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 ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
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.
no subject
(I still think the dead should give it a try.) --Me too.