Mondoweiss

Matthews: 'I Want to Know Everything' About Politics/Religion

I need to restrain my enthusiasm about Chris Matthews. He's my go-to guy for politics, he's both brilliant and streetsmart (though his self-indulgent streak--lately he's been airing clips of his dancing on Ellen DeGeneres's show, two nights in a row--is simply mindboggling). Tonight Matthews was at his best. He had on Deborah Solomon of the New York Times, who had lately interviewed the Rev. John Hagee, and David Kuo of beliefnet.

Both reporters were making the argument that the political culture is going too far in its scrutiny of the candidates' pastors and other religious connections. We've gone "into the weeds," Kuo said, while Solomon was saying that Hagee's and Jeremiah Wright's views don't really matter re McCain and Obama.

Matthews cut this off. He pointed out that we've just had a president whose religious beliefs affected his decisionmaking re the Middle East. Then he said, "I want to know everything." It was a great journalistic comment, aimed in this case at journalists. Let's have as many facts as we can, then decide what's important. Let's be curious, not incurious.

Some day this guy's going to talk about Jews and Israel in American politics...

Supporting Obama, Chafee Cites 'Foreign Entanglements.' Translation: Israel Lobby

Tonight on "Hardball," former Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee, a Republican, said he was for Obama because he was concerned about our "foreign entanglements." And in this sense he was a true "conservative," he said. Chris Matthews said, Hear hear.

A year or so back the American Conservative had a great issue about What's Right? What's Left? predicting a realignment of our politics in the wake of Iraq. Its latest issue contains editor Scott McConnell's analysis that Obama's suggestions of evenhandedness in Middle East policy represent a historic challenge to the Israel lobby's power.

[T]here are different ways for Americans to be “pro-Israel” and push back against the view that being pro-Israel means supporting the right of the Jewish state to lord it over 5 million Palestinians in conditions increasingly seen as resembling South African apartheid. The alternative view won’t sweep the country, but it will migrate from its present home on university campuses and liberal Protestant churches into the wider body politic. [Emphasis mine]

Finally will come recognition that the Israel lobby’s power to dominate the American debate is beginning to weaken.

I share McConnell's optimism. When Lincoln Chafee talks about "entanglements," he means the Israel lobby. In the Senate, he was a liberal Republican, now he's a radical conservative. Well-bred Protestants like him have an aversion to being provocative. I know this from my wife, who likes to say that her people are as sensitive as mine, but they learn to bite their tongues. Please, senator, next time say it out loud!

2 Comments on '60'

I'm a devoted "60 Minutes" watcher and had two strong impressions from the last two weeks.

1, Last week LaDainian Tomlinson, the Chargers' incredible running back, said that he spends the day before a game in fear of injury. Playing a game of football is like being in a car wreck, he said, and he worries whether that day is going to bring a season- or career-ending injury. Let alone concussions. The Times' Alan Schwartz has done passionate, important reporting on this issue. I hope the comments on "60," by one of the league's top performers, mean that things might change... 2, Tonight in a report from New Guinea on rarely-seen bird species, Robert Simon, who spent 10 days in the bush, kept cooing over the fact that no one had caught these scenes on film before. With the suggestion that no one had seen these birds doing their mating dances before. I think this is somewhat racist. 3 years ago I was in New Guinea and on a trek through the mountains, my guides brought me to a village for a Tolai fire dance. The thing went on all night long, men jumping in and out of the fire. Well, they were all wearing amazing, outlandish bird costumes. Strange wire-and-paper headdresses and tail feathers. Birds are revered in New Guinea, and the people who live there have been observing them for eons. 

C-Span Shows Us Walt/Mearsheimer's Cheerleading Audience (At Last)

Walt and Mearsheimer spoke at Politics and Prose in Washington on September 5; C-Span aired the event tonight, over a month later. A pity the network should wait so long, on such a newsworthy event.

The authors surprised me only in their fluidity. They seemed confident and calm. But they had the house behind them. This was the true revelation of the event. It appeared that about 2/3 or more of the audience was supportive of the authors. They cheered criticism of the Iraq and Lebanon wars, they cheered the authors' sharp attacks on the Israeli occupation and on suppression of free speech about the occupation in the States.

All but three or four in the long line of questioners were sympathetic. And most were well-informed. The questions came from peacenik types, Arabs, professorial types, people with foreign accents. Young hipsters. They knew about cluster bombs and Foreign Minister Bevin and the state of historical scholarship. By contrast, the pro-Israel lobby side seemed undermanned and a little intimidated. These critics didn't go after Walt and Mearsheimer hammer and tongs, as if they sensed, this crowd is hostile, better scream about it later, outside.

It struck me that the media may ignore this book or deride it all they please, but Walt and Mearsheimer are really tapping into widespread popular dissatisfaction with our policy toward Israel. You sensed a hunger for information and for a forum in that sophisticated crowd. You felt the explosion of suppressed views, and joy that such things might be said. In that sense, it was a tremendously exciting night; for it suggests that Americans from many different walks of life wish to change our foreign policy, and do so in an intelligent manner.

'Be Careful of Little Lives': E.O. Wilson

The great biologist and student of ants, E.O. Wilson, was on C-Span the other day, endorsing, among other ideas, Einstein's belief that we must all become vegetarians or turn the earth to powder. There are more than 500 vegetable species we could rely on, Wilson said; we have limited ourselves to five.

At the end of the program there came a religious moment. The moderator read an email: "What do you do about ants in the kitchen?" I was washing the dishes, and turned to listen. I have a problem with ants near one of the dog bowls.

Wilson said, "Be careful of little lives." Then he said, Well, ants like honey or bits of tuna, you can feed them that. Get a magnifying glass, study them. You will be seeing one of the most socially-organized societies on the planet. And this, he said, is what life probably looks like in other parts of the universe.

I was humbled. At the risk of stating the obvious, I had expected a murderous solution. But the amateur's love of nature was alive in this great man even at age 78. Be careful of little lives.

The Anchor as Pastor: Couric, Gibson and Williams in Minneapolis

Did you notice the frankly-religious component of the evening news broadcasts on Thursday night, when all three anchors were in Minneapolis? Brian Williams choked up as he spoke of the "expired souls" who were under water, then gave what we used to call a "soul shake" to a Mpls Fire official, congratulating midwesterners for being so strong and midwestern. Katie Couric ended her broadcast with a homily on Why it happened to these people, the same god-works-in-mysterious-ways note hit by Charlie Gibson when he did a take on Thornton Wilder's classic about a similar episode, The Bridge Over the San Luis Rey.

My first response to such open religiosity is, Just the facts. In a complex, gripping story about infrastructure, do we really need our anchors talking about unseen forces? Since when are the dead "expired souls"? Why are reporters wool-gathering about fate? My next response is, We must want this from them, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. Television has collapsed the world. And evidently this is what now passes for a sense of community: the feeling when watching the nightly news that we are all Americans.  Praise the airwaves.

Death-Sniffing Cat Shows Up in the News, Anchoring My 'Sopranos' Theory

My argument that the 'Sopranos' ended with a bloodbath (which David Chase didn't show out of sensitivity to our love for the Soprano family and because it was obvious to the discerning) was based in part on the figure of a cat that bedevilled Paulie Walnuts. You'll recall that Paulie finds the cat in the clubhouse, staring at the portrait of murdered Chris, and tries to broom it out, saying,  "That cat is an omen of death!" or words to that effect. Then Tony Soprano forces Paulie to take a job he doesn't want to do--because all the other capos who did it died--and sure enough, in a late scene in the last show, the cat starts following Paulie. Whose death, though prefigured, is never shown.

This was evidence of Chase's great theme in the final show: Tony bullies everyone into his circle of death, overcoming their better judgment. (The other giveaway was his forcing his son Anthony into his SUV when the kid is jogging, trying to improve his health...)

Well, life imitates art. Here's that cat again.

Great Slappers in History: Couric vs. Patton

New York Magazine's profile of Katie Couric is already famous for her admission that she repeatedly slapped a staffer on the arm after he put the word "sputum" in her script a few weeks back, sputum being a word she struggled with and didn't like. The piece is otherwise pretty admiring of Couric. On Drudge's radio show the other night, New York Mag's Joe Hagan said that he found Couric to be something few TV celebrities are: unassuming, down-to-earth. I like her more after his piece, I think I'm going to switch from Brian Williams...

It's interesting to compare the Couric slapping episode with the other great slapper of American history: General George Patton. In the summer of 1943, the General visited a hospital in Sicily and slapped two shell-shocked soldiers whom he regarded as cowardly. One of the kids was 21 and had been on the front for four years, till his buddy was wounded and he asked for a rest. He was blubbering. The other kid was also trembling. Patton hit both men in the face with his gloves. He reportedly knocked the blubbering kid's helmet liner off.

There are some similarities in the Couric and Patton episodes. Both cases distressed subordinates (the hospital staff were in turmoil over Patton's behavior). In both cases, a few media insiders knew about the incidents. Eisenhower managed to suppress the Patton story till the popular columnist Drew Pearson blew the case open three months later. In the Couric case, a lot of people at CBS knew about the incident, but it took Joe Hagan to expose it, about a month after. And in both cases, the slappers freely admitted their conduct, and defended it.

It would seem that people were far more outraged over "Georgie" Patton's behavior than they are over Couric's, even in this hyper-sensitive age. Patton lost his command. Of course it's possible that Couric will lose hers, too. But if that happens, the Patton analogy bodes well for her. The greatest "ground gainer" of the European war, Patton was too valuable to Eisenhower to stay demoted. Command was restored, and Patton returned to glory in Germany. Though he died freakishly, in a Cadillac, on a hunting trip in Germany in 1945, Patton passed into American legend, outstripping  all his classmates at West Point '09. I get the feeling Katie Couric's slapping chapter will help her in the end.

The Joy--and Risk--of Yiddish: Gatorade's 'Schmendrick' Ad

Last night, watching sports, I was shocked to see a Gatorade ad in which Harvey Keitel as a first-base coach counsels Derek Jeter to steal second and calls pitcher John Lackey "a schmendrick." (Here's Lackey's comment). Shocked because schmendrick is one of my all-time favorite words to describe a loser. According to Leo Rosten's classic, Joys of Yiddish, it means a grandiose shlemiel, a child, or a penis. Yesssss!

The mainstreaming of schmendrick brings up my favorite subject: assimilation. Yiddish evolved (I believe that Slezkine says this in the classic The Jewish Century) as a language that protected and preserved Jewish difference in Europe. Jews had an extra-societal role, as merchants, financiers, priests, per Slezkine, and this mixture of Hebrew and German was part of their separateness.

When I was growing up, my grandparents and parents all used Yiddish, a little or a lot. At times it functioned as shibboleth: it set our tribe apart. Though as time went on, words like oy and shlemiel and chutzpah and schmatte and shlep got mainstreamed. Rosten wrote his bestseller about Yiddish in 1968. Of course, Saturday Night Live used f'klempt to great effect.

I don't think the mainstreaming of Yiddish is a casual event. It got mainstreamed because it carried different ideas, many of them psychological, that the culture willingly accepted. Where would we be without chutzpah and shlep and yenta? We wouldn't be America.

My theory of assimilation is that America accepted Jewish gifts because it needed and liked them (like last night's Seinfeld rerun, all about a "butchered" nosejob). America changed in untold ways with the cultural influence of Jews, and almost all for the better (this isn't about neocons!). Just consider the hours that big lawyers work in New York now compared to the white-shoe days--a Jewish cultural change. Jews changed and betterized journalism, too; I watched that happen.

I love American pluralism. As a Jewish assimilationist, it is my contention that you can't give a country gifts and hold on to them at the same time. To think that you can change the culture as much as we have and not be changed yourself is absurd.