Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Would you still consider LBJ to be a raving unconfined nut?
  

    

I wouldn't.  History has shown him to be a highly calculating megalomaniac
perfectly capable of fucking an entry wound from the Grassy Knoll to make it
look like an exit wound.
  

    
LBJ was perfectly sane if compared to George W.   I heard Johnson's
biographrer on NPR the other day telling how, as Senate leader, he
would literally kick another Senator in the shins in order to get his
way.
  

    

Never trusted anybody unless he had the guy's pecker in his pocket.  Sane or
paranoid?  Either?  Both?
  

    
LBJ once put his penis  over  the railing of a yacht and said, "Watch
it hit bottom."  That's  just one example of his crudeness and the
arrogance of power.  It doesn't matter how you label him, he was
responsible for the unnecessary deaths of Americans and Vietnamese.
  

    
Like Kenedy before him and Eisenhower backstopping the French before
that, and much more shamelfully Nixon and Kissinger after him..To his
credit he realized he was wrong,. 
  

    
I  always thought the crudeness was the least objectionable thing
about him --  down to receiving visitors sitting on the toilet, a la
Louis XIV. Plus he didn't talk in that nauseating pea-soup equivocation
and weaselwording: he could say things like "It's better to have X
inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in."  The
war was a catastrophe and brought out his worst side-- but again, I
think he fitgured that out.  Caro's book about him brings out all the
warts, and he's still worht 20 of W.
  

    
That stepped-on snail on the sidewalk over there is worth 20 of W.
  

    
      The INS is detaining Arab men and boys in L.A.  Welcome to the
Fourth Reich.
      As Jews, which at the very least me, Krass, Gans and several
other WELLingtons are, any thoughts on all of this insanity?
      I've been meeting more Jews lately who say they've ALWAYS
thought Israel was a terrible idea.  It's certainly turned into a
grotesque perversion of Jewish values. 
      I LOVE being a Jew.  I love Matzoh balls, yiddish humor, Karl
and Groucho Marx, Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner, Lenny and Dylan, and
I'm eager to read Isaac Babel.  I'm very proud to be Jewish.  
      But I HATE Israel. 
      Am I a self-hating Jew?  Am I making sense?         
  

    

You know me.  You know I was converted to Zionism in the 1970s.  I love all
those same things you love.  Hating a valid nation-state is not the same as
hating human rights violations.  If so, I would have to say that I hate the
USA *and* Israel, and I love both.  Hating the people that run a country is
often the same thing as loving the country they run, don't you think, Mike?
  

    

> Am I a self-hating Jew?

I believe the current term, in hardcore Zionist circles these days, is
"Jewish Anti-Jew."

I'm always conflicted about Israel, having been raised in a non-Zionist
Jewish home but fully aware of the great danger ahead for the Jewish people
in an increasingly Jew-hating world (always the case when economies turn
south, as we know . . . must be the Jews' fault, of course). As much as I
despise Ariel Sharon and the practices of his government, I also derive an
admitted comfort knowing that Israel is there as a psychological hive for
Jews to come together and defend ourselves against what could be a vicious
onslaught from all directions (not to get all paranoid and shit, but, you
know).

I'm hearing some nasty anti-Jewish racist talk all over, from that
Saskatoon Indian dude up in Canada who said Hitler was only trying to get
rid of an obvious scourge (Jews)--OK, that guy's an outright loony fruitbat,
but you KNOW there are way too many folks out there who secretly agree with
him--all the way to the other side of the spectrum in the thin euphemisms
you hear in Lefty/Revolutionary discussions, e.g. "The Pro-Israel Lobby" and
"The Zionist Agenda." Whatever problems one has with Israel, one must be
aware that these terms carry an underlying race-hatred that is most
disturbing, at least to my secular Reform Jewish ears.

I agree that it's possible to hate Israeli policy without hating Israel.
There are too many beautiful people who live there for me to hate it. Would
said beautiful people were in positions of power . . .

(I suppose I wish the same for the USA . . . )


End of ellipses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
  

    

The thing that has been bothering me lately is the terrible damage that
is being done in Israel from the idea that we Jews are "the chosen people."
That is a meshuggene, grandiose fiction which has been used for millenia
to make ourselves feel good on the one hand but also to claim all kinds of
things as our birthright which are, simply, not.
  

    
It's all insane.  I don't think Jews are the chosen people, and I
don''t think people are the chosen species.  As an atheist, I don't
consider myself Jewish, although anti-Semites do.  They think of
Zionists and Jews as the same thing.  What were the Arabs supposed to
say--you are welcome to take our land?  I'm not even a cultural Jew
except maybe that I like Chinese food.  Oy.
  

    
"am I a self-hating Jew?"  

Since when is supporting the present state of Israel a requirement for
being Jewish?  Feh!

my mother: Ma, I got married again.
my bubby:  So, is he Jewish?
my mother:  Ma, we're both scientists.  It doesn't matter,  We're both
athiests.
my bubby:  You couldn't marry a Jewish athiest?
  

    
When my renegade-Jew sister married a renegade-Catholic, my mother saw
they had Unitarian literature and asked, couldn't she become a Jewish
Unitarian.  My mother was a victim of her own conditioning, and for a
while she refused to see their baby, but then she came to her
senses--or maybe I should say she came to her emotions--and finally
cherished her grandchild.
  

    
      I agree with Paul in so far as my atheism precludes me from
being labeled.  I do dig Chinese food as well, and some Jewish culture.
 But as much as I never felt anything for Judaism as a religion or
Zionism as a nationalist plan, I'm feeling even more alienated from the
whole mishegas by the current regime of theocrats and Brooklyn-born
"settlers".  I'm being somewhat rhetorical, but why is it so many
left-wing agnostics who are ethnically Jewish suddenly side with
genocidal, ethnic cleansers, i.e. the Israeli government, when
discussing the Middle East?  
       I feel responsible, as an ethnic Jew whose family was
persecuted in both Tsarist and Bolshevik Russia, to stand up and say
out loud that Israel sucks!
       Thank you, Krass, for saying the unsayable. The members of this
list just got to see in (more or less) real time your honesty and
iconoclasm that's been referred to historically.
        No, Jack, I don't think hating a government necessarily means
I love the the country.  I'm quite misanthropic in general these days
because humans are still unable to tell the truth. Although there are
many Israelis -- from the Refuseniks to this woman lawyer who defends
Palestinians (she's the Kunstler of Israel, I forgot her name) -- who
are opposed to the Sharon government's policies.  In fact, there seem
to be more Israelis who are horrified at Israel's policies than
American Jews.  
       Shmo, anti-Semitism is an ugly -- and sometimes genocidal --
form of scapegoating.  Agreed.  I don't think it excuses Israel. 
      What Krass said is precisely why I've loved and appreciated Paul
Krassner since the 1960s.  Telling the truth is not a great way to
make people happy.  But it is righteous because the truth is ultimately
the only valid moral compass we have.
  

    

> I agree that it's possible to hate Israeli policy without hating Israel.

Damn straight.  I hate American policy without hating America.
  

    
Furthermore, there are Jews who insist that I am Jewish even if I
don't think so myself, because my parents were Jewish.  Isn't that like
the Nazi notion that Judaism is a race rather than a religion? 
Anyway, today is the last day of this orWELLian dialogue, and I have
felt privileged and stimulated in particpating.  It's been fun
communicating with unseen intelligence.  I'll check in a few times, the
last one being 11 p.m., California time.  Thanks to all those who have
asked necessary questions and given necessary answers, and to Simmons
& Gans and all the others who are responsible for this forum.  Check my
Web site, paulkrassner.com, for my books; not there yet but now
available is my latest, Murder At  the Conspiracy Convention and Other
American Absurdities, with an introduction by George Carlin; $20
including postage.
  

    
Ahh, too bad it's over, but it's been fine, fine to have you here,
Paul. Thanks. 

Your mother's comment about Unitarian Jews cracks me up, for that is
exactly how we were brought up. Though my parents, scientists, were
atheists, as well. Since my family was also persecuted in Tsarist
Russia, I never deny being Jewish, though I know little about it, other
than what I learned when I decided to go to Hebrew school at age 11. I
always say that most Jews would deny me (for I am, after all, an
atheist) but the Nazis consider me Jewish. Whatever. I embrace that
part of me which is Jewish, whatever it is. 

<michaelsimmons>, it has been precisely my experience that American
Jews support the Israeli government far more stoutly than my Israeli
friends. They did not grow up next to their Palestinian neighbours
(though there is a whole generation now of Israeli kids who _cannot_
know their Palestinian counterparts, thanks to government policies).
It's crazy, as Paul says. 

Yes, we need a place in the world for Jews to be safe; there must be a
way beyond THIS way.  

It's VERY unfortunate that many people think when we criticize Sharon,
we are anti-Semitic. It's absurd. 
  

    

> Anyway, today is the last day of this orWELLian dialogue

It does not have to end.  Paul, you are welcome to hang out and rave with us
for as long as you like.
  

    

Jenifer, you sould about as Jewish as I am.  Until I started going to seders
with some good friends a few years ago, I used to say that the last Jewish
thing that ever happened to me was my circumcision.
  

    
so you cut it off right there?
  

    
<gulp>
  

    
      I'll be checking in daily but thanks Krass, "it was a laugh, it
was a giggle", to quote the blonde dame in Quadrophenia after the alley
shag.  It was an honor to interlocute your WELL appearance.
       Thank you, Gans, as always.   Dan Levy, always a pleasure. 
Jack King, you are my brother.  Shmo, you're a pro.  Everyone
else...SHALOM!   
      
  

    
I have a request, which I often make to my live audiences, and so I'm
doing it now this electronic audience: Does anybody have a fact or an
opinion that you'd like to share?  Of course, that's what goes on in
the Well all the time, but I'm the new kid on the block.