I watched cities consume cities, killing history
Earlier I asserted that there have to be words even in the face of things that seem unspeakable, so even though
spatch has been listening to me for the last half-hour repeat like a tape glitch, "These people make no sense to me. I don't understand them. I don't understand," I need to put more words around it than that.
It started with Stephen Miller. I put a lot of it into "Cosmopolitan Bias," but I don't understand him. I get that that resistance genealogy means nothing to FYGM, but Miller goes beyond complacency and into absurdism, funny as a heart attack. Being Jewish and not just throwing in your lot with white nationalists but aggressively working to bring about their promised land as flat and white as a sheet of cut paper, its borders closed, its citizens as monocultural as the Cavendish banana, I don't get that. Forget ethics, what about self-preservation? Where do you see yourself in this shining new nation-state, the American flag and the Christian church? Do you really think racial ideology will make an exception for you? You're so useful, they'll be grateful? Proof of tolerance? One of the good ones? They put the listmakers on the trains, clever boy; they deported the Judenräte and they liquidated the ghetto police. When that charmed circle tightens, you're not going to be inside it. (Convert and they'll still remember you were of Jewish extraction, like cyanide out of almonds. Every time someone on Facebook says that Miller looks like a rat or a vampire, even if they're saying it in condemnation of his policies, I wonder what they'd say about me.) Whatever winning side you think you're purchasing a seat on, I don't want what you've helped set in motion to go far enough for you to find out you're wrong. I don't know if I'll still be around.
So then I start thinking about Jared Kushner, who I have always taken for more of an opportunist than a true believer, especially when his visible, Orthodox-observant Jewishness is a big selling point of his father-in-law's non-racism: yes, but would you let your daughter marry one? Well, he did! I have gotten the idea that Israel is tangled up in it for him, but there I run into the same wall as the Netanyahu government and their affection for Evangelical Christians whose Zionism is more than tinged with the patronizing and the apocalyptic: I am not sure that any system of belief whose endgame is Armageddon can be said to be in the interests of Israel, especially when the sequence of necessary steps includes the conversion of the Jews (and a two-state solution? The Bible says nothing about that). It bewilders me and it disturbs me. It is buying the wrong kind of protection, for the wrong purposes, from the wrong people. But we can scale back from millenarianism and the survival instinct objection à la Miller still applies. Complicity is no guarantee of security. Even a political ignoramus must notice when, in a context of criminal investigation and protection, his wife is rated a "fine woman" by her father's attorney and he himself is dismissed as "disposable." I wondered about his genealogy, how far back the immigrants that he would repudiate, laughing at his father-in-law's jokes about murderous, rapist Mexicans.
His grandparents were Holocaust survivors. His grandmother was Rae Kushner of Novogrodek. One of the architects of the tunnel escape from the Novogrodek ghetto. A Bielski partisan. Gedenkstu vi ikh hob dikh gelernt haltn a shpayer in di hent? Now he makes less sense to me than Stephen Miller. How can you grow up with that story in your family and stand smiling for photo ops with a father-in-law whose campaign didn't even bother to dogwhistle its racism and anti-Semitism? Who signs executive orders to extort from his own government the legal pretext to detain entire families that he calls animals, infestations, indefinitely? In camps? How different is their barbed wire from the walls your grandmother crawled beneath? Or the DP camps where she waited for years after the war, stateless, unwanted by America? Never mind self-preservation now, how can this be what you choose to do with the life she won for you in 1943?
These people make no sense to me. I don't understand them. I don't understand.
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It started with Stephen Miller. I put a lot of it into "Cosmopolitan Bias," but I don't understand him. I get that that resistance genealogy means nothing to FYGM, but Miller goes beyond complacency and into absurdism, funny as a heart attack. Being Jewish and not just throwing in your lot with white nationalists but aggressively working to bring about their promised land as flat and white as a sheet of cut paper, its borders closed, its citizens as monocultural as the Cavendish banana, I don't get that. Forget ethics, what about self-preservation? Where do you see yourself in this shining new nation-state, the American flag and the Christian church? Do you really think racial ideology will make an exception for you? You're so useful, they'll be grateful? Proof of tolerance? One of the good ones? They put the listmakers on the trains, clever boy; they deported the Judenräte and they liquidated the ghetto police. When that charmed circle tightens, you're not going to be inside it. (Convert and they'll still remember you were of Jewish extraction, like cyanide out of almonds. Every time someone on Facebook says that Miller looks like a rat or a vampire, even if they're saying it in condemnation of his policies, I wonder what they'd say about me.) Whatever winning side you think you're purchasing a seat on, I don't want what you've helped set in motion to go far enough for you to find out you're wrong. I don't know if I'll still be around.
So then I start thinking about Jared Kushner, who I have always taken for more of an opportunist than a true believer, especially when his visible, Orthodox-observant Jewishness is a big selling point of his father-in-law's non-racism: yes, but would you let your daughter marry one? Well, he did! I have gotten the idea that Israel is tangled up in it for him, but there I run into the same wall as the Netanyahu government and their affection for Evangelical Christians whose Zionism is more than tinged with the patronizing and the apocalyptic: I am not sure that any system of belief whose endgame is Armageddon can be said to be in the interests of Israel, especially when the sequence of necessary steps includes the conversion of the Jews (and a two-state solution? The Bible says nothing about that). It bewilders me and it disturbs me. It is buying the wrong kind of protection, for the wrong purposes, from the wrong people. But we can scale back from millenarianism and the survival instinct objection à la Miller still applies. Complicity is no guarantee of security. Even a political ignoramus must notice when, in a context of criminal investigation and protection, his wife is rated a "fine woman" by her father's attorney and he himself is dismissed as "disposable." I wondered about his genealogy, how far back the immigrants that he would repudiate, laughing at his father-in-law's jokes about murderous, rapist Mexicans.
His grandparents were Holocaust survivors. His grandmother was Rae Kushner of Novogrodek. One of the architects of the tunnel escape from the Novogrodek ghetto. A Bielski partisan. Gedenkstu vi ikh hob dikh gelernt haltn a shpayer in di hent? Now he makes less sense to me than Stephen Miller. How can you grow up with that story in your family and stand smiling for photo ops with a father-in-law whose campaign didn't even bother to dogwhistle its racism and anti-Semitism? Who signs executive orders to extort from his own government the legal pretext to detain entire families that he calls animals, infestations, indefinitely? In camps? How different is their barbed wire from the walls your grandmother crawled beneath? Or the DP camps where she waited for years after the war, stateless, unwanted by America? Never mind self-preservation now, how can this be what you choose to do with the life she won for you in 1943?
These people make no sense to me. I don't understand them. I don't understand.
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You're welcome! It feels like a form of accountability, whether they heed it themselves or no.
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People like Stephen Miller are not steeped in conservative thinking and do not operate with a conservative disposition. They were formed by their rebellion against the stifling conformity they found at liberal universities. Their primary orientation is not to conservative governance but to owning the libs. In power they take the worst excesses of statism and flip them for anti-liberal ends.
I'm not sure that Miller's even thought it through that far, beyond that and anti-Latino hate.
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So we have an emotional sixteen-year-old writing policy for a mental ten-year-old just to put one in daddy's eye. Fantastic.
I'm not sure that Miller's even thought it through that far, beyond that and anti-Latino hate.
My mother just found me this profile from about a month ago, which suggests strongly that his primary motivation still is the lulz, as measured in other people's pain. That he likes rigged games, where he wins if he hurts someone with impunity (because he gets to hurt them) and he wins if they fight back (so fragile! so triggered! punked again!); either way he gets to dance away laughing that he's in the one in control. And if that's the case, he's even stupider than I thought. He will think he's safe, because he's the one you can't pin anything on. I would want popcorn if I didn't think I'd already be dead.
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I've heard "freeze," but I've never heard "fawn." That's useful and also distressing.
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We're drenched in such evil right now.
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That's just it. I don't expect people to be their families. I don't even expect all family stories to count with the same weight. I am just stunned by the case of Jared Kushner because it's not the failure of historical memory, it's not even the failure of living memory in the broad generational sense, it's the rejection of personal memory. I looked it up. Rae Kushner didn't die until 2004. I found her testimony at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
"Now, we are ready to talk and we realize that if we don't tell our story and establish something to commemorate what happened it will be lost. There is a society meeting from my town once a year and every year that I go there are fewer people there. We are slowly dying out and it is our obligation that our stories be told. History should record what happened to us. People should know what happened to us. If we don't tell the story now, who knows what people will say in twenty years. Maybe they will say it never happened. Now that we still have the strength and we have the power, we have to make sure that the world does not forget. Governments have to make sure that another Hitler does not rise to power. Protestants, Catholics, and even Polacks and Germans should not be killed because of their religion. Blacks should not be killed because of the color of their skin. We are all people. I tell my children this. It hurts when I see Nazis marching with swastikas in front of the White House or see the Ku Klux Klan parade. It is scary and it is painful."
And that's what her grandson encouraged back into the world. America gonif! I thought first that if she'd still been alive, Charlottesville would have killed her. Then I thought that she would have spoken out. We can't rely on the dead. They have already said everything they're going to say. But we can still listen, and it amazes me how Kushner closed his ears. It can't happen here? It didn't have to, if you didn't help it!
Both those men see personal advantage in what they're doing, and personal ambition blinds them to the fact that they are not among White Nationalists' Chosen Ones. Maybe in the case of Kushner he's like a hapless man on a runaway train, fancying himself controlling it.
Statistical distribution being what it is, I expect greed, selfishness, dishonesty, cruelty, and plain old dumbfuckery to prevail among Jews as among any other population. To think otherwise is to imagine we are not really human. But I expect also an awareness of the past. The degree to which that's been jettisoned here is striking.
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We are all people. I tell my children this. --I just don't even.
This reminds me of the parable of Lazarus and the rich man--the rich man ignores Lazarus-the-leper's suffering, and then Lazarus goes to the bosom of Abraham and the rich man is in hell. The rich man begs Abraham first to tell Lazarus to give him just a drop of water to drink, and then when Abraham tells him that's impossible, the rich man begs him to send Lazarus to his five to warn them to reform, whereupon there's this exchange:
“Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’
“‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’
“He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”
I always found that parable kind of defeatist and give-uppy, but now I wonder if it isn't just a description of a sad reality: some people really don't/won't learn some things.
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That is a sick burn for a Gospel.
I always found that parable kind of defeatist and give-uppy, but now I wonder if it isn't just a description of a sad reality: some people really don't/won't learn some things.
I believe it has to be true for some people, but I wish it were not.
(I still think the dead should give it a try.)
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(I still think the dead should give it a try.) --Me too.
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You start saying it during the windup. The punch lands on either shande or goyim depending on distance and reach.
You can also say it afterward, during the teeth-spitting stage. It's a flexible ritual.
It is hard to live here. It must be hard to live out there, too, God knows, but I cling to the idea of Massachusetts as slightly less likely to fall.
We're working on it.
I am supposed to be in Providence on August 11th for the release party of Forget the Sleepless Shores (arranged back in March), which I recently realized means I will not be counter-protesting the Nazis in D.C. I think I am going to have to convince people that buying queer Jewish books is itself a form of counter-protest. It feels like it these days, which is the weirdest thing.
I hope it's not just armchair activism with a personal stake.GO APOLOGIZE SOMEWHERE ELSE T. WITTno subject
(I am sorry I can't be in Providence on August 11. But I think I have the honor of placing the firstest pre-order.)
((Have you seen the video loop of Richard Spencer being punched to Hamilton?))
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It's an honor by me!
((Have you seen the video loop of Richard Spencer being punched to Hamilton?))
No! I saw the mashup with Captain America: The First Avenger, which was beautiful.
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https://twitter.com/natefoo/status/822659271645167618?lang=en Ugh, I can't find just a YouTube link but it, too, is beautiful. It inspires me. And no one suspects a large rounded person with a pretty dress of being the punching kind.
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WHAT WHERE
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The link I used to have is broken! It was the "Star-Spangled Man with a Plan" number spliced to finish with a sock to Richard Spencer. I'll keep looking.
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It totally is!
//distracts Tiny Witt. with first edition of Black Beauty
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I don't even know that much. :o(
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You have empathy and you notice the past. I think those are two significant distinctions.
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They have no empathy (Kushner) and are additionally actively sadistic/sociopathic (Miller). They are too narcissistic to believe that anything bad could ever happen to them. Bad things happen to other people. Other people have no relation to them, in any way whatsoever. Other people are not human and deserve what they get. The society they're creating will benefit them (they believe; it always has so far) and that's all that matters.
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I understand that this mindset exists and I understand how it works in the world. I don't understand it as a way of being.
Other people are not human and deserve what they get. The society they're creating will benefit them (they believe; it always has so far) and that's all that matters.
It makes sense: if you don't think other people have weight in the world, you won't believe they can hurt you. I just really expected self-centeredness to kick in harder for self-preservation. I wouldn't have expected the strong drive for personal advantage to go along so closely with the room-reading skills of plankton. [edit] I did once know a narcissist who was supposed to be a Machiavellian spellbinder of people and the first time we met approached me with an extremely obvious territorial display, so I guess it happens. I still thought some consciousness of historical precedent would get through.
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It says something for your compassion. Like, that you have some at all.
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See
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ETA: hold on, we need a more appropriate icon for this.
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I feel Thomas Harris must have been heavily responsible for the serial killer idea; it doesn't come out of Peeping Tom (1960), Psycho (1960), or even Hitchcock's later Frenzy (1972). And then it fuses so well with all kinds of supernatural monsters, whether it has anything to do with real people or not, it becomes its own world.
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I wasn't expecting Hannibal Lecter. Just . . . not this.
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So I use the family story as part of my resistance efforts. He may be able to ignore or discount that history in his politics, but I can't and won't in mine.
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Good for you. No sarcasm. I think that is the right thing to do.
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I agree that I don't think it's possible. But I did not know about his family and the contrast upset me.
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