American Culture is a Thick and Sticky Substance and It Gets into Everything

American Culture is a Thick and Sticky Substance and It Gets into Everything


Discomfort is a powerful brew, for it is almost an invariable that those moments that resist all forgetfulness are the ones in which I felt the most ill at ease. It was precisely one of those memories that woke me up this morning, and what it made me understand, not the moment or the recollection, but the act of remembering this moment, is Culture, by its very nature, is fundamentally subversive to the individual and utterly pervasive. I suspect this plays heavily in this year’s presidential election, and the power of this nation’s Culture frightens me.

Forty years ago, probably longer ago, but definitely not shorter, I was sitting at a round table at a Chinese restaurant in Washington, D.C. called the Yenching Palace. It was, like most Chinese restaurants in the 1960’s, a fairly drab menu from which they worked: sweet and sour pork, chicken, and shrimp; wanton soup; low mein, all varieties; Shirley Temples; some spicy dishes with which my father and my grandmother played taste bud roulette; and, of course, tea and fortune cookies. I don’t believe I ate anything other than the sweet and sour dishes and the fortune cookies, and the likelihood of scoring a Shirley Temple was about one in six with my father’s mood the determinant factor.

However, the Yenching Palace meal that woke me up was different than most. First off, we had a guest other than one of my grandparents. She had short brown hair, probably in her late thirties, although a six year-old’s recollection almost always throws all grown-ups into the late thirties category. I suspect it seems old enough to be an undisputed adult without that official old” tag hung around the subject’s neck. She spoke with a heavy accent, and in recalling the conversation and its content, I suspect the accent was Israeli, but it could have been French, German, Russian, or any other foreign sounding accent that didn’t make me think of the then popular Frito Lays commercials.

My father sat to my left. My brother James, seven years-old and notoriously well-behaved, sat to my right. The foreign woman, directly in front of me. Those three and I are the only four characters in the memory, although I can bet with certainty that there were others there. My mom must have been there. My father never, ever went anywhere with only James and me. He was not a “kids” person and would never have undertaken an outing with us without my mother’s child care abilities, such as they were, along for the ride.

Also, my siblings, Tony and Claudia, both older than James, were not there. This is likely for I remember thinking the meal was kind of special. And, if truth be told, any meal that did not include some form of put down from our older siblings, verbal or physical, meant the meal was special for James and me. Now, my older siblings’ presences I would have remembered, because without fail they would have interacted in the scenario that is to follow, but they have no place in the memory. I lived in a six year-old’s kid-centric head at the time, and if there had been more kids at that table, I would have known it and remembered it and more specifically, remembered Claudia and Tony’s reactions to what was to pass, because I was the youngest, and youngest always performs Kremlinologies on their older siblings. It is a pure survival mechanism and never put aside. They must have been away at camp or something like that.

Anyway, the table setting being set, I remember slurping wanton soup as quietly as a six year-old can and struggling with the cumbersome shape and calamity-inducing slipperiness of a wet wanton, when the conversation at the table ceased being grown-up talk and took the shape of absolute disaster.

As is true at most Jewish tables in the 1960’s, some discussion of the Holocaust was going to happen. It was just over twenty year’s prior that World War II had ended, and those wounds still throbbed in nearly every Jewish household.

This throbbing manifested itself in various forms. In my family’s, it came in the form of Jewish self-hatred. My mother would chastise speech, looks, mannerisms with the verbal scurge, “Too Semetic.” My father, a very Semetic looking and sounding man, was more direct in his distaste for his own Jewish-ness, and openly objected to all Jewish religious practices with the phrase “that Jewish sh-t.” Needless to add, none of us were Bar Mitzvah-ed, and it is of little coincidence that we three boys graduated from an Episcopalian private school in the shadow of the National Cathedral. However, my father still had a significant feeling of loyalty to the race, and he spoke rather animatedly with this unknown but accented woman, who agreed with him, but went even further as to the evils of Hitler. Thus, when my brother James added to the discussion the explanation that, “Hitler killed the Jews because the Jews killed Jesus,” I knew we had the making of a true event on our hands.

I wasn’t entirely clear as to who Hitler was other than he was a very bad man and hated Jews. Jesus was familiar, as Washington, D. C. was the South in the 1960’s with White and Colored water fountains and segregated counters at the local Hot Shoppes. Hence, I was sufficiently steeped in the Christian mythology to know Jesus was the guy with the long hair and beard hanging on the cross. This knowledge arrived via a Southern osmosis that felt inescapable despite my family’s other-ness, and I had no mechanism for avoiding this pervasive American Christianity. Plus, I was six. Definitions of religious and historical characters are no more complicated than “Hitler was bad,” and “Jesus wore a beard and long hair.” This was all fine as far as I was concerned. Ricky Canavan was a hippy too, and he was the nicest baby sitter we ever had, so Jesus did not seem too awful.

It was with wonder, however, that I watched James, a mere 16 months older than I, get involved in a “grown-up” conversation. And oh, what an involvement it was. The woman who sat across from me began to yell at James. My father began to yell at James. I have no recollection of what they yelled, but I remember it was bad. James began to cry. The woman yelled at my father for teaching James horrible things. James tried to defend himself, but my father shouted him down. When grilled, James admitted he had received his historical information from his friend, Tommy Tate, with whom James also smoked cigarettes in the garage, but that last tidbit was information divulged at another point in our lives.

The woman who sat opposite also began to cry. My father quieted everybody down and then gave a long explanation as to why James was basically an idiot and rude and why he should apologize to the woman to his right. He did so begrudgingly, and his resentment was palpable, and I think, to this day, valid. It was not that his historical pronouncement was accurate or inoffensive, but that, because he was a little kid, he should not have be accosted by two adults in so very angry a manner. Even I knew that was wrong, despite my suspicions that Tommy Tate wasn’t exactly a font of wisdom.

But why did my father and this woman react so vehemently to this seven year-old boy? The two of them did not spend much of their time debating with children. My father openly spoke of his distaste for all conversation with children and often hoped we age quicker to spare him the boredom. No, James became something far bigger than a 7 year-old boy when he spoke up that night. He came to represent the distilled American culture filtered down through misinformation, myth, hatred, religious zealotry, familial ties, neighborhood friendship, and Tommy Tate. And despite the overturned Chinese mustard and tea, the scattered silverware, and the Bartok-like discord to the language and emotions around me, I achieved an unprecedented level of clarity from that single moment. American Culture is a damn powerful thing, and if you think somehow you have escaped its grasp, you will be slapped back into reality soon enough.

I suspect I woke up having remembered this incident because last week I felt truly slapped back into reality by the American embracing of Sarah Palin. I simply will never be sufficiently prepared to accept this country’s willingness to distort fact to make the story fit the desired image. I guess that is why this has been a Republican century. The Democrats keep insisting things are not that good, and changes must be made, while their counterparts insist all is well and that cacophony of despair you hear from Wall Street is simply a bunch of whiners unwilling to take the bad with the good. Disregard the buffoon on NPR who states we are on our way to a depression, let alone a recession, and disregard those who point out Republicans have marched this country into Depression before with a weak-minded and trenchant President with no semblance of a leadership road map. That does not play well on the streets of Toledo, Ohio or Peoria, Illinois. No, the American myth is this is a good, Christian country, with good, Christian people, who are tolerant of other people, who are allowed to live here too, but they cannot run the show. No, good Christians run this good, Christian show, and the rest of the country, come on over and watch how we do this the good, Christian way.

For years I did not believe this was in fact the American in which I lived. But I lived in New York City, not America, a town where African-American men feed their children bagels and cream cheese as a default setting for breakfast. Italian men know Yiddish phrases, and most everybody agrees Ed Koch, a Jew, was the quintessential New Yorker and should have been Mayor for Life. This is not real life. This is not real America. This is New York.

Then I moved to Chicago. Slap! I met Jews. I met Gentiles. None of the Jews knew the Gentiles, and vice versa. Neither of them knew a single African-American, who, from what I can tell, were not allowed to cross north of the east-west running and aptly named Division Street. This is the real America.

This is also Sarah Palin. Take away the pregnant teenage daughter. Disregard the Downs Syndrome baby, the five kids, the Troopergate, the stolen emails. They do not matter. What matters is she represents American Culture. She, like most Americans, went to a state school or six, and finally graduated college. She’s a mom, who schleps around kids to hockey practices, although they don’t use the term “schlep”—too Jewish. She goes to church. She believes in the primacy of the Bible. She is knowledgeable enough to get by like most Americans, but she isn’t an intellectual or policy wonk. She didn’t go to Harvard or Yale. She likes guns. Hell, she is an American through and through.

More importantly, she translates into “American.” What I mean by that is the American public sees her as indelibly American, and thus she has struck a chord with the American people. That she is a bigoted, spiteful, ill-equipped and ill-prepared candidate to take the office a heartbeat away from the most powerful position on the planet does not register. Nope. She is a real American woman. She is sexy. She makes babies—lots of them. She leaves her husband alone. She deals with the kids the best she can. She works hard. She is a tough lady, and don’t you mess with her. She looks good in high heels. She is the anti-Hillary and the anti-Barack at the same time.

America loves her. She is one of them. That Obama and Biden are wiser, smarter, more prepared, more capable of leading this country to a place it must go to avoid further financial disaster and erosion of America’s standing in the world: doesn’t matter. That she is perhaps the laughing stock of world wide politics and the United States lowers itself another notch because she is in the position she is in: doesn’t matter. No, she is one of us. She is the absolute result of American, laissez-faire Democracy. What evolves is not Communism, as Marx and Engels predicted, rather a populist revolt of not ideas, but feelings, sensations, smells, desires: all of them completely American, and there is not one damn thing you or I or anyone else can do about it. The power (or tyranny) of the majority has spoken. The American culture has seeped into every pore of every institution and its thick, sticky tar-like substance will never come off. And what has emerged from this stuff? Why Sarah Palin, of course. She is exactly what America really wants.

Thus, to answer an earlier question, the one that woke me up this morning: why is American culture rousting me out of bed in so violent a fashion? I can only answer with the following: it always has, but I just wasn’t paying close enough attention.

A Fuerher of Our Own

A Fueher of Our Own

American Jews face a very difficult political reality today. I came upon this dilemma while I was listening to the ninth of twelve CDs of “European Thought and Culture in the 20th Century,” a series of lectures from The Great Courses™ series produced by The Teaching Company and given by Professor Lloyd Kramer of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In his 17th lecture Professor Kramer gives a brief rundown of the events that thrust Hitler and the Nazis into power in German. My notes read as follows:

“By the early 1940’s there was no way to ignore what was happening in Europe with the aggression of the Nazis. Ell European countries but Spain were at war, and Spain had just endured a bloody civil war which resulted in a dictator assuming control of that country’s political fortunes. Intellectuals were divided by Nazism. People in the middle of a moment in history cannot see the outcome or assess the validity of their choices. Intellectuals were faced with the problem of abandoning the abstract and making political choices. They made these choices in the military context of the 30’s and 40’s. Three German writers are perfect examples of the possible choices in response to the rise of the Nazis and totalitarianism: Martin Heiddeger—support; Hannah Arendt—exile/flight; Dietricht Bonhoffer—resistance leading to death.
In later January, 1933 Hitler and the Nazi party legally come to power in Germany. Within a matter of months, Hitler declares and gains emergency powers. Again almost immediately, he launches the persecution of Jews, outlaws all other political parties and trade unions other than those with close Nazi affiliation, establishes Germany as a police state, builds concentration camps for political opponents, and essentially militarizes the entirety of Germany culture. The Nazis begin to re-arm and prepare themselves for a massive offensive against their European neighbors. This is also the start of “The Final Solution,” the systematic extermination of all Jews.”


The resultant Holocaust is all too well known to us. This specific lecture goes on to show that Heiddeger, Arendt, and Bonhoffer, all three great intellects, made three distinctly different choices regarding their acceptance or rejection of the Nazis. While that moment in history was as desperate as any humanity has ever recorded, the questions facing the American Jew and his political choices today are, while not as terrifyingly life-threatening, far more difficult an intellectual puzzle to unravel than what the great minds of Heiddeger, Arendt, and Bonhoffer faced with the rise of Nazi Germany. And here is why.
If we look at that second paragraph of notes which detail the Nazi rise, one cannot ignore the startling similarities to the sequence of events and actions between Hitler and the Nazis and the present Bush administration. President Bush came to power legally, and within 8 months, the tragic events of 9/11 lead the president to declare a state of emergency. We have remained in this state of armed readiness since. In this heightened posture, America has justified some seemingly implausible political actions. I say “implausible” because I never expected the United States, the land of the free, to perpetrate such defiling of American ideals as “Guantanamo,” “the attorney general purges,” “the Iraqi war,” “the planned Iranian war,” and the seemingly endless number of assaults on American Civil Liberties I had come to believe to be an American birthright. Further, this administration’s attempts to imbue the presidency with king-like divine rights of power have posed a greater threat to our constitutional guarantees than any other political maneuvering since the grotesqueries of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Indeed, we have become aware of documented cases of Middle Eastern-Americans being swept up off street corners and placed in jail cells for weeks, even months, without explanation for why they were detained, without means of defense, and without a phone call to a lawyer or loved ones. Our government clearly falsified information about weapons of mass destruction to legitimize the Iraqi invasion and subsequent occupation. And it is but a hair’s width of sanity and the interjection of concrete evidence about Iran’s lack of effort to create a nuclear bomb arsenal that keeps our military dogs at bay from Iranian borders. Seemingly, America has declared an undeclared war against Arabs, short and sweet. By throwing a blanket of “terrorism” over ever turban in the Middle East, this administration attempted to receive a carte blanche to invade wherever and whenever they wanted, just so their bullying behavior yielded enough oil to satisfy the American populations gluttonous desire for fuel and American oil companies greedy thirst for profits.
This lumping of one people-- today it is Arabs, seventy-four years ago, it was Jews-- into a faceless group of “enemy combatants,” who by their very existence threaten the moral (filthy, greedy, blood-thirsty: pick the adjective to applies to the group and era), religious (Muslim vs. Christian, Jewish vs. Christian), and financial (“They control all the oil,” or “They control all the banks”)well-being of the United States, is essentially the line Americans are being fed by the present administration. Thousands of lives have been lost. Thousands are incarcerated and tortured, regardless of the legal hair-splitting of the term, “water-boarding.”
But these are Arabs, who are being treated thus. These are our sworn enemies, foes determined to wipe out Israel. Therefore, the question before American Jews is: can we adopt the ways of our former enemy in opposition to our present enemy? This is indeed a more difficult decision for the American Jew than the rest of America, for Jews must wade through the history of victimization at the hands of the Nazis, before being able to see clear to the unencumbered American question of whether this administration’s policies have been valid or legal or moral.
Yet, while the American Jew might have his vision blurred by the encroachment of the past onto his thinking today, the answer to the question: Should I support a presidential administration that treats my enemy as we were treated by the Nazis; is even more powerfully the same. To condone the same shape of actions which led to the extermination of six million Jews is to condone the extermination itself. Regardless of what group of people are on the other end of the stick this time, we cannot allow our nation adopt the policies of the most morally repugnant leader and government in modern history. We must not. For if we open that door a mere sliver, those echoes of goose-stepping footfalls will drown out any American Jewish voice denouncing any future attack on any Jew ever again.
The question then must be posed: do we accept (Heidegger), flee (Arendt), or confront (Bonhoffer)? There are arguments for all three positions. Although the above makes clear I am against accepting what the Bush Administration has to offer, in any form, mind you, that does not mean I am oblivious to the profoundly valid arguments pleading for military forcefulness in the world community as a means of achieving stability, and hence peace. However, military might and aggression is successful when applied judiciously and without bias. What I mean by that is we should not threaten a sovereign nation because it has brown skinned people as opposed to light skinned people, which seems to be the extent of the Bush foreign policy other than the oil grab doctrine. Rather, we must establish a significant enough military force as to dissuade other aggressors throughout the world from attacking other sovereign states (and us) for fear that we might exercise our power against the aggressor. Still, to be able to carry this posture, one must assume a moral high ground, and not one reached by declaration (Hey, we’re the good guys. See the white hat?). Instead, our actions as a country must show the world our conscience is clean and clear of lesser motives.
As American Jews with much at stake in the well-being of American life, our acceptance of our government means a commitment to the democratic process. Should this process become compromised (see: Florida, Presidential Election: 2000), the stability and freedom we have enjoyed in the US is jeopardized.
Another alternative is to flee. My father did this. He was sick of the government. He was sick of banging his head against the wall, so he took himself, his wife (English), his vast knowledge of American law, and moved to England. Unlike Hannah Arendt, he left for more personal than political reasons. But the issue is should we leave these shores and from afar point out the misguided direction in which the country is headed? This option strikes me as a completely sane choice. Other than Israel (and that doesn’t exactly qualify as Sanity Central), Jews have never known a country from which they did not have to flee at some point or another. The Wandering Jew plant was named after a repetition of circumstance, as opposed to us being named after a plant.
Secondly, to remove oneself from a state of conflict is to achieve perspective. Nothing rounds out one’s viewpoint like either a distancing of time or space. I can’t possibly imagine that our present federal government could look any more ridiculous from a change of scenery, but my father swears otherwise. And this coming from a man who goes to work everyday with men wearing wigs style for the 18th century. Go figure.
As for confrontation, there is much to say for it. However, the ability to confront our government in writing, in peaceful protest, and/or by any other means, merely serves to suck the wind from one’s anti-establishment sails. One of the great things about this country is its uninterrupted support of protest. While violent protest is not tolerated, and while other protests might be disrupted and even attacked by the establishment’s police force, the population at large views these police attacks as a violation of our inalienable rights and there is a constitution which back up this viewpoint. This is not to say there are not oppressors in our government, but they are not the loudest voice in the crowd of the body politic.
Additionally, the freedom of speech extends to the written word, and writing about the violations of human rights is rarely, if ever shut down in the United States. And one need not be Al Gore to take a pot shot or two at Bush and his cronies. Heck, all you really need to do is write a blog and figure out how to put on an rss feed (something which is beyond me at present, but I was just looking into how to do it), and lawdy, lawdy, you got yourself a protest. Now, perhaps my next blog will be from a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama, but I doubt it. Instead, I, like most, will go ignored by the powers that be, and elections will proceed without incident and I will avoid incarceration and show up at the polls on Election Day. When I do, I will have committed the most audible protest imaginable. You can join me, and, to quote the tag line from last century, “throw the bums out of office.” We can only hope.