“Israel makes every possible effort to avoid civilian casualties,” yet another Israeli ambassador said only hours before the Gaza massacre. Truthdig
Yeah and if you believe that, I got a bridge to … oh wait.
Did you ever see Bill Murray doing ‘The Israeli Price Is Right’? On what is by now a completely worthless SNL—my god, you people are easily amused. But in the early days, man, you lot not only missed the Killer Bees—one of John Belushi’s best roles, really—they were from South America, wore bandoleers and were very edgy in the way you’d imagine bees with bobble head-feelers might be (and Belushi doing Cocker better than Cocker, even alongside him …)
… you missed—by this silly insistence for being born after the best times—”The Israeli Price Is Right.” It was an education. This boombox doesn’t work? Of course it works! You insult the prize? Our prize not good? You take it! And a surprisingly aggressive Bill Murray would come down into the audience and badger the winner into accepting whatever broken piece of crap. Prize by force.
Half an education. What SNL didn’t parody was the Nice Jewish Boy, a type I daresay so thick on the ground in New York, what was the joke? After Portnoy’s Complaint was published, nothing. The book that gave us the deracinated Jewish Prince and Family inside, outside, every whichway. The Sons of the Diaspora. (The goyishe version being The Sons of the Pioneers, backup singers to my idol, Roy Rogers.) Why, every Jewish mother had her own, live-in Messiah who had already appeared.
One of the few perfect novels ever written, the equal of Madame Bovary but funny beyond measure, tragically funny, in a way that American Jews were horrified to see in print. Held up as objects of ridicule! By one of their own! You cannot imagine the stink that book stirred up. Yet in the end, it led not to the increased Anti-Semitism the overly-protective, post-Holocaust generation of parents so feared, but to another, nearly equally horrifying prospect: assimilation. Oh yeah, like that was never going to happen.
Take Ronald Frumkin, the penultimate NJB, (Alex Portnoy is not nice) who hangs himself from the shower rod one afternoon with a phone message for his mother pinned to the pocket of his impeccably ironed shirt. At least the narrator, sinful bugger that he is, sees these things, and to that degree escapes them, even as they inform his alienation for a lifetime.
Yes, let’s discuss Nathan Zuckerman and Roth’s (or Zuckerman’s) suceeding novels …
Anything but the example of my marriage. The story of a shikse (a word I’d never heard and thus had no idea was derogatory) from a small New England town, taken in, hoodwinked, swindled blind by such skillful means as she never dreamt existed. In other words, by a husband by turns self-pitying, noble, and passive-aggressive (“Jewish men don’t hit their wives.”) … words fail. Years later I saw it wasn’t self-destructiveness at all: that was him. I didn’t have anything I could call my own, and if I had, he would have consumed that.
Which is nothing more, and nothing less than the story of the waves of F-16s that appeared in the sky … and proceeded to fire upon an enemy armed with homemade rockets. Maybe some stones too. And why did the planes come? Because they were provoked. They had to. “You made me do this.”
Me, I was a lamb to the slaughter. The poor Palestinians have no choice, they live in the slaughterhouse. Which doesn’t even belong to them. Nothing must! Because Israel is so … would you believe wounded? Aggravated no end? Who are these Hamas who disturb the peace with a shoulder rocket, a mortar. Wipe the fuckers out of existence! Teach them a lesson they’ll never forget! (A famously effective approach to strife, marital or international.)
They say that absolute power absolutely corrupts. Looks to me like any substantial power-over brings out the worst in men, and that true shepherds, true husbands of their flock are few and far between. And if you are waiting for Israel to change its collective mind, and acknowledge the Palestians have feelings for the land, just like them, I can tell you, forget it. Princes, all, annointed by suffering, and a God who told them they were better than anyone else. You can bet God didn’t say anything about Matthew 7:120 to them.
We’ll see what Obama does. But I have a declaration of my own: Special Treatment to make up for the Holocaust is officially Over. Not least because the survivors and descendants of same will turn around and commit genocide without batting an eyelash.
I say it’s codependence, and I say the hell with it.
