I never laughed so hard as I laughed with Lenny Bruce. No doubt not every reader here will remember Lenny. He was a stand-up comic from the Fifties and Sixties who specialized in ethnic jokes. The ethnic joke stand-up is an American small theater art form of specific merit that could only have developed in the U.S.
Like jazz, ethnic joke stand-up is quintessentially American, even if it has seen more prominent days. Hopefully, they will return. Like jazz, the ethnic joke stand-up comic says something definitively wonderful about who we are, and what our place is in this world.
When I write philosophy, as I write it, the ethnic joke stand-up routine is never far from my heart. I keep it there because it makes me proud to be an American. Americans are loud, boisterous, proud to a fault, but of anything we have as the collective of Americans that is the rightful envy of the world, it is our sense of humor. It is our ability to survive being the brunt of a joke that distinguishes us.
Americans have been the brunt of many jokes lately, and good for us. It makes us, and as a consequence the world stronger.
I am a Scot by ancestry. I also started out white. I went blond for a while. And now I am back to white again. I would like to visit Scotland before I exit, just to see the place and to hear the brogue first hand. The Brits are quite good with jokes about the Scots, and I enjoy them immensely. I am not Scottish. I am an American, but I wear that small piece of my ethnic persona with pride and never fail to keep an ear out to listen for a good Scot joke or, a good dumb blond joke.
I enjoy all ethnic jokes. Ethnic humor is not about the stereotype. It is about participating in the humility of which not a single American has enough. We are generally too proud to be hurt, and we are likewise not above stepping over the boundary of political and social correctness for a good laugh.
We are ashamed when the joke hurts someone. And, we extend the common human courtesy of advice to all, like the know-it-all every American is at heart, "It is just a joke." We all know jokes can hurt. We all hope jokes promote acceptance and reduce the potential for hurt. But, we generally will tempt the ill-fate of the hurt in a joke for a good laugh. Foreigners say Americans are crass. And, so what if we are?
I am confident, for any era or locality accompanied by a proscription against ethnic jokes of any sort, that these proscriptions actually cause a net hurt greater than the unintended hurts of the jokes that must be apologized for by the awkward perpetrator. For shame! So what?
When I read about a Jewish conspiracy, and it is everywhere today on the net, I wonder, on what planet these things began. I know this has been an historical phenomenon, but how does it arrive here on our shores? What need does it fill?
Sure, humans are bigots. That is quite natural. Tom and Dick put it best, "And, I don't like anybody very much." But a vast Jewish conspiracy? Why have I not brushed up against it?
First of all, "Jewish" denotes a loosely associated religious group, a large segment of which is in fact not very religious, if religious at all. There simply is no such thing as ethnically Jewish. One might just as well look for ethnicity among Protestants, Catholics or Muslims. It just is not so.
The German Jews are not Polish or Russian Jews, any more than they are Ethiopian Jews, Iranian Jews or Chinese Jews. American Jews will tell you they are a Russian Jew, or a Polish Jew. Most are however American Jews, because their parents were one or the other, or often enough one of them was not any kind of Jew at all. I mean, look at Kinky Friedman. Is there anyone in America who is not proud of Kinky Friedman? Go Kinky! Give 'em Hell!
Anyone can convert to Judaism.
If there is a Jewish conspiracy, those who believe in the benefits of it, should become a Jew. Becoming a Jew is easy. Just start telling everyone you are Jewish. Being a good Jew is easy. Attend synagogue. Wear a yamika when you're at synagogue, as it is supposed to show a sign of respect for God. The Jewish god takes offense at the top of your head? Well, if that works for you, I have no objection to it.
A few school friends and I swam for the Jewish Community Center in Royal Oak several times with my Junior High swim coach Mr. Rosenthal. I saw no evidence of a Jewish conspiracy then, and I still see none. At fourteen I was willing to go anywhere under any circumstances to get into a swimming pool and look at all the girl-swimmers in their wet Speedo swim suits. I was quite sure then, anyone who went out for the football or the basketball team was slightly out of tune with human nature. But as I said, if it works for you, I have no objection to it.
If there is a Jewish conspiracy, it must involve delicatessens where the Jews have a near monopoly. Nine times out of ten, the food is good in a delicatessen. They are not like Chinese food restaurants where the food is either great, or you are taking your life into your hands. You generally cannot get egg rolls in a delicatessen, but then you can't get blintzes at a Chinese take-out either. And kimchi is something that if you haven't tried it, go Korean, you are in for a treat and the possibility of opening up North Korea to American tourists. I'd go even though my wife wouldn't tolerate the flatulent savant.
I worked for a small moving company in Brookline, Massachusetts on and off for a couple of years many years ago. It was run by a Lacrosse player from Baltimore who attended The Boston University School of Music. Jim Walker was his name, and a great eater he was. He played piano quite well, but apparently not as well as he moved them. Jim and I moved lots of pianos. It is a two-man job to move a piano, grand, baby grand or upright. Pianos are actually quite easy to move, if you know what you are doing, you can lift more than your own weight and, you work well with the second man. Otherwise, you had better call a professional.
Movers like to eat. Our crews, sometimes as many as four of us would lunch at every kind of ethnic restaurant available in the Boston area. There are a lot of them, and we knew where they all were. We never ate at a franchise restaurant, and never even considered doing so. Of course due to the way we dressed, often shorts, T-shirts and sneakers, and, due to how sweaty we often were, there were some limitations concerning the sort of place we could get into and eat in comfort.
"Chinese? Thai? Korean? Italian? Or another delicatessen?" It never took long to decide. We feared nothing, and we tipped well too, because generally the waitresses liked us as much as I liked swimming, and no doubt in part for the same reason too. So, they fed us well, and, they generally asked us to come back. Had I the chance, and if I were still in the shape one needs to be in to be a mover, I'd do it once or twice a month just for the food experience.
The reason I have brought up the moving business is movers get a pretty good glimpse at the inside reality of what humanity is all about.
I don't think I would be violating any confidentiality agreements to tell all of you, some people are... Well... Pretty freakin' sick puppies, like the Brookline psychiatrist who went to great lengths to explain away the three blow-up dolls he had in his closet, under his bed and in the linen cabinet of his bathroom. He wanted them moved, except the one he intimated had sprung a leak, which he offered to Jim Walker, if he wanted it...?
With every trip up and down the stairs we encouraged Jim to go ahead and take it. "She ain't bad looking, Jim. And she's just your type too! You could patch her up! Where d'ya s'pose she's a-leaking, Jim?"
Now, all the Jewish conspiracy theorists will tell you Jews are born liars. Of course, we are all born liars, except this psychiatrist who was Jewish. And by his wasted effort he demonstrated how bad a liar he was, which of course gave Jim fits every time he elaborated his thrice-lie about using them in his "practice". And then, to remove the embarrassment of the falsity of the statement, he would suggest again, Jim could have "her".
"Come on Jim. When was the last time you were out on a real date?" and, "We're all beginning to worry about you Jim... What is your problem? She obviously has had her eyes all over you all morning." [...] "Go ahead, Jim. Ask her out. She can't say, "No."" It got so Jim was getting pretty fed up with moving psychiatrists. "Poor thing, Jim. She's been locked up in that closet for God knows how long. Ask her out, will ya!"
Jim had a good sense of humor, but not that good. And the psychiatrist cleared out and let us finish the job without his being in the way, or encouraging us any more to try and fix Jim up with a date.
The reason I bring up my having worked as a mover for some time is to point out movers are in a good position to find out just about everything about everyone. And in Brookline there is a rose in bloom on every corner. I saw no evidence of any Jewish conspiracy.
There are a lot of Jewish judges. I suspect they are judges because they could not make a decent living as lawyers. There isn't a Jewish lawyer in the country capable of carrying the handle off the satchel carried by Johnnie Cochran, F. Lee Bailey or Gerry Spence, none of whom are Jewish, unless they are closet Jews and converted to Judaism in order to get in on all the benefits of the Jewish conspiracy.
No doubt the reason there are so many mediocre Jewish lawyers is because, Jewish kids are taught to respect the law by Jewish religious dogma. It isn't a bad thing to teach kids. It is how the Jews teach it that ruins them for lawyering. The Jewish tradition says the law actually makes perfect sense all the time. And it does too, until the first time you walk into a court room and all the snakes are sidewinding all over the floor, up the walls and across the ceiling the way they do.
It must be a real shock for a Jewish kid fresh out of law school. It must be like getting married in one of those countries where they pre-arrange your marriage and you never even get to see your bride until after you've said, "I do." and she then lifts the veil! OMG!
Jewish lawyers actually start out believing the law works, that it has some understandable schematic to it, like morality, and that the rule of law is not merely the ruse of law. They end up judges to take their wrath out on humanity when they figure out, it isn't so.
Alan Dershowitz is a Jewish lawyer who at one time had some well healed renown, but smart aleck as he is, he has since come out in favor of torturing anyone he thinks needs to be tortured. This has reduced his stature even in the far less than particular legal community so much so, he likely now is only fit to be a judge. It would serve him right too.
I noticed one day when I was watching a trial that judges are in their own sort of prison, undergoing their own sort of torture for every minute they are sitting there in their dresses listening to witness after witness testifying about who did what to whom in sorted and gory detail, and with so many bald faced lies Franz Kafka and Quentin Tarantino couldn't together design a better torture.
There was a time in my life when I did a fairly extensive study of judges.
And I must dutifully report having brought one once before the Board of Bar Overseers and the Commission on Judicial Conduct as well, judges are pretty good liars.
In private they must give each other awards for being the most able liar. I'm pretty sure they keep those awards under their dresses. That Brookline psychiatrist had quite a few dresses too. Among all the deceitful and lying judges there are in this country, there no doubt are quite a few Jewish judges, but the ignominy of it has little to do with any sort of Jewish conspiracy, as they all lie, Jewish or not. It seems to be the criteria most favored by governors who appoint judges, as well as it is a necessary skill to getting elected where judges get elected.
There could be a chicken soup conspiracy. I learned the other day while reading H.G. Wells that the Old Testament was written in the Bronze Age, before there were chickens outside of Burma, which is apparently their source. So, no Jewish mother at the time of the writing of the Old Testament was making chicken soup to cure anything. It is a modern day fraud. In our society where litigation has suddenly fallen into second place behind open talk of rebellion on virtually every street corner and in every fast food outlet around the country, we might all do well to learn from this lesson about Jewish mothers, and the lies that have been told about them.
Don't take me wrong. I'm all for hanging every judge in the country, I make no bones about that. I am not planning anything, or even encouraging anyone to plan anything. But I am not going to stop anyone either. I don't care if they are Jewish or what they are, hanging judges wholesale seems to be the solution to a lot of today's more pressing problems, problems like divorce settlements and public nuisance suits.
As for going after Jewish mothers though, well... I think the sorts of people who advocate that sort of thing are despicable. Besides, haven't those people ever seen a picture of the young Lauren Bacal? Again, you are in for a treat. I have wondered, if she was ever on a swim team?
I don't know where else to look for a Jewish conspiracy. Alan Greenspan, the former fed chairman, was one of the most able and misguided economists to ever walk the face of the earth. Greenspan for nineteen years single handedly gave the U.S. economy growth, which was for so long what Americans and the world wanted before the discovery of the moral imperative and the realization that growth is immoral at this stage in the history of humanity on the planet.
Now that growth is seen as the cancerous thing it is, everyone just wants an Easy Street with a rose in bloom and a decent delicatessen on every corner.
Paul Wolfowitz, the current President of the World Bank and one of the purported leaders of the Jewish cabal, a man hated by three-fourths the world and ninety percent of the nation, has recently been seen in a photograph shown wearing socks with holes in them. It is a pathetic picture of a conspiracy, if it is a conspiracy.
I suspect Wolfowitz, like Greenspan, is more an example of the incompetence of dim-wittery. He is another Jewish guy who couldn't ever make it as a lawyer. He is a guy who thinks economics actually holds some viable answers. He is a guy who thinks, like the Jewish conspiracy theorists, that there are bad people in the world.
It is an illusion. There are no bad people in the world. There are only misguided people in the world. Doubtless Mr. Wolfowitz is one of them, but not because he wears socks with holes in them. I wear socks with holes in them! I wear underwear with holes in them too. I wear them until my wife gets some sense of just who she is and, throws them all out on me. And then for a time I wear nothing at all until she gets out and buys me some without holes in them.
So, here is your so-called Jewish conspiracy:
The U.S. Government sends billions of dollars to Israel every year. U.S. politicians get their cut with every junket trip they take to Israel, and with every donation Israel-supporters make into their political war chests. This has been going on for years. The root of the problem is our government in Washington D.C. They could stop it at any time, but they don't. So stop wagging your finger at Jews, and get your own act together and get rid of these slimy political snakes who are responsible, and, who are entrenched in Washington D.C.
And, I ask you. If Congressional sidewinders are really concerned about the war in Iraq, has anyone pointed out to them virtually no one in Iran is dying right now, and they are supposed to be a fundamentalist Islamic regime! They don't get it because they don't want to get it. What they want is to be re-elected. Don't give it to them even if they do end the war in Iraq this week as the vote this past November demanded.
Everyone in the world should stop looking for bad guys, bad people and big bad conspiracies around the world. The problem is us, and we have been met with our own disastrous wants and our own incredible gullibility.
No matter the problem, no matter the solution, if it's an exclusively empirical solution applied to the real world, the resulting byproducts of the processes of empirical reason will give rise to problems tenfold that of the original problem.
That is Robertson's Law.
Representative government is an exclusively empirical solution, and sometimes it requires a non-empirical solution just to get the attention of all those who have grown so comfortable where they are doing what it is they been doing for all these years.
I'm not advocating revolution. I'm just saying, when it comes to that, I won't be getting in the way of it.
Don Robertson, The American Philosopher
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