The Wicked Son

by David Mamet

  Do, can, or could the Israelis delight in “reprisals,” in “retaliation”? The very words are revelatory, for such actions by the United States are known as “defense”—a country defends itself; reprisals and retaliation are the actions of a mob. And, if the actions of the Israelis are strategically, or indeed morally, imperfect, could their detractors, put in the same position, suggest or implement better?

  The outright denunciation of Israel as “acquisitionist, bloodthirsty, colonial, et cetera” is to me simply a modern instance of the blood libel—that Jews delight in the blood of others. The world was told Jews used this blood in the performance of religious ceremonies. This libel gained currency in the West due, inter alia, to the efforts of Henry Ford and his campaign against the Jews; it has been newly adopted by much of the Arab world and is taught and broadcast (Moslem blood taking the place of Christian) in various Middle Eastern propaganda and schools and, indeed, in much of the so-called liberal press.

  As the outright currency of this canard waned in the West, its utility was preserved in the shift from a religious to a political attack. Now, it seems, Jews do not require the blood for baking purposes; they merely delight to spill it on the ground for some magical, nefarious, and diabolical reason. The treatment of the Jews as vampire has, on analysis, much of the “as you know…” for, if one did not “know” that Jews are subhuman, why would one entertain this bizarre accusation?

  Imagine the anti-Israeli propaganda currently engaged in on college campuses and other institutions of enlightenment—directed against Canada—not that Canadians are misguided, wrong, but that they are “bad”—devoid of the capacity for goodwill, duplicitous, inspired by some nefarious and implacable power to wrong those around them; possessed of a power so diabolical it induces their neighbors to strap bombs on their young and send them into the marketplace to slaughter women and their babies.

  What is this power? It must be the Devil; indeed, it is the Devil, and the Jews will not stop until they have ruined the world.

  It is not that the “Jew is bad” but that we human beings are imperfect, easily stampeded, and incapable of ascribing our unreasoning fear to anything other than reason. The conceit of the “bad Canadians” may seem ludicrous—how ever could the friendly Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, known of old, become a monster? But it needed only a few days of government diatribe to wipe out the traditional archetype of “our friend the jolly Frenchman” with his loaf of crusty bread and to send the newly aroused pouring Chablis down the drain. And have not the middle-aged gay couple next door, whose happy commitment we witnessed over twenty years, now become that monstrous threat to the “institution of marriage”?

  The thus-afflicted individual—the victim of jingoism—is enraged not by the newly revealed threat but by his loss of autonomy. Torn between a desire for safety, which has been presented as the necessity to conform, and its price, which is abdication of reason, the individual becomes enraged and, voting for conformity, explains and expresses his rage against the newly proclaimed Other. It was a semantic master stroke to label a law destructive of our Constitution the U.S.A. Patriot Act, for provisions that would be rightly seen as outrageous in an act designed to promote security were passed when to oppose them would have been to risk the appellation “traitor.” The appellation of the act threatened the autonomy of the unconvinced legislators and permitted them to express their otherwise inexpressible rage against the Other (the terrorist).

  The Jewish State has offered the Arab world peace since 1948; it has received war, and slaughter, and the rhetoric of annihilation. After fifty-six years of war this tiny fingernail of a country, the size of Vermont, continues to exist and to practice democracy in spite of the proclaimed implacable hatred of an Arab world rich, vast, and populous.

  Enlightened university opinion in the West indicts Israel as an aggressor. This is a fantasy similar to that of the Insatiable Black. This black, sexual monster, who wished only to rape white women, was still an absolute article of white American faith at a time within my memory.

  I recall seeing an African-American jazz combo in a nightclub in Chicago in the 1950s. The leader said they’d just returned from a tour of the South, and that when they played “I’ve Got My Eye on You,” they better have been looking at each other.

  American white men, slaveholders, and others had of course raped African-American women over centuries as a droit du seigneur. And the ascription to the black man of an insatiable, demonic sexuality was among other things an attempt at self-license. It also posited a universe the operative mechanic factor of which was ungovernable lust, so that, in terrorizing the black, the white was enlisting the “inevitable” in the cause of Good, was teaching, in effect, a religious lesson.

  Similarly, Christian and Moslem fulfill a religious duty in scourging the supposed sin of the Jew, that sin not lust but avarice. For this is the unstated epithet: just as the American black man was a slave to sex, so is the Jew a slave to his lust for property, and his monstrous, constant crimes against the Palestinians proof positive of his taint—inexplicable other than as a malignant genetic mutation.

  The “crimes” of Israel, as those of the African-American man, are imaginary, existing in the mind of the accuser and engendered both by his guilt at his oppressive behavior and by his attempt to license his own criminal passions.

  The rhetoric of sad reason, that Israel is an “experiment that has failed,” is but the coward end of a spectrum whose bold extension is “kill all the Jews and drive them into the sea.” The first, in addition to being a racially derogatory epithet, is additionally a goad and a sop to the second. For Israel is not an “experiment” it is a country. Ben-Gurion said, in the late forties, that the world was divided into two halves, those places the Jews could not stay and those to which they could not go. What has changed? The world still hates the Jews.

  The change is the State of Israel, and, regarding it, the anti-Semite finds a protected voice. He may write anti-Jewish propaganda and, at will, publish and peruse it with a smug delight.

  “Mr. Sharon (who had ignited the powderkeg of the intifada by entering the Haram-al-Sharif, Jerusalem’s holiest Muslim site),” from The Economist, 28 March 2006. This organ of supposedly reasonable discourse continues in what might seem, if not a supportable, a rational statement, though it has been established that Sharon did not transgress any site holy to the Moslems and it is universally known that the intifada had been planned for months before the supposed causus belli.

  The repeated assertion of Sharon’s murderous “walk” is the modern-day equivalent of the charge of well poisoning and the murder of Christian babies. It is only the most current rendition of the idea that “the Jews killed Christ”—it is the blood libel, and its purveyors, in their absolute refusal to think rationally, bear some responsibility for the deaths in the cafes of Tel Aviv.

  One so disposed might read The Economist’s supercilious pronouncements on the pesky Israelis with a secret sense of glee, as a Victorian perhaps perused a nineteenth-century African adventure novel’s description of “the shiftless niggers.”

  The contemporary reader aghast at such racism may nonetheless understand as right reason his excoriation of the Israeli “rape of Jenin,” of savage Israeli soldiers driving the poor oppressed to greater and greater prodigies of terror.

  The pure-hearted liberal who would die rather than endorse the wife beater’s exculpatory “She just wouldn’t listen” delights to extend his imprimateur to the atrocities of the jihadists. This is anti-Semitism.

  It is, unfortunately, human nature to think the Other inhuman.

  Our comfortable society has rationalized the tropism thusly: that Other that has been subdued may be granted the status of the picturesque. The mechanism is seen in the idea of the noble savage, and in the Bold Mussulman of the Hills in the Edwardian novels of the Great Game in the contemporary fetish for Native American culture and philosophy, and in the idea of “diversity.” Those who have been sub
dued need no longer be feared, and we, the majority culture, are now free to appropriate those last, late-appearing aspects of their worth for our own use and delight.

  The image of the Arab totters today in the American consciousness. On the one hand, we have “the terrorist”—the bombers of New York; on the other, a poor, beleaguered peasant, in extremity forced to throw rocks against Israeli tanks.*1

  The Jew, for a brief moment, was, to the West, the noble savage—for example, The Goldbergs, Potash and Perlmutter, Weber and Fields, Gentlemen’s Agreement, Fiddler on the Roof, The Diary of Anne Frank, and Exodus. Exodus (1960) was the turning point, when the Jewish State, obviously intent on continued existence, began to forfeit its protected status as colorful victim—wherein the world saw Jews assert our absolute right to exist.

  For the Other may avail itself of various perquisites of the majority culture (and this is the tacit bargain) only by asserting his powerlessness. He might gain grudging support for affirmative action but will endanger that support by plumping for school vouchers—by demanding equality rather than requesting reparations. And our picturesque Native Americans may be awarded the sin franchise of our gambling casinos but become “uppity” when demanding land guaranteed by ancestral treaties.

  World Jews, then, with the rise of the Jewish State, have become uppity. As Israel and its citizens continue to assert an absolute right to existence, much of the Western world withdraws what it is unable to understand was but a patronizing and cost-free consideration of a colorful victim.

  The transition of Jew from amusing hard-luck denizen of the bazaar (see any Holocaust film) to pagan thug might indicate to the fickle West an incipient ethnocentrism.

  We Jews are neither. And the Western nexus of amused contempt and loathing is unitary. The shift from the first toward the second does demonstrate the dawning of reason; it denotes a change not in the conduct but in the status of the Other. Contemporary Western loathing of Israel might reveal to the inquiring mind an ancient never-eradicated prejudice.

  “How dare they disturb my morning coffee,” says the West. “Did I not find them charming for so long—and this is how the swine repay me?”

  * * *

  Hide in Plain Sight

  The memory of absolute wrongs causes absolute trauma in a race, just as in the individual. Incalculably ancient race memory of dinosaurs persists to this day, transformed as an affection for the dragon. Memory of the most traumatic of cultural acts, child sacrifice, can be seen, hidden in plain sight, as ceremonies of transformation, redemption, and, in fact, of jollity.*2 Like the Santa Claus myth, the Akedah, the Crucifixion, are ineradicable race memories of infant sacrifice, and of the deeply buried wish to resume its practice, so racism must be the unresolved race memory of slavery.

  The idea that one group of human beings could be the property of another must always have been a psychological burden, to the oppressors, to the oppressed and to those not overtly affected by it, save by their exposure to its corrosive presence in society. It is a testament to what can only be called “conscience” (understood as guilt) that the race memory of the affront persists, generations after the eradication of the actual practice.

  Here is the internalized, persistent rationale of slavery: if a group has forfeited the most basic human rights, there must be something wrong with them.

  This is a transformation from wonder (or pity) through reason to acceptance. It allows the confused to function with the burden of an otherwise unassimilable contradiction. It removes the necessity of either action or outrage; these, indeed, may be discharged not at the perpetrators but at the victims. Not, perhaps, because of any recognition of inherent evil on the victims’ part but, to the contrary, because a recognition of their innocent humanity would force the onlooker to a knowledge of his own cowardice. And to the cowardice of the society whose benefits he enjoys.

  Such a betrayal (by him, and of him by his society) cannot be forgotten. Like the trauma of infant sacrifice, it must be assimilated. The Western Christian world acts out this ceremony each year at the winter solstice, in its anxiety with the Santa Claus myth: “What shall we tell the children? Are they old enough to understand?”

  Here we have an intergenerational, centuries-long ceremony of confusion of myth and reality. The myth, here, serves not to integrate the affronted consciousness but to preserve a trauma. It is the contre-coup to the outrage of child murder and its societal acceptance. The ancient, human desire to hide the truth from the children was so strong as to persist, thousands of years later, when the threat itself is gone. And the undischarged trauma of slavery (for all of the Western world, black or white) persists as racism; as the absolute certainty that if this or that group was so abused (cf. the Intifada) they must have brought it on themselves.

  One may note that this is not primarily a reaction of the coward but of the child, who looks on at horror inflicted on another and at his parents’ and his society’s passive endorsement of the horror. To conclude that his parents and their society are depraved is beyond the child’s imagining. They must, then, be correct. The true strength of race prejudice is that it is inculcated in childhood (before the possibility of rational judgment) and is inseparable from the child’s need for security and for powerful and moral parents.

  The adult, in persisting in inherited racism, upholds his parents, his society, and indicts that force (the victim) that would, by its very presence, convict them. African-Americans, in my lifetime, have been notably effective in the battle against race prejudice (in themselves and others) by, for example, the campaign “Black Is Beautiful.” Their insistence on this phrase forced those who found it untrue or difficult to wonder at their strong reactions to a simple inoffensive formula.

  The illness, racism, cannot be perceived by the sufferer. Racism and love make such perfect sense to those affected that the entire world is redefined in their light. The sufferer cannot perceive “their effect,” for he is their effect. His consciousness, that mechanism whereby he might perceive them, is the afflicted organ.

  Racism cannot be perceived. The sufferer, therefore, must reason backward from the behavior to the necessarily operative idea. This is too difficult. How can the busy, self-involved human being spend his day working toward a perception, the acceptance of which would entail self-revulsion and shame?

  He will not. The laws of psychic economy ensure that his mind will, always, do the easier of two difficult things, and repress. This repression and its burdens are chronic rather than acute. It is transmitted from one generation to the next (cf. the Santa Claus myth).

  The Akedah (the Torah story of the binding of Isaac) is an attempt to deal with the trauma of human savagery. Anti-Semitism is an attempt to deal with the Akedah. In the Akedah the Torah lifts the injunction against discussion of infant sacrifice, and the hatred of the Western Christian world is turned, not against savagery but against that force that would weaken the repressive power.

  That the Jews persist in the same religion which gave rise to Christianity and Islam is to their practitioners as little tolerable today as it was when these two schismatic professions split off from the mother faith. Jewish persistence is, thus, an indictment, to the affronted, prejudiced mind, of generations of his non-Jewish forebears who, were the Jews recognized as nonoffending, the adult child would now have to recognize as monstrous. For them, as for the Jew raised to hate his own, no “proof” will suffice. Remonstrations are often taken, indeed as further “proof” of Jewish subhumanity (here called “wiliness”).

  The wicked son ascribes his anomie to “the Jews,” or, in a psychologically brilliant variation, to “Jewish guilt,” that is, “to some nameless, terrible thing I, as a Jew, have inherited.” Imagine this construction with some other group substituted for Jew. “My group, X, is so terribly, terribly bad, they have enjoined upon me some unnameable, wicked curse. They have cursed my soul.”

  If we substitute another word for “Jew,” this formulation is revealed, of course, as
voodoo. How can the wicked son observe his thoughts, feelings, and actions and compare them to an agreed-upon neutral norm (in effect, the essence of psychoanalysis)? For, only through doing so might he come to recognize their bizarre, insane aspect.

  What can save the self-loathing Jew from his apostasy? Reason will no more reach him than any other addict. Perhaps shock may work its unfortunately effective way with him. Perhaps the shock that he is bequeathing to his children, that same abuse to which he, as an unthinking child, was subject.

  * * *

  Jewish Anxiety

  Anxiety is a universal disease, and the Jewish apostrophization of anxiety is an attempt to assimilate—but to what?

  Pagan, which is to say, ineradicably human, ceremonies survive all around us. The American political circus is an attempt to discover or create a human without blemish and offer such as an opponent to the gods.

  Religion has striven and strives to supplant human idolatry, which constantly reasserts itself; politics, similarly, is, now and again, the doomed and failing struggle to supplant paganism with reason.

  Theoretically, political parties employ a candidate to promote a political platform, and the opposing candidates are judged both on that platform and on their ability to express it. Currently (and, we must suppose, intermittently throughout history), what was political discourse has devolved into each party and candidate calling attention to the other’s lack of perfection. Drug use, sexual peccadilloes, youthful misdemeanors, or, indeed, inconsistencies are alleged against one’s opponent. The candidate against whom such are proved or stand irrefuted is thus adjudged unfit to stand against the gods.

  We note that the contemporary American electorate is uninterested in a candidate sufficiently intelligent to confront complexity. This lack of interest in a candidate’s mental capacity might prove baffling, but let us reflect that no intelligence is required to act as a symbol. Intelligence in a symbol is irrelevant. Consider, for instance, Miss America, the First Lady, game show presenters—though their intelligence is beside the point, their purity must be unquestioned: Marilyn Chambers was the face on the Ivory Snow soapbox; her face was removed when it was discovered she had acted in pornographic movies.