NEIL POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE

First as caution, second as calamity.

I am an American, and to once again paraphrase and borrow from the work of another apparently difficult and certainly far better-known Jew, Newark born.

Therefore, I will speak solely of Americans, and solely of my own experience.

In both cases, not for. Of, and of only.

I am neither ideologue nor identitarian, which is to say, despite the breadth of my vast ego, I am nowhere nearly narcissistic enough to ever assume my opinions represent that of others.

In this regard, I have come to believe that the overweening and frankly overwhelming modern population explosion of the easily offended often derives from the frequently preposterous notion that anyone can self-designate as a spokesperson, a representative of a widespread identity, a position to be reckoned with—that one’s feelings are facts, inviolable absolutes.

“Speaking as a…”

Nope. Not me. Not ever.

In sum, mistaking one’s personal reaction of hurt feelings for an offensive universal affront to human dignity is all the rage for the weaponizing of fragility posse. And it’s worth noting that we can learn to control our reactions, a lesson that seems to have been dropped from the syllabus a few decades back.

That said, as I’ve noted elsewhere, little or nothing offends me, but my feelings are easily hurt. Separating these two responses has been a gift since late middle age.

So, to beat a dead horse, I speak only for myself. I have no interest in convincing you, or changing your mind. Go on about your business, agree with me or disagree. I tend to ignore praise, and I do everything within my power to avoid engaging in anything like the spirited discussions of my misspent youth, time pissed away in arguing points over which I, or you, disagree.

I’ve happily aged into the default position of fuck off, and delightedly so. I’m not going to argue with you. Rather, I will end our digital connection with a few keyboard clicks, to no loss for either of us.

And now, at last, if you will please bear with me, the first of what will be several buried ledes.

The chasm between image and reality has a permanent presence in the back of my mind, and it’s been brought to the front office by the recent and now ongoing revelations about that dewy and doe eyed romantic mythmaker who, it has been revealed, apparently isn’t quite the charming feminist ally as he has presented and sold himself to a credulously adoring public for years.

This is, of course, only the latest in the age-old mistaking of presentation for reality, a time-honored way for us to get past the often gnarled difficulty of the truth, to take pleasure in the nuggets of pandering and patronizing bullshit that are far more satisfying.

This is frequently true, with or without an NDA.

This unfortunately universal mindset of perception has been wildly and profoundly exacerbated by and with the advent of modern mass media, which, from its very beginnings, was midwifed by novels, Dickens and Dime, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, and the spectacles of the Hippodrome. The movies, from word one, and all manner of kinetic image-based narrative which derive from them, were way ahead of John Ford in “…Print(ing) the legend.” He just codified that notion.

For example, in those now mostly forgotten formative days of the movie business, William S. Hart, despite his efforts at his idea of realism, was, in reality, a second-rate Shakespearean actor who found a new lease on a career pretending to capture the real west…

…While Tom Mix, who brought the rip-roaring theatrical circus to the cowboy picture, was the real deal, a genuine true to life cowpuncher. But despite the bones he’d broken as an actual bronco buster, Mix never made any bones about any so-called realism in his wild and wooly shoot ‘em ups.

And, John Wayne, that fabulous chickenhawk, fought the Second World War from the safety of the backlot, of course, while many of his contemporaries, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Tyrone Power, and Clark Gable, to name only a few, put their careers on hold and their asses on the line of fire.

Not to make any more enemies than I already have or need, but maybe the Duke was hedging his bets on a negotiated peace, or an Axis victory, for that matter. I mean, Karl May was one of the Fuhrer’s favorite authors. John Wayne as Old Shatterhand? We’ll just never know.

And don’t get me started on Walt Disney…or Ronald Reagan, for that matter.

In a similar if tangential regard, whenever I hear an actor describe his preparation for a movie as comparable to the training for the actual military/police/whatever authority figure he is being paid a shitload of money to portray on screen, I cringe at that performer’s cluelessness.

And, it merits mentioning that I like and respect actors, for the most part. But really, now. This is dissociative and ridiculous, the more so because these ninnies could likely ace a polygraph, convinced as they are of what is obviously utter and complete sheer nonsense.

So, this mistaking of image for reality, intentions for actions, acts itself out in the audience and in the performing community as well.

One of the consequences, unexpected by me at least, of those images and intentions displacing reality and action, is that millions of people now live lives as if they are performers, the cosplaying mega stars of their own streaming (un)reality series.

These days, we have devolved, as a society—I almost typed “culture,” but come on, really now—to see our own behavior, our own, you should pardon the expression, reality, through the scrim of popular entertainment and its increasingly simplistic two-dimensional gestures and anodyne tropes.

A few years back, among a vast swathe of other unsettling notions, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff pointed out that an alarming number of students seemed to think that they were somehow entitled to be amused, to be entertained, by their academic experience. Literally. “I enjoyed this class” had become a distressingly common review of a course of study.

Clearly, the experience of effort exerted can certainly be rewarding, satisfying, engaging, and enlightening. But to apply the same measure of value to an education, to work, for that matter, as we use for entertainment, sport and leisure seems counterintuitive and alarming in its implications for the further application of that education, that work.

In the name of full disclosure, I love what I do for a living, with a career that began over a half century ago. Doing this work is as satisfying as it is often frustrating. But it remains work, a job, separate and distinct from those experiences where I take my leisure and pleasure.

But now, what was at the time a disturbing trend, has become a watermark of our time. Clearly, Orwell and Huxley should have compared notes, and conjoined their dystopias. We have become a culture that expects to be constantly entertained, and that judges any and all experiences through that two-way filter of entertainment. Life as performance.

In truth, I could start anywhere, as noted by the early Hollywood examples above, which are, to be sure, lost to that culture, a culture with access to nearly everything and curiosity about next to nothing, certainly nothing that predates one’s birth. In sum, a sad number of you reading the paragraphs above might know who John Wayne is, but who the fuck is Tom Mix, right?

But for my purposes, which will eventually become obvious, let’s start with the moon landing, July 20, 1969—although I may backtrack for another point to a few years back. Or not.

Along with a couple of other longhaired freaks—not “hippies,” for fuck’s sake, that was a media designation of derision—I watched with boundless joy as those heroes set foot—not “stepped foot,” again, for fuck’s sake—on that airless rock, and listened, a tad puzzled, as Neil Armstrong garbled a preprepared quote.

If I hadn’t been so high, I might have heard the nascent faint rumble of skepticism from the swarm of Dunning-Krugerandians, already unable to accept reality on its own terms. Sure, this was entertaining, but it couldn’t be real. Right?

Right?

Hollywood even made a movie about a fake moon landing, in 1977, but it was another picture released that same year that I am convinced had a pernicious impact on the space program, and would, as I will lay out below, ultimately fuck up a fuckload more than just NASA in the schism it created between perception and reality—not to mention creating a nuance free misunderstanding of women, of men, of behavior, and of politics in all forms.

In the name of full disclosure, for the sake of those of you who have stumbled onto my occasional screed with no clue, or for that matter, no interest in my actual professional life, I drew the comic book adaptation of that other 1977 release. To be clear, there was no indication at the time that this big budget version of Saturday matinee junk was the Old Testament of what would become a secular religion.

I am on record, endlessly, in regard to the millstone around my neck this work has been for decades, and my concomitant bitterness at having never profited from its massive sales. I can affirm here that I will not allow those feelings about my experience to color what I have to say about what should have been a minor attraction in service of a niche market and its massive and unfortunate impact on the manner in which several generations have completely misunderstood, misinterpreted, and acted counterintuitively in the misbegotten and catastrophic misread of realpolitik.

In the first place, as long ago as the early 1980s, I came to believe that starships, laser swords and PEW PEW PEW, were far more fun, more entertaining, more real, than the clumsy stumbling truth of the actual space program for far too many of my fellow Americans, who wanted more from their television sets than those staticky images of ineptly bouncing Michelin tire men.

See above, in re: John Wayne. In space!

American enthusiasm for the actual ambitions of those all too human pioneers on the threshold of interplanetary discovery and exploration rapidly dimmed, waned, and died, as special effects captured the American imagination.

At the same time, the simple-minded nuance free narrative of these and similar pop culture franchises, including the sad number of adults reading all too many YA enterprises, imbued millions of the incurious with a world view that was no more complex, no more serious, or for that matter no more real, than any Tom Mix circus cowboy movie.

On both sides of the political spectrum, even among that non binary cohort, there were Good Guys and Bad Guys. Heroes and Villains. Faces and Heels.

And like the “You suck! No, you suck!” realm of professional wrestling, where reality is defined by self-definition as opposed to you know, action, everything is now fabulously Kayfabe.

This, despite the slow erosion of popularity of this decades old franchise, as toxic and proprietary fandom beat the shit out of it and each other. Sure, the geek love has faded, but the fatuous simplicity of this dunderheaded crap, the credulousness of the audience which has absorbed its dimwitted lessons, and the willful ignorance which has become the default of modern culture, show no sign of going anywhere soon.

This vast swathe of citizens, awash in that fatuous credulity, devoid of actual critical thinking, will believe anything. Anything, that is, of course, that supports whatever preconceived notions were waiting to be confirmed in the first place. Utterly fucked up notions bearing no resemblance to reality are all too often the norm for a left to right polity that tends to find mutual agreement on one thing.

Specifically, to quote Tom Lehrer, “Everybody hates the Jews.”

I’ll bet you didn’t see that one coming, huh? But stay with me—I will do my level best to tie it all up.

And now, for yet another buried lede…

Critical Theory has made a compelling case for the systemic presence of racism in the West. I am also of the mind that Harry Truman’s desegregation of the American military, and most of the further federal fiats ending racial segregating policies as enacted by the government, were motivated less by any true altruistic sea change of heart on the part of White Anglo Saxon America, but rather by the need to contradict and counteract the USSR and its dismissal of America’s self-identification as the land of the free, and the home of the brave.

Of course, the left solely blaming the West for systemic racism utterly ignores the quantitative and qualitative racism found in the Soviet bloc—and, to be real, everywhere else. We are, for better and mostly worse, a tribal species.

This double standard, of holding the West to a higher standard, is standard practice for an increasingly out of touch left wing, as I will elaborate further.

As noted above, I am an American by birth. An Ashkenazic Jew by ethnicity. Second generation, to be specific. An atheist by choice and experience. Yet, a Jew I remain. Most Jews will understand this. Many Gentiles will be confused.

I have never been to Israel. I have no interest in visiting Israel. Despite any attempts on the part of assholes on either side of the aisle, I owe no fealty, political, social, philosophical, or moral, to any country but my own.

And, entre nous, Benjamin Netanyahu is, to my mind, in a sociopolitical sense, a complete cunt.

That said, I am firmly convinced that antisemitism is as systemic as racism, on as worldwide a scale, on the right and on the left, crossing all racial, ethnic, national, and sociopolitical boundaries—and that “Zionist” is just the latest euphemism for Jew hate, joining “Rootless Cosmopolitan,” once the left’s favorite designation.

I’m waiting for the return of Yid, Yahood, Sheenie, Mokkie, and Kike. The day is, of course, young.

In the past week, I have been called “…Rabidly anti-Palestinian…” and “…a disaffected Leftist.”

I am certainly the latter, unequivocally. It’s been hard out there for a one-time Red Diaper Baby.

As for the former, my response is one of complications and caveats. Despite my uninterest in visiting Israel, I find the fact that this tiny country, surrounded as it is by several billion representatives of a faith that regards my ethnic cohort as vermin and prays for the day of the elimination of Jews in Israel and everywhere—everywhere, hereabouts included—something of an existential threat.

As I say, second generation. My grandparents fled the Pale of Settlement, a journey memorialized and trivialized by FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, some forty-five years before those they had left behind dug their own graves on the orders of the Einsatzgruppen, and some fifty-five years before Stalin’s death inadvertently saved the lives of thousands of Jewish MDs across the Soviet Union.

Of course, when the left is charged with antisemitism, it whatabouts to point at Nazi Germany and its mass murder, ignoring the Soviet purges—which were, to be sure, pogroms by another name—on the part of Russian Communism.

From the circular logic of the modern left, its commitment to social justice makes it incapable of antisemitism, and deems any acts of antisemitism on the left as anomalies, the work of the rare bad apple.

Of course, since Jews are not considered worthy of the diversity, equity and inclusion of Intersectionality, the circle draws itself. As per David Baddiel, Jews don’t count.

And, also of course, that “bad apples” excuse is rejected outright by the modern progressive left in its judgment of any political policy not its own, so draw your own circular conclusions in regard to that righteous hypocrisy.

A favorite comic example of this is the Olympics level political contortions of progressives when confronted by the wild haired racism and locker room homophobia of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara remains priceless, hipster t-shirts notwithstanding.

But back to the Middle East, where antipathy to Jews has long been a vibrant notion, certainly since the Mufti and Hitler hit it off so well. As a result of this meeting of like minds, Middle Eastern troops deployed as Wehrmacht for much of the desert war. Honorary Aryans, like the Japanese and Italians, I would guess.

This antipathy simmered for decades, and, as documents later revealed, was manipulated and exacerbated by the KGB, which saw in the Muslim world, which the same documents reveal to be a theocratic culture held in sneering contempt by the Soviets, an opportunity to fuck with the US via its local proxy, Israel.

This manipulation included the translation of THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION into Arabic, and, in a peculiar echo of the CIA financing small magazines of literature and anti-Soviet left wing intellectual thought, secretly funding the founding of the Palestine Liberation Front.

So, yes. We have Yuri Andropov to thank for Yasser Arafat.

YA fiction? No, YA fact!

So, wait now, you say. What does all this have to do with a now nearly half century old media phenomenon, that has contributed to the dumbing down of several generations? Next week is the first week in May, Holy Week for this secular religion, so the cringe will be rampant, this despite the deterioration of its commercial value as indicated above. The damage is done.

Well, here’s how I see it.

Again, as per above, I believe, I know, that antisemitism is systemic—a mindset so ingrained that David Duke and Louis Farrakhan can find common ground. So, the predisposition to despise Israel is already there. This despite the rape and murder of men, women and children committed by those who attacked Israel. This assault was met with indifference by a progressive culture which has shut down institutions over Halloween costumes and hurt feelings.

Jews were, and are, too often perceived as just having it coming.

Add to this the simple-minded notion of good and evil fulminating in a swarm of cosplaying morally performative freedom fighters in the United States, dressing up to play heroes in service of a medievally theocratic, misogynistic, sexist, homophobic religio-political movement, that would imprison and execute these selfsame shitheads once the jihad was over.

These murderers of children have convinced these privileged shmucks that they, the rapists, are the underdog, manufacturing a completely upside-down view of reality, of innocence, of guilt.

Kayfabe, babe.

Useful idiots for the KGB decades ago. Useful idiots for Hamas and terrorist culture today. Stockholm Syndrome meets Identification with the Aggressor. You can’t make this shit up.

The Jew hate is a constant underground river, simply waiting for the ways and means to go mainstream. The sort of imbecile world view that regards terrorists who rape and murder children as freedom fighters is, I believe, attributable to that systemic antisemitism, informed, exacerbated, and made acceptable by that simplistic narrative informing violent protest as cosplay.

I mean, Queers for Palestine says it all.

So, yes, I am here solely to talk about my experience, my ongoing American experience. On an international scale, it’s about Israel, of course. But this pack of willfully ignorant antisemites have brought their threat to the country in which I live, to the lives of people I love.

And, just as “Zionist” is just the new “Kike,” When the privileged American ignoramuses shout “Globalize the Intifada,” I hear, quite clearly, “Perish Judah.”

Trust me on this.

As ever, I remain,

Howard Victor Chaykin…A Prince…of, it would seem, of the Jewish American variety.