The Secret Knowledge

one film, must be available in their intrinsic state of powerlessness for the next go-round.

The woman’s victory over the ax murderer is not a portent of her change from victim to nonvictim, but merely a chance, momentary suspension of that state.

For, in our love of Women-in-Jeopardy films, and in the Left’s love of the Palestinians, there is something of the sadomasochistic. (If one truly deplored the fact of an alleged injustice, one might actually do something about it, but the West sees the Middle East conflict as entertainment; and part of our polymorphous enjoyment of the ending is that though the woman prevails, we know that she is exploitable again next film.) ⁴¹

We confuse news with reality, and so do the news organizations. They are selling entertainment, and, like any good entertainer, will stress the facts likely to please the audience, and structure the rather confusing and nonconclusive nature of day-to-day existence as a drama.

Six houses were destroyed in the Israeli Army’s incursion into the Arab town of Jenin. It was described by the Western news as “The Rape of Jenin,” and a photo showing a supposedly wounded Palestinian child cradled in his mother’s arms went around the world.

Of less currency was the photo taken from an only slightly wider angle showing the mother and child completely surrounded by photographers, arrayed around the now obviously staged shot.⁴² But that second shot, though a better depiction of the actual state of events, had less entertainment value as part of an enjoyable spectacle of misery; to call attention to this would be as irritating to the consumers of “outrage” as would a film buff in the next seat at a horror movie explaining, shot by shot, how the effects were produced and that the woman screaming on the screen was actually an actress in no danger at all.

To do so would have lessened the viewer’s enjoyment of the Rape of Jenin.

For one of two things must be true, in the West’s abandonment of Israel: either it is known, at some level, that the Palestinian claims are insoluble, exaggerated, unjust, or skewed; or that the audience, in truth, does not actually care. For if they cared, they would do something, and as they do nothing, one must assume that action would put an end to their enjoyable position as viewer.

Michelle Obama famously declared that America is a “mean, mean country,” of which she was never proud until it nominated her husband for President. But this “mean, mean country” sent soldiers from the North to eradicate slavery (an action, I believe, unique in the history of the world), in a war fought at shocking cost, which would confer upon those who willingly risked their lives no benefit other than their participation in a cause they knew to be right. More than 360,000 Union soldiers died freeing the slaves. This is an actual abiding and permanent legacy of slavery. They died to extinguish evil.

Many in the West enjoy not the suffering, but the contemplation of the suffering of the Palestinians.

For a film one buys a ticket. What is the ticket one buys to enjoy this other spectacle? Its price is the indictment of the State of Israel, in contravention of history, of facts, reason, international law, and affinities, national, cultural, and traditional.

Just as at the movies we would resent the fellow in the next seat explaining the effects, so actual information about the Middle East conflict is considered an intrusion and a distraction from the spectacle. One has made one’s choice (bought one’s tickets) and would like to be left in peace to enjoy the show.

In films the villain is identifiable because he wears the black hat; in the Middle East spectacle he wears a yarmulke.

In 1895 Theodor Herzl was sent by his paper Neue Freie Presse to cover the trial of Dreyfus. Herzl’s cultural awakening came in seeing Dreyfus stripped of his badges of rank while the crowd screamed not “death to the traitor,” but “death to the Jews.”

It was a better story that way in 1895, and it is a better story that way today. But it is just a story.

The question, “Excuse me, what has Israel ever wanted except peace within its borders?” is greeted, largely, in the West, by the response: “Shut up, I’m watching the news.”

The bifurcation of Humanity (as opposed to acts) into two identifiable camps, Evil and Good, is, essentially, a childish act; the notion that one may gain merit from this division, and that this merit makes one the superior of the unenlightened, is the act of an adolescent.

Should such reductionism result in any actual social change, the adolescent intellectual is immediately supplanted by the Man of Action (the Tyrant), as observed by Eric Hoffer in The True Believer.

For just as the con man capitalizes upon the reluctance of the mark to ascribe evil motives to a chance acquaintance, the Jacobin, his motives limited to pursuit of power, easily supplants, and, traditionally kills, the fool dreamer who thought he was creating a paradise.

17

PURITANS

He did not, like a Puritan, torment himself and others with scruples about everything that was pleasant.

—Macaulay, The History of England, 1848

Have we turned into a nation of maiden aunts?

Must one, upon risk of exclusion from polite society, decry all life as waste, and all differences of political opinion as heresy? Must the opening salvo of any conversation, interminably, be “Did you see what he/they did today?”

For, at least, one could say of Hitler and his assassins, that they enjoyed their anti- Semitism. But the Left proceeds, from day to day, in a sort of sad, wistful fury at all the things of life not recognized in its cosmogony.

To them, in an inversion of the truly, historically, Liberal philosophy, everything not permitted is forbidden.

But the Talmud cautions that when a man dies, he will be called to account for all the unenjoyed, permitted pleasures of this life, which, after all, were given to him as a gift.

And we have become a nation of noodges.