I am thankful for all the comments on the Ace Greenberg "Jewish geography" post of yesterday. One thing I'd say to Richard Witty is that he lives in the sticks; and I am talking about an establishment network. These guys are focused on the wheelhouse, in New York and Washington. The WASP/Gentleman's Agreement analogy seems to me a helpful one because what motivated Digby Baltzell to write The Protestant Establishment in 1964 and condemn his own elite tribe (the entitled WASPs) as an exclusive "caste" was Baltzell's sense of discrimination and suppression of talent (the Jews, then). A good thing he did, too. The WASP leadership was serving us Vietnam on the silver service. As the "parallel establishment" (Jacob Heilbrunn's excellent phrase for Jewish neoconservatives) served us Iraq.
One of the things about the Jewish rise is that my people have such a sense of being outsiders and persecuted that it is very difficult for us to look on our own position as being a powerful one. Thus the leading book on the sociology of the new multicultural elite, Bobos by David Brooks, has a lot about WASPs in its index but nothing about Jews. He doesn't want to go near that question. Which is to say that the very people, journalists and scholars, who are responsible for examining such trends (and yes, Jews have disproportionate roles in that cohort) end up denying it. I think this is an important factor in the attacks on Walt and Mearsheimer by the New Yorker, the Times, Jeffrey Goldberg et al. The thinking goes: We have meager power. We have clawed our way by our fingernails in the teeth of the old order to get what power we have. Walt and Mearsheimer are now attacking our meager power. I am going to use my power to bash them. The Jewish segment of the Establishment also rose against Jimmy Carter. Goldberg called him a "pharisee," I believe. Now Ehud Olmert, a Jew, speaks of apartheid, so that's different!
The real issue here isn't tribal idiosyncrasy, to which every tribe is prey (and honey, I know; I've hung with Irish, Scandinavians, blacks, Polynesians, and WASPs on my way to this blog), but bandwidth and access in today's elite. Jews have been reported to make up 30 percent of Supreme Court clerks. Meritocracy, you say; but when all three execs of the Tampa Bay Rays are (apparently) Jewish, can we wonder about clubby culture in the elite? I saw that clubbiness at the Harvard Crimson when I worked at the newspaper, and heard talk about such clubbiness even in the Harvard Government Department, where I took courses from both the late Judith Shklar and Michael Walzer.
The bigger issue: Where are critics of Israel in the American discourse? How many of them can get employment? Lately Brian Lehrer, the popular leftlib talkshow host on WNYC, did "30 issues in 30 days" for the presidential campaign, and devoted just one show to "Iran, Israel, and the Middle East" (nothing about Palestine mind you, even as One-Jerusalem is all that Sheldon Adelson and Lieberman seem to care about); and his respondents re Israel were Jerrold Nadler and Zev Chafets. Brian that's not fair: Nadler sends his kids to Jewish schools, Chafets emigrated to Israel to work for a former terrorist, Begin. Not a Palestinian or non-Zionist or Arabist in sight. I.e., even on the left, there's no bandwidth. I say that this is a condition of power. When you look at Walter Russell Mead, a three-barrelled Protestant minister's son, attacking Walt and Mearsheimer in Foreign Affairs, how much is that a reflection of Mead's need for employment at CFR, which I am certain relies a lot on big Jewish donors? Your response is, Well if it is so hard, then how come Walt and Mearsheimer got $750,000 from a major publishing house? Good point. The world is changing.
"Well if it is so hard, then how come Walt and Mearsheimer got $750,000 from a major publishing house?"
This is what I wrote when Ezra Klein played the AIPAC etc's reputation is overblown/W&M-didn't-fact-any-problems card:
"First, in pluralist America, many people are always testing the boundaries of taste and external constraints, so if AIPAC and so managed to restrain public debate it's much more likely to be because they were in fact able to do so, rather than because they had a only reputation with little or nothing behind it.
Second, to say that Walt and Mearsheimer got away with it, so the constraint must not have existed, is rather bizarre: these were two of the best insulated individuals in the country on this issue, absolutely top scholars, in the most prestigious universities, doing a double-team act to provide a bit of mutual support. They still got personally nuked in the press again and again, even though their book was larded with half-accommodations of their opponents positions, surely at least some of them tactical in nature. Walt and Mearsheimer took a bullet for the team and opened up the discourse a very little bit.
Third, the opening of the discourse has also been much assisted by the interweb, which has partially de-gatekeepered opinion journalism. If the web didn't exist, Spencer, Matt and you would all still be working for TNR and a real constraint on allowable views of Israel/Middle East policies surely exists there (among many other outlets – see Alterman on this)."
"Well if it is so hard, then how come Walt and Mearsheimer got $750,000 from a major publishing house?"
This argument is really sick. How much do others who write with a similar meritocratic background get for their work? I've seen the statement often but never once a "statistical comparison". None of the people using this meme ever told me: what was their accepted versus unaccepted sum for such a work.
I think your fishing Phil.
With an ugly side to the coin.
"but when all three execs of the Tampa Bay Rays are (apparently) Jewish"
Ummmm, they are in the World Series aren't they? Looks like meritocracy to me.
From Niqnaq: A new e-mail making the rounds among Jewish voters in Pennsylvania equates a vote for Senator Barack Obama with the “tragic mistake” of their Jewish ancestors, who “ignored the warning signs in the 1930’s and 1940’s.”
The source for the e-mail is the Pennsylvania Republican Party strategist, Bryan Rudnick. Here is a page from Mr. Rudnick's company, Alliance Strategies Group –
Jerusalem.com Launched Today
The NYTimes coverage of Rudnick leaves out mention of his Zionist preoccupations.
whenever i am reading the comments section and my brain goes into a sort of fog, and i realize i'm not taking in what is written, i say,"uh-oh" and scroll to the name of the poster and it's richard witty. every time. i usually catch it in 2 or 3 sentences. the weird thing is, it's not the content, there is something in the sentence construction that emanates a toxic chemical that creates brain fog.
does anyone know what it is?
whenever i am reading the comments section and my brain goes into a sort of fog, and i realize i'm not taking in what is written, i say,"uh-oh" and scroll to the name of the poster and it's richard witty. every time. i usually catch it in 2 or 3 sentences. the weird thing is, it's not the content, there is something in the sentence construction that emanates a toxic chemical that creates brain fog.
does anyone know what it is?
i have same symtoms as peters, and yes it is pretty hard to pin it down. a possible clue: witty is an accountant i think and once when he wrote about accounting principles he was very clear. maybe he suffers from some kind of verbal conceptual dysfunction.
I'm also a poet.
Witty's mind is a spreadsheet, pages and pages of double booking.
Book cooking, cooking books, there's his abstract obfuscation
bins, over there his partial figures, his unbalance statements.
There his original page, and adjacent–his partial English translation
just for you.
hahaha. to all of the above. also english could not be his first language. maybe he is a poet of some other language.
anon, you are a poet.
hahaha. to all of the above. also english could not be his first language. maybe he is a poet of some other language.
anon, you are a poet.
Ask questions if you don't understand what I mean.
Witty,
I understand you perfectly fine.
Richard Witty, radical rural poet of the zionist resistance, target of vicious anti-Semitic activists, courageous self-parody of unreformed zio-think.
Wherever Weiss walks, Witty whines.
hehe :)
Wherever Weiss invokes even inferred shame of being Jewish or guilt by association, I contest.
Is there institutional exclusion? Or, just suspicions exagerated to the level of defamation (if names named).
If it is institutional exclusion, specific accusations should be made to specific people, not just a blanket indictment.
Thus spake the bard Richard, all rigid and righteous, Reality's radical Refusenik.
"there is something in the sentence construction that emanates a toxic chemical that creates brain fog."
Peters, Capitain Witts is our very own "Phantom Anesthetist". Peter Gabriel made the song Here Come The Supernatural Anaesthetist inspired by the original gasser, and monkey me have an adapted version which plays in my mind immediately after the first two or three words of a wittyan comment:
"Here comes the supranational wittycist.
If he want's you to snuff it,
All he has to do is
Rich it."
"-He's such a fine liar!"
I'm not sure if Witty knows it, but he writes the way death talks. Behind the calls for peace there is always the message of surrender. Everything will be fine if the struggle ends. No wonder most of us resist his talk. Though some are easy pray, most will fight him till the bitter end. Only our transylvanian dismisses the thing and laugh at its face because it cannot touch him (and it doesn't seem to have tasty arteries anyway).
Ok, jokes cannot be too obscure, so here's the mondoweissian connection between the mad gasser and "Rich," which besides being the name of our gasser is also read by me more or less like "reach".
You americans have an attention span the size of my ability to make funny jokes…
"Richard Witty, radical rural poet of the zionist resistance, target of vicious anti-Semitic activists, courageous self-parody of unreformed zio-think."
Outstanding MM!!!!!!!
Phil Weiss:"but when all three execs of the Tampa Bay Rays are (apparently) Jewish"
(apparently)
Boston Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein, who, at 35, is also a Jewish wiz kid — although not of the Wall Street sort.
There are two groups that are "going down" in the next election, both conservative.
1. Neo-conservatives who advocate for the anticipatory "defense" and free market.
2. The paleo-conservatives that thrive on resentment, pretending that their "liberty advocacy" is anything but more of the same.
With Obama taking a rational stand, and succeeding in policy by doing so, any worldview that depends on fanatic or reactive orientation will fail to be relevant.
Good to see Witty is unboard by his own words and definitions–with the death of right-wing Zionism, the only version consistently the dominant player.