WHITE NOISE

The photographs—many of them selfies, for fucking idiot’s sake—of the American Nazi terrorists invading the Capitol building, with their 6MWE(for the innocent among you, SIX MILLION WASN’T ENOUGH) and CAMP AUSCHWITZ STAFF t-shirts, brought to mind one of those daily passages of thought, unconnected tissue that becomes recognizable as potentially ironic narrative when the musing kicks in to connect that tissue.

I posted a link last week to a piece I’d published on SUBSTACK, entitled THE ICONOCLAST’S DILEMMA, generally about finding myself in the middle of extremist views from several sides, and specifically how each side of the trough views iconoclasts in entirely different and somewhat disturbing ways.

This was followed by a comment on that Substack piece, which, while agreeing with much of what I’d written, insisted that I had still profited from white privilege.

On the same day, one of those idly passing the time posts passed through my Facebook page, asking the innocent question, “When did you take your first airplane trip, and to where?”

My answer was December of 1966, and I flew from New York City to Montpelier, Vermont.

It was the public display of Jew hate worn proudly by so many of these tragicomically photogenic examples of ambulatory piss poor protoplasm, not to mention the loathsome late stage capitalist producers of merchandise such as those indicated above, that brought both those apparently disparate and unrelated posts to mind.

In 1966 I was sixteen, visiting a college which wasted no time in rejecting my application for admission.  

Entre nous, considering my career and what I’ve become professionally, I’d love to imagine that if anyone thought about that rejection on their side of the table years later, it would be with regret.

And yes, as ever, I digress.

But neither that campus visit, nor that first airplane flight for that matter, are my most profound memories of the experience.  Rather, it was the hour-long drive from the airport to the campus, through a pelting Vermont snowfall.

I shared the car with a driver and two other passengers, a man and woman, all my parents’ age, all of whom seemed to know each other well enough to at least chat familiarly. It might be worth noting that I wore a suit and necktie, had a head of well combed hair, wore a toggle overcoat, and kept silent, as was expected of children in those days, and make no bones about it, I was short and round cheeked, and thus looked like a child, perhaps two years younger than my actual age.

Within a few minutes of our leaving the airport, the conversation finally penetrated my consciousness.  As noted, I missed the opening salvo, but the chat was about Jews and their vile and to this trio, completely obvious, and to be sure, completely despicable Jewishness.  The discussion managed, in that hour, to cover every possible iteration, not to mention cliché, of Jew loathing. 

American Anti-Semitism’s Greatest Hits, if you will.  

Now these weren’t rude or impolite New Englanders. In that regard, they made a brief attempt to engage me in their chat, to bring this kid into their spirited colloquy.  I replied with an incomprehensible mumble, which satisfied them that I was equally polite enough to let my elders continue their conversation.

I kept my mouth shut for the remainder of the trip, and just listened to a litany of utter and complete bullshit, terrifying beliefs that I had previously only read about.  And it would be a great punchline if I told you that, as I was deposited on campus, that I pulled a gotcha—“Surprise—Jewboy here!”

But no.  Didn’t happen.

That said, those three people—White, middle aged, middle class New Englanders, as proudly American as anyone might be—believed, as so many did and do, that Jews, those alien Orientals, those rootless cosmopolitans, those secret manipulators as per the Secret Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, were identifiable by universally recognizable physical traits—fleshy lips, curly hair, hook noses, the usual—not to mention the beloved classic of the absurd and misbegotten marriage of rapacious bolshevism and rampant capitalism.

Me, they simply regarded as one of them, and well mannered, at that.  In retrospect, just as I’d never actually heard the sort of perspective these average just plain folks were calmly expressing for the world to hear about people like me in real life, I’ve come to believe that the only Jews these all too White people were actually acquainted with were on television, and that they themselves had never met an actual flesh and blood Member of the Tribe in their banal, tiny, cloistered and ultimately devoid of nuance lives.

Needless to say, this experience was brought back to mind big time years later by the dinner table sequence in ANNIE HALL—and don’t get me started about hitchhiking across country in my late teens with another fellow Member of the Tribe, when we’d scored a ride from what turned out to be a car full of Ku Klux Klan Rodeo Klowns, a lift that got us from Akron Ohio, to Gary Indiana.

Needless to say, in regard to our shared Yiddishkeit, none of our hosts who, like those rockbound Vermonters had probably never encountered a flesh and blood Jew in their real lives, were ever the wiser.

So, if by white privilege one might mean not being marked by pigmentation, thus making it convenient and easy to be identified and targeted by the sort of White Supremacist “Christian” American Nazis who are nowhere near finished with their commitment to murdering the republic in the name of White Ethnonationalist Identitarianism, sure.

But to be clear.  Those t shirt wearers at the capital, those rodeo Klowns, those just folks New Englanders and everyone like them never have and never will consider Jews White. My sallow beige is an aspect of a secret identity, and that barely, a secret identity likely revealed the moment I express myself honestly and clearly about where I stand on the ethnic flow chart.

I know full fucking well what is meant by “That New York sense of humor.”  It ain’t Cholly Knickerbocker they’re talking about.

And, to let no one off the hook, we are all Others to Others, despite any fabricated fantasia of self-congratulation we might conjure in an attempt to bullshit ourselves into believing otherwise, so to speak.

That universal lizard brain we all possess as human beings processes, often instantaneously, any encounter with someone unlike us in any number of identifiable ways, filtering our reactions through not so much our DNA than via the messy network of perspectives and beliefs with which we’ve been inoculated since childhood. 

These prejudices, these presumptions, these cognitive biases are often mindsets that, if we are to function successfully in a plural society, we have had to, successfully, or perhaps in the case of so many of our dismayingly fascistic fellow Americans, not so successfully, unlearn.

And finally, let’s face it, the only serious anti-Semites who actively and earnestly regard Jews as White are Black anti-Semites. 

Trust me on this, and if you don’t, just ask Lewis Farrakhan. 

You’ll be glad you did.

As ever, I remain,

Howard Victor Chaykin, a prince—but only tangentially of the Jewish American variety.