The Wicked Son

by David Mamet

  If this belief is truly held, why is he driven to seek ratification for his unalignment? And why does he seek it exclusively from similarly disaffected Jews?

  This is the case of the autonomic attempt at creation of community. But he builds not upon the rock of their shared heritage but upon the fiction of their freedom—like children playing at running away, miming their independence, of necessity under the protective gaze of those committed to their safety.

  Anomie is the sickness of the American Age—the feeling of rootlessness, of purposelessness, colored over by the vehement assertion of freedom (whatever that may mean), and the unstated but essential implication that this freedom confers, upon the nation and individual, some unnameable preeminence. We find this cant of freedom (which is to say, preeminence) in the mouths of corrupt politicians wishing to incite and inspire—fettered by the absence of ideas, reduced to the recitation of magical chants.

  The American Jew is not exempt from the general malaise, but he may be tasked with an additional burden. If he is ignorant of his people and their ways, he may attribute a generalized cultural disaffection to his own particular situation, thus exacerbating both the actual problems attributable to his situation as an American and to his situation as an uncommitted Jew. This ignorance, this inability to correctly understand a generalized social problem, may metastasize into apostasy.

  In our contemporary society, ceremonies of matriculation (which is to say, societal endorsement and thus amelioration of the problems of maturation) are, in the main, absent, corrupt, optional, or moot. These ceremonies, where they still exist, are subject to discount by the unbeliever, the disaffected, the intellectual. His assertion of “freedom” from that which he sees as compulsion, however, may be understood as strengthening rather than weakening the case for observance.

  Healthy societies recognize that transition, birth, death, manhood, womanhood, marriage, grief require a mechanism that will force the affected to submit to change. The ritual—bar mitzvah, baptism, marriage, military induction, Kaddish—removes from the individual the corrosive, indeed, destructive element of choice.

  For what individual would, willingly, surrender the known state and privileges of childhood, bachelorhood, civilian life, or the intellectual vacuities of the university for the unknown and most likely arduous responsibilities and duties of a more demanding state?

  The healthy society rips the matriculant from the old state and debars him from reentry. If the new state is optional, if the progress toward it is reversible, the individual is left with a constant anomie, and he may, likely, identify its cause as the more mature state itself; and malign both it and the fact of ceremony in general. The widespread Western derogation of ritual further exacerbates the apostate’s disaffection and endorses his indulgence in flight.

  The times are against him. What is for him?

  A six-thousand-year-old tradition that recognizes his dilemma.

  * * *

  The Apikoros and Gun Control; or The Oslo Syndrome

  There is a statistic floating around for sufficient time as to have had its origins, and thus its probability attain the force, if not of fact, then of conventional wisdom: a firearm, kept in the house for self-protection is X times more likely to injure its owner than to injure an intruder.

  Let us set aside the statement’s probability and examine it philosophically. Let us, in fact, suppose that it is true. A home owner is more likely to be protected by the absence of a gun than by the presence of a gun. Why? Or, differently, the gun in the hand of a malefactor is an irresistible tool of aggression, but the same instrument, with the same potential, in the hands of the law abiding is not only ineffective, but self-injurious.

  The old joke has a man-in-the-street reporter asking passersby for the greatest scientific advancement of all time; one says space travel, one says atomic energy, and another the thermos. Why the thermos? “Well,” the man responds, “you put in coffee, it keeps it hot; you put in lemonade, it keeps it cold.” “So?” the reporter asks, and the man responds, “How does it know?”

  How does the gun know the worth of the person holding it? Let us suppose that this same malefactor and gunslinger took the gun home after a night of depredations and he is awakened from his sleep by a burglar. Would the gun in his house be more apt to inflict harm on him than on the burglar?

  I believe most would respond “No.” Why?

  “How does it know?”

  For the gun, like the thermos, is neutral. It is inert unless and until wielded by a human being.

  If the burglar may master the (fairly simple) rudiments of gun safety, but the ordinary citizen is debarred, we might ask, “Debarred by what?” And we might answer that the absolute belief in remaining unarmed is not a wish to court harm but a wish to avoid it—that the propitiatory identification with the aggressor is believed more effective than self-assertion.

  If we substitute assimilated Jew for gun-adverse home owner, the otherwise bizarre urban myth may come into focus. (And it is not, I think, out of place to remark that repetition of this absurd notion of the effectiveness of surrender is most often in the mouths of Jews. It is mouthed as a recognition symbol—a hailing sign of membership in the group of right-thinking urban liberals; its psychological underpinnings are, and, I believe, are recognized—if only subconsciously—as anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist: “Self-protection incites violence.”)

  How odd that these same middle-aged, intellectual Jews, who asked their parents of the Shoah, “Why didn’t they fight back?” have adopted, in their maturity, that same passivity that they, as children, attributed (wrongly) to their race.

  I have never heard this “keeping a gun is more likely…” statistic from anyone but a Jew. It is never presented as a rational, individual decision—“I would rather risk home invasion, murder, and rape than chance inflicting damage on my family through my own negligence”—but always as a statement of faith—“The decision is not mine, I merely submit, happily, to its authority.”

  The authority, here, of the statistic and the authority of the burglar are one: They are that which one is powerless to oppose. They are that society of the Irresistible Other—the liberal, Jewish voice of the New York Times, of National Public Radio, the right-thinking, Jewish Left, which seeks the illusory solidarity of identification with the illusory, inert, supposedly moral, wider world—which is to say with (in their view) the non-Jewish world.

  This is the blame-the-victim mentality that asked, after September 11, “What could we have done to make those people so angry? Should we not examine ourselves?” This is the convinced rectitude of the friend who asks the cancer victim what she did to “welcome the disease.”

  What is the source of this idiotic, immoral cant?

  In The Oslo Syndrome, Kenneth Levin wrote: “What motivates those Jews who are active in or align themselves with these various Israel-indicting bodies…?…a wish to believe, in the face of anti-Jewish pressures, that Jewish salvation can be obtained by embrace of a wider identity of leftist acolyte and by Jewish self-reform and self-effacement in conformity with leftist tenets.”*10

  Here, in abandonment of Jewish heritage, solidarity, and religion, the apikoros posits a confraternity of the reasonable and then insists on inhabiting it, in spite of all evidence to the contrary of its nonexistence, preferring the irrationality and, indeed, the danger of his actual, unprotected position to the danger to his psyche of the truth: that he is a Jew, that the world is not fond of the Jews, and that his only chance of safety lies with the Jews.

  It is not the gun in the home that causes his umbrage, but his panic at facing his real position. The benefits, indeed, the delights, of his race and its heritage might very well outweigh his panicked drive to assimilate, if they were known to him.

  Perhaps these unseen benefits are denied, in fact viewed with repugnance, as their embrace might reveal to him his cowardice.

  * * *

  Racism

  Voters:

  Th
e Jews loom large only because we are on our knees.

  RISE UP!

  Fifty thousand reap the benefit of the hopeless labor wrung out of thirty million French—their trembling slaves.

  It is not a question of religion—THE JEW is of a different race—the enemy of our own.

  JUDAISM: Voilà the Enemy!

  In standing for election I give you the opportunity to protest, with me, against the Jewish Tyranny.

  Do so—it is a question of Honor.

  —From a French broadside, A. WILLETTE, standing for election to the legislature, 1889

  Having experienced racism as a racist makes its appearance and operation much clearer. I grew up in a time of separate drinking fountains.

  The lie of black inferiority was so pervasive that, to the white child, it must have been true. So that, in opposition to reason, morality, observation, experience, and common sense, I considered blacks somehow inferior.

  In what did this supposed inferiority consist?

  I knew, my young self, that they were human beings, that they were no different intellectually, or physically, than the spectrum of nonblacks. But yet they must be inferior, or I, or else the world and I, must necessarily have been involved in a vicious, sick delusion.

  But yet I, who considered myself intelligent, and acceptably humane and moral, thought blacks, in some magical way, were inferior to whites. The rhetoric of “Can’t you see…?” would avail nothing and, in fact, reinforced, to my depraved mind, the delusion.

  For the rhetoric came, to my mind, from supplicants, which is to say, inferiors.

  I count myself greatly privileged to have lived long enough to see the beginning of the end of racism in this country. It is not my place to speak of the benefits to the oppressed. It is difficult and, indeed, pointless to make an endorsement that would be paternalistic—one might as well confess a righteous content at a fall in the murder rate—but I have benefited personally. I am better off without this sick delusion, as are my children, as is the body politic in which I live. An increased clarity aids me in recognizing this delusion in others: notably in the reaction of much of the Christian West, and of its press, to the State of Israel.

  The bombings of southern black churches could and can under no possible ethical system be excused. These crimes can, by rational beings, be considered as nothing other than monstrous murder. But the bombings of Jews in Israel by terrorists suggest, to otherwise rational minds, that “the other side deserves a fair hearing.”

  Why this exception? Because the Palestinians use their own children to carry the bombs? The Japanese acted similarly with their kamikazes, yet no one thought their actions increased the rectitude of their cause.

  Depraved individuals in the West have killed their own children,*11 yet no one considers the murderers’ cause just because the children were their own. Is not the murder of their own children, if not more reprehensible than the murder of the children of others, then at least equally so?

  That the Palestinians want land from the State of Israel, does this excuse the murder of the Jews? Then why not ask of the bombers of New York, and of their cronies, to list their demands, so that we may better understand and, perhaps, reward them.

  Terror is terror. Everywhere except in Israel. We are going to war with Iraq, with Al Qaeda, but not with the Hamas, a representative of which issued in the early years of this millennium a plea that the world not consider his people terrorists, since they bombed only because of the ongoing situation with Israel. In effect, they only killed Jews. Murdered vacationers in Kenya are not vacationers but Jews, which is to say, “other than human beings,” and there we have the unfortunate truth:

  The “Rich Jews” somehow want to take over the world.

  The “Poor Jews” want to take over the settlements.

  The Jewish financial interests want to bleed the earth.

  The Jewish financial interests, somehow, for some reason, want to destroy the world economy.

  Palestinian terrorists murder their own children, and the world blames the Jews.

  I am coeval with the State of Israel. I was born November 30, 1947.

  In my lifetime we Jews, mythologically, have served the cause of soft pornography. The world weeps at our being killed. What fun.

  I wrote, years ago, that Holocaust films are “Mandingo for Jews,” and that the thrill, for the audience, came and comes from a protected indulgence of anti-Semitism: they get to see us killed and to explain to themselves that they feel bad about it.

  The film The Sum of All Fears has Tom Clancy putting the world itself at the brink of chaos because the dumb Jews have misplaced one of their atomic bombs. Further, as the film progresses, we find that the plutonium for the bomb was stolen from the United States. Where does the blame accrue?

  Plucky little Belgium struggles against the Hun, but not Israel. Well.

  What can we do? I believe we can do this: we can speak up. Many of us harbor fantasies about speaking up against the Nazi tyranny. How could the world not have spoken in 1933, in 1943, we ask? Were I alive then, we fantasize, I would have spoken….

  But we were not, or not of an age of reason, and we cannot “speak up” in the past. We can speak up now.

  Don’t let an instance of anti-Semitism pass. Stand up for yourself, and stand up for your people. It is possible to support the Palestinian cause without being an anti-Semite, and there are people of goodwill who do so. But much of the pro-Palestinian feeling in the West is a protected example of anti-Semitism, and, when and as it is such, it should be opposed.

  * * *

  Performance and Restraint

  “All development is weaning.”

  —DR. DONALD GAIR, M.D.

  One may approach or attempt to propitiate a mystery through performance. One may also do so through restraint. This is the great lesson of the Akedah.

  One may worship God through sacrifice, through scarifying of the flesh, through prostration, and one may worship God through that respect evidenced by restraint: have no false god, have no idols, do not mix milk and meat.

  Those commandments Judaism qualifies as “negative,” the “‘not’ commandments”—don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t bear false witness—are of immediately apparent utility. Among the negative commandments are also those whose utility is, perhaps, more abstract, e.g., don’t have sex during menstruation, don’t work on the Sabbath, don’t mix milk and meat, silk with wool.

  These, at a minimum, may remind the observant that he is not God, that there exists a power greater than he, his desires, or, indeed, his intellect and that submission to that power is a first step toward communion with it.

  Similarly, one may gain inclusion in a group through performance or through restraint. The performance of ritual may be the attempt to gain the attention, and thus the approbation, of some greater power. This power may be a deity, a religion, or some organization that claims to represent such.

  The rituals of baptism, circumcision, the Hadjj are all survivals of the notion of ordeal. The ordeal here has been abstracted, but the underlying idea is clear: suffering, pilgrimage, ritual purification, trial by water will attract the notice of the gods and of their representatives.

  The undergoing of ordeal answers the central question both of the religious acolyte and of the victim of the confidence man: “Why me?” For the ordeal, presenting itself as an attempt to impress the gods, is, to the contrary, an attempt to impress the acolyte. His successful conclusion of the ritual instills in him the naturally occurring suspicion that perhaps, in his acceptance, the group has made a terrible mistake.

  We note that the individual, by accepting the power of ritual, endorses the power of, and thus feels himself worthless before, the mystery the ritual bids to serve (the ritual thus essentially substituting its own concerns for a generalized anomie) and that increasing devotion to the religious group may address this anxiety and, so, awaken in him increasing gratitude—called, variously, filial piety, patriotism, religiou
s dogmatism, or sports rooting.*12

  So much for ceremonies of performance.

  Ceremonies of restraint are more problematic because, although they may propitiate the gods, they, being in the nature of a nonevent, may seem, to the individual, less effective in propitiating the group.

  The problem is, of course, circumvented by the vow, by its proclamation, and by outward demonstrations thereof: the nun’s habit, the Amish dress, payot, and, perhaps, thinness (considered as a representation to the group of the individual’s power of self-control).

  But there is another category of restraint—that which, in rejection of certain ritual practices, defines the individual as a member of a differing group. Such observances, while not identifying the individual to the group (not taking the Lord’s name in vain, for example), nonetheless create unit cohesion by stilling the individual’s anxiety about his own self-worth—and through his subsequent ascription of this freedom to the group and its desiderata.

  “Yes,” he may think, “I am and deserve to be a member of that wise group, A, and am assured both of my inclusion and of its worth, as I discover the power to restrain myself as instructed, from the abhorrent practices of that vile group, B.” And, consequently, perhaps, not, “Am I good?” but “Obviously, then, I am good, and my group is good because it practices restraint. Perhaps, then, it possesses other excellences, not perceptible to the outsider. Perhaps I shall investigate them.”

  The power of restraint, thus, is that of self-suggestion. It is not that the previously unaligned individual’s thought processes have been changed; rather they have been subverted.

  Today the young wish to get tattooed. By such they indicate their ability to undergo ordeal, and, by such, and its concrete sign, they distance themselves from parental control.*13

  Jewish tradition forbids the scarring of the flesh and tattooing. The Jew who wishes to permanently decorate his body is in the same position as the Jew who decides to opt out of his religion. He feels, in a state that I think may fairly be described as “adolescent,” the longing to belong, to individuate himself from his parents and those years of their onerous control. He longs to join the wider world, which in his ignorance he identifies as “that which does not pertain to my parents.” He then physically himself as a ritual of individuation.