaning of this title. Rhetorically, she might have
meant, “So, what if abortion really does end life? We need to rethink abortion
in the light of the fact that these fetuses are living babies and stop the
practice,” or she might have meant, “Abortion ends life. So? It’s my right and I’m
going to do it anyway if I choose.” The fact that I am (A), writing this post
at all, and (B), choosing to discuss her article in it, should lead you to
conclude without having read the article that the second interpretation is the author’s
intended one.
Let me make
a couple points about Williams’ article before getting into specifics. First,
it is a polemic, an attack piece. Her language is fiery and sometimes
colorfully exaggerated. In my discussions, I am going to ignore that aspect of
it and delve into the meat of the article, the point she was making beyond all
the heated rhetoric. Second, there are a couple of points that she and I agree
on. She says it’s time to stop quibbling over whether or not a fetus is alive
and to acknowledge that they are living. We need to stop using euphemisms to
evade the question of life. I wholeheartedly agree.
Williams
begins her discussion by claiming that it was unfair and misleading for those
of us who oppose abortion to put it in terms of life versus choice, because we
force the other side to come out somehow opposing the notion of life. She
claims that we, those of us who are anti-abortion, in standing on the platform
of “it’s a life,” somehow deprive her side of equally semantically powerful
choices. SO, she claims, she and those who think as she does have been stuck
using less charged words: women’s
rights, reproductive freedom, etc. In other words, we who believe that abortion
is wrong have somehow unfairly stolen the semantics show by capitalizing on
word such as ‘life’ and ‘alive,’ and in Williams’ opinion, we wrongfully force
her side to debate the matter on a life versus choice basis, “… it’s pretty
silly to pretend that what was growing inside of them wasn’t the same? Fetuses
aren’t selective like that. They don’t qualify as human life only if they’re
intended to be born.” On that, she’s absolutely right. As to the rest,
it’s an interesting argument. Her discussion of semantics is fairly accurate as
far as it goes; ‘life’ is a more attention-grabbing word—in linguistic terms it
primes more--than ‘reproductive freedom.’ Yet, have we stolen the show, or have
we been discussing it correctly? Well, since Williams is willing to admit that
we are talking about living human beings, we can leave that last question aside
and go on. Williams and I agree. Fetuses are living human beings.
Mary
Williams and I differ sharply, however, once we pass that point of agreement.
She goes on to argue that unborn children are ‘non-autonomous entities,’ and that
the mother’s rights automatically supersede those of the baby. It is a baby,
Williams acknowledges, but it has no rights that the mother need concern
herself with: “a fetus can be a human
life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides.
She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health
should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of
her.”
Once I got over my own stunned shock at reading that, I
asked myself, has this person fully considered the ramifications of what she’s
saying? Let me spell out some of those ramifications and flesh her argument out
to one of its logical conclusions, and please keep in mind I’m speaking in
purely hypothetical terms. Supposing we somehow came up with a law allowing for
the forced euthanasia of the severely mentally challenged. We could rationalize
it with all sorts of utilitarian arguments about their “drain on society” and
all sorts of humanitarian arguments about their “quality of life,” and so this
law gets passed. Then, when this hypothetical law is in place and the people
are dying, we acknowledge that what we’re doing is killing people. Our defense
is that they don’t have any rights, or certainly far fewer than we do, that we,
those with mental competence, are making the decisions and we have the right to
make those decisions because we’re the ones who have to decide what to do with
these mentally retarded people, these ‘non-autonomous entities,’ to use
Williams’ phrasing. In fact, why confine it to the mentally challenged? Why not
the physically disabled too? Supposing my parents would have had the legal
right to euthanize i.e. kill me if I’d become too much to handle. Sound
familiar? If you’re thinking Nazi Germany, then we’re on the same page.
Ok,
back to reality. We don’t have laws like that and my parents would never have
done so anyhow. Yet, isn’t this line of thinking just what Williams employs to
advocate the right of the mother to kill the unborn baby? The question isn’t
why would she expand this line of argument to other populations besides the
unborn, but rather, why wouldn’t she? It is a logical next step, and it’s not a
very far step at that. It’s the sort of thinking (whether applied to the unborn
or to anyone else) that could make you lose sleep at night. It should. Lest you
think I’m exaggerating or overinflating her case, consider Williams’ closing
words: “I would put the life of a mother
over the life of a fetus every single time — even if I still need to
acknowledge my conviction that the fetus is indeed a life. A life worth
sacrificing.”
If
that article was all I had to go on, this blog post would not have been
written. I could have dismissed Williams as the lone voice of lunacy. Yet
Williams refers her readers to a Planned Parenthood video on the page. The
video is called “Moving Beyond Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice Labels, You’re Not in
Her Shoes.” It’s not a long video. Take a moment to watch it. You can also find
it at www.notinhershoes.org.
The
video, a promo from Planned Parenthood, urges viewers to stop thinking about
labels such as pro-life or pro-choice. It argues that those labels box us in
and confine the abortion discussion, oversimplifying it. Finally, it contends
that abortion is a “personal medical decision,” something on par with a mammogram
or a cancer treatment. We are urged to think of the woman in her personal
circumstances and to be more empathetic and compassionate.
That
last bit rather strongly implies that you can’t be empathetic, caring and
compassionate if you oppose abortions. It’s a neat rhetorical trick, actually,
because anyone on my side of the conversation who takes that video seriously
now has to justify our beliefs and demonstrate how compassionate we truly are
and how our compassion is not diminished by the fact that we happen to oppose
the killing of an unborn child. Remember, according to Mary Williams, that’s
exactly what we should be calling the “fetal tissue,” and unborn child. So, the
fact that we only want that baby to live somehow makes us coldhearted?
I
realize that Mary Elizabeth Williams likely doesn’t speak for many people even
on the pro-abortion side of the debate. Yet the fact that her article was
published by an organization that sees itself as a reputable independent news
venue is telling. More importantly, Planned Parenthood’s video reaffirms those
sentiments. So, do labels like pro-life and pro-choice confine us? As a
linguist, I am here to tell you that we can go round and round on that one. It
would be more profitable to ask whether those labels and their various versions,
pro-abortion, pro-choice, anti-abortion, pro-life, etc. et al really do portray
the situation inaccurately. If they do, and if those of us who oppose abortions
have been dangling red herrings in front of the public for forty years, then the
game would be up. In fact, if that is what anti-abortion folks like me had been
doing, we would have been busted and debunked about thirty years ago, maybe
twenty.
The
fact, and here I speak of the fact of language and linguistics, is that the
debate we have been having has been expressed in the most accurate terminology
the English language can provide. If you are anti-abortion, you are de facto
against abortions. If abortion means the ending of a fetus, and if a fetus is
alive, then abortion means the ending of something that is alive. What more do
we want here? No, my friends. No. The reason that Planned Parenthood and people
like Mary Williams want us to dispense with our terminology and its
accompanying framework isn’t because our words are inaccurate and our
conceptualizations baseless or unjust. It is because our terminology is highly
semantically accurate, and our frameworks for the last four decades have been
right on point. Dancing around the semantics of the words we use or lying to
patients about fetal development, as Planned Parenthood counselors have been
caught doing several times in Indiana and Wisconsin, won’t change any of that.
“A person may think their own ways are right,
but the Lord weighs the heart. To do what is right and just
is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice” (Proverbs 21:2-3, NIV).
but the Lord weighs the heart. To do what is right and just
is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice” (Proverbs 21:2-3, NIV).
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Meditations on Arriving at Age 30
Spock: “Is it possible that we two, you and I, have
grown so old and so inflexible that we have outlived our usefulness?”
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
I have
never posted a blog entry on my birthday. In and of itself, I suppose that
doesn’t matter. Still, this is my 30th birthday, and the decade mark is another
milestone. I’m remembering how a friend of mine felt when he passed the 30 mark
about fifteen months ago. He was complaining about aging as many people do,
bemoaning the coming of his thirties. What I didn’t understand is what was supposed
to be so bad about it. He told me to wait a while, to wait until I saw 29
vanishing into 30. Then, he added, I might understand.
Well, after
366 days of being 29—since that year was a leap year--it has vanished into 30,
and I’ll tell you this much, I still don’t get it. For a long time I have
wondered about our western, and particularly our American, obsession with
youth, with being and with staying young or at least trying to. I found an
August 2010 NY Times article on this topic quite revealing. The writer, one
Robin Henig, opens the article with this question, “Why are so many people in
their 20’’s taking so long to grow up.” [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html]
It’s quite a lengthy piece, as you’ll see. Henig’s basic assertion is that
people, both men and women, are taking longer to achieve those milestones of
adulthood long held to be the traditional markers of adults, and the author
cites five: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent,
marrying and having a child. Some people don’t complete all five in the same
order or at all depending on their preferences and circumstances. I’ve been in
school for twelve years because it has taken exactly that long to finish this
humanities doctorate and that’s without any time off for rambling around to
“find myself,” as the expression goes. What I’m focusing on right now are those
who put off most or all of those milestones by choice. The median age for
marriage has risen five years in only a generation, with many opting not to
marry because, the reporter even admits, our society has become so accepting of
other types of relationships outside of marriage. Indeed, I have many friends
and acquaintances content to live for years on end with a partner, walking away
with no fuss and no bother when they decide it’s not working anymore.
I find it
interesting that two people’s views, both psychologists, are distinctly at odds
in this piece. Jeffrey Arnett argues that the 20’s should be considered a form
of extended adolescence; ‘emergent adulthood,’ he calls it, in which people are
exploring and finding themselves and basically taking the whole of their 20’s
to decide who and what they want to be. He points to feelings of restlessness
in folks in their 20’s and to a general desire to see what’s out there, a
resistance to settling down. Arnett suggests that, just as we recognize
adulthood and childhood as separate developmental stages of life, we ought to
recognize the 20’s as its own distinct stage of life. His close friend Richard
Lerner, who admires and respects Jeffrey both professionally and personally,
claims this view is nonsense. Many people, Lerner points out, don’t go through
this protracted self-discovery quest, and if you’re going to call it a ‘stage
of life’ like childhood or old age, then, developmentally speaking, everybody
goes through it or everybody doesn’t. End of options. He also adds that his
friend Jeff, as a developmental psychologist, should really know better than to
play around with the term ‘stage of life’ so sloppily. That’s my tongue in cheek
paraphrase, of course. Lerner’s argument goes something like this: the fact that Joe’s 20’s are marked by
focusing on himself and that he screws around with whoever and that he holds
seven different jobs in six years is, for example, balanced out by his neighbor
John, who at age 26 is settled into his job after grad school and has been
married for a year and who has a baby on the way. So the fact that some people
experience this delay while others don’t, and that in many parts of the world
this so-called life stage doesn’t seem to happen at all, invalidates Arnett’s
claims in the eyes of his fellow psychologist. In mine too, I might add. I add
too that Arnett seems to have done a bit of rambling in his own 20’s if his
biographical sketch is to be believed, so perhaps he is better equipped to
cater to it in others.
I don’t
take a psychological view of the question. I take a historical one. Looking
back at old TV and radio ads, you find something interesting. Ads targeting
teenagers didn’t start appearing in large numbers until the 1950’s. There were
certainly people between 12 and 20 before the 50’s, to be sure, but that
marketing demographic was created in the 50’s. Now we talk about teen
pregnancy, teen violence, teen drugs, teen psychology, teen everything, and we
talk about ‘teens’ per se, as though the notion of a teen per se has always
existed. I’m neither condoning or condemning the rise of the teen demographic.
I simply acknowledge it. Rock music and the word ‘teenager’ itself came out of
the 1950’s, after all. In fact, though, adolescence itself is something of an
invented demographic. The concept of an adolescent dates back to 1904, when G.
Stanley Hall first published his ideas on the younger adults flooding the rapidly
growing populations of America’s industrializing cities. In fact, research psychologist
Robert Epstein, an outspoken critic of Arnett’s proposals, points out that adolescence
as we understand the concept doesn’t exist at all in quite a few cultures,
where children’s transition into adulthood is marked entirely differently from
our western cultural paradigm. [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=yet-another-stage-of-life]
Notice I say adolescence isn’t universal, and I mean adolescence as a life
stage as distinct from puberty, the biological transition into adulthood with
its hormonal and other physical changes, which undoubtedly is. What folks like
Jeffrey Arnett want us to believe now is that ’20-somethings’ comprise just
another life stage group whose needs, wants and feelings should be acknowledged
and coped with like those of children, adults and the elderly.
My question is, what next? Perhaps
30-somethings should be considered as being in a distinct life stage. We could
talk about the median age of divorced people and going back on the dating
market again. Why not. We could create special branches of therapy and
counseling devoted to counseling those dating divorced parents with kids.
Actually, those services may already exist. Then—because why should we stop
there—the 40-somethings can have their own life stage. We can talk about
workaholism, second and third marriage breakdowns, the in-office affair as a
cultural norm and so on. For the 50-somethings, … but do I really need to go
on? Am I the only one who finds this bordering on the absurd? I certainly hope
not. I actually laughed when I read this article about two years ago. Now
that I am 30, I simply wonder.
One thing that came out of Henig’s
article is that Arnett, the psychologist who advocates emergent adulthood, was
inspired by the work of another earlier psychologist, Ken Keniston, who
observed some aspects of this emergent adulthood phenomenon in the young baby
boomers back in the early 1970’s. Again, to take the historical point of view,
the baby boomers were a unique generation. They grew up in a time of peace and
prosperity. They had everything they wanted especially compared to their depression
era parents, and they were the ones who set off the 60’s counterculture
movement and everything, again I say everything, that came with it. It doesn’t
surprise me one bit that the descendants of the baby boomers display some of
their parents’ same early 20’s behaviors. After all, where does behavioral
learning usually take place? It starts at home, of course. That’s not to say
the baby boomers learned to be so carefree from their own parents. After all,
as any sociologist or historian can tell you, cultural rebellion and upheaval
often stems from frustration with the status quo. What I am saying is that
since the upheavals of the 60’s, the behaviors that got started among the young
have simply been passed down and have become quite the accepted thing. It will
take a similar revolution in attitude amongst those of the younger generations
for this trend in our society to be reversed.
It’s one thing if you don’t decide
to have kids or get married. Not everybody is suited for those things. It’s one
thing if you’re becoming a college professor or a medical doctor and your 20’s
are eaten up by school. That school has a purpose, a purpose you presumably
chose. Fair enough. Yet, feelings of wanderlust or general optimism about your
burgeoning set of options do not comprise a life stage to me, and I cannot take
this seriously. If you feel you have too many options, draw a tree diagram and
put your favorites at the top.
What I have observed in my
demographic, or perhaps I have to now say in my former demographic, is a lack
of goal setting and planning. Like I said in my New Year’s resolution’s blog
post a few weeks ago, setting a goal is one thing. Finding out the steps needed
to achieve it and then doing those steps—that’s a whole other discussion. I
will be the first to admit to not being goal obsessed on a day-to-day basis. I
don’t get up every morning—as I have known some folks in grad school to do—an
set out a list of that day’s goals, and if I don’t meet the goal I had for the
day, I usually shrug, figure out why and meet it the next day along with that
day’s goal as well. All that to say this: the reason my demographic is feeling
at such loose ends is a distinct lack of willingness to first set goals and
then to slog through the nasty work necessary to meet them.
It’s not for lack of intelligence
and it’s not even because of laziness most of the time that all this has come
to be. It’s a matter of what we are telling our younger adults. Our society is
sending the young two messages. First, that it’s ok to put off life’s milestones.
It’s quite acceptable. If you don’t want to do X right now, then don’t. You’ve
got time. That’s the first message. The second is that we are societally
obsessed with marketing youth. Youth is the prime stage of life in this
country. You see it everywhere. You rarely see product ads targeting the middle
aged or the retired or the elderly. What you do often see are companies seeking
to hire “young and innovative” employees. “Young and innovative,” a phrase I’ve
seen in various forms in many places. Never mind that older folks are capable
of being innovative too, and never mind the fact that older employees or
colleagues might be equipped with wisdom and insight that the young lack. We
worship being young and staying young.
It’s time to rethink the whole
mindset. Often, the only way to come by wisdom and insight is to live long
enough and see much of life. That being said, the desire for the new and
innovative you usually see among the young is a good one. Yet, it should be
complimented by respect for the wisdom and the types of insight that often can
only come with greater age. I don’t think I’ve obtained any particular wisdom
at age 30, but I respect the benefits that age and more life experience can
bring. I have lived through all of my 20’s, a decade of turbulent change as I
continued marching through school and towards my chosen career path. Not
marrying while in the throes of grad school was a good idea, and I have no
regrets about marrying at 30. That being said, I can’t identify with giving control
over to wanderlust and this inability to cope with so many options and choices
that Arnett talked about. They were there in my own life, but I suppose I
always had a different perspective than a lot of 20-somethings. What we need is
not a new life stage. What we need is a new perspective.
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