I woke up this morning and saw a Star of David clearly formed in the wind twisting branches outside my dawn window. I grabbed the camera and tried to make a quick snap, before the branches blew back to being just branches again. It was odd, as I went to bed thinking about the Jews all wandering and about Hitler and Hanibal and Switzerland during the war… and thinking about Kramer.
In my story, which is at some meta level, the story of the charcter named Alex (or Phil, or Pat… I’m still undecided on this) It should be known that during the year my father was dying of a fairly painful form of esophogeal cancer that had condemned him to eat by tube (no, not you tube, a rubber tube), thus robbing him of one of his central joys in life, eating (he was after all, a son of a baker) we invented a number of ceremonies and rituals to replace food. Most of these involved drugs… most of these pretty heavy drugs: Morphine and Fentanyl. Opiates. The other opiate we ritualized was television and specifically Seinfeld. We more or less built the evening (when, it suddenly occurs to me, he was porbably most high on the opiates) around the channel 11 schedual of Seinfeld reruns. To keep laughing, was very important and really all one can do when staring down death… you know, short of hysterical crying.
Seinfeld was like church, or more accurately temple. We prayed three times a day.
Something I wrote yesterday (even before I heard about the scandal) had me thinking: “Could a Jew be a Nazi?” I mean certainly they could be and some were facist (in as that is a financial/political ideology that need not include anti-semitism … the “evil other” is just expediant way of creating a “group think”… it could as well be Armenians, or Poles, or Catholics, or Irish, or Gays, or Terrorists, or…. Africans for that matter). I was thinking about how children who are beaten, or molested have a very high likelyhood of recreating that abusive behavior in their adult life. The beaten become the beater. All political correctness asside, I think this is the guilty reality that many Eropeans smell when they see what goes on in Lebanon and Palestine (ian territory). Sure they’re the assholes who beat and raped the kid, but they hate to see it grow up and repeat daddy’s mistakes. It’s condescending and patronizing and I suppose if some one shot that many missles at France, France would nuke the bejesus out of them. But I digress, or not. Does the Seinfeld show have anything to do with the Sate of Israel? I don’t know, but it certainly has something to do with the Jewish experience at least in America, or at least in New York and that’s good enough for me to start free associating off the Krammer/nigger scandal. There’s something fairly shocking about seeing an Archetype of the East Coast, New York Jew going on a racist rant, as most of us think of Jews as the champions of the oppressed and of civil rights particularly… and for good reason.
I remember one of the worst fights I ever had with my father was about this question of Switzerland and the Jews in World War Two. We were up at the Lake (Champlain… home of deep dwelling Champion monsters…. FLUKES) House of my cousin who we shall refer to simply as D. We were drinking white wine and eating cheese and I (in a Sophomoric tone of high knowledge) got on the subject of how there had to be Nazi sympathizers in Switzerland during the war…probably in Basel as it was right on the border and of course the Americans had bombed a ballbearing factory there. My father claimed that it was an accident. I informed him that the American and British air campaign was specifically built around destroying ballbearings in Europe (Pinball metaphor in TOMMY for all you Who fans) with the idea that the war machine would literally grind to halt without them.
“Accident my ass,” I said, getting beligerant.
“No. It was an accident of navigation… They mistook Basel for a German town. Americans can’t navigate in Eruope. How do they know what Europe is shaped like? They bomb anything with lights.”
I postulated that if Ford and Lidbergh and Prescott Bush in America were sympathetic to the Nazis, surely some German-speaking Swiss would have been seduced by the idea of a Triumph of their tribe and tounge over the Romans (and all Romance speakers).
“No,” He said. “You don’t understand Switzerland. We were neutral. We speak all languages. We are beyond tribes. We traded with both sides to stay alive… you make pacts with the devil, but you don’t become the devil.”
I kept needling him, “Most people do become the devil. I’m just saying some Swiss must have been Nazis”
“No.”
I can’t remember the nuance of the argument, but it boils down to a man with a German accent repeating over and over “Vee ver not Nazis. Vee ver not Nazis.”
Which is sort of a sad sight to see if you care at all about the German language and culture in general and you realize what a taint has been put on all that glorious history of art and letters and music. But I was young and kept at him untill he truly lost his shit and came within a minute of smaking me, before he charged out of the room and the discussion was, for all intents and purposes, finished.
Later we went to a neighbors house for cocktails and I got pretty drunk on Scotch (whiskey is dangerous water) and continued drinking beer untill I started yelling at D. She is and was a woman who likes to yell and I’d been listeninng to her yelling at everyone all weekend…. but me…
I guess I figured she could handle a dose of her own medicine. If she could dish it, she could probably take it. Thing was, I wasn’t mad at her at all. I was mad at my father, because I knew I was right and it was hard to watch him spew papp he’d been indoctrinated with in school thirty years earlier. I realize I was doing what people do… vent anger where they can and when they can, often for no better reason than that they can. So… sorry D. In case I never apologized. I didn’t really figure it out untill this very moment. I wasn’t yelling at you, I was yelling at my dad. Thing is, he had a pretty good punch and I didn’t want to feel it’s sting.
It was not untill my father was dying that the whole Swiss banking reparations scandal broke wide and the world realized that the Swiss are greedy and manipulative bastards (why it took so long is beyond me, any bank is never to be trusted, that’s why God created accountants). Of course, my Dad and I never discussed it. He’d lost the argument of life, so what was the point of kicking him when he was down. Besides, the whole thing is pretty gray besides. Which brings us back to Black and White. All comics are damaged people and what they do seems to damage them more. I don’t know what Michael Richards was thinking. I think he went crazy, or maybe just tried to cut a heckler with some Chris Rock /Richard Pryor jujitsu and fucked up the joke like Kerry on education… I don’t know.
All I know is that years ago he made my father keep laughing on his death bed and so I will always have a place for him and his work in my heart. So I will try to forgive him as he has earned that from me with laughter. But then, I’m not black, so my forgiveness in this case is somewhat irrelevant.
Hell of a line to leave stage with: “There are still those words, those words, those words.”
Sakespeare couldn’t have said it better.
“Shake a spear? You calling me a spear chucker cracker?!”
Quiet Domino from Sonja and two sides of a start and Tea And Sympathy For The Devil; a collaboration with yours truly and Raszka