Having It Both Ways

Guess where this sentence is from:

[T]he half-Kenyan-by-way-of-Hawaii candidate, who only recently completed a beer-and-bowling tour to impress blue-collar Midwesterners, has committed more fully to showing off his inner Jew.

It comes from a front-page news feature in this morning's New York Times. If I hadn't read it myself over breakfast, I might almost have guessed it came from der Stürmer. (And I think the reporter who wrote that sentence is Jewish, no less.)

Were her editors reading with blindfolds on? Or was it their intention, as a friend of mine believes, to crank up the notion that Barack Obama is an anti-Semitic phony?

The article is filled with the sort of material that William S. Burroughs used to refer to as contradictory commands⊕. It includes all the correct denials, but uses a tone that leaves the theme hanging in the air. To wit:

Mr. Obama is Arab, Jack Stern's friends told him in Aventura. (He's not.)

He is a part of Chicago's large Palestinian community, suspects Mindy Chotiner of Delray. (Wrong again.)

Mr. Wright is the godfather of Mr. Obama's children, asserted Violet Darling in Boca Raton. (No, he's not.)

Al Qaeda is backing him, said Helena Lefkowicz of Fort Lauderdale (Incorrect.)

Michelle Obama has proven so hostile and argumentative that the campaign is keeping her silent, said Joyce Rozen of Pompano Beach. (Mrs. Obama campaigns frequently, drawing crowds in her own right.)

Mr. Obama might fill his administration with followers of Louis Farrakhan, worried Sherry Ziegler. (Extremely unlikely, given his denunciation of Mr. Farrakhan.)

"Simply genius," says my friend. "Now let's wait for the Obama 'endorsement'."

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

⊕Contradictory commands are two commands that contradict each other given at the same time. "TENSHUN!" The soldier automatically stiffens to the command. "AT EASE!" The soldier immediately relaxes. Now imagine a captain who strides into the barracks snapping "TENSHUN!" from one side of his face and "AT EASE!" from the other. The attempt to obey two flatly contradictory commands at once both of which have a degree of command value at the automatic level disorients the subject. He may react with rage, apathy, anxiety, even collapse. -- The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs

Postscript: May 23 -- The article, which implicitly defames Jews and paints them as simple-minded racists, is actually a two-fer: It race baits both blacks and Jews. Not bad, eh? And it's currently (Friday morning) the most emailed article on the NYT Web site.

I'm willing to bet that Obama will not only win a majority of the Jewish vote, but that Jews will support him more than whites, Hispanics, Catholics, Protestants, or Mormons will.

May 22, 2008 8:02 PM | | Comments (1)

1 Comments

By David Ehrenstein on May 23, 2008 4:25 PM

Yes it's their intention to crank up the notion that Barack Obama is an anti-Semitic phony.

After all Hillary Clinton says he isn't a Muslim "as far as I know."

The NYT is a terrible newspaper and always was. And the people who write for it are with very few exceptions lower than pond scum.

Leave a comment

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
more picks

Sites to See

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Straight Up | published on May 22, 2008 8:02 PM.

What Barricades? was the previous entry in this blog.

Of 'Victims, Perpetrators, Observers' is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Creative Commons License
This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.