Santa's bad stocking stuffer of a health care bill NØbel For Obama

Just how buddy-buddy were the public option and President Obama? Well, as Sam Stein of the Huffington Post makes clear below, they had a few photo-op and sound-bite meetings but the romance was luke-warm at best--just enough to goad unfounded hopes.

In other words, the president was seen in public with the public option but nothing more than that. She never got an invitation to the Lincoln bedroom. Still, the gossip was enough to engender hopes of a deeper bond between them.

The health care bill that will be put in your Christmas stocking tonight is not a gift from a magi but a trick from a practiced media magician. And the simulacrum Santa who brings this present is a registered Republican who will fool you as to his political identity by hitching donkeys to his sleigh. President Barack Hoover Obama has fooled many into thinking he is a closet liberal. No. He is an outed conservative who only looked like a liberal by carefully constructed contrast to his predecessor.

The implosion of the Obama presidency will continue next year. My New Year's resolution therefore is to re-connect to activism and breathe new life into the cause of change. I just hope the true Santa places copies of the NØbel For Obama

petition in those stockings. Obama needs searing, sustained heat from the Left.

The time for patience has run out.

Sam Stein writes:

First Posted: 12-22-09 06:43 PM | Updated: 12-23-09 01:50 AM

President Barack Obama, in an interview withThe Washington Post, said on Tuesday that in the two years leading up to his election he "didn't campaign on the public option" for insurance coverage.

Could that possibly be true? A plan for government-run insurance has been the focal point of the soon-to-be-concluded health care debate; the catalyst of white-hot partisan warfare; and the provision that progressive and conservatives alike have deemed the arbiter of whether legislation is a success. Is it possible the political world was, by-and-large, confused when they assumed this was what candidate Obama had wanted?

Not entirely.

The Obama campaign clearly did incorporate the public option into its health care agenda. The then-candidate signed a statement put together by the pro-reform group Health Care for America Now, which included the provision as part of its principles for reform. On issue forms Obama filled out for several publications he pledged to "create a new public health plan for those currently without coverage." His campaign arm, Organizing for America, continues to champion a "public health insurance option to provide the uninsured and those who can't find affordable coverage with a real choice." The White House website says that: "The President believes [public health insurance option] will promote competition, hold insurance companies accountable and assure affordable choices. It is completely voluntary."

It does, indeed, seem fair to say that a public option for insurance coverage was a component of the Obama health care agenda. But exactly how serious a component was it?

An examination of approximately 200 newspaper articles from the campaign, as well as debate transcripts and public speeches shows that Obama spoke remarkably infrequently about creating a government-run insurance program. Indeed, when he initially outlined his health care proposals during a speech before the University of Iowa on March 29, 2007, he described setting up a system that resembles the current Senate compromise - in which private insurers would operate in a non-profit entity that was regulated heavily by a government entity.

"Everyone will be able buy into a new health insurance plan that's similar to the one that every federal employee - from a postal worker in Iowa to a Congressman in Washington - currently has for themselves," Obama said at the time.

In the following months, reporters would remark, as did Robert Pear of the New York Times, that Obama "says he would 'establish a new public insurance program' for people who do not have access to group coverage." But it's not clear that their reference was a non-profit entity modeled after congressional coverage or the "government-run plan" that progressives pine for today.

By December 2007, however, Obama clearly had endorsed a government-run option. In a speech at the Iowa Heartland Presidential Forum, the then-Senator declared that if he "were designing a system from scratch" he would "probably move more in the direction of a single-payer plan,"

"But what we have to do right now," Obama added, "is I want to move to make sure that everybody has got coverage as quickly as possible. And I believe that what that means is we expand SCHIP. It means that we extend eligibility for some of the government programs that we have. We set up a government program, as I've described, that everybody can buy into and you can't be excluded because of a pre-existing condition."

In January 2008, meanwhile, Obama submitted an issue form to Ebony Magazine, in which, as the third principle of his health care reform agenda, he promised to "require all employers to contribute toward health coverage for their employees or toward the cost of the public plan."

By that point, the press, commentariat and widely respected health care observers all were reporting the government-run plan as a component of the Obama agenda.

On May 31, 2007, Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and aNew Yorker staff writer, wrote in The New York Times that both Obama and then-candidate John Edwards, were offering "a choice of competing private plans, and... a Medicare-like public option, too."

On September 20, 2007, Ezra Klein -- then a staff writer at The American Prospect and now withThe Washington Post -- wrote a column for the Los Angeles Times in which he said that "all of the Democrats" in the primary field had offered the option of "a government-run insurance program modeled on, but distinct from, Medicare."

On February 12, 2008, Jonathan Oberlander of the University of North Carolina, told NPR's Fresh Air that Obama and then-Sen. Hillary Clinton both "would create a new public plan similar to Medicare."

"And do we have any sense of what those public plans would look like?" the host asked.

"They have been fairly vague about that, as candidates often are in this election season, other than to say it would be like Medicare," said Oberlander.

On February 26, 2008, meanwhile, Jacob Hacker, the so-called "godfather" of the public option, offered much the same synopsis. In an editorial in the Los Angeles Times, the Yale University professor noted that both Clinton and Obama would require employers to "provide coverage to their workers or enroll them in a new, publicly overseen insurance pool." People in this pool, he added, "could choose either a public plan modeled after Medicare or from regulated private plans."

On July 30, 2008, The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn wrote that Obama was gravitating closer and closer to making the public plan a prominent feature of his health care platform. "[He] not only included an optional public plan in his eventual blueprint for universal coverage; more recently, he also tapped Hacker to be on his campaign's health care advisory committee," Cohn wrote.

On August 18, 2008, Cohn followed up on his story, writing that Heather Higginbottom, the Obama campaign's policy director and now White House adviser, considered the public plan "an elemental pillar" of the proposal. The President, Cohn added (channeling Higginbottom) "is prepared to defend this fall even if, as expected, Republicans attack it (falsely) as a "government takeover" of medicine."

The general press, naturally, followed suit.

Fortune Magazine, on July 7, 2008, wrote that "At the center of Obama's plan to help ease the middle-class crunch would be a requirement that nearly all businesses provide health insurance or contribute to a government-backed "purchasing pool" that includes private plans and one public plan like Medicare."

The Chicago Tribune, on August 21, 2008, wrote that Obama, "would require employers to offer health benefits to workers or contribute to the cost of a new public plan"

The National Journal on August 23, 2008, reported that Obama's health care plan "would require insurance companies to compete in publicly structured exchanges not only with each other but also with a government-run insurance plan. 'Wherever possible," Obama said in an interview last year, he wants to harness "market mechanisms to bring about change.'"

There are countless other examples as well; but remarkably few other times in which Obama himself was quoted supporting an additional program of government run insurance. His campaign never pushed back on the report. If anything, it seems they clearly constructed a health care strategy that embraced the public option as one of several principles of reform.

It also, however, seems clear that the philosophical attachment of the candidate to the issue was limited. Obama would discuss the public option more frequently once he took office. But on the trail he almost always highlighted other elements of his health care agenda first. As one progressive activist who has worked on health care reform for the past year put it:

"What I think [Obama's] point was [in making his statement to the Washington Post], is true. The public option was not his number one talking point on the trail. Hell, it wasn't even number 12. The public option didn't become the central part of health care reform until after [he entered the White House]."

President Obama: The Great Squanderer

I don't know why I keep beating that dead horse called Obama who has already turned his own White House into a glue factory, who just seems so congenitally incapable of becoming the champion he dreams--and has been given every opportunity of--becoming. Sooner or later he'll do something--wrong, of course--that he thinks will prove us errant in our disappointment. He really is a Herbert Hoover with no chance or desire to be FDR.

Someone tell me what it will take for him to quit that bankrupt civics class fixation he has with consensus, especially since his idea of inclusiveness seems to involve hearing only from middle and advanced age white men from the oligarchy. This is the oligarchy that allows him to be a guest host of its meetings but never a player in its high-stakes poker games (conducted elsewhere).

Never have we had to live with a president who has a more nagging and negligible idea of his power and authority. Did he think he could inspire the plutocrats in possession of power the way he did the hordes dispossessed of it?

I remain angry at Obama because giving into contempt or laughter or indifference (this last option increasingly popular) would be far more painful. God help us all when people like me finally give up our indignation. It contains the last gravitational pull of integrity. Here's The Nation's Naomi Klein to lay out the wasted opportunities.

Published on Monday, December 21, 2009 by The Nation
For Obama, No Opportunity Too Big To Blow
by Naomi Klein

Contrary to countless reports, the debacle in Copenhagen was not everyone's fault. It did not happen because human beings are incapable of agreeing, or are inherently self-destructive. Nor was it all was China's fault, or the fault of the hapless UN.

There's plenty of blame to go around, but there was one country that possessed unique power to change the game. It didn't use it. If Barack Obama had come to Copenhagen with a transformative and inspiring commitment to getting the U.S. economy off fossil fuels, all the other major emitters would have stepped up. The EU, Japan, China and India had all indicated that they were willing to increase their levels of commitment, but only if the U.S. took the lead. Instead of leading, Obama arrived with embarrassingly low targets and the heavy emitters of the world took their cue from him.

(The "deal" that was ultimately rammed through was nothing more than a grubby pact between the world's biggest emitters: I'll pretend that you are doing something about climate change if you pretend that I am too. Deal? Deal.)

I understand all the arguments about not promising what he can't deliver, about the dysfunction of the U.S. Senate, about the art of the possible. But spare me the lecture about how little power poor Obama has. No President since FDR has been handed as many opportunities to transform the U.S. into something that doesn't threaten the stability of life on this planet. He has refused to use each and every one of them. Let's look at the big three.

Blown Opportunity Number 1: The Stimulus Package When Obama came to office he had a free hand and a blank check to design a spending package to stimulate the economy. He could have used that power to fashion what many were calling a "Green New Deal" -- to build the best public transit systems and smart grids in the world. Instead, he experimented disastrously with reaching across the aisle to Republicans, low-balling the size of the stimulus and blowing much of it on tax cuts. Sure, he spent some money on weatherization, but public transit was inexplicably short changed while highways that perpetuate car culture won big.

Blown Opportunity Number 2: The Auto Bailouts Speaking of the car culture, when Obama took office he also found himself in charge of two of the big three automakers, and all of the emissions for which they are responsible. A visionary leader committed to the fight against climate chaos would obviously have used that power to dramatically reengineer the failing industry so that its factories could build the infrastructure of the green economy the world desperately needs. Instead Obama saw his role as uninspiring down-sizer in chief, leaving the fundamentals of the industry unchanged.

Blown Opportunity Number 3: The Bank Bailouts Obama, it's worth remembering, also came to office with the big banks on their knees -- it took real effort not to nationalize them. Once again, if Obama had dared to use the power that was handed to him by history, he could have mandated the banks to provide the loans for factories to be retrofitted and new green infrastructure to be built. Instead he declared that the government shouldn't tell the failed banks how to run their businesses. Green businesses report that it's harder than ever to get a loan.

Imagine if these three huge economic engines -- the banks, the auto companies, the stimulus bill -- had been harnessed to a common green vision. If that had happened, demand for a complementary energy bill would have been part of a coherent transformative agenda.

Whether the bill had passed or not, by the time Copenhagen had rolled around, the U.S. would already have been well on its way to dramatically cutting emissions, poised to inspire, rather than disappoint, the rest of the world.

There are very few U.S. Presidents who have squandered as many once-in-a-generation opportunities as Barack Obama. More than anyone else, the Copenhagen failure belongs to him.

.

Below is yesterday's entry at Boogie Woogie Flu, one of my favorite music blogs. It's deals with a rarely sounded theme--at least recently--in American letters: being mistaken for a Jew and the existential crisis that often ensues as the "victim" realizes he is both the target of undeserved prejudice and a coward for feeling so insulted by it. There's a rich post-war literature rich in such encounters--and where they lead. But I didn't know this remained a modern danger--until I looked at my own life.There are so many variations on the theme of mistaken Jewish identity. I, for one, am often incensed when I am correctly identified as Jewish. Immediately these days I lapse into a Jackie Mason Yiddish-ized minstrelsy to conceal my anger and to prove an ingratiating (but subtly derisive) mock-comfort with my identity. In other words, I practice a kind of defusing akido of amenability that makes my assailant feel at ease with his prejudice or discomfort and in no way threatened by me for having these feelings. Prejudice is an entitlement for many who feel them. It's almost as if you live in an urbane post-Nazi Nazi Germany where people don't turn you in but simply remind you to wear your arm band next time you go outdoors. "Frankly, I don't need such badges to tell me who you are," you are told over and over. "But you know how easy it is to fool the man on the street."Most Jews I know aren't trying to fool their neighbors anymore--just themselves. They revel in a kind of Jewish "white face" minstrelsy. The Coen Brothers "A Serious Man" is a superb deadpan Jewish minstrel show, but you don't know it until you examine the guest intrusion of a Korean family stereotype used to mock or merely to remind us of the stereotyping that is going on. The movie is both homage to and subversion of defining stereotypes. Jewish identity is, at its worst and most banal, racial. Why anyone, including me, would revel in ethnic stereotypes is a mystery I must solve before taking leave of this birth. If I don't, I fear being saddled in some future incarnation with the infamous "black-skin" life-conundrum in 1931 Scottsboro Mississippi. (Who said time has to go forward?) Africa is another story about a different matter. There my race would be mainstream and I would feel safe as, possibly even taking for granted, my racial self. Of course, there might be tribal riffraff to contend with. But that's why I would keep a machete under my bed (all the while longing to live in America where the people have a gods-given right to own guns).Okay, what does a non-Jewish victim of mistaken identity do? In an interview, John Lennon conceded he was often mistaken for a Jew and said it gave him no offense. Indeed, given Jewish suffering, he was flattered. I wonder if he really felt that way. Certainly, it was a great response from a rock and roll rebel. But I digress.If blacks are cursed by "invisibility," Jews are cursed by "visibility." I mean, no black man runs the casual, daily risk of routine mistaken identity such as described here--or even the "honkie" caricature of a white man in his own mind. [I remember a black next door neighbor character in the TV sit-com "Family Ties" who shared the secret sin of loving white man's mood music with "young Republican" Michael J. Fox every week. It was supposed to be walk-on sabotage of stereotypes.] That separateness is unique to African-American alienation. On the other hand (or is it foot?), every white man is potentially a victim of being mistaken for a Jew--a kind of inverse alienation based on the anxiety of suddenly losing the security of being unconditionally "white" and "wasp." Apparently, such vulnerability and the cowardly confusion it generates is an infuriating regular occurrence for lapsed Catholic blogger Chris O'Leary. He starts a remarkable Hanukkah-season essay with a quote from poet John Berryman's famous prize-winning remembrance, "The Imaginary Jew," published in the Fall 1945 issue of Kenyon Review. Its author, a lapsed Catholic, committed suicide in 1972. Many commentators see the seeds of that act in his story. I don't see all roads in such identity-tormented lives leading to sleeping pills or pistols. I see the "peace" made with such encounters like that made here. I know that I took refuge in Sufism, in part, to remove any eligibility for mistaken identity and any emotion if I failed in that intention. Friday, December 18, 2009Mistaken IdentityBy Chris O'Leary"Listen, I told you I'm not a Jew.""I don't give a damn what you are," he turned his half-dark eyes to me, wrenching his arm loose. "You talk like a Jew.""What does that mean?" Some part of me wanted to laugh."How does a Jew talk?""They talk like you, buddy."-John Berryman, "The Imaginary Jew"The Kenyon Review, Vol. 7, No. 4, Autumn, 1945.Although my name is Christopher Paul O’Leary and I was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church (that’s as far as it went: no communion, no confirmation), I am regularly taken for a Jew. This could be simply because I have a beard and wear glasses, or maybe whatever Irish Catholic residue I still carry reads instead as Jewish: a faulty translation.I grew up in southwestern Virginia, where there are few Catholics, let alone Jews. My identity was fixed then. My third-grade teacher had me stand in front of the class and explain what a Catholic was. I stammered and tried to remember something from the masses I attended in the summer, when I was under the care of my grandmother in Connecticut. At last I said, “Well, we have the Pope.” The teacher, a brutal mountain-bred descendant of Covenanters, nodded. “That you do,” she said, and silently consigned me to hell.Something changed. The Jewish confusion, let’s call it (it would be a good band name), first occurred in Boston, while I was in college. A Hasidic teenager with a clipboard (I never learned what he wanted) was approaching students on Commonwealth Avenue. He quickly appraised me: “Jewish, yes?” He startled me and I sharply replied no. He stepped back, stared at me again and said, “Well, good!”It was a backwards curse. Once I moved to New York, the Jewish confusions multiplied. A typical example: I was walking on Eighth Avenue and ahead of me a man was passing out fliers for a strip club while he kept up a running patter. “Hey come on down. Come on down the block. Your wife don’t have to know. Your girlfriend don’t have to know.” He spun towards me. “Your rabbi don’t have to know. Come on down the block.”I was even Jew-bashed once, in Sunnyside, Queens, while walking to the subway. As a group of teenagers passed me, the largest one nearly knocked me to the sidewalk as he sneered, “Well if it isn’t our friendly neighborhood Jew!” The rest laughed and cursed. I stewed over the encounter for days—angry at being harassed for something I wasn’t, then feeling guilty for being indignant about that factor. But there are more legitimate reasons to harass me, I countered. I was the victim of inaccurate bigots. I grew paranoid and wondered if people in the local market called me “the friendly neighborhood Jew” after I left. I stopped being friendly.I married a half-Jew (I still have a menorah in the basement), we moved to Massachusetts, we divorced. Soon after the latter, I had to drive to Old Greenwich, Connecticut, to cover a conference. Old Greenwich is the sort of place where money goes for its retirement. Even the sewer grates look pristine. I pulled into a palatial hotel. The attendant at the gate was a West Indian man who offered me a wide smile and pointed at my chest: “Let me guess---you’re Jewish!” he boomed.He seemed to savor the last word, drawing out the vowels. He seemed elated he had found a Jew. Was he one too? Was he grabbing at the opportunity to bond with any type of perceived outsider? Or was he just some lunatic? I denied the charge yet again, shaking my head no, took my ticket and drove past. He looked so sad. I’ve since regretted not temporarily converting for him: for a moment I finally would have been what the world wanted me to be.

Jew-bilation: The Existential Agony of Mistaken Ethnic Identity

Below is yesterday's entry at Boogie Woogie Flu, one of my favorite music blogs. It's deals with a rarely sounded theme--at least recently--in American letters: being mistaken for a Jew and the existential crisis that often ensues as the "victim" realizes he is both the target of undeserved prejudice and a coward for feeling so insulted by it. There's a rich post-war literature rich in such encounters--and where they lead. But I didn't know this remained a modern danger--until I looked at my own life.

There are so many variations on the theme of mistaken Jewish identity. I, for one, am often incensed when I am correctly identified as Jewish. Immediately these days I lapse into a Jackie Mason Yiddish-ized minstrelsy to conceal my anger and to prove an ingratiating (but subtly derisive) mock-comfort with my identity. In other words, I practice a kind of defusing akido of amenability that makes my assailant feel at ease with his prejudice or discomfort and in no way threatened by me for having these feelings. Prejudice is an entitlement for many who feel them. It's almost as if you live in an urbane post-Nazi Nazi Germany where people don't turn you in but simply remind you to wear your arm band next time you go outdoors. "Frankly, I don't need such badges to tell me who you are," you are told over and over. "But you know how easy it is to fool the man on the street."

Most Jews I know aren't trying to fool their neighbors anymore--just themselves. They revel in a kind of Jewish "white face" minstrelsy. The Coen Brothers "A Serious Man" is a superb deadpan Jewish minstrel show, but you don't know it until you examine the guest intrusion of a Korean family stereotype used to mock or merely to remind us of the stereotyping that is going on. The movie is both homage to and subversion of defining stereotypes. Jewish identity is, at its worst and most banal, racial. Why anyone, including me, would revel in ethnic stereotypes is a mystery I must solve before taking leave of this birth. If I don't, I fear being saddled in some future incarnation with the infamous "black-skin" life-conundrum in 1931 Scottsboro Mississippi. (Who said time has to go forward?) Africa is another story about a different matter. There my race would be mainstream and I would feel safe as, possibly even taking for granted, my racial self. Of course, there might be tribal riffraff to contend with. But that's why I would keep a machete under my bed (all the while longing to live in America where the people have a gods-given right to own guns).

Okay, what does a non-Jewish victim of mistaken identity do? In an interview, John Lennon conceded he was often mistaken for a Jew and said it gave him no offense. Indeed, given Jewish suffering, he was flattered. I wonder if he really felt that way. Certainly, it was a great response from a rock and roll rebel. But I digress.

If blacks are cursed by "invisibility," Jews are cursed by "visibility." I mean, no black man runs the casual, daily risk of routine mistaken identity such as described here--or even the "honkie" caricature of a white man in his own mind. [I remember a black next door neighbor character in the TV sit-com "Family Ties" who shared the secret sin of loving white man's mood music with "young Republican" Michael J. Fox every week. It was supposed to be walk-on sabotage of stereotypes.] That separateness is unique to African-American alienation.

On the other hand (or is it foot?), every white man is potentially a victim of being mistaken for a Jew--a kind of inverse alienation based on the anxiety of suddenly losing the security of being unconditionally "white" and "wasp." Apparently, such vulnerability and the cowardly confusion it generates is an infuriating regular occurrence for lapsed Catholic blogger Chris O'Leary. He starts a remarkable Hanukkah-season essay with a quote from poet John Berryman's famous prize-winning remembrance, "The Imaginary Jew," published in the Fall 1945 issue of Kenyon Review. Its author, a lapsed Catholic, committed suicide in 1972. Many commentators see the seeds of that act in his story. I don't see all roads in such identity-tormented lives leading to sleeping pills or pistols. I see the "peace" made with such encounters like that made here. I know that I took refuge in Sufism, in part, to remove any eligibility for mistaken identity and any emotion if I failed in that intention.

Friday, December 18, 2009

Mistaken Identity

By Chris O'Leary

"Listen, I told you I'm not a Jew."
"I don't give a damn what you are," he turned his half-dark eyes to me, wrenching his arm loose. "You talk like a Jew."
"What does that mean?" Some part of me wanted to laugh.
"How does a Jew talk?"
"They talk like you, buddy."

-John Berryman, "The Imaginary Jew"
The Kenyon Review, Vol. 7, No. 4, Autumn, 1945.
Although my name is Christopher Paul O’Leary and I was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church (that’s as far as it went: no communion, no confirmation), I am regularly taken for a Jew. This could be simply because I have a beard and wear glasses, or maybe whatever Irish Catholic residue I still carry reads instead as Jewish: a faulty translation.
I grew up in southwestern Virginia, where there are few Catholics, let alone Jews. My identity was fixed then. My third-grade teacher had me stand in front of the class and explain what a Catholic was. I stammered and tried to remember something from the masses I attended in the summer, when I was under the care of my grandmother in Connecticut. At last I said, “Well, we have the Pope.” The teacher, a brutal mountain-bred descendant of Covenanters, nodded. “That you do,” she said, and silently consigned me to hell.
Something changed. The Jewish confusion, let’s call it (it would be a good band name), first occurred in Boston, while I was in college. A Hasidic teenager with a clipboard (I never learned what he wanted) was approaching students on Commonwealth Avenue. He quickly appraised me: “Jewish, yes?” He startled me and I sharply replied no. He stepped back, stared at me again and said, “Well, good!”
It was a backwards curse. Once I moved to New York, the Jewish confusions multiplied. A typical example: I was walking on Eighth Avenue and ahead of me a man was passing out fliers for a strip club while he kept up a running patter. “Hey come on down. Come on down the block. Your wife don’t have to know. Your girlfriend don’t have to know.” He spun towards me. “Your rabbi don’t have to know. Come on down the block.”
I was even Jew-bashed once, in Sunnyside, Queens, while walking to the subway. As a group of teenagers passed me, the largest one nearly knocked me to the sidewalk as he sneered, “Well if it isn’t our friendly neighborhood Jew!” The rest laughed and cursed. I stewed over the encounter for days—angry at being harassed for something I wasn’t, then feeling guilty for being indignant about that factor. But there are more legitimate reasons to harass me, I countered. I was the victim of inaccurate bigots. I grew paranoid and wondered if people in the local market called me “the friendly neighborhood Jew” after I left. I stopped being friendly.
I married a half-Jew (I still have a menorah in the basement), we moved to Massachusetts, we divorced. Soon after the latter, I had to drive to Old Greenwich, Connecticut, to cover a conference. Old Greenwich is the sort of place where money goes for its retirement. Even the sewer grates look pristine. I pulled into a palatial hotel. The attendant at the gate was a West Indian man who offered me a wide smile and pointed at my chest: “Let me guess---you’re Jewish!” he boomed.
He seemed to savor the last word, drawing out the vowels. He seemed elated he had found a Jew. Was he one too? Was he grabbing at the opportunity to bond with any type of perceived outsider? Or was he just some lunatic? I denied the charge yet again, shaking my head no, took my ticket and drove past. He looked so sad. I’ve since regretted not temporarily converting for him: for a moment I finally would have been what the world wanted me to be.

Jew-bilation: The Existential Agony of Mistaken Ethnic Identity

Below is yesterday's entry at Boogie Woogie Flu, one of my favorite music blogs. It's deals with a rarely sounded theme--at least recently--in American letters: being mistaken for a Jew and the existential crisis that often ensues as the "victim" realizes he is both the target of undeserved prejudice and a coward for feeling so insulted by it. There's a rich post-war literature rich in such encounters--and where they lead. But I didn't know this remained a modern danger--until I looked at my own life.

There are so many variations on the theme of mistaken Jewish identity. I, for one, am often incensed when I am correctly identified as Jewish. Immediately these days I lapse into a Jackie Mason Yiddish-ized minstrelsy to conceal my anger and to prove an ingratiating (but subtly derisive) mock-comfort with my identity. In other words, I practice a kind of defusing akido of amenability that makes my assailant feel at ease with his prejudice or discomfort and in no way threatened by me for having these feelings. Prejudice is an entitlement for many who feel them. It's almost as if you live in an urbane post-Nazi Nazi Germany where people don't turn you in but simply remind you to wear your arm band next time you go outdoors. "Frankly, I don't need such badges to tell me who you are," you are told over and over. "But you know how easy it is to fool the man on the street."

Most Jews I know aren't trying to fool their neighbors anymore--just themselves. They revel in a kind of Jewish "white face" minstrelsy. The Coen Brothers "A Serious Man" is a superb deadpan Jewish minstrel show, but you don't know it until you examine the guest intrusion of a Korean family stereotype used to mock or merely to remind us of the stereotyping that is going on. The movie is both homage to and subversion of defining stereotypes. Jewish identity is, at its worst and most banal, racial. Why anyone, including me, would revel in ethnic stereotypes is a mystery I must solve before taking leave of this birth. If I don't, I fear being saddled in some future incarnation with the infamous "black-skin" life-conundrum in 1931 Scottsboro Mississippi. (Who said time has to go forward?) Africa is another story about a different matter. There my race would be mainstream and I would feel safe as, possibly even taking for granted, my racial self. Of course, there might be tribal riffraff to contend with. But that's why I would keep a machete under my bed (all the while longing to live in America where the people have a gods-given right to own guns).

Okay, what does a non-Jewish victim of mistaken identity do? In an interview, John Lennon conceded he was often mistaken for a Jew and said it gave him no offense. Indeed, given Jewish suffering, he was flattered. I wonder if he really felt that way. Certainly, it was a great response from a rock and roll rebel. But I digress.

If blacks are cursed by "invisibility," Jews are cursed by "visibility." I mean, no black man runs the casual, daily risk of routine mistaken identity such as described here--or even the "honkie" caricature of a white man in his own mind. [I remember a black next door neighbor character in the TV sit-com "Family Ties" who shared the secret sin of loving white man's mood music with "young Republican" Michael J. Fox every week. It was supposed to be walk-on sabotage of stereotypes.] That separateness is unique to African-American alienation. On the other hand (or is it foot?), every white man is potentially a victim of being mistaken for a Jew--a kind of inverse alienation based on the anxiety of suddenly losing the security of being unconditionally "white" and "wasp." Apparently, such vulnerability and the cowardly confusion it generates is an infuriating regular occurrence for lapsed Catholic blogger Chris O'Leary. He starts a remarkable Hanukkah-season essay with a quote from poet John Berryman's famous prize-winning remembrance, "The Imaginary Jew," published in the Fall 1945 issue of Kenyon Review. Its author, a lapsed Catholic, committed suicide in 1972. Many commentators see the seeds of that act in his story. I don't see all roads in such identity-tormented lives leading to sleeping pills or pistols. I see the "peace" made with such encounters like that made here. I know that I took refuge in Sufism, in part, to remove any eligibility for mistaken identity and any emotion if I failed in that intention.

Friday, December 18, 2009

Mistaken Identity

By Chris O'Leary

"Listen, I told you I'm not a Jew."
"I don't give a damn what you are," he turned his half-dark eyes to me, wrenching his arm loose. "You talk like a Jew."
"What does that mean?" Some part of me wanted to laugh.
"How does a Jew talk?"
"They talk like you, buddy."

-John Berryman, "The Imaginary Jew"
The Kenyon Review, Vol. 7, No. 4, Autumn, 1945.

Although my name is Christopher Paul O’Leary and I was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church (that’s as far as it went: no communion, no confirmation), I am regularly taken for a Jew. This could be simply because I have a beard and wear glasses, or maybe whatever Irish Catholic residue I still carry reads instead as Jewish: a faulty translation.

I grew up in southwestern Virginia, where there are few Catholics, let alone Jews. My identity was fixed then. My third-grade teacher had me stand in front of the class and explain what a Catholic was. I stammered and tried to remember something from the masses I attended in the summer, when I was under the care of my grandmother in Connecticut. At last I said, “Well, we have the Pope.” The teacher, a brutal mountain-bred descendant of Covenanters, nodded. “That you do,” she said, and silently consigned me to hell.

Something changed. The Jewish confusion, let’s call it (it would be a good band name), first occurred in Boston, while I was in college. A Hasidic teenager with a clipboard (I never learned what he wanted) was approaching students on Commonwealth Avenue. He quickly appraised me: “Jewish, yes?” He startled me and I sharply replied no. He stepped back, stared at me again and said, “Well, good!”

It was a backwards curse. Once I moved to New York, the Jewish confusions multiplied. A typical example: I was walking on Eighth Avenue and ahead of me a man was passing out fliers for a strip club while he kept up a running patter. “Hey come on down. Come on down the block. Your wife don’t have to know. Your girlfriend don’t have to know.” He spun towards me. “Your rabbi don’t have to know. Come on down the block.”

I was even Jew-bashed once, in Sunnyside, Queens, while walking to the subway. As a group of teenagers passed me, the largest one nearly knocked me to the sidewalk as he sneered, “Well if it isn’t our friendly neighborhood Jew!” The rest laughed and cursed. I stewed over the encounter for days—angry at being harassed for something I wasn’t, then feeling guilty for being indignant about that factor. But there are more legitimate reasons to harass me, I countered. I was the victim of inaccurate bigots. I grew paranoid and wondered if people in the local market called me “the friendly neighborhood Jew” after I left. I stopped being friendly.

I married a half-Jew (I still have a menorah in the basement), we moved to Massachusetts, we divorced. Soon after the latter, I had to drive to Old Greenwich, Connecticut, to cover a conference. Old Greenwich is the sort of place where money goes for its retirement. Even the sewer grates look pristine. I pulled into a palatial hotel. The attendant at the gate was a West Indian man who offered me a wide smile and pointed at my chest: “Let me guess---you’re Jewish!” he boomed.

He seemed to savor the last word, drawing out the vowels. He seemed elated he had found a Jew. Was he one too? Was he grabbing at the opportunity to bond with any type of perceived outsider? Or was he just some lunatic? I denied the charge yet again, shaking my head no, took my ticket and drove past. He looked so sad. I’ve since regretted not temporarily converting for him: for a moment I finally would have been what the world wanted me to be.