June 22, 2015--Black Like Me

In 1957, in The White Negro, Norman Mailer wrote about young white people who so liked jazz and were so turned off by what they saw as conformist white culture, that they adopted black culture as their own.

Four years later, in 1961, journalist John Howard Griffin, wrote Black Like Me. It is a non-fiction account of his six-week experience traveling in the racially-segregated South while passing as a Negro. Reversing the much more common reality of some light-skinned black people who, to avoid discrimination, passed for white.

In Griffin's case he arranged for his skin to be darkened through the administration of Oxsoralen, an anti-vertigo drug that also darkened skin, prescribed for him by a dermatologist. In addition, he spent 16-hour days for weeks under an ultraviolet lamp.

He met segregation, threats, and enough overt racism that within days he feared for his life and tried to blend into the background so as to avoid the dangers he sensed around him. He kept a journal of his travels and it formed the core of his book and then later a major motion picture starring James Whitmore.

Something analogous to this has been going on in the state of Washington where Rachel Dolezal recently resigned from her position as president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP. Like Griffin she is white and was attempting to pass for black.

Aside from the fact that she has become an instant butt of jokes on late-night TV and comes from a crazy-mixed-up family (her parents were the ones ultimately to out her) her claim that she is black (which she still insists is true though acknowledging she does not have "one drop of black blood" in her genetic background) raises a whole set of complicated issues about race and identity and what it means to be black or white or Asian or Christian or Jewish or, for that matter, male or female.

In regard to the latter, Bruce Jenner recently revealed that he was undergoing treatment to become a biological woman because for his entire live he thought of himself more as a woman than a man.

Dolezal says a version of the same thing--growing up with four adopted black children as siblings she claims to have developed a deep commitment to black culture and the issues African Americans, because of their race, still face in America.

She said, and continues to affirm even after being forced to resign and dragged through the media gauntlet, that she "identifies as black"--

But it's a little more complex than me identifying as black, or answering the question of, 'Are you black or white?' . . . Well, I definitely am not white. Nothing about being white describes who I am.

She, though, is genetically white but thinks of herself as black. Jenner is genetically male but identifies as female. Situations of this kind are common enough and are now being more openly discussed.

Mainly, what constitutes gender (clearly more than genitals)? What defines race? Just how much African blood or DNA must one have to be considered black by others? And how much, if any, needs to be present for blacks or whites to deem themselves one or the other? Or determined by society and perhaps the courts if necessary? For example, in affirmative action cases?

Freud famously said, "Biology is destiny."

Perhaps not.

Indeed, many scholars claim that all forms of identity are socially constructed. If so--and I feel a strong case can be made that this is true--why is it all right for Bruce Jenner to think of himself as a woman but inappropriate for Rachel Dolezal to take on a black identity? If it is all right to assume one's own sense of gender, ethnicity, or belief system, why not blackness? Or whiteness? Is race still our hottest button?

March 13, 2105--GOP Clown Car Update

I'm so excited. It is reported that South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham is running for the GOP presidential nomination. That's the only explanation why he is spending so much time up in frozen New Hampshire.

If he actually enters the race, stay tuned for lots of laughs.

He is best known as John McCain's butt boy. Graham is rarely spotted except when half hidden behind or nestled near his idol, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate.

Like McCain he is prone to making bad jokes that reveal more truth about him--as Freud would suggest--than laughs.

Recall McCain's "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" during his race against Barack Obama. He of course felt he was being pretty cool knocking off the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann." Many of the rest of us, though, thought he was semiconsciously tipping voters off about what he would do if elected.

In fact, McCain seems still to embrace this point of view. Incredibly, he was one of 47 GOP senators this week to sign an open letter to Iran's leadership, suggesting that unless they suspend their uranium enrichment program entirely these hawkish senators would ratchet up sanctions even more than at present or, if that failed, that they would press the military to bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.

Graham went even further in his lame joke. He suggested that he endorsed a military coup d'etat. He really did.

In Concord, NH on Sunday he said--

Here is the first thing I would do if I were President of the United States: I wouldn't let Congress leave town until we fix this. [Sequestration budget cuts for the Pentagon] I would literally use the military to keep them in if I had to. We're not leaving town until we restore those defense cuts. We're not leaving town until we restore the intel cuts.

It elicited a few self-conscious chuckles but unleashed a bit of a tempest in the press. So much so that a Graham spokesperson had to walk his comments back, assuring us that he was joking.

If he wants to be president, he should try harder to discover a sense of humor or hire some better joke writers.

In the meantime, the clown car is set to take off. Thankfully it already contains Rick Perry, Chris Christie, Ben Carson, and, yes, The Donald. Now if we could only get Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann back on the stump, the next 12 months, with Lindsey in the mix, could be quite a riot.

June 3, 2014--Take My Wife . . . Please.

I always thought the roots of Jewish humor were those described by Sigmund Freud in his book, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.

He argued that most Jewish jokes indicate Jewish people's ability to (a) engage in a thorough self-criticism of themselves, (b) advocate a democratic way of life, (c) emphasize the moral and social principles of the Jewish religion, (d) criticize the excessive requirement of it, and (e) reflect on the misery of many Jewish communities.

If you think of Woody Allen as the quintessential schlemiel and self-mocking jokester, only (a) and (e) pertain. Jewish humor is all based on self- and communal criticism and the resulting inner turmoil, misery, and self-pity. There's nothing in Woody's humor or any really funny Jewish humor about democracy or the moral principles of the Jewish religion.

It's hard to think of anything funny to say about any of these high-minded concepts. But Freud was a theorist without much of a sense of humor and so . . .

Recently, I have come to a very different conclusion--

Much of Jewish humor is derived from Jewish food.

Not the food itself, which when ingested can cause all sorts of inner misery and gas (both subjects of many jokes), but the names of our favorite traditional foods--from Bagels to Knishes to Tsimmis.

What other food traditions have so many foods with funny names? Veal Parmigianna? Cog au vin? Meatloaf? Corn beef and cabbage? Not even close to being as funny as Flanken, Ruglach, or Gedempte Fleisch.

A crepe is not funny, but a Blintz is. A porterhouse steak may bring you culinary pleasure, but not as many laughs as Brisket. It could be worth lingering over sweet and sour soup but Matzoh Balls, though tasteless, are funnier.

Neil Simon has a theory that words beginning with K's (or hard Cs) are funny. In the Sunshine Boys, one of the Boys, Willie, an old vaudevillian, gives his nephew a lecture about what's funny--

Fifty-seven years in this business, you learn a few things. You know words that are funny and which words are not funny. Alka Seltzer is funny. You say "Alka Seltzer" you get a laugh . . . Words with "K" in them are funny. And with Cs. Casey Stengel, that's a funny name. Robert Taylor is not funny. Cupcake is funny. Tomato is not funny. Cookie is funny. Cucumber is funny. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny.

People who study what's funny agree. There are some sounds in English that are by their nature funny. Those that begin with P's, B's, T's, D's, hard-C's, and especially K's.

These sounds are called by linguists plosive consonants because they are plosive, they "start suddenly." And thus for some reason make us laugh.

Though not funny, this helps explain why Jewish foods, the plosive names of Jewish foods, are so funny. Also, since Jews spend a lot of time dealing with phlegm, often the result of eating the wrong thing, we thus specialize in sounds and words that make creative use of it. Think, for example, of Felix Unger's honking in Neil Simon's Odd Couple.

P-foods include pickled herring, pirogue (dumplings ), pletzel (flat bread), p'tcha (calves foot jelly) and of course pastrami.

B-foods are among the most familiar to non-Jews (and gentile New Yorkers)--babka (two b's plus one k), bialy, borscht, blintz, brisket, and the universal bagel.

T-foods include teiglach (small sweet pastries) and tzimmes (a stew of carrots, yams, and raisins). Both delicious and funny.

Foods beginning with G's are the well-known goulash and gefilte fish as well as chicken skin cracklings called gribbenes, perhaps my all time favorite Jewish food name.

And finally there are all the funny food names that begin with K's--kasha varnishkas (groats with farfalle pasta), kichel (egg-dough cookies), kneidlach (the Yiddish name for matzoh balls), knishes, kreplach (similar to pierogi), kugel (a sweet and savory casserole with lots of broad noodles), and kishke (beef intestines that also is used in expressions such as the alliterative, "Kick him in the kishkes").

When you grow up eating food with these kinds of names (and don't forget lox), a predisposition to humorous stories and jokes is inevitable. Couple this with self-mockery and gas and, Freud aside, there you have the real roots of Jewish humor.

April 23, 2014--Obama's Drones

Five days after Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula released an audacious video of a daytime militant rally in southern Yemen, President Obama authorized a drone strike that killed at least 55 Al-Qaeda-linked terrorists.

Putting aside for the moment the legal and ethical issues, in many ways this was a good thing. These men are among the world's most dangerous people and drone strikes are a good way to get at them with little risk to U.S. or Yemeni forces.

The openly-flaunting way in which Nasser-al-Wuhayshi, head of AQAP, organized the rally and brazenly made videos of it public, not only emphasized the level of the threat he and his fighters represent but also was a way to humiliate his enemies, especially the United States. He brashly seemed to say, "Catch me if you can."

So Obama was quick to rise to the taunt. At least three drone strikes were carried out over the weekend and as a result dozens were killed.

One thing even fierce critics of Obama's concede is that he not hesitant about authorizing drone strikes against bad guys, including an occasional American citizen.

Putting tactics aside--drones' ability to respond quickly to threats--it is striking to see Obama acting so decisively about . . . anything.

The very same Republican critics who poke him about "leading from behind" give him begrudging credit for being so aggressive about the use of drones. But I suspect Obama is uncharacteristically decisive and forceful when it comes to the deployment of drones for other than just military or political reasons.

Political-Psychology 101 would suggest the unfettered use of drones is the one arena in which Obama has undisputed power and can act out his frustrations.

For a president who knows that at least half the reason conservatives oppose everything and anything he initiates or even supports is because he is African American, for a president who is reluctant to play the race card much less even openly confront this political bigotry, fearing being characterized as an "angry black man," having a means to act out his frustrations and, I am sure, rage about this must be irresistible.

The giveaway that this is not a preposterous notion is that authorizing the use of drones without seemingly endless cogitation--a quality for which Obama is known and not-entirely-unfairly criticized--is the one area of leadership in which he clearly leads from the front and is expeditiously decisive.

In Freudian terms--this is an example of displacement theory.

As a close reader of the Constitution, he knows that much of this is extra-legal or, minimally, questionable; and yet, time after time, instead of being cautious or timid, he acts boldly. And, it would appear, successfully.

It may be unfeeling to suggest that ordering the killing of people--even terrorists--is in some ways therapeutic, but considering the circumstances in Washington and in Red-State America, on some level it is understandable.