Executive Times

 

 

 

 

 

2007 Book Reviews

 

The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-hatred, and the Jews  by David Mamet

Rating:

***

 

(Recommended)

 

 

 

Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com

 

 

 

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

 

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