Posted on 03/23/2004 8:02:11 PM PST by quidnunc
When I was young, my parents in the early 1960s told me to ignore stories about the “Jews.” Of course, out here in rural California, I never met such distant persons, but only heard about them from disgruntled farmers (who, I wager, had never met any either). These pesky “Jews” apparently in some secretive cabal controlled the entire fruit-market of the United States! “They” — not the paradoxes of interstate commerce and the cutthroat nature of American marketing — explained why we got $3 a box for plums while “they” took $20.
Middle men, market manipulators, and secret smart guys who trafficked in inside breaks and shady deals — all these right-wing farmers used to swear pulled the strings of the American fruit market. When I asked my mother if this could possibly all be true, she would sigh, and say, “No, no, no. You see when people fail, or when they are angry, or they become afraid and confused, they always blame those who are different or successful or confident. And often that means Jewish people, most of whom our neighbors have never met.”
And then I grew old, and learned that it wasn't any more reactionary men of the soil who evoked the Jews to explain why they were not listened to, or felt weak, or were frustrated, but rather often very liberal, and self-acclaimed progressives. Instead of Shylock fruit merchants, the new sneaky Jew was the neoconservative — with a funny-sounding name like Wolfowitz or Perle who, due to some sinister genius, had hoodwinked red-blooded Americans into fighting and dying for the Likud party in Israel. Not 9-11, not Saddam Hussein's horrific record of genocide, not some systematic effort to end rogue states and terrorist havens, and not an idealism to bring consensual government to the landscape of the Middle East explained why we went to Iraq. No, it was once again the Jews.
When I was young, my mother and father also lectured me about the paranoid style in American politics. “There will always be someone like a McCarthy waving papers and shouting conspiracies,” they preached. At the time, inasmuch as they were agrarian conservative Democrats in a sea of reactionary Republicans, I think they were telling me to watch out for phraseology from our politicians like “cooked up,” “treason,” “traitor”-and especially to be on the look-out when they screamed and frothed, and made all sorts of scary allusions like “some leaders have told me in private” or “the greatest example of (fill in the purported travesty) in American history.”
And then I grew old and listened to Howard Dean quote al Qaeda's about killing Spaniards as proof of our blunders and ponder the “theory” that George Bush knew in advance of 9-11; and Ted Kennedy refer to cabalistic meetings in Texas; and Al Gore scream, veins bulging and hair tossed, about the administration's treasonous war; and the Democratic National Chairman alleging that a President was AWOL while in the military; and John Kerry hinting at unnamed foreign leaders contacting him in secret — the conspiracists Chomsky, Gore Vidal, or Michael Moore no doubt all grinning off-stage.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at victorhanson.com ...
"When I listen to those who talk of race first rather than last, and identify themselves and others by their skin color, it is almost always by those on the Left, and usually by those who have something to gain by claiming first loyalty to a race or tribe rather than to a common humanity."
How many hyphenated Americans out there appear to owe more allegiance to the left side of the hyphen?
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