Saturday, May 22, 2010

Peter Beinart, The Parody


Anonymous has read Mr. Beinart's smear of Israel in the New York Review of Books and offers Bad Rachel's readers a glimpse of the first draft. 
First, a few key grafs AS ACTUALLY PUBLISHED:
Most of the students, in other words, were liberals, broadly defined. They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was a Zionism that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those beliefs. Luntz did not grasp the irony. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was the kind that the American Jewish establishment has been working against for most of their lives.
Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

Now, the DISCARDED FIRST DRAFT: 
Most of the students, in other words, were liberals, broadly defined, though an insufficient number were gay and too many were broads.  They had imbibed some of the defining values of the mindless knee-jerk liberalism their pony-tailed 62-year-old professors threw at them: a belief in open debate that of course excludes those who would advance anti-feminist or anti-gay or pro-Israel argument, a total hostility to the US military and for that matter to all military forces, a commitment to human rights but not in China or Cuba. And in their innocence, they did not realize that those “values” were being thrown at them by a bunch of superannuated former radicals who were mostly former Jews now embittered because their daughters were all joining some havurah. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was a Zionism that recognized Palestinians as deserving Haifa and Jaffa and Tel Aviv, capable of peace if you just overlook 120 years of killing Jews, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those beliefs, which is to say, any Israeli government that could ever be elected outside of Berkeley. Luntz did not grasp the irony. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was the kind that the American Jewish establishment has been working against for most of their lives, Chomskyite Zionism we might call it. Yet Luntz failed to see how amusing it is that this form of Zionism is Zionism without Israel, Zionism whose goal is purity of heart rather than the boring and repetitive calls to defend real living Jews.
Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel, but I don’t care for them.  They condemn gays, though I want to reassert that I have children, and they are not even liberals. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for almost all people, Palestinians included, except maybe Jews, you know, sort of like the position taken by the Human Rights Watch Jews and the Amnesty International Jews. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. This is important because there is so little criticism of Israel, and so little of it from Jews; we need to get on the stick.  I mean, most university faculty are so pro-Zionist, there’s no room for open discussion of Israel frailties, anywhere, especially in the New York Times.  For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead. Alternatively, the Jewish establishment has asked to check your Democratic Party membership card, but let’s not quibble; surely you all realize that no-one can rise to a leadership position in an American Jewish organization any more who is a liberal, despite the fact that they all appear to be headed now by key Obama supporters, but that’s by the way.  I have my children at the door, and having children changed my view of a lot, for example my view of having children, for the moment anyway, but I may write about that in the New York Times, which owes me one, and maybe I’ll do a piece about how to raise non-Zionist children, which begins by freeing yourself from the need to defend actual living Jews when you could focus instead on what really matters, which is what’s in your heart, as long as you live here and not there.  Being a liberal Jew means never having to say you’re sorry, or a Jew, or a Zionist, except to say you’re sorry about the Zionists.  Am I at 5,000 words yet?

Friday, May 7, 2010

The Cave


In his cups sat the ph'losophizing Plato
Sighing, "Ah, it is clearly my Phaedo,
To be locked in a Cave,
With no idea save
The dear eidos of my Alcibado

The Shmavens (apologies to Edgar Allan Poe. First appeared in the Weekly Standard blog.)


When the air about him thickens, a sweet sensation rises, quickens--
Heart a-quiver, Chris feels words Obamunist deliver legthrills he's not able to ignore.
It's all New Testamenty, really, churchy Super-Tuesday zealy,
He teeters on the edge of torpor, can't remember Hill'ry any more,
Then tears of joy, sprung all unbidden, glisten on his cheeks,
And flow full-bore,
And he leaves the final vestige of his fitness in a puddle on the studio floor.

Ah, the meretricious speeches Thomas Lauren Friedman preaches
(What felicitous ability to bore!):
The Chinese are our betters (no useless democratic fetters);
We are oil-addicted morons; we are greed-afflicted gorgons; oh and by the way, we're racist
to the core.

And still we overpay his bloviating by a thousand score--
And foot the heating bill for his great bastion ever more!

And golly how the mad unharnessed hose, awash with all that purple prose,
Fills the Dowdy unfulfilled fantastic fantasies of manly shores! 

Undone a bit by unrequited love, perhaps--or is it lust?--she takes her marriage tips from unwed priests
And if sometimes her heart beats so she cannot mine the wordsmith's ore,
And fingers others' words to make her language soar--
Well, never mind: It's just a girl she is, and nothing more.

Cosseting his Sully caput, he nightly ponders Palin's output,
O'er many a crazed and frenzied stream of spurious lore.
As he scribbles, nearly drooling, there comes a drumming,
As of someone's heart rate thrumming, thrumming at his condo door.
"It's the sonogram," he flutters. "At last I'll prove the truth about that hawkish whore-
And then I'll find some more to blame her for!" 

We wonder if they'll ever any of them be restored to normal lucid shores.
But quoth the shmavens: "Nevermore!


horizontal space

Reading Henry James

Henry James was a man of distinction
Who showed neither remorse nor compinction.
Snorted he through his nose:
"I've at last found the prose
That no mortal man talks in or thinks in."

Lion of the Senate, RIP (a version of this first appeared in the Weekly Standard blog)

An amorous sot name of Teddy
Lost control when things got a bit heady.
He went over the side,
Left his ride in the tide,
And his squeeze giving head to an eddy.

At the Straussian Picnic


Does one don white gloves and boater
A mask, a whip
A boa floater?
What, I wonder, does one wear
When invited to appear
Among the denizens of Athens
(Well, Athens as they’d like to see it,
Chicagified and monotheist)?

They’re chowing down on Hebrew Nationals
Someone asks: Is Bellow rational?
Should Pericles have lowered taxes?
Was Hobbes the Father of the Axis?
(Will Nietzsche please get off our backses?)
Did Montesquieu invent our Nation?
Can Hegel save his reputation?

Is man-boy love the wrong persuasion?

Oh, thanatos and thanatopsie
Will I break bread with Seth Cropsey?
Will Baumann and McClay be there?
Will Francis Fukuyama share
His thoughts about Robespierre?
Will I learn at last to grasp
The meaning of Pythagoras?
Will I understand the Good
And tease out just where Plato stood
On sophistry and eidoshood?

Mais non, helas
I’ve not been asked.
Nor will I be.
It’s purdah-land you see for me.
Phenomenologically
Pariahville’s my destiny.
I guess I’ll never get to Know
What I don’t Know.
Ah, well, to hell,
No, to Hellas,
With that bloody show.