Chuck Lorre is a fabulously successful Hollywood sitcom producer– Two and a Half Men, the Big Bang Theory. Lorre airs mini-essays at the end of every show, his famous “vanity cards” of a couple of hundred words, broadcast nationally for a half second or so in the time granted a producer to display his or her brand.
Here is a portion of one of his cards that aired last fall, an essay praising government ineptitude:
I celebrate the magnificent, muddle-headed ineptitude of our democracy. As far as I’m concerned, a little confusion and waste may keep the trains from running on time, but it also keeps people like me from getting a one-way ticket in a cattle car.
Lorre is 60 and Jewish. Many American Jews of his generation and older really believe this stuff. Jon Stewart once said that Jews had to be good at looking over our shoulders because of pogroms. In this place and time, this is a delusion. And an irresponsible one.
P.S. A reader passed this Lorre essay along yesterday after I did a post on Terry Gross’s interview on public radio with Mitch Hurwitz, a very successful Hollywood producer, in which his Jewishness came up a lot, and the two were uncomfortable about talking about his rather obvious entitlement. I said they were biting their tongues because like many American Jews, they don’t want to give up a traditional sense of ourselves as outsiders. Certainly we have been persecuted historically; but a historical lens keeps many of us from acknowledging our place in American society– and the obligations that flow from such power. Terry Gross is uniquely situated to do this story. I hope she gets to it.
It’s not gonna be Jews the next time. It could very well be Gypsies again though. They are definitely still in the same position. The same hate speech is still employed against them in both Eastern and Western Europe.
And even beyond that, it’s difficult (but not impossible!) to see a genocide happening in a major Western country anytime soon. If any country is a candidate, it’s most likely Israel (but Lorre would never say that).
And even beyond that, all this focus on “poor us” prevents people from realizing that actual genocides do happen in other parts of the world, like the one in Rwanda during the mid-2000s. But those were poor black people in Africa, so who cares right?
As you say, it isn’t merely delusional. It’s downright irresponsible.
Another cable TV reality series, “Russian Jews,” is chock full of recent Jewish immigrants, as glitzy, materialistic, rude, obtuse, and rascist, ethnically chauvenistic as the Iranian Jewish immigrants and Gypsies portrayed on current US cable TV.
In contrast, there’s also a slew of cable TV series shows about rednecks; and the audience sees, there, for their entertainment pleasure, all the same things–except the rednecks are not rich, but poor, and they’re not rascist.
Phil, your site is a good resource of information and your heart is in the right place, but if you talk about yourself and Chuck Lorre as “us” and are concerned about how “we” use “our” power simply because you are both Jewish-then you are delusional.
Also, I don’t know the context of the cattle car comment, but you may be reading too much into it. My own Nazi comments usually come as a result of dealing with some office manager or something who is drunk on power, or some loudmouth who is bullying a waitress or cashier…Although I refer to most racists or homophobes as Nazis also. But that isn’t my only point of reference. In my city, there is a lot of gentrification going on-and generally in conversation I break down the old timers and new comers into Palestinians and Zionists.
“Many American Jews of his generation and older really believe this stuff. Jon Stewart once said that Jews had to be good at looking over our shoulders because of pogroms. In this place and time, this is a delusion. And an irresponsible one.”
Believe what? That because a society is welcoming and functions well, it will always be the same? What delusion are you talking about? Is it a crime not to be completely laid back about ourselves like you apparently are?