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Executive Times |
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2007 Book Reviews |
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The
Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-hatred, and the Jews by David Mamet |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Punchy In his new
book, The
Wicked Son, David Mamet keeps jabbing and
punching until he hits the reader square in the face. With his trademark
assertive and often confusing expression, Mamet
presses for facing the reality of anti-Semitism, and
for coming to grips with the ways in which Jews show disdain for their own
culture. Here’s an excerpt, all of the chapter titled, “Hide in Plain Sight,”
pp. 19-24: The
memory of absolute wrongs causes absolute trauma in a race, just as in the
individual. Incalculably ancient race memory of dinosaurs persists to this
day, transformed as an affection for the dragon.
Memory of the most traumatic of cultural acts, child sacrifice, can be seen,
hidden in plain sight, as ceremonies of transformation, redemption, and, in
fact, of jollity.* Like the Santa Claus myth, the Akedah,
the Crucifixion, are ineradicable race memories of infant sacrifice, and of
the deeply buried wish to resume its practice, so racism must be the
unresolved race memory of slavery. The idea that one group of human beings could be the
property of another must always have been a psychological burden, to the
oppressors, to the oppressed and to those not overtly affected by it, save by
their exposure to its corrosive presence in society. It is a testament to
what can only be called “conscience” (understood as guilt) that the race memory
of the affront persists, generations after the eradication of the actual
practice. Here
is the internalized, persistent rationale of slavery: if a group has
forfeited the most basic human rights, there must be something wrong with
them. This
is a transformation from wonder (or pity) through reason to acceptance. It
allows the confused to function with the burden of an otherwise unassimilable contradiction. It removes the necessity of
either action or outrage; these, indeed, may be discharged not at the
perpetrators but at the victims. Not, perhaps, because of any recognition of
inherent evil on the victims’ part but, to the contrary, because a
recognition of their innocent humanity would force the onlooker to a
knowledge of his own cowardice. And to the cowardice of the society whose
benefits he enjoys. Such
a betrayal (by him, and of him by his society) cannot
he forgotten. Like the trauma of infant sacrifice, it must be assimilated.
The Western Christian world acts out this ceremony each year at the winter
solstice, in its anxiety with the Santa Claus myth: “What shall we tell the
children? Are they old enough to understand?” Here
we have an intergenerational, centuries-long ceremony of confusion of myth
and reality. The myth, here, serves not to integrate the affronted consciousness but to preserve a trauma. It is the contre-coup to the outrage of child murder and its societal acceptance.
The ancient, human desire to hide the truth from the children was so strong
as to persist, thousands of years later, when the threat itself is gone. And
the undischarged trauma of slavery (for all of the
Western world, black or white) persists as racism; as the absolute certainty
that if this or that group was so abused (cf. the Intifada)
they must have brought it on themselves. One
may note that this is not primarily a
reaction of the coward hut of the child,
who looks on at horror inflicted on another and at his parents’ and his
society’s passive endorsement of the horror. To conclude that his parents
and their society are depraved is beyond the child’s imagining. They must,
then, be correct. The true strength of race prejudice is that it is
inculcated in childhood (before the possibility of rational judgment) and is
inseparable from the child’s need for security and for powerful and moral parents. The
adult, in persisting in inherited racism, upholds his parents, his society,
and indicts that force (the victim) that would, by its very presence, convict
them. AfricanAmericans, in my lifetime, have been
notably effective in the battle against race prejudice (in themselves and
others) by, for example, the campaign “Black Is Beautiful.” Their insistence
on this phrase forced those who found it untrue or difficult to wonder at
their strong reactions to a simple inoffensive formula. The
illness, racism, cannot be perceived by the sufferer. Racism and love make
such perfect sense to those affected that the entire world is redefined in
their light. The sufferer cannot perceive “their effect,” for he is their effect. His consciousness,
that mechanism whereby he might perceive them, is the afflicted organ. Racism
cannot be perceived. The sufferer, therefore, must reason backward from the
behavior to the necessarily operative idea. This is too difficult. How can
the busy, self-involved human being spend his day working toward a
perception, the acceptance of which would entail self-revulsion and shame? He
will not. The laws of psychic economy ensure that his mind will, always, do
the easier of two difficult things, and repress. This repression and its
burdens are chronic rather than acute. It is transmitted from one generation
to the next (cf. the Santa Claus myth). The
Akedah (the Torah story of the binding of Isaac) is
an attempt to deal with the trauma of human savagery. Anti-Semitism is an
attempt to deal with the Akedah. In the Akedah the Torah lifts
the injunction against discussion of infant sacrifice and the hatred of
the Western Christian world is turned, not against savagery but against that force that would weaken the
repressive power. That
the Jews persist in the same religion which gave rise to Christianity and
Islam is to their practitioners as little tolerable today as it was when
these two schismatic professions split off from the mother faith. Jewish
persistence is, thus, an indictment, to the affronted, prejudiced mind, of
generations of his non-Jewish forebears who, were the Jews recognized as nonoffending, the adult child would now have to recognize
as monstrous. For them, as for the Jew raised to hate his own, no “proof”
will suffice. Remonstrations are often taken, indeed as further “proof” of
Jewish subhumanits’ (here called “wiliness”). The
wicked son ascribes his anomie to “the Jews,” or, in a psychologically
brilliant variation, to “Jewish guilt,” that is, “to some nameless, terrible
thing I, as a Jew have inherited.” Imagine this construction with some other
group substituted for Jew. “My group, X, is so terribly, terribly bad, they
have enjoined upon me some unnameable, wicked
curse. They have cursed my soul.” If
we substitute another word for “Jew,” this formulation is revealed, of
course, as voodoo. How can the wicked son observe his thoughts, feelings, and
actions and compare them to an agreed-upon neutral norm (in effect, the
essence of psychoanalysis)? For, only through
doing so might he come to recognize their bizarre, insane aspect. What
can save the self-loathing Jew from his apostasy? Reason will no more
reach him than any other addict. Perhaps shock may work its unfortunately
effective way with him. Perhaps the shock that he is bequeathing to his children,
that same abuse to which he, as an unthinking child, was subject. * The Santa
Claus myth is a straightforward
account of child sacrifice. It must, however, be read in the mirror. Children
can be good or bad. They put their stockings out, and, in the middle of the
night, a man comes into their home with a bag. If the child has been bad, the
man puts the child in a sack and takes him away. All that is left of him is
his stocking, hung on the foot of the bed. If this interpretation seems far
fetched, please consider the parents’ anxiety about the myth’s “falsity.”
Christian parents may agonize over “when shall we tell the children” (that
Santa is not real) and may, year by year, conclude, “There’s time for that
when they’re older. Let them enjoy their innocence (their ignorance) a
little longer.” It is no great reach to see, here, the anguish of a family in
antiquity, knowing the tribe will choose, at the winter solstice, some child
to be sacrificed and to see the parents wish to extend the child’s period of
exemption from terror for as long as possible. Mamet comes across with an authoritative air
that made me wonder about its foundations. Despite that shortcoming, I found The Wicked
Son to be a challenge to read, and a challenge to think about. If you’re
up for a challenge, The
Wicked Son packs a punch. Steve Hopkins,
January 25, 2007 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the February
2007 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Wicked Son.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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