cleo the Jewess

You've heard of Cleopatra
who lived down along the Nile
she made a "Mark" of Anthony
And won him with her smile.

They say she was Egyptian
But I've reason to construe
She was Jewish and Hawaiian
with a dash of Irish too.

When she strolled with bold Mark Anthony
on Egypt's yellow sands
you could see that she was Jewish
by the motion of her hands.

By Al Jolson


"It will all end by killing Jews."

From: "The Thanatos Syndrome" by Walker Percy



Over lunch today I was discussing the movie "It's a Beautiful Life," (an Italian comedy about German concentration camps!) with a couple of the workers from the free clinic. And how the supposedly most civilized nation on earth that time managed to give itself completely over to "blood and iron." I think that the death wish or Thanatos is something that women generally find incomprehensible in spite of the fact that they manage to participate in their own way over the centuries in terms of bloodletting. I think that the male brain finds war very natural without any particular conditioning. This is also what Freud observed among other peculiarities of my particular half of the human race. Attempts to suppress this are all very well-intentioned but like certain weeds with underground roots, they keep popping up in other areas. Milton Caniff was sort of a artist philosopher who wrote a famous serial -a comic strip without the humor -- about war in the Pacific. It was one of the forerunners of what we would now call the graphic novel. Mad Magazine once asked him to write a strip explaining his views of humanity and he was quite upfront about it. It was his theory that cultures/civilizations required periodic bloodlettings. History certainly seems to be on his side.

Whether war is inevitable or not, the idea of requiring a blood sacrifice is extremely deep in virtually all cultures whether one looks at the Middle East, the Orient, or the various Native American cultures many of which required human sacrifice as well as constant warfare against their neighbors. I would contend that it is more biological/carnal than cultural. It can be emphasized or deemphasized but the idea that one can be too sophisticated and leave all this behind is naïve in the extreme. In fact I would assert that the more sophisticated a person is, the more he can escape the weak leadership of civil moralities or transcendent ones such as the 10 Commandments; and either rationalize that he is superior to such common stuff or suppose that a person can simply sublimate until the cows come home. (These would be the "Security Cows" who guard the privacy of Gary Larson.)

Thus we have the continuing spectacle of the battle between right and left which never resolves partly because both sides insist on the absolute necessity of the shedding of someone's blood. It seems very odd, does it not, that in either case it is young people who are put on the chopping block? Republicans seem to okay with sending young people away to war to kill and be killed; Democrats and Libertarians insist on an absolute right to abortion on demand. In either case the rights of young people are either temporarily or permanently suspended. And the older people remain safe behind their desks, books, lawyers, and entertainment media. There are at minimum two components to this: advocacy and passive permissiveness i.e. looking the other way.

What are these? Sacraments? And if so, to which god or idol or abstract ideal? We are good at recruiting. We talk a lot about "deconstructing." Try deconstructing this!

The Jews of course are no strangers to requiring blood sacrifices. Even though the Temple has long since been destroyed, it can be argued that there is still no end in sight. This of course was the point of "The Man in the Glass Booth". But there is also no way that Jews in particular can escape unreasoning passionate persecution which may wax and wane but never goes away. The danger has never been greater with the rise of Wahhabi Islam. Much of this is not explainable from any type of rational or scientific point of view. But it would certainly seem that the Jews in many countries even still in Europe will not be free of the challenges faced by Queen Esther and Mordecai. Both Hitler and Haman are dead, hoisted by their own petards: but starting in Egypt, radical Islam has vowed to carry out their juggernaughts. Then it will be too late to resort to cleverness, rationalism, intellectualism, sophism or even technology and "the bomb."

There is a strange illusion in the Western world as long as we produce entertainment, Coca-Cola, and provocative media, we will be safe; because no one wants to cut off the amusements we provide. The Jews of course, including Jolson and so many others, have used entertainment and self -- deprecating humor for centuries to defuse the bomb of anti-Semitism and to sublimate through artistic and other means what I presume would be the same impulses shared by men around the world.



It would seem that "original sin," is making a comeback; even/especially in environmental circles. However that is not all and I have alluded to the other side of the story in my previous entries. I do not have a conclusion as such since this is an ongoing nasty nest of problems but let me say this: Spring has sprung and clues are everywhere; which make the claims of foolish parties and partisans inconsequential, even our worst impulses. Dancing can be far more than entertainment, hint, hint.