The Wicked Son

by David Mamet

  The Right cast the late presidential contests as one concerning “values” and “morals.” Such morals and values were inchoate, largely unspecified, and, when clear, identifiable as universal.

  Why, then, should the Right predominate over the Left in the minds of “moral” voters? Not because their candidate possessed “more” of these values but because he was more willing to so cast the debate. For that debate was not an invitation to the electorate to judge the candidates against a stated standard but a call to the voter to observe which side was the more willing to so characterize the conflict.

  Observe which side, the Right said, is the more willing to cast aside not only the historically irrelevant possession of reason but the ethical elements of religion—compassion, humility, forbearance—and to revert to a Manichaean fundamentalist understanding of the world.

  This reversion is claimed, by the Right, as a return to a literal understanding of the Bible; in truth, however, it is a call to that paganism the Abrahamic religions superseded. “It’s about morals,” whether uttered by jihadists or the Christian Right, is a call to lay down the intolerable yoke of religion (“What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor”) and to serve, once again, the One True God, the unquestioned self, its fears, and its appetites.

  The least bearable burden of reason is the knowledge of one’s own powerlessness: human intelligence, it may be seen, does not eradicate strife; where, then, does power lie?

  Ultranationalism and fundamentalism are both attempts to find those hidden essentials of humanity whose abandonment has brought about this loathsome state we call the present. And the land, as of old, must be cleansed by blood.

  The Crucifixion, like the Akedah, is an attempt to master the racial horror of infant sacrifice (the cleansing of the land by blood). If sacrifice is renounced (in the Christ story: “Don’t you see what you have done?” in the story of Isaac: “You may stop now”), the worshipper is left with a burden. The burden of this renunciation is not, primarily, shame (“Oh, my God, what was I considering?”) but longing.

  Obviously, and observably, the gods are angered as we, misguided, have neglected to feed them. Nor does our crime stop there: we have also listened to the rantings of those who have been embraced and counsel as a policy the replacement of sacrifice by “reason” (liberals, nonbelievers, Westerners, reformers in general).

  There is an aesthetic quality in fundamentalism, in jingoism, in jihad—a pure joy in the rejection not only of reasoned religion but also, indeed, of science.

  “Belief” is such a potent force that it may replace logic: we may burn the heretic books that speak of “evolution,” and we may say the cost is huge: the loss of the scientific method, but this is not a loss at all but a gain, the repeal of the taxing concept of cause and effect. For Galileo may “prove” that the earth revolves around the sun, but we know, instinctively, the opposite is true; and religion may suggest we remove the mote from our own eye, but we know that the cause of strife is the Other.

  The recrudescence of the pagan is seen with the approach of the winter solstice, where in the West, anxiety has regressed the Christ story into the Santa Claus myth.*3

  Assimilated or assimilationist Jews, another stratum of society, are anxious over “conflicting claims” of the two solstice holidays, Chanukah and Christmas: What shall we do? Are we needlessly depriving our children of a deserved “treat” by not celebrating Christmas? Are we being untrue to our heritage by considering celebrating it, should we not give our children what must, rationally, be seen as the benefit of celebrating both holidays?

  In falling victim to this anxiety the Jews are reverting, not to Christianity but to a universal horror at the waning of the sun—such anxiety vulgarized, in the Christian tradition, by the jolly story of Kris Kringle. (The 2005 Christmas movie The Polar Express, from the book by Chris Van Allsburg, is an eruption of the psychological underpinnings of the Santa myth. Here the children, who do not quite “believe,” are taken away from their homes and, in effect, reeducated.)

  It is not, finally, a yearning to “be like the Christians” that drives these conflicted winter Jews; they have simply fallen under the influence of the old gods. They strive, in their fog, not to come to a final decision about the presence or absence of the mistletoe, but to confess the sin of apostasy and to prostrate themselves, weeping, before the waning sun.

  “Jewish guilt” and “Jewish anxiety” are not Jewish at all but universal—a universal desire to revert to paganism. It is not the Christians the Jews try to ape with their Chanukah bush but the pagans. The cure for the Jew is neither assimilation nor conversion, but religion.

  Religion came into being to supplant the anomie and excess of paganism. Humans individually, and all religions they create, are always in a dynamic struggle between the desire to revert to, and the desire to supersede, the pagan.

  The answer, for the Christian, is Christianity; for the Jew, Judaism.

  Each may desire to revert. This yearning may lead the Christian to identify the cause of anxiety as the presence of heterodoxy, humanism, liberal humanism, or other descriptions of a church grown insufficiently rigorous; this Christian may seek solace in fundamentalism, as may the Jew. The Jew, however, is, in the main, less aware of his own religion and its opportunities for the fundamental. He is more likely to suppose that the “error” he finds in his religion can be cured only by his embrace of another.

  The assimilated Jew, ignorant of his own religion, supposes solace in what he misunderstands as a universalist Christianity and labels his anxiety as error, and that error as “Jewish.”

  * * *

  A Hot Hen’s Kiss

  There is a system of beliefs correlative to anti-Semitism, the contemplation of which may reveal the nature of both as mania. I refer to that of the Baconians or anti-Stratfordians. These believe that Shakespeare’s plays were written by someone other than Shakespeare, the most vocal adherents of the faith plumping for Francis Bacon as the author.

  This delusion dates back to at least the eighteenth century. And, as with other prejudice, it begins with a belief and proceeds to the manufacture of proofs. Anti-Stratfordians hold that it is impossible for Shakespeare to have written his plays because he had little formal education, he had little exposure to Court, he was not widely traveled, in short, that he was “not the right type.”

  Proceeding from conclusion to investigation, they cite or concoct various proofs of their theory. Notable among them is the Bacon Cipher.*4

  Francis Bacon, in The Advancement of Learning, sets forth a simple binomial cipher, composed of A’s and B’s. Plaintext A is aaaaa, B is aaaab, et cetera.

  Now, consider the phrase, “How fine is the day.”

  Were we to capitalize some letters seemingly at random, we might find: “howfIne is the day.” Now, if the lowercase letters signified A and the capitalized B, and we chopped up the message into groups of five letters, we would find: howfI neist heday—or—if lowercase equals A, and uppercase B, AAAAB AAAAA AAAAA, we now refer to our binomial cheat sheet where the alphabet is rendered in cipher. We find AAAAB = B, AAAAA = A, AAAAA = A, or “BAA,” the cunning cryptographer having hidden the secret message, the sound of a sheep, “Baa,” in a seemingly innocuous comment about the weather.

  So far so good.

  Unfortunately, however, various editions of Shakespeare were printed with little regard for capitalizations, and many in more than one font; and Baconians have found, in this accidental alternativeness, a binomial A-B cipher.

  Applying this A-B binomial cipher to a page of plaintext Shakespeare, they discover this group of hidden letters: SASSOHHKINTE. The letters discovered, however, yield no meaning in this raw form. But perhaps they may be considered as an anagram, and rearranged to yield their sense.

  The Baconians might anagram this apparent nonsense (SASSOHHKINTE) to yield the plaintext SHAKS IS NOT HE; thus, by but a minor stretch, proving the anti-Stratfordian case.

  The same letters
, however, might, equally, be anagrammed A HOT HEN’S KISS. Proving not much of anything at all.

  So, again, the Baconians start with a premise, peruse a text that they declare contains a cipher, find enciphered letters, and arrange them at random to establish the principle that was the initial inspiration for their efforts.

  The Baconian A-B cipher is but one of a host of devices whereby the faithful find proofs for their theory of non-Shakespearean authorship. Others include a numeric system (like that suggested by various “Bible” codes, taking every Xth word, for example, and arranging them to suit), dreams, supernatural encounters, and so on.

  But note the underlying enormity: (a) that a writer who, for the purposes of argument we will call “Shakespeare,” the greatest writer the world has ever known, would craft his work as a pretext for the transmission of a secret message, and (b) that this message (let alone being moot) was, however extracted, badly written.

  Why would a scholar indulge in such contortions, such inversion of the scientific method and of simple reason? Why engage in what is essentially a religious quest and call it the study of literature? For the same reason one engages in Jew-hatred, because of a delusion of grandeur. For what greater power (to the litterateur) than that to award the mantle of divinity?

  This obsession can be seen in the various seminal irritations leading the scholar to the supposed proofs: that Shakespeare was insufficiently educated, insufficiently trained, and so on; which may be understood as “How dare this upstart…”

  The possessed, then, proceeds to recognize in himself a heretofore unrecognized genius, that of detecting fraud among the wrongly celebrated, and raises himself to the post of Supreme Champion of Right. For what could be more laudable than to correct the most egregious error in the history of the world? Thus anti-Semitism, the Gospels, and Christian dogma (although somewhat mitigated by Vatican II), etc.

  The Jew-hater begins with a proposition that glorifies and comforts him: that there exists a force of evil in the that that he has, to his credit, discovered and bravely proclaimed. In opposing it, he is self-glorified. This glory, like that of the Baconian’s, is brought about by a simple profession (or, indeed, sentiment) of faith; one triumphs over evil, thus becoming as a god, at no cost other than recognition of his own divinity.

  The actual proofs are secondary and may be indulged in ad libitum—they need not be either consistent or rational, and those demanding either in them may freely be reviled as nonbelievers, and, in the case of the Jews, persecuted, robbed, and killed.

  What good to point out that “the Jews” could not have condemned Jesus on the Sabbath following Good Friday, as no court could be convened on the Sabbath; that no court could be convened during Passover; that deicide is an oxymoron; and on and on ad nauseam. The “proofs” exist merely to buttress a belief; the belief exists to license fantasy and the crime that it engenders.

  * * *

  Treason

  In the new Europe, the Jew probably will soon be a thing of the past. The remnants of this unhappy people will soon disappear. Many of them have been starved, many sterilized, and it is not to be supposed that they will keep their identity much longer. One wonders what group will be selected to act as the scapegoats when the Jews are all gone.

  —DOUGLAS MILLER, You Can’t Do Business with Hitler (1941)

  In Philip Roth’s brilliant novel Letting Go (1962), the first-person protagonist, Gabe Wallach, is a wealthy, assimilated, Harvard-educated custom-tailored Jew. He is rather gormless, adrift in his view, in a glass-bottom boat in a swamp of Jewry. To him all Jews are risible, corrupt, sordid, misguided, or cruel.

  Here the immigrant generation is, at all times, squabbling, self-obsessed, greedy, ill dressed, ill kempt. But the raisonneur, Gabe Wallach, the Jude Süss, the “light, bright and damn-near white,” is the dispassionate observer from the Parnassus of Full Americanization. He lusts after Libby, the Jew-by-choice, the wife of his colleague Herz.

  Libby’s decision to convert is seen by Wallach, and by all the novel’s other Jews, as a monumental error. She has gone to the mikvah in her Jantzen swimsuit. She marries Herz in a civil ceremony, as the rabbi to whom they have presented themselves for counseling excoriates Herz for apostasy and his betrothed for stupidity. Both sets of parents turn on them. Only Gabe, the dispassionate, assimilated Jew, sees through the squalor that their marriage has brought on them, his generosity of spirit inspired by a simple human urge: he wants to mount her.

  He runs into her on Madison Street. She accompanies him shopping. He indulges himself, at Brooks Brothers, in a complete haberdashery, extending to smoking jacket, Homburg, and puce leather gloves. And Roth notes Libby’s glee in his Anglophile self-indulgence, so far removed from that world of “oi-oi-oi” to which the little minx has, unwittingly, consigned herself.

  The world of the immigrant generation is, to the novel’s hero, a horror tale of close escapes and nonescapes from poverty, of intellectual and social gaffes and of communal misery. This vision is hurtful, unrelieved, and unsympathetic; it is an accurate portrayal both of the immigrant generation’s trials and of their progeny’s ingratitude.

  The generation of my grandparents came from Europe with nothing, and sent their sons not only to college, but thence into a conquest of the professions. This generation heroically survived and overcame the trials of immigration, of the Depression, of the War, armed with nothing but determination to succeed. They succeeded so far beyond their expectations that their sons became sufficiently Americanized as to loathe their parents.

  Who is this Gabe Wallach, this modern man, so scornful of tradition, of filial respect, as to mock, not with loving irony but with vicious sarcasm, the ways of his forbears? And how virulent was and is this view?

  For the idea of the risibility, first of the immigrant generation and then of its religion, was for its grandchildren the norm. The savaging of the Ashkenazi immigrants, in the novels of their children in the 1950s and ’60s, bore fruit (inter alia) in the nebbish stage persona of various post–Borscht Belt comedians, a Jewish gloss on a generally accepted form of entertainment—racial indictment. Those old enough may recognize this type of impersonation, which used to be called, generically, “Amos and Andy.” But the minstrel show, the “darky” turn in vaudeville, and Amos and Andy were the creations not of African-Americans but of whites.

  Can one imagine African-Americans, the descendants of slaves, mocking their forebears’ trials, and the fears and strategies both for accommodation and for self-respect, forged over two hundred years of inescapable bondage? Must not that trauma be respected?

  How could one who had not experienced it treat the survivals of slavery with anything other than a profound, nonjudgmental respect? And might not the spared recognize, in the culture that they had inherited, phenomenal courage and invention rather (and more morally) than awkwardness and difference from the “majority culture”? For to today’s African-American, though not to the Jew, the idea of “the majority culture” is, perhaps, recognizable as an illusion.

  For what is the majority culture other than an accidental, moot, and, at best, transient confederation of the momentarily unchallenged? It is no culture at all but an assemblage of the fortunate under the illusion that they have something in common other than their luck.

  True cultural identity, as familial identity, comes from absolute commitment. Assimilation that entails rejection of one’s ancestors’ sorrow, rather than a “ticket of admission” to the majority culture is an announcement of depravity.

  Why does this emancipated Jew, Gabe Wallach, this or that comedian’s stage clown—you or I, perhaps—turn his back on race and religion? What are his reasons? Watch, and he will confect intellectual, emotional, political, and aesthetic explanations.

  The Jews in Letting Go, in the raisonneur’s eyes, have neither manners nor understanding of the country they inhabit and affront. The State of Israel, Noam Chomsky informs the ignorant, is a crime; an independent “ex-Jew” ex
plains that he “once met an unpleasant rabbi” a theological freethinker asks how she can “believe in a god who would ask Abraham to murder his son?”

  These are put forth as peremptory challenges, that is, each is but a rhetorical flourish, considered sufficient in its utterance to exempt the speaker not only from filial piety but from the need of further investigation, explanation, or defense of his position. Imagine, however, that these varied indictments are uttered, not ad lib by many individuals but serially, by one Jew. Let us, then, employ the old wisdom of a Western Avenue, Chicago, car salesman: “If I could, would you?” Thereby, the salesman worked to break the prospect free from a generalized sales resistance, and force him to utter a concrete (and thus potentially surmountable) objection to buying a car—for example:

  SALESMAN: What is it, specifically, that you don’t like?

  PROSPECT: (thinks) Well. I don’t like the color.

  SALESMAN: What color would you like?

  PROSPECT: (casting about for an improbable, thus, extractive choice) I’d only like it in light green.

  SALESMAN: If I could get it for you in light green, would you buy it…?

  Here, the prospect, rather than reverting to an undifferentiated state of sales resistance, will utter another concrete objection.

  PROSPECT: And, I don’t like the price.

  SALESMAN: What price would you like?