… Maybe Monetizing That Jewish Space Laser Bullshit Wasn’t The Best Idea
I was born in 1950, five years after the world was finally forced, by substantial visual evidence, to accommodate and process what, in all likelihood, it had suspected all along; that the intended future of European Jews, eastern and otherwise, was enslavement, extermination and maybe soap.
VE Day put a stop to German intentions in regard to their elegantly named Final Solution, and, a few years after my birth, Stalin’s timely death put paid to the upcoming nationally planned murder pogrom of the Soviet Union.
Needless to say, both could have gone in quite the opposite direction. An Axis victory, a negotiated peace, might very well have put the lives of American Jews in jeopardy. And had Stalin not died, the fractional number of Jews in the world would have been reduced dramatically.
The jitters of the war years among Jews were sustained by the post war red scare, which, in retrospect, was, for all intents and purposes, a hayseed pogrom/show trial by any other name. Premature Anti-Fascists. Really, now. We knew what that meant, aside from the obvious.
I may not have completely comprehended what was going on—I was smarter than the average kid, but, really now, a little kid I still was—but the anxiety that my family and every other Jew experienced, that cold breath of potential universal murder, or as it would come to be called, genocide, that midnight chill on their necks, was palpable, even to a little boy with his head stuck in a comic book.
Family dinners started out fairly jolly, old jokes and familiar laughs enhanced by Schlivovitz and Maneschwitz. But the wine and liquor both ultimately lead to a lapse into shrugs and headshaking rumination over the recent past. The conversation danced around the notion, as indirectly acknowledged as Elijah’s empty chair, that we had, by dint of being here rather than there, dodged the bullet that had slaughtered everyone we knew in the old country, wherever or whichever that was.
I’m second generation. My parents were born in the USA. I say this with a qualification—I learned a few years back that I am actually illegitimate; I have no idea who my biological, as opposed to my adoptive father was—so, for those of you with an axe to grind, yes, I am a bastard, literally and figuratively.
But assumptions are made, and it’s too late to stop now. Chaykin remains my name.
It was clear that we and those like us were grateful to have survived, entirely due to purely geographic fortune. Not a one of my family ever considered leaving the United States for what appeared to us in Brooklyn to be an uninhabitable desert with too much sunshine and way too much squinting into that relentless sun by overly cheerful men and women in khaki shorts.
“Next year in Jerusalem,” was a metaphor. A metaphor. Unlike, say, “Globalize the Intifada,” for example. Or that “From the River to the Sea” threat. It’s those two, cloaked in the morally performative language of middle eastern anti-colonialism, but deployed, as we all now know, to revive and make war on the rest of us, that have brought us full circle back to the Existential Threat.
To be honest, of course, anyone in their right mind is all too hip to the loathing of Jews that squats in the shriveled turd that is the right wing heart, of the 6MWE and CAMP AUSCHWITZ t-shirt crowd. They fucking hate us, pure and simple.
And certainly no one with an ounce of sense bought or buys into any of that faux Philo-Semitism of the Christian Nationalist right, all that Holy Land hooey. Remember, these are people who retrofitted a mythical Middle Eastern magic man into a Norwegian, for fuck’s sake.
And let’s not forget the Latter Day Saints’ posthumous and scandalous conversion of dead Jews. I’m sure the Mormons meant well, but let’s face it, intentions are nonsense. It’s action that matters, and that was some insidious bullshit.
Clearly, Dara Hall has a very good point.
I grew up in New York City—“Hymie Town,” as per the right reverend Jesse Jackson—surrounded by Jews, and a shitload of Jew baiters of all races, creeds and colors. That melting pot bullshit was, to be clear, so much bullshit. Well into the mid 1960s, you left your neighborhood, your ethnic claque, at peril.
Once everybody of my generation started getting high, that sort of thing got just a little bit backgrounded, certainly in most of Manhattan, but the boroughs kept it alive. And in the absence of overt antisemitism, the cliché, and, yes, to be honest, reality, of the self hating jew took hold, to, to my mind, keep it simmering on the backburner.
In regard to the reverend Jackson calumny, there wasn’t much of a reaction to that man of god’s crassness. I got over my surprise at this non reaction, and wondered out loud, at the time, what the reaction might be to Atlanta being dismissed as, say, “Rufus Town,” and got shut down by a couple of archetypally self hating Jews.
See? Even before David Baddiell made it clear, Jews didn’t count.
Except, of course, for those of the self loathing variety.
My first actual experience with in your face antisemitism was almost comically close to a Philip Roth New Yorker short story. I was barely sixteen, in Vermont for a college interview, sharing a hired car from the regional airport with locals who’d flown in from LaGuardia with me, who talked shit, details long forgotten, about Jews they’d encountered on their trip to New York. In retrospect, maybe they were just subtly putting me in my place, but I’m pretty damned certain I didn’t read as a kike to this quartet.
The same can certainly be said for a ride I had, only a few years later, the first time I hitchhiked to California. I was lucky enough to snag a lift from three guys, a few years my senior, who were already a bit high, who shared a number with me, and also shared that they were, professionally speaking, Ku Klux Klan Rodeo Klowns.
Decades later, when I saw the SNL film of Eddie Murphy in White face on an all White bus, packed with White people behaving in their specific White people ways, I got it.
All this notwithstanding, coming of age in New York City in the sixties and seventies cast me in a bubble, certainly. There were always episodes, and anecdotes, and moments of genuine surprise, but the sort of nervous anxiety that informed my parent’s generation, for which we chided them, of course, smug know it alls as were, had all but vanished.
This coincided with the now still ongoing presence of a certain strain of cultural cliché, namely the various strains of what must be identified by its species, Judaica Neurotica. This all too universally embraced canard dates back to Vaudeville, traveling through silent and sound film, into television.
Aside from the ancient and long forgotten representations of this—forgotten by you, maybe, but not by me, or Drew Friedman, or Eddy Portnoy, and a few select others–more modern examples would include Woody Allen, guilty as charged, because, you know, look at him. Fran Drescher, she of the shrewish banshee shrill. And the insufferable Larry David, whether he is that awful in real life, or simply plays it on television. Nobody knows or cares about the difference, if such a difference actually exists.
And let’s be honest. There are plenty of funny Italians, and there’s certainly cleverness among the Irish, and wit to spare in the Latino community. But when you hear “…That New York sense of humor…” they don’t mean any of that, and they sure as fuck don’t mean Poughkeepsie.
You know damned well what they mean.
And if you don’t, let me spell it out for you. Smart ass fucking Jews.
A contributing factor to my superpower of passing for White in mass culture might very well derive from my never having lived up to society’s cliched assumptions and presumptions about nice Jewish boys. Ever. As a curious example, no less a light than the currently dead Harlan Ellison was genuinely shocked to learn I was a Landsman.
A single telling example, presented not with pride, certainly, but with acceptance, despite the assumptions about the wonderful husbands Jews make; I can assure you with no fear of contradiction that I am the worst first husband three women have ever had.
Now, it’s worth noting that, as a direct result of that aforementioned mass murder that preceded my birth, there are very, very few of us out there. The number I seem to recall is .02. That said, I’ve come to the unsettling conclusion that the majority of those who despise us with such arrant and enthusiastic gusto have never actually crossed paths with an actual Jew in their lives.
Rather, their distaste, their contempt, their hatred, derives from the cartooned presentation of Jews in popular culture; neurotic, self hating, needy, solipsistic, greedy, crass, tastelessly philistine. These cliches were, of course, first foisted on Jews by the overtly Christian culture of the last two Millennia, beginning around the time of the Middle Eastern to Norwegian reboot.
Unfortunately, certainly in more recent times, in what I have to assume is some perverse need to be accepted, too many of us took these character flaws and made of themselves caricatures of character. Owning nonsense imposed on a minority by a majority predisposed to despise that minority seems, to me at any rate, an unhealthy lifestyle choice.
I was at a comic book convention in Buenos Aires a while ago—Argentina having its own issues with the whole Jew thing, for those of us with memory might recall—when I had an experience that illustrated this presumption about Jews for me. I showed up a few minutes before my allotted hour of presentation was due to begin, as the fellow cartoonist who preceded me continued, unabated, eating fifteen minutes of my time.
He came off the podium, and an apology, or even an acknowledgment, for that matter, for his feckless rudeness as I might have expected wasn’t forthcoming. Rather, noting my annoyance, he indicated that my reaction was so typical of Jews and their unearned and unwarranted sense of entitlement.
I was flabbergasted, and had no reply—and then, in the moment, I realized the only response this willfully ignorant piece of shit expected —this citizen of a third world country once westernized by Spain, where Jew hate is baked into the culture—was a rueful chuckle of acknowledgment.
“Jews, am I right?”
I kept shtum. I never argue with idiots.
More recently, I had a blow up with a fellow member of a spiritual fellowship in which we are both long time members. I’ve known this right wing knuckle dragger for two decades, a lout who spent much of our time in those two decades poking me with every Jew cliché he could muster. And yes, it’s on me that I let this bullshit go on, but, to be fair, I didn’t give a fuck what he said or thought.
This guy was a walking cliché, spouting off on wokeness, the oversensitivity of Liberals, blah blah and blah. One morning over coffee, he overheard me talking about a professional issue I mentioned in passing to a friend, and offered me advice. When I said to him that he knew nothing about my business, he took loud and abrasive umbrage at my dismissal of his unsolicited advice, calling me a dick, and storming away. We haven’t spoken since.
Scorecard—twenty years of Jew baiting trumped by hurt feelings over “Mind your own business.” I would assume my third world colleague would deem this fair.
I have finally came to understand that the culture in which we live has grown bored with Jews, and everything associated with Jews, including, among so much else, the attempted annihilation, first by German Nazism, then by Russian Communism.
It happened too long ago. It didn’t really happen. It happened, but it wasn’t as bad as they say. They had it coming.
On the extreme right, we bear witness to the first salvos in what will be an alarmingly easy campaign, namely the rehabilitation of Nazism in general, and Adolf Hitler in particular. Cultural amnesia, historical incuriosity, miseducation and willful ignorance will ease this transition for a culture systemically lazy in regard to anything but its own comfort. What is today an extremist view will, I fear, soon become more commonplace.
On the extreme left, the response to a terrorist attack has become a crusade by progressives in the service of a near empire of ethnically cleansing colonizing theocracies, accusing a tiny country of those very crimes. A Western culture versed exclusively in the binary of Oppressor and Oppressed, performed by a cult with a grasp of geographic realpolitik on a par with the STAR WARS franchise.
And, of course, this conflict has opened the door to armed violence against Jews through out the Western World, Jews with no connection whatsoever to this war.
Let’s not forget that a discomfiting number of earlier riders in this posse felt bad, of course, but thought the talent at CHARLIE HEBDO had it coming. Needless to say, the insidiousness of Western self hatred by those who have never actually experienced genuine hardship in their protected and privileged lives is a petri dish for a mind numbing list of idiotic presumptions.
So, it’s no great leap of faith to understand that this war is a perfect excuse to insist that Jews have it coming, too. As sure as “Guileless” universally precedes “Self regard,” So, it seems “Genocide” must precede “Gaza.”
And for those of you not paying attention, this holding Jews with no connection whatsoever to Israel responsible for any aspect of this war simply and succinctly confirms the firmly held belief in an international Jewish Cabal by the world at large, left and right.
What else is one to make of a heckling shithead shouting “Free Palestine!” at a third rate Jewish comedian working at the Har de Har Har Hut in Minneapolis?
“I’ll get right on that after my set—and thanks for reminding me.”
And, to complicate the relativism/whataboutism of all this, I think we can accept the fact that the right wing will ultimately embrace the rehabilitation mentioned above, and, potentially decide that the German mechanized disposal of Jews either didn’t really happen, or didn’t go far enough, or both. I’ll likely be dead, not long dead but dead enough, but I’d kill to see the streaming series and feature films that evolve from this misbegotten eventuality.
The left, however, are in for a potentially very different experience. Karl Marx’s quote, mangled and misattributed to Vladimir Lenin, to whit, “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them,” has its place in modern western Leftism, in its reckless and, you’ll pardon me, fucking psychotic embrace of the well financed soft jihad in the name of an incipient Caliphate.
The Jewish intelligence Apparatchiks who had made much of the 1917 revolution a reality, and who made up much of the Lenin’s Cheka and Stalin’s OGPU, weren’t expecting their Stalin ordered mass murder in his housecleaning of what he deemed rootless cosmopolitans, counterrevolutionaries threatening the Soviet state.
The leftists who helped engineer the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, and were rewarded for their work in this revolution of the people by their summary execution at the hands of the Ayatollah Khomeini and his clerics, I must assume might have had a few last minute regrets in allying themselves with religious fanatics as they were beheaded.
The current crop of morally performative tools, completely ignoring those they have identified as victims of genocide, of colonization, of apartheid as they truly are; fascist theocrats, misogynist, racist, wildly homophobic, and like all such are deeply guilty of the crimes they ascribe to others, are weaving that rope, tying the nooses, and hand delivering the hanging rope for free.
And if there are any more ridiculously loathsome than the tragicomical Queers for Palestine, it’s the Jews who have flung themselves into the fray, demanding to be seen as, you should pardon the expression, one of the good ones. As if private self loathing isn’t satisfying enough.
With all due respect, fuck them all.
But certainly, the most terrifying aspect of the loathing of Jews from one end of the political spectrum to the other is the relative youth of these ill informed, emotionally unformed virtue performing retards. They’re going to be here forever; they’re a generational majority with the push me pull you ability to be even more destructive than my contemporaries. And that’s saying plenty; we fucked up a lot.
Add to this the smug, know it all mindset that is willful ignorance on a stratospheric level, a desperate need for attention, a complete dismissal of critical thinking, not to mention my two favorite biases, cognitive and confirmation, and you’ve got a cocktail for toxic disaster for western civilization in general, and Jews in particular.
So, yes. The Existential Threat has returned, as the horseshoe bends to confirm what is already abundantly clear. Jews are fucked. And the past year has confirmed that all the rational explanations, the defensive arguments, the refuting of utter bullshit amount to nothing.
So, as much as I’d love to offer a measure of optimism, of hope, I have nothing in this regard.
We are here, witness to the beginning, and I shudder to imagine just how dreadful it’s going to get.
As ever, I remain,
Howard Victor Chaykin…a Prince…not that that matters much anymore.
